3-14: Exeunt Femmes

Keys gives Cat a little kick, friendly but urgent. He's gotten quite absorbed studying Holy Nation scripture—too absorbed for her liking. Having grown up in the Holy Nation, none of their dogma is new or interesting to her and she sees little value in perusing it. Especially not when she, Shryke, Outlaw Hana, and Pilaf are waiting around. She only agreed to come on this little Holy Nation excursion in the first place in order to provide some backup in case things went sideways. As she told the gang when they recruited her, she's sick to death of Okran.

Cat agrees to put the books down and the human squad heads out, planning to give the last couple shops in Blister Hill a quick peek and then hit the road. Keys must be wearing her displeasure plain upon her face, though; as the squad passes one of the local temples, the temple priest gets that look about him like there's a sermon coming on. He strides up to her.

Arrest and enslavement as a response to someone not wanting to hear your sermon is obviously a gross overreaction but I guess it goes to show how seriously the Holy Nation takes its rhetoric about needing to control women. The squad ducks down an alleyway to get out of sight, planning their path out of the city. Keys is expecting the priest's cry to raise an alarm and set the entire guard on them. Strangely enough, though, no guards come. It's just the priest, alone, chasing them.

Sick of the whole venture and supremely pissed off, Keys whirls around and takes a swing at the man, cutting a gash in his leg. Unlike the rest of the Holy Nation hierarchy, priests are not fighters. They're just guys—horrible guys—with no fighting skills, weapons, or armour. This priest is making a mistake. Before he has the chance to reconsider it, Pilaf brings her head in low and jerks to the side, impaling the same leg Keys just hit on her horn. The priest immediately passes out from the pain and crumples to the ground in a heap.

For a moment, the squad thinks they've gotten away with it. No alarm was raised, none of them have bounties for Assault (somehow), and no one else seems to have seen them. It seems like they can just walk away before the priest gets back up. Unfortunately, just as they're about to, a shop guard comes running around the corner, club in hand. He must have heard the commotion.

The squad drops the shop guard too, again without accruing a bounty and again seemingly without being noticed, but again someone else comes running just as they're about to walk away nonchalantly. This time it's a high paladin. This is actual trouble. It's time to book it.

The squad has little choice but to leave Blister Hill via the front gate, running as fast as they can. The high paladin running after them has brought a couple regular paladins with him, more than enough to beat the squad should they try standing their ground. It barely even matters that the gate guards don't join in the chase.

Things get off to a dicey start. The paladins are pretty fast for guys in armoured boots—they quickly overtake Shryke. Curiously, though, they don't start attacking her. They must be fixated on one of the faster members. Shryke breaks from the pack and starts to run south toward Okran's Pride, fearing the paladins may turn their attention toward her if they lose track of the others. She ends up hiding behind a rock formation.

The rest of the squad actually manages to outrun the paladins. While Shryke is wearing leather boots, the others are all wearing wooden sandals that grant a small boost to Athletics, enough to make the difference. Eventually, the squad gets far enough away that the paladins give up the chase. Once Shryke catches up, they start back north, planning to rejoin the rest of the gang at Flotsam Village. There's little risk of further attack by any other paladins they meet on the road—without bounties on their heads, patrols aren't going to know them as heretics or priest-punchers. Still, it's a relief when they see the swarms of flying robots that hover over the Floodlands. A place where robots roam is a place the Holy Nation won't come. They've made it out.

Speaking of the Floodlands, the non-humans (and Riddly) have spent the duration of the humans' holy excursion exploring there. Unfortunately, there hasn't actually been much they haven't already seen; most of the ruins are too dilapidated for anything of value to remain. There is one lab, though, that due to a particular circumstance, only a skeleton can safely explore.

This old lab sits right at the water level, tilted enough to submerge the front half of the ground floor. It's not at all challenging to swim inside but the problem comes with the security spiders that guard the place. While the non-human squad is strong enough to defeat a couple of them now, they're still dangerous enough that fighting them isn't wise. Someone could lose a limb if not their life. Sneaking in is, as usual, the best option. The issue is: You cannot sneak while swimming. Anyone who tried to swim in here would get spotted in a flash and ripped apart by spider bots while they tried to slowly breast stroke away.

This is where skeletons' unique underwater advantage really shines. You may recall that skeletons walk along the bottom of the water instead of swimming, being quite heavy and not needing to breathe. Since anywhere you can walk, you can sneak, a skeleton can creep stealthily up into this building where no one else can.

Contrary to what the Holy Nation thinks, Jam and Horse's skeleton limbs do not actually make them skeletons, so the job falls to Burn. When night falls, they creep in and take all the expensive tech stuff they can carry from the top floor. A few ancient science books, a pile of skeleton repair kits and a bunch of miscellaneous parts to sell—it's not a bad haul. It takes Burn a few trips and the non-human squad finds themselves wishing they didn't send Pilaf off with the humans as they struggle to fit everything nicely into their bags, but they get the job done.

When the gang reunites in Flotsam Village, the non-human squad's haul and the human squad's bounty cash-in have earned them significantly more Cats to their collective name. They fill the bar and spend a while swapping stories, Keys proving the star of the hour as she regales the non-humans with her priest-fighting misadventure.

When someone brings up the question of what to do next, Outlaw Hana whips out a bounty she saw in Blister Hill while Cat was busy reading scripture. It reads:

As unpleasant an atmosphere as Blister Hill was, nothing bad actually happened to the gang there on their trip and Cat got the cannibal chief's bounty turned in just fine. Why not do it again? If they can find this “grand wizard”, the bounty would make for a considerable boon.

The idea's a pretty easy sell. While the bounty writer evidently had no idea where this Cannibal Grand Wizard might be located, the Cannibal Plains are only so big and the gang can cross off a few sites they've already visited. First thing in the morning, they pack up and start making their way.

The blood-red sky may look like something's gone terribly wrong but it lasts for just a moment at the crack of dawn, quickly giving way to softer hues as the sun rises. The gang will be crossing the Cannibal Plains in the bright of day; if they don't want to get too worn down by random fights on their way to wherever the Grand Wizard is, they'll have to keep an eye on their surroundings. Fortunately, they're not exactly wandering aimlessly. They have a pretty good idea of where to start looking.

The town of Deadcat's been marked on the map for ages now. While it shares its name with the neutral faction that encompasses the world's various fishing villages, the gang's avoided it so far. Its position smack in the middle of cannibal territory has come across considerably fishier than anything the eponymous faction reels in. Whatever Deadcat's situation, though, the city icon makes it seem like a big deal. If it does turn out to be controlled by cannibals like the gang suspects, there's a good chance that's where a Cannibal Grand Wizard would hang out.