Pathfinding: An Adult Choose Your Own Adventure, Seventy-first Entry
#72 of Pathfinding-CYOA
Pathfinding: An Adult Choose Your Own Adventure
Seventy-first Entry
By Gideon Kalve Jarvis
Vote Tallies
Free Erlend? Y/N: 1/11 - Erlend stays a slave, but this vote will come up again later
Party members leaving (any with more than 3 votes goes with the vanguard):
Boskan - 10 - Removed from party
Imogen - 7 - Removed from party
Wisselfleur - 7 - Removed from party
Lesage - 7 - Removed from party
Vin - 4 - Removed from party
Landis - 4 - Removed from party
Kyte - 4 - Removed from party
Rael - 2
Wicker - 2
Additional Votes
* Urtan/Urta incest scene - 4
* Incestuous foursome with Windtooth, Wauken, Rufus, and Erlend - 4
* Spark goes back into the sex machine, and this time he has sex with himself - 2
* Meet Lysha in Valkyrie City - 2
* Check on Belthin's fate - 3
* Padmini/Wisselfleur/Imogen (adding Lesage if possible) all f/f scene - 2
* Jonna/Skaeth scene - 1
* Lesage starts using a Crown of Morpheus for sexual storage purposes - 1
* Introduce a non-sexual character - 1
* Return of the succubus imp as an active character - 1
* Rufus develops a full knot and sheath - 1
* Rael/Erlend romance - 1
* Reintroduce Kabula and Loshada, the centauress and her daughter - 1
Vote Options in Progress
* Shara and Padmini learning flesh magic and non-lethal skills (sex quite likely)
* More Hanaro sex scenes (Rufus and Urtan primarily)
* Rufus bottoms to Windtooth (his father, the Blue Feather alpha male)
* Shara gangbanged (all-female and all-male both suggested)
Author Notes
The new party composition is as follows:
Adel - chipmunk girl, princess in exile of a fallen kingdom, mate of Rufus
Cassidy - stealthy tan-furred rabbit
Erlend - slightly wicked-looking actaeon buck, good leader and fighter
Hanaro = Cho-Lin samurai, mate of Rufus
Jonna - huge black-furred she-minotaur paladin, painted in white runes
Maji - water elemental who regularly takes the shape of an orca made of water
One-eye - crafty gnoll warrior, more-or-less loyal to Urta and, through her, to Rufus
Padmini - powerful and shapely elephant kundalini and martial artist
Rael - gold-and-white-furred she-wolf teen, Rufus' daughter
Ryg - white-furred she-wolf shamaness
Shara - red foxtaur wizard, specializing in illusions
Urta - she-gnoll leader of most of our gnollish companions, past and present, Rufus' mate
Urtan - brother of Urta, not under her command, Rufus' mate
Wicker - reindeer actaeon, slender and effeminate, Cassidy's apprentice, learning fast
Pathfinding Seventy-first Entry
"Blasted kobolds," growled Rufus, pulling a few more of the little poisoned needles used by the blowgun-wielding lizard-things from his shoulder and upper thigh. "They're all over the place."
His own immediate concerns dealt with, and Ryg and Padmini already on the way to provide swift treatment for the poison before it hampered anyone's abilities, Rufus motioned Rael and Adel over to a nearby rock. The kobolds seemed to have unerring aim...and, Rufus had to admit, unerring taste, considering that they'd chosen to pepper both girls' pert, toned little bottoms with the tiny slivers of metal on every one of their brief hit-and-run attacks.
"It hurts," whimpered Rael as she let her daddy lift both her loincloth and her tail to carefully pick the needles out of her tushie, massaging her plump pubescent folds until they were nice and moist to help distract her from the discomfort she felt. "I hate kobolds! They're mean!"
Nearby, Adel kept a stoic silence as she pushed her fawn-colored leathers down as well, baring her puffy labia as she leaned over a rock of her own, doing her best to wait patiently while Rufus attended to his daughter's needs first, then her own. His fingers working into her cunny soon caused them to squelch wetly, and that helped immeasurably to take the edge off her discomfort. All the same, it was quite obvious Adel wasn't happy either.
The series of unfortunate events had all started just three days march into the wilderness, and now they were seven days away from their starting point. Somehow, military forces - orcs and ogres and small bands of gnolls, all wearing the colors of the Warlord - started to harry the Valkyrie camp. Fortunately, Adel had been placed in charge of organizing the movement of the Valkyries, and the little chipmunk girl demonstrated a true genius for organization, especially military organization. Because of her work getting everyone in their proper places, and arranging a good chain of command, even when, twice, Valkyries were abducted by marauders, the Valkyrie force had been able to swiftly mount a counterattack and rescue, with minimal losses.
It had been Skaeth's idea to split off from the rest of the vanguard, an idea that both Jonna and Adel agreed with, though for different reasons, both of them quite strategically sound, as far as Rufus could tell. Adel agreed because she saw the wisdom in laying a false trail for the numerous attackers, guiding them elsewhere while the Valkyries joined the main forces gathering at the Blue Feather camp, where they'd be almost impossible to assault. Jonna agreed because the tall, statuesque she-minotaur knew the terrain on the route where Skaeth had suggested they use almost as well as Skaeth did, heading up into the rougher hill country that bordered the mountains, and had always found it to be perfect for guerilla fighting. The side trek would slow Rufus' little band, of course, but all-in-all, that was far less important than ensuring the Valkyries passed through actaeon territory, gathering even more troops before they pressed onward, into wolfen territory, and joined the Blue Feather alliance.
