Meet Our Ambassador of Orcish Affairs

8 February 2007-

More plot developments this week, as we got more a bit more involved in the meat of the investigation. It turns out that the (re)possessed librarian went missing between our acceptance of the job on the mainland and our arrival at Freeport, and now we are hoping to find him. Our librarian contact at the Great Library of Freeport took us to the missing librarian's house, which revealed little except a diary and a to-do list. The diary confirms that our man went missing five years ago, and then returned about 9 months ago, and the list seems to indicate that he's having problems again. On it is a directive to meet with the captain of an orcish pirate ship which we saw docked as we arrived, and that hardly sounds sanguine.

We decided to approach the ship, and try to talk to the captain ourselves. Reasoning that orcs would respect strength and martial prowess, and would be afraid of magic, we led with Jeff, a half-giant merc with more than a little in common with the orcs, and Kevin's fire mage. The brilliance of this selection became immediately clear when our chosen ambassadors approached the ship, and were greeted rudely by the guards at the bottom of the gangway. Jeff responded by punching the offending guard so hard in the face that it both knocked him out and knocked him back into first the hull of the ship, and thence into the water. The other guard proved more accommodating. Their captain, it seems, has recently heard from the librarian, but wouldn't give us the details without being handsomely rewarded for his trivial trouble. We, on the other hand, didn't want to pay out for useless information. We left the ship to contemplate how we could both rip off the orcs in such a way that they would come after us (so that our patently orcicidal wood elves would have an opportunity to slaughter them "in self defense"), and yet still get us the information we desired. Hmmm...