RP:Trespassers Will Be Eaten

Summary Odhranos finds he has bitten off more than he can chew in fighting a pack of black dragon whelps, but luckily Orikahn and Robert arrive and the whelps are beaten into a retreat.

Ancient black dragon's den

Odhranos is thrown with some force against the wall of the cave, enough to crack a spine, had the mage not been wearing armour underneath his simple grey woollen robes. Gritting his teeth and raising his heavy stone shield, he points his long crystalline staff like a spear and true to the comparison, a flickering leaf-blade of incandescent flame extends from the end. Moving lithely and swiftly, the mage dispatches one drake-whelp as it lunges towards him, catching it on his shield and his flaming spear sinking into its side, but while distracted by the first, a second whelp managed to use its diminutive wings to elevate itself and plummet heavily on top of the unsuspecting mage. With a grunt, Odhranos goes down and it is all he can do to block the heavy snapping jaws and weak yet potent blasts of acid-fire with his shield.

Robert wasn't exactly a vagrant, he always preferred the term "Knight Errant" which was still the equivalent of "Armoured Thug" or at least it was from the land he had spent some time at recently, the people weren't exactly the kindest of folk. The knight wandered up to the cave, sniffing loudly in his helmet, rolling his shoulder and looking around. He was told there was adventures to be had in the massive stone chasm, though more likely than not, the person who had told him just wanted him to leave and never return. The knight sighed, not seeing any remarkable signs of dragons or anything, and entered the cave. Walking along, it didn't take much time for him to hear the sounds of violence, a component of heroism! The warrior threw his travelling bag down, and ran, finding the mage being pushed around by some large lizards! Well, they weren't exactly dragon material, chances are he wouldn't really get any recognition for dealing with them, well, aside from the mage that wa- His train of thought was interrupted as the mage was downed, the knight shaking his head, snapping to his senses. Robert charged the dragons, unsheathing his longsword, planning to plant a firm thrust into the lowest-hanging neck he could find, but he had to have some cry of course. "Cease you overgrown chicken-newts!" nailed it

Orikahn is only getting around to gathering his things back up after the last time he was in this cave. He'd already recovered and redonned his armor, which he'd shed one piece at a time as she fled, wounded companion in arms, to escape the weighty burden. Now that said companion is on the mend, the massive sabertooth has a little time to pull the pieces back together. The long trail of discarded metal eventually leads him back to the cave itself, and, with some note of trepidation, he finishes reaffixing his pauldrons and slips his way into the cave, slinking cautiously, his bushy feline tail waving curiously behind him. Lo, what's this? Beneath his everfrost hood, the cat's ears perk, and he cranes his neck. The sound of pitched combat! Kahn knows well enough what these nasty lizards can do, but that only makes the hunt seem all the more appealing. Trepidation! Peril! Adversity! Fine ingredients for campfire tales and songs of glory. Slipping his bow from his back and knocking an arrow, he slips deeper into the cave to spy on the fight unfolding within.

Odhranos hears the rather interesting war-cry of Robert and is momentarily confused as to where it is coming from. As is the dragon it seems. Odhranos takes the instant of confusion to take the upper hand and with a little pulse of his new-found and developing control over stone, he forces his great granite shield upwards and it crunches quite audibly into the lower jaw of the distracted drake. With a howl, the wounded whelp rolls of him, and the mage is quick to finish it off. Glancing across the cave, he spies the knight, dimly illuminated by the light trickling in from the open mouth of the cave. Holding his staff aloft in greeting, Odhranos shouts over the din of the incensed dragons. "Thank you for that distraction friend, you may have just saved my skin!" the grey mage calls, then he glances over the knights armoured shoulder and spies another figure, one he dimly remembers encountering shortly, in a situation not too different from this. His focus snaps back as the drakes rally and the mage plunges into the fray once more, hide-cutting slashes and skull-shattering blows being dealt out a-plenty.

Robert arrived, plunging himself into the fray, which was kind of a terrible idea on his part, though he was determined to prove himself! To who? Eh, anyone would do at this point. The knight ducked under a swipe from vicious claws, and back stepped away from becoming a chew toy. Robert really took his agility for granted. The knight raised his blade, and leapt into the air, clutching it close to his chest as he moved, the blade sinking into the whelp's throat. It was a well-executed move, spare for the fact that the whelp's head dropped, sending him rolling across the floor. Dazed, Robert rolled over, to find another whelp, looking straight at him. This wasn't an issue, thought Robert, that thing was meters away- as his depth perception returned, he saw the beast standing over him, it's mouth oozing in it's blind rage. The knight gulped, scrambling for his longsword, in hopes of saving his own skin.

