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We ended up getting some interesting loot from the body of Thrass Zal. Boyce took a ring that helped him in dealing with Infernals, Trent took a ring that had a genie servant in it, Grey took a belt of Strength and traded it for a similar item of Dexterity, and I had an extremely difficult-to-use Amulet of the Planes.

I am not sure how I felt about having an item like this. It pretty much allowed me to go wherever, whenever I wanted to. I thought about Drellin, and Wil, and simply shook my head and resolved not to attempt to use it for a while. I seemed to be chasing after shades with these two. Wasn't anyone willing to go to any effort for me? Why did I have to do everything?

Anyway, I shook the thought from my head and focused on our new, strange ally, Vana. Initial discussions with her made her come across almost as useless as Kaz. Well, except she made it very, very clear that we should not trust Kaz at all.

Discussion with her sort of brought a new, much more logical but insidious scenario to light about what was really going on with Kaz. He had been using us, it seemed. How completely unsurprising. It more surprised me that he was able to successfully keep the charade going for so long.

But what was actually going on here was that Kaz was prompting his cult and Anzja to collect these girls and infuse their essences them into Veris for whatever reason (maybe she was hungry for power initially, maybe they needed a Manifested daughter of Azranael in order to be able to resurrect Azranael's powers, who knows really). The effect of doing this would cause a semi-resurrected form of Azranael to appear with enough concentration of power to break Kaz's ass out of jail.

There was some question about whether Kaz was prompting Anzja to do this so he could be free again, or if Anzja was using Kaz in order to make a power play of her own. I suppose Anzja could be working at freeing Kaz so that she could immediately slay him once freed and steal his godly powers and ascend to godhood herself.

Either way, they were both evil assholes and it really just seemed that regardless of whoever was using who, they both needed to die.

But getting back to Veris, Vana made it pretty clear that she would eventually be completely consumed by Azranael's essence, and would effectively go completely insane. And if left unchecked, we'd have an insane being with god-like powers running amok on Farne. And that it was most likely that already Veris's spirit was consumed beyond recovery.

So, now we have three foes far beyond our abilities to slay on our short-term hit-list. Plus their three devil lackeys of probably similar power level to Vana who were certainly going to have to be dealt with in one way or another. We sure had our work cut out for us.

Vana told us we should absolutely not trust Kaz, and assume he's been lying to us from the beginning in order to use us, and so now we had to decide what to do with him and his gem. Vana told us she could take over Kaz's former duties of teleporting us around, and also that we could sequester the rescued “girls” in her citadel in Celestia for safe-keeping. She gave us each a bracelet that would allow any of us individually to plane-shift straight to her (with people in tow) so that we could get in, grab the girls, and get out with a minimum of fuss.

After that we returned to Farne in order to try and figure out what to do with Kaz, but found we had a note waiting from Parnth. We had to head back to the camp in Seldermoor to speak with her, and found that our timetable had been accelerated. She told us that her spies had informed her that something big was going down in Pernicdel one month from now.

Boyce did some divinations and verified that we basically had to take care of Kaz, Veris, and Anzja before then. With my head in my hands, I felt the crushing weight of far-too-much responsibility on top of me. Why did I, why did WE, have to do this? We were just miserable peons! Kaz was a god, how the hell can you defeat a god? But if we could take him out, then Anzja would be rendered useless, as she received her powers from him. Veris was also a concern, but her powers came from a ritual that Anzja performed, presumably powered by Kaz, so that would cease once Kaz was gone too. In an instant, ridding the world of Kaz's existence had become the key to everything. And he was a god! Or nearly so. And we certainly were NOT. How oh how?!

For a couple of days we debated about what to do about Kaz's gem, not really coming to any solid conclusions other than we could not just dump his gem with the expectation that none of his peons could get to him. His uneven demonstration of powers made it seem as if he was a master of Space, and that he collect his minions to him anytime he wanted, so nowhere would his gem really be hidden or safe from the likes of them. Also, if he had to die, then we'd need to keep him in a place where he could be easily accessed. I brought up the possibility of deceiving him back, feeding him bad information. But I don't know how long WE could keep that up before he figured it out. Eventually we decided to put our concerns with Kaz and his gem on hold, and attend to more pressing matters for the time being.

