>>6067381Your Seafood was gone three days.
The place he chose to nap, the dead tree and utterly blasted patch of grass, gets attention from more eagle-eyed travellers on the road.
It's inconvenient to have to keep half an eye's watch all the time, and you have to drop whatever you are doing to sprint a distance and hide when, twice, armed Humies and Axebeards come poking around, but you stay at the camp. You expect your Seafood will come back, and if he doesn't find you within shouting distance of here, you're going to get it.
For those three days you just eat up, do drop-fall traps, pick things, and poop. It starts to look like you might hunt and strip the area four hundred paces from the dead tree empty. The amount and spread of your poop does some good: it stinks a lot because of your recent grubber-based diet, and the Fighty Ones that come through your camp are eager to conclude it abandoned because of that.
You practice the Carrionpede whenever you can, spreading your limbs across the ground without your elbows and knees resting, and scuttling here, scuttling there; over rocks, up trees and down again, an unsettling slalom of low profile, ferocious movement, for anyone watching. You still can't jump worth a damn from this posture, just a kind of bounding hop (~10" vertical, ~30' forward) which you can do fairly rapidly.
You wonder what the offensive parts of the Form are like. In anticipation of being taught, you pretend a short stick is a knife and whack at things as you scuttle past, full speed:
There! Your ankle! Yahh! No more toes! Harr! The bugghole!
This Form really is suited to you! You can't wait! You really can't wait!
But Gui Li's moanings crescendo to screams after a long bit, reminding you of the Conjugal Performance Ceremony you need to periodically perform, and you spend two Times and more'n half a Time (~ 2hrs 40mins) a day doing the Ceremony, about 3 to 4 times a day, to be safe. You always do the Ceremony once you're done training; it's always slowly, slowly, that Ceremony, might as well use it to catch your breath.
>[THOUSAND SEGMENT CARRIONPEDE IMPROVEMENT]>[2+2-1(/4) MELEE HIT CHANCE, +0(/4) MELEE DAMAGE]***
You get a few useful things from the dead woodcutter and his donkey: a battered old hatchet, near blunt, just the thing to pair with your Dagger; one back-basket, which you line with the dead Man's clothes and the donkey's blanket; and two large baskets, which you modify into double layered armor, using the donkey's bridle for the under-rigging, and short planks for the chest and shoulders, tied on with cording.
[COMBAT LOADOUT]
>Sky Pokey Dagger (Ruined), 1d10+1>Shoddy Hatchet (Old), 1d3-1>Shoddy Medium Armor (Kludged: 12/12 durability; usually 20+); -4 physical damage (usually 6-8); (Fitted; usual -2 movement penalty negated)The back-basket and hatchet are useful when collecting wood, the main part of the material for the Ceremony, and various snacky stuff, the main other part.
