It is indeed a fine day. Kenabras isn’t her favorite city, but it’s certainly more pleasant than most Worldwound forts. Her horse, a black mare, walks at her side; she buys her an apple, and herself something sweet.

She smiles at the priest of the God of Walls and Ditches, pausing to listen to his sermon for a moment.

“—this is a trade as well, you see. You have something I want: your time and attention. And I have something you want, the contents of this jar.

Because I’ve decided that your time is worth more to me than what’s in this jar, and because you want what’s in this jar more than you want to spend that same time and attention on something else, we’ve made an agreement to trade.

You’ll do a lot of trading like this in your life, not just with coin and material goods, but with your time, your attention, and your labor. And those are no less currencies than your coin, no less important and negotiable.

Now, with that idea in mind, would anyone like to do a spot of haggling? Who wants to try and convince me that they should get an extra honey drop?"

It’s a very different focus than she’s accustomed to. She doesn’t think a priest of her homeland would talk about haggling and trade, rather than duty and growth. Children are the same everywhere, though.

She’ll buy herself something to drink and find a place to sit. Perhaps the Lady Terendelev will show herself.

There’s a cleric of Cayden Cailean laughing and magically filling mugs with wine and ale for free, and there’s a girl with bluebird face paint trying to convince people to buy some kind of sharp-smelling concoction, each serving of which is crowned with a foam sculpture of a cute animal face. And there are street vendors offering meads and many of the other fine things that can’t simply be conjured into existence.

There isn’t a Lady Terendelev around—or at least there’s no one who’s recognizably a Lady Terendelev. There’s talk about a parade happening later, though, and apparently someone is saying that there might be a copper dragon there or something?

Another dragon might be showing up? She thought this wasn’t the capital, but maybe she misunderstood. Or possibly they’re talking about a parade decoration, that would make more sense.

She’ll ask the girl what the drink is made of! It looks interesting.

So it turns out that if you prepare a dead ochre jelly right you can render it non-acidic! And then you can soak its bits in different fluids and you get something that tastes like that kind of fluid but also sharp and kinda sour! It’s pretty liquid-y but it still jiggles a bit, look, look at it jiggle.

…Right. She’ll pass, thank you. Although it’s genuinely a very impressive accomplishment.

Is there anywhere to get tea? She desperately misses tea; what’s left of her personal supply is being tightly rationed. 

There’s a sleepy looking elf offering tea! She’s pouring pre-made tea from a collection of what look like small, beautifully carved wooden vases sealed with corks, and then casting prestidigitation to bring the tea to temperature.

Well, she’s certainly going to buy some; mediocre tea is probably the best she’s going to get around here. She’ll ask after the supplier, too, if the woman seems amenable.

It’s not mediocre, it’s just the kind of tea suited for uncultured barbarians who’ve never had a drop of tea in their lives. She has a friend who grows the leaves, and does in fact know how to make Very Good tea, she can make it with the kind of skill that you acquire by having spent fifty years making tea.

She’ll offer to pay very generously indeed if a fresh pot’s on offer, then, seeing as how she is not an uncultured barbarian herself. 

It’s good to meet people who appreciate the finer things in life.

She appreciates the compliment to her skills, but will politely insist on a lower price, as Hai-Xuan is clearly a fellow connoisseur and—

And then there’s screaming. And then there’s lots of screaming.

She draws her sword and prepares to defend whoever’s in danger, commanding her horse to defend her as she does so.

Who’s screaming, is it demons, what kind of demons? In the unlikely possibility it’s non-demon problem, what’s happening?

They’re.. corpses? They look like they should be corpses, they look like a bunch of commoners who got hit by a nasty negative channel and should now be corpses, but they’re not dead. Instead of being dead they are on the ground wriggling and writhing and gurgle-screaming and desperately clawing at their own rotting skin and muscle as it sloughs off of their bodies.

The old, roundly priest of Abadar is standing in the middle of what was once a crowd, surrounded by a thirty foot circle of screaming writhing rotting bodies.. Except that he doesn’t really look old and roundly anymore, now he’s something decrepit and grotesque. His skin is bleeding and cracking and he looks more like some kind of twisted skeleton that’s been wrapped up in slabs of meaty fat than a real living person.

And his eyes, his terrible eyes, cold and glassy and distant and alight with purpose. He moves forwards towards the remainder of the once crowd, the people that are screaming and hollering and quite sensibly trying to get away, so that he can get into the optimal position to nail more of them with a negative channel. He moves fast for something that was once an old man.

…huh, did he die of some sort of disease, suddenly, and then reanimate, and then immediately get empowered by some other god? That would be incredibly odd, but it’s the best explanation she can think of in a round.

She could probably put a lot of those commoners out of their misery, but it’s not clear to her if their problem is the sort a positive channel will help with, so she’ll leave that off for now.

Anyway, the horse is now charging the undead cleric while she approaches the scene, casting Shield of Faith on the horse, and then herself.

She and her horse and the few other people unlucky enough to be within thirty feet of this mess get hit with a Quick Channel Negative as performed by a seventh level cleric. Said cleric then points at Hai-Xuan in particular and casts— "Hunger for Flesh."

She and her steed pass the save for the channel, at least. The horse completes its charge.

Hai-Xuan, however, just failed her save for an unfamiliar spell. Growing fangs and a hunger for flesh is distressing. She reacts to this in a very traditionally draconic manner: she instinctively draws her aura about her, opens her mouth, and breathes flame at the problem.

The cleric is apparently quite happy to just stand there while it gets gored by a horse and toasted by fire breath, it doesn’t even really try to dodge the fire. It reaches out with one hand to tap the horse with an Inflict serious wounds, and then with another to cast a ranged sebaceous twin on Hai-Xuan at the same time. 

And then it gets hit the face by a magic missile that comes zipping over Hai-Xuan’s shoulder.

…Ew. Not actually something she can practically deal with right now, though. She’ll cast Protection From Evil, since with this many weird esoteric spells going around, it’ll probably be helpful at some point.

The horse is pretty agile, but it’s not exactly a small target. The cleric can probably hit her. Hai-Xuan looks pained, but doesn’t change plans.

The horse is afflicted with some serious wounds, courtesy of the cleric managing to hit it with an Inflict serious wounds. And now the cleric is going to cast Waves of Blood to push her and her horse away, and even if they don’t actually get propelled Hai-Xuan will possibly get smacked in the face by some of the mangled writhing bodies that the spell is going to pick up in its area of effect.

How does Hai-Xuan feel about getting swamped by a torrent of blood and being pelted with the not quite dead bodies of the rotting commoners?

Very, very glad she has Prestidigitation.

The cleric is probably a less experienced combatant than her horse! He sure didn’t seem to be doing much fighting earlier today. Waves of Blood is of very dubious effectiveness. 

 Hopefully the sorcerer who appears to have arrived has a better idea of how to actually solve this problem, at least temporarily. She’ll cast Bless; there’s not much point to defensive buffs right now, since she’s not in melee herself and she’s not confident she can actually walk over to her poor steed. Apparently she should’ve gone for a Rod of Reach, not Extend.

The cleric gets hit with a thrown spear, and then someone moves in to toss a net at them and all the sound in a twenty foot radius dies beneath the weight of a silence.

And here are the people with swords and maces!

Oh thank the gods. She'll keep an eye on the situation, but she's going to slowly move over to heal her horse, and then see if casting Stabilize does any good, at this point.

Nothing, these people are pretty stable, just stable in a terrible state. One of them moans and reaches out towards her with a wet, skinless hand.

The cleric is having a mace repeatedly applied to his face.