Session 6: Plot Twisting

Secondmonth 19th 1759 – Secondmonth 25th 1759

After Sigrid finished talking to Morek, they decided (in contrast to their original plan) that they should return to Ao-Manasa. Rellik wanted to complete his contract on Mischa, and while everyone else was initially in favor of continuing on to the Temple, they quickly decided that having a less-than-pleased Rellik onboard was probably a bad idea.

The Ocean’s Blade sailed, under fair weather, to Ao-Manasa. They went down to the Twisted Fish, hung out a bit, and learned that another person had been murdered, that very morning. They couldn’t find out quite who it was, and Sigrid wanted to Ea-Shamar to get more information, but the rest of the group convinced her that they should go kill Mischa first.

They went to the Mevarin house. The same strange old man greeted them, nearly refused to let them in, then showed them to the sitting room, where Mischa was. They (meaning Sigrid and Blank) asked her about the Hora Quan, and she said she didn’t know anything, that was her father’s hobby, and they should go to the University if they were really that interested. Then Sigrid used touch of justice on her, discovered that it was she who had killed her father, Kedlar Mevarin, and was trying to find out if this was true and what it meant when Rellik snuck up behind Mischa and stabbed her.

They fought. They won. She died. Rellik’s critical hit and Soern’s paralytic spelling (facilitating a subsequent coup de grace from Rellik) made it a decisive victory. The butler came in about halfway through, but was quickly immobilized—first by Sigrid’s grappling, then by Soern’s magicing. Captain Blank and Sigrid (who the butler had now decided were pirates, because they were all pirates, because only pirates would try to murder someone in their own home) got him to agree to keep quiet, by threatening to reveal his theft of cheese. (Which Sigrid discovered using touch of justice, and which he referred to as his “terrible secret.”)

Sigrid, of course, wasn’t happy with Rellik, because she’d wanted to know what was going on. She pointed out that there might have been someone else involved, and that now it would be (at least) much harder to follow that trail. No one listened, because Rellik didn’t care in the first place, and Captain Blank and Soern were too busy looting the place.

Sigrid pointed out that this was probably a bad idea, because if they tried to sell stuff they’d taken from the house it would become fairly obvious they had been involved in the murders. She made Soern put back the jewelry he’d taken, but Captain Blank still took the alcohol he’d found, because Soern reported that some of it was “magic booze.”

They also searched Mischa’s room, where they found a box with two vials of crystal scorpion poison and two yellow roses under the bed. Rellik took the vials, and one of the roses, and put one of the vials and the rose on Mischa’s body, as a sort of tip off to the guard.

Then they left. They went down to the Black Angle, because Soern wanted to buy some things from Cer-Athene, (once they got there, he decided against it) and because they wanted to talk to Gannen. He wasn’t there, so they hung around a bit, and tried to talk to Mazquar.

Gannen got there some minutes later, and Sigrid began trying to use touch of justice on him. Hilarity ensued.

Meanwhile, Captain Blank’s witch sight told him that Gannen was a champion of death, information he discreetly relayed to the others at the first convenient moment. Based on this, it seemed clear that he had been involved in the murders, somehow. Probably, he had been in secret communication with Mischa, and the letter had been some kind of code.

Except that, when Sigrid finally got her justice sense to work, she discovered that the most unjust thing he’d ever done was “illegal arena killings.”

And before she could puzzle out what that meant, Ea-Shamar entered the Blank Angle, with retinue, and arrested him for the murders.

Nobody was quite sure what to do after that. Rellik told Tillienne that he hadn’t done it, that Mischa had, and that she should tell the guards that. Sigrid went down to the castle, to talk to Ea-Shamar, but was told that she was “busy,” and wasn’t available. They decided, in the end, to just get out of town for a while, to go investigate this business of the Temple of the Hora Quan.

So they set sail, the very evening of the day they’d arrived, for the Tomb of Ozymandius, from where they would chart their course to the Temple. They made good time that first day, but on the 22nd a terrible storm kicked up, and they were driven west, which wasn’t that bad because they were heading that way anyway. On the 23rd, it still hadn’t let up, and they were driven even further west, past the tomb entirely. The weather, though cold, cleared up on the 24th, and they were able to make it to the tomb.

The weather continued on the 25th, when they set their new course and made for the fabled Temple of the Hora Quan.