Honestly the whole party is "will nobody rid me of" but I am the only cleric so I get to steal the joke. Because I'm also the rogue.
(Also I made a Celyn icon from a drawing I did of him and Robin.)
Our party is still three lunatics and a paladin:
Celyn Bettws, Meddlesome Priest and Fairy Appreciator
Viepuck, still the Doogie Howser of Eldritch Fantasy Lawyers (new and improved recipe with added criminal law!)
Izgil Moonseeker, Moon Appreciator, Dwarf, and Responsible Adult
and of course Robin of Abenfyrd, the Paladin
When we left off we were about to be ambushed.
The party is riding along a road with a fairly sheer, wooded hillside to the right and scattered trees to the left. This is of course reasonably good terrain to set up an ambush in.
It is hard to ambush a party when the person in front has a weapon that says "Oh hey by the way, you're about to be ambushed" to him. Robin passes word of the impending danger back down the line of people riding down the road, and thus we roll initiative, with several people doing well by comparison to the bad guys.
Celyn takes a moment to spot a number of bad guys and drops a fairy fire on a cluster of them, making it So Very Obvious that they have been seen. Robin, partially assisted by the fact that several of these guys are in fact now glowing, rides Greymalkin the wingless gryphon up the sheer slope and being the idealistic cinnamon roll that he is, demands that they stand down. (One does in fact surrender. The other tries to stab him.)
Bad guys get to act: two rather more dangerous guys emerge from hiding, both attacking Celyn, and manage to do 2/3 of his hit points in damage. This makes Robin moderately cross about the situation. Meanwhile the bandits who do not have a man in plate armour in their faces unload their bows at the party's horses, two of which spook and run away; the affected party members manage to get off them. This makes Robin even more cross about the situation. (They stabbed his boyfriend and shot his horse?)
Izgil holds a spell for Celyn to clear out of the zone of effect, which everyone knows Celyn will do because being between a pair of assassins is not a good time; Viepuck snipes a couple of bad guys out of trees with the help of his familiar. Celyn does, in fact, bamf off his horse to over next to Robin, and stabs the hell out of the guy who took a swing at Robin before dodging around to behind the paladin, putting Cranky Man In Plate Armour between himself and the guy who just stabbed the hell out of him. The spell goes off, hitting several bandits and both assassins, and two bandits and one of the assassins are stuck staring at the moon. Also, Celyn's horse.
Robin takes a moment to heal Celyn, tells the guy who surrendered to stay put, and charges back down to have the sort of blunt conversation with the assassin who stabbed his boyfriend that results in said assassin getting knocked on his ass. Izgil tells Viepuck to move out of the way, once again holding a spell for an ally to clear the field; Viepuck heads down and around and blasts the assassin up the steep hill, plonking him in front of one of the two bandits who is still awake and not staring at the moon with Pioden (Celyn's mare). (The other one of the two bandits had gone down the hill to shake the other assassin out of his stupor.) As Viepuck moves, Izgil encases the now-not-stunned assassin in ice (that also kills the guy who snapped him out of it).
In the distance, we hear the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Viepuck's familiar goes off to lay eyes on this and spots some people in Baronial livery approaching. This may be helpful? Or it may be another problem? We do not know, given we know the baronial court has been suborned.
Robin pursues the knocked-away assassin up the hill and knocks him on his ass again. Celyn comments to the surrendered guy, who he happens to be standing next to, "Don't move," then takes the few steps required to get to the assassin and finishes him off, then greets the remaining bandit with a very perky, "Hi!"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
artan: Do you have intimidate?
Me: I don't have intimidate but sometimes I say 'Hi!' to people and it works!
Gamemaster: Oh, he surrenders.
(I have now said 'Hi!' to hostiles in situations that are likely alarming to them three times - once in character backstory fiction and twice at the table - and it's worked twice! It works better when the situation is 'very alarming', not merely 'alarming'. Possibly I need to be holding a bloody weapon at the time for it to be effective? Simply being an amiable madman may be insufficient. More testing is required.)
The ice-locked surviving assassin throws a knife at Izgil, perhaps in the hope of disrupting the When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie That's A Charm Effect. It does not. He proceeds to start swearing and does not stop until the squad of horsemen arrives, looks at the scene, and asks, "... so, uh, who are the victims here?"
The party explains to the guard that the bandits were attempting to turn the party into victims but were not, in fact, actually sufficiently good at murder to pull that off. The guard explained that they had gotten a tipoff there was trouble on the road and had come to investigate. The bandits on the hill tell us everything they know in a generalized state of panic. Robin goes up to the ice-encased assassin and says, "Why?"
