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Three lunatics and a paladin!
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, driving this bus accidentally, who gave the twelve-year-old the wheel
Izgil, with the frustrated pedantry
Celyn, mostly just vibing (I had a few moments but I get tired and muzzyheaded easily at the moment)
Robin, who got to be dramatic at the end
When we left off we were on top of a cliff near Veltor, the capital of the barony.
Specifically we jumped off the cliff in the predawn light near the waterfall so that the drop would be minimally visible, cast a feather fall, waited a bit to let Viepuck recover his magical powers, and then wandered up to the town.
Our plan was to turn up, say we were there (given we had been summoned umpty sessions ago and ducked town before the messenger could report having seen us and given us the message), and check in with various people we knew, like the head magistrate, the Merriweathers (halfling tailors who are clearly part of the halfling intelligence network), people at the local Warlord temple, the castle steward, and so on, to try to get a better read on the Baroness before we needed to deal with her.
Plan encounters plot: everyone who enters Veltor is expected to swear an oath to not use magic in town. All forms of magic, miracles included.
It is worth noting that the party is known to have done three things with magic while in this specifically town:
* heal a bunch of people
* put on flashy entertainment show
* kill a fairy that was murdering people
Nobody who knows us really wants us to not do these things. (Particularly #1 and #3.)
So: someone sends up to the Warlord temple to bring down Marian, the senior person who can call upon miracles, to interrogate us about our intentions. Robin of course immediately says something to the effect of, "Look, we've been summoned here, but if I can't go into the city without committing to break my vows as a knight if I encounter people in need of my strength I guess we're staying out here."
Now, Marian is a reasonable cleric who understands the value of the aforementioned #1 and #3 so there is an extended negotiation in which we commit to not using magic inside the city unless it is necessary for, you know, defense of the people, and swear according to powers that she accepts as legitimate (Robin on the Wanderer, Celyn on the Wyrdling's chance and fate, Izgil on the dwarven ancestors, and I ... forget how Viepuck managed to finesse his nonsense). Then we have to swear that we haven't encountered necromantic stuff in the last week, which is complicated!
Because we obtained that phylactery piece and were dealing with it at some level until yesterday morning, you see.
And for this she has - with visible strain - summoned the zone of truth. So we can't lie!
Robin manages to thread the needle by noting that we were in the Old As Balls forest and encountered all kinds of weird shit there and he could not promise that all of it wasn't necromantic, everyone knows the forest is full of all kinds of weird haunted stuff. We were eventually pinned down to swearing - by Viepuck's phrasing - that we had not encountered any necromantic stuff that the Baroness should be informed of that she was not already aware of, which works on many levels.
In telepathic contact with Viepuck (where some of this negotiation happened) Marian said something to the effect of "You know more than you're sharing" and after discussion did not get filled in but agreed to be a Help if we needed a Help in the future.
Veltor is a weird town - it's in the back-ass end of the broad valley between mountain spurs/haunted forest/etc. that is the barony, but it's the capital because of historical reasons nobody really remembers anymore. Which means that there isn't any travel through - it's the end of the line - and there's very little reason to go there without being on Official Business, which means there are two inns/taverns in town. The Golden Quill is for the law clerks, and the Granite Mug is for the townies. We wound up in the Granite Mug, which is currently full of guardsmen who have finished the night shift and are getting a meal before falling over.
One of whom - the dwarf fanboy - spots us, squeaks an, "I know those guys!" type comment, and promptly gets buttonholed by Izgil who wants to talk to him about how he's doing, how things are, what's up with these new regulations, and so on. Which gets the entire crew listening to our reports of what's been going on in the rest of the barony in varying levels of competence at eavesdropping (none in Celyn's league). The proprietor offers to set us up with a meeting with Etienne, the Captain of the Guard, who is from Veltor but has been in service to the baroness's family in Aslain for some time and this might be presumed loyal there and possibly a problem for us if his loyalty is kneejerk.
ETA: Viepuck does make a point of noting that normally in an inn he would put on a show but since he can't use his illusion spells right now he is tragically unable to do this thing.
