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Character and setting info: http://pastebin.com/u/MagicalPrincess
Archives: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Start+Over+Quest
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MagicalMarquise
Ask.fm: http://ask.fm/MagicalMarquise
Collection of character descriptions (WIP, courtesy of anon): http://pastebin.com/pzYffs0R

>>46647271
>>Head towards the lake house.

>>46647271

It's here! I love you, MP.
>Lake House!

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Just a brief reminder that this episode will most likely run shorter than usual because I have appointments later this evening.

Please carry on.

>>46647271
>>Head towards the lake house.

You stick to your original (well, second original) plan and head towards the lake house. At least you are one hundred percent certain you will not lose your way and can check where you're headed even at night. Assuming it doesn't get cloudy, but it rarely seems to around here.

When it does it also tends to rain cats and dogs but that's another matter entirely.

As soon as the sun goes up and noon becomes a couple hours away, the heat already starts becoming a nuisance and you get both very thirsty and very sweaty. Very quickly. At least, being close to a large body of freshwater and having plenty of reserves yourself, you can remedy to the situation as often as you like, although it does slow you down a bit.

There's also the problem of bugs. The reeds are just swarming with mosquitoes at some points and they're always eager to sting. And even if you avoid such parts that have those black clouds of flying mean, there's still plenty about, some noisier than others, and many more that skim on the water's surface.

The points where you can take a dip without becoming food for them are few and far between, but welcome havens as you can douse yourself with some of that water, cooling your body down and washing away dirt and other unpleasantness. At some point Bryld comments how the local ants, being so red, are very difficult to spot on you, which makes you feel like tiny feet are crawling all over your body even if there's nothing and you know it.

After you took a break to have lunch, you wordlessly decided to move a bit further up the slope that leads down to the lake so you could rest at the shade of a tree. And then moved to another that didn't have a huge beehive sticking out of it.

You're just trying to relax and rest your tired bones for a moment when...

>... You really want to go for a swim.
>... You ask Tahenohan if she can't do anything for those bugs.
>... You ask Bryld if she can map the lake.
>... You think you see a figure in the water.
>Other?

>>46647552
>... You ask Tahenohan if she can't do anything for those bugs.
Aww yiss

>>46647552
>... You ask Tahenohan if she can't do anything for those bugs.

>>46647552
>... You think you see a figure in the water.

>>46647552
>... You think you see a figure in the water.
Hi!

>>46647634
Hello anon, nice of you to tie it like this! We all do enjoy bullying MP.

"Tahenohan", you ask while you're recovering your energies to continue your journey, "Can you do anything about all these bugs? They're really annoying".

She laughs as you ask, ruffling her own hair as if to make sure none of them are stuck in there. You think you saw a bit get stuck, and you can swear they were trapped, sank in in and were eaten. It somehow doesn't surprise you. "I usually just freeze them".

"How?", you ask.

"Magic", she explains. You feel kind of dumb for even asking. Before you make the next most obvious question, she continues on her own, "Bugs don't like low temperatures so if I keep a minimum-power ice armour on me when I go near them they either freeze up and die when they touch me or avoid me in the first place". She pauses, "Well, most of them at least".

"That's so handy", Bryld sighs, "I hate bugs so much, I almost don't want to go swim any more".

"We didn't encounter this many on the southern shore, I think it's just this area in particular", you speculate, figuring it has something to do with the vegetation and the presence of this many reeds. Although to be completely honest the Shadow Marches as a whole are full of bugs of all sizes.

“Well, at least we won't lose our way with the lake this close to us”, Bryld reasons, looking at Tahenohan, “Hey Tahe, can you like, freeze the lake for a moment so it's safe when we go in?”.

When the necromancer answers, you are distracted by something in the lake that catches your eyes. Amidst the very strong reflections of the noon sun, and from your vantage point, you can see pretty much all of its impressive size, and manage to spot a shadow on the surface. A humanoid figure that's either robed or with straight long hair, seemingly standing in the water, or maybe just half-out, it's difficult to tell with all the glare.

