shit. things are not going well. we are in way over our heads. well, i am, anyway.on AAA016 afternoon, we got back to the keep, which lucan had been supposedly guarding. he couldn't stop it from being "decorated", though. maybe i haven't been living in the city long enough, because i still think there are some things that are scarier than necromancers. there were flowers around the gate house and pennants in the windows. of course, i figured we'd never see lucan again, but there he was safely inside.
he couldn't explain what had happened to the keep. there was some woman named quicksilver around, who he said had been "helping out". she's a wizard, from some elven order i've never heard of before. apparently they fly around in a grove of trees. lucan said he couldn't stop her from decorating things. he didn't *look* charmed, but my magic sense still isn't as good as i wish it was.
cor came back, panicked because someone had put plants in her room ("mushrooms aren't plants," said lucan. pedant. [1]), so i had to go look at mine. well, at least no one touched my books. she replaced my desk, though --- i'm not really sure why. also, she left me wolf skulls and a giant bear head for decoration. i didn't even kill these, what are they doing in my room? i've never liked trophies, even when i was six and killing a wolf was a big deal. [2] the bear rug is nice, though. maybe now that i'm a city person, i i'll keep it and not sleep on the floor. i cut off the head, though.
things looked better after dinner, since siarrah was there. it's good to see someone alive and apparently sane. also, they are apparently going to put together a herb closet in the basement or somewhere. that could be really useful. so maybe quicksilver is not so bad. i hope she doesn't notice that i cut off the bear head. i think i might be able to do some magic for sewing things back together, but i really don't want it.
then there was some real news, none of it good. some illendi are apparently coming to meet with the mayor. he asked for advice from us on when to reveal the illendi to the town, but he's already planning to do it now, so i'm not sure what advice he really wants. anyway, he also wants us to host the illendi at our keep so that they don't get hurt.
then siarrah told us that valen is after the felderoak, which is being kept by a monastary of dreamers in ermery. also, apparently, the druids have disappeared from telperest. no one's seen them in weeks. dreaming, valen, the felderoak, and druids: that's four bad things.
things are not good between us at the keep either. cor told siarrah that parna is illendi, so that siarrah wouldn't eat parna when she found out. of course, parna was outraged. he doesn't trust siarrah at all. maybe he and siarrah could take an oath. i don't understand the big deal with oaths, but it made parna feel better about cor and ideh, so maybe it would work for siarrah too.
we talked to fahaeli, who was useful for once. i'll just make a list of what he told us, before i forget: - ermely has been seen in the akuren lately - people apparently think ermeldrene is a guardian spirit, and he used to be an oracle a long time ago - he's found records from before the cataclysm that talk about the bilani. one of the people who cast the spells on the bilani wrote that they were given too much freedom. i'd have to agree. - there are stories about similon, the next bilanus over from edswota - some of his research agrees with the "magic comes in cycles" idea, so maybe another making is coming, as edswota said
also, fahaeli's people are trying to get the other sangreal back from kanton. his people are not planning to be careful about being seen by telperest residents, or at least he wants us to think not, and he didn't seem to care about the meeting with the illendi from siarrondo. maybe the mayor's plan isn't so bad after all, if the alternative is to have everyone in town hear that illendi have been killing telperest citizens. before he left, fahaeli made sure to tell us he'd be around all night in case any of us wanted to talk to him individually. sometimes fahaeli doesn't creep me out; he just makes me angry.
anyway, he could have saved the trouble. when we got up in the morning, ideh wasn't around, and cor had a note in dwarvish which she said says that he had betrayed his people by not killing parna. maybe the mayor should have mentioned to us that he was sending us off with an illendi-hater, given that we were supposed to be talking to illendi. the mayor isn't stupid; he must have known.
we are pretty definitively stupid. i don't know that i like parna, but it would clearly be very bad if he got killed. we're better as bodyguards than as diplomats; if we can't even act as bodyguards reasonably, we're not going to do much good. we have to trust that the people who are fighting (and *standing* *watch*) on our side aren't going to try to stop what we're trying to do. as far as i know, what we're trying to do is help as much as we can to keep all of correllendor from going up in flames, and to keep there from being a war with the illendi.
so everyone in the party needs to trust each other. i wanted all of us to be there when cor told parna what had happened, but cor said he wouldn't talk to her unless no one else was there. i don't like that. parna doesn't trust us, and he needs to, because otherwise he'll get killed, or fahaeli will have a spy in our keep, or both. siarrah is a wild card in this. if she is going to fight with us (and, if we survive this and go after the felderoak, we may need her to fight with us), parna will find out what she is, and he needs to not freak out and spoil things.
but the big thing is, we need to be able to trust the people who we should be able to trust. i think lucan and cor and ceder and siarrah are okay --- i don't think any of them are going to backstab the rest of us or parna and lorkin. but i don't know what parna wants, and i don't know who quicksilver is, and they're both going to be around and on our side during the thing with the siarrondo people today, so i need to find out whether i can trust them, and i need to not be wrong.
because we certainly don't know what the sage or the mayor or the illendi or the bilani or the people of telperest (even the brothers at the temple, much as i'd like to trust them entirely) are going to do. so, basically, we're screwed, and we need all the help we can get.