We do various planning and drift over to knock on the Merriweather's door, as while they're usually open in the afternoon they are known to occasionally respond when people knock. We encounter one of them hanging out watching the activity in the square on the way and promptly fall into a conversation about clothes. (Robin: heavy armor, clothes not visible/relevant. Izgil: dresses as well-off merchant class. Viepuck the not-very-former-street-rat: deemed to be a sensible size by a halfling tailor. Celyn, who dresses like a well-off peasant: "We can probably help you.")
At which point, Celyn launches into an extremely well-informed and clearly conscious commentary on clothing, class, the implications of wearing particular clothing, the messages conveyed thereby, and so on— a topic he has been discussing with Viepuck on and off because he feels that Viepuck as a grifter should have solid understanding of how to construct an outfit for effect rather than merely copying off people with the right vibe. Viepuck, as a former tailor's apprentice, also has things to talk about regarding construction, and Izgil as a former merchant has thoughts about clothing as well, so the three of them and the two halflings talk shop for several hours. (Celyn at one point checks in with Robin about whether or not he wants to be included in the talking shop, but Robin demurs.)
(I am eternally amused that Celyn dresses to give the impression that he's a well-off peasant extremely intentionally, and I am glad it came out so overtly for once. The reasons are not just that he's actually very class conscious and is a well-off peasant damnit, but they do include that.)
When the conversation works around to the Baroness, Viepuck comments that she's evil. There is a pause, telepathic conversation from the halflings enquiring about this, and Viepuck explains what we know about the situation as much as is possible without setting off Bobby the Lich's Self-Detection Spell. The halflings get increasingly pale and alarmed and eventually shoo us all out.
We have lunch with the proprietor of the other inn for more intel gathering, I believe. (I was out of the room/having a brain crash phase for a chunk of this bit.)
Amongst the intel we collect in here is that it is generally put around that Areschera was verified to have turned up in mid-February, which we know is about six weeks later than when she made the deal with the Baroness, which is dated like 2 January. Izgil considers this inaccuracy in calendrical systems to be a personal insult which he cannot properly object to because the general consensus in town is that we do not poke that bear.
Eventually we repair to our rooms in the Granite Mug, and everyone goes to bed, with the information that Etienne will come chat with us over breakfast, and the baroness expects to see us the day after tomorrow. Only Viepuck decides to carry on his efforts to Troll The Everliving Fuck Out Of The Baroness, sneaks out of town, disguises himself as a younger, more bedraggled urchin, and reports to the gate that he was told to deliver something to the baroness in the middle of the night.
The gate guard gets Etienne, who does a perfunctory 'swear to not do magic' thing, takes the fake necklace that Viepuck had had Izgil make out of stuff we had lying around the party, goes, "This isn't what I was told to get, but okay, we'll see" and stashes the urchin in the keep. Viepuck as the urchin proceeds to explain to everyone awake around him that he's scared and hungry, gets taken to the mess hall, and ducks out when the middle of the night crew is looking the other way.
Which absolutely sets the cat among the pigeons.
When we wake up, in fact, we learn that Etienne has been jailed for incompetence, and there are people searching for this small boy who is suspected of being a necromancer because of course everything that goes wrong in the area is necromancers, the Merriweathers (who have had, as a family, a shop in this town for 200 years) have up and vanished in the night, and the general paranoia levels are ridiculous, and ongoing chaos is ongoing.
Celyn notes that the Merriweathers might have reason to be wary of local barons (this baroness having been installed because the previous baron had a bunch of Merriweathers executed on false pretenses, though we have encountered a suspicion that might've been a frame job of him, I forget how) but that doesn't help the rest of the panic level. We talk to various people.
I forget when we made contact with the high-level party that's going for the lich to ask how things are going, and the answer is that they have successfully destroyed the thing's anchor and are now resting up before they go fight the guy in the morning. We ask what we should do and get told that the sensible options are to lie low and trust them to handle it, or to serve as a distraction (implication: by talking about Bobby). We tell them we'll keep them updated.
The Warlord cleric is on bedrest because bringing through that miracle is more oomph than she can do naturally so she gets very tired when she has to do it (which means that if she does it too often it will kill her). We ask how the fuck she can do it if it's beyond her capacities, and she prayed to the Warlord for something to ease the burdens of the people and got given this.
Viepuck realizes that her god wouldn't want to kill her slowly and that therefore she must have been given this Zone of Truth power to do something that would be a one-shot, like, for example, reveal the corruption of the baroness. We fill the cleric in, therefore, so that she can be present at the eventual confrontation and prepared for the circumstances, and Celyn gives her a blessing of prophetic dreams from the Wyrdling before she has a nap.