While this debate was going on, Parnth had been working on collecting her people to the three refugee camps for the purposes of a mass evacuation. She had informed us that the army legions who had been holding the three camps had been given orders to basically slaughter entire populations of the places within a week and then head to that big to-do in Pernicdel. Apparently the army was being amassed in its totality and all the dukes of Upper Thalia were being summoned to the shindig. Parnth wanted us to organize an evacuation of her people from the camps to somewhere, so we told her we'd need bodies to help. And so we waited for her to gather them and get them all into place.

There was not much debate over this issue, and we quickly decided upon evacuating them to Runearch, much to Hilda's dismay, and then from there, at a much more leisurely pace, funneling them back to Pal'Parntha so they could return to their homes and families. Also, while Parnth was still in recovery, we urged her to remain at Vana's citdel in Celestia so she would no longer have to worry about her safety. She agreed, but stated that of all the people in the three refugee camps, she must be the last to go. Argh, alright, whatever.

On the day of the evacuation, Sigurvan stayed with his mother, as did Grey, and things kicked into high gear. How it worked was that each camp would have several Manifests holding gates open to Hilda's keep (like Boyce) and myself other Manifests and Clerics would be curing the remainder of the running plague for each person before they stepped through the gate to Runearch. Trent helped to cover our magicking as much as possible, and then later helped to organize the evacuation from the Runearch side with Poul.

We knew it would be suspicious to have so many refugees disappearing very quickly, so we did a number of things to cover our shenanigans. We spread rumors that the plague had had a resurgence and that people were dying left and right. We started stuffing clothes with straw and laying them out as “dead plague victims”, one for each person that escaped, so that the body count in the camp would seemingly remain stable, even if some were now “dead”. Then we started “burning the bodies”, using it as a reasonable excuse to remove the evidence of the fake bodies as we continued the evacuation. In this way we used their own assholeishness against them, as it seemed that the army introduced the plague on purpose to begin with. Lastly, we timed the start of the evacuation such that the last of the people from each camp would be escaping during the night, since as the number of people remaining in the camps dwindled to zero, the chance of getting caught rose exponentially.

Things never seem to go well for us, but surprisingly, the evacuation went smoothly and as stealthily as we could've possibly wished it. Following its events, I insisted we return to Alestia to see if the temple of Hathandar had found the person I had requested to speak to a while back.

The boys tagged along and we sat down in a room in the temple to discuss the nature of Kaz. But the recent discussions with Vana seemed to have rendered the need for this man pointless. However, to my dismay, what did fall out of this discussion was that Grey suddenly decided it would be a good idea to go get Hathandar involved in killing Kaz. Because hey, what do you need to kill a god? By golly, another god! I mean, that's how things had worked in Farne for thousands of years, so it seemed logical.

Of course… why did we have to go talk to Hathandar IN PERSON? I was horribly embarrassed, I tried to explain to Grey that there was a hierarchy for such things, like asking his priests and stuff to pray to him and present this request on our behalf, but Grey would have none of that. Against my better judgment, Grey and I headed back to Celestia, back to the Library of Souls, to go look up Hathandar's address.

We headed by Hathandar's castle of light early on in his visiting hours that day. When we banged on the door, Grey thoroughly confused Hathandar's butler-person in attempting to explain why we were here. Eventually we were shown in to a sitting room to wait.

Not much time passed (surprisingly) before Hathandar strode in. He was a youngish but ageless half-elf, with long blond hair and golden eyes, wearing white robes and really wicked-looking heavy boots that seemed as if they would effortlessly crush your bones to dust if he decided to kick you with them.

