She shakes her head. "It's not very important for me to know. Do you have any leads?"

“Fellow says the crocodiles out on the beach teleport, which probably means they swallowed a magic item which would be nice to have. I also found a way to sneak into the dungeons, but I don’t really want to employ that until I have a way to get the people there out.”

"A way to get people out, such as a magic item which allows one to teleport? Perhaps that should be our first task, then?"

"I was planning to get on it as soon as I had some allies who can fight. Crocodiles are not generally very threatening but substantially because crocodiles cannot normally teleport."

"I'm not useless in a fight but I've not been in very many, and none with crocodiles."

The advantage of having more people is that it'll be an easier fight; the disadvantage is that other people will also want the item of teleportation. Probably one ally who isn't asking her too many questions and is on board with her main mission is the best balancing of those considerations. "Maybe we can go out hunting first, for practice working together, and then hit up the crocodiles. There are some beasts out on the coast I haven't bothered hunting only because I couldn't move that much meat, but I imagine your people could."

"I expect there'd be interest."

Then they can go hunting. The things which are edible and not too far from Fort Joy were of course all gone before any of them got here, probably within a few weeks of the first prisoners disembarking here, but there's quite a lot of island on the side of the fort that the prisoners have access to, and anything sufficiently dangerous or enough of a hassle is still alive. There are also voidlings, of course, wandering the beach. You can't eat those. She watches Alaherren fight them, trying to get a sense of how useful an ally she's acquired.

Alaherren fights like a mage, which is to say she typically hides behind a rock flinging blasts of frigid air at the voidlings until they are coated in enough ice to immobilize them. When one creeps up to her through a blind spot she disorients it with a jolt of lightning and then, after some struggle, dispatches it with a flint knife in one hand and a crude wand made from an etched seashell tied to a stick in the other. (The stick breaks in the process.)

Imene knows the type, half her friends are mages. (More than half her friends are dead.) She thinks they can probably tackle the crocodiles without inviting the complications of additional assistants, and probably should go ahead with that. Unless Alaherren trusts anyone who they should bring on board. (Her read is that if Alaherren does trust anyone that much, she wouldn't be wrong to; she doesn't seem like an optimistic person.)

Some of the other elves here would be trustworthy with this, but aren't likely to want to do anything to stir up trouble. (Which is to say, Saheila is reluctant to stir up trouble and everyone else listens to her. Alaherren does not clarify this point to Imene.) Alaherren doesn't know any other trustworthy prisoners.

Right. Then she proposes that they go kill the crocodiles. They almost certainly won't die and it's nowhere near the riskiest part of this plan and there's not a cheap way to make it less risky. (She does not explain all of this reasoning to Alaherren; it would come across either condescending or alien and she doesn't know which. Alaherren probably doesn't know enough for it to come across as distinctly Lucian-mentored but that'd be even worse.)

The crocodiles spend most of their time lazing in the sun on the beach, a ways away from the part of the island that the prisoners frequent. They could ordinarily perch in the trees nearby and just shoot them; with the crocodiles capable of teleporting this will probably be notably riskier but still better than any other plans. 

It does seem safer. Do all the crocodiles teleport or just one? If it's an item it should probably just be one... if there are reports of multiple teleporting crocodiles this might be something different and less useful, but if it's only one, they can maybe watch and identify which one and target that one first?

When she came out to scout it out it looked like just one, not that she can now pick out that one among the others. Probably if they sit in the tree all day it'll teleport eventually and reveal itself.

Ordinarily a day spent sitting in a tree scouting with a new ally would be something she enjoyed immensely but under the circumstances she mostly feels dread and misery. She attempts to conceal this; Alaherren would misinterpret it. 

"How long has it been since you got here?"

"Three months."

"Have things changed in that time? More guards, or less food, or - if you have a sense of how often they take people away to cure -"

"There used to be more food, I've heard, but that changed before I arrived. More guards and - stricter, less kind - in the last month. They take people away in groups...every couple weeks, maybe?"

"Are the guards always Magisters?" It's probably not even an important distinction to people outside the Order.

"That's what I've heard them called."

"I'm surprised the Magisters are going along with this. I don't think you could keep whatever evil magic they're doing secret from all of them. You'd expect someone would speak out about it when they get back to the mainland."

"I assume the ones that would be inclined to speak out mostly don't get sent back to the mainland. Or they know they'll be executed for treason if they do, and are afraid enough to keep quiet."

"In a sense I hope that's so because it means we'll have lots of allies once we can credibly protect them. In another sense -" - in another sense the Divine Order has fallen very far, very quickly. Under Lucian it would never have been treason to resign in an enormous huff about how he'd done something evil. People did it moderately frequently. Her inner model of Matten is yelling at her that it's a very specific sort of person who has opinions about that and that by venturing them she is identifying herself as such a person, and for what exactly?

A crocodile teleports with a splash onto a voidling, saving her from the dilemma. It spits the voidling out after determining it is made of naught but rot and darkness. "- that's our crocodile," she says with satisfaction.

'that's our crocodile' was not how Imene expected to end that sentence when she started it but if she's going to press that point she can do it later. "And already covered in water. How convenient."

Imene has a lot of specialized arrows for killing things. She doesn't usually use them while hunting because they do terrible things to the meat but in this specific case they are not hunting this crocodile to eat it and they need it dead before it can teleport away. She'll pull out the fancy frost arrows and help Alaherren freeze it.