Woe betide us all

We’ve found a new companion. She seems quite capable, helping to rain some misery, but a bit on the shy side. I’m guessing by her name she might have some familiarity with dwarves though at the moment she’s playing her cards close to her chest.

What she was doing in Durthen’s room I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to know, either. On the one hand, knowledge is power, but on the other what use is gaining knowledge if you then have to immediately go and get your whole mind erased for fear that one piece will contaminate everything else if you leave even a trace of it behind. No—what Durthen gets up to behind closed doors is not worth the risk.

The guy that had Oby’s pendant seems as much a victim as we. I have to give him credit, though—S-L-I-P-P-E-R-Y. I don’t know what his trick was, but I’d love to be able to just slip out of grapples, run through webs, and all that other neat stuff he was doing.

If there hadn’t been so many of us we would probably have never caught him.

While he had Oby’s proud spire in his pocket, he had no idea where it had come from. The only thing of interest here was that he’d been forging some documents for a ship we’d heard about that was supposed to sail on the morning tide. Mr Puppet, meet Mr String.

Down to the docks and Livia shifts into the form of our “scribe” and goes aboard to deliver the documents. That’s 200g for the good guys. She tries to find out from the sailors what’s what but it seems they’re just the hired help and don’t know anything useful so instead I let Obegard turn me into a cloud of smoke and I use a mind-talking spell he cast to keep everyone informed what’s happening.

Firstly, can I just say that being smoke is kind of cool.

Secondly, can I just say that being smoke is so slow I almost fell asleep just getting to the ship.

But eventually I’m in the hold checking around, though I have to be kind of careful with the sailors wandering around placing crates. It didn’t take too long to find something interesting. Sure, most of what was there was food and wine just like the forged documents said, but I found the one crate where the bottles looked kind of funny and the labels didn&rquo;t quite look right, and I let the others know we’d have to somehow get this crate out from under the others and then sneak it off the ship.

Once again Oby came up with the main plan (way to go, Oby!) turning himself invisible and giving himself the ability to fly. Unfortunately when he flew through the loading hatch a magical alarm sounded and the sailors started battening everything down.

Moving quickly, Oby joined me, magically shrunk the crate and managed to whip it out from under the other crates before it was trapped, then vamoosed back to our inn while I slowly drifted back ashore.

We made it back to the inn safely and examined the mini-crate, determining that the bottles contained magic potions and poison. Tut, tut, tut—how naughty!

Life wasn’t so easy though. The ship’s captain came to the inn (apparently informed by the forger—but how did he know where we were staying???) and we negotiated to return his cargo.

Again, he had little information, but was able to tell us who gave him the contents of the crate.

And so the net is closing: the question is, around whom?