Thomas would greatly appreciate that. They went north, towards the lake.

Northward, then, keeping their eyes peeled for fishy perils. 

Everything seems pretty much normal. Apart from the bear. Which had slightly fishy breath but in other ways was not especially piscine.

Once they get to the lakeshore, however, there are several murlocs huts. And murlocs! Murrglblgrlblr!

Gosh they make the cute noise and everything.

She's not enthusiastic about just barging into their home and murdering them without a good reason, her understanding being that they are at least sometimes people, so ... keeping a non-hostile distance at first ... are there any signs of Rolf and Malakai? 

Not so much.

Concerning. Can she derive any useful or interesting sociological facts by observation? For example, what do they seem like they're... doing, by default, are they farming kelp or playing catch or sharpening spears or .... ? 

Just... wandering around aimlessly, looks like.

Well that's very weird. 

Can they try taking a circuit around the lake? It's not that huge a lake and if the murlocs are what got the missing guards there should be signs of struggle or something she would think. 

There seems to be some sort of activity at the memorial island in the lake's center.

On the other side of the murloc encampment, there's what looks like a half-chewed body.

Oh. Oh no. Yeah the murlocs definitely got them. 

Obviously at this point the next step in the quest is probably to kill the murlocs, but the guy's already dead so that wouldn't actually help him and this kind of seems like dubious murder hobo behavior given that they aren't going to just respawn for the next baby adventurer to come by and grind them for XP. The kobolds had invaded human territory and were therefore arguably fair game but the murlocs ... live here. They have houses. 

"I feel like all of my options here are ethically questionable," she complains to Diane. "I don't want to just slaughter a whole town of tiny fish people because they killed one guy, that seems disproportionate, but also they killed at least one guy and we can't just... not... do anything?" 

"We could try getting to the body, to start with? See how that goes?"

And then at least they could bury him or something, if he's got family they'll probably appreciate that more than him getting eaten. "Yeah," nod, "that's a good idea." 

She's kind of expecting it won't be possible to avoid getting swarmed at all but they can at least aim for small swarms? 

They can hold it to two if they try hard and believe in the power of frost nova.

Blurglrmurglr!

Crowd control spells are fascinating to behold, and also incredibly useful. 

"Blurglrmrgl to you too," she says to one, somewhat absent-mindedly, and then immediately feels kind of bad because that's a Talking To Dogs script. 

"Murglr!" It tries to stab her with a crude spear.

Rude. 

On the bright side, one feature of 'upgrading' to a shovel is that it vaguely resembles a polearm, i.e. now that it is repaired it has a haft that can be used to deflect incoming stab slightly more effectively than a hammer and with less loss of followthrough. Nothing on a shield - she really needs to get a shield, come to think of it - but, you know, she works with what she's got. 

When they get to the body, it is definitely partially-eaten.

There's a badge which says "Footman Malakai Stone" on it.

Ick. Poor Malakai. It seems silly to drag the half-eaten corpse back to the guardhouse to needlessly horrify all his friends, but 'we just left him there to rot and/or get eaten' also seems like it would perhaps upset people. 

...... well, she does have this shovel right here. How about they drag the corpse (ick, augh, she is so glad she has gloves now) out of the lake and bury him, sans badge? 

That seems like the... respectful? thing to do.

Digging an entire grave turns out to take an obnoxiously long time. Gosh darned three-dimensional volumes. 

Once she's done, though, she wants to know what's up at Heroes' Vigil. Was that people over there? 

It looks like people.

"I think... they're doing magic over there. We should be careful."

"Oh dear. Okay, good to know." 

She will investigate ... very sneakily? ... as sneakily as a person in armor can be, anyway, which admittedly isn't very. She is pretty much just going to try to stay out of earshot. 

The wizards are wearing red bandannas.

Ah-huh. 

Time to report back, because somebody is definitely gonna want to know about that. 

"More of those scarves, huh?"