Excerpt 22

Not wanting to linger lest more of these Raven’s Roost bandits come by, we press on to Fallcrest, plus Esmerelda, plus Arranis, plus two oxen.

The syphilitic halfling disguise for Splug and Norbert was perhaps not fully thought through; it was a very near thing at the gate when we reached Fallcrest. Naturally a number of those manning the gate were in fact halflings. I guess I knew this would be a problem but it seemed a better idea in the abstract. Impossibly, they seemed to accept it for the moment and we were in.

The dwarf sergeant Murgeddon said he wanted to talk to us at the Tongue and the Toad. Oh boy that’ll be fun.
At our tower, there was a great profusion of notes on the door.
Increasingly irritated notes from the Tongue and the Toad about the bar tab. Did I not pay that?
A deranged love note to Fitz which demanded to be read aloud. Many laughs to be had, until both tone and content of the letter got sufficiently creepy that we trailed off.
A letter from some fellow who wants to meet us at the Nentir inn to talk about something something.
A note about a lost cat.

Perhaps from our recent lack of exposure to realworld priorities not involving demonslaying, we start with the cat. Arriving at the cottage (as was indicated in the note), we are instantly suspicious. The sweet looking old lady who lives there says that her cat has since been found and she does not need our help. Our insight skills were all sorely tested in trying to figure out if she was lying, and Neil diplomatically asked some followup questions to make sure that the cat really existed and was safely back in the cottage. Somewhat anticlimactically the cat was then cheerily indicated to us with a grandmotherly wave. There it was, haughtily watching us from a chair across the room.
Not to be so easily put off, I checked the cat for signs of illusion or other magic. Although I didn’t find any, this is different from from saying that they were not there. I was uneasy. And after I admitted to the group that it did not *seem* magical, the cat’s manner became decidedly smug.

Back in the heart of town, Neil and I slum around a bit to find out what we can. Somehow going to the Nentir inn or to the Tongue and the Toad seems too easy. But the only interesting information we can find points us either to Sir Oakley at the Nentir inn or the guard waiting for us at the Tongue and the Toad. It is the one day in Fallcrest when nobody is ranting about imps in their basement, or wanting us to rescue their nephew from the witchlight fens, or seeking a buyer for their supposedly magical snuff boxes. of all the luck.

We give up and submit to the sternly suggesting hand of destiny. We go to the Tongue and the Toad.
I wave cheerily at the barkeep, as though I do not have a large unpaid bar tab. When the subject is immediately raised by the barkeep, I protest. Were not some of these items provided gratis? Surely I could not have ordered quite so many casks in such a short time. Neil intervenes to help, and this seems positive until his idea turns out to be that I will pay my tab double if I can have more time in which to pay it. Still, I suppose it worked, in that the tab remains unpaid. Moving on. But with drinks. Added to the tab of course.

Sir Oakley – a paladin of bahamut. (A more conventional one than Fitz though; no demonskin accoutrements nor demon-cross-dressing tendencies were detected) He is descended from the founder of Gardmore abbey, and in fact his great great great grandfather was Gardrim the Hammer. He comes from up near the old city of Nera, the erstwhile capital of Nerath.

What Oakley wants from us, is for us to purge the evil from Gardmore Abbey. the place is north, close to Winterhaven. He says up near the top of the large complex of the ancient mountain stronghold, there is a temple that he wants to purify. He offers 2000 gold pieces. Gardmore is of course one of the oldest settlements of the Vale, or was. As old as Fastormel, or older perhaps, I forget. The Abbey was initially really a fortification, but it was destroyed about a century ago by orcs. Orcs and hill giants and worse if the histories have it right. So it’s a huge heavily fortified castle basically that’s been crawling with orcs and god knows what for only a century. A walk in the park!

The dwarven guard we spoke to, the one from Hammerfast – Murgeddon I think was his name. He overheard us talking and came over. He was another veteran of the Bloodspear war, that last lovely time in which the orcs laid waste to our Vale. In fact he said he fought alongside Sir Oakley at one point.
He says that he had stood at the temple mount of Gardmore abbey and saw the then-lord Markelhay go down below with his ancestral sword in hand, never to emerge.