Robin meant this as an existential thing, really, but the more practically minded party members got out of him that he was mad about missing a really big payoff. Viepuck read the guy's mind and tried to provoke him into useful commentary by suggesting that he might pay for information leading to the party figuring out who hired them, the guy leapt at the chance to maybe get free, asked Viepuck if he had any influence over the guard, and was profoundly baffled that the answer was "None whatsoever! You'll probably hang!" Viepuck is also good at baffling the bad guys by his mere existence.
Viepuck: Why did you go after Celyn? Why not Robin?
Assassin: Did you see the armor on that guy? Come on.
(Robin, meanwhile, is grumpily and somewhat sadly baffled by the existence of bad guys at all, and apologetic to Celyn about not anticipating the assassin ambush from the left side of the road when he went after the guys on the right. Celyn, who is back to showing his general state of madness by being completely unruffled by being thoroughly stabbed - particularly since Robin had already healed him - is gently unconcerned and can answer Robin's concern about his well-being with an "I'm fine!", given that the dice fall where the dice fall, though also clearly very fond of the way Robin cannot wrap his head around the existence of evil.)
Viepuck's provocations on the surviving assassin did get him a look at the guy who hired him (while still reading his mind), who was someone we knew, one of the Rangers we were coordinating with. They also got the assassin to cuss him out and tell him he was a ridiculous clown following these people around, which got Viepuck waxing enthusiastic about what a great job it was being a herald. Viepuck uses his magical telegraph to ping the guy and say "hey we're nearly to town, where can we meet you?" and we make plans for that.
The captain of horse (who was our would-be rescuer who didn't have anything to do other than arrest the bandits and collect the bodies to make sure nobody raises them as zombies) arranged for us to bunk down in two rooms of the barracks; it seems likely that Celyn and Robin took one room and Viepuck and Izgil the other, especially since there was one guard who couldn't be re-housed and who was a dwarf fanboy who was really enthused to talk to a dwarven hero like Izgil, so that was the three in that room.
We also got the captives (four bandits and an assassin) stashed in jail; Viepuck tried to frisk the assassin for lockpicks and failed, Celyn proceeded to show him how to frisk a guy for lockpicks. Celyn occasionally has moments of 'let me provide sensible adult guidance here' regarding Viepuck, but mostly about very random things like "how to choose your clothes to create a particular social effect" and "where to find thieves' tools on a captive".
Celyn: Question for everyone. Should I clean the blood out of my shirt before we go talk to Damien?
The party: ... yeah, probably.
Celyn: Okay! [uses a spell to clean the blood out of his shirt, shows the rent to Viepuck] Could you fix that?
Viepuck: Yep. [casts a spell to fix the shirt]
Mike the Gamemaster: You have mending?
Viepuck: And tailoring skill!
Mike: ... yeah it's probably better than it was before.
We go talk to Damian. Viepuck confirms that he was not in fact involved in the hiring of the assassins. We collectively agree that now that we are back in town, the better part of valor is for Damian to go back to helping deal with the undead in the mines, which is the sort of thing that we as a sixth level party are kind of overkill for and it would waste our time better spent hunting down Larger Problems that can't be brute-forced by sufficient ordinary people. Viepuck and Damian spent a while noodling out ideas for a performance he had been plotting, one that was a sort of Hamlet-style attempt to provoke the fairy who was passing herself off as the clerk, which we were plotting on backing with various spells to reveal illusions/shapeshifting power as necessary.
We go to bed, we get up, we go to a meeting with the captain of the horse, which unfortunately also contained ... the clerk who we know has been replaced with a fairy. (Robin checked. Yep! Fairy!) We got asked who the heck would want to off us and Robin basically went, "... would you like a list? Given this litany of things we have been dealing with?" We learn that the assassin did in 'fact' make an escape attempt overnight which he did not survive, using lockpicks that he apparently produced from the boot that Celyn is absolutely certain with expert knowledge did not contain lockpicks. This is all very convenient to someone who is probably not us; on the other hand, given the guy did try to murder us we are not terribly sad about it.
We also learn that the baroness, who is known for being obsessed to the point of derangement with the idea that necromancers have infiltrated the hierarchy of the goddess most likely to specifically notice and want to obliterate necromancers, has chased rumors of same off to the west and left the clerk as her formal representative. We also learned the 'good news' that the person behind the assassination was captured - Damian. Who claimed apparently to have infiltrated the Rangers to find us, a matter we actively disbelieved when reported to us as he'd been there for years according to the people we met him with.