Celyn: The Wyrdling, they're very cryptic, though.
Marian, amused: I'm familiar with the gods, yes.
The magistrate wants us to find the kid, and is flustered about other information. We do eventually sort out that we can talk to the steward and Etienne, and she doesn't think she can get us to both at the same time, so we go talk to the steward, who promptly wants to go talk to Etienne. We get to a point in dealing with this that we basically crack out the proof that the Baroness and Areschera were in cahoots, though nobody can read Sylvan but the party and we don't want to bother Marian to have us attest to it under verifiable oath she needs to sleep the last one off. The magistrate wants to head off to the capital immediately to report on this chaos, we ask her to stay at least until after our audience with the Baroness because her word of honor holds a lot of weight.
(I don't know about everyone else but given that the high-level party is supposed to, we hope, take out the lich at any moment now I figure the week of travel is enough time to not make this reporting a problem for the magistrate unless it was going to be a problem for everyone ever because they lost, so it is not worth convincing her not to go to the capital at all.)
ETA: Izgil gets the opportunity to explode in pedantic aggravation because that contract is dated before February 12 argh. Which you can tell I meant to put in this because it was in his dramatis personae summary.
While we are having this conversation, Celyn hears someone come down the stairs and signals to people. He can't hear what's being said at the end of the hall, but someone says it sounds like the baroness, so all the evidence bits are promptly hidden and everyone does their best to look like they're not up to something, with varying levels of success probably. She comes in and attempts to get us to restart the conversation, which is a bit stilted, but we eventually get to "we were helping look for the kid, but we can't get a good enough description of this artifact he's supposed to have to use finding magic." The Baroness goes all speculative about 'finding magic' and demands to know if we can do that. With a good enough description, yes. She does description, we ask for a drawing, she sweeps us all up into the keep to get her nephew Rene who is a good artist to get him to draw the damn pendant while we scramble for a plan.
ETA: Because Celyn knows specifically that she is lying about the pendant he takes this opportunity to focus on trying to pull out her tells, as being better at knowing when she's lying in the future will be potentially useful.
There is some discussion, as Izgil works on the locate object spell, with the Baroness's niece, who is scared of magic and also fascinated. She's concerned that magical studies will twist someone, Izgil assures that with the correct attitude magic goes fine, but if magic is sought for reasons of power and domination that will twist people. A side comment about fear gets Celyn saying that it depends on the fear, because if the fear is driving the choices then that is bad, but if the fear is harnessed and overcome, that is beneficial, which gets the niece shooting a sidelong glance at her aunt. We are not sure how to interpret that other than 'fear is a factor in auntie's stuff', which we kinda knew.
Anyway, according to plan Izgil does the magic and reports that he can't get a good location on the item because it's part of a paired set and they're interfering with each other. The Baroness is basically at "Fabulous, we will try again tomorrow when you have figured out how to correct for that, come, let me show you to guest rooms. Join us for a family dinner this evening after sunset." We are shown to guest rooms, and send to the Granite Mug for our stuff from the rented rooms.
In the guest rooms, Viepuck discovers we are being scried on via various shenanigans, and that the scry point is basically tracking Robin in specific.
Robin: Why me?
Izgil: You're the leader.
Robin, bewildered: Am I?
Celyn: Other people think so.
Robin: I guess?
Celyn: You have the fanciest armor.
Robin: Okay....
Celyn: What do people look for when they're looking for the leader? The handsome man in the fancy armor.
(Robin could not argue with that sociological analysis, even if it was also Celyn being the world's least subtle flirter.)
(When I quoted that bit at someone else she said, "Also, have you seen the other people in your party." Which is a valid and entirely separate point, because the other people in the party are in fact three lunatics.)
The genuinely somewhat sensible thing to do here is to go to the guards and say "We're being spied on magically, please tell the Baroness, she would want to know" because if the Baroness is responsible for the scry point then she has some sense we figured something out and knowing how paranoid she is, not telling her would be suspicious, and if the Baroness isn't responsible for the scry point then there is even more going on and likewise.