Orikahn sees a couple of intrepid adventurers in the heart of a deadly fray. Ah, one of those tricky magical types. Kahn's run into several of those and is developing an ever lower opinion of their methods, questionable at best. The other's an honest-to-goodness swordsman by the looks of it, so, when the time comes, Kahn has no trouble deciding where the aid of his arrows shall fall. While Robert scrambles for his longsword, Kahn's already sighting his bow, and with a telltale "hrisssssTHUP", he's assaulting the slavering serpent with an arrow, a serrated broadheads that sail into the wretched beast's open mouth to pierce its palate through. Wasting not a moment, Kahn knocks and draws again, sending another screaming arrow, only have it bounce uselessly off the reptile's scales. Ah, he's given himself away, now, for the dragons are not mindless vermin. With his cover so blown, Orikahn holsters his bow at his back, leaps to his feet, and swells his chest for a savage roar, his fanged maw spreading wide to bellow his savage battle cry through the cavern.

Odhranos has a double take as Orikahn's roar bounces off the hard walls of the cave, the resonance amplifying it to ear-drum shatteringly loud proportions. As the feline makes his entrance to the battle, Odhranos backs away for a moment. He quickly takes a count of the remaining whelps. Four, five...six, no, five now, as the newcomers set about finishing off the remaining drakes. Odhranos takes it upon himself to take down at least two more of the creatures, having been the fool to blunder into the cave in the first place, it might go someways as to redeeming himself. With a calm silence, he strides forwards and his staff bursts into flames. As the drakes catch sight of the fire-wielding mage, one charges at him, jaws open wide, only to receive a gulletful of flaming crystalline staff. As the whelp thrashes, it knocks the staff out of Odhranos' hand, leaving him weaponless. In the instant before the other whelp charged, Odhranos made a quick choice. Having lost his staff, which he required to cast fire-magic, he was left with the only non-staff dependant magic he knew, and not very well at that. Slamming a black-armoured hand flat against the cave floor, Odhranos poured all of his energy into a wave of energy, hoping to overcome his lack of experience in earth-magic with sheer power. With a deep growling of shifting stone, a thick spear of rock bursts from the rough floor of the cave and quite literally punches through the unfortunate drake, pinning it against the low, stalagtite-strewn ceiling. With a low groan, Odhranos falls back onto his knees, his head pounding with a magic-induced headache

Robert grasped at his blade, swinging around to hopefully catch it in the fangs of the slobbering scoundrel, alas, it appeared to be having a crisis, with an arrow lodged in an essential part of it's face. The knight rolled to the side, not wanting to get caught under any form of corpse, much less become a cadaver himself. "Thank you...Whoe-" as Orikahn began to roar, Robert placed his hands on the side of his helmet, his sword falling to the floor, alas, it did about as much sound-blocking as would turning around and reciting poetry. As the echoing death noise ended, Robert turned to watch a whelp get pinned to the ceiling. "Goodness gracious!" he shouted, temporarily losing his hearing, tinnitus was tough stuff. The knight tried to focus, his tin suit not exactly helping his hearing dilemma. He had a plan for stopping another whelp, though he found none of them were really focused on him, taking the initiative, he charged over to Odhranos, his sword at the ready, prepared to slash at the whelp if it recovered from it’s fiery mouth-bath.

Orikahn draws his tomahawk and barrels in, still snarling, sprinting headlong to leap and join the melee. The ferocious hunter sails, flailing onto a dragon's back and digs his claws in for grip, hooking his fingers beneath the lizard's scales to begin hacking with gusto, one blow after another falling in rapid succession. Beneath him the creature bucks and thrashes, trying to throw the cat from its back, but after a few strikes of his axe does Kahn land a sickening crack, breaking through the scales and into the vulnerable, living tissue below. "Grahaha!" Orikahn laughs in triumph and abandons the axe to begin tearing with claws and teeth, tearing and burrowing, tossing bloody tissue hither and thither.

Odhranos is lucky he isn't watching Orikahn. The mage is hardy, but he would feel distinctively queasy watching the dragon being quite literally dismantled with bloody abandon. As it is, the mage quickly darts in and pulls his staff from the incapacitated dragon's throat before Robert's sword blow parts the dragon’s throat and the expensive crystalline staff lodged in it. Crouching on his haunches, he glances around the room. Only two dragons remained and they appeared to be losing their nerve, having witnessed the speedy dispatching of their vile brood. As Odhranos stands and paces slowly across towards them, a writhing, spitting fireball coalescing at the head of the mage's staff, burning off the oily sheen of corrosive dragon-spittle and making the usually grey-white flames burn a sickly and malevolent lime green. With a keening yelp, the resolve of one whelp breaks and it turns, sprinting for the shadowy tunnels that led deeper into the mountain, followed closely on it's heels by its craven comrade. Nodding approvingly, the mage lets the drakes go, he has no hatred for the creatures and no wish for them to go extinct, but also the whelps will perhaps know better in future than to attack the mage, and educate its brood accordingly. Turning to his comrades, the mage smiles, the green light highlighting his face in a most unsettling way. "Thank you for your assistance, I must ask your names" the mage stated, as polite and formal as ever.

Robert cleaved the dragon, it was not exactly an easy task, and he probably wouldn't be pulling anything like it again, at least in his career of being a knight that is. "Woah." he murmured, rolling his shoulders. "Didn't know I had that in me..." he took a step back, watching as the sickly green flames caused the drakes to flee. Under his visor he would raise an eyebrow, he never really trusted mages, and people he did trust, he stopped trusting after he found out they were mages, but all the same he was glad for the experience, it was ...glorious? Knightly? Something like that. "I'm...Robert." the knight panted breathing heavily from the ordeal.

