Games, all sorts

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So while we were dinking around, Bagram, Doak and Liri were kidnapped by Veris's demon buddies. Boyce was able to determine they were being held extraplanar, and was even able to scry them, with effort. The three of them were chained up on a mountain top in what I can only assume was hell.

We dropped off a note that we'd meet the kidnappers in Endelbar the next day at high noon in the town square. Before then though, we talked to Philip Madrigal to get info on the murdered Electors. I also debriefed Baroness Hames about how her townspeople were being used/controlled to perform the murders (or any attempted murders) of the Electors and others.

And following that, we headed off to Endelbar to get ourselves situated before the encounter. The two demon girls we had fought at Talpin's house turned out to be the ones they sent to meet with us. We asked them what their terms were for the safe return of our family. They wanted us [dead] and would exchange our family for the four of us. Grey haggled with them. Eventually we got the girls to go away to speak to their masters and find out from them what they had to offer us if we were to voluntarily join their side, and then we'd meet them again the next day with their answer.

Turns out Grey's plan was to capture the two bimbos and imprison them with Kaz so that he'd have someone there with them, and maybe to get them out of the action. This plan really kind of bothered me, it seemed a bit side tracked from our two goals: to free our family and to mess up Veris's stuff. I am not sure why exactly I went along with it.

Anyway, we met the girls the next day, then lured them out via teleport to the area around where Kaz's gem was buried. Boyce dropped a spell to prevent them from teleporting away, and Grey and I disabled them to keep them from running out of Kaz's range. They had brought 6 demons as support and we “killed” some of them before all being sucked into Kaz's gem. Then Grey and I worked on moving the gem as far away as possible as quickly as possible, as the three big baddie demons began teleporting into the area right before Kaz pulled us inside.

Underground, we tunneled out massive volumes of earth, moving the gem away from the area near the battle we'd just had. Trent fought what magic they had to figure out what was going on. Eventually we got out of range and then Trent and Boyce went to retrieve the airship so we could move the gem to a new area for hiding. We pulled over a couple days from where we ran and buried the ship and the gem within an underground cavern for safe keeping.

Boyce went to scry on the Fossils and found Bagram to be missing. This really disturbed me. His life wasn't worth capturing these two idiots. We could easily have found out the information they held any number of ways, perhaps a few weeks from now, but still. It wasn't worth it. So I put my foot down and declared we would be mounting a rescue effort and no more screwing around making “deals”.

Anyway, for our trouble and Bagram's life, we learned that Veris was collecting redheads to gather the ancient blood of an incredibly powerful fallen angel, and her “girlfriend” was named Anzja, and apparently Anzja is a priestess of some sort whose powers were being granted by an unnamed deity. I can only guess that this diety is probably Kaz, but we have no real direct evidence to this yet, just a lot of big red flags.

Anyway, Anzja is the one controlling all the summoned demons, including “the big three”. Her part in Veris's plan is to summon the blood of the fallen angel and channel it into Veris. This is presumably how she was able to nuke Seldermoor. I suppose that if we had gone by Tusbel like we had planned, we would discover that the grounds of her palace that we had visited a month or so ago would be empty of the redheads that we had seen.

From here, we had to plan our rescue of the remaining Fossils. While Boyce was off doing god only knows what in order to get us to the location to where Liri and Doak are being held, I had a few things of my own to accomplish. No one else seemed all that interested in pursuing a more large-scale assistance so my goal was primarily to work this angle alone. With that in mind, I set off to find Philip Madrigal.

However, given our dubious state of acceptance at the moment and the danger that knowing us (and being allied with us) posed, I decided to adopt a persona named Jocelyn Hembree in order to protect Philip and others we knew in town. Jocelyn Hembree was brown-haired brown-eyed 25 year old girl who was fairly non-descript.

After arriving to talk to Philip, I explained my somewhat unrealistic and fairly insane plan of trying to get Hathandar's attention focused on Veris's incredibly evil actions, in the hopes that he would get Sturmgaard mobilized to start harassing Veris's duchy's eastern border which would hopefully succeed in dividing her attention and forces. From what I knew about Hathandar, I could very much see him actually going for this. I mean, perhaps I had an incredibly unrealistic hope about this, but I was surprisingly pumped about it. My confidence on such a long shot surprised even myself.

