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Thread: Marsh Kingdom

  1. #21
    "I dunno. Lowlife is just another way to say underdog, so I might stick with that," Kou replied to Miki's assertion. Moving on, there were observations to make regarding the necromancy being used, and Miki made note of this when mentioning the number of Necromancer types found in Age of Eternity. 'If we have to check trees for corpses, we may as well get a move on. Sounds like you know what you're talking about, so I'll follow your lead, and help out however I can.' With that said, Kou perked up and prepared to depart. It was apparent to him that Miki had whatever knowledge they would need to solve the initial mystery of this scenario, so he figured he would become more useful only afterwards.

  2. #22
    "Underdog has an interesting ring to it... I'll consider that one~" Miki said with an affirmative grin. As they carried on a mental conversation, it seemed that Kou was willing to go along with what Miki had to say about necromancy and help her on her inquisition. "Hai, we'll return when we have news," she said to the Chieftain. And with that Miki also took the action necessary to leave this place. She began floating out of this place stretched across her pillow, stopping for a moment to offer a place beside her to Kou. Whatever the case, it was imperative to figure out the type of necromancy being used by the Chieftain's son. Miki almost wanted to assume a specific type, but given what the Lizardmen had to say about the powers of this particular individual she couldn't simply make the assumption. So she supposed finding some burial sites would be the thing to do first, "I guess, we should look for trees with holes in them. I also want to check the tomb below the Chieftain's Throne Room, but I figured we could do that after checking the marshes," she explained of her own logic. There were some very specific things she was looking for as far as burial disturbances.

  3. #23
    Both sides agreed to the path worth taking, and Miki took the initiative in floating off. Kou walked alongside the floating pillow, only to eventually be offered a place atop it. Keeping up the pace beside it, he hopped up and rotated himself forward, allowing him to land face-down atop the cushion. "Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Besides... if anything's going wrong already, I'd rather see the leaders last, instead of having them be the surprise." Kou managed to relax against the pillow, and he would remain in such a state for the duration of the journey, if left uninterrupted. Still, he was ready for any challenge to come... if any such thing were to even appear before them on this leg of the trip.

  4. #24
    Eventually with Kou alongside her on her pillow, Miki would lead them to the outskirts of the marshes. Here she'd begin looking for hollow trees with openings, figuring them to be the easiest. By her own approximation the ones with the largest holes were likely what she was looking for and she'd begin her search at one on the western front. Here she allowed the pillow she was atop to float up to the hollow and she peeked down into it. "Hm... I found one!~" she said happy that there was indeed a grave here. Much to her general satisfaction there was a skeleton within and it didn't show any signs of life. That being said there was something strange about it. "Hm... it is..." she thought about it for several seconds. She extended a finger and drew a strange rune, this one a sideways hour glass known as Dagaz. This particular rune would settle and create a small glowing orb of light where it sat, so she could see better. With this illumination, Miki finally understood what she was looking at.

    The skeleton of the Lizardman within this place, was intact for the most part. Standing upright with what should have been his arms crossed over his chest and his head up and proud. But as she looked along its skeletal remains, there was something off about it. Several of the bones of its body were missing, fingers, toes, and tail bones were missing from this corpse. These weren't so bad alone, but the number of them that were missing from a single place was a bit disturbing was beyond normal. What was more, with the added light she could tell that they hadn't simply fallen off. "There are bones missing from this one. Bones are used in the simplest form of Necromancy. You can grow skeletal armies with them. The problem is, they are all kind of weak when they are formed that way... they don't have flesh and aren't very clever. They simply attack until they are disrupted. I supposed Lizardman bones are pretty strong, but..." Miki gave pause while she thought out loud. "If this is all that the Chieftain's son was capable of, he wouldn't have asked us for help..." Miki said with a decent amount of confidence. "Bones can be destroyed and are less likely to hold their forms when they are too far away from their masters. Blunt force is enough for those, the Lizardmen could handle it on their own..." she muttered, her long term thoughts coming together, her face deeply upset in her own concentration. The rune she'd cast here dispersed and she drew another, just in case. Using this as a 'West-most point' she drew the rune, Wunjo as the start of a containment field specifically for Lizardman corpses. "This implies he started off a pretty standard Shaman, bones aren't endless, and used simply as part of the cycle. It requires access to the bones too, something you kill or someone you know... it fits into the balance of nature but... whatever he is capable of now, is outside of that... so I have to find out what doesn't make sense," Miki said this was all mostly to herself, but aloud simply because she was used to doing this sort of thing. Soon after making her western point she headed south checking other graves looking for a change in collection method.