>Go check. Alone.
>Call the girls, go check.
>Call the girls' attention to that.
>Ignore it, what'd Tahe say about freezing the lake?
>Other?

>>46647744
>Call the girls, go check.
A friend!?

>>46647744
>Go check. Alone.

>>46647744
>Call the girls' attention to that.

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>Three votes
>Three options
You can't be serious.

>>46647744
>Call the girls, go check.

>>46647744
>Call the girls, go check.
Friendly tiebreak!

>>46647874
Anons are just waiting for you to get bullied before voting I bet.

"Girls", you interrupt them, pointing towards the lake, "I think someone's there".

Both of them squeeze their eyes and shield them from the sun in order to try and see what you saw. You understand their difficulties, the reflection glare really is annoying and you have to shut your eyes closed after a while, and keep seeing red-green burns against your closed lids.

"Uh", Bryld goes, "Where?".

"Ow, my eyes", Tahenohan goes, closing her eyes as well and rubbing them a bit.

"I don't see anything", the bunnygirl gives up too, "Are you sure you saw someone?".

"Yeah", you confirm, "I saw a figure in the lake, right there".

As a matter of time you can't see it any more. Having had to close your eyes you lost track of where exactly it was and now you can't find it any more. And your eyes kind of hurt if you insist.

"It was just a reflection. Don't be paranoid", Bryld sighs, "I already don't feel like diving because of all the bugs, if you tell me you saw monsters too I won't be bathing again". She says it like it's something terrible, and in fact it is, because she'll get sweaty and stinky. That's quite normal given the local weather but of course everyone would be better if it could be avoided.

Both she and Tahenohan start cleaning up, and you have to help a bit, if anything because you might be blinded if you keep staring.

“If we keep this up, we might be there before tonight, right?”, Bryld asks, eyeing Tahenohan.

“Yeah”, she confirms, “But it might be after sundown if we don't hurry”. You could only barely see the house from the vantage point just a few moments ago.

You move down and continue walking along the shore, but you can't help but keep staring through the reeds, constantly seeing shadows. You're almost sure it's just your eyes playing tricks on you now.

>”I really saw something there!”.
>Take the first excuse to dive in the lake and see for yourself.
>Ignore it and focus on your destination.
>Other?

>>46648051
>>Take the first excuse to dive in the lake and see for yourself.

>>46648051
>”I really saw something there!”.
Raise those flags

>>46648051
>”I really saw something there!”.
>Take the first excuse to dive in the lake and see for yourself.

>>46648051
>Take the first excuse to dive in the lake and see for yourself.

>>46648051
>>Ignore it and focus on your destination.

Maybe it's a mermaid...

>>46648224
>"You can't MAKE me have fun!"

>>46648051
>”I really saw something there!”.
>Take the first excuse to dive in the lake and see for yourself.

You're not convinced that there's nothing. You're not convinced that you just imagined it. What Bryld said about the sun's glare playing tricks on you isn't wrong, but you just know that a figure in the water is not something you could have imagined, the fact that someone might have been standing on a lake just so you could only barely spot it and possibly make a fool of yourself by pointing it out is way too silly and dumb to not be true.

About halfway in the afternoon, you get your chance: everyone is sweaty and hot enough that a dip in the water sounds like fun, and is willing to brave the bugs to get what they want. You also, like you predicted, passed over the reed-infested part of the shore and noticed a steep drop in the amount of flying insects that pester you. It should be said that the shape of the shore and some other smells and noises you hear remind you of how rats, of the quite huge variety, would dig their homes inside of canals and then devastate the crops, but hopefully there's no such thing here.

You and Tahenohan are the first ones to jump in the water, while Bryld is content with staying very close to the shore and taking her sweet time washing herself and refreshing her clothes as well. And yours too, because she's just that sweet of a girl.

A pair of slender, half-elven hands grab your tail and yank it playfully, making you almost sink down. It doesn't take much before you can no longer touch the bottom of the lake, but you can swim well enough for this not to be a problem. "Hey, hey", she goes with a manic smile as you turn around, not quite accidentally groping you as she does so; it always feels so weird when someone grabs your breasts underwater, the pressure and brushing feels so different just because they're floating, "Do you want to play some watersports?".