Orikahn feels the dragon's legs give way, and as the creature collapses, Kahn lifts his head out so he can clamber the rest of the way up and close his fanged maw upon the great serpent's neck, choking off breath and blood alike, cutting short the fading cries of the dying beast. Kahn keeps himself so clamped until the last dying spasms of the dragon have played out, and only then does he release his jaws to look up and survey his humanoid comrades. Somewhere in the course of the struggle, Orikahn's hood fell back to his shoulders. The visage that greets Odhranos and Robert seems almost more monster than man; a hulking anthropomorphic feline with saber teeth, coated and dripping with fresh blood and gore. His gaze gleams with unnatural phosphorescence and, more unsettling than the glow, there are three, his supernumerary eye resting at the centre of his brow. "Good fight." He comments, his basso rumbling over the reverberating stone walls. "Swords and steel-for-skin, wild magic monger," he nods to the knight and the mage each, still panting in his exhilaration.

Odhranos is a little alarmed by Orikahn's visage, their previous encounter being brief and dark and the mage didn't get a chance to study the feline's features properly. He was especially curious about the saber-tooth's third eye, but decided it would be rude to ask. Dimming the flames from his staff and reverting their colour to the usual grey-tinged white, he steps slowly around and over the decapitated, eviscerated and overall dead corpses. Crossing the cave to where Robert stands, he extends a gloved hand, the long, wide ended sleeve waving slightly in the light breeze that blew in the cave entrance. "My name is Odhranos, it is a pleasure to meet you, Sir Robert" he smiles ruefully, offsetting his formal words. "And to you, Sir Feline, I am glad you enjoyed the fight" the mage quipped, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards as he pulls his left glove off and reaches up with his shield-hand, running thin, pianists fingers through his long brown hair, interspersed with thin grey strands.

Robert looked between the feline and the man, raising an eyebrow under his helmet. He reached up to his head, pulling his helmet free, his long blonde hair shown to the world. "It's a pleasure to meet you as well Mr. Odhranos!" The knight held his helmet as his side, placing one foot in front of the other, creating a majestic pose, looking to the walls of the cave as if he was staring into the distance. "It truly was heroic combat!" the knight then ceased being majestic, and went back to simply standing there, staring between the feline and the man, considering whistling.

Orikahn studies Odhranos' staff with overt suspicion and, rather than make nice and be sociable, the feline declines returning the greeting in favour of retrieving his tomahawk from the ground so he can begin de-scaling his kill, chipping the gleaming black bits off of the skin and tossing them beside himself in a glittering pile. "Kill what you keep, | keep what you kill," he mutters to himself in a singsong voice, "song for a fireside, | make a bed of dragon hide, | a hunter eats his fill | when I keep what I kill." Expectantly, he looks to the others, perhaps hoping to prompt them somehow. These dragons aren't going to clean themselves, are they?

Odhranos smiles at Robert's posturing, warming to the flamboyant knight already. The feline however? Not so warm, in fact, Odhranos was feeling a distinct disdain from the furred hunter as he set to de-scaling the corpse of the whelp. Shaking his head, but resolving not to make a scene, he reaches up and plucks the ball of flame from the end of the staff. Manipulating the fire so it burns away from his hand, he is able to hold it in his gloved hand and with the other hand he reaches around his back and pulls an ornate yet scalpel-sharp knife. Kneeling before the closest dragon, he looks up at the knight. "Let's get through these quickly, if we gather the meat, I can grill it. Not the most gourmet of meals, but not as bad as you'd expect" the mage smiles amiably.

Robert looked between the pair of strangers, he had no idea about scaling dragons, or cutting them apart for that matter. Landing a lance in someone's face? Yeah. Donning a full suit of segmented plate without help? Kind of. But dismembering the corpses of his foes? Nah. Though he was not opposed to attempting to do so. "Alright." he stated flatly, looking at the corpse of one of the lizard-like adversaries. He sauntered over to it, before leaning down, and searching through his belt. He had his mail-breaker, but it didn't have edges. Ah! His utility knife! For heroically cutting ropes! Now it was scaling lizards. The knight knelt over, and began working. The scales were humongous, making this probably a bit easier than it would be on a smaller beast.

Orikahn works quickly and with a practiced hand, and he's nearly gotten the whole lizard's side cleared already. Seeing the others move to begin dressing the dragons likewise, he grins a fanged, albeit still rather grisly grin, what with the blood matting his fur and all. In just under a quarter of an hour, the cat has his serpent scaled, gutted, strung and draining from a stalactite. Let that be a sight to greet the others if they decide to barge back in after such a cowardly retreat! After his is up, he moves to assist the others with theirs, beginning with Robert. In what he believes is a private whisper, he leans over and mutters at the knight. "That one, the magic man," he sends an indicative glance over toward the mage, "we will be finding a sneaky to steal his dragon meat, yes? Because he is tricky types?"