Welcome to Gaia! ::

You wake up to water lapping against your feet. You find yourself on a beach, covered in wreckage of the vessel that brought you here. You take in the salty air with a deep breath. Among the debris, there are the bodies of those less fortunate than you. You are clad only in soaked, tattered rags, but the corpses around you might hold provisions you need. You hear footsteps nearby, perhaps other survivors.

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Kaya comes to when a seagull lands on her. Nearby is a small broken crate, holding a dagger, leather armor, and bow. The sun is rising over the land to the east, indicating they're near the western coast. She recalls the cities she's familiar, corrupt port of South Bay and quiet colony of Greymouth, are on the side of the continent. Above her, she sees the creaking mast of the crashed vessel leaning directly over her. She sees other bodies along the beach, not knowing which are alive and which are dead.

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William "Lucky Bill" Dodd wakes up covered in wet sand. Next to him is the dead body of a Tradewinds Consortium guard, clad in hide armor with a dagger, short sword, coin bag, and light shield. His brown hair is covered in seaweed, and there are seagulls circling him. There's a small metal lockbox nearby, half buried in the sand. He, too, realizes they're likely on the west coast of the continent, given his years as a sailor for the Leonard Royal Navy.

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Florian Tain wakes up as the tide washes against his face. He sees a dagger and robes on a nearby body, but sees something move out of the corner of his eye. Something wet and soft rubs against his neck and moves down his back. His senses register it as something with a magical resonance. It seems oddly comforting as it caresses his shoulders.

While she shouts in protest, Bill watches as a pair of large hands in gauntlets settle onto the shoulders of the woman he calls his wife, not by ceremony but common law. No sooner does the city guard touch her than she’s raised her knee swiftly to his ill-protected groin. The guardsman stumbles back, his face warped in agony, and his wife grabs a nearby chair and swings it at the man’s middle. After that, she wastes no time falling upon him as fast and hot as fire, clawing at his face with her nails. Though it doesn’t take long for the guard’s retinue to pull her away, beneath the bruises, Bill smiles with pride.

‘You won’t get ol’ Marhylla ‘thout a fight, you won’t,’ he says through a mouthful of blood and loose teeth. ‘She’s not fit fer shackles and indenture.’

The head guardsman stands up slowly and takes hold of his wife by her long red curls. ‘No bother,’ he sneers and spits in her face. ‘Harborin’ a fugitive’s as good as treason. It’s the scaffold fer this filly.’

Bill rises out of his chair, the one they’d been beating him in before Marhylla had arrived home, and takes a clumsy step forward.

‘No… No!’

He takes a swing at the man, but in his battered stupor, he can’t balance or gauge distance very well. He falls to the floor like a sack of mason’s bricks.

‘Just you pipe down, mate,’ the leader laughs. To his fellows he says, ‘Get ‘im tied nice ‘n’ good to that chair, boys. I think this b***h owes me a bit o’ quim before she ‘angs.’

Marhylla turns back to him then as they prop him up and bind his hands, and he sees she wants to cry out for him, wants him to save her. But she doesn’t and he can’t. For a fraction of a second, he watches the fire leave her as her eyes dim, her face goes blank and her body sags into the arms of the city guard. He’s seen the look before, countless times. He’s seen it as a boy in the slums… as a deck hand of a conquering fleet… as a slave.

‘The death of hope is the death of the soul, lad,’ the old salt had told him their last night in a foreign master’s fields.

But the inferno ignites once more, futile as it is, as Marhylla kicks and screams like a desperate animal. It takes one hard blow to her head from the lead guard to knock her out and she crumples back into his arms.

Bill struggles fitfully against his bonds, standing up only to fall over again along with his chair. ‘Don’t you touch ‘er, you soddin’ whoreson!’

‘Take ‘er in the other room,’ the leader says to his obedient men before approaching. His footfalls are strange like… waves breaking against the rocks…

‘What’s wrong, mate?’ he asks. ‘Ain’t ya one o’ them Legate-lovers? Don’tcha believe in fair pay? Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, coin for coin?’

Towering over him, the man kneels down. There is a salty smell on his breath…

‘Don’tcha believe in justice?’ The guard emits a spray of saliva as he hisses the last word, which never seems to end but carries on in eternal sibilance.

‘Marhylla!’ Bill yells, ignoring him. He strains to look to where the other guards have taken her. All he can see is a blinding light, yellow, red and orange. From the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees… a tidal wave?

“Wake up, Marhylla! MARHYLLAAA-BLUBLUBLUBUBUB-AAA!”

“Lucky” Bill Dodd wakes up coughing and sputtering as the ocean crashes into the shore all around him. As the water retreats, he opens his eyes slowly, blinking them and looking blearily about in disorientation until they settle on a pale, bloated corpse. From the uniform, he knows it to be the body of a guard of the Tradewinds Consortium, the company tasked with shipping transports such as himself out of Leona and, he supposes, other places sick of their petty criminals and political dissidents. Experienced with death at sea, Bill merely grunts at the sight.

Raising his head and turning his neck, which cracks unpleasantly in the process, he stares ahead and squints against the glare of the sun on his face. Taking a deep breath in to recover from nearly drowning, the stench of the sea and of dead things assaults his nostrils, but they too are well-known to the former sailor. The shrill cries of gulls from up above racks his head like a bad hangover.