We are intrigued. the money, the history, the mystery, the magical sword that no doubt Lord Markelhay would pay dearly to have restored (we neglect to actually consult him as to the hypothetical value to his lordship but hopefully not an egregious oversight)

To tie up the big loose end though, we pay a visit to Grundelmar. His note about the cult of the Elder Elemental Eye was after all the reason we high-tailed it back from the 7 pillar hall to Fallcrest. (Notwithstanding the higher priorities of finding suspiciously nonmagical cats, and placing hideous dolls on my pillow (NEIL!) and bickering about the price of a cask of ale. )

Grundelmar: “Thank you for coming. I hope I did’t sound too overwrought”
Shazia: “No, it’s…. you always do. Tell us about the Elder Elemental Eye”

He says they had the cult leader but that he escaped, and he was a man called Veden Cartwright. He is still a danger to us all, dabbling with evil forces as he is, somewhere up north in Winterhaven. Cartwright had been playing with dead things. (Apparently beyond flaying their skin off, or making experimental jerky). Grundelmar says he can offer us a holy symbol of the sun. In some convoluted bartering that I cannot follow, we end up with the symbol of the sun, and somehow we also agree to go investigate Veden Cartwright. I think we temporarily bought the symbol, but if we get Veden Cartwright successfully delivered to the Raven Queen, we’ll get our money back from Pelor? Commerce makes strange bedfellows, even among the gods.

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TO WINTERHAVEN we have gone! Sorry about the capital letters. I was dangerously sober and She was screaming a bit loud. I have a new and healthy tab at Salvina Raften’s bar. It is good to be back here. Cartwright indeed was here but they ran him out of town for doing experiments on farm animals. We hear there have been orc raids on the kings road between Fallcrest and Winterhaven. A few people mention trouble or strangeness at Gardmore Abbey, and that Lord Padraig is looking for someone to investigate.
After an uneventful night of sleep for most of us, (except for Esmerelda who stayed up gambling and flirting at the bar, unprofitably) we meet with Lord Padraig, and before long we are agreed to become his investigators at-large.

—————
To Gardbury downs we have gone! On arrival at its western part, the mystery of Esmerelda’s batshit was explained. She actually has a small bat and It has some limited ability to communicate with her via simple images.
(I presume though that she is unable to send it the image “please do not poop on me”)
She makes use of said bat to scout the western face of the mountain facing us, upon the top of which sits part of the stronghold of Gardmore Abbey. Quoth the bat — there is a secret staircase winding its way up the mountainside. We file this useful shortcut away for later and trudge around like damn cavemen, so as to “investigate” I suppose.

Trudging we go, all the way around to the east side, where sits the main gate of the Abbey, It is a thirsty business and once there, Splug and Arannis scout ahead and come back reporting that the front gate is fully manned by Orcs at the gate, gatehouse, battlements etc. And that besides orcs, it did look like there was at some point something else, considerably larger than an orc, but it was not clearly seen.

We continue around from the west to the south, along the curtain wall, as stealthily as we can. On the southern part of the wall there is a large collapsed section on wall, through which we can see an immense and overgrown garden. It is teeming with life, energy and more than a little Feywild magic. Oakley is surprised and he says he knew only that there was a garden here, a word that does not do this place justice.

Splug picks up signs that there are Displacer Beasts and Owlbears here, which puts us on edge. We see a tower in the distance, and various buildings that speak of unknown histories if not mysteries. We decide to first investigate a low stone building next to a fountain. We find there the remains of a mosaic of Bahamut, and a fountain, and er, 5 well armed eladrin warriors looking unamused. The leader says his name is Sir Barryon, and that they are searching for evidence of his father’s fate. Somehow their search led here but from here they seem to have lost his trail. And worse, his sister Anelastra has wandered off and is feared lost, in danger, captured by local nymphs, eaten by feybeasts or worse.
Quite reasonably, Splug taunts them. They are after all a singularly useless rescue party and having lost one of their number already, “almost as good as nothing at all”.

They respond poorly and not long after we politely take our leave. We agree to look for the sister but no more. Worse they have no useful information for us, having never been to Dragonroost (the defiled temple at the top)

They say that there is a path from the garden that heads northwest, in the general direction of Dragonroost, but it seems the better idea to go back around and use the secret stairs that led up the mountainside.
Otherwise why even HAVE a magical bat that poops on you.

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