Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Mandraiv's Diary 3


With a crowd milling out the front looking for a free meal, we decided to butcher what animals were in the holding pens and give away the meat, telling the people that there would be no further charity from this shop.  We decided to ignore a couple of crab people we discovered in the sewers under the shop, figuring they’d starve soon enough and that they weren’t a danger to the populous as they were trapped in their little area.  We loaded our prisoners onto a cart and used the cow we saved from slaughter to pull it to the guard house, where Kroft, the guard captain, was surprised that we had bought them all in and handed them over to her questioner to establish the truth.

Kroft also told us that she wasn’t really able to hold our gnome prisoner, and that the courts would likely just fine him and set him free, so a couple of us took him out the back and beat the crap out of him, explaining that if we ever heard of him mistreating children again, we’d come back and kill him.  She (Kroft) also offered us a place to stay in the barracks, and then agreed to set us up at a tavern instead.  We retired to the tavern for the evening, figuring on returning the next day to discover the fate of our captives.

At the tavern that night, some drunk guard named Grau approached our priest (a man with a remarkable attraction to nutters and desperadoes, it seems) before being convinced to return to his post and that desertion was not the answer.

The next morning we returned to the guard’s citadel to witness the hanging of the five deserters which went off with only a limited hitch as our queer warrior tried to intercede on behalf of Varik.  It turns out that as well as desertion he had been trying to start a rebellion against the queen, and he danced the hempen jig with his companions.  Interesting to see some of the internal drivers for some of my new companions, but it looks as though they’ll generally listen to reason and shouldn’t get in my way too much.

We then met again with the guard captain, and soon had our next mission.  Go and talk to an underworld figure, the king of spiders, and bribe him to reveal useful information to prevent an ambassador to the city from destabilising the economy.  We were taken part of the way by some fencing teacher, who apparently had a long history involving the queen’s 2IC and Grue, although we couldn’t get the whole story from him.  Somehow, I’m sure we’ll meet again and find out more then.

We went to the spider king’s lair, a group of ships offering all manner of vice and secured an audience with him.  While trying to establish an appropriate figure for the bribe to get the information we needed, the bloke recognised the only female member of our group, a big, ugly women and member of the sable marines as such, and ordered his thugs to attack.

A long fight ensued in which we dispatched or chased off all of the thugs on board the head ship of the bunch, and knocked out the spider king, a bunch of his spiders and some kind of half spider monster.  Searching afterwards revealed the information we needed, as well as another nice pile of loot.  This adventuring caper is a sure winner for gaining cash fast.  And in Korvosa, first you get the money, then you get the power.

Once we had finished looting, we entered a discussion about the fate of the spider king.  As Kroft had told us she felt that he had powerful influence in the underworld, I felt that he had to die – if charged he would face a vice tax and be released to exact his revenge on us.  One member of the group, name of Watson or something, big bastard anyway, stubbornly resisted my logic, insisting that it was wrong to kill the spider, but I was finally able to distract him long enough to slit the crook’s throat and chuck him in the river prior to our leaving the ship.  We got many a strange look leaving the area, but were left alone by the thugs, and soon returned to the guardhouse where Kroft was pleased that the spider king was no longer a threat to the peace of the city.

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