Sore, soaked and caked in sand, Lucky Bill stands up with a symphony of creaks and pops from various parts of his body. Still half-haunted by a dream already fading from memory, he lets out a sudden bellow as if to exorcise the feelings he can’t explain. Some of the closer seagulls screech in surprise and take flight and as he watches them flutter away, it’s only then he notices the tangle of seaweed that’s been flopped down on his head like the dreadlocks of a savage brought in from the Dark Continent. With a rumbling groan, he wraps thick, callused fingers around the kelp atop his scalp and hurls it at the remaining birds.

“Oi, that’s right! Sod off, ya gits!” Bill raises his arms and begins to flap them wildly as he runs toward the gulls who ascend in a mass panic. Once they’re gone, Lucky Bill yawns and stretches and scratches his rump, waking up fully.

“Godsdamned sky-rats… Now, where in the depths do we find ourselves, m’lucky lad?”

Taking in his unfamiliar surroundings, he sees the sun rising further inland to the east, with the sea to the west. Along the coast, evidence of a shipwreck is everywhere in the form of flotsam and corpses, though Bill doesn’t remember anything of how it came to be. Only a few pieces of the ship remain largely intact, in particular the mast that sits on the rocks and the bow that still peaks out of the water. He briefly ponders if he could fashion a makeshift boat, but considers it an unlikelihood best left to be mulled over later.

“Good riddance,” Bill mumbles and looks back down at the body beside him. There’s a sword on one side of the guard’s belt and a dagger and coin purse on the other, as well as a light shield not far off. The dead man’s uniform, a simple set of dark blue hide armor with a prominent insignia in the form of two crossed keys, looks to be in considerably better shape than Bill’s own rags and he quickly dresses himself in the clothes of the stiff Consortium goon, no longer in need of protection, currency or modesty in his present state. The cuirass is a little tight thanks to Lucky Bill’s potbelly, but it will do for the time being.

A bit further away, he spots a thin lockbox roughly the length and width of a small tabletop and looking to be the watertight sort that might carry a captain’s logbook or other such items of note. Whatever’s inside could give him some insight to where he is and, better yet, where he shouldn't be. Picking it up, Bill finds it predictably locked. After a few moments of combing the sands for a sizeable rock, he finds one and begins loudly smashing at the lock in the hopes of busting the case open.

As he does, it occurs to him that he might not be the only one still alive on the beach. He should probably look for others, but seeing as anyone he’d run into would be either a fellow prisoner, and thus a criminal, or a jailer, he doesn’t feel especially keen on searching them out. He realizes, however, that he must look for some food and a source of fresh water soon. Or beer…

“By the depths,” Lucky Bill sighs longingly and looks up to the sky. “Legate, ‘Bringer ‘n’ all the gods kind ‘n' cruel, what I wouldn’t do if’n ya gave us a nice, frothy pint right about now…”

He waits a moment for one to appear, knowing better, before finally scoffing and returning to his work with the lockbox.

Fergus Hedgewick wakes with sand and water in his mutton chops. There's the pecking of seagulls on his rags. The tide washes over his feat, washing his hairy hobbit feet. He begins to take note of the bodies and wreckage strewn about him, thanking the Stormbringer for sparing him. Nearby is a broken and battered body, that of a Consortium goon. He's dressed in leather armor, clad with dark blue sleeves and their crossed keys-insignia on the shoulders. The guard has a bag of coins, canteen, pouch of ammo, and powder horn (miraculously still dry). Nearby is a battered, almost broken musket that looks serviceable, if the sand is cleaned out.

He thinks he sees a man standing over a broken chest nearby. The man has an octopus perched on his shoulder, and is looking over some glass jars filled with food.

Florian sees a halfling cleaning a musket behind him.

Lucky Bill is looking at a barrel when it suddenly begins moving. The barrel starts rolling down the beach, propelled by something inside it. It comes to a stop against a pile of wreckage, unable to move any further. Beyond it, however, Lucky Bill notices something he did not see before. Two other survivors are standing erect and awake. There's a halfling holding a musket, and a man with an octopus crammed into a jar of seawater. Nearby is a crate full of jars of water and foodstuffs. The barrel, however, continues to jerk violently and randomly. The three men stare at it, and each other, waiting for some kind of response.

The lid of the barrel flies open, tossed by some powerful blow from within. There is a reeking stench of formaldehyde and alchemical preservatives as a pair of creatures dart out. Lucky Bill manages to stab one, giving it a glancing blow. Clumps of rotten flesh fall off the creature as it tries to scurry away. Bill sees the creature as it moves across the beach. Some of the flesh on the jawbone has fallen off, exposing its teeth.

It is a goblin, smelling like whatever vile chemical bath it was immersed in. It shambles along with its limbs extended rigidly, perhaps held in place by rigor mortis.The goblin is clearly no longer alive, kept animated by some unknown force. The other goblin is exactly like it, only missing part of its left arm. The eyes in both turn towards the nearest living things: the survivors. The one that Lucky Bill stabbed heads for him, while the other one charges Fergus and Florian.

[OOC: Initiative Order: Fergus, Lucky Bill, Florian, Zombie Goblin 1 (which Bill already stabbed once), Zombie Goblin 2]

"Are those...?" the sorcerer wondered, narrowing his eyes, "huh. I don't do well with dead things."

Florian watches for a moment as the zombies extricate themselves from their container, and then calmly walks so that Fergus was between him and the zombies. He focused on the injured one, and threw out his hand. His extended index finger locked on the goblin.

The blur of motion seemed to continue from his finger, a vibration in the air, a distortion in the light. It shot quickly along the vector of his finger, heading for the goblin.

[Casting magic missile]