>”The lewd or non-lewd kind?”.
>”Yes”.
>”No”.
>”Just the two of us?”.
>Other?

>>46648366
>”Yes”.
But we don't have any beach balls or anything...

>>46648366
>>”Yes”.

>>46648366
>”Just the two of us?”.

>>46648366
>"Sure."
But keep an eye out for the mysterious figure.

>>46648366
>”Yes”.
>”The lewd or non-lewd kind?”.
Trick question, there are only degrees of lewd.

>>46648366
>”Yes”.

>>46648366
>”The lewd or non-lewd kind?”.
Heh

"You know I can't say no when you ask like this", you smile at her, guessing that she's groping you because she has something in mind.

"Good!", she smiles that manic smile of hers, "How long can you hold your breath for?".

Just as soon as you begin to fear this is getting way too kinky, even for you, she adds, "I bet there's plenty of things on the bottom of this lake that are waiting for but our greedy hands to grab them".

Oh, so that's what she means.

"I... Well, long enough I guess?", you never lived near large bodies of water so you had little chances to practice swimming, just enough to be able to swim in smaller bodies, like rivers and stuff. But you can almost touch the bottom with your feet if you don't go too far, so it's not like you're really at a high risk of drowning.

"Then let's go on a treasure hunt!", she suggests, with more excitement than she ought to have, "After all, what we find here is ours for the keeping! No taxes, no politics...", she keeps massaging your breasts and staring with her wide-open, unblinking manic eyes as if to massage some strange ideas inside of you.

"I get it", you say, "But what are we hunting for?".

"Well whatever you think is precious!", she goes, and kicks away from you, smiling one last time before plummeting beneath the surface quicker than you'd expect.

She hastily passes between your legs and playfully yanks your tail by its spade for one last time before you lose track of her.

You look around for a bit. The lake is too large for you to reach the other shore comfortably, or possibly at all, and this isn't the wider point either. You're confident you can scrape the bottom close to the shore quite well, but past that... It might be too dangerous.

You also have no idea what might be precious or treasure-like at the bottom of a lake, but well...

>Participate in the treasure hunt.
>Screw it, hunt Tahenohan instead.
>Screw it, go back to Bryld.
>Screw it, look for a mysterious figure.
>Other?

>>46648640
>Screw it, look for a mysterious figure.
If we see something interesting we can always grab it.

>>46648640
>>Screw it, look for a mysterious figure.

>>46648640
>Participate in the treasure hunt.
Pretty sure Tahe could easily slip away from Lillith anyway, little point hunting her.

>>46648640
>Participate in the treasure hunt.
Riches!

>>46648640
>Participate in the treasure hunt.
This is too adorable

>>46648754
Tahe is always adorable.

Since you don't have anything better to do, other than just keep walking, you decide to participate in this little treasure hunt. Besides, who knows, you might actually find something worthwhile.

You take a deep breath and dive under the surface of the water. It's fresh and clean enough that it takes you almost no effort to keep your eyes open underwater and makes for a very good distraction.

And again, what if you actually make a bit of coin with it?

The bottom of the lake, which you can now see very well even if the water was very clear to begin with, and... It's actually more crowded than you would have thought. There's plenty of stones of various shapes and sizes, but they don't look tremendously precious and they'd be pretty difficult to carry around, too.

You see small crabs, several schools of small fish swimming away near the centre of the lake, and plenty of vegetation, more than you'd have thought. You're not an expert on underwater flora and fauna but aside from some pretty flashy-coloured fishes and sometimes plants, you don't think you can see anything precious.

There are clams about, but more towards the centre, and you've heard they sometimes have pearls inside and those things are very precious, but you don't even know how to open one up. Or which ones have pearls inside.

In short, you're just swimming blindly, staring at dirt, tiny crabs, looking at fish in the distance and trying to guess whether the stones you see are just pieces of rocks or could maybe, possibly, be something more.

You also cannot stay underwater for long, so even just this little is taking plenty of attempts to find out. You guess Bryld must be thinking something's wrong with you by now, but she isn't acting on it.

