September 1, 3042

Greeatings, Feanole!

Goodness, it's been a long time since I've written, hasn't it? Well, at least this time I can say I've had a proper excuse. War wreaks havoc with correspondence, you know. You'll have to let me know how things are in Arthenon, my love÷that is where you are at the moment, aren't you? That's where Lord Simon said he was sending you, at any rate. I was a little surprised by his tone; as if he expected any Telperin to go meekly at his bidding! Well, if you're still here on Glenzor (the continent, that is) I don't want to know about it. And if you are helping out the elves, I especially don't want to know about it÷you could put me in a very awkward position.

You see, dearest heart, I'm in the army now. Indeed! It's true. Lord Mikhael convinced us to enlist under Emperor Chullin. He had his own reasons, I'm sure (he always does), but honestly, there are worse ways I could secure my position in Glenzor than having military rank and honors. Assuming, of course, that the status quo doesn't change radically. I suppose if the elves took over the city I might be hanged for treason to my race or some such. But I don't see the elves running over us quite that easily.

Well, let me backtrack a bit. The elves, as you know, took a bad beating in their last war with the orcs, and they lost their little artifact, the Clay Sword. Now they want it back, and King Chullin's not about to give it up. Both sides have sent foot soldiers out to the edges of the marsh to slug it out, and this has been going on for a couple of months. (Danny was appointed an Ul-Uruk-Haiin [commander or something] right from the beginning.) Now, both sides want to see if this can be settled with simple muscle, because neither wants to deal with a magical holocaust. So the strategies are tricky. Everyone wants magic on their side, but no one wants to provoke the other side into pulling out the archmages. So the mid-level mages (read: us) are being employed mainly for reconnaisance and special missions, rather than on the front lines.

Now, when Lord Sorceror Mikhael got us enlisted, they wanted to call us just another mercenary gang. We couldn't have that, so we are now listed on their rolls as:

Do you like the name? I thought of it myself. So Mikhael was appointed as our commander (ahem) and granted the rank of Uruk-Hai-Ha, which is one step below Danny, but one step above the rest of us. (Congratulate me, I'm now the Warlock Insidiae al-Uruk-Hai Lairunya Maegmirion Hanalindur Teperineva. Try fitting that on your calling card, dear sister!) Anyway, did I mention that your friend Gulceleb is back in town? I'm sorry you missed him÷was there something going on between the two of you that you didn't mention? I made some innocent comment about you and he making a good couple, and he gave me this absolutely venomous glare, and said if I ever suggested it again, he would decorate my hat with my entrails. So 'fess up, sister of my heart÷are you and Nicholas ex-lovers or not?

Well. Where was I? Ah yes, rank. The reason Nicholas came up was because he chose not to take a rank; he went along as our cook, instead. He's quite a good chef, too, even if far too vegetarian for Lord Mikhael's taste. But apparently he didn't care to deal with all the regimental discipline, or to wear the uniforms of the Scintillating Company, so now we have this Sorceror Damnare travelling around with us who keeps saying, "I'm only a cook...."

So we were assigned to do a little investigation. Seems one of our other little adventuring troops that was helping to guard the supply lines had disappeared. They called themselves (rather pretentiously) the Four Letters of Fate, because they had a Fighter, an Abjurer, a Thief, and an Enchanter in the party÷two of them orcs and two of them centaurs. All the clues pointed towards a group of elven adventurers called the Travellers, who had apparently been drafted into the elven effort much the same way we work for Glenzor. Well, we played cat-and-mouse with the Travellers for several days, and discovered that they were fairly harmless; we knew from orcish intelligence (hah!) that at least one of them was a pacifist who refused to kill, anyway. And then one of them managed to get into our Leomund's Shelter, past the Alarm, through the Private Sanctum spell, and stole Nicholas' ring of Mind-Shielding off his finger while he slept÷and then left it on a table across the room. Impressive. But dreadfully petty.