[1] yes, i know, ooc vocabulary. it happens.
[2] scott and pete, i'm assuming here that the wolf heads were just ordinary wolves. barg would be less complacent about blink wolves/head of janx/etc. assume a wilderness lore check (at +7) if necessary.
The trip as fahelai would hear it from parna. detail can be added as needed. Best read with a voice somewhere between a flaming guy and an irritated valley girl... and don't forget the hand gestures =PTravel to the town was uneventful. At the town we heard some gossip about the tower but the only useful information was the routes there and the mystery of the stairway. There were two routes there - one through a swarm of kobolds and up a stair which seemed to have 'vanished' recently, the other through a higher and lesser used pass. The town wasn't full of fighters - the swarm seemed to scare them completely and they had evacuated outlying farms. They could make a really good pair of boots though...
Anyway, The trip to the tower was also mostly uninteresting from the scholarly point of view. The woods were straightforward though filled with ghouls, which I am sure ~you~ have heard about before. That evening we camped within sight of the tower and were attacked by a giant manta ray and a group of flying kobolds. The manta was gigantic - could deafen and stun with its shrieks and after we damaged it, it simply flew away before it was killed. You'd think with a whole group of ~clever~ adventurers we'd be able to find a site where we could sleep the night through.
*sighs*
The next morning we got up and bumped into ~another~ sentinel apparently spying on the Edswotha. OK, so we're exactly not sure that it was a sentinel. There was an old man in the middle of nowhere who introduced himself as Ermaldrine. He was only 'kind of here' via some 'travel magic' and was very interested in the sentinels. He'd been in one and skirted another and was now checking out Edswotha. He warned us about the balasthiri...
oh, the balasthiri?
Well the balasthiri are these anti-life beings from... elsewhere. Edswotha said he was gating them in to keep him company because ~we~ had abandoned him. He seemed rather upset about us abandoning him and there was constant mention of popping-
Oh, right, Edswotha.
So we met Edswotha in the tower. Maybe it's better to say we met the tower, Edswotha. And really I only think we were in the tower. We were wandering around outside not finding any entrance so ~I~ asked Edswotha to let us in and he gated us in.
Well, no, I'm not really sure about that, I called out "Edswotha, let us in" and we were uncontrollably gated into... Well it worked... He gated us into the tower where w--
you want me to finish in order? Sorry....
I think we were on the rim of the mountain talking to Ermaldrine. Right. And he asked us to keep an eye out for these energy beings and find out their relation to the sentinel and report back to them. The ~rest~ of the group seemed to think this was fine and didn't inquire as to why a mysterious person named suspiciously similarly to a sentinel and possessing similar magic just ~happened~ to be snooping around and asking us to do his inspection for him. Maybe they didn't see anything suspicious in the fact he flickered and vanished at the end of the conversation.
no, sorry I wasn't there I can't give details on that. Figures that they didn't observe more carefully.
Anyway, we agreed to investigate and headed down the cliff to the tower valley. I had to rescue one of them on the way because he started falling and...
what? I thought it was pretty amazing... I mean saving someone's life can't just be irrelevant and I've done so little in the real world and I was able to single-[word for lower pair of handed]ly rescue one of the ones you respect so....
Ok, never mind then.
So we got to the base of the tower and started fording through this ~tedious~ maze. On the way we were attacked by some of the lesser balasthiri because they didn't know that I was Illendi yet and their priest hadn't told them to obey me. Oh well yes, once they realized I was illendi they took us to their village that we'd passed on the way into the cen--
Deepest apologies, respected elder.
We started going through the maze and were attacked by this deer with glowing eyes. Later we learned that the balasthiri are some form of energy being. At the time we knew that they evaporated any living matter they touched, apart from specially prepared skins which they used to 'hold their energy together' in our world. They also can make one uncontrollably afraid of them, reasonable considering that they can disintegrate any living matter - at least trees and Ida and Ida's kimono which, while decidedly plain looking, was apparently special in some way.
