You all decide to leave the potion shop that very night. With the foppish Vyrin Lortis in the lead, you silently weave through the twisting, turning alleyways of the Old Gnomish Quarter (or the OGQ if you want to be all acronymy) back to the city proper and Faetol Aranfadori (or, if you’re not into the whole Elvishy thing, “Gargoyle Tower” the nickname for Ruthorian’s house).

Once you’re safely inside and stash your bag of Gwebbo’s loot, Vyr flings her bow at a servant and instructs him to get you set up with rooms. In a celebratory mood, she invites you to continue drinking with her, ordering up some of her uncle’s best vintages for the occasion. Aloof as always, she seems little concerned whether you join her or not. Finally in a nice bed, you pass the night dreaming of small angry tattooed people shaking their ink-stained fists at you (well, all of you except Nim.)

The next morning, Daisy and Dov have TERRIBLE hang-overs from the ink fumes that got the best of them the night before. Over a breakfast of… well, some kind of lichen thing (it’s good, whatever it is), Ruthorian asks how Pobody’s mission went. Vyr animatedly tells him all about the ‘grubs’ (i.e. gnomes) she plucked (i.e. punctured with arrows). She brags about how she vandalized the factory floor and Gwebbo’s office, writing “Lord Vorn Lives” on the walls in grub juice (i.e. gnome blood). She is grieving her father and friends, soundly defeated by the gnome gang-lord, so I guess you can’t really hold it against her (Daisy at least can relate). She too couldn’t find that one Inkie that was hiding in the crates, so there’s at least one witness that might get back to Big Blot (aka Gwebbo) and inform him of your likenesses.

Ruthorian tells you he is confident that the talented Pobody will identify the sword today. The wizard is no doubt grateful you’ve helped him re-activate Artivole’s portrait as it will aid him in his efforts to keep tabs on Gwebbo.

Your elf host also updates you with this:

“I’ve been making inquiries, and Trimphid did indeed enter the Court, but no one has any idea where he went, or won’t tell me. I think I’ve found a way to get you in though. It’s well-known that I’ve been studying the raven problem; I’m something of a local expert on it. Occasionally, I sponsor speaking engagements in the Court on topics related to corvid malevolence for the amusement of the nobility. There is some interest in hearing of your firsthand involvement in the defeat of Green Maggs and her raven allies. I have set up a soirée for you to speak on the subject tomorrow, perhaps have you perform a pantomimed reenactment? I can get you each a pass provided to entertainers. As far as how to track Trimphid once you’re inside, I do have an idea that I’m going to pursue, and will update you when I know more of the particulars.”

As a parting comment before retiring to his studio, Ruthorian also tells you that he has heard the chief warden wants to speak with you.” No doubt the city’s wardens are curious where you’ve been disappearing to.

You all load up Ambrosius with the loot and proceed together to Pobody’s. And sure, you get some stares, but no one thinks “stolen loot”, they just think “aww poor dog”.

After it seems pretty clear it’s not going to a be a quick IDing of your sword, Dov, Nim, and Ambrosius head out to sell the loot and talk to the warden, leaving Daisy behind to fend for herself in the potion shop.

The hours pass slowly as she waits for him to finish. She tries not to go near the alchemical magical whats-it-callits filling every available surface. Thoroughly disinterested and disdainful of her waiting room, Daisy becomes bored out of her mind. The clockwork toads are not great at small talk. She’s actually glad Ambrosius didn’t stay with her, and she’s pretty sure the toads would be too, as he would want nothing more than to leap over, wrap his jaws and paws around each of them, and rip their gears and springs out. Not that he would, of course. But it would require a lot of patience and self-restraint and she wouldn’t want to put him through it.

Daisy is just about to give in herself to her primal instincts and gnaw on one of the toads when the wizard emerges from his study, still peering at her sword in his hands. The gnome looks tired, and somewhat defeated.

“Well, that was quite a puzzle!”, Pobody exclaims. “Your sword has a powerful dweomer that I can’t seem to crack. Oh, within an hour, I was able to determine what the sword actually does once its magic is activated. It was tricky, sure, but I was up to the task! But then I spent the rest of the time trying in vain to identify the command words to activate the damnable thing. Even its basic enchantment [i.e. its plus bonus to attack just for being magical] has been suppressed somehow. Unless you know what to say to it, it will just remain an ordinary sword. A stubborn thing! Blech, I want nothing more to do with it!”

And with that, he hands it unceremoniously back to her.

Here’s what it would do (that is, if one speaks the command words):

The katana has been specially designed to inflict harm to dragonkind.

