#session nine

[orbital-vessel]

We are in your walls

[deadgodsdnd]

session nine

The group stands on the edge of the small island the Duke’s hunting lodge was built on, under the light of the full moon, watching the eight men and women chained to the pillars turn into snarling beasts. Du and Klindal waste no time grabbing the shapeshifting child out of her rabid father’s reach. Du escapes to safety while Klindal remains on the other side of the lake, calling the power of the storm to stop the bloodshed that these creatures are keen on. Rhorix joins him while Kepesk stays on the island, using his rifle to take out what he can at a distance. Kebe tries to stop the cultists gathering on the balcony with a surge of lightning - but one woman stands among them who seems unfazed. She turns her attention to him and the tabaxi nearly dies under her relentless attack.

Attenders of the party start throwing themselves into the lake - not to save themselves - but to give their bodies and lies to the chaos of the churning waters and the ravenous werecreatures on the other side of the water. The woman leading them stands at the center of the lodge’s balcony, conducting them and the magic in the air like a composer of doom.

Rhorix saves Esrik using the extradimensional hole he has on a small piece of cloth, along with several other lycanthropes, but not all. Esrik managed to break free from the hole and ripped through Rhorix’s pants but was eventually subdued. Istan and the reinforcements arrived in time to see the lodge go up in blue flames as the priestess escaped. Kebe barely escapes the fire with the seaweed tome. Kepesk searches the lake for the Duke’s body and takes his signet ring, but gives the body to the dragonborn who said she was working to uncover the Duke’s secrets.

Du stays with Gaernin, Vuthara,  and the recovering werecreatures at a villa Istan owns on the outskirts of the city walls while the rest of the group returns to Serissen’s house to rest. In the morning, the party seeks entry into the underground artificer’s guild and they spend their time searching the shops of rare magical items.

When they seek council with the leader of the guild, Faevaris, guards are there. The group’s presence is requested as well, because Istan has been arrested, and the hearing is happening at town hall. The party speaks up for him and they demand for the guards and the Duke’s body to be present - to prove that he’d pulled troops out of the city, without council approval, to stop the cultist activity.

He hints to the party to go to his home and check his plants, and they’re ambushed when they do. Du is stabbed in the eye at the beginning of the confrontation but his adrenaline pushes him forward to slay each and every enemy he comes into contact with.

Klindal finds a secret message on the bottom of one of the plants that leads the party to go into the sewers and find the Thieves’ Guild. Calum is their leader, a hulking red-headed human who looks like he’d be more apt with a tankard of mead and a greataxe than with thievery. He’s had a falling out with Istan, but will trust Rhorix with the proof that Istan had left him with. But the chest comes at a price. He leads them to another chamber, this one filled with sick elves whose chests look almost collapsed in. Klindal recognizes the symptoms from a poison his father had helped develop decades ago.

Calum’s price? That whoever is attacking his men is stopped.

[hcafilm]

Kai’s entry blog

In todays session, we firstly discussed the details and availability of the group for the screening at Warner Bros. We came to an agreement of the date for our screening which is really exiting stuff. Next, we focussed on lighting. Due to entering a film competition, we were kindly given a brand new lighting kit, equipped with all high-tech and professional apparatus. Before setting this up, i briefly ran through ‘three point lighting’ which is a vital foundation to lighting and cinematography. I ran through the use of the Key light; the main and most powerful light on the subject, the fill light; to soften facial shadows and balance out the light on the subjects face, and finally the backlight; to draw focus onto the subjects outline to separate them from the background, making the shot feel less 2-D. in the process of this, we learned how to safely set up and handle the lighting. for example, we were told to never look into the light, be aware of the heat given off, to not leave cables in open areas, to always turn off the lights when not in use, to always have the legs at 90 degrees and to have the front leg facing the subject to avoid the possibility of the light falling onto him/her. After this, I took to the imac and started to edit footage from the Queens Square Fair. i spent a lot of time on this, making smooth transitions and edits.