After some flailing about, it is suggested that we move to a safe space in the dungeon in case we are attacked. Robin is extremely disinclined to acquiesce to the request. He also suggests to Izgil that "doesn't your spell require line of sight to the moon", which is a level of outright falsity that one does not expect from the paladin. We point out to the guards that if something comes to attack us we are better equipped to handle it than they are and it would be better to not put them between us and the problem, which they do in fact find convincing. Viepuck eventually stomps over to the tower Areschera was occupying so we can claim the barracks room on the top as least disruptive, though the replacement Clerk is quite put out by our nonsense. (For which he apologizes several times.) We set up our stuff, Celyn plays dice games by himself because nobody else in the party is a gambler, Robin summons Greymalkin to hang out by the stairs, and eventually we tromp downstairs for dinner.
The landing is full of guards who are supposed to keep us up there who say dinner has been cancelled. They are going to be difficult until they see the gryphon following us downstairs at which point this turns into an awkward parade of people following us as we go off in search of some damn food. (Honestly I suspect a lot of drama would have been prevented on their part if someone had had the wits to say something like "Something has come up, we're terribly sorry, we shall have a meal brought up to you immediately." The Baroness's social graces in implementing deceptions are not up to standards.)
As we reach the keep's courtyard people scatter before us for reasons other than Greymalkin, as eventually it turns into someone saying, "It's the necromancers!"
This is the point where Robin, armed with his lantern, casts a daylight spell to illuminate the sunset-level courtyard, mounts Greymalkin, and demands to face his accusers, because he is absolutely not here for any of this nonsense and wants to have it sorted promptly.
After a great deal of flailing about, we learn that the baroness's guard claimed we did a runner after murdering two guards, which is patently nonsense by the fact that we came down looking for dinner and I suspect everyone knows it but random claims of necromancy are a thing these days, and we are eventually stashed in the courtyard overnight for everyone to watch and a trial will be held in the morning. There is soemthing about holding a magic item as a hostage but the only one that anyone has any real substantial investment in is Robin's lantern and while he's willing to let someone else have custody of it for the interim he's not willing to let it out of his sight.
Given that we have achieved "this is probably going to be dramatic", we ping the high-level party to say when our nonsense is now predicted to happen so they're aware of what they have to work with.
I do not know if we ever got any damn dinner.
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, driving this bus accidentally, who gave the twelve-year-old the wheel
Izgil, with the frustrated pedantry
Celyn, mostly just vibing (I had a few moments but I get tired and muzzyheaded easily at the moment)
Robin, who got to be dramatic at the end
When we left off we were on top of a cliff near Veltor, the capital of the barony.
Specifically we jumped off the cliff in the predawn light near the waterfall so that the drop would be minimally visible, cast a feather fall, waited a bit to let Viepuck recover his magical powers, and then wandered up to the town.
Our plan was to turn up, say we were there (given we had been summoned umpty sessions ago and ducked town before the messenger could report having seen us and given us the message), and check in with various people we knew, like the head magistrate, the Merriweathers (halfling tailors who are clearly part of the halfling intelligence network), people at the local Warlord temple, the castle steward, and so on, to try to get a better read on the Baroness before we needed to deal with her.
Plan encounters plot: everyone who enters Veltor is expected to swear an oath to not use magic in town. All forms of magic, miracles included.
It is worth noting that the party is known to have done three things with magic while in this specifically town:
* heal a bunch of people
* put on flashy entertainment show
* kill a fairy that was murdering people
Nobody who knows us really wants us to not do these things. (Particularly #1 and #3.)
So: someone sends up to the Warlord temple to bring down Marian, the senior person who can call upon miracles, to interrogate us about our intentions. Robin of course immediately says something to the effect of, "Look, we've been summoned here, but if I can't go into the city without committing to break my vows as a knight if I encounter people in need of my strength I guess we're staying out here."
Now, Marian is a reasonable cleric who understands the value of the aforementioned #1 and #3 so there is an extended negotiation in which we commit to not using magic inside the city unless it is necessary for, you know, defense of the people, and swear according to powers that she accepts as legitimate (Robin on the Wanderer, Celyn on the Wyrdling's chance and fate, Izgil on the dwarven ancestors, and I ... forget how Viepuck managed to finesse his nonsense). Then we have to swear that we haven't encountered necromantic stuff in the last week, which is complicated!
Because we obtained that phylactery piece and were dealing with it at some level until yesterday morning, you see.
