Duty Session 552: Investigating Payon Cave

Gwen did get out when she wasn't making fashion, cooking or otherwise engaging in business. People often forget she knows what she's doing when it comes to money.

Today however Payon needs purging, she's a Holy knight and was ready to go and make a mess of the undead. She's not forgotten about the undead army and suppressing it's remnants was an important thing to do.

Today she's clad as a Mystic knight, tabard, big bow on the back, stocking and long sleeves make up this outfit. OOC https://i.imgur.com/F4Uttl1.jpg

"So we shouldn't waste time and get into it should we not?"

    Asuna arrives on her noble steed, Tomoe. Who is, fortunately, not rearing up to address the threat of a rock, butterfly, or shadow. A wonder.

    She's delivering on her usual cosplay schtick, this time it appears that she's going for Sailor Jupiter. Gwen knows all about it, of course. She made it!

    "Let's get to it! We'll stomp these undead into the turf!"

    She's pretty fired up today!

Goldenblade has joined the quest, looks to Gwen about not wasting time. "It seems like there's plaqnty of time," she points out. "With the Palace Lands out of here, there's fewer immediate goals. On the other hand, there's no time like the present and wasting time is a waste." Asuna gets a puzzled look, and makes her glad she had sons. -They- didn't dress like middle school girls.

Gwen is taking point she is a tank she smirks at Asuna. "We should fear if Morri ever finds out she'll have ideas for paired costumes, and more if she nets Shiruba." Oh she knows, she has plans, she is making said outfits for those plans as we speaks. The girls are doomed, they just don't know it yet. Gwen's mind skips a beat as they see undead coming down the pipe at them.

"Undead!"

With that Gwen will charge in to pull angro and start unloading with holy magics.

Yes there are undead, a whole lot of skeletons most of them are armed with rotting melee weapons rather than bows so the party will have a chance to close without getting hammered down in a hail of fire. The other issues is the undead seem to be making use of the trees as cover.

Goldenblade leaps into the fray, blades slashing, blazing, hacking skeletons to pieces. This is not a good day to be a skeleton. Smashng them with every blow of her swords, and setting afire the ones that don't drop, she contributes to the party mowing them down like weeks in the forest.

    "Well, so far your work has scored really high. I'm guessing Morri's had feedback. Everyone is scared, but honestly? I can really move in these skirts!"

    And with undead to deal with, she proves it quite well, too. Using her dire red panda to close the distance, she vaults straight into a front flip, crashing right into the enemy.

    It's a flurry of dazzlingly-fast rapier blows and a good backhand here and there that she unleashes on them. "Skeletons, they are wonderful, aren't they?"

Gwen piles unto the undead using raw physical force that no human on Earth should have, it's clear she's gotten even stronger as of late. Goldenblade cleaves into the undea hakcing and smashing in a way Conan would approve of if the Barbarian saw her. Meanwhile Asuna is teaing them up pretty good and it's almost like she's moon dusting them with how they die.

"Better than zombies no smell! You seem to be having fun, were you this into it before we ended up here? Shiruba got me to go to a few Cons in japan..."

Soon the party leaves the undead behind and enter a cave full of more of them. Oh the smell, there is the bloody smell Zombies They lunche towards the pary and Gwen just seems to be ready to purge she starts chanting and letting lose with fire spells into the undead ranks.

    "Oh? Not really. My mother would have killed me. She'd probably kill me now. Bad enough I played my first mmo!"

    With the cave ahead, Asuna has to leave Tomoe behind. She's not a great match for spelunking. But in her defense, she's amazing in the trees.

    "Speaking of that smell..."

    Asuna tries to just avoid the zombies. They are slow! And being The Flash, she succeeds. Thankfully. She is trying to conserve power here for when she needs it most.

    "I feel like I'm losing my SEA credibility here. Zombies show up and I don't even light one of them up like a torch!"

Goldenblade blinks, says to Gwen, "No, I never did any of this before, it's all new to me. My son took kempo when he was in school, but that was in the seventies." On the other hand, she lifted bricks all day, and carried loads of them for work, until she retired only just in the last year. So she's pretty strong as well.

The slow zombies are not much threat, but she's held off on the blazing speed, and keeping it in reserve now means the zombies can catch up with her, costing her far too many HP to fight them off. "Dang zombies," she complains

Gwen is having a bad time, she gets the undead's attention but isn't able to burn them down fast enough and she gets swarmed. She's not in danger of going down but she's being hampered pretty darn hard. Still with Goldenblade and Asuna backing her up they eventually get through it all.

"Well that was not enjoyable and your mom sounds like more of a pain than mine. Look we my have to have strong words with her later."

Gwen hits the cleaning function before moving on.

"God my parents met at a con..."

Now the fun part is getting through the caves, the undead here are speed bumps thankfully, the real foe is whoever designed this cave like a maze...

    Asuna laughs. "You know, a lot of people seem to think that about my mother. But.. well. She really wanted me to be ready, be, you know, perfect and all that."

    That she is carefully cultivated high class marriage bait is obvious to everyone but The Flash. Joke's on her mom there, though. Her daughter is now one of the ETO gamers, who are setting records for time spent in virtual reality.

    "We need a map."

    That's what she decides. But her attempts to make one. Yeah. She should really stick to calligraphy and leave the map making to the experts.

    "You know, if you turn this sideways and squint, I think it looks like a peko.." Maps aren't supposed to look like that.

The fun part may be getting through the caves, but Goldenblade has an expert eye for where tracks once were, even when they're not there now, because of the impression they leave on the ground underneath, and the way the mine railcars impressed the ties into the ground. "Nah, this isn't hard," she says. "The path goes this way," she explains and will lead on.