Anyway, we also attempted to scry on these Fingers of Fate or whatever, finally located them, and discovered they were being held in the dark and were being systematically and expertly tortured. (Nicholas confirmed for us that it was an expert job÷he wouldn't explain to us how he knew this.) Then we found one of them (the "T," Mandelbrock) being tended for nasty wounds in a drafty little peasant's hut. We retrieved him; he told us all about their capture by the Travellers, and how he had gotten away only by jumping off his horse into a ravine. So when we finally caught up with these obnoxious Travellers, we were more than a little offended by their manners. Well, that's one excuse for what happened, I suppose. Actually, we were still scouting, and we spotted one of them (the monk, Tarciryion) spying on us, and we just blithely went charging after him. (Have you ever tried to cast an Invisibility spell while riding at full gallop?) No plan, no coordination, all the wrong spells memorized...

We chased him through the woods, and his friends came to meet him, and a Solid Fog got dropped in the middle of the battlefield, and everything became a bit chaotic after that. They had a cleric of Prometheus on their side. God of Forethought. Which meant they always had the jump on us. Really annoying, that. And when he first started Hold-ing everyone in sight, we just thought he was a stud with lots of spells. But no, he turned out to be a wanker with a wand of some sort that churned out infinite Hold Persons. So Nicholas got Held right off. Mikhael soon followed, after trying to follow the forms of war and ask for a parley. Mikhael then figured he was Doomed, so he used his ring of Telekinesis (actually, Sind's, but that's another story) to give all his magical stuff to Sind's dragonnette familiar, Femir, thus disarming himself so they wouldn't kill him. Also, nothing would tell Danny that we were in trouble better than the familiar coming into Field Headquarters alone with all Mikhael's stuff÷including his prized scarf of Protection from Mental Molestation. He never takes that off÷he even wears it in the bath! (Don't ask me how I know that.)

The situation was starting to get rather desperate. I gave the cleric a few tastes of my wand (Krakum Ixem Zorch!!), and put some nice cracks in his plate mail, and he finally left Mik'n'Nick (arrgh) alone. Of course, this meant he came after me, and I was Held soon after, but it gave Simon time to pop the cork on his Bottle and confuse the issue for all the Warriors of Valhalla someone had summoned up. At least most of us had Fly or some such thing up so we could keep ourselves out of harm's way as we waited and DI'd. Finally Sind was the only one left actively battling them÷and then the Travellers Charmed him. Doomed, I thought. We were all doomed to be captured and tortured and fed bread and water and not allowed to bathe! Absolutely Doomed.

Somehow, though, luck with us. They asked Sind to come with them and talk, and he agreed readily, but went back to get his horse. He came back near us at about the same time Nicholas came up from his Hold. He grabbed Sindaraen, Dispelled him, and we all ran like quicklings with their hair on fire.

In the end, Fea dearest, I have come to one simple, undeniable conclusion: That although it is horrible to be Doomed, it is infintely worse to be Embarrassed.

So then what?

Well, we went back to camp, lied shamelessly in our report, and took a long hot bath. We sent a Letter to the Travellers asking for a parley under a white flag, and we continued to try to learn everything we could about them from Mandelbrock. (By the way, we realized that by getting the Thief back from the Fate Folks, we were left looking for the Four Letters of Fea.) This whole mission was beginning to seem less and less straightforward. The Travellers we'd met in combat just didn't seem capable of performing the kinds of torture we'd witnessed. Mikhael was convinced from the very beginning that there were drow involved in all this; he swore he could smell the stench of the Underdark a hundred miles away. He and Sindaraen actually bet 500 gold on the subject.

But we finally managed to meet with the Wankers over wine and cheese (provided by yours truly) and negotiate for information on the prisoners. After a great deal of flattery and polite intimidation on both sides, we were finally convinced that they were not Fate's kidnappers, and they even told us about a druid who might know where they were. We didn't have to give up even one of our elven prisoners for the information, either. Wankers. Cute ones, though. Their illusionist Faramir was quite fetching; I gave her one of my amethyst bracelets to set off her hair. And that boy Tarciryion! I gave him one, too. (Lord Mikhael is gloriously confused÷I haven't had this much fun playing the game since Sind stopped trying to figure me out!) Faramir kept scrying on me afterwards; we had some delightfully flirtatious conversations, and we made an agreement to meet somewhere after the war÷or perhaps during. I don't know. Would that be treason?

Well, now you're thinking that parley picnics are all there are to our little war. I can only wish that it had been so÷though Lord Mikhael keeps telling me I should be careful what I wish for. Shortly before the meeting with the Travellers, we had a slight disturbance at night÷caused by them, we thought÷and we discovered Mandelbrock trying to slip false orders in among Lord Mikhael's things. We Sepia Snake Sigil'd him and put him in a corner til after the parley, then pulled him up and interrogated him under a Zone of Truth.

