session 38

It's raining. Tom, Hoff, Siobhan and Dirr are freezing. They're stood outside the ancient underground citadel of the Kenget Kamulos.

"Listen ducky - your name ain't on this 'ere list, so you 'aint gettin' in. I didn't make the rules up you know. An' I've been stood out 'ere with just a pack-a-mac on for goodness knows 'ow long 'cos my relief is off gaddin' - inni Brian..."

The other guard who is much more of the silent "undress you with his eyes, visualise his wicked way with you then cover you up with an imaginary dust-sheet before you've even opened your mouth" type nods.

"I said to the duty manager that 'e'd 'ave to arrange someone else to take 'is shift since we all knew there's no way 'e was goin' to come out 'ere in this weather today. I tell you! I do my bit - We ALL do our bit, don' we Bri'"

Further nodding.

"But that lad's got no community spirit! No community SPIRIT I tell you! Spendin' all day down the piaza with his dirty great protigé 'hanging out'. As though the rest of us don't have protigés! I've got a lovely protigé but I don't spend me 'ole life messin' with it!"

The team turn and walk away. This conversation obviously wasn't going anywhere and besides - the fact that they could hear it carrying on even as they rounded a corner and went out of sight of the guards suggested their involvement wasn't particularly important to it.

"Hold on a second..." Tom stops with an excited look on his face. "Those chaps's uniforms looked JUST LIKE that chap we met in town a while ago... That retired magician!"

"You're right!" Dirr replies "And since there's only 4 of us now, we've plenty of room in the team to take him on! I wonder if, were we to pop back and hire him, he would be able to get us into the Kenget's lair."

"Yes. I wonder that thing too. If we hired him... COULD he get us into the Kenget's lair where only Kenget's are allowed to go?"

"He is a (former) Kenget. So he might just be able to do that thing which we need to do..."

(as an aside, I should mention that this unsubtle hint dropping was actually done in the game with a block of text - it wasn't that I worked it out myself. Also - since you need to have him on the team at this point, I think that it makes Siobhan the only completely optional team member in the whole game. Everyone else HAS to join you at one point or another, even if you can ditch them and re-hire them afterwards... This makes me like Siobhan even more than before since she's sort of an underdog. Since she's completely pointless and adds nothing to the story of the game she becomes a sort of sympathetically tragic figure for me)

When the party arrives at the house Khunag is hanging out in, they appear to have caught him unprepared.

"Join your party eh?" He says while hurriedly trying to stuff a load of eagles and electric guitars into a hollow paper maché mannequin of himself (at the same time trying to diguise what the mannequin is by draping his cape over it's face)

"What're you doing Khunag?" asks Dirr.

"Oh... I'm just... Kissing a beautiful lady..." Khunag makes out that he's kissing the mannequin hoping that by pressing his face firmly into its he will hide its painted on beard. "OW OW OW"

"Errr - everything ok Khunag?" Tom, concerned, tries to get a better look at what's going on. But as he sees him approach out of the corner of his eye, Khunag sort of sex wrestles the dummy to the ground as though starting into some much more intimate process than most people would consider normal in front of 4 strangers.

"Woah! We should leave!" Hoff cries out - he'd not met Khunag before (although the team would almost certainly disagree) so his first impression of him is of a man so wholly surrendered to carnal desires that he'll publicly mount an obviously paper replica of himself stuffed with birds and clanging musical instruments.

"No Wait!" Khunag announces - flinging the dummy behind a curtain and turning to face his audience, arms raised above his head and lips pecked and bloody. "Of COURSE I will come with you! You caught me in a moment of unpreparedness but..." his eyes scan wildly around the room for something he can use to impress his new team mates. "...Khunag can never be caught..." he edges away from the curtain and back towards the team, moving his hands around infront of his face as though mystically coming at them through a sort of shrowdy invisible mist "...Totally without his wits about him. OH HO! I HAVE YOUR NOSE!!!" He makes to grab at Siobhan's face, then pokes his thumb between the top 2 fingers of his fist.