We ask to talk with him. Every attempt to do so is nixed by the clerk 'out of concerns for our safety', for which we have visible contempt honestly, because he's this one guy, there are four of us, and for every 'he has magic' we actually have more by mass, and the whole situation is rather implacable, even when Viepuck suddenly manifests Matrix-I-know-kung-fu knowledge of criminal law, making him an increasingly terrifying twelve-year-old. No, we instead get a lot of smarmy sympathy for how hard it must be to be betrayed by a friend and ally. We agree as how it is sure a thing when people aren't what they seem to be. She does not seem to perceive the joke.
I think this is where we get the information that one Lady Debrune is stuck in a set of rooms with a polite guard keeping her from leaving. We know her cousin from Cleenseau - a complicated ally of sorts, perhaps. We go talk to the lady. As names are given out, her apparent servant/assistant twitches when Celyn is mentioned; Celyn notices and then recognizes him as the fey who warned him off some poisoned food in an earlier plotline. Celyn thus, predictably, goes off to talk to the fairy while the rest of the party talks with the lady.
artan: Having the crazy person talk to the fairies certainly minimizes the risks of talking to fairies....
Me: Hey, my crazy is optimized for talking to fairies! ... except for the other crazy.
The fairy's suspicion is that the reason the lady has been hauled in is to get them (possibly him) under the observation of Her, meaning the fairy masquerading as the clerk, and that the Duskhound (terrifying horned fey) checks in on them occasionally. He would like help getting out. Celyn is not like he expected him to be. "Maybe better!" Celyn agrees we will do what we can.
The lady notes that she believes the difficulty they are having is probably resembling what Lord Punchable Face (who left Asineau out of fear of fairies) was afraid of, which is pleasantly oblique and confirms that she is in the know here. We agree that this is a problem, yes.
We go to the local temple - to the Warlord - to get some space to plot that's less likely to be spied on (partly so Celyn can drop in the information he learned from the fairy). The idea of revealing the fairy with the Hamlet performance is made more complicated by these developing things, and so we back it off a bit to 'we can trigger it if it seems warranted but'. Unfortunately, Viepuck had proposed the thing to the clerk before we learned they obtained Damian so we were stuck with something.
Conversations at the Temple included - at some point in sequencing, I am not clear in my memory where - somehow getting onto the overall topic of the Night Queen "infiltration" and the question of why the paladin and cleric we fought beside at Fellburn (the paladin who had rescued Viepuck from the child sacrificing ring a few years ago) had not turned up for the kangaroo court that was obviously a trap. This got Robin off on a glorious frustrated and impassioned rant about how exhausting it is to be doing constant triage on how many people we can protect and knowing that going one way means other people will suffer and there aren't enough people who are able to do this and taking a side adventure to deal with bullshit would mean people's lives and there just aren't enough people capable of dealing with these problems in action in the first place. The devotee in the temple retreated into a faint, "I just don't know what to believe"; Robin suggested believe in people's actual actions. (Celyn checked in with Robin afterwards about whether he was all right and got an "I'm all right but lots of people aren't".)
While we were at the temple we also received a letter from the magistrate we left trying to solve the fairy-fucked-with murder case, who has turned up more evidence of bullshit and wants us to come help. Viepuck told him we had a similar case here we were working on and also did he know the clerk here was accusing him of being a useless drunk? We also wrote a letter because carrying on a conversation in sending is resources we don't have.
Robin felt that we needed to cultivate allies within the town, and thus wanted to volunteer his services as healer and religious support at the Warlord temple, because it's the Warlord temple focusing on people from the barracks with injuries. Celyn of course joined in to support this endeavor, and the two of them spent the afternoon healing people and offering blessings of the gods and generally building up local goodwill. Meanwhile, Viepuck went off to talk to the captain of horse some more (I have forgotten her name so she's just gonna get her title) and got her to confess to a substantial number of Things Being Weird Around Here, and is the clerk suborned in some way, and basically backing us up. Izgil, meanwhile, went to chat with some local dwarves and also some local halflings and obtained a quest: they know that Lady Debrune was here and genteelly imprisoned in that way one does with important people, and was quite likely in danger. The halflings were happy to plan to smuggle her out of the area if we could only extract her from the keep.