Anyway, we fought the deer and some moles and saw some balasthiri birds and balasthiri 'humans' on the way in. We also passed by a village of skin-wearing balasthiri which was decidedly odd as it didn't seem to fit in the space it was in. The village looked huge but given how many of the maze paths intersected it it could not have been that big. Anyway, we made it through the rest of the maze but were stopped right at the edge of the center clearing by a group of human-wearing balasthiri. They didn't immediately attack so we tried to communicate with them and it turns out they spoke anghil. They were very insistent that I, as the speaker of ~the~ language, should come meet with their priest so rather than doing more fighting we headed back to their village.
I wasn't able to get much information out of them on the way because Ida was listening too intently. I ~told~ him he wasn't allowed to learn our language without your permission, elder, but he persisted in trying to pick up words. The rest of the group got somewhat irritated that I would not translate but I was really trying to look out for ~our~ interests. In any case, our balasthiri guards were only bright in the visible sense and were not terribly informative.
The leader of the balasthiri was slightly more interesting than his followers. He basically had taken over caretakership of the tower and area after we left. He was very respectful to me and very very respectful to the tower. I think they were kind of scared of it - they wouldn't go near it and didn't know how to contact it. The priest did lend us a few human-wearing balasthiri to guide us to the tower but they would not go close by. The group wandered around the whole thing looking for doors but it didn't occur to them to just ask the sentient tower to let us in. Once they were sure there was no mundane entrance I simply asked Edswotha to let us in and he obeyed promptly.
Once we were in the tower we talked to Edswotha for ages. I'll tell you the things I learned in order because. I memorized as many as I could but I didn't bring anything to write on so if you interrupt me I'll get all confused and have to start again.
Edswotha mentioned the 'little girl dolls' and later the Tempus Twins. The party has encountered them before and not had great success fighting them. Apparently they're large animated porcelain dolls which move through time however they feel like it. We're not sure if it's backwards or sideways or in circles or whatever.
Edswotha definitely moves in circles. In time, I mean. The party mentioned that so I won't go into it.
The dwarves were 'gotten rid of' in the unmaking. Cor brought this up and I think everyone else was surprised so I'll assume it's not common knowledge. Edswotha said it was not done deliberately but Cor was pretty unhappy about the whole thing. I'd suggest not talking to her about it - she'd probably attack you or something.
Edswotha was a male anghil before he was ... towerified. Now he considers himself an it. It considers hi-- itself an it. Whatever. I didn't know we were a part of the tower making....? There were 13 baelani at the making, in any case, and all of them were stuck in towers.
Around the time of the unmaking things and places were 'tied together'. The sentinels were sick of guarding the area and waged war on each other. I ~think~ that was the unmaking. Anyway, they untied the tied-together-places and that was the unmaking. Makes sense.
Edswotha said he knew where our holy land was. He offered to take me there. Me!! I knew my duty was to come back and report but apparently the sentinels can help us get back there. And I was awfully dutiful to come back rather than being the first one there, wasn't I? *sighs* it would have been wonderful to be the first one back there.... Anyway, Edswotha said that the gates somehow fueled a 'ship' and were needed before the ship would leave. It didn't really make sense to me. In any case he did say he could take us back - he was awfully willing to transport anyone anywhere.
The other thing he said about our homeland was that there was more than one. Specifically he said "there are two, one inside the third". I remembered that one word for word especially well. Ermaldrine said that the symbol stood for the boundary between the kami and sentinels are and the real world - the space at the bottom is the pathway from one to the other. He really seemed to believe what he was saying but I don't know that he was telling me the whole truth. Maybe our 'arrival' land isn't in this world - Edswotha offered to send me to the balasthiri homeland and that certainly isn't on this continent.
Speaking of the balasthiri homeland ~I~ convinced Edswotha to retrieve an angreal from there. He (it) said that he'd put them there for safekeeping but told them to put one at the foot of the tower. I picked it up before the party really thought about it and I still have it. I could give it to you if you need it - Edswotha told us that they were like keys to the door. We may not be able to get to the homeland without them. He did have a lot more in his balasthiri store but I don't know how willing he'd be to get more. He was awfully torn between obeying and popping me. Maybe if we send someone to keep him company he won't hate us so. I could give you the angreal and you could keep him company only if I gave it up I'd have to leave the party. I wouldn't mind doing that anyway. Some of these people aren't as trustworthy as you thought.
I have to stay with them? *sighs* what am I to do now, then?
apologies for spelling errors both in english and for me not knowing town/people names. Also deepest apologies to Cor who I'm ~trying~ to like ;-)