Alas, the terrible trick is made no better by the fact that his thumb has skin on it but Siobhan's nose very obviously doesn't.

"Shall we get going then?" someone suggests...

"Um... Yeah... Yeah, let's just go..."

Later.

"...I 'aven't 'ad a moment's REST since she bought that cor anglais. I told you Brian, didn't I, she's up and down with it every which way and there's no point saying to 'er. I SAID to 'er I said, 'listen, you 'aint going to impress anyone. You'll just scratch it all up the sides and no amount of rubbin' it with a spat on chammy's goin' to 'elp..."

"Can we come in please"

"Well alright, but I'm not 'ere for your entertainment am I. Eh? EH?"

When we enter, we're taken to see Rhain who is one of the Murder Pope's select few companions.

The citadel of the Kenget Kamulos is a pretty typical dungeon lair. It's dimly lit - preserving the all important air of mysterious anonymity. It's peppered with columns with shackles on them for you to chain people up to. Whips and clamps and that sort of thing can be found on all the tables. The floor is stone which makes it easy to mop up though - so it's practical too. Well groomed beards and tight-fitting robes seem to be the style here.

Rhain can be identified by his leathery hat of office and Tom and the gang immediately start their pitch when they meet him.

"Please can we buy the secret of enchanting objects off you? We've got cash!" (this is mostly true - the Dji Cantos gave me something like 1000 gold to offer in return for the secret, but I might've slightly spent a bit of it on food supplies earlier on since everyone was starving and I didn't know really how much hospitality I could expect from a cult of trained assassins).

Rhain shifts in his seat and there is the creaking of leather but no-one in the team can quite see where it might've come from.

"Normally we'd kill you up just for suggesting such an exchange" he intones. "The Kenget Kamulos's secrets aren't for sale you know. HOWEVER - turn around for me."

He indicates that Tom should give him a twirl. Tom complies, assuming that Rhain's assessing his weaponry. "I imagine he doesn't want to bite off more than he can chew?" he whispers to Khunag as he turns on the spot.

Khunag rolls his eyes.

"I think that we won't kill you right away..." Rhain licks his teeth in contemplation. "Why don't you go make yourself comfortable while I go have a word with the Murder Pope about your proposition."

Albion has dipped its toes in and out of the standard fantasy setting for the whole game so far. Although it's in space (and a lot of the game is in weird alien terratory) we have had a lot of olde worlde magic and villagers stuff that's not a million miles away from standard D&D fare. However, up to this point it's never quite gone completly Forgotten Realms. The villagers are all mud-huts and dirt-farming, the world's had a more pre-medieval feel to it than your usual Tolkien rip-off. But the Kenget Kamulos could (apart from their name) have been taken directly from the pages of a Dragonlance novel or any other generic fantasy. They live in a stone-mason's dream dungeon in a mountain, are a powerful yet reclusive society with a love of arched gables and an obscure power structure. They're all either wizards or mighty warriors. You get the feeling (from how lavish and beautifully put together this area is) that the developers really enjoyed making this part of the game since it was their chance to put a straight up fantasy citadel in.

Although the Kenget's culture seems a little odd.

While waiting for Rhain to get back to us, we took a stroll and talked to a random, rugged, bearded chap who was wandering around looking tough about what sort of stuff goes on here.

"What's with the murder pope then?" we ask.

"Oh the murder pope is the man who is our worldly link to Kamulos - the god of doing a murder. He is our leader here and head of our religion..."

Hoff sniggers and nudges Siobhan, muttering "Religion! Hee hee - they think they have this murder god! What a joke! They don't even realise that the Dji Cantos can fact-prove that only Amoeba and Amoeka exist! What a bunch of idiots!"

"So tell me about being a Kenget Kamulos then?"

"I am a Martial Arts Kenget. I'm only a level 4 Kenget though. You see there are 5 levels of expertise - level 1, you learn the basics of using small weapons. At level 2 you learn one handed weapon technique. At level three you learn about firing your ranged weapon. At level 4 you are shown the secret of two handed weapon technique and then you have only the fiftth level to master."