We go to the dinner and do our performance thing. This includes a number of things, is mostly conducted by Viepuck with illusion work, and absolutely mortifies Robin, because Viepuck is doing a whole 'and here are the things we have done in the heroic mode' deal. Because the captain of horse is primed to pay attention to things everyone is aware of the person who is extremely alarmed by Greymalkin's entrance (Greymalkin being from a fey kingdom that was wiped out by the Gloomshaper at one point and thus having a Reputation), but the clerk was very good at poker face, being sarcastically approving of our exploits except for the one where we talked about killing the Hunter's harpies; she was willing to be honestly pleased by the harm done to her rival. Somewhere in here Viepuck proposes that Celyn try to pickpocket a ring off the clerk, but that winds up feeling way too high risk when we have the trial to thwart tomorrow, especially when this is not in fact a skill Celyn has practiced.
These tales produced the clerk giving a glorious speech about how great it will be when we go off to deal with the cave spelunking for zombies, she will personally be raising more funds to get a troop to send us off in charge of. Or maybe we can go deal with perils in the woods! She would love it if we were not here. Very much. She is sure there is something worthy of our attention somewhere! When we note there is the trial we want to attend, she goes into a how-tragic-to-be-betrayed-by-a-friend riff but of course, we are all only human...
Izgil: Are we though?
Which did fluster her slightly, heh. But she covered by acknowledging the dwarves and halflings in attendance. The party breaks up and people separate off and people talk to various others, making arrangements for various plots. Viepuck winds up chatting with the captain of horse again and making a way-too-old-for-twelve comment about how the crop of young lords in various roles in the area makes for certain complexities.
The captain of horse, in her late thirties, looking at the party collectively: Kids.
Viepuck, pointing at Izgil: We have a chaperone!
Amongst our things telling her is that Damian is not in fact located in the jail. She does not question how we know this, she is just deeply bothered by it. Viepuck ducks out to the loo and casts magical telegraph, contacting Damian and confirming that he's alive, being guarded by the Doomhound, and got dragged up some stairs to get to where he is. We carry on with various scheme arrangements while Es*tiaslos the flying purple eldritch octopus cases the keep to figure out where the hell Damian is.
Having located the secret door, we proceed to hatch a sequence of plans to get Lady Debrune out of here and then go in and rescue Damian before he is either killed or entirely ensorcelled to throw himself under the bus and possibly us as well, who knows what complicated charm effects laid by fey might accomplish.
The rescue of the lady proceeds as follows:
Celyn talks his way past the guard by the simple means of saying that since the party were likely leaving soon he needed to be sure to mention something to the lady. Once inside, he conveys to the lady and her fairy friend the plan; the fairy stops pretending to be a servant and is clearly very much almost in charge. Celyn is of the opinion that other people's complicated relationships are not his to enquire about especially if they involve fairies. The plan includes disguising the lady as a peasant because Celyn is a firm believer in the power of peasants to wander around largely unremarked upon; this is 100% what drives his clothing choices when he's not in combat gear.
The lady, some time later, feigns a stomachache or something and gets the guard to go get her some soup. When the guard is away from his post, she and the invisible fairy slip out under Celyn's guidance, with Es*tiaslos making sure the late night halls are clear, and make their way out of the keep. Viepuck slips into her room, disguises himself as her, accepts the soup when it arrives and declares bedtime, takes care of making the bed look occupied, sleeps the guard with a spell, and makes his own departure.
Meanwhile, Robin and Izgil have gone to the dwarf fan guard and recruited him to help rescue the lady in danger, appealing to his sense of justice and such. Under the light of the lantern, a critical success means the guy is all in on this and so honored to be trusted with so important a task and will take it to his grave. All of which means when Celyn is getting the lady out the gate the guard actually on duty is distracted by a dice game and our friend Guard-Bob complaining about how hard it's been to sleep since the undead attacks and he had a nightmare and he's so grateful to spend time with his dear dear friend, etc.
Getting the lady out and to a safe place was successful; the halflings were apprised that we might want to sneak another human into their wagons somewhere along the way, depending on how our next mayhem goes. As we did this, the still-invisible fairy pulled Celyn aside for a brief aside:
The fairy is from a small fey kingdom in the Feywild that would perhaps like to be Switzerland but is actually more like Luxembourg; it has some rumor of allying itself with the Tyrwinghan queen. This is backed up by the fairy giving Celyn him some backstory about why he was in Cleenseau in the first place that Celyn really wants to talk to Robin about but of course there is no time; the party is back into the keep to try to rescue Damian.