Anyway, Philip agreed that my reasoning was sound if the actual result I wanted was a bit of a far shot. Because it certainly wouldn't hurt, he came down to the embassy of Sturmgaard with me, which was actually just a set of offices inside of the temple of Hathandar. We met with a man named Albrecht Telfair, who was also a priest of Hathandar. We plead our case to him on the unofficial behalf of Alestia, and ourselves personally, and he agreed to pass our case on to the important folks in Sturmgaard's governmental hierarchy, with all due haste and elevated importance.

From there Philip headed back to his office, and I headed back out into the temple proper. Unrelated to the ambassadorial offices, I donated 100gp to the temple of Hathandar because I knew I was asking a lot of him, and asked the priest(s) to pray to Hathandar to consider the recent actions of Duchess Sanria Veris of Upper Thalia and if he was willing to step in and assist those who might oppose her actions.

And with that I sat down in the temple and did my own set of prayers to Hathandar, including a lot more details about what was going on, and what I was asking of him. Namely pointing out Veris's dispassionate genocide of Seldermoor, a group of people she purportedly wished to rule, solely to further her own political status in Upper Thalia. And then I went on to tell him silently that she was stealing the power of a dead devil named Azranael who seemed to be equally as powerful as some of the farnian gods, thereby making Veris as powerful as a god, and this at the expense of the lives of hundreds of people at least who carried the blood of this ancient devil. And lastly I explained that Sturmgaard, a country that he has complete sway over, is in the unique position of putting strain on Veris's resources which would interfere with her plans to dominate Upper Thalia, the goal which she used as her excuse to commit all of these atrocities.

I also added that I wanted to request the assistance of him and Sturmgaard through the proper channels, not trying to manipulate people the way Veris did to Alestia in order to split Duke Tenris Melfir's forces recently. And lastly I explained to him that in a cowardly move, she kidnapped our (normal/non-manifest/defenseless) family to attempt to put pressure on us to stop harrying her, and has even killed one of the three at this point to drive the point home that she has no respect for life and innocents.

I spent about an hour in Hathandar's temple trying to convey my desperation to him through prayer, in my own fumbling, incompetent way. I was not sure how this prayer thing was supposed to work but I sure hope I did it right. It sorta disturbed me that I was putting so much faith into something that was likely never to bear fruit, but… there it was. In an utterly baseless desperate hope, really thought Hathandar would hear my pathetic begging and help in some way. I left the temple of Hathandar feeling surprisnigly more confident, reassured, and light on my feet despite the dangerous and difficult task ahead of me (the rescue mission).

On the way home to our empty Inn, I stopped in at the temple of Aya to donate 100gp and request that the priests pray to Aya to do what she could to get Hathandar's attention focused on our cause, and hey, if she can assist us in anyway, to please do what she can. I also spent an hour here at Aya's temple to personally pray to her asking her for the same assistance I asked her priests to pray about. I was not really sure about how much Aya cared about serious-type stuff going on in the mortal world given her light-hearted and rather goofy godly “portfolio”, but maybe, just maybe, I was hoping, her priests underestimated her attachment to this world and her aversion to serious evils like callous genocide for piddly political power.

I arrived back to the inn after all of this to find all three of the boys just sitting down to discuss our plans for the rescue of Liri and Doak.

So, to-do list, in order of priority:
#1: Rescue Doak and Liri
#2: Interfere with Veris's conquest of Upper Thalia
#2a: Ball rolling on Hathandar/Sturmgaard
#2b: Need to visit Tusbel/Pernicdel to see what we can find and to attempt to “start some shiat”
#2c: Need to find out if Duchess Parnth is still alive; if she is, no doubt she'd be willing to help fark up Veris's shiat.
#3: Find out all information possible about this fallen angel presumably named “Azranael”, whose name Grey had turned up during redhead-research a while back.