View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Channeling negative energy is mostly useless if you are a banker. There is no way to usefully take a minute out of your day to walk into a room, channel negative energy at everybody in it, and then go back to banking. Maybe if he worked at a mint that was right next to a mine staffed with skeletons, but in a city, absolutely not. Supposedly it can be valuable in the field, but Jaume does not live or work in a field. All channeling negative energy does for him is remind him that he is still Evil, it has not worn away in the river of the boring reliable Neutrality of his day-to-day: he came up among Evil people and traded Evil currency and financed Evil churches and projects. One day it may change, faster with all these foreign influences many of whom might be Lawless but are at least mostly not Evil. For now -
Well. One thing channeling negative energy is useful for is crowd control.
He can't do it very many times a day; he's not Splendid enough. It'll have to count.
This temple was Asmodean before, so it wasn't architected for channeling when the Abadarans took over, but they got that fixed: it has, by now, two balcony levels, with a bridge across the middle layer, so that the channeling cleric can stand in the center of an approximate sphere of customers who trickle in and take their seats and wait for the bell. Jaume can cast orisons just like anyone else, and he's walked the circles of densely packed chairs tapping people with Stabilize. But he's never stood in the center. He never needs to personally be within thirty feet of that many people.
Today, he stands there. Loaded up with all the buff spells that will last long enough to make sense, while the front door screams and strains, Jaume takes to the stairs and finds his place on the bridge.
The door bursts open. A mob of bank robbers explode into the circular room, just shy of thirty feet across and entirely within range.
When the room is full, Jaume channels negative energy.
(It's the second time. He had to defend his bank in the sack of Corentyn, too. But they didn't have the balconies and bridges there; it was just him punching his way through a mass of bodies till he had a central position.)
Some of the mob fall. Some of them stagger but move forward; some of them flinch and make a retreat. Jaume has the Earth domain, and he can acid-dart someone who looks less affected than the others; that brings the man down. He can pick out the ringleader, who's taking a mace to the teller windows now, and give a command in the voice of an inevitable: "Flee." And the next-most-in-charge: "Flee." That one makes his save. Acid dart.
Most people robbing a bank do not bring their bows, but a couple people have them on hand, maybe from other more obviously ranged-weapon-friendly missions of chaos. Jaume takes a crossbow bolt in the shoulder and slumps against the railing. Somebody's coming up the stairs. Jaume has a healing spell left - that's why you charge for them - so you'll have extra, for emergencies - he fights to keep breathing steadily enough to speak the words for Cure Light Wounds, and the bolt works its way out with a squelching noise. He's harder to hit from prone, so he doesn't get up, just surveys the mess downstairs. At the moment the footsteps are pounding on the bridge enough to make his skull echo, he channels again.
The person approaching takes the damage but still goes for the sword strike while Jaume is on the ground. The stranger gets lucky. Jaume doesn't get a chance to use his next inevitable command. He has to hope now that with the channels finished and the field safe for his fellow Abadarans he'll be rescued rather than decapitated here and now by this thief.
After all, if he dies today, he probably goes to Hell. And that isn't where his god is and he doesn't think, really, that it's where he belongs. If he'd been born anywhere else -
He loses his grip on consciousness.