October 12th Notes

Joe is alive and everyone is happy and there is a celebration. We head back to town and everyone is making Joe feel happy but he is still a little out of it. We pass by the orphanage on the way to the Behemoth. The kids see Joe and they all come and surround Joe. The adults come out with tears in their eyes and Joe starts to weep as well. We assume it is tears of joy and not of pain from the kids climbing on him. We are finally let got back to the behemoth and Flea gets it moving again. Before we head off to the Grig leapers, Xestro and Blaze get new armor and Blaze goes shopping for a crescent board. Blaze, Big Dee, Hikari, and Allison go to the tecnowizard store and find a Devil Man as the owner of the store. She is able to charm the owner down to 18 stones from 25 and she politely declines the invitation to dinner. She thinks that she gets a good deal until Bib Dee tells her that she spent 2or 3 million credits for a 350,000 credit board. Apparently we should have communicated better before we got to the store. We all pile into the Behemoth Explorer and we set off. We travel through the rest of the evening. Start out early the next morning and travel without mishap. It takes two days to get to the ranch. Hikari hears shouting coming from Blazes’ room and stops just before he falls into a black bottomless pit that comes oozing though the door. We fill the seeker on the way and talk about what we know about the Grig Leapers. They are MDC animals, have two large back legs, four arms, all of them clawed. A long tail with a sharp tip, big mouth and have a reputation for being nasty, mean, aggressive and fearless. A couple of these things will attack an adult dragon. They are known for being cunning and hunting in packs from 12-hundreds, but if there are hundreds, there is not much else living in the area. Body length is 5 feet and the tail is about 8 feet long. It’s a demonic cross between a grasshopper and an alien. Stand on all six and are about 4 feet tall. One individual is not that tough, but a pack is trouble. They are fast, agile, can climb anything and known to swarm over things and into things. Don’t have any know weaknesses. They are not stupid, if they are losing, they will retreat and regroup. They are not trainable even by the Simvan. No one has been able to chase away a pack, they must be eliminated. They have been seen to leap 30 feet standing still. Hunt at night We get there the evening of the second day we get there and the ranch owner says that we can get together and have a barbeque dinner. There is a ley line off to the east and the known area that the pack is at is off to the north west. The forman comes over and talks with us. There is a pack of leapers that have been taking cattle from the herd and have killed three of his cowboys and he doesn’t have the man power or gun power to go in an exterminate them. They don’t know exactly how big the pack is but at one time they saw about 30 of them. He gives us directions on how to find the canyon. Hikari asks about the lay of the land. The ranchers have been moving the herds south, 6 miles north, 3 miles east of the ranch. They are worried about having to move the herds so far that the ranch is between the pack and the herds. The canyon is about 12 miles away from the ranch. We go out to the herd that night. Flea is happy because he got a flood light in town so we can see where we are going. We get to the herd about midnight and go talk to the cowboys. It’s been a quiet night. There are twenty cowboys that stay close together. They have a large campfire going. They typically loose 5-10 cattle a night. The flood light lights up 500 ft wide, 2000 ft in front. We are planning on waiting until the pack comes, starts eating the cows, and then fight them. Zebulon is going to stand back and shoot from a distance. Flea is planning on shooting from the top of the behemoth, and Jarl is also going to be on the top of the behemoth protecting the roof which is the most vulnerable spot. Joe is flying around, 30 ft up, the area to scout out the grig leapers. He sees one in the field. Joe hovers over the top of it and blows out a breath to blow fire at it and two come out from the sides and leap up at him. They jump on his tail and one of his wings. He is now falling. He flames on and they fall off with piercing cries, landing on their feet, and Joe is once more a flaming pile of dragon. Hikari sees a light out in the distance and then it vanished. We figure it is Joe and go in the general direction of the light after a minute and a quarter of arguing. We have to stay with the behemoth because it has the light. Joe rights himself and looks around. There are the three that he saw and five more coming toward him and surrounding him. Joe flies up into the air, and gets a little clawed up as one swipes at him. He is now 80 ft in the air circling the leapers. We see a spark of light from the behemoth back in the air. Two of the leapers stay under him and the rest go off into the dark. He throws a fire ball down at them but misses. He does a blinding flash and one is a little affected and the other isn’t. Joe flies for three minutes throwing fire balls at them and they dodge them all. The behemoth is about half a mile away from Joe and the leapers turn toward the noise of the behemoth, hiss and slink away. Joe moves off toward the cattle. We head toward Joe still about half a mile away. Joe can’t see any leapers but they can see him, since he is still glowing. Joe lets off a thunderclap and the cows start running east. We hear the thunderclap and see the cattle running. The rest of the night is spent chasing the cattle down and the leapers are gone. The next morning we see the remains of a couple of cattle. Allison does Astal Projection during the day and goes to the lair of the grig leapers and sees a cliff face about in the middle looks like it has been honeycombed. She goes into one of the caves it is four feet across and 10 ft deep and there is a grig leaper and a whole bunch of little ones all sleeping. She goes into another cave and sees more asleep. She count the caves and there are 54 holes and 37 attacked the herd. Hikari and Blaze and Allison and Onida go toward the lair to see where they come out of the canyon. They come out the side of the canyon opposite to the cliff where their lair is. We rest until the next night and then go back to the lair. The predominate wind direction is toward the canyon. Blaze and Hikari fly over the edge of the canyon so that they can count how many leapers go out to hunt. About 30 min after the sun sets they can make out movement and then see the pack coming up the side of the canyon wall walking 3 or 4 animals abreast of each other. They get a rough count of 34 animals. Allison goes in with her astral projection to see how many are staying. She counts about 25 little ones running around the canyon and there are about 12 big ones. Some of the big ones are on the cliff face watching things and others are with the little ones. They move really quick up and down the face of the cliff. From what she can tell, there are none left in the caves. We decided that we need more people. Maybe Northern Gun will donate products for people to come help us. We tell the ranch hand that we are going to go get more help.