1.  +4 Dragonbane – Against dragons, the weapon’s enhancement bonus is +2 better than its actual bonus (which is +2). It also deals an extra 2d6 points of damage against dragons.
2.  Three times per day, when it hits a dragon, the wielder can have that attack ignore the dragon’s Damage Reduction (DR) as a free action.

Pobody doesn’t know any more than that and is happy to see Daisy to the door.

She returns to Ruthorian’s and finds Dov and Nim aren’t back yet, but hey, Ambrosius is there!, resting. Plus her share of the loot.

Vyr is at the house, too, practicing archery with anxious servants in the back parlor. There’s no sign of Ruthorian, but Vyr thinks her uncle is maybe in his studio, sculpting something unsavory.  It’s getting to be late afternoon. Hmm, wonder what’s keeping Nim and Dov…
Daisy barges around the house until she can find someone who’ll tell her when they last saw Nim (and Dov, she reluctantly admits) and where they might have gone.  From her awkward gruff interrogation of the servants, she gets the sense that her two friends had just come back from the market to drop off their earnings and Ambrosius before heading out again to visit the barracks. No big deal.

Although it has been kind of a while since they left…

So Daisy decides to go to the barracks with Ambrosius. She’s about to turn the corner and be in sight of the barracks when she suddenly hear a gravelly voice from up above:

“Wouldn’t go there if I were you.”

It’s Scrafe, Ruthorian’s gargoyle, trying to look inconspicuous by staying still as a statue. No one’s apparently provided him the memo that Tupelu most definitely lacks the big stone castle parapets where someone who looks like him might conceivably blend in as part of the scenery. Luckily he’s high enough off the ground that no one else is noticing the entirely out-of-place rock demon-creature.

Daisy stops and grinds her teeth in frustration. “Okay creepy gargoyle thing. Why not?”

“Your friends went in. And right after that, a whole lot of wardens go in too. And then nobody come out. I’m still waiting. They find out about the factory job or something? Your friends better not rat!! Master is already in enough trouble. He doesn’t need to be connected to this gang job you pulled! I knew he shouldn’t have taken in that wayward Lortis girl. A nasty piece of work, her. Low class and she flaunts it! Nothing but trouble! You put him up to this?”

Daisy responds:   “He took her in because she’s FAMILY. Not that I expect a creature like YOU to understand that!” Daisy ground out between her teeth, hands on her hips, unaware that she’s attracting stares. “Anyway, I didn’t ask to be involved in these stupid elf/gnome things either. I just want to find my brother, and my…friends. And get out of here. So why don’t you make yourself useful and go…peer in some windows or something?”

The gargoyle curses Daisy in some language that sounds like rocks scraping all over each other, makes some crude gestures at her with his little stony claws, and flies away.

And it doesn’t look like he’s flying to the barracks.

Not really thinking of another plan, Daisy decides to just barge right on in. When she enters the barracks, she see there’s some commotion going on – something’s happening in one of the inner chambers. The wardens are distracted; none of them at first register her presence.

Daisy charges on through towards where the commotion is, tripping and pushing anyone in her way. Her sudden charge and bull rushing into an already volatile situation causes pandemonium. Those wardens that weren’t knocked over pull out their weapons, expecting additional threats. No one was quite expecting a surprise halfling-on-sheepdog onslaught in their barracks. In the chaos, she hears someone yelling, “It’s Green Maggs, she’s here! She’s here!” Some wardens are running in panic, tripping over each other.

Daisy keeps an eye out for her friends but isn’t able to see them at first. Then she hears the sound of combat and heads towards that. It’s a couple of those exotic ninja fighters that burst into being from thrown stones – “Twisters”, Daisy remembers they’re called. They’re there in the barracks suddenly and engaging deftly with the wardens, and for the moment no one is trying to fight her. She’s in a hallway and can choose between going left or right.  Daisy goes right and the hallway ends with a  closed door.

Seeing as there’s not much time to think about it. Daisy promptly busts the door down.

The door smashes open causing someone behind it to be thrown to the floor with an ‘oof’. In the center of the room, she sees Nim standing behind a small table with an overturned chair behind her. She looks anxious. There is a disoriented elf warden on lying the floor in between – the one Daisy knocked down.

“Daisy!” Nim’s sunken-eyed look of despair brightens considerably. She’s smiling a little with relief which is… a sort of odd and not-appropriate reaction to what’s happening outside. “Please tell me you heard that voice too?”

Daisy and Ambrosius balance atop the door, under which the half-squished elf wriggles. She stills as Daisy presses the tip of her lance against the back of her beck.

“Maiden’s Knees and Ankles, Nim, what have you gotten into without me?!” She pauses a moment before asking, “…..what voice?”

