April 29, 3043

On the road to Glenzor

Dear Khamul,

Hello! How are you getting on in Glenzor? Keeping your head down, I hope; the elf-haters are out in force these days, I'm afraid. It wasn't always like that in the city, or I would never have settled there; it used to be such a fun place. And it will be again, I'm sure. I hope you will stay around long enough to see why I love it so. At any rate, let me know how you are faring; is your health continuing to improve? Practicing regularly with the blade? Lope and the others aren't giving you any problems, are they? Do let me know if you need anything—anything at all.

Meanwhile, I'll keep you up to date on what we're doing out here—though you may not want to hear all of it, given the strange situation the war has put this little elf into. We have finally been sent into actual combat with the enemy, although we are still not precisely on the front lines. I begin to understand why, however; if there were more companies like ourselves in the thick of things, the war would either be over very quickly, or much messier than anyone cares to deal with. We can be rather—ah—efficient when it comes to dealing with ordinary troops. After only a few minutes of spellcasting, we were left with only thirty-odd demoralized fighters to take prisoner—out of a battalion of one hundred and seventy-five.

I shan't name any names, in case you should recognize someone; personally I find it much easier to deal with the elves as enemies when they are nameless and faceless. And I simply have to keep in mind that they were the ones who started the whole war up again; besides, it's my own lifestyle I'm defending, not some abstract "racial heritage." It's a lifestyle I wouldn't even be allowed to lead if I had remained home in the elven territories; I would still be in elven kindergarten if I'd stayed there. Here, at the tender age of one hundred, I am independent and wealthy, and I've had the opportunity to leap forward in my magical studies, not to mention having exciting adventures and meeting influential people. (Though I have discovered that the Elders who drove me crazy back home are not unique—influential people of every race are pompous, arrogant, and obnoxious!) Remind me to tell you stories about Yomalia or Skineater sometime....

At any rate, this is a dreadful time to be out in the field. The weather is absolutely beastly, and it's even worse because we're out here in the middle of the wilderness. All the mud and ick...I may be an elf, but that doesn't mean I have to be woodsy—I'd still much rather be under a roof when it's raining like this. Oh well; at least we have magic to provide ourselves with shelter. I suppose all things considered, the travel could be much, much worse. (To my mind, it sometimes seems magic is better suited to making oneself comfortable than to keeping oneself alive.) The job itself has been simple, once you accept that my loyalties have been placed with Glenzor. We were supposed to find three mysterious female drow, and the elven troupe that they had kidnapped, or sidetracked, or taken command of, or whatever. We were to "deal with" the elves, and bring the drow back for questioning—preferably alive. (Keep three live female drow by your side for a month of overlands?!? Please!!)

We trekked to the right area (briefly sidetracked by some wagon that had been attacked by were-felines—on my birthday [snif], no less!), and tried to "Locate: Elves." Eventually, we found some that were being held prisoner by these cyclops shepherds, and had a Hell of a time getting them out. It should have been very simple; we're experienced adventurers, right? Plenty of muscle and magic...a little jailbreak should be a cakewalk! Well, the initial scouting went well—Mikhael's a wizard at this sort of thing—but we decided that Nicholas and I should do the rescuing, since we had multiple Wraithforms and extra-dimensional spaces to hand. We'd Wraith in, put the prisoners in my Magic Closet, and Wraith out. Very simple. But...the prisoners started yelling when we woke them, and we had to beat a hasty and undignified retreat as the cyclopes came charging in to investigate—I Wraithed out with three of the prisoners, and Nicholas had to use his Teleport to get out with the last. To make matters that much worse, the last place Nicholas had memorized as a Teleport spot was a full day back from our present position—a lesson to be learned, there, I think.

Anyway, the rest of us set out to question our three prisoners; we'd intended to present ourselves as the benevolent rescuers, get them to tell all to their "buddies," that sort of thing, but.... Instead they were blithering idiots, abjectly afraid of the people who'd freed them from captivity; you'd think they had never seen magic before. Then Sindaraen took over the questioning, and that made it even worse—Sind couldn't keep a story straight if it were printed on a yardstick! Finally, we had to resort to ESP and the like, and after much fumbling, got ourselves a fairly coherent picture of a particular valley not too far away. We Sigil'd the elves (put them in stasis) and left them in the cave, figuring we'd either come back for them soon or the stasis would wear off in several days and they'd be free to go. (We didn't go back for them.) Oh, and Nicholas finally rejoined us, alone. He said his prisoner "didn't make it." I'm almost afraid to ask what this means. I sincerely doubt he would have gone to the trouble (or the risk to himself) of Teleporting the fellow out if he'd just meant to kill him, and if he was going to torture the man, he should at least have come up with more information than we did. All I can think is that the prisoner tried to escape, and either succeeded or was shot down, and Nicholas doesn't want to admit to either. A puzzle indeed.