The fourth day out, everything had actually started to go right for a change. Sending Lesage off with the Valkyries - since everyone knew an angel of knowledge couldn't lie - along with Imogen and Wisselfleur to further handle the transition to the Blue Feather camp, and the actaeons Boskan, Vin, and Landis to help the group through deerfolk territory, and Kyte as Rufus' lieutenant in his absence, the others set out with a much-reduced party, and every intention of making sure they appeared like they were still the main vanguard.
With Cassidy, Shara, and Wicker assigned the duty of laying false trails, very soon the party began to encounter numerous skirmishing bands of raiders, of the same size and composition as the bands they'd originally had attacking the Valkyries. Since Rufus and company had already faced similar odds on numerous occasions, it wasn't that difficult at all to lay a trail of traps and deadfalls for the orcs and ogres - neither of which are known for their general intelligence - and ambushes of their own for the gnolls, soon the raiding parties were vastly diminished in numbers, their slain or incapacitated numbering in the scores after only a matter of two days.
After the fifth day passed into night, the party's efforts took a turn for the worse. Kobolds, a race typically overlooked as small and physically very weak, as well as lacking in a great many of the natural abilities possessed by almost every other race on Therafim, started their own little campaign of harassment, now that there were no more significant numbers of the larger races to hinder them and take the spoils for their own. The fifth night out, they'd come down and run off with a significant portion of the party's provisions before Hanaro, on guard duty at the time, had been able to leap to the attack and drive them away with several efficient strokes of her samurai sword. It seemed that the kobolds had been watching the party carefully, because they specifically waited until one of the few people without any major sensory abilities had been the one to stand watch before they'd launched their raid. If Hanaro hadn't been as vigilant as she always was, the damage would have been far greater.
On the sixth day, the party had been forced to start a running battle, as the kobolds would pop out from behind rocks, shoot a slurry of blowgun needles that were far more irritating than lethal, and then race off before anyone could really mount a charge. The nasty little lizard-things would always wait just barely long enough for the party to start to relax its guard (since maintaining a constant vigil is very nearly impossible for mortal creatures) before the next attack, ensuring they always had just barely enough time to get away.
Well...most of them, anyway. Twice, the party had reacted fast enough to capture a kobold. In the first case, it had been Cassidy, snapping out a blunt-tipped fowling arrow to knock a kobold silly before it could squirm down a tiny crack in the rocks with its fellows. The second time, Urtan had snatched one up as it had tried to sneak up and swipe Rufus' travel pouch from his belt - apparently there were some advantages to having Urtan always checking out the hoary-furred wolf's butt. Both times, however, the kobolds had simply clammed up, going totally catatonic once they realized they couldn't get free. Being on the bottom of most dungeon food chains when they were cut off from the rest of their groups, kobolds typically expected that capture equaled death, and most likely in an extremely horrific and painful fashion. Given the likelihood that this is, in fact, what they could expect most of the time, simply letting their brains shut down as much as possible and accepting the inevitable was one of the better options available.
After coming to the realization that he wouldn't be getting any information out of them, and that the kobolds already knew their location, Rufus tied the prisoners up and left them on the side of the trail, stripped naked, but otherwise unharmed. He doubted he'd get such mercy from kobolds if he should fall into their clutches, and strongly doubted they'd see his acts of kindness as anything but weakness, but it hadn't seemed right. Urta, naturally, had objected strenuously, and wasn't talking to Rufus right now because of her annoyance at him, but he could tell she'd come around again, given enough time - she was a gnoll, after all, and how gnolls typically treated kobold prisoners was a case-in-point behind why the two captives had simply blanked out upon capture.
At the end of the seventh day of travel, just as Rufus was looking around for places to set up a well-defended campsite, Cassidy came bounding back into the main group with news.
"The kobolds are gathered up ahead," he reported in his calm, quiet voice. "They're making a stand to fight us."
Sure enough: at a narrow pass, where it would be almost impossible to get around them, the kobolds had indeed gathered in a tightly-packed fighting force. These kobolds didn't look like the nearly-naked skirmishers that had been harassing the party for the last few days. Instead, they were well-equipped, wearing armor made from carefully shaped giant insect chitin, bearing shields fronted with the scales of some monstrous-sized reptile, with long spears bristling out of the front of their tight-pressed, disciplined-looking phalanx.
"Finally," growled Rufus softly as he hefted his axe experimentally, "a real fight."
Path Choices
Looks like we've got a fight on our hands! But how are we going to handle these attackers? There are three rolls that need to be made here:
* An offense roll
* A sense roll
* A defense roll
We have a base 20% of success in each of these rolls. The number will increase based on which of our party members we place on each duty. Using the party roster listed above, select who you think would serve best in the following three roles:
1) Offense
2) Sense
3) Defense
Feel free to suggest additional strategies that you think might work. A good enough strategy may provide a bonus on rolls to which it seems to apply, if I decide to make use of it.