Gwen has some success in finding the way and Goldenblades skills with construction are able to see the party through the caves. "Perfect, yes sounds like the sort that doesn't let their child be a child. As for the map? We should see about making one here." The few undead they run into are speed bumps and they have no real issues until they run into lover boy. Boing Boing he comes he's way too fast too. Gwen attempt to catch him in a Divine wind attack crying out as she lunges for him.

She can indeed Asuna is marriage bait high class and has some ideas about it, not that she's going to pry.

Goldenblade looks over at high-class marriage bait Asuna, but attitudes like that were way above her station, and none of her coworkers were like that with their kids. That would have been weird in modern times. "Sadly, no one in Japan ever tells rich people they need to get with the times, and you get these whackjobs living in the 1870's," she sas tiredly. When the bouncing fellow bounces out, too fast to be engaged in melee, she will unlimber her bow, but she's no archer, and can only get a couple arrows into him. "Man, what sort of drugs is he on?" she wonders.

    "Yeah, you know. It totally does go this way, doesn't it? You have sharp eyes, Goldenblade." Asuna gives her own map a look and decides to crumple it up and throw it away. "May it lay there until the abandoned item collection system notices it. Or until the mountains crumble into the sea."

    Either way, it sure did look like a peko. And yeah, maybe she did spend some of the time following the others through adding to her work. Feathers, claws, the whole thing! All very poorly done, really. Please don't tell her that. She'll feel bad.

    "I have heard that said. It's got to be a hard balance, though. Everyone is always so busy. And there are expectations, you know? It wasn't always so rough. Those damned viruses really messed things up. Hurt people. Made my family even more busy."

    The sudden appearance of the...

    "Is that a jumping undead thing? Jumping.. man?" She's rambling, and rather lost on how to classify the monster. It's her thing, she wants to get it right!

    *CLANG*

    Moving more by instinct than anything else, Asuna moves suddenly into an aggressive shield stance. A stance which causes the spaz monster to smash headfirst into a shield. It probably doesn't feel good at all, really. The blow is pretty powerful.

The boyfriend is a harder fight than expected but the party is just able to bring him down. It makes some kind of noise as it does calling out Munak... as he goes out.

Gwen pauses for a moment "Wrecked a lot of shit, if my dad wasn't a Marine... who knows what would have happened income wise. I can't fault the calls for them wanting to hang the ones who made them. I hate to tell you Asuna you sound like high class marriage bait to end up some suits trophy wife." Gwen gets blunt.

She can't say more as BOING BOING BOING! Its the Munak and she bouncing right at them, Gwen is forced to use Sanctuary in the path of the undead turning the healing spell against her, while Asuna and Goldbeblade live though the attack and finally the trio are able to bring the thing down in a combo strike.

"Well that's that for here...yeah lots of asian mythology here. I'd have a field day in Europe if they bothered with celtic."

Goldenblade may have been okay with the jumping monster in melee, but this one's much too fast for melee. She pulls out her bow, but she can't lead the target enough to score more than an occasional lucky hit. It'll have to be up to Gwen and Asuna here. As far as the Asian mythology, she shrugs. She came late to asian culture, relatively speaking, so she wasn't raised with all the monsters and mysticism. She was raised with American monsters and symbolism. But she knows a bit about it because her wife taught it to their kids, and she caught bits here and there. She plunks arrows, but mostly misses. She is no archer.

    When the boyfriend finally gets turned into pixel dust, Asuna can focus on the conversation more properly.

    As if. She talks the whole time! She's the Flash!

    "A marine? Wow, so you're American, Gwen? And yeah, whoever actually did that stuff deserves whatever bad things come to them."

    She doesn't respond immediately to the marriage thing. She's focused on stuff! But she will eventually get back to it. "Huh. You mean like, some rich guy's wife or something? Ugh. No way! I've already got my si... I mean I'm marrying who I want! I don't care if he's some busines owner or just some sweet guy who loves pizza, it's what I feel about him that matters!"

    She gets a bit passionate there. Fired-up, even. A few more really, really brutal shield blows to jumping man's head are delivered before he's dusted. So yeah, onward.

    "Oh wow, what's a cute little girl doing here?" A few steps closer, "It's okay, honey, we're not going to hurt you-WHAT THE @!@^!!?!"

    So Asuna isn't exactly ready for the little girl. She should be. She really should.I mean, this is right out of like a few dozen horror movies. Granted, she's never seen one, but that's still no excuse.

    She scrambles back, but she can't really get a decent ranged shot in cause that little monster is dynamite! But eventually, thankfully, it's defeated. Not really due to anything Asuna did, though. This survival is all about Gwen doing her job well.

Gwen says "Texan when you get down to it. Yeah my father been a contactor since he mustered out and I worked for the business." Gwen secratary, she's far happier running her shop and tromping through the wildenress it seems though.

"Munak, a child turned to the undead... yeah not an easy thing to do but it was the best thing to deal with her I fear. Don't know any way to bring them back and some were made as undead to begin with. This world is gamey in the strangest ways."

    Asuna is panting, rather shocked. Relieved, too.

    "That.. was creepy."

    She shakes herself out of the stunned thing she's got going on. "Oh and there's loot!"

    She'll put the coins away. They are always handy, after all. Maybe she can use this to learn a new dish? Who knows.

    "I may never look at little girls quite the same way again after this one." That's a big fat +2 to foreshadowing there...

    "I should probably get myself back to Tomoe, though. She's umm.. not always the best behaved when I'm out of sight. But the knot should hold her! Thanks for teaming up! Looking forward to meeting again!"

    Did she actually use a good knot? Who knows!

Goldenblade smirks to Asuna, at least assumes monsters are hostile. But she nods about getting out of here. "Let's get moving," she agrees.