Nim shrinks a little again. “The voice! The… oh. Nevermind then, we’d better go,” she mumbles, looking crestfallen. “The wardens said Green Maggs is here — if we brought her vengeful spirit into town with us, we’re uh… we’re probably in several kinds of trouble.”

Daisy’s eyes go wide with fear. She looks down at herself and cranes back over her shoulder, as though half-expecting to see a hideous hag stuck to her back. Not immediately seeing anything, she relaxes a tad.

“Well okay, if the elves think there’s an evil witch ghost, that’s their problem. At least you’re safe. Come on, let’s go find that idiot Dov. And don’t wander off again, okay??”
“Okay,” Nim agrees, nodding politely. “But they made me go this way, they were questioning me about Dovien– , the Pure are coming for him, they still think he’s a murderer,” she adds, and it’s maybe a good thing that Daisy doesn’t understand her very vivid elven-language swearing.

Daisy wishes for a moment she could swear in another language too. But the only Axlan her Nana taught her was the family motto, and that doesn’t seem appropriate right now, so she’s settles for, “Damn it! We’d better hurry then. Come on!” And with that, she turns Ambrosius and charges back out the door and down the hall, sparing a glance back to reassure herself Nim is following.

It’s another empty interrogation room. Big obvious differences: the door isn’t smashed open and there’s no elf warden rug decorating the floor. (They really should add one here; really ties a room together.)

Nothing seems unusual, so they hustle off towards the sounds of fighting.

Out near the main exit doors of the barracks, several tuista durista (“men of sorrow” in Elvish), aka Twisters aka “murder machines”, the elven assassins who sprout into being from magic flash stones and look like they hail from cruel desert wastelands, are fighting crowds of defending wardens. You spot Dovienya talking to himself near the combat but as of yet not actually engaged in it.

Daisy orders Nim to stay close behind her, and edges towards Dov – making sure to keep herself and Ambrosius between Nim and the fighting.

Dov says, “Things were perfectly well in hand before you came in here and started murdering everyone, now call them off!”

Then turns towards Daisy who was edging up on him. Nim is behind her.

Daisy pulls Ambrosius to a halt. She’s turned beet red – extremely affronted, even by her standards. “….WHAT!? Why you…YOU’RE the one who….I’M HERE TO RESCUE YOUR UNGRATEFUL ASS,” she sputters.

Dovienya returns Daisy’s affronted look with an angry look of his own. “Look, call it what you want, but where I come from rescues don’t involve murdering innocent guards.”

Dovienya turns back to the battle and looks around for someone.

“Innocent is getting harder to suss out, actually,” Nim points out cryptically, looking distressed. She moves to take back one of her re-confiscated weapons, pointing it at the sorrow-men… or the guards, or the… well, shit. “I don’t know which side of this fight I’m on,” she admits, as it takes her several tries to actually grab hold of her sickle-shaped blade as it shifts defiantly out of her grasp.

“I…don’t either.” Not presented with an obvious target, Daisy slumps, looking strangely deflated. “They were already doing…” Daisy waves her hands to encompass this fighting, “this when I got here. At least…weren’t they?” But then she pulls herself up straight. “But I most certainly DID NOT murder anyone. I just…knocked a few of them over.”

She turns to Nim, distraught. “Hey, can’t you do your….color thing? Knock them all out and we’ll work it out later?” Daisy pauses for a moment. “Or I could just knock Dov over head and drag him out. Leave this mess to the rest of them.”

From near Dov, you hear the familiar grating voice of Scrafe, but there’s no visible sign of Ruthorian’s gargoyle.

“Yes, do that last one; I’ll even fetch you the rock! And let’s get out of here, Master’s expecting you.”

“Wait…I saw that gargoyle fly away before I got here.” Daisy glares around suspiciously. “Nim, do you feel anything weird in here? Like…weird magic stuff?”

<begin gargoyle rant:

“[krckghhxx] Yeah well I turned back to see you headed into the barracks when I etching told you not to go, and Master says you are to be protected at all costs so, as I was explaining to bird-shanks here, *this* is the cost! So get going! Don’t let the lichen grow! Master gave me these twisterstones and said watch over you and make sure you don’t come to harm even you are ratting on master and insulting his loyal servant and pushing down wardens and arguing and wanting to etching fight the very twisters that are saving your plinths! {Xyckkruugk] knows what he sees in you he shouldn’t be trusting you, you heap of [ughkkurrk vxkxkkkq]!!”