[qu33n0fcups-blog]

The Symbols

The most disturbing and obvious lead we have are the symbols found on both Sam's head after what appears to be an assault at the Wroth-Caleb crypt, and on Allison's when she was found. They appear on the forehead, drawn on with a red pigment. Thanks to Sam's camera running after she dropped it, while the look at her assailant wasn't clear, we could see both the mixing of this pigment (though with unknown ingredients) and the actual drawing. This is sort of a godsend, given that the symbols became very smudgy, and catching them in the act of being drawn helped clarify the first two that appear on Sam's head.

Screenshots of these symbols from 'Session Nine: Wroth-Caleb':

And these, same video, from when they were being made:

Screenshot from 'the tree', the symbols on Allison:

The rightmost symbol on each appear to be the same, and this is likely for the middle one as well, though too blurry to tell for certain with that one. The one on the left is different.

When I first saw them, they were immediately familiar to me - they very strongly resemble Runes. I won't conclusively say that they are, it could be a freaky coincidence. For anyone who doesn't know what those are, the Runes are the ancient Nordic/Germanic mode of writing. Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien's work would recognize them as a decorative motif. They're still used today in modern eclectic neopaganism, divination and Asatru, amongst other things. They stand for pronounceable letters as well as having symbolic meaning.

The runes of the Elder Futhark (that is, the oldest known set of runes - a set of letters is an alphabet because it begins with alpha and beta, a set of runes is a futhark because it begins with F U Th A R K) that these resemble follow.

The symbol definitely in common resembles Haglaz, the letter 'H'.

The middle symbol, very clearly on Sam and vaguely on Allison, resembles Laguz, the letter 'L'.

The left symbol on Allison resembles Naudiz, the letter 'N'.

The left symbol on Sam resembles Ansuz, the letter 'A'.

So, on the rare chance that the unknown assailant is using them as a simple cypher, we have acronyms ALH and NLH. Now what that might mean, your guess is as good as mine.

However, I don't think that's what's being implied here. Note, I'm currently running off of easily googleable sources, I don't have any books handy to hit (I might need to schedule a library trip), so what I'm running off of is wikipedia, top search results, and misty memories of back in high school when I had pretensions of witchcraft (hey, it's a phase some kids go through) and briefly used them to divine with. So take my assessment with a grain of salt until I've got more to back things up with.

But. What sends off alarm bells in my head that their use here is symbolic, possibly even meant for some sort of ritual or magic, is the first rune on Allison's head, Naudiz. When I used the rune for divination, that was the one you didn't want to cast (like coming up with the 10 of swords in tarot). It refers to need and distress. And it was found on Allison's corpse, and the only variation between her head and Sam's.

The other runes' 'on the surface' symbolic meanings are: ansuz = related to the Aesir (the gods), Haglaz = hail, Laguz = water. The A meaning makes sense in context if we assume that either something supernatural is at work or the assailant was attempting to work some kind of magic. The L meaning could be related to the tragic circumstances of Allison's initial disappearance - being swallowed by the waters near the Blue Hole without being seen going in, water too shallow for her to disappear under. I'm a bit lost about the H meaning - it refers to literal hail, the icy stuff from the sky, so I'm not sure how that fits in yet.

I will have to delve further the next time I have some free time - as a homemaker I'm not blessed with as much of it as you'd think. I'd like to find sources about the runes that aren't fluffy neopagan new age repackaging, or purely academic and from a linguistic standpoint. I'll look for a reliable translation of the old rune poems - the works in which the ancient peoples who used them recorded their meanings. I should also cross reference the other Futharks just to be safe - the Elder Futhark is the oldest and the one most commonly used by modern magic practitioners, but there's also the Younger Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon Futhark to consider. And it's possible that this is a coincidence and they're not meant to be runes, but I find the resemblance too striking to ignore.

[steveistired]

Eight Great Ghost Stories (from the past 15 years)

[takec17h19cln2sheart-blog]

[herskinmakesmecry]

[herskinmakesmecry]