Adventures of Fu: Saving Hostages, Executing Kidnappers, Women Are Dangerous (Also, possibly NSFW/triggering)

This adventure actually happened in the same week as the previous session. When there's games, there's lots of them!

 

Long story short/er, because I'm not in (such) a rambling mood today... 

 

Yet keep in mind: Today's account contains mentions of abuse of both sexual and non-sexual varieties, and executing/sacrificing prisoners. If that bothers you, don't read!

 

Fu and Yanzi slept well, and joined forces with the 6 "ne'er-do-wells" that Wolf has hired as a kind of personal...
 

...well, Fu gets the impression they're his eyes, and hands, when he is personally occupied with something else. Hey, the man is planning to marry again!

Either way, the two beggars, and the six kinda-xia, and a girl from the Golden Lotus* went to investigate. The "eyes and hands of the Wolf" had found out that the house where they did encounter the 7 demons belonged to a noble family. 

Consequently, they were going to visit the family's estate, located in the countryside!

So, the 9 of us went off. Fu asked whether a portal can be opened somewhere in the vicinity, so the travel continued for roughly half an hour.
 

We approached it as hostile territory, basically. Except we found nobody, except signs of people having left in a hurry, possibly involuntarily. Who leaves without taking personal belongings, and leaving food to rot and mold?!?
 

I mean, there weren't even animals.
 

 We did make a good search, until one of the girls had an idea while visiting the basement: she started to tap the walls.
 

At the end, she found out a tunnel which someone had recently passed through. It ended into a dry well in the middle of the forest.
 

Then Fu got to shine, not only noticing the traces - which were a couple days old - but also spotting ley lines, which criscrossed the clearing and lead deeper into the forest.
 

We followed the traces. That's how we reached a hill with an opening - probably a cavern - in front of a lake. And there were three guys guarding the entrance.

They had crossbows, too. After some of the girls (who rated their own abilities to sneak too highly for their own good) tried to sneak on them, but one stepped on a twig, and two of them got shot in the following barrage of bolts.

Fuck, repeating crossbows! (Link to a picture, Blogger didn't want to add it as a picture, for some reason).

The girls ran back. Fu tried to challenge the trio to fight up close, but they didn't seem interested. In fact, they didn't seem to listen!

 

We slowly determined they were from Jin, so Fu had to ask the Golden Lotus girl (who spoke it) about cursing in Jin.

 

They seemed not to care about that, either.
 

However, they brought a girl from the cave - we didn't know her - and warned us that "hostages are going to be killed unless we leave immediately".
 

...we left, of course. We're brave, not stupid.

So we went back to the well. Following the strongest leylines, we found something like an altar-crossed-with-a-gazebo. It was right in the forest, and no routes seemed to lead to it.
 

Fu prayed at the altar, and a ghost/spirit appeared. He immediately asked her (it was visibly a her) for help!
 

"Why should I care about them?"
"The owners of this forest might be the hostages!"

"The ones who kill animals and cut trees from this forest. Why do I need to care?"

"If you help us, you could negotiate with them to not kill animals nor cut trees from this forest!"
 

She didn't seem persuaded. And she asked him several times, suggestively, "what's in it for me".
 

He shrugged.
 

"What do you want?"
 

"Tell me what can you give me?"
 

"I'm a martial artist, mystic and beggar clan member. You tell me!"
 

"So you're strong", she intoned, while putting a finger across his jaw.
 

Thing is, Fu immediately opened his jaw.
 

"Yes, I've got all my teeth", he confirmed, while still wondering what she wants! He wasn't going to sell himself, but if she merely wanted to check his shape...eh, maybe forest ghosts also need strong young men to carry heavy loads?
 

"Well, yes, you are strong..."

That's when Golden Lotus girl decided to take charge.

 

"Listen, bitch, you can help us freely - or I can call Jing Xiaomei! You want to explain to her why you're asking to steal his chi?"
 

"Why do you think she was asking for that?!?", Fu asked incredulously.
 

"Shut up, she wanted to have sex and to steal your life force! You'd have died!"
 

A courtesan obviously knows better than a beggar teen what a horny ghost might be up to!

It seemed, however, that the forest spirit/ghost didn't want to have anything to do with Jing*** Xiaomei! In no case!
 

Whoever that was, she did seem to have something of a rep.
 

So in return for us not calling her to help, whoever this was, she first sent a squirrel to investigate, then painted us a map of the cave. Then, at out request, the ghost offered to send forest moles to open us a tunnel to the cave. 

 

We asked for the timing, and actually put it off for a while: the moles were going to be done before midnight. We wanted it to open after midnight, to avoid them shooting or otherwise harming hostages.

While waiting though, the Golden Lotus girl decided to ask for reinforcement. She asked Jing first, but Wolf was busy.
 