: end rant>

“‘Deny all kings’…” Nim says aloud, growing stock-still despite the surrounding chaos. “We should go with… Scrafe,” she says, sounding more definite about this than she has about anything since being rescued by the unstoppable force that is Daisy. “I can try to stun the wardens, they won’t come to harm — but Dovienya, you will be in terrible danger here if we don’t run away right now.” For once she looks pretty insistent, giving both of them a sober stare.

Daisy stares at Nim, looking….could it be impressed? Standing in her stirrups, she reaches up and grabs the back of Dovienya’s tunic. “You heard the woman. Let’s blow this joint.”

Dovienya stops advancing and turns to look at Nim. He tilts his head slightly while studying her, glances back at the battle, then sheathes his sword. “Well why didn’t someone just say so? Hey floating voice, maybe next time start with an explanation and then work your way up to desert elf assassins?”

Striding purposefully toward a back room Dovienya says to Nim, “Don’t bother with the spell. The wardens have stabilized their lines and have a healer, stunning them would just put them in more danger. Daisy, the rest of our gear is in this back room, since you seem to have an easier time picking things up can you help grab Nim’s stuff?” Dovienya grabs his own belongings and takes a moment to scribble a quick note of apology to Chief Elriel and Guardswoman Hedril. Then he turns with his friends and heads for the exit.

Daisy glares incredulously at Dov’s retreating back. Turning to Nim she mutters, “We just pulled his ass out of the fire, and he’s going to act like HE’S in charge now?”

Nim shakes her head. “His backside will still be a little warm after this, give it time,” she says. “Let’s get out of here, though, please…? I’m hoping one of you can tell me if Green Maggs’ angry ghost really is here, though, while we’re running.” She sort of slouches back into her normal shape, glancing around nervously, all traces of her solemn, mystic pronouncement from seconds ago now gone.

“Running, yes.” Daisy nudges Ambrosius after Dovienya, pacing Nim’s stride. “That was some warrior queen thing you did back there, by the way. Can you do that on command?”

“Running yes, or… witches and running..?” Nim ventures, still very worried about the whole Maggipen thing, but then shakes her head as if to dispel some cobwebs from it. “Did I do something weird? More than usual? Sorry about that. There’s a lot…” she makes a complicated gesture that provides no further helpful explanation of anything, really, pointing to her own head and then upwards towards the sky in the process.

Daisy shrugs, “Well you went all ‘DENY ALL KINGS!’, which sounded impressive, although I don’t know what it has to do with this mess. As for witches, well that’s more your realm than mine. I mean, I didn’t see any witches in there. Just a bunch of pissed of elves and murderous sand ninjas.”

“Oh, well, yes, that…” Nim says, looking unabashedly pleased that someone was impressed with her confusing declarations for once. “I mean, I thought I heard her voice is all…” she explains, looking slightly less worried now but still a little twitchy. “I’m not really any more in the loop about what’s happening than you are, but I have a pretty clear missive from the universe that we should not blindly trust the law to do the right thing, right now. They’re susceptible. So, if I have to pick… then… gargoyle,” she says, summing up her still-confusing take on the last few minutes.

Once outside of the barracks, you all hear Scrafe’s disembodied voice again, urging you down the street and occasionally cursing at you in his harsh rock-language. You turn a corner out of the view of the barracks and he pops into visibility, hovering in the air, peering around for somebody, his stony bat-like wings flapping furiously.

The gargoyle then spots a young elf dressed in Ruthorian house colors waiting nervously on the street nearby. He flies over, rips a folded up piece of parchment from the poor thing’s hands. The servant, caught unaware, shrieks in surprise, but when it dawns on him that he’s now empty-handed with his mission complete, he scurries gratefully away.

Scrafe ignores the fleeing servant and reads the note, shoves it unceremoniously in his stone-carved maw, then turns back to you.

“Right, well, now you done it. You been pushed off the parapet! Master saw my scry of your barracks bungle and has made ‘rangements. Says he packed up the rest of your gear and sent it on with the house staff, along with your passes. Says there’s no time now, you must escape the wardens. Says you’re to go straight to the Courts. [hkgh! hkgh! hkgh!] Good luck, he says but I say good riddance! Hope the fall’s long and you smash into powder! You better not have ratted out Master, you [kxhhgk tchkrkk]. Oh, he says to wait for word from him inside as to how to track the wizard. [hkgh! hkgh! hkgh!] Well don’t just gape, get off your plinths and follow me to Court! [hkgh! hkgh! hkgh!]”

Scrafe then flies upward to perch on top of the nearest building protrusion. He starts leaping from structure to structure, keeping himself in your sights as he does so. You can’t help but hear him [hkgh]-ing to himself with derisive amusement at your unfortunate predicament.

To Be Continued…