Having successfully failed, now the party has to clinch their victory and nab Bingle. The problem is, they haven't really thought that far, and Lawry pulled out all the stops during his fight with the Obliterator.
It's the day of the fighting championship, and Lawry chooses not to play things straight, to put it bluntly.
It's the day of the fighting championship, and Lawry chooses not to play things straight, to put it bluntly.
The Earth Kingdom's fighting champion is a sure way to impress Bingle, but it unfortuantely also tends to draw the attention of the criminal establishment. Getting the kid on board to travel the world as a fighter, with his nemeses, wearing false facial hair, turns out to be a complex, multi-step endeavor.
When it's clear he can't stay in his old home, Bingle strikes south towards the Earth Nation, where as it turns out, there's a veritable party of earth masters forming. In this case, it's a celebration style party, rather than a traveling group of adventurers, but if you're going to find people who can magically move earth, it's the place.
Bingle retreats to his home territory, and our heroes learn a little more about Bingle's past. It's not a typical life story, and it's not a typical place to grow up.
Even the most well run public event has a few hitches to it the planning teams don't expect, but luckily those bumps along the road are secondary to the main objective of our heroes! Unfortunately, there's one issue they hadn't considered, and the whole plan risks falling apart at the seams from it.
There must be a way a group of top government agents can capture a magical child, and the group conceives of a method absolutely nobody will see coming. As the saying goes, the enemy cannot anticipate your plans if you yourself don't know what you're thinking.
Our heroes find themselves in an abandoned mining town where they're harassed throughout the night without much explanation. The enemy is clearly near, but who the enemy is and what they want is decidedly muddy.
If Bingle were clever, he'd be quite difficult to find after an escape in a ray of light. Fortuantely, he's twelve, and would get lost if he didn't follow the roads, leaving a trail of dazzled and confused witnesses. You can't pay a teacher with rays of sunshine, and Bingle had to have stopped somewhere.
Bingle has been captured, but he isn't happy about it and it's a long walk back to the Dark Nation capitol. Just about anything could go wrong, and our heroes still know fundamnetally nothing about their captive.
The party finds themselves in a small frontier town where the Light Nation boy was supposedly seen, but before they can capture him, first they have to deal with precocious hijinks and tomfoolery, ending in tragedy.
In a world of elemental powers, our heroes stand above the rest in the mercenary business, due to good marketing if nothing else. The Emperor of the Dark Nation himself hires our heroes to track down a plucky twelve year-old boy with unclear motives and a prophetic destiny.
It's the final challenge! But the whole game seems rigged, and the whole event has been so stressful and off the wall that not everybody involved still knows exactly what they want anymore.
Champions aren't just fast and neurotic! They're also supposed to have a lot of neurons, or possibly faster neurons, or maybe well-connected ones. They're smart, supposedly - a fact which the team must put to the test in an escape room.
Champions aren't just fast and neurotic! They're also supposed to have a lot of neurons, or possibly faster neurons, or maybe well-connected ones. They're smart, supposedly - a fact which the team must put to the test in an escape room.
There are a lot of different aspects to balance, and when your god represents precarious balance, the whole act of currying your gods favor is naturally prone to tipping. The next challenge is theoretically impossible for Elvis to lose! Which means the god of precarious balance may be rather fickle about it.
The first challenge of the show is an apartment fire! Our heroes have a chaotic and non-cooperative technique at best, but with a little dumb luck victory is possible. It's just fortunate by itself that the victims trapped in the building aren't real people!
Even singing up for event times can be a sort of challenge when you've got the right sort of team. At least the catering is free and the breakfast is continental! For better or worse, our heroes are contractually obligated to play the games to the end.
There's a god for every occasion, and for every god, a champion blessed with that god's powers, however minor. Getting noticed in this kind of ecosystem can be pretty difficult without a leg up, but luckily there's a champion of charities!
There's been a murder, but who done it? The group has only minutes to identify the culprit, but evidence is shaky at best, and from some points of view the most likely perpetrator is Lawry.
The crew meets Mayson's wife, and she's not terribly excited to see them. Seeing your estranged husband after two years of running off to be a monk is one thing, but apparently him being there violates some kind of international law.
Mayson raises the question of his wife with Elvis, and the crew decides that the effort is a worthy "side quest". The only hitch is how to do it and how to keep Max from objecting.
After arriving in East Turkanislockistav, Mayson realizes that before they do anything, they need independent information, and Lawry learns that his abilities as a talented sneak, thief, and artist place him in demand.
Max leads the crew through the woods and to a temporary location, but Mayson doesn't have a lot of good reason to trust Max's intentions. Additionally, their location of rest turns out to be less than safe in the long run.
It was all a skeleton plot! A mysterious man named Max pulls aside the curtain and reveals our heroes have been duped about their adventure from the start, but he's not entirely forthcoming yet about why or how. For now, escape is foremost on the mind.
In defiance of convention, the group makes a set of characters inspired by the DnD class system. They're your basic dungeon delvers and skeleton slayers with unusual backstories. However, Mayson's estranged father appears with an important message. Is he sincere, or is the entire thing all an elaborate act?
Trapped and interrogated, the party has no choice but to cooperate with Chanclas himself, and they're given one final tour. However, they won't go out entirely without a fight, and they definitely won't be pleasant about any of it.
After a few twists and turns, the party winds up in the innards of the factory, and it spells bad news for all those who dwell there. There are a certain list of pests you never want to see in a building that handles food, and player characters are at the top of that list.
Only a certain amount of whimsy and magic can hide the horrific necessities of industrial demand. Charlie Chanclas knows that when you have a goose that lays a golden egg, you breed it and eventually establish a mass farming operation while aggressively capturing market shares.
