How many times can one ranger die?

How many times can on ranger die? Okay—here’s a summary folks.

We left rock town with some repentant jews, who were only fake repentant because they kept insisting that they were well motivated the first time around. That smells like worse trouble for me down the road.

We’re greeted on the lake by the black-fox-daughter-of-death. We’re having a lovely chat when a flock of every bird you can imagine came and dropped a drove of weasles on us. Turns out these guys were pissed at me for maligning them in the name of logic. I admit it! I repent (properly, not like those ninny Gads)! These gentle creatures have coats of such luster that the loss of a single one in the world would be grave indeed. Hence forth I pledge 1 of my beans to every weasel I knowingly see. What’s good for constitution must be good for luster too.

Okay, so we fight this 9 headed bull creature that is friends with the black fox, we win, and in a really sort of picture perfect moment zombres commands the water to rise up, grasp both Kolya and this beast, and prevents any death – and also saves the life of black-fox’s friend, indebting her to us. She let’s us into her lair to retrieve Marcella—but really just to ensnare us. There’s a silly puzzle where we have to pull a giant goat head from the ground. It has seven horns, and they phrase it as though each horn belongs to its own head rather than a single giant head. Then you just have a hard time pulling on each on. We used magic and got some stern looks from a few weirdos sitting on thrones. I don’t trust anyone who needs to pretty up their chair just to impress someone like me. I always think they’re just trying to convince themselves that they’re actually important, and if you don’t believe it deep down, then it’s probably not true. Anyway, on the way out Arben talks her into having a dinner date. They do, and she says "I like you honey, the next time you're just about to die whisper my name and I'll come a-runnin'," or something like that. This is even after Zombres interrupts the date weirdly, so he must have really pulled out all the stops. That's like rub a stone all over your face charm right there.

So, Marcella is alive—and now we go to get some brain guts stuff in Africa so that she and Kolya can heal their wounds from that pozozo guy. We first meet this crazy guy with an army of skellingtons. I gues the gang all know him, and we are carried to a river by them. I start hacking up lungs left and right—this African environs really doesn’t agree with me. Everyone said india was bad, but they’re just absurd. Next we meet this crazy beautiful woman, and you know there’s just something about her. I just wanted to sit there and talk to her about weasles and beans and necklaces and jesus forever. Heck, I’d even talk to her about chung quell, and I don’t talk about him nearly as much as I want to. So she has some weird indentured servants (shame on them, one should serve only jesus) and tells them to point us in the right direction. Our third and final stop in Africa led us to a place with a giant status of molloch. I saw some movement that I thought was a weasel, so I threw a bean at it. Zombres yelled at me that I could turn to stone—but I stick by my convictions, ya know? Anyway, if I know anything I know that Molloch is one bad dude. He is just about the only dude I am certain is not jesus. It’s pretty clear that no one was supposed to worship this guy.

So, we fight him and his charred babies (the horror, the horror!) and get the brain guts. Marcella is not only revived but fully revived. This is good. Then some of that servants come out and tell us that we need to bring a perfect child back to the beautiful woman. Actually, they don’t. They do this thing that I really appreciated. They jus laid out our options before us. “we were told to do this. You can do that. These other things are likely to happen, but we’re not in control of them. You can also do these things. We don’t personally wish you harm, but we’ve contracted out our will to another for a year and we’re honest folk—we stick by our word.” These are solid dudes. So, we ask them to sit tight for 24 hours while we deal with this egg problem.

There was a lot of internal division about what to do about this egg. Lao gave it to us. Chung quell asked us if lao knew about the thing inside. He did and he tried to kill us with it, or he didn’t and just – what gave an egg like this to us for no reason? Clearly, he is trying ot kill us. Zombres thinks we can still work with this guy. I think we should tell Cung Quel, because we PROMISED HIM WE WOULD! Others seem to