3B - One flew over the cuckoo hut

Holding Room

Sam has no problem constructing a makeshift tent. Given the lack of modern conveniences in the hut, it comes to little surprise that the tablecloth has no plastic lining. It is merely a large sheet of cloth. Still, it doesn't need to stop a lot of blood to do the job as it's not like the stuff will be splattering everywhere. He has his rig set up and ready to go. All that's left to do is to drop the body (or part of it) into the grinder and start cranking.



Garden

Sun's grip strength makes squeezing the honey out of the honeycomb easy enough, and he soon has sticky hands and enough beeswax to fashion some ear plugs. Baba Yaga notices him messing around and pauses her argument long enough to say, "You keep wasting time and you're friend is going to burn up. He should only have a few minutes left, I would guess."

Wasting no time, Sun runs back to the stables, shoves the beeswax in both his and Ichigo's ears and once against Kinsley begins playing. Sun and Ichigo are completely unaffected. Now they just need to open the door and hope the same is true of the Nightmare...

Very, very carefully, Sun opens the door of the Nightmare, making sure the door is between him and the horse, in case it spits fire. If everything turns out to be safe, he uses mittens and shears to get some hair, stuffs it into the pot, and takes that back to Baba Yaga.

((I thought that Sam had already dumped the body into the grinder. I had meant for him to do that before gathering stuff.))

Sam opens the trap door of the cage doing his best to avoid getting blood on him. He gets back under his tent and starts grinding.

WuJen continues to berate Baba Yaga for her bad behavior. "What's this prove anyway? That you can force people weaker than you to do things they shouldn't? Haven't you ever heard that one's character is revealed by how they treat their lessers? I mean really, we already knew you could strong arm people, did you have to go and prove it in the most hellish way possible?

All you had to do is talk to people, or maybe even travel in a less conspicuous way and no one would bother you. You are the cause of all your troubles."

The Holding Room

Sam gets cranking. The room is filled with the squelch of flesh and the occasional cracking of bone as he literally grinds the body into hamburger. It does not take long to have more than enough meat and bone ground up and ejected into the collection tray than he really needs. The ghoul's upper torso remains visible above the grinder, its dead, lifeless eyes gazing blindly at Sam.


The Stable

The nightmare is unaffected by the song at first, but once Sun opens the door to its enclosure, it freezes in place, unable to move while hearing the song. It is not long before Sun has a pot of fire in his hands. The pot is clearly not designed to be holding such a payload and is getting quite scorched indeed. Hopefully it should hold together long enough to deliver it.

In the Garden

Baba Yaga says to Wujen, "This world chews up and destroys anyone with an ounce of mercy. I start being kind to people and then people will immediately think I am weak and try to take advantage. Then I'll have more trouble than I know what to do with. It is a cruel world out there and the only way to keep it from getting you is to get it first. You should understand that plenty, elf. It's elves who put Ankev away. It's elves who thought THEY could hunt ME. I helped those Layathians and they did nothing but betray me for my help. You can't trust anyone in this world unless they fear you too much to dare act against you. Even then..."

Sun closes the mare's door and goes to the garden, trying to balance speed and carefulness, making sure the flame doesn't shake around in the pot, as that would cause the already weak pot to take unnecessary strain, yet fast enough to make sure the flame doesn't have the time to burn through the pot.

Sam checks the timer.

((I'm not sure how we want to handle the fuzziness of how long the three timelines here have been going on... Narratively it would be nice if we all just met up in the garden now...))

However long it says, which I imagine is probably about maybe half of the time allotted, Sam expected Sun and Ichigo to have met up with him having harvested some fire hair by now.

He gathers the baby's blood, the broom, the ghoul meat, and the elf oil, being careful still to not actually touch the ghoul meat or blood possibly dripping from it.

((This seems like a lot of stuff. I'm thinking Sam could probably handle it by holding the broom and blood in one hand while holding the ghoul meat in the other and pocketing the vial of oil. But it will be not a lot of fun traveling.))

He heads over to the stables to see what problems Sun and Ichigo are having that have held them up.

((And here is where it seems like Sam will arrive in the stabled sometime before what has been established having taken place... So I think we should ignore that and just have everyone meet up in the garden. But, obviously, it's up to the GM how to handle this))

Sam
Sam is rather weighed down by all the meat and blood and is having a hard time carrying it since the bins are really meant to be held with two hands each and he only has two hands total. He considers bracing them against his body, but his desire not to get any on himself directly conflicts with that. Eventually he decides to go over to the stables and see if Sun or Ichigo can lend him a hand with that, but in a comedy of errors, he arrives there just after they are ran off elsewhere to get things to handle harvesting the nightmare. By this point he realizes he only has less than half of the time left and doesn't have time to be running all over looking for them so he resorts to making multiple trips from the holding room to the stables.

It takes some time for him to do, but he eventually arrives with the ingredients with a small bit of time to spare, but the fact that Sun and Ichigo have not returned yet is concerning. He does notice that some damage has been done to one of the beehives and that there is a significant number of bee bodies in the grass. He has no idea how many, but it's significant enough to notice there are bee bodies in the grass at any rate, which is a fair many. He also notices Wujen is large and going back and forth agitating Baba Yaga because he has a very clear lack of self preservation sense. Meanwhile Little Dragon is wringing a frog in her hands. Presumably the very same frog that is Wujen.


Sun/Ichigo
Having finally harvested some of the nightmare hair without dying in the process, Sun quickly closes the door and the trio head back to the garden to find an impatient looking Sam staring at the half-hour glass, and Baba Yaga yelling at the giant Wujen. The other freed prisoners are also there, apparently standing around awkwardly, trying not to get turned into frogs themselves and kind of hoping that Wujen would stop yelling at Baba Yaga.


