In Which we Fail to Talk a Modron Down from the Ledge

May 29 ~ 10:00AM

In this episode we learn two things: first—those eminently reasonable beings the modrons are not free from cracking under normal pressure. You should always be compassionate, because you don’t know what will cause someone to break. Second—it’s better to be forthright and honest, you will get more information.

Before we can learn these lessons, though, we have to do A LOT of yacking, which I’ll do my best to put down for you. To be honest, though, I was never good in school and a lot of this yacking seems to be beside the point. Politicking and questioning and haberdashery do not keep my attention, so I might have some of this wrong.

Right before we were going to leave the sewer, Eorl and Can appeared. They fit right in, so I can’t blame them for wanting to pop in. Actually, I hadn’t even realized that Can had left, but I guess it was a good thing since he knew where to bring Eorl. Eorl had the danger cart, too. Anyway Eorl had a dream from Harald. I didn’t trust the dream, because maybe some evil genius who looked like Harald had sent it, but I guess they communicate through a box too, so he was able to confirm the dream. I don’t know why he sent a dream and not just a note through a box, though.

So in the dream he revealed that the best way he knows to get some special toy is to hack four dungeons on June 5th. He is but a single man, so he can only hack three and wants to know if we’ll hack the fourth. We should meet him at some place—the duoroes of cachelnick or something—on the 25th if we’re going to do him this favor. If we want to get there, we have to go to domnath, at big dong, we can teleport to Karashi. Whatever, places around here have such weird names. If anyone finds these notes they’ll be in a better position to reconstruct what the hell is going on around me than I am to understand it. Why can’t everyone speak Greek? In a delightful show of self-awareness and social cunning, Eorl brought us a cross bow and 25 bolts to perhaps quell Arben’s distates for Harald and doing favors for him. It worked, because Arben sent him a passive aggressive note agreeing to help, to be put in a box.

But, I mean, we agreed, but I’m not sure we agreed. Because then we decided we had to figure out what to do. In order to figure out what we want to do we ask J-cat. He responds in rhyme, like he enjoys doing to this particular request for information and he says something like:

Now can you find, will ye be shown, the nine who are men and unknown If you go looking for a circle of liches, well, you’ll be out classed, they’re powerful dudes and dudettes. If we want to reinvent herald’s wheel (HUH????), well, the dungeon might be difficult to find. And, anyway, the nine unknown men and the liches will find us if we go to the dungeon. If we’re more cautious then brave, we should go to some monkey’s cave Who is there it is unknown, but old friends must still count the world before it ends.

Arben knows of two different monkey caves: Sugrevah—king of the monkeys—lived in a cave at some temples in the center of India. Hanumaha also lived in a cave with some mermaid where his half monkey half fish son was conceived. It’s near Sri Lanka in south India.

This was not enough to go on, so we magic mirror Nirvanahanncommonadatta, who seems pretty irate that we’ve contact him in the middle of darkness outside come craggy mountain where he’s being silent. To shut us up he agrees to meet us tomorrow at lau kot, where our lionine pal takes us.

We go to some tavern full of mulsim traders who tell us that sulak shanpal is king before we take a nap. Nirvana finds us, takes us to a back ally, and tells us that he doesn’t trust us. He also hates Harald, but likes that we know gerbertus who he can’t find. We tell him that we’re looking for math wisdom and this is just what gerbertus is doing. He tells us to go study or talk to uigi anandi to find math knowledge, but it won’t be good enough for us if gerbertus wasn’t able to find it there. So then we ask him about monkeys and caves and he starts to tell us about Mathura, and some killer apes in the south, and thanjauor to find the 9 unknown men.

At thie poinst Nirvanadannahammurabi forces our party to act sensibly. He basically says—look I’m not 411, and I don’t really even know why I should tell you anything—what is going on and what do you need from me. To my astonishment and delight we’re forthcoming with him! I really do support the free spread of information. If everyone knew everything, then they’d all agree about what’s true and right and all that good stuff. If we don’t lead by example, we’ll just muck everything up. Anyway, we tell him about the modron situation, and he tells us that there’s trouble in modron paradise. Specifically, at least one of the secunduses has decided to usher in an era of chaos since their own system is breaking down.

Armed with this knowledge we call us our pal S—he’s covered in dead modron—and ask him what’s up. Apparantly he’s been ordered by another Primus through another S to abandon his post. This has caused in him one of those ultimate moments of crisis. Is he to be faithful to the laws, that he knows are just and right, or the authority? The laws and the authority are supposed to fit together hand in glove. They’re not right now. Do you try to excommunicate the pope when you know he’s a heretic? This is a choice he really isn’t prepared to make.

Happily, this isn’t a choice he has to make. We try to let him know that pope primus is standing tall. In this case he really should have killed the messenger, because he made up the message! He doesn’t seem to buy it, though. He also looks like he’s about to crack. No one wants to excommunicate a pope, and once you realize you might have to the pillars of your sanity all look like they might crumble. Tutles are not made to be foundations.

We cut off the phone call and try to figure out how best to compassionately act toward this guy. Gwynn thinks that Arben should find some way to twist the meaning of our contract around so that no one gets struck down by a curse, but that if anyone does it’s Arben. He’s a weirdo. I think we should go there and perform a mercy killing. See, if he dies, he’s going to go back and talk to Primus. Then the pope is going to say, YOU DID SO WELL, LOYAL SERVANT. YOU DID NOT WAVER EVEN IN THE FACE OF TEMPTATION, IN THE FACE OF REASON FLOUTING EVIDENCE. I AM PROUD, AND BECAUSE OF THIS PRIDE I TRUST YOU AND ONLY YOU TO TAKE CARE OF THE ROGUE SECUNDUS. It’s going to be just like that, and then he’s going to say “man, those compassionate danger gangers, they spoke sense to me. They truly understand law and order,” and will go out and restore order to the numerological realm. Worst case scenario he says “shit, those jerks, I’ll take care of them after I’ve restored order to the numerological realm. The thing is, in BOTH of these cases, he no longer has to excommunicate the pope. I don’t want him to have to do that.