Lexxander Nightgrass - Session 3

= BRAH! =

5 May 2021 IRL

XXXXX 2250 SooN

Lexxander Nightgrass is standing in an open cell in the basement of a church, with a couple of pieces of freshly-killed werewolf at his feet. He had killed the werewolf, at the were’s request, but he didn’t feel good about dispatching a monster. He feels only sadness at the turn that poor old man’s life had taken. This bloody abattoir covered in body chunks from previous victims of the unwilling werewolf, this is not a place a sad old man should have to die.

The headless body starts to change form, back from a wolf and into a man. While he watches and grieves for the stranger he killed, it returns to fully human form. Even the blood seems to be changing, as though the lycanthropy affected the blood as well as the body of the old man. Lexx is glad that at least in death, the guy will be human again, something he desperately wanted but couldn’t achieve in life.

Lexxander spends the night in a grim task - burying the dead man and his recent friend Peridot in a manner as respectful and decent as he can. They deserve it. He digs them fresh graves in the graveyard outside, making sure to choose a piece of land that isn’t sullied by blood and gore from the activities this church seems to enjoy, even praying over them a little. When he completes his sad mission,  he ponders his future and his past, and the large baseball sized d20 the Lady gave him. He is a tiefling lost, with no map in sight.

He has nothing left to lose at this point. He’s adrift on the current of life, and fate. Contemplating his gift from Lady Luck, and having really, no idea what the Hells to do now, he lets the dice decide his future. Giving the white chunk a roll, well, it looks like he’s heading west, to Las Vegas. Lexx will try to find a shrine or church or something dedicated to the Lady, maybe find out what he should ....do.

He pulls out the almost-dead cell phone, only 8% remaining. Ah well, it’s not like he has anyone else to ask for help or suggestions, or even talk to. After several rings, a gruff voice answers “yeah”. “Hey, Valbin, it’s me, Lexx”, he begins, and the phone clicks off. He glares at the phone for a second. Okay, guess he doesn’t want to talk. He powers off the phone and decides to get a move on.

Lexxander takes the old man’s truck and heads north up the Florida gulf coast so he can eventually hook a left west. The scenery isn’t bad, beaches, pretty green-blue water, thickets of Florida scrub land, thousands of empty miles in which to think about what he’s done and who he’s becoming. After an indeterminate distance of beach and sand and scrub repeating like a loop, he spots a sign that not only lifts his spirits, but also makes him laugh. In this small touristy beach town, someone has erected a huge sign with a logo of a giant peach being juicily stabbed with a sword, and the name “Chadd’s ARSEnal” underneath. The building is large, and he thinks they’ll likely have some new scimitars for sale. Despite the ridiculous logo and name, he pulls in, because a paladin without appropriate arms is like a skunk without it’s smell.

Behind the counter in the small public area stands a tall young-ish man with rippling blond hair down to his biceps, a deep cut pink and blue tank top exposing his blonde armpit and chest hair. An incredibly annoying surfer-brah accent emits from the man when he welcomes Lexxander to Chhhaaaaadddds, brah. Lexx is not charmed, but whatever, he’s not going to be around this tool for long. Buy a scimitar and get out.

“Oh, dope, you want a new sckimmie? Haaah, brah, we got the sickest sckimmie-sckimmies on the Gulf Coast, man. Check this out, brah!”. Appropriately-named Chadd taps a bit on the computer in front of him, and a projection appears on the wall and they look over the available scimitars. There’s  one of Giant Slaying, one Elemental Slaying, and one of Dragon Slaying. Lexx wants them all, they’re all beautiful and put his current scimitar to shame. His palms fairly itch with the desire to hold a quality martial weapon. In the pictures, they gleam with sharp razor edges and elegant chased lines. Lexx really can’t decide, because he wants all of them, so rolls his Lady dice to pick one, letting it choose the Giant Slaying scimitar for him.

“So, brah, can I ask you a question?”, the Chadd asks. Dryly, Lexx informs him that he already did, but sure, he can ask one more. “Your horns brah, like, do they uh..regrow if you like, chop them off?”. “Well gee, I’ve never cut them off before so I wouldn’t know.”, Lexx flatly says. Chadd proposes a dope idea, brah. If Lexxander lets him cut off a horn, he can have a scimitar for free. Lexx hesitates, and Chadd ups the deal. “Brah, brah! If you let me cut off both horns, you can have TWO sick sckimmie-sckimmies!”. Mentally shrugging, Lexx decides to roll his Lady dice again. He doesn’t even like his horns anyway. The Lady determines that he will barter both horns for two “sckimmie-sckimmies”, and Lexx is confused if she’s on his side or not.

