13A:Play/16 We Asked For It

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Starring: 📜Elistheren, 🌲 Qistis, 📚 Annalana, 🐾 Kaelon
Guest Starring: Ocimum
Challenge: All the drow
Location: Dark Wood
Date Played: 2017 July 25

Chaos in the Drow Village

📚 Annalana: Drow sword maiden has armor that is magically spotless. Cook’s (Alium) faction.

A bunch of drow charge our tent. Elis casts a blessing of Winsay on Annalana’s spear, which she puts to good use. Elis goes outside the tent to get some relief from combat and is jumped by more drow. Annalana hears him in danger, disengages from the drow spider-mage and rushes out of the tent. She leap into the air, killing several drow and inspiring Elis. Elis then does something with unguents that causes the tent to explode.

Meanwhile, the high elf sides on his/her high horse, watching the carnage.

📜Elistheren: Politics. POLITICS. "Oh, you can't read those banned books, Elistheren, because we decided that they're dangerous." And how did they decide? With politics. The Priestess was given the power to make that kind of rule.

I'm sorry, that has nothing to do with the current situation. The Drow want to kill us, over… politics. Their internal politics. Pointing out, in loud terms, that we don't CARE apparently did nothing to assuage them. Letting Annalana punch them in the face, on the other hand, did.

Since we're trapped in a tent, surrounded on all sides, I removed the tent. It at least gave us better control over the battlefield.

🌲 Qistis: This very bullshit is the reason I stay as far away from elven business as possible. Not like I'm particularly welcome by any means considering I'm a "half-breed" but with my father being full high elf the politics would just come up constantly. How they pit these people against each other is beyond disgusting and I'll probably never understand it. I just need to keep my mouth shut regarding my opinions to the elf queen and we'll (hopefully) be able to get out of here alive once all of this mess is done.

Battle is winding down

📚 Annalana: There are a lot of causalities and dying around the battlefield. Klorafighting (spider faction) is talking to the Exora high elf.

Annalana whispers “Pineapple is the code word” and sneaks off, poorly. She pulls the cloak over her head, transforming into a drow. Noticing that she is being noticed, she just starts to loot the bodies of our attackers, taking the nice, magical armor done in the dwarves style, offering her studded leather to Qistis.

A drow that no one noticed that was around whispers to Qistis, “Now is your time. You should leave before things get even worse.” Shadow magic obscures the figure. As we leave, we hear that “Klorafightem will be the representative …”

📜Elistheren: The small blessing is that, after we slaughter the better part of a Drow assault team, the fighting quiets down and Chloraphytum stands victorious as the leader, bringing the faith of the Spider Queen to the elf's high councils. I take that as quite the victory for Her religion.

🌲 Qistis: The drow Chloraphytum is named victorious by that pompous ass Exora sitting on his high horse. Behind me a drow whispers that it is time to go. Not like I needed any particular motivation for this but the voice is one I recognize and it sends chills down my spine. Hopefully the others did not notice him. I had hoped to avoid an encounter with him while here but it seems him finding me was likely inevitable, considering where we were. I just hope that once we're out of the dark wood he won't be able to contact me again.

Traveling through the woods.

📚 Annalana: We make our way through the woods, with Kaelon leading the way as best as we can.

📜Elistheren: So much so that I don't particularly mind that we're lost and will almost certainly die in this forest.

Getting some rest

📚 Annalana: We rest for the night, where Annalana takes a long first watch. During Kaelon’s watch, a high elf approaches the camp with his hands up. “You are going to need a guide out of the woods to help you before your companions starve.” “I’ve been tracking you for the last few hours, and news of some outsiders has spread. The Queen’s soldiers would kill you on sight.”

His name is Ocimum and he offers his services to guide us out. Kaelon talks with him, then Qistis does on her watch, followed by Elis.

In the morning, Annalana awakens and skims her journal. She says good morning to Ocimum, mistaking him for Qistis. Annalana then threatens the real Qistis with violence. Eventually things get sorted out.

📜Elistheren: Ah, but we find a guide! Or, more accurately, the guide finds us. He seems to be fishing for information, and that certainly puts me on my guard. As with most things, I divert the conversation towards religion.

🌲 Qistis: We make it out of the Dark Wood but not out of the Elf Queen's domain entirely. We find somewhere suitable for rest and during the night a high elf wanders out of the woods and offers to be our guide. He names himself Ocimum and he seems to be a bit too interested in the particulars of our party.

In the morning Annalana has forgotten to read her journals first thing and nearly kills me. This has happened twice before and both times I've had some extremely stern words about this. The least she could do is be a bit more detailed in her morning primers. Confusing me for the high elf? Absolutely ridiculous.

Traveling

📚 Annalana: It turns out that we’re a long way from home. Ocimum gets us safely out of the woods and tells us to go west to Concord. Ocimum was assigned the role to help those who are lost in the woods.

Ocimum takes Kaelon aside and talks with him. The high elf is obviously not a high elf. He suggests that Kaelon investigate his sister, who is apparently Qistis.

Annalana agrees to get a tattoo on her wrist “Read Journal First” and Elis offers to teach her Dwarven shorthand for better journaling.

📜Elistheren: Dwarven, like many languages, uses a runic alphabet, where each rune combines with the surrounding to make a certain phoneme. So, for example, kurweiz followed by eiwaz forms a soft "s" sound.

Grithar of the Garnets was a linguist during the early part of the 13th Age. Not only did he formalize the modern runic alphabet, but after a crippling accident with a pick axe left him unable to write, he recognized that while a Dwarven word might contain twenty or thirty letters, at most it was usually five or six syllables. Thus, he invented a second alphabet- unlike the 29 characters of Dwarven runic, it has 63 characters, but each character represents an entire syllable AND each character can be written with a single stroke of the chisel- or pen- but Grithar was using chisels. The result is that you can transcribe events nearly as fast as you can say them aloud, and since each character has a shape that mirrors its pronunciation (in a mnemonic fashion), reading it is equally quick.