Everyone United Again
The ingredients have all been gathered and brought before Baba Yaga, who suddenly stops paying attention to Wujen and eyes it all with glee. "Perfect!" she shouts, "With these ingredients, I can finally make my greatest creation: Nightmare Hair Pasta Ghoulash!"

She snaps her fingers and the ingredients all float and begin to follow her as she heads through one of the doors, presumably making her way to the kitchen. She seems to have completely lost all interest in anyone in the garden. She also appears to have forgotten to do something about the half-hour glass that Sam still has and is painfully aware of.

"You know, the one thing I've heard about you that was admirable was that you keep your word. Now that my friends have murdered, tortured and endangered themselves so you could make a snack, can you at least tell us how to get out of your house? Once we are gone you might consider releasing the creatures trapped in your jars and anywhere else too. If you think I'm irritating now just imagine later once I've learned all their names..."

Sam glances down at the too rapidly depleting magic timer.

"We should follow her," he says, and heads to the kitchen.

"Yeah let's do that"

You all chase after Baba Yaga, who completely doesn't pay attention as she starts working on her recipe in the kitchen with gusto. There is a sizzle of ingredients and a smell that is at the same time putrid and enticing that fills the air as she cooks. Wujen addresses her as she is cooking and she looks up long enough to say, "Oh. You're still here? Who are you lot and what did I promise you, again?"

The spider on her shoulder chitters a bit and she says, "I know, Scarlett! I'm so looking forward to this meal, I could just squeal!"

"You promised to let us leave," Sam responds. "And also to not roast me alive when this runs down," he adds, holding up the half-hour glass for Baba Yaga to see.

Baba Yaga glances at the half-hour glass and says, "Oh, that thing. You might want to toss that in the sink over there."

She continues working on her meal, browning the meat in the oil with some garlic and onions before adding the blood to form the sauce. She then sprinkles some pepper and sugar into the sauce along with a pinch of oregano. Meanwhile she dumps the nightmare hair into a pot of boiling water along with some salt. The hair sizzles with a cloud of steam as it hits the water.

Relieved, for the moment, that the half-hour glass itself doesn't seem like it was ever going to be a direct cause of live-roasting, Sam puts the half-hour glass in the sink as instructed.

((incidentally, was that supposed to have been inferred? When Baba Yaga gave Sam the thing, I assumed that it was just a timer that she would check when they gave the ingredients and roast him if it was broken or out. But then the GM said something... I think he might have characterized Sam as being worried about the hourglass itself causing damage. So I rolled with that.))

This has been a particularly stressful half hour for Sam. Aware that Baba Yaga has not followed through on the letting them out part, Sam finds a seat and boots up Towers of Hanoi to calm his nerves a bit.

Towers of Hanoi self coothing technique roll: (will+towers of hanoi[?])
Sam Dekker carried out 9 launched of one d6text :

6 , 2 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 6 , 1 , 5

Roll to see how well he's doing in the game: (logic+towers of hanoi[mental?])
Sam Dekker carried out 13 launched of one d6text :

1 , 4 , 4 , 6 , 6 , 2 , 3 , 1 , 4 , 2 , 2 , 3 , 6

The half-hour glass slips into the standing water in the sink with a "bloop" as the last drips of time flow to the bottom. Sam's fears of the half-hour glass doing the roasting are soon confirmed as it it grows red and instantly evaporates the water in the sink with a forceful eruption of steam that fills the whole kitchen. Had he been holding it at the time, it would not have been pleasant. It seems that the only action needed to avoid such a fate was to not be holding it when the time was up.

Baba Yaga happily stirs the pots as she cooks, humming a happy tune to herself amid the steam. She then suddenly seems to remember you are all still there and asks, "Was there something else?"

Sun raises a finger. "Uhmmm yes uhhmmm we would like to leave, if you don't mind. You did promise to let us leave if we got the ingredients for you."

Baba Yaga says, "Did I? That doesn't sound like me."

Glancing at the spider on her shoulder she asks, "Did I promise that?"

The spider chitters and Baba Yaga sighs, saying, "This is why you never make decisions on an empty stomach. Oh well, a promise is a promise."

She absently wiggles her fingers and says,
"Retched vermin, don't you grouse.
All together, get out of my house!"

There is a sort of retching sound as the house shakes and one by one you are all forcibly ejected through a nearby door and out of the mouth of the giant chicken hut. You tumble through the air, over the gate and brambles, onto the grassy forest beyond. It is well into the night when you look up.

Sam uses his SATlink to connect to the matrix. He doesn't have anything that he needs to do online, but he feels better being connected. He refreshes his email a couple times.

Everyone who was freed appears to be included in the pile. That includes your group, the ogre, pegasus, unicorn, centaur, hippogriff, satyr, Grant and Krista. Wujen appears to still be a frog despite leaving the hut.

Kinsley picks himself up and says something in elvish before waving and heading out.

For those of you who speak elvish...:

The centaur stands and gazes back in the direction of the hut, stoic-faced. The other animals start dispersing as well (unless someone tries to stop them).

"Frak wujen is still a fraking frog what the hell were going to do now?"

WuJen hovers his form over by the Centuar and in Elvish says "I am sorry we didn't get a chance to retrieve it friend, I know that spear is important to you. It's not your fault. Remember that Honor comes from within and is measured by your own actions, not by the possession of something external."

"Surely there is a way to replace it. I'll help if I can. That woman has much to answer for, but it won't be us that brings her reckoning, all we can do is repair the damage from her bad behavior and move on with living."

Now out of the house and having said his piece to the Centaur he leaves his body to examine what's been done to turn his body into a frog.

WuJen manifests his astral form. "It's inconvenient, but I'll figure it out. Let's get these people settled and returned back home."