Chadd “brah”s into a microphone a bit, and they idly chat about surfing while they wait. Lexx admits that he’s never surfed, but he’d like to, and get’s informed that, “Brah, it’s so awesome brah! Shredding the waves, oh it’s the sickest! It’s so, like, dope brah!”. A frizzy-haired dude comes out from the cavernous back area of the store, carrying three glorious scimitars in his arms, mercifully stopping the description of how epic surfing is, brah.

Once again, Lexx rolls the die to determine what sword he will pick in exchange for the second horn, and is informed that he will get Dragon Slaying. “Hah, cool brah, so like, are you ready? This is so dope!”. Wanting to get it over with and get away from these brah-dopes, Lexx lays his head down on the counter. It reminds him, uncomfortably, of the werewolf, the old man. He can sense and slightly see Chadd waving a scimitar up and down, as though planning what angle is best to strike the horns off of his head.

Thinking again of his difficulty with the old were, Lexx pops his head back up. “Hey, are you sure you can do this?”, he eyes the blonde man. “I’m pretty partial to my dreds and I would hate for them to get scratched, you know what I mean?”, he very meaningfully informs Chadd. Chadd nods wisely, and it’s likely that at some point in his surfer-brah life, he too has had precious dreds.

“Brah, I’m ace with a sckimmie, brah, but like, I got a better idea for right now!”, Chadd suddenly spits out. “Oh, what?”, Lexx is wary of any more of his great ideas. What other body parts does he want to chop off now? “Dude, let’s shred for a while, brah!”, he brahs to the brah and the other brah. “Brah!”, Puck brah’s back. They each grab the scimitar laying closest to them and head out to the beach, because at this point, why not? This is a weird day, Lexx is just going to go with it, he has somewhat amusedly given up and is along for life’s ride.

On the walk to the beach, Lexxander asks them if they know about Lady Luck, and any churches dedicated to her. Chadd tells him a short anecdote about The Dude, a guy who showed up in Vegas with a dollar and now lives in a penthouse, thanks to Lady Luck. “Are there any other churches on the way to Las Vegas?”, Lexxander asks the two brahs. They cheerfully, with many ‘brahs’, inform him of a church in New Orleans, but warn him it’s not a good place. The congregation is mostly people looking to avoid jail, being murdered, hoping to score big on a robbery, that kind of stuff. “I hear they’re reallllly not good brahs, brah”, Puck informs him somberly.

Seven odd looking surfboards are tucked up on the shoreline. They’re thicker than Lexx would have expected, and have pipes sticking out the back. He’s never surfed, but Lexx doesn’t recall having seen pictures of surfboards with tailpipes.

As they head towards the boards, the dudes kick off their flip flops and pull of their tanks and drop their weapons, until they’re left barefooted in board shorts. “Check it!”, Chadd gestures proudly towards the sea. “Boom boards, brah!! They’re so sick. You want to shred? These will sssshhhhhreddddd!”. Lexx swears he can hear the extra letters generated by Chadd’s excitement.

Chadd rushes ahead and jumps on a red board. He stands on some sort of metallic-looking circles in the center of the board, which makes a soft mechanical noise. Lexx tips his head and watches while Chadd whips out a ruby shard and shoves it into the pipe on his board. To Lexx’s great surprise, the board surges forward into the sea, with no effort from the rider.

Puck laughs at the look on Lexx’s face. “Brah, it’s the shards. A ruby goes hella fast brah, like 120. Diamond is way chiller, like only 60.”. He hands over a ruby to Lexx, and hops on a blue board of his own. “C’mon dude, this is gonna be epic!”, and he bends over and stuffs a diamond into his tailpipe, zooming after Chadd, who is currently riding some frighteningly large waves.

Lexxander mulls over the shard in his hand, looking at the ruby, the huge waves generated by the two riders, the tailpipe, and back to the ruby. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the Lady’s dice. She’s decided that he’s going to participate in the foolishness, and she thinks he should use a diamond.

Gingerly, the tiefling steps on the white board in front of him. The initial hum is mildly unsettling, but he was expecting it. Shaking his head at his own foolishness, he leans over and stuffs a diamond into the pipe. The board launches into the water, and Lexx does his best to stay atop the board while it does so.

