This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
An adventuring party recruited from Osirion teleports into Azir on the 8th of Desnus. Rahadoum's recruiting contact in Osirion wrote ahead to note they were expected. Couple of guys he's known a long time - a wizard, a ranger - and a new guy, sorcerer, probably to replace the cleric they usually travel with. They spend two days in Azir getting oriented and head out to the front. The ranger wears an unusually high quality amulet of Nondetection; the sorcerer wears a headband for intelligence, which is a bit unusual as sorcerers usually don't need it to cast, but some variants do; they are otherwise unremarkable. Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, no reading, which could mean neutral or 'hiding it'. They work quickly and effectively, manage resources reasonably well, get recommended to higher-ups for a closer look on that account.
Gemma could absolutely use his help with the patients who're there for injuries or who might benefit a lot from Lesser Restoration.
Yfandes is out on her walk with Sondra for the rest of that day, occasionally Mindspeaking Vanyel to ask how Randi is doing.
Randi does, in fact, seem to be managing; he's a little more distracted than usual but he has Shavri with him and plugs through some of the backlog of minor Karse-related decisions.
Savil swings by Vanyel's guest room after handing off Tayledras-watching duty to another Herald, and reports that they have not tried to run away at all. She's a bit stiff and formal with him, compared to before.
Fazil will come back once he's used his healing spells, hug Van, and try to distract them both with discussion of, uh....
"Did you grow up in Haven?"
"Oh, me?" Vanyel glances at his aunt. "No. We're both from Forst Reach, it's a landholding out at the western border - er, what used to be the western border, we've now officially annexed Lineas and Baires."
"They used to be these two tiny kingdoms over there that went to war with each other every generation or so. Most recently, the entire royal family of Lineas got ripped apart by demons, and then Donni Final Strike'd the entire royal family of Baires because they were trying to take over and would've caused a giant earthquake - er, it's complicated, long story. And, while we're speaking of awkward events - Van, you'd said you suspected the dagger was Leareth, did you ever ask him?"
"Oh, um, yes, he confessed to for some reason giving Vedric Mavelan a magic dagger that would cause someone's entire family to be attacked by demons, which he planned to use to take over Lineas some number of decades later. Leareth wanted all the Baires mages and all of Lineas' unused mage-energy to help out with invading Valdemar. Though apparently Vedric goddamned Mavelan was absolutely not supposed to trigger it when he did, and Leareth would have confiscated it if he'd known Vedric was scheming to do it before Leareth actually kicked off his invasion, but I guess he missed that one. Well, we did know he used to read as Evil."
"Leareth is...Leareth. I think he does evil things and works with evil people when he feels like those are the tools he has, and - well, we saw in Cheliax that if he has better options he'll take them."
"All our trips home are horrible. That particular one was horrible because of the Lineas incident, but even without that, neither of us particularly get along with the family."
"I did! My family's still there. We, uh, weren't anybody, my father and my uncles worked at the docks. I started working at the temple when I was nine because no one would hire me for dock work yet, too scrawny."
"I mean, most people are farmers, everyone helps out around harvest time. In Sothis - it'd be ordinary to work but not ordinary to be the one supporting your whole family, I think, among poor children, and then wealthy merchants keep their sons in school a few more years. Mahdi went to school until he was twenty."
Shrug. "We had a string of bad luck. My uncle died, and my father remarried my uncle's wife - that's a normal thing to do, so she's not alone trying to support a family - and then my mother got sick, and there wasn't really enough money to go around, and - my father was much more materially and emotionally invested in his second wife. They got along better. They had a child together, by then. So he mostly stopped feeding us. Phrased that way it sounds like entirely a failure of character but it was much more about the circumstances? There wasn't enough money. And lots of people find it hard to pay attention to a situation they're importantly failing at."
"I don't much care for my brother or how he raised Van, but he did better by him than that."
"It's a low bar. Turned out all right, though. We were hungry for a couple of years and then Abadar chose me, and he probably wouldn't have if I hadn't been working every daylight hour in his temple for four years."
"Wow. That's - a lot of responsibility you must've had, if you ended up supporting them."
"Well, I certainly hope your parents are very proud of you now. - Er, if they're still alive, sorry–"