So...the picture we'd gotten from the prisoners' brains was good enough to scry on, so we got our bearings, checked a map, and set out for the valley. The weather was still miserable, but we arrived uneventfully and began scouting for elves again. It didn't take long for us to locate a two-man scout post, even in the pouring rain; we took it out with our usual brutal efficiency, right down to taking down the messenger birds—minimal hawks—that they tried to release to alert their HQ. Believe it or not, we interrogated the birds to learn more about the main elven camp; their answers were understandably limited, but useful. We formed a truly glorious plan to polymorph into mini messenger hawks ourselves, and fly in with alert messages tied to our legs, then wait for squads to be sent off to deal with these imaginary problems before de-polymorphing and taking out the high command. Unfortunately, this plan was deemed too impractical, but I think we should have gone for it. Simply too classic!

But instead we snuck up on the place in ordinary, boring adventurer-style. Simon and I did most of the scouting—we took out four gate guards with nary a peep of warning going out. Invisible, stone-skinned, stealthy, and behind a man....is there any better way to begin—and end—a fight? Well. We went on over the ridge, and discovered a serious military faux-pas. A hundred and seventy-five troops, camped on both sides of a stream flowing through a narrow canyon. There was only one sloping road leading into the place, and one cave entrance where the stream flowed out. As neat a trap as ever I have seen; and given the comments of some of the survivors, I think perhaps they were set up there by the drow—deliberately. Were they expecting some sort of sneak attack from outside? It makes me uncomfortable to think that we might simply have been the bar of the mousetrap, with someone else maneuvering us into place. However we looked at it, though, we couldn't leave a full battalion of enemy troops behind our lines, nor could we have taken them all prisoner. So....

We descended, with the full weight of surprise on our side. I cast "Locate: Drow," zeroed in on one particular female commander, and focused my attacks on her. It was the others in the party who caused the real carnage: Sindaraen cast a tremendous Wall of Fire over a full fifth of the battlefield; our commander Daniel and my sister F‘anol‘ sent lightning bolts whizzing this way and that. Lord Mikhael cast deadly illusions from his perch in one of the trees rimming the canyon, and Callous laid about him in his usual grand (and slightly inefficient) style. Simon, of course, took off into the cave, and was not heard from again during the rest of the battle. My drowess dove into the same cave, and F‘a and I sent two lightning bolts skittering along the surface of the stream after her; the bolts crackled and disappeared into the darkness, and then there was silence.

It was over in a matter of minutes. Mikhael began calling for surrender as Nicholas lifted Daniel and his smoking wand out of the combat. The elves quickly threw down their weapons, so F‘a and Sind and I left the wrap-up in the capable hands of our commanders, and went to retrieve our drow. She was unlucky that day—we found her floating face down against the rocks, but didn't get a chance to do much more than strip her body of magic items before the algae-covered walls of the cave erupted into algae-covered moss men. F‘a and I fled backwards, but Sind flew deeper into the cavern, and Callous trudged after him. We regrouped with Mikhael & Daniel, and agreed that Nicholas should remain outside with Sind's quasi-familiar Femir to watch the prisoners and coordinate our spellepathic communications. (None of us mentioned out loud that the caves were slightly unstable, and that Nicholas is more than a touch claustrophobic...)

So we made our way back in and dealt with the algae-uglies. Farther inside, we discovered that Sindaraen had played hide-and-seek with some hideous kind of squid- man—later tentatively identified as a "morkoth"—and his pet sirens, until Callous had caught up and fought them off . Then—well, things became slightly chaotic after that, and we were quickly split up. Sindaraen had flown up through a hole in the ceiling, and I followed, with Daniel and F‘a not far behind. Mikhael stayed with Callous, and they worked on following the morkoth down the underground stream to wherever it was going.

