Glorified Mercenaries: The Rebootening

Bart looks between Sylvain and the fridge several times in confusion, eventually stepping forward to the appliance; curiosity getting the better of him.

He tries to open the door while half-hiding behind it, clearly fearing something bursting out to try to eat him.

Inside the fridge are a half-drained cola bottle, some leftover takeout, a couple of sandwiches, and a paper bag labeled NOT YOURS.

"Trial Zero: Credulity, complete," Sylvain rumbles. Ilves lets out a weak chuckle. "One'a these days we're gonna get a group where nobody falls for that."

A faint smile plays around the moatin's lips. "Someday. Come." Sylvain waves Group F along behind him. "Your real trials await."

'Alright that was pretty good,' Naisse quietly mused to herself. She was sure some sort of trap, or maybe a portal or something was in there. Maybe these people aren't as big of chumps as she thought. A good sense of humor often got people on her good side.

A bit more satisfied with how this was likely to go, she followed behind Sylvain.

Giles gestures towards the door, beckoning Kairui forward.

"Wouldn't want to overstep my bounds and precede my betters. After you, Bishop Kino."

"Hmph. It's about time a peasant showed respect of the higher class."

Kairui strides forth, nose high in the air.

"Of course. I'd never disrespect someone who carried the favor of the Church."

Bart gives an indignant grumble before shutting the fridge. He stands by Giles while Kairui passes, ever so slightly grinning.

Sylvain leads your group through a short hallway, ending in an iron door. He has to fiddle with the handle a bit to get it open; as soon as he does, you're hit by a blast of cool air (the poorly air-conditioned interior of the building being much hotter than it had any right to be).

You enter a small garden, walled off by brick; on the other side, you can just make out a door and what looks like a ditch. Birds and insects flit about, carefree. In the middle of the trees and flowers is a small plastic folding table, which holds several flasks of brightly-colored fluid and a clipboard. After snapping up the latter, Sylvain steps to the side and stands beneath an apple tree. "Trial one. First, determine which of the substances on the table are safe to consume. Please do not harm the plants. You may ask questions. Begin."

"Huh, alright." Giles rubs his chin for a few moments, eyeballing the flasks. "Which ones are safe to consume?"

"I motion that the demons be sacrifices so I can try all the liquids out on them."

Bart follows behind the others outside, flinching at the rush of air. He clears his throat and gives Kairu a friendly pat on the shoulder. "No need for that... er, sir? Father? How do you prefer to be addressed? Anyway, I specialize in wounds but I can probably see if they'd make anyone seriously ill without much trouble."

He looks between Sylvain and Giles, bemused, while going to inspect the liquids. "Unless this is another joke and you'll just tell us if we ask?"

Naisse literally shoves her way past Kairui to get closer to the liquids.

"Oh, so sorry about that." All she can hope is that he doesn't pass the tests, while she takes a look at the liquids herself.

Bart looks up from the flasks at Naisse with a grin. "No need to be rude."

Sylvain looks over at Giles, and very nearly smiles. The moatin briefly glances at his clipboard to jot something down.

He says nothing.

Kairui makes an incredibly over-the-top offended expression, and says, "Hey, watch where you're going!" He shrugs it off, adjusts his robe, and he inspects the liquids real closely. "It's obvious there are some magical influences here... These are all potions."

He takes out a few empty vials, pours the liquids in some of them, and takes out another vial, filled with a sweet-looking yellow liquid. He adds a drop to each in turn. The animals suddenly become very interested in the liquids. He pours them out on the table.

"Now we wait."

ROLL FOR INTELLIGENCE (+1 Magical Expertise Skill) I GUESS.

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For the record, most noncombat tasks (without an opponent) I'm going to go based on a simple little challenge rating table I've got mocked up, where 3 is "easy even for a rube," spmething around 9 is "starting to get a bit tough for those with prior training," and 18 is "extraordinarily difficult even with experience."