Despite that, he seemed to have a relatively good humor about him, and chatted with grey in a pleasant, casual manner. I tried to stay extremely quiet in the background through all of this as Grey explained what was going on. Did I mention that I was absolutely mortified to be here, standing before Hathandar in person? Ugh. I needed to stop whining at people whom I end up having to face later. Talk about awkward. But I guess Hathandar had heard what I had been sending up to him because everything Grey explained he seemed to already know about. Very few people knew about Kaz's situation, and so Hathandar could only really have heard the details of that if he had been listening to me. My face turned red with embarrassment as I thought about this while trying to blend in with the furniture.

So, eventually Grey posed to him the point of why we were here talking to him. We figured a god-like being like Kaz could only be slain by another god. Hathandar seemed bemused at our obvious request for direct action on his part. Instead of giving any kind of reply, he told us he'd go consult some of the other gods of light I guess and get back with us in a few days or week or so.

And with that, Grey and I headed back to Farne and Alestia to rejoin the others.

[ Antics in Town ]

The fourth day from speaking with Hathandar, we received a summons to Hathandar's main temple in Sturmgaard. The Arch Bishop of Hathandar (I guess this was like the main guy??) said he was told in a vision… Grey cut in, saying, yeah yeah, what did he say? The Arch Bishop seemed really surprised, saying, oh, you were expecting this?? Grey indicated that he should continue, so he did so and informed us that… Hiroko's sword was what we needed to do what we needed to do.

… The fuck? WE were supposed to do this? Slay a god? No kidding? I stared at the man, who obviously had no idea to what he was referring specifically. I had the very, very strong urge to just start laughing like a crazy person right then and there. So much for help. I mean, I guess this was better than nothing. I guess.

We thanked the man, and headed back to Celestia to get an idea of where we could find Hiroko's sword from Vana. She told us that Hiroko died, and probably fell to earth, somewhere between Upper Thalia and Alestia. Boyce did some divinations to attempt to locate the sword and… figures, the thing was inside of Kaz's gem. Somewhere.

The more I thought about this seemingly impossible task, the darker my mood turned. Hiroko's sword. A sword. That means neither Grey nor Trent could wield it. Which meant Boyce or I. But Boyce was going to be busy, trying his damnedest, keeping us anchored in Kaz's prison in order to finish our combat with him, as well as keeping any assistance Kaz might attempt to pull in OUT.

So. I knew it was going to end up falling to me to wield the sword. I never did trust Kaz. And while I didn't know this Hiroko chick, who was by all accounts crazy herself, I was at least representative of her in spirit, being female and half Masayuman (and having been romantically screwed over by someone descended from Kaz's clan, just like Hiroko had been by Kaz himself). I don't know if people of such power as Hiroko were really all that dead when they died, but perhaps Hiroko's spirit, what small bit may remain within the sword, would recognize the kindred spirit in me and give me an even greater advantage in this battle. But would it be enough? Could we really do this? Hathandar seemed to think so, but… I had my doubts.

I thought about it for a while, and eventually came to the conclusion that there was no getting around it. This was it. This was the end. Whether we really had a chance or not, we needed to do our absolute very best to take care of things here and now.

It was clear, now, that we needed to leave Kaz's gem where it was, and pretend like nothing has changed. This time around WE needed to try and fool HIM, in order to get us back into the gem (with him unsuspecting) when we were ready to do this thing, get that sword found, and hopefully take care of this once and for all.

But in order to do this, we needed to do a lot of planning and a lot of preparation. We headed back up to Celestia to talk to Parnth. We explained to her that she needed to have her people together and ready to take over Upper Thalia before that month deadline, which had now dwindled to three weeks. We explained that this big event was effectively things coming to a head, and that we needed to prevent it, which meant we needed to interfere before then, which would escalate our need of her getting her people together. Two weeks would be better. And that if she could think of anything that we could do in the meantime to ease her way into ruler-ship, we were all ears.

And so, our planning to assault Kaz in his prison began.

Lately I had not been using my mundane sword much, and I wondered how out-of-practice I was. Also, I had never used a straight-sword, so I figured it would be worth picking up an average one of a similar style to Hiroko's from the Ling Zhao section of town and start practicing with it in my spare time. Also, I stopped carrying my scimitar and instead carried it instead (except when we finally went to visit Kaz, I would be switching back to the scimitar).