We saw and heard signs that Simon had been around, but could not find him. Again, things were slightly confused here; we did a lot of trying to find each other, fighting off the occasional algae creature, or dodging sink-holes that opened up in the floor. Finally we encountered a second disguised drow leader (unbeknownst to us, Simon had already killed the third). She retreated, but apparently ran into Simon carrying her friend's dead body over his shoulders, and dosed him with "Dust of Choking." Very nasty stuff—he could barely breathe and barely move—but he kept crawling after her anyway! Meanwhile, Sind had caught up & come face to face with her in the next cavern, with Danny right on his heels. I tried momentarily to help F‘a with Simon, then decided protecting our commander was the better choice of action. Good thing, too! I Hasted myself and entered the fight just as Daniel fell down (again), dealt a few blows to the drow, then ran over, picked Danny up, carried him out of the room, fed him a healing potion, and ran back in. (I love being Hasted!)

The drow-bitch took a fantastic amount of damage before turning to run—Sindaraen kept lobbing spells at her too, though he stayed well back out of range while I fought her toe-to-toe. She finally climbed a wall and scurried away, but with my nifty new spider-climbing Cloak, I followed—and I was not only faster, but as silent as a shadow. I waited until she let her guard down a bit, as she tried to climb a rope ladder through the ceiling to another chamber, then hovered behind her (with my Fly spell) and skewered her—I don't think she ever knew I was there!! All the others heard was the clang and clatter as her armored body hit the ground, but nobody could even say "good job" when they came in and saw me sitting cross-legged in the air, cleaning my rapier. Sigh...I guess you have to be truly phenomenal in this group to get any sort of compliment. I keep trying to do my best, but nobody seems impressed. Oh well.

Anyway, we then had to race down (healing ourselves all the way) and reinforce Callous and Mikhael, who were battling the two morkoth in their lair. These creatures had some sort of charming powers that Callous (per usual) kept succumbing to, and Mikhael was trying to fight them hand-to-hand with his sword. I admire his courage, but honestly, the place to try out fledgling fighting skills is not deep in a cavern, alone against a magical creature twice as big as you are! I know he thinks we don't respect him, but does he really think prowess with the sword is going to impress us more than his many other skills? It's Mikhael's brain that's our treasure—if we wanted more sword-arms we'd go out and hire them. Why can't he see that he's the glue that holds this group together? It would destroy the Scintillating Company if he were to be killed—we would scatter to the four winds faster than you could sell your soul to Skineater. We all love Daniel, but he's not the integral member of the group that Mikhael is—we carry on without him when his duties take him elsewhere. I don't think we would without Mikhael. He is our leader, whether he likes it or not.

Sigh. Well... where was I? Oh, yes, the morkoth lair. Ugly place—a deep cavern reachable only by a water passage, filled with slimy eggs and their two slimier parents. I gather the drow had made some sort of deal to distribute these eggs around the continent, in return for....what? We don't know yet. More unsettling mysteries.... Anyway, I think most of us succumbed to the morkoth's "charm" at one point or another (if you can use that word at all in conjunction with such disgusting creatures); I know I did, and Danny did—Daniel threatened Sindaraen with an ice storm! (Very bad news, now that Sind has an affinity for the plane of fire...) But luckily we had Nicholas in our brains (via spell) to shake us out of it ("Callous, if you don't get a grip I'm going to kill you myself, animate you, march you back to Glenzor, and let Morshasha deal with you!"), and eventually we did manage to eliminate the squiddies. We destroyed the eggs too, then made sure we'd gotten everything important (i.e., valuable) out of the caverns, gathered our prisoners and our drow corpses, and headed home.

The trip has been uneventful, so far. I've avoided talking to the prisoners wherever possible, though Mikhael has made the gentlemanly offer of allowing their commander to dine with us. He seems interested in getting to know the fellow, which I don't understand. They're only going to torture him for information and then kill him when we turn them over to the army anyway. Why make him a face that will stick in your memory? I'd rather we had just killed all of them outright on the battlefield, personally. It would be better than having to listen to them in the Leomund's Jail Cell at night when I'm on watch. I can't wait to get back to town and have this whole rainy, muddy, filthy mess over with. A long stint in a real bath-house is just what I need—even if it is the dawn of summer and broiling hot when we get back. There's something about a real tub, with fresh, clean water that's not magically created, and a hundred scents to choose from, and a pretty maid to scrub your back....

Well, you can tell I'm getting homesick. I'll be back with you soon, but don't warn the apprentici—Sind and I prefer to surprise them. Keep well, try to keep cool, and we'll be crossing practice blades again before you know it.

Yours truly,

Lairunya Telperin