A 25 foot wave looms above Lexx, and he panics. Chadd is ahead of him, cutting across the face of the wave, and with no idea what to do, Lexxander tries his best to mimic Chadd’s actions. He sweeps across the front of the wave with all the grace of a fully-dressed novice tiefling paladin boom-boarder. His board launches gracefully off the top of the wave. Hovering 35 ft in the air above nothing, Lexxander briefly contemplates his life choices, before slamming back into the water. Miraculously- thank you Lady Luck - he stays mostly planted on his boom board. He wiggles a foot back into position, because “Lexx has Dex”, wooooo!

Chadd and Puck are heading towards a waterspout out in the sea. Seeing no way to actually stop this boom board, and in the spirit of a very weird day, Lexxander decides to follow them. They all ride boards around the whirlpool circle at the base of the waterspout. Looking down, Lexx sees what looks like another whirlpool with an empty space at the bottom, in which a glowing blue rune  lies right in the center.

Puck and Chadd are still zipping around the rim of the whirlpool, but Lexx’s board seems to be faltering. Concerned at the slowing speed, he contorts himself - ‘cause Lexx has Dex! - and stuffs another diamond into the pipe. The white board lightly bucks and speeds up, to his relief. He has no desire to end up at the bottom of a whirlpool with a dead board.

The three of them spin around the whirlpool a time or two, the brahs hollering like, well, brahs. Lexx is more comfortable with his board by now, and he’s starting to enjoy the loops. He glances down and instantly feels less enjoyment. The blue rune is vomiting out a few 9 foot blobs of humanoid water elementals. Lexx presumes that the brahs knew this would happen, and brought him as a bait boarder so the elementals wouldn’t eat the brah-worst. “You Assholes”, he yells, but they don’t hear him over the noise of the whirlpool.

Exuding a moist and gloopy pseudopod, one of the blobs swipes at Lexxander. When he passes by. As his head goes underwater, he hears the faint sounds of “brah? Brahhhh!”. Gasping for air, he pops back up out of the water, damaged by 14 points from that wet smack-attack.

Chadd swipes his boom-board right through an elemental, spinning a dope 360 on the far side. He grins madly, wet blonde hair sticking to his back and flapping in the in the self-generated wind. Puck laughs and air-fives his brah.

Lexx grabs the scimitar on his fully-clothed back, brandishing it at the water elemental. The elaborate chasing on the blade glimmers, and he thanks Lady Luck once again. The sword he randomly grabbed as they left the ARSEnal was, luckily, the scimitar of Elementals. He’s about to slice some water up!

Lexxander swings at the big blue-green blob, and Lady Luck is once again on his side, because he rolls a Nat 20, doubling the already-doubled damage from the scimitar. The bright blue-green colors in the blob glow like neon when Lexx hits it with a weapon meant specifically to kill it. The blob splits into two smaller blobs, and Lexxander’s board carries him around to the other side of the whirlpool.

Puck attempts to copy Chadd and slice through the full blob with his board, but he’s apparently not as graceful. Puck falls off his board and the blob on the left sucks his body straight into the belly of the beast. Chadd, displaying his deep store of intelligence and tactical knowledge, casts Walk on Water and leaps off his unstoppable ruby-fueled boom board into the middle of a whirlpool while screaming “PUUUUCK, BRAHHHHHH!”. He brah-fully tries to get to Puck, but slips a bit and the water wall carries him away. When he circles around past his board, Chadd grabs for it, also brah-fully, and also missing it. Not a good brah-moment for Chadd.

Lex has Dex again, and grabs a med kit from his bag, because he’s hurting a bit. Unfortunately, his Dex doesn’t extend to actually using his med kit. When he pulls on it to pop it open, he tugs too hard and get to watch as the seven-use med kit gracefully spirals through the air before executing a perfect landing right in the swirling water wall. He swoops by the Puck-eating water elemental, but his focus is on trying to spot the med kit, and he misses any chance to break him free. Resigned to the loss of the med kit, Lexx dips a shoulder into the water and applies his Armor of Agathis. A crackling shell of spiky ice forms over his body. Lexx is now an ice-covered, fully clothed, tiefling paladin, on a boom board, with a scimitar, fighting water elementals, that have by now sucked TWO brahs into their gloopy bodies.

Lexx slices at himself with the sckimmie, drawing blood to cast a ritual and boost his attacks. He swoops by the split elemental and smashes it again, freeing Chadd’s head. “Brah, I’m rough brah, this is not sick, this is the opposite of awesome, help brah!”, he wails, while his blood is slowly turning the elemental pink.