  5. #25
    Kou perked up when Miki announced finding a Lizardman burial site. His gaze fell upon the tree she approached, and he didn't find anything incredibly off about it initially. Only when Miki brought attention to the lowest form of Necromancy did he remember seeing such a thing in the game Age of Eternity, and subsequently take note of the pieces missing from this skeleton. "Sou ka. That's from the Bone Army build. I've seen that a lot; it's one of those resource management builds." Knowing there were at least two higher tiers of Necromancy in this world, Kou wondered why the aforementioned build was so common among them. Irrespective of this, though, there was a great concern for the other forms of Necromancy being what had to be in place. "So... what's the next tier? Is that what we have to be worried about, maybe?"

  6. #26
    It seemed that Kou was at least a bit familiar with Necromancy himself, if not from doing it, than from seeing it used in multiple builds in the game Age of Eternity. "Bone Army as a build will turn you into a pack-rat. But... it is exceedingly effective once you get the rotation down," she said with an affirmative nod. She imagined the realness of this world, made it a bit less effective for the creation of large armies, unless one had semi-unlimited access to corpses, like the ones they were searching for. As they moved on from this tree, Miki floated them by several others, she paused only long enough to peek into them, and see what kind of conditions the bodies were in before she continued moving. She'd take the time they were moving between trees to answer Kou's questions. "Corpse Build is next up from Bone Army. When used it basically just lets someone raise a body as soon as it falls. It will fight on their side with its current physical ability until its body can't move anymore. It's better than bones because they can take more damage, but it's harder to use properly because they require a lot more to raise. That's the exchange and why most people don't use them..." she said with a firm nod. As they flew by another hollow she noticed it wasn't empty but instead had a body within it, that was missing an entire arm, leg and tail. The head remained in this one, but this body had obviously taken quite a bit of damage. More than a single battle would have dictated. "The thing is, that means the Corpse build is the one which would be most useful with the bodies of Lizardmen, as they are pretty physically tough. I had a similar idea when using Orcs... and I made due with fewer overall 'pets' to raise a single large 'Zombie' of the Orc persuasion for a few levels," Miki mentioned. But something about this wasn't right. "But my problem with this is, that even the zombies aren't really that hard to kill. They are strong but it shouldn't be that much of an issue. So... I am wondering if he's managed to become something stronger than that... Or if he's figured out how to raise multiples that are at the strength of the corpses, because that could be problematic and he has an entire army and that shouldn't be possible..." she said, at this place she put down another rune, this one Ansuz. She was creating a strange combination of runes for a bounded field, but she thought it might help keep the numbers of called dead to a minimum. She followed around the outer edge to the next area and looked through the hollows in the hopes of getting some hint of what was going on here.

  7. #27
    "Sounds like an annoying type of glass cannon, piling up resources for skill use instead of holding potions and shit," Kou asserted. He could agree that the first two methods of Necromancy would be virtually useless for staging a rebellion, but there was also an itch on the back of his mind from an earlier claim. "Hmm..." he muttered, thinking back to words spoken by the Lizardman who led them here. "That one guy... He said all the deaths at Dwargon were helping the enemy. That amount of bodies isn't something you could just pack into an Adventurer's Bag..." As he considered this, Kou became more and more concerned by the idea of what would meet them in the future. Mostly, he was bothered by the idea of what would naturally come next in Necromancer tiers. What he thought of was something he knew to have been a top-tier build in the game at some point, until being tweaked by the developers for being considered a 'tier 0' build. When this memory appeared to him, his eyes widened. "Death Knights..."