Sindaraen promptly passed Mikhael five 100-gold-piece gems.

It seems the Derro of the local Underdark, under the prompting of a manscorpion named Balfock or something, have taken interest in the surface doings. They schemed to eliminate all three sets of local adventurers by kidnapping one and setting the other two on each other. They paid Mandlebrock 200,000 gold pieces to betray his adventuring companions of seven years, and then to manipulate us into going after the Travellers for it. He had been spying on us all this time, and passed on information about all our capabilities and items to the Derro. Oh, and he mentioned that they had specifically targeted Commander Archibald for death.

First of all, this led us into a fascinating discussion of what sort of bribe it would take for us to betray each other like that (Mikhael said that anything less than half a million would be an insult, while Sind said he might just do it for a piece of SkinEater's soul). Secondly, it made us quite grateful that we had companion along who hadn't advertized his abilities in front of Mandelbrock (he was only the cook). But mainly, it left us with a big problem. We of course reported to our superiors (if you can call Danny that with a straight face), and of course, got assigned to go investigate.

We travelled on foot out to where Mandlebrock (before his grisly execution) told us the entrances to the derro lair were÷under a circle of six ancient barrows. The Derro Barrow. The Narrow Derro Barrow. Where a Narrow Derro Barrow Dweller ferrets marrow from a sparrow ... well, it was the silly hour. Before we could really approach, we ran into a patrol of five Derro mounted on Hook Horrors. We tried to lie low under our Hallucinatory Terrain, but again, inexplicably, our enemies were able to detect the magic, and they sent three of their number scurrying back to their burrow. Barrow. Whatever. We attempted to be quiet about capturing the other two, but once again ended up blasting and running with our captives for a while. Then we tried interrogating them. Between Nicholas' skill at this sort of thing (I wonder about that boy....) and my speaking imperious Drow to them, the first one was fairly willing to talk. He told us about the manscorpion, and their plans, and other interesting facts. Such as? Well, when we asked him how many Derro there were under the Barrows, he calmly said eighteen thousand.

At about that point, Femir told us there was a hunting party of about 25 out after us, so we ran (remember, we had no horses). And ran. Simon popped the cork on the Eversmoking Bottle. And we ran. And Nicholas laid down a Cloudkill in the smoke. And we paused, and Mikhael and I shared some stimulants to bolster our failing Con. And some of them died in the cloud and the rest came on. And we ran. And Nicholas laid down Evard's Tentacles under the smoke. And we ran. And their spellcaster zoomed high above us on a giant flying spider. And Lord Mikhael teleported himself and Sind (who was Flying) up to zot them. And the spellcaster (and his spider) looked seriously alarmed and winked out, and finally the hunting party stopped coming, and we were finally allowed to breathe÷and Mikhael and I promptly collapsed to the ground. I recovered fairly quickly, but Mikhael looked absolutely dreadful÷he was pallid and sweating and had a racing heartbeat. I tried giving him some wine to calm him, but that only seemed to make his condition worse. He became wildly suspicious of everything we tried to do to help him, until at last Callous Held him and Neutralized all the drugs in his system, and he finally fell (and I do mean fell) into a deep sleep.

Finally we managed to return to Danny's headquarters, swatting down scrying attempts with Dispel Magics the whole way. We made our report and collapsed into our heavily fortified Leomund's Shelter, hoping they'd assess the situation and pull out an archmage to deal with it. Well, we hoped. I mean, eighteen thousand derro. You can't blame us for hoping, can you?

Surprise surprise÷our orders have been changed. Now our job is to:

1. Find and rescue the Three remaining Letters of Fate.

2. Eliminate the derro from what our captive called "the Surface Dark." Not all the thousands, but still probably over 200, and with three Savants÷the high-level priests they worship as gods.

3. Find out everything we can about the manscorpion÷especially why he's messing with the surface war and whether he's allied with the drow, like so many of his kin. (The drow are supposed to be on Glenzor's side in this war, but Mikhael doesn't trust a pact with them for even half a moment, and I'm inclined to agree with him.)

4. Find a way to seal off the Surface Dark from the Greater Underdark. (Now that should be simple, eh?)

Wish us all Luck!

Lairunya