Quoted By:
Anxiety does not trouble you as it does lesser men – your sleep is untroubled, although perhaps not refreshing - the Αλγεα grip your right side and shoulder with their sharp talens at odd moments through the night. You awake very early on the final day of the Oetian Games and find that your torment has been eased significantly. Your right shoulder is quite stiff and tender, but you gauge that casting a limited number of stones or spears is now within your power. Close quarters combat would be a highly risky endeavor, with pain slowing your reaction speed and sapping your strength – with any luck, you can avoid it.
>Hippomedon now has 7/13 wounds and he will be competing today with a -4 wound malus!
You dress yourself in the lion’s pelt (you are growing to hate it, truly), and loop your freshly-replaced club through your leather belt. Stepping outside your quarters, you find that the cramped halls of the palace are shadowed and empty, torches choked by ash, kitchens dark. Peering outside a window, you see Πασιφαε Selene riding low over the hilltops – your eagerness for redress over Hyperbius has caused you to misjudge the hour, and awaken well before dawn.
You grin – you alone in Trachis are ready for today’s exertions.
The frozen pit of anger in your guts begins to thaw – you are only hours away from setting the world back into place. Argos atop Thebes, yourself above the Theban, as it should be. Without the prospect of breakfast, you slip out of the palace, through the streets and outside the city gates – a shockingly large number of hide-tents are scattered in every direction, cramped close together, and the noise here is substantial – a plague of commoners drunkenly bickering, shouting, hollering, stumbling in and out of their tents, fighting… A vast, heedless army has descended on Trachis while you’ve been in seclusion; Hellas’ entire population of halfwits dumped out onto Eurykratides’ doorstep, all eager to see the final result of the Oetian Games…
You’re light-footed for a giant, but even so, your size causes alarm on several occasions as you cross paths with the low men. You pay them no mind - their drunken shouts lost in the greater wash of the indigent. Striding into the hills, you scour the earth for smooth stones, about half the size of your fist. Finding them in rocky country is no difficulty. You place five in the hide bag attached to your belt; these you will use against the Theban.
>Hippomedon has collected five rocks for use later today! These are improvised weapons and we’ll be using Homer’s boulder damage table for these – dice+1dX+(1/2)(STR bonus) is the typical calculation, IIRC, but these have a size of 1. Hippomedon’s Gifted Athlete bonus applies (+3), given that he’s picked appropriate stones for this purpose ahead of time, but so does his wound malus (-4). So the final calculation for any wound/damage attempt with these stones is dice+1d1+5, I believe.