(Also I made a Celyn icon from a drawing I did of him and Robin.)
Our party is still three lunatics and a paladin:
Celyn Bettws, Meddlesome Priest and Fairy Appreciator
Viepuck, still the Doogie Howser of Eldritch Fantasy Lawyers (new and improved recipe with added criminal law!)
Izgil Moonseeker, Moon Appreciator, Dwarf, and Responsible Adult
and of course Robin of Abenfyrd, the Paladin
When we left off we were about to be ambushed.
The party is riding along a road with a fairly sheer, wooded hillside to the right and scattered trees to the left. This is of course reasonably good terrain to set up an ambush in.
It is hard to ambush a party when the person in front has a weapon that says "Oh hey by the way, you're about to be ambushed" to him. Robin passes word of the impending danger back down the line of people riding down the road, and thus we roll initiative, with several people doing well by comparison to the bad guys.
Celyn takes a moment to spot a number of bad guys and drops a fairy fire on a cluster of them, making it So Very Obvious that they have been seen. Robin, partially assisted by the fact that several of these guys are in fact now glowing, rides Greymalkin the wingless gryphon up the sheer slope and being the idealistic cinnamon roll that he is, demands that they stand down. (One does in fact surrender. The other tries to stab him.)
Bad guys get to act: two rather more dangerous guys emerge from hiding, both attacking Celyn, and manage to do 2/3 of his hit points in damage. This makes Robin moderately cross about the situation. Meanwhile the bandits who do not have a man in plate armour in their faces unload their bows at the party's horses, two of which spook and run away; the affected party members manage to get off them. This makes Robin even more cross about the situation. (They stabbed his boyfriend and shot his horse?)
Izgil holds a spell for Celyn to clear out of the zone of effect, which everyone knows Celyn will do because being between a pair of assassins is not a good time; Viepuck snipes a couple of bad guys out of trees with the help of his familiar. Celyn does, in fact, bamf off his horse to over next to Robin, and stabs the hell out of the guy who took a swing at Robin before dodging around to behind the paladin, putting Cranky Man In Plate Armour between himself and the guy who just stabbed the hell out of him. The spell goes off, hitting several bandits and both assassins, and two bandits and one of the assassins are stuck staring at the moon. Also, Celyn's horse.
Robin takes a moment to heal Celyn, tells the guy who surrendered to stay put, and charges back down to have the sort of blunt conversation with the assassin who stabbed his boyfriend that results in said assassin getting knocked on his ass. Izgil tells Viepuck to move out of the way, once again holding a spell for an ally to clear the field; Viepuck heads down and around and blasts the assassin up the steep hill, plonking him in front of one of the two bandits who is still awake and not staring at the moon with Pioden (Celyn's mare). (The other one of the two bandits had gone down the hill to shake the other assassin out of his stupor.) As Viepuck moves, Izgil encases the now-not-stunned assassin in ice (that also kills the guy who snapped him out of it).
In the distance, we hear the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Viepuck's familiar goes off to lay eyes on this and spots some people in Baronial livery approaching. This may be helpful? Or it may be another problem? We do not know, given we know the baronial court has been suborned.
Robin pursues the knocked-away assassin up the hill and knocks him on his ass again. Celyn comments to the surrendered guy, who he happens to be standing next to, "Don't move," then takes the few steps required to get to the assassin and finishes him off, then greets the remaining bandit with a very perky, "Hi!"
artan: Do you have intimidate?Me: I don't have intimidate but sometimes I say 'Hi!' to people and it works!
Gamemaster: Oh, he surrenders.
(I have now said 'Hi!' to hostiles in situations that are likely alarming to them three times - once in character backstory fiction and twice at the table - and it's worked twice! It works better when the situation is 'very alarming', not merely 'alarming'. Possibly I need to be holding a bloody weapon at the time for it to be effective? Simply being an amiable madman may be insufficient. More testing is required.)
The ice-locked surviving assassin throws a knife at Izgil, perhaps in the hope of disrupting the When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie That's A Charm Effect. It does not. He proceeds to start swearing and does not stop until the squad of horsemen arrives, looks at the scene, and asks, "... so, uh, who are the victims here?"
The party explains to the guard that the bandits were attempting to turn the party into victims but were not, in fact, actually sufficiently good at murder to pull that off. The guard explained that they had gotten a tipoff there was trouble on the road and had come to investigate. The bandits on the hill tell us everything they know in a generalized state of panic. Robin goes up to the ice-encased assassin and says, "Why?"