>Try and push yourself closer to the centre.
>Turn stones up to see what's beneath them.
>Dig through the dirt near the shore.
>Dig through the dirt far from the shore.
>Try and reach some of the clams.
>Ask Bryld to join you.
>Give up.
>Other?

>>46648951
>Ask Bryld to join you.

>>46648951
>Try and reach some of the clams.

>>46648951
>Ask Bryld to join you.

>>46648951
>Turn stones up to see what's beneath them.
>Ask Bryld to join you.

>>46648951
>Try and push yourself closer to the centre.
>Ask Bryld to join you.

It was inevitable. At the twelfth time or something that you emerge again after a dive, Bryld just flat out asks "What are you doing?".

"Treasure hunting", you explain, "Why don't you join us?".

"Us? Oh", and she sighs, immediately understanding who started this, "... I should have guessed".

"Yes", you confirm, "Yes you should. You should also come here and make yourself useful".

"You know we should save our strength for the journey. And possibly not spend another night camped out next to a bug-infested lake", she replies, and you cannot deny that she has a point.

"We may be able to make some money out of this if we try", you suggest.

"How? I don't think- Look, okay, fine", and she wades in. She's been naked for a while, about as much as you all were, but hasn't bathed much, "I'll come, just so we can get this over with and finish our journey".

"Yay!", you go and hug her tightly as soon as she comes within arms reach.

Neither of you two has any idea what to look for, and if you couldn't hold your breath very long underwater, Bryld is even worse at that and refuses to go farther than a few metres after she can't touch any more. Not that it would help, you have to admit, you're mostly just playing around like children exploring a strange, new place.

You would like to think you're way more professional at this when it comes to actual exploring, if anything because you're making actual maps thanks to Bryld.

At some point, when you're expecting Bryld to stop insisting you go back ashore and start dragging you instead, you emerge just to find her waiting for you, and greet her with a smile.

“Come here”, she beckons you with quick movements of her hands, “Take a look”.

You dive again with her, and witness her digging and revealing what seems to be a reinforced wood panel. It looks to be part of a much larger item.

>Help her dig it out.
>Dig through the whole nearby area.
>Call Tahenohan.
>Other?

>>46649360
>Call Tahenohan.
>Dig through the whole nearby area.

>>46649360
>Call Tahenohan.
>Help her dig it out.

>>46649360
>Help her dig it out.

>>46649360
>Call Tahenohan.

Well.

Who would have thought.

You emerge to call Tahenohan. It takes a few attempts because she's a really fast swimmer and quite fearless in her half-elven lack of common sense, but you eventually manage to attract her attention and she makes a beeline for your, emerging close enough to startle you even if you knew she was coming.

"You brought a friend!", she comments with quite a bit of merry.

"I found something buried here", Bryld explains, "I think it's a chest of some sort".

"Let's dig it out!", the half-elf goes, and joins you in the attempt to bring it back to the surface.

Even though the bottom of the lake is relatively easy to dig, it still takes the three of you quite some time and several trips to the surface before you make enough space to reveal what Bryld found. It's a quite large chest, about one metre and a half wide. The enameled wood has allowed it to survive its strange location better than it would have if it were untreated, but most of its beauty has been unfortunately lost. The iron used to reinforce it has rusted and now has a greenish hue, full of a myriad of tiny bubbles and a bit of actual moss growing on it.

It has a large and heavy-looking padlock to keep it closed, but it too has rusted and likely lost a lot of its original hardiness. Tahenohan spotted some kind of marking on one side but it has been scratched away, not by the ravages of time or being submerged but intentionally, with a knife, nail or other sharp instrument.

You make a first feeble attempt at lifting it on your own but run out of breath much sooner than you'd think, accomplishing almost nothing. You just don't have a good leverage from that position.

“It looks really heavy”, Bryld comments. It's at a distance where you can barely touch if you stand on your tiptoes, meaning both your friends have to stay afloat.

>Try and lift it, all three of you.
>Find something to use as a lever.
>Mark the spot and move on.
>Other?

