Obegard's romantic delusions

Construction in Dragon Keep is proceeding well, and the architect was showing me the drawings. While everything he pointed out for my part of the keep sounded familiar his plans seemed to bear very little resemblance to the sketch I’d given to him on the crumpled up parchment I’d handed him a couple of weeks before.

We were chillin’ when Sorscha arrived, telling us some story of someone who knew someone who knew something about something to do with someone, yada, yada, yada Medusan Lords.

Long story short, Road Trip!

Someone else has shown up, an elf named Livia. I think she’s another manipulator of the Arcane, but so far I haven’t seen her and Oby getting all wet together. Which, I gotta say, is probably a good thing...

The others seem very accepting, given how judgemental they normally are. Perhaps Ili’s misfortune has taught them something about being more accepting.

Obegard has come up with yet another way to travel long distances. This one supposedly puts us on the edge of some so-called shadow plane. I must say it seemed quite pleasant.

In this new city, we found a brawl on the first evening. A couple of us had the sense to stay out of it, but it turned quite nasty. The watch arrived and took Dearthen away, but our spellcasters had already magically debunked, not a bad move given all the rules this place has around fighting and magic. The commander took my statement, but forgot to say the magic words (“Here’s a thousand gold”) so I evaded nimbly and he went away none the wiser.

It sounded like Dearthen wasn’t going to be in too much trouble, partly because the guys that started things were from the fighter’s college. He finished up paying a fairly small fine, and also coughed up for the others to avoid them getting into more trouble.

We asked the scholars in the library to try and find out something about someone or something in the big chain of things we were here to investigate. It was going to take some time so we headed for the market, when some Upworlder woman walked up to Obegard and handed him an envelope, saying she had what we were looking for. She leaned in toward him and I could see Obegard start to pull away, but then Malakar hit him across the head and pushed him back into her.

It appeared that all she wanted was to give him a kiss, but later we discovered she’d lifted an amulet he wore. I have to admire her style—we didn’t see anything and she probably picked the easiest mark to get close to.

We opened the envelope to find a coin that none of us recognised, so it was back to the library. This was a sufficiently difficult task that we were required to engage the head librarian but as before we were given preferential terms due to Obegard’s membership in the Tower.

When we returned to check on the state of the research there were three people working on the coin and the told us they’d identified it as being from Mourn, an ancient city in the Shattered Lands now long gone and which nobody knew the location of, or anything much else.

We didn’t tell them that we’d seen a map showing the location of Mourn, or that it had been a city of the Medusans, since we knew all that through our association with Sorscha, and it was important that we help maintain her secrecy.

We retired for the night and as I slept soundly near the dying fire the magical alarm Obegard had set off near the door went off. I saw a large shape skittering up the wall and across the ceiling, and as others came out of their rooms I pointed it out to them lest it take them by surprise.

I started to suspect it was one of Malakar’s lycanthropic buddies as it shot a spider web while clinging to the ceiling without appearing to cast spells, but after the fight as we examined the corpse of one of the head librarian’s assistants Malakar assured us she wasn’s a lycanthrope and Obegard identified her as an Aranea—some sort of spider-woman.