Robin meant this as an existential thing, really, but the more practically minded party members got out of him that he was mad about missing a really big payoff. Viepuck read the guy's mind and tried to provoke him into useful commentary by suggesting that he might pay for information leading to the party figuring out who hired them, the guy leapt at the chance to maybe get free, asked Viepuck if he had any influence over the guard, and was profoundly baffled that the answer was "None whatsoever! You'll probably hang!" Viepuck is also good at baffling the bad guys by his mere existence.
Viepuck: Why did you go after Celyn? Why not Robin?
Assassin: Did you see the armor on that guy? Come on.
(Robin, meanwhile, is grumpily and somewhat sadly baffled by the existence of bad guys at all, and apologetic to Celyn about not anticipating the assassin ambush from the left side of the road when he went after the guys on the right. Celyn, who is back to showing his general state of madness by being completely unruffled by being thoroughly stabbed - particularly since Robin had already healed him - is gently unconcerned and can answer Robin's concern about his well-being with an "I'm fine!", given that the dice fall where the dice fall, though also clearly very fond of the way Robin cannot wrap his head around the existence of evil.)
Viepuck's provocations on the surviving assassin did get him a look at the guy who hired him (while still reading his mind), who was someone we knew, one of the Rangers we were coordinating with. They also got the assassin to cuss him out and tell him he was a ridiculous clown following these people around, which got Viepuck waxing enthusiastic about what a great job it was being a herald. Viepuck uses his magical telegraph to ping the guy and say "hey we're nearly to town, where can we meet you?" and we make plans for that.
The captain of horse (who was our would-be rescuer who didn't have anything to do other than arrest the bandits and collect the bodies to make sure nobody raises them as zombies) arranged for us to bunk down in two rooms of the barracks; it seems likely that Celyn and Robin took one room and Viepuck and Izgil the other, especially since there was one guard who couldn't be re-housed and who was a dwarf fanboy who was really enthused to talk to a dwarven hero like Izgil, so that was the three in that room.
We also got the captives (four bandits and an assassin) stashed in jail; Viepuck tried to frisk the assassin for lockpicks and failed, Celyn proceeded to show him how to frisk a guy for lockpicks. Celyn occasionally has moments of 'let me provide sensible adult guidance here' regarding Viepuck, but mostly about very random things like "how to choose your clothes to create a particular social effect" and "where to find thieves' tools on a captive".
Celyn: Question for everyone. Should I clean the blood out of my shirt before we go talk to Damien?
The party: ... yeah, probably.
Celyn: Okay! [uses a spell to clean the blood out of his shirt, shows the rent to Viepuck] Could you fix that?
Viepuck: Yep. [casts a spell to fix the shirt]
Mike the Gamemaster: You have mending?
Viepuck: And tailoring skill!
Mike: ... yeah it's probably better than it was before.
We go talk to Damian. Viepuck confirms that he was not in fact involved in the hiring of the assassins. We collectively agree that now that we are back in town, the better part of valor is for Damian to go back to helping deal with the undead in the mines, which is the sort of thing that we as a sixth level party are kind of overkill for and it would waste our time better spent hunting down Larger Problems that can't be brute-forced by sufficient ordinary people. Viepuck and Damian spent a while noodling out ideas for a performance he had been plotting, one that was a sort of Hamlet-style attempt to provoke the fairy who was passing herself off as the clerk, which we were plotting on backing with various spells to reveal illusions/shapeshifting power as necessary.
We go to bed, we get up, we go to a meeting with the captain of the horse, which unfortunately also contained ... the clerk who we know has been replaced with a fairy. (Robin checked. Yep! Fairy!) We got asked who the heck would want to off us and Robin basically went, "... would you like a list? Given this litany of things we have been dealing with?" We learn that the assassin did in 'fact' make an escape attempt overnight which he did not survive, using lockpicks that he apparently produced from the boot that Celyn is absolutely certain with expert knowledge did not contain lockpicks. This is all very convenient to someone who is probably not us; on the other hand, given the guy did try to murder us we are not terribly sad about it.
We also learn that the baroness, who is known for being obsessed to the point of derangement with the idea that necromancers have infiltrated the hierarchy of the goddess most likely to specifically notice and want to obliterate necromancers, has chased rumors of same off to the west and left the clerk as her formal representative. We also learned the 'good news' that the person behind the assassination was captured - Damian. Who claimed apparently to have infiltrated the Rangers to find us, a matter we actively disbelieved when reported to us as he'd been there for years according to the people we met him with.