>>46649726
>Find something to use as a lever.
Any wayward branches or logs around?

>>46649726
>Find something to use as a lever
PIRATE SWAG

>>46649726
>Try and lift it, all three of you.

>>46649726
>Find something to use as a lever.

Trees don't seem to be growing close to the lake, and the amount of civilization surrounding it implies that none will get cut and no log will be dropped there, by accident or otherwise.

Still, it doesn't mean there aren't pieces of wood you can find out there, it just means you have to go look for them. You are unfortunately devoid of any axe or other cutting tools that would allow you to hack away a branch from somewhere else, not to mention that most surrounding trees are palms, which don't really have much in the way of branches. And the reeds aren't quite strong enough to even try.

It almost takes longer to find something suitable to use as a lever than it did to find the treasure chest itself. It's not a very long branch but it looks sturdy enough.

Bryld helps out by digging some kind of gentler slope where you can push the chest upon, Tahenohan claims the branch to use as lever and offers to help you out as you grab a side handle and yank the chest with all your might up the slope Bryld created.

It makes sense that you, being bigger and stronger than the other two, would get that sort of job. Although being an adventurer you bet Tahenohan is much stronger than she looks, even physically, but you're digressing.

Unfortunately pulling with all your might quickly drains your breath, and even if you're tall you waste a lot of time and energy emerging to catch it. Still, you keep insisting, and after a long while you manage to pull it out enough that you can now keep your head above water level as you pull.

At that point, bringing it back ashore is a joke.

You take a better look at the chest while Tahenohan jumps around excitedly. The wood is not quite rotten, but the iron is very rusty and moldy, and the large padlock prevents you from opening it. Even on the surface it's too heavy for you to just carry it around.

>Smash the padlock.
>Pick the lock.
>Mark the spot and move on.
>Other?

>>46650007
>Smash the padlock
I mean, what could go wrong?

>>46650007
>Pick the lock.
We can always smash after if it doesn't work, but not vise versa.

>>46650007
>Pick the lock.

>>46650007
>Smash the padlock.
>have tahe check for magic traps

>>46650007
>Pick the lock.

You know what you have to do in this situation. You need a thief to check for traps and pick the lock and then the loot will be yours.

So you look at your party. You have a cartographer and a necromancer and you guess you count as a cleric even though you've never been officially invested by your own cult.

Well.

You look at the large branch that Tahenohan is still holding in her slender and eager hands as she manically looks between you and the chest full of treasure, hopping in place and waiting for you to do something.

The padlock doesn't look so strong now, it most likely was a long time ago but now you could probably smash it open if you tried hard enough. Maybe. It would be better if you had a sledgehammer or something packing a harder punch but you guess beggars can't be choosers. Besides, you didn't have the money to properly equip yourself and clothes and food took precedence over anything else at the moment. And still do, considering your situation.

One day this will probably change and you'll be able to become adventurers but not right now. Right now you're just three stark naked ladies that just dragged a large chest out of a lake and are wondering how to open it.

"Just to confirm, any of you can pick locks?", you ask, but the looks you get are exactly what you expected. "Good", you nod, and strike the padlock with all your might.

You hit it several times and eventually crack the branch, splitting it in two. Well that didn't work. Bryld looks a bit disappointed, and Tahenohan just approaches the padlock, raises her foot and stomps it from above.

You'd have expected her heel to get hurt, but the padlock breaks instead. She looks up at you, raising a thumb, “Downward chops, Lillith. That's the way to go”. It would have helped if she told you earlier, but still you weakened the thing enough for her to be able to break it with a kick.

You toss the branch away and grab the lid. You take a deep breath and open the chest.

Inside it, you find...

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Aaaand I'm all out of time!

Sorry everyone, we'll have to wait next week for the treasure's content, for now take 150xp for this session and- No wait, you don't get xp, silly me.

Just follow my twitter to keep up to date on when I'll run. See you next time!

>>46650331
You cliffhangering fuck!
Thanks for running.

>>46650331
Thanks for the thread MP, see you next time.

>>46650331
Thanks for running MP