The blob takes another swipe at him, shattering his armor of Agathis. Ice shards explode off his body, drilling into the split blob. Lexxander is down to only 6 temporary hit points, and out of choices. Puck is likely dead, and Chadd is only a few seconds behind him.

With a heavy sigh, Lexx stuffs the ruby from his pocket into his boom board and cuts hard, hard left, trying to get up and out of the whirlpool. The larger blob reaches into the whirlpool, altering the flow of the water wall. Lexxander struggles mightily to lean hard and force the board up out of the wall, despite feeling himself slipping backwards. “Not yet, child, I still have use for you”, a gentle lady voice sounds in Lexx’s head.

Despite physics, the white board begins to move up the water wall, against the flow and the effort of the large elemental. With a yell that sounds suspiciously like a “BRAH!”, his board shoots over the edge into the air before landing on the water far away from the sucking maw of the whirlpool.

Breathing heavily, he heads back to the shore. As the board zooms along, he considers his options for getting off the apparently unstoppable death machine. “Well”, he says to himself out loud, “I guess I’m going to just have to buck the biscuit”. Lexx cuts the board hard right, so it’s running parallel to the shore. Girding his loins, he launches himself off the board towards the sand, while the board is still zooming along at close to 120.

Lexx tumbles end over end across the beach, as does the white Lady dice when it pops out of his pocket. The ruby-fueled boom board, free as a rocket ship with no pilot, shoots out of the water. The board flies across the land, kicking up sand, and slams into an important support beam for the pier, followed by a little explosion. Lexx is hurt but not beaten, and only took 2 points off his temporary 6, yay! He gets up off the sand and dusts himself off, before grabbing his Lady die,  which is showing a 1.

Two hours earlier, George and Fiona went to the pier. He wants to propose at the top of the Ferris wheel. They eat funnel cake, they play silly games, they’re having a great time. They let someone go ahead of them and take the last cart for the Ferris wheel, resulting in the pair having to take the next ride. As they get to the top, the sounds of an explosion and then a sudden creaking noise splits the air. The wheel lurches to the side and Fiona, recently so happy, slips out of the cart in sudden abject terror. George screams in alarm, and grabs the arm of his beloved. The giant wheel starts leaning further and further, George still gripping Fiona’s arm with every ounce of love in his soul.

Lexxander is running, screaming desperately “Get off, get out, get off the pier!!!!”. The sounds of screaming grow louder. Another metallic creak rings out, and then another - the wheel is toppling faster and faster. KA-CHUNK! The merry-go-round, filled with young children and families, erupts in high-pitched children’s screams when it tips sideways. It’s leaning dangerously close to the water.

Seeing that his one-man running-and-shouting idea isn’t going to stop this pier from collapsing, Lexxander changes tactics from prevention to rescue. He can see the bodies falling or jumping into the water, and he dives in to help save them.

Lexxander is blindly grabbing at people - there’s so many, he can’t choose, whoever he makes contact with, he’s helping get to safety. He’s doing the best he can, dragging an old lady in one hand and a child in the other hand, kicking towards the shallower water. They get to where they can stand, and Lexx releases them with a final push towards land, and flips around to go get more people. As his head turns, he locks eyes with George, still gripping a terrified Fiona. While he’s looking at them, the ride supports finally give way with a great rending moan.

Horrified, Lexx can see that the two will fall into the water, and then the Ferris wheel will fall on them. Redoubling his efforts, futile though they may be, Lexx frantically swims towards the spot in the water where the couple will likely land. He can’t swim faster than gravity works, and the wheel splashes down into the water, sending a great geyser of ocean into the air, and ironically, generating a tidal wave that pushes the people in the ocean to the shore.

Lexx watches the wheel sink down to the bottom of the ocean through frantic swim strokes. The water isn’t very deep where it landed, and a majority of the Ferris wheel is sticking out at a drunken angle. The part under the water, though, there’s at least two people still down there.

Finally reaching them, Lexx gulps air and dives down. Jorge is lying on the seabed, apparently pinned down by some part of the fun ride, struggling to free himself. Fiona is there too, swimming free and frantically tugging at Jorge or digging at the sand, trying to rescue her beloved now, after he rescued her. Lexxander sees them through the churned up murky water and a feeling of doom sweeps through him. It’s going to take a miracle to save this man.