We ask to talk with him. Every attempt to do so is nixed by the clerk 'out of concerns for our safety', for which we have visible contempt honestly, because he's this one guy, there are four of us, and for every 'he has magic' we actually have more by mass, and the whole situation is rather implacable, even when Viepuck suddenly manifests Matrix-I-know-kung-fu knowledge of criminal law, making him an increasingly terrifying twelve-year-old. No, we instead get a lot of smarmy sympathy for how hard it must be to be betrayed by a friend and ally. We agree as how it is sure a thing when people aren't what they seem to be. She does not seem to perceive the joke.
I think this is where we get the information that one Lady Debrune is stuck in a set of rooms with a polite guard keeping her from leaving. We know her cousin from Cleenseau - a complicated ally of sorts, perhaps. We go talk to the lady. As names are given out, her apparent servant/assistant twitches when Celyn is mentioned; Celyn notices and then recognizes him as the fey who warned him off some poisoned food in an earlier plotline. Celyn thus, predictably, goes off to talk to the fairy while the rest of the party talks with the lady.
artan: Having the crazy person talk to the fairies certainly minimizes the risks of talking to fairies....Me: Hey, my crazy is optimized for talking to fairies! ... except for the other crazy.
The fairy's suspicion is that the reason the lady has been hauled in is to get them (possibly him) under the observation of Her, meaning the fairy masquerading as the clerk, and that the Duskhound (terrifying horned fey) checks in on them occasionally. He would like help getting out. Celyn is not like he expected him to be. "Maybe better!" Celyn agrees we will do what we can.
The lady notes that she believes the difficulty they are having is probably resembling what Lord Punchable Face (who left Asineau out of fear of fairies) was afraid of, which is pleasantly oblique and confirms that she is in the know here. We agree that this is a problem, yes.
We go to the local temple - to the Warlord - to get some space to plot that's less likely to be spied on (partly so Celyn can drop in the information he learned from the fairy). The idea of revealing the fairy with the Hamlet performance is made more complicated by these developing things, and so we back it off a bit to 'we can trigger it if it seems warranted but'. Unfortunately, Viepuck had proposed the thing to the clerk before we learned they obtained Damian so we were stuck with something.
Conversations at the Temple included - at some point in sequencing, I am not clear in my memory where - somehow getting onto the overall topic of the Night Queen "infiltration" and the question of why the paladin and cleric we fought beside at Fellburn (the paladin who had rescued Viepuck from the child sacrificing ring a few years ago) had not turned up for the kangaroo court that was obviously a trap. This got Robin off on a glorious frustrated and impassioned rant about how exhausting it is to be doing constant triage on how many people we can protect and knowing that going one way means other people will suffer and there aren't enough people who are able to do this and taking a side adventure to deal with bullshit would mean people's lives and there just aren't enough people capable of dealing with these problems in action in the first place. The devotee in the temple retreated into a faint, "I just don't know what to believe"; Robin suggested believe in people's actual actions. (Celyn checked in with Robin afterwards about whether he was all right and got an "I'm all right but lots of people aren't".)
While we were at the temple we also received a letter from the magistrate we left trying to solve the fairy-fucked-with murder case, who has turned up more evidence of bullshit and wants us to come help. Viepuck told him we had a similar case here we were working on and also did he know the clerk here was accusing him of being a useless drunk? We also wrote a letter because carrying on a conversation in sending is resources we don't have.
Robin felt that we needed to cultivate allies within the town, and thus wanted to volunteer his services as healer and religious support at the Warlord temple, because it's the Warlord temple focusing on people from the barracks with injuries. Celyn of course joined in to support this endeavor, and the two of them spent the afternoon healing people and offering blessings of the gods and generally building up local goodwill. Meanwhile, Viepuck went off to talk to the captain of horse some more (I have forgotten her name so she's just gonna get her title) and got her to confess to a substantial number of Things Being Weird Around Here, and is the clerk suborned in some way, and basically backing us up. Izgil, meanwhile, went to chat with some local dwarves and also some local halflings and obtained a quest: they know that Lady Debrune was here and genteelly imprisoned in that way one does with important people, and was quite likely in danger. The halflings were happy to plan to smuggle her out of the area if we could only extract her from the keep.