So she told the ghost to not sweet it, she is coming just to help in the fight - and called Jing Xiaomei anyway!

Amazingly, the girl who stepped through a portal was one I knew! She visited the Beggars Compound once - and somehow set off all the mystical alarms, designed to protect us against demons! Fu still hasn't worked that one out.

Either way, we quickly had to explain that the ghost (who was nearly having a meltdown!) was helping us. For reals! Please don't harm her!
 

Jing Xiaomei is an angry young woman, but she contented herself with forbidding her to feed.

Then they started hatching plans. The newcomer was in a hurry, so she quickly devised a plan: she dressed herself, Yanzi, the Golden Lotus girl and the ghost herself in clothes that she took from...a chest that she pulled from thin air****, as far as Fu could see.
 

Then they dressed as entertainers Geji (basically Geisha/Kisaeng, despite the many differences) and went along. They approached the Jin guys unarmed, and told them that they were lost in the forest and would like some food and a guide, I think...they were talking in Jin, so Fu understood nothing!
 

Whatever the case, the morons let them approach, and even smiled. Then the four girls promptly killed them.

We quickly (but silently) approached, and then snuck inside the cave. It was really a short fight, Fu only knocked out a couple of mercenaries (and his second was the last man standing, something Bohu teased him about - I think he told me I need to eat more?!?)
 

Afterwards, Xiaomei allowed the ghost to feed on anyone that was still alive, except one. "We need one to interrogate".
 

It was a painful interrogation. But Fu was talking to the kidnapped nobles and servants, so he quickly decided that it was just expedient to let the ghost kill them for us.
 

Besides, she had helped us, she deserved to feed...

As an aside, Fu has very little mercy to begin with, and he usually keeps it for poor people and those too young, weak, or helpless to help themselves. So he has even less to spare on murderers, thieves, rapists and torturers. Which all of the Jin mercenaries were, just from the account!
 

One of the nobles had lost a hand because he had refused signing some documents (they left him the hand he writes with)!

 

And, well, you can guess the rest...

So no, Fu wasn't overly worried about the ghost getting her due payment. 

 

But he almost paled upon seeing that the ghost merely kissed them and drained their life powers to them, basically shrinking them and drinking the water from their bodies (if I've got that one right).
 

"What? She wanted to do that to me? Women are dangerous!"
 

Even worse: he had been contemplating silently asking the ghost whether she's really interested in him as a...well, young man?
 

Now he knows for sure that she only wanted his life force! (Also see footnote** at the end).

We also determined that we had some more good news and some more bad news for the newly-liberated nobles.
 

Good news: Jing Xiaomei is a very good doctor. All of them, especially the crippled man and abused women, got first-grade medical at the spot!
 

Bad news: one of the noble's daughters had been missing. By the description, both me, Yanzi and one of the girls guessed who she was...
 

Remember the previous part? The one where we mentioned there was a body of a young woman who was missing parts?
 

Well, we could tell them where to go to find her body. Most of it, at any rate.
 

More good news: some of the kids we'd saved were kids nobody had asked about. Turns out, two of them had been lead away from here! They only wanted the smallest, it seems...maybe to fit in the giant pot we'd found next to the cage?
 

By our description, they recognized that yes, two of the three were theirs. But they said they were going to take the third kid whose parents hadn't asked about him/her, too!
 

That is, unless said parents appeared, they were going to adopt him or her. 

 

That made Fu real happy, for some reason he couldn't explain.

And then we left, brought them to the city via a portal (used by Jing Xiaomei), while most of the servants went back to clean the country house. We had good news to report, including having fed a ghost without losing any lives***** in the process!



Yeah, no rambling. Right!


*Fu is starting to suspect that all girls from the Golden Lotus are trained in kung-fu, and possibly other stuff as well, and that they're sending them along with us depending on when they've got a day off!

**Unlike both Hoi and Wang, my other PCs in this campaign, he can't believe seriously that a woman would be interested in him. He thinks he is too young, too dirty - being beggar - and too boring, so why would they? Hey, he wouldn't be interested in himself!

 

At the same time, he's been taught to behave modestly and decently, further complicating matters...so he was genuinely perplexed what the girl wanted!)
 

***Also the name of the Wolf, our kinda-employer, owner of the Golden Lotus, very skilled magician and kung-fu master, and a lot of other things. He seems younger than Little Minnow and Scribe Yu, who are in their 70ies/90ies, but they call him "old". It's perplexing, but Fu doesn't interfere in the elders' conversation!
 

****There is such a spell in Art of Wuxia, but Fu doesn't have any idea.
 

*****The Jin guys were going to be executed anyway. I think Jing Xiaomei thinks of this as "utilizing resources properly". Fu thinks along the lines of "killing two rabbits with one stone, punishing the wicked and paying for services received".