  8. #28
    Kou remarked that the build Miki mentioned sounded annoying because of the lack of potions and other disposable items. She could only chuckle because she knew better, but only because she put some thought into her initial build. "Iie, it doesn't have to be a glass cannon. If you choose a good starting race, with high regeneration or a decent class with the ability to use supplementary skills in high volume, then you can just be a cannon. A bit tank-y even, if you wanted to lean that way..." she mused, knowing she'd chosen such a build for herself, and it was very easy for her to get there considering her chosen skills. Beyond this point, as they made their way east from the south she came across the sort of hollows she'd been dreading. Moreover, the speech that Kou was giving her a horrible feeling deep within the pit of her stomach. "Ugh... Death Knights were completely nerf'd in-game, so I had to look into it to be sure. Now I have a different problem and that is figuring out if that part of the game mechanics directly translate to this world..." she said finding this not to be a tree hollow, but a broken stump with only the foot prints within to hint at anything being there. "The whole body is missing and strong enough to break through the tree. It is the most viable option that he has the ability to create Death Knights, which would make him a Lich. But... I wonder if the nerf made it into this world..." she said with a knowing smile. "When the Death Knights build was nerf'd in-game, they made it so you could only raise a Death Knight of something you'd killed with an A or higher Disaster Rank. You also had to possess an artifact of it and pray on the Lich King's O-bel-isk..." there was a break in Miki's speech as she realized something important. Her general explanation covered and easily connected to how such things could have been connected back to this world, but there was a key piece she'd only just realized had been mentioned before. "The guys who brought us here said he was raising Lizardmen friend or foe, which if there is an obelisk nearby would be an explanation of his power. And they wouldn't know about it, because the Obelisk only shines for those with the ability to host a piece of the Lich King, mages and those with connections to the cycles of life and death," she said calmly but there was just one more problem. "But I didn't see anything unnatural in this whole area..." she looked towards the north and it was back near where they'd come from, no more marshes only the burial mound of the Chieftains.

  9. #29
    It seemed the Bone Army build wasn't as specific as Kou thought. Miki stated that one could build such a character even as a tank, if they wanted. He imagined dealing with such a thing would be a nightmare, if said tank had proper resources to keep their army steady. Miki was also privy to the knowledge regarding Death Knights in Age of Eternity, and wondered if their alterations had any effect here in this world. "It'd be hell, even if we were dealing with the nerf. We're not quite at A-rank in Disaster Rank. If this guy has more than five of those, we could be done in by even the nerf," he asserted. All this talk of a Lich was making things worse, considering Kou assumed whatever this Obelisk was, they'd have to deal with it in order to deal with the Lich himself. "So, he'd need one of these Obelisks to be a Lich... but there isn't one visible here? Are we sure this guy is doing Lich stuff with that last burial site? If so, I'm guessing we'll really want to find that Obelisk."

  10. #30
    Miki nodded to Kou. It seemed he understood the gravity of the situation even without her explaining it. The rank of A as a Disaster was equivalent to about level 50... and they were a bit shy of that themselves. Given this if multiples of such creatures existed under the control of the corrupt Lizardman Shaman, it would be a daunting task for them to undertake. "It would be pretty difficult. I tried my luck against a pretty high ranked creature while I was teetering below level, and it took me a while and every tactic I had just to kill it. Even if we are both capable of doing that, the introduction of even a third creature would make that a bad day for us..." she added her own ideas. As she looked at the shattered tree everything about it told her that it was likely Lich related abilities which called to this creature. She thought about it for several seconds longer, choosing to explain her logic in this moment. "I am fairly certain it was Lich related. It could have just been a corpse raising, but... nothing of the creature is left here, not even its weapons. Zombies aren't raised with enough of an AI to properly wield their own weapons, they just create bone or blood variants of their class weapons. Besides, I am pretty sure this area, directly west of the mound for the Chieftains is reserved for the honorable warriors. Those who served the Chieftain as strong sword arms, meaning that one was most likely to have a Disaster Rank of A, besides maybe... the Chieftains themselves..." she said with a fairly good understanding of the hierarchy of Lizardfolk, gained mostly through looking at their dead. "Finding the Obelisk is important. If we can find it, we can damage or break it. If we do either, it will weaken the Lich it is connected to. Not physically but spiritually, and cause his control over his minions to falter enough that they degrade a bit. If we manage that then we can keep him from raising multiple other Death Knights and likely increase our chances of victory by quite a bit..." she concluded with a nod. "But, it's a little weird, because I know in AoE if you break the Obelisk of Lich in PvP they are immediately alerted... if it works that way here we probably don't want to do anything to it, until we are ready for the battle..." she murmured as a precaution unsure of how the mechanics of the game would transfer into this world.

    She was almost certain about the aspects of a Lich she'd seen here, given some of the other quests she'd completed within the game Age of Eternity. With that in mind, she floated towards the mound looking along it until she found a large stone set of doors, which barred its opening. These doors seemed to ooze mana in high quantities, that contained the chill of death. "Hm... that's pretty weird. Even I can sense this..." she said looking up at the door and noticing that several talismans had been placed along this opening as if to seal it shut from the outside. "I wonder if the other Shaman felt the magic coming from here and decided that they didn't want it leaking out into this place?" Miki questioned. Though she wasn't a mage by class association, what she felt here was the chill of death in much greater quantities than she'd felt the entirety of their travels around the marshes.

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