And for this she has - with visible strain - summoned the zone of truth. So we can't lie!
Robin manages to thread the needle by noting that we were in the Old As Balls forest and encountered all kinds of weird shit there and he could not promise that all of it wasn't necromantic, everyone knows the forest is full of all kinds of weird haunted stuff. We were eventually pinned down to swearing - by Viepuck's phrasing - that we had not encountered any necromantic stuff that the Baroness should be informed of that she was not already aware of, which works on many levels.
In telepathic contact with Viepuck (where some of this negotiation happened) Marian said something to the effect of "You know more than you're sharing" and after discussion did not get filled in but agreed to be a Help if we needed a Help in the future.
Veltor is a weird town - it's in the back-ass end of the broad valley between mountain spurs/haunted forest/etc. that is the barony, but it's the capital because of historical reasons nobody really remembers anymore. Which means that there isn't any travel through - it's the end of the line - and there's very little reason to go there without being on Official Business, which means there are two inns/taverns in town. The Golden Quill is for the law clerks, and the Granite Mug is for the townies. We wound up in the Granite Mug, which is currently full of guardsmen who have finished the night shift and are getting a meal before falling over.
One of whom - the dwarf fanboy - spots us, squeaks an, "I know those guys!" type comment, and promptly gets buttonholed by Izgil who wants to talk to him about how he's doing, how things are, what's up with these new regulations, and so on. Which gets the entire crew listening to our reports of what's been going on in the rest of the barony in varying levels of competence at eavesdropping (none in Celyn's league). The proprietor offers to set us up with a meeting with Etienne, the Captain of the Guard, who is from Veltor but has been in service to the baroness's family in Aslain for some time and this might be presumed loyal there and possibly a problem for us if his loyalty is kneejerk.
ETA: Viepuck does make a point of noting that normally in an inn he would put on a show but since he can't use his illusion spells right now he is tragically unable to do this thing.
We do various planning and drift over to knock on the Merriweather's door, as while they're usually open in the afternoon they are known to occasionally respond when people knock. We encounter one of them hanging out watching the activity in the square on the way and promptly fall into a conversation about clothes. (Robin: heavy armor, clothes not visible/relevant. Izgil: dresses as well-off merchant class. Viepuck the not-very-former-street-rat: deemed to be a sensible size by a halfling tailor. Celyn, who dresses like a well-off peasant: "We can probably help you.")
At which point, Celyn launches into an extremely well-informed and clearly conscious commentary on clothing, class, the implications of wearing particular clothing, the messages conveyed thereby, and so on— a topic he has been discussing with Viepuck on and off because he feels that Viepuck as a grifter should have solid understanding of how to construct an outfit for effect rather than merely copying off people with the right vibe. Viepuck, as a former tailor's apprentice, also has things to talk about regarding construction, and Izgil as a former merchant has thoughts about clothing as well, so the three of them and the two halflings talk shop for several hours. (Celyn at one point checks in with Robin about whether or not he wants to be included in the talking shop, but Robin demurs.)
(I am eternally amused that Celyn dresses to give the impression that he's a well-off peasant extremely intentionally, and I am glad it came out so overtly for once. The reasons are not just that he's actually very class conscious and is a well-off peasant damnit, but they do include that.)
When the conversation works around to the Baroness, Viepuck comments that she's evil. There is a pause, telepathic conversation from the halflings enquiring about this, and Viepuck explains what we know about the situation as much as is possible without setting off Bobby the Lich's Self-Detection Spell. The halflings get increasingly pale and alarmed and eventually shoo us all out.
We have lunch with the proprietor of the other inn for more intel gathering, I believe. (I was out of the room/having a brain crash phase for a chunk of this bit.)
Amongst the intel we collect in here is that it is generally put around that Areschera was verified to have turned up in mid-February, which we know is about six weeks later than when she made the deal with the Baroness, which is dated like 2 January. Izgil considers this inaccuracy in calendrical systems to be a personal insult which he cannot properly object to because the general consensus in town is that we do not poke that bear.
Eventually we repair to our rooms in the Granite Mug, and everyone goes to bed, with the information that Etienne will come chat with us over breakfast, and the baroness expects to see us the day after tomorrow. Only Viepuck decides to carry on his efforts to Troll The Everliving Fuck Out Of The Baroness, sneaks out of town, disguises himself as a younger, more bedraggled urchin, and reports to the gate that he was told to deliver something to the baroness in the middle of the night.