In this case, for Naisse identifying the potions just by eyeballing them, I'm going with a challenge rating of 11, if only because... I mean all she's doing is looking at them.
d10 (2) + INT bonus (3) = 5...

Kairui would get a challenge rating of 7, because it’s a plausible and efficient solution. However, I’m applying a conditional +3 to the challenge, so if he didn’t crack 10, the fluids would all swirl together, making the whole thing pretty useless.
d10 (8) + INT bonus (5) + Skill Bonus (1) = 14!

(Side note: I considered counting it as Luck instead, since it's more banking on the animal's reactions than your own cognition, but it's moot because the resulting 11 would still eke out a victory over the mighty ten.)

Naisse: They're pretty brightly colored, like the type of chemicals or potions you'd see in a cartoon. You're fairly sure this was achieved via food coloring, and done solely to make it easier to keep the different substances straight.

Kairui: The fluids, thankfully, remain separated, and the birds and insects quickly slurp up all the fluid (with the exception of the poisonous fluids, which it turns out were red and light blue – these they quickly learn to leave alone).

Sylvain nods and takes some notes, then waves the group over to the ditch which imprecisely bisects the garden. Approaching it, you can see it’s fairly deep, and quite wide at that – there was a good deal of effort put into digging this thing out. A concrete floor has been set up at the bottom, with frowny faces, skulls-and-crossbones, little pointy things, etc. having been scrawled into it while the cement was still wet. More professional inscriptions - some kind of sigils, actually, by the looks of them - appear to have been carved into the edges after it had set.

"Second: Cross the pit. Don't fall in. No cheating." Sylvain briefly glances up his papers. "You may ask questions. Begin."

How exactly could you cheat at crossing a pit?

...actually this is a very legitimate question.

"How exactly could you cheat at crossing a pit?"

"The sigils emulate real-world conditions that may impair your ability to cross this gap." Syl looks to Naisse. "An anti-cheating measure, if you will."

He nods at Albert and jots a few more notes down.

Kairui shrugs, and opens an arcane portal from here to the other side. He is about to go into it, but then a strange sigil covers the portal, electrifies it, and makes it disappear. Kairui's movement is now 0.

"No cheating," Sylvain says boredly.

Curses.

"... Um, I'm 80 pounds (around 36 kilograms)."

"Too bad nobody here's an Earth specialist. Right? Surely one of you would have mentioned that by now if you were."

Drumming his fingers on his briefcase, Giles muses "Think I run about 120 these days. I'd feel safer if we could get something to walk across built, but I was never much good at physical magic."

While he waits to see if anyone's going to respond, he begins some simple divinations to identify the nature and effect of the magical sigils built into the ditch. (Informational magic, +3)

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Giles: d10 (3) + INT bonus (4) + skill bonus (3) = 10

Albert: There's one or two couple sturdy-looking trees on each side of the ditch.

Giles: The pattern appears to alternate between paired wind sigils, and opposed void and magnetism sigils (i.e., the standard antimagic array). Insects and birds tend to avoid flying over the ditch, abruptly turning away if they get too close to it.

Giles points out what he learned. "Might be a little hard to just leap over, and any good-luck or protection charms I could give you might just be nullified."

He looks over at Bart. "You said you were a doctor, right? You know any life magic, or are you one of those weird traditionalists? Seems like a life-user ought to be able to topple one of these trees, and we could just make a log-bridge rather than getting blown down trying to tie off a rope."

"If all we need to do is to topple that tree, then I can help you there."

Kairui ponders over which form of magic to use, and he decides that a blade of wind would be efficient.

(I guess roll both for whether the magic works and also whether the tree falls just right.)

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Kairui: d10 (8) + INT bonus (5) + skill bonus (1) = 14
Challenge rating: 10

Kairui: The tree falls just right to form a makeshift bridge. The wind runes below it activate, causing a bit of an updraft, but the sturdy trunk itself remains mostly unaffected.