"And what's the fifth level."

"Achieving the fifth level is every Kenget's goal where you enter a sort of nirvana state - called Arsetorn - where your skills are so good that you can finish a man off with just your fist."

"Not a lot of women folk around here I notice..."

"Women are meaningless to us. Kengets buddy up with each other as companions."

"Oh... so... how do you keep numbers up?"

"We abduct young boys."

There is a moment of stunned silence. Then the team move on.

I'd like to clarify that this isn't made up or particularly embellished. There's lots more that the people in the citadel will tell you if you talk to them (including the fact that "Kenget Oqulo" are magic using assassins who can achieve euphoria just by thinking about finishing a man off) but most of it is pretty dull.

One interesting fact comes to light as you ask around though... Apparently Khunag is a TOTAL bastard. So much so that the Kengets shun him to the point of seemingly not even seeing him.

It's quite bizarre - EVERYONE seems to know what a totally ball-bag the guy is, but no one ever acknowledges he's right there in the room (indeed, he spends the whole time boastfully naming every room you go into just to show off that he's been there before "Now THIS is the second library. I think this is my favourite library, since it's a little less showy then the first library - y'know, the touristy one..."). I only hope this shunvisibility cloak that he's acquired holds up since the story is that he's a PROPER git and if anyone deigned to see him they'd almost certainly feel the need to kill him AND us.

You see, it turns out there's this tradition of no-murdering-day which happens on new year's eve. On no-murdering-day, the Murder Pope (he's called the "Cuain" in the game, but the basically describe him as having a popescent relationship with Kamulos, so I'm translating for ease of understanding) goes to bed and won't get up until he has the vital fluid of a Kenget (of priestly rank or above) splashed on his face.

All the ranking Kengests duel to see whose going to have the honour of waking up the pope with their spurting juices, but last year (while everyone was distracted fighting over this) Khunag murdered the Murder Pope instead, in the hope of being elected the next Murder Pope himself (he was one of the Murder Pope's special companions you see).

People were outraged that not only would the Murder Pope get murdered, but he'd be murdered by his bosom-buddy AND on NO-MURDERNG-DAY!

Thankfully they caught Khunag out and elected someone else as Murder Pope instead. But he escaped and subsequently if ever any of the Kenget catch up with him, they'll TOTALLY get their revenge!

Actually... it turns out there's quite a handsome ransom available to anyone who catches Khunag and brings him to justice.

""Ransom you say? What size ransom are we talking about here..?" Asks Tom.

"Oh, millions of gold coins. He's the most hated enemy of the Kenget Kamulos you know!"

"Interesting... what about secret knowledge? You think that if someone were to bring in Khunag, they could take secret knowledge instead of the cash?"

"Oh certainly! They could pretty much take whatever they wanted!"

"Oh... gosh... gang!" Khunag pipes up "You know I've just remembered a secret passage! Yes... There's a secret passage leading from the bedrooms to the chamber of knolage! No need to part with the gold or ANYTHING valuable to get at the Kenget's secrets! Crumbs how silly of me not to think of it earlier. I'm sure we can get the secret of enchanting weapons without having to bargain with anything we might regret parting with later heh heh heh! Right guys? Guys?"

Since Rhain's taking ages to get back to us, we let Khunag take us up the secret passage.

Alas, someone catches us at it.

"Oi! You lot! So you couldn't wait for Rhain to respond to your offer and you thought you'd just nick what you wanted eh?"

"Well... um... You see..."

"Now you can surrender, or be dead... Which'll it be?"

Dejectedly the gang give in "Surrender please".

And with that we have all the gold we'd been given to buy secrets with taken off us (annoying since I could've spent much more of that on cool gear before coming here if I'd've known that not having it all wasn't going to be a problem in the negotiations) and we're thrown into a dungeon within a dungeon with no chance to escape.

Oops.