Smoking Lizard Media

Sick bastards!

© 2018 G.N. Jacobs

From the Journals of Stephor the Seeker:

My travels in search of the necklace have taken me across the vast expanses of everywhere and right next door. Strange creatures abound everywhere that can’t be contained in a single volume bestiary. None have been so strange as what I have come to call the Lucha-iraffe.

Edward and I had just recovered from knees and elbows bar brawl with the Carnivorous Strawberries that ruined a perfectly nice day near London watching an admirable woman win her sporting match, when we drove our borrowed chariot back to where we parked our ship. It was as the guidebook asserted a typically gray threatening to rain sort of morning. We drove through suburban houses trying to find the highway, more on the irony of two strong men used to tall ships and the right stars to steer them fumbling with that infernal navigation assistant, later.

We came upon a fellow hero (we assume) being attacked by the foul beasts in question. Edward is even crazier than I when it comes to supporting other heroes, he hasn’t said but I assume he pays penance for…well, Blackbeard. Edward had the wheel as my previous times at the controls came from that other great English speaking country where the chariots assume Right Lane, Wheel on the Left and asserted the switch would kill me. Truthfully, I just wanted to look at the trees and houses. Don’t tell Edward that.

So when we saw the incident depicted in the photo pasted next to this entry, Edward jammed the foot brake while pulling the handbrake forcing us into a spin. He had paid attention turning the wheel into the direction of the spin and – THUNK! – wiped out the third of what looked like giraffe-men who for reasons of photographic decency wasn’t preserved in this volume. When this third beast landed in a nearby oak tree, Edward exited his door with all the violent bluster I’ve come to expect of him.

“Aye, me lads, what have ye?” Edward asked in his characteristic bellow.

Edward cuts a fine imposing figure even when his speech doesn’t revert back to his original slang. However, he’s the first to suggest that tire irons in lieu of his much favored steel cutlass does more than speaking Pirate to help those impressions. The giraffe-men, whom at first I took as idiot men dressed up for a costume event, barely looked over their shoulders from their task pummeling the hero with the metal Roman helmet. Around this time, I took the picture with my borrowed phone as my images are more aesthetically pleasing.

We charged in headlong as much because the beating the helmeted man took complete with abject bleating for mercy did cause us to question his status as hero. But, then again it was a prodigious beating and we fight whenever we can or need to. I reached the struggle first leading with a hard elbow and shoulder throw. Edward had picked out the other one, the beast seen grabbing helmeted man by the nutsack. He has such a low tolerance of gropers, must be another pirate things I’ll never fully understand.

WHAM! All you need to know at this point in the fight is that both Edward and I wound up flat on our backs grateful for the fact that our foes hadn’t yet finished with the helmeted man. In my case, I didn’t fight a delusional man as I suspected, but a monster or at the least a human-derived mutant. He had an extremely stretchy neck that he bent in the middle to escape my modified shoulder/neck throw. Edward later told me that his opponent extended his neck forward like a battering ram to bash him in the chin forcing him to drop the tire iron.

Suddenly, my mind reached the instantaneous conclusion that the giraffe analogy was spot on. I had assumed it was just the orangish mottling on their skin, but the stretchy weaponized battering ram head cemented this. The helmeted man bleated his last words for at least three weeks and fell by one of the tires of a parked chariot. And then the battle became even stranger…

Edward had scrambled to his feet dogged at every turn by his giraffe-man. The villain had my large friend by the throat flailing about for any sort of hand weapon finally closing his hand on a side mirror attached to the blue chariot. I sparred with my beast using every wit I had left to avoid getting my ass kicked by someone that moved like he’d been taught at a secluded Chinese temple. Apparently, hand to hand combat among bipedal creatures is largely the same, except for pressure points.

I nearly broke my hand on his head, I shifted left and got him on the chin with a front snap kick. That got his attention as he wobbled slightly and ever so briefly. WHAM-CRUNCH! Edward mashed his villain with the mirror raining glass shards over the pavement drawing blood that thankfully proved crimson. I don’t like other hues of blood.

“Bucear desde el coche!” Edward’s villain shouted instructing mine.

The beast before me went vertical stepping up off the tire up into a backflip that landed behind me. Hard won experience in these fights already had me moving my head to the left so this orange bastard couldn’t throw the inevitable rabbit punch. Even though they were bleeding almost as much as we; they moved like acrobats cooperatively switching between Edward and me as targets.

They spoke their language, I later identified as Spanish as they proved the best fighters in my life to that point. In one case mine took a cupped hand boost leading into a pike and full layout that – CLONK! – resulted in me getting a foot to my chin. They had no words other than announcing their blows. Still, we thought we had the pattern until the return of the stretchy battering ram head.

Attrition killed us as it kills everyone…eventually. Edward and I stood back to back spitting blood and at least one tooth…his I swear. We mumbled our ‘forever and forever farewells’ and we kept our hands up when…KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM! A resident of what had been a sleepy neighborhood where good people live emerged on the front step of his single floor house with a double-barreled shotgun killing both of our foes…

Editor’s note:

Stephor and Mr. Teach profusely thanked the homeowner for their deliverance and promised to provide the man’s grown daughter a good husband, which was promptly declined because he only had sons. The blood ran dark crimson on the pavement where the two previously invincible armored heads attached to stretchy necks lay blasted across the asphalt and into the nearby gutter. It was this homeowner that named the lucha-iraffe, a portmanteau of luchador and giraffe after how they fought and their orange giraffe-like hides. Stephor noted that bullets solve many problems…

In game terms, the lucha-iraffe is a mostly humanoid monster or pissed off human mutation with a penchant for mugging in order, people wearing shiny objects, nosy people wearing shiny objects that butt in where they aren’t wanted and anyone else they feel like. They have two major weapons at their disposal superior hand to hand combat skills and the described armored heads attached to those surprising stretchy necks.

They fight normally like luchadors jumping or falling off cars, handrails tucking into a highly acrobatic combat style. Luckily, so few have ever been encountered in wresting or boxing rings so it is only unsupported conjecture that the lucha-iraffe gain bonuses (+4 optional) to both the attack and damage when there is an actual turnbuckle to leap off.

It is not known why they only seem to speak Spanish or have the disturbing tendency to grab certain opponents by the privates. Another, not fully documented trait is that the lucha-iraffe has a highly developed sense of gender in that male would consider it beneath them to fight with females though this changes when there are females of the species present.

As they are human-sized bipeds with interesting adaptations for combat, the best available data suggests a range of three to seven D8 hit dice per example. Their native armor is roughly equivalent to leather armor. Apparently most of that armor springs from the thick bones in their skulls that they use as battering rams. It is also untested but presumed logical that native armor increasing with hit dice as they age. Another untested theory is that the rubbery stretchy necks might be susceptible to severing and all around beheading. Repeat this is untested.

And there you have it bored gamers…The Lemony Lucha-iraffe.