Mandraiv's Diary 14

Oh man, what a pain.  One of the clerics let slip in the morning that one of Four-arms’ many diseases was leprosy.  Of course, his nose falling off was a bit of a giveaway.  This caused two problems for me.  Firstly, I didn’t have a bell to give him so that he could announce himself properly.  Secondly, Artox lost it.  He lost it badly.  Even when he managed to remain quiet, his telepathic laughter, constant jokes and shit-giving were unbearable.  Some examples:

“What do you call Four-arms in a bath?  Stew.”
“Did you hear about the time Four-arms laughed his head off?”
“What did Four-arms say to the hooker?  Keep the tip.”
“Why didn’t the Beatles play for Four-arms?  Lend me your ears…”
“How do you get Four-arms out of bed?  With a shovel.”

It was pretty funny to begin with, but after several hours, it was losing its value as a source of humor.  I mean, it’s really only luck that prevented anyone else from contracting the funniest of diseases.  Artox insisted that it was fitting, but I’m not completely convinced.  We went shopping, picked up some disease curing capacity, healed what we could and went back in.

We re-entered the cult HQ to finally clear it of all traces of evil, and much to my surprise the inner beauty priestess turned out to be somewhat competent.  With healing, at least – she also had some kind of power to enable others to fight more effectively.  She never really tried to fight directly, which was certainly for the better as she managed to almost stab everyone accidentally at least once on the way down the elevator (“I’m a bit rusty”) and I think may even have collected one of Four-arms’ ears on the point of her weapon before we headed down.

In the temple we found a bunch of zombies, which we easily took care of.  The only problem was that they were no ordinary zombies.  These ones exploded with filth and disease when killed.  Still, we were all so over any concern over disease by this time that they were really not all that interesting.  We also killed the vampire who managed to flee when last we confronted it, and took out the high priestess.  During the fight with the priestess, she confessed that the queen is the one behind the disease, but we were irritatingly unable to find any hard evidence when searching the complex.  We did manage to find some notes from the vampire about the plague, and some loot, but no hard evidence against the queen.  Oh yeah, there was another bizarre event in the fighting – after we killed the priestess, she came back at us a few seconds later as some kind of undead.  Fortunately, this was one of those times when reanimation is not a power-up, and we were able to take care of the priestess mark 2 without too much trouble.  Except that the cleric was almost killed.  Surprisingly, it was our cleric, not the inner beauty one. Still, the surprisingly able inner-beauty chick was able to heal our cleric up, and we left the complex.

We rested for a couple of days and cured ourselves of our various diseases.  At last.  That was truly horrible.  The blood veil, a foul plague that caused a slight blemish on my normally immaculate face, and no amount of vanishing cream working sufficiently well was finally cured.  I was back to my usual, all-natural, unbelievable, implausible, really, really good looks.  Four-arms may have lost a part of his brain to leprosy though, as it took him a long, long time to realize that he could use all of the notes on blood veil that we found to create a cure.  We secured the necessary supplies and a few assistants through the help of the city watch, and with Four-arms’ prediction of a few week’s work to wait, relaxed.  A day or two later (Artox has a  point about this guy sometimes) he had created a cure.  We went into full production and started to see the plague dying out in the city.  It seems like out actions were noticed by those in power too.  We were rewarded for defeating the plague with our pick of the city watch’s armoury and a ceremony.  

The ceremony was awesome, if somewhat plan-changing.  The queen presented us all with a writ of substantial value to spend in the city, and gave a very grudging speech about our heroics.  She was so obviously filthy at us for defeating the plague that it was all I could do not to laugh.  Just as well I didn’t bring Artox along.  There is no way I could have kept a straight face with his commentary during the speech and presentation.  While it was nice to be cheered by the citizens of Korvosa, we have clearly earned the hatred of the queen.  This means that all my work to earn kudos with her in order to gain political power have been a waste of time, and that we’ll have to overthrow her if I’m ever going to rule this place.  Not that big of a deal, but I think that my original plan of rising to near the top with her backing, then replacing her was a much more cunning plan.  A plan so cunning many would expect it to have come from a fox who'd just been appointed the Professor of Cunning at the Arcanamirium in Absalom.  Not from someone who is so unfeasibly good looking.  Why do people assume that just because I'm gorgeous, I'm also a moron?  That only applies to women - I'm living proof.