The gate guard gets Etienne, who does a perfunctory 'swear to not do magic' thing, takes the fake necklace that Viepuck had had Izgil make out of stuff we had lying around the party, goes, "This isn't what I was told to get, but okay, we'll see" and stashes the urchin in the keep. Viepuck as the urchin proceeds to explain to everyone awake around him that he's scared and hungry, gets taken to the mess hall, and ducks out when the middle of the night crew is looking the other way.
Which absolutely sets the cat among the pigeons.
When we wake up, in fact, we learn that Etienne has been jailed for incompetence, and there are people searching for this small boy who is suspected of being a necromancer because of course everything that goes wrong in the area is necromancers, the Merriweathers (who have had, as a family, a shop in this town for 200 years) have up and vanished in the night, and the general paranoia levels are ridiculous, and ongoing chaos is ongoing.
Celyn notes that the Merriweathers might have reason to be wary of local barons (this baroness having been installed because the previous baron had a bunch of Merriweathers executed on false pretenses, though we have encountered a suspicion that might've been a frame job of him, I forget how) but that doesn't help the rest of the panic level. We talk to various people.
I forget when we made contact with the high-level party that's going for the lich to ask how things are going, and the answer is that they have successfully destroyed the thing's anchor and are now resting up before they go fight the guy in the morning. We ask what we should do and get told that the sensible options are to lie low and trust them to handle it, or to serve as a distraction (implication: by talking about Bobby). We tell them we'll keep them updated.
The Warlord cleric is on bedrest because bringing through that miracle is more oomph than she can do naturally so she gets very tired when she has to do it (which means that if she does it too often it will kill her). We ask how the fuck she can do it if it's beyond her capacities, and she prayed to the Warlord for something to ease the burdens of the people and got given this.
Viepuck realizes that her god wouldn't want to kill her slowly and that therefore she must have been given this Zone of Truth power to do something that would be a one-shot, like, for example, reveal the corruption of the baroness. We fill the cleric in, therefore, so that she can be present at the eventual confrontation and prepared for the circumstances, and Celyn gives her a blessing of prophetic dreams from the Wyrdling before she has a nap.
Celyn: The Wyrdling, they're very cryptic, though.
Marian, amused: I'm familiar with the gods, yes.
The magistrate wants us to find the kid, and is flustered about other information. We do eventually sort out that we can talk to the steward and Etienne, and she doesn't think she can get us to both at the same time, so we go talk to the steward, who promptly wants to go talk to Etienne. We get to a point in dealing with this that we basically crack out the proof that the Baroness and Areschera were in cahoots, though nobody can read Sylvan but the party and we don't want to bother Marian to have us attest to it under verifiable oath she needs to sleep the last one off. The magistrate wants to head off to the capital immediately to report on this chaos, we ask her to stay at least until after our audience with the Baroness because her word of honor holds a lot of weight.
(I don't know about everyone else but given that the high-level party is supposed to, we hope, take out the lich at any moment now I figure the week of travel is enough time to not make this reporting a problem for the magistrate unless it was going to be a problem for everyone ever because they lost, so it is not worth convincing her not to go to the capital at all.)
ETA: Izgil gets the opportunity to explode in pedantic aggravation because that contract is dated before February 12 argh. Which you can tell I meant to put in this because it was in his dramatis personae summary.
While we are having this conversation, Celyn hears someone come down the stairs and signals to people. He can't hear what's being said at the end of the hall, but someone says it sounds like the baroness, so all the evidence bits are promptly hidden and everyone does their best to look like they're not up to something, with varying levels of success probably. She comes in and attempts to get us to restart the conversation, which is a bit stilted, but we eventually get to "we were helping look for the kid, but we can't get a good enough description of this artifact he's supposed to have to use finding magic." The Baroness goes all speculative about 'finding magic' and demands to know if we can do that. With a good enough description, yes. She does description, we ask for a drawing, she sweeps us all up into the keep to get her nephew Rene who is a good artist to get him to draw the damn pendant while we scramble for a plan.
ETA: Because Celyn knows specifically that she is lying about the pendant he takes this opportunity to focus on trying to pull out her tells, as being better at knowing when she's lying in the future will be potentially useful.