We go to the dinner and do our performance thing. This includes a number of things, is mostly conducted by Viepuck with illusion work, and absolutely mortifies Robin, because Viepuck is doing a whole 'and here are the things we have done in the heroic mode' deal. Because the captain of horse is primed to pay attention to things everyone is aware of the person who is extremely alarmed by Greymalkin's entrance (Greymalkin being from a fey kingdom that was wiped out by the Gloomshaper at one point and thus having a Reputation), but the clerk was very good at poker face, being sarcastically approving of our exploits except for the one where we talked about killing the Hunter's harpies; she was willing to be honestly pleased by the harm done to her rival. Somewhere in here Viepuck proposes that Celyn try to pickpocket a ring off the clerk, but that winds up feeling way too high risk when we have the trial to thwart tomorrow, especially when this is not in fact a skill Celyn has practiced.
These tales produced the clerk giving a glorious speech about how great it will be when we go off to deal with the cave spelunking for zombies, she will personally be raising more funds to get a troop to send us off in charge of. Or maybe we can go deal with perils in the woods! She would love it if we were not here. Very much. She is sure there is something worthy of our attention somewhere! When we note there is the trial we want to attend, she goes into a how-tragic-to-be-betrayed-by-a-friend riff but of course, we are all only human...
Izgil: Are we though?
Which did fluster her slightly, heh. But she covered by acknowledging the dwarves and halflings in attendance. The party breaks up and people separate off and people talk to various others, making arrangements for various plots. Viepuck winds up chatting with the captain of horse again and making a way-too-old-for-twelve comment about how the crop of young lords in various roles in the area makes for certain complexities.
The captain of horse, in her late thirties, looking at the party collectively: Kids.
Viepuck, pointing at Izgil: We have a chaperone!
Amongst our things telling her is that Damian is not in fact located in the jail. She does not question how we know this, she is just deeply bothered by it. Viepuck ducks out to the loo and casts magical telegraph, contacting Damian and confirming that he's alive, being guarded by the Doomhound, and got dragged up some stairs to get to where he is. We carry on with various scheme arrangements while Es*tiaslos the flying purple eldritch octopus cases the keep to figure out where the hell Damian is.
Having located the secret door, we proceed to hatch a sequence of plans to get Lady Debrune out of here and then go in and rescue Damian before he is either killed or entirely ensorcelled to throw himself under the bus and possibly us as well, who knows what complicated charm effects laid by fey might accomplish.
The rescue of the lady proceeds as follows:
Celyn talks his way past the guard by the simple means of saying that since the party were likely leaving soon he needed to be sure to mention something to the lady. Once inside, he conveys to the lady and her fairy friend the plan; the fairy stops pretending to be a servant and is clearly very much almost in charge. Celyn is of the opinion that other people's complicated relationships are not his to enquire about especially if they involve fairies. The plan includes disguising the lady as a peasant because Celyn is a firm believer in the power of peasants to wander around largely unremarked upon; this is 100% what drives his clothing choices when he's not in combat gear.
The lady, some time later, feigns a stomachache or something and gets the guard to go get her some soup. When the guard is away from his post, she and the invisible fairy slip out under Celyn's guidance, with Es*tiaslos making sure the late night halls are clear, and make their way out of the keep. Viepuck slips into her room, disguises himself as her, accepts the soup when it arrives and declares bedtime, takes care of making the bed look occupied, sleeps the guard with a spell, and makes his own departure.
Meanwhile, Robin and Izgil have gone to the dwarf fan guard and recruited him to help rescue the lady in danger, appealing to his sense of justice and such. Under the light of the lantern, a critical success means the guy is all in on this and so honored to be trusted with so important a task and will take it to his grave. All of which means when Celyn is getting the lady out the gate the guard actually on duty is distracted by a dice game and our friend Guard-Bob complaining about how hard it's been to sleep since the undead attacks and he had a nightmare and he's so grateful to spend time with his dear dear friend, etc.
Getting the lady out and to a safe place was successful; the halflings were apprised that we might want to sneak another human into their wagons somewhere along the way, depending on how our next mayhem goes. As we did this, the still-invisible fairy pulled Celyn aside for a brief aside:
The fairy is from a small fey kingdom in the Feywild that would perhaps like to be Switzerland but is actually more like Luxembourg; it has some rumor of allying itself with the Tyrwinghan queen. This is backed up by the fairy giving Celyn him some backstory about why he was in Cleenseau in the first place that Celyn really wants to talk to Robin about but of course there is no time; the party is back into the keep to try to rescue Damian.