There is some discussion, as Izgil works on the locate object spell, with the Baroness's niece, who is scared of magic and also fascinated. She's concerned that magical studies will twist someone, Izgil assures that with the correct attitude magic goes fine, but if magic is sought for reasons of power and domination that will twist people. A side comment about fear gets Celyn saying that it depends on the fear, because if the fear is driving the choices then that is bad, but if the fear is harnessed and overcome, that is beneficial, which gets the niece shooting a sidelong glance at her aunt. We are not sure how to interpret that other than 'fear is a factor in auntie's stuff', which we kinda knew.
Anyway, according to plan Izgil does the magic and reports that he can't get a good location on the item because it's part of a paired set and they're interfering with each other. The Baroness is basically at "Fabulous, we will try again tomorrow when you have figured out how to correct for that, come, let me show you to guest rooms. Join us for a family dinner this evening after sunset." We are shown to guest rooms, and send to the Granite Mug for our stuff from the rented rooms.
In the guest rooms, Viepuck discovers we are being scried on via various shenanigans, and that the scry point is basically tracking Robin in specific.
Robin: Why me?
Izgil: You're the leader.
Robin, bewildered: Am I?
Celyn: Other people think so.
Robin: I guess?
Celyn: You have the fanciest armor.
Robin: Okay....
Celyn: What do people look for when they're looking for the leader? The handsome man in the fancy armor.
(Robin could not argue with that sociological analysis, even if it was also Celyn being the world's least subtle flirter.)
(When I quoted that bit at someone else she said, "Also, have you seen the other people in your party." Which is a valid and entirely separate point, because the other people in the party are in fact three lunatics.)
The genuinely somewhat sensible thing to do here is to go to the guards and say "We're being spied on magically, please tell the Baroness, she would want to know" because if the Baroness is responsible for the scry point then she has some sense we figured something out and knowing how paranoid she is, not telling her would be suspicious, and if the Baroness isn't responsible for the scry point then there is even more going on and likewise.
After some flailing about, it is suggested that we move to a safe space in the dungeon in case we are attacked. Robin is extremely disinclined to acquiesce to the request. He also suggests to Izgil that "doesn't your spell require line of sight to the moon", which is a level of outright falsity that one does not expect from the paladin. We point out to the guards that if something comes to attack us we are better equipped to handle it than they are and it would be better to not put them between us and the problem, which they do in fact find convincing. Viepuck eventually stomps over to the tower Areschera was occupying so we can claim the barracks room on the top as least disruptive, though the replacement Clerk is quite put out by our nonsense. (For which he apologizes several times.) We set up our stuff, Celyn plays dice games by himself because nobody else in the party is a gambler, Robin summons Greymalkin to hang out by the stairs, and eventually we tromp downstairs for dinner.
The landing is full of guards who are supposed to keep us up there who say dinner has been cancelled. They are going to be difficult until they see the gryphon following us downstairs at which point this turns into an awkward parade of people following us as we go off in search of some damn food. (Honestly I suspect a lot of drama would have been prevented on their part if someone had had the wits to say something like "Something has come up, we're terribly sorry, we shall have a meal brought up to you immediately." The Baroness's social graces in implementing deceptions are not up to standards.)
As we reach the keep's courtyard people scatter before us for reasons other than Greymalkin, as eventually it turns into someone saying, "It's the necromancers!"
This is the point where Robin, armed with his lantern, casts a daylight spell to illuminate the sunset-level courtyard, mounts Greymalkin, and demands to face his accusers, because he is absolutely not here for any of this nonsense and wants to have it sorted promptly.
After a great deal of flailing about, we learn that the baroness's guard claimed we did a runner after murdering two guards, which is patently nonsense by the fact that we came down looking for dinner and I suspect everyone knows it but random claims of necromancy are a thing these days, and we are eventually stashed in the courtyard overnight for everyone to watch and a trial will be held in the morning. There is soemthing about holding a magic item as a hostage but the only one that anyone has any real substantial investment in is Robin's lantern and while he's willing to let someone else have custody of it for the interim he's not willing to let it out of his sight.
Given that we have achieved "this is probably going to be dramatic", we ping the high-level party to say when our nonsense is now predicted to happen so they're aware of what they have to work with.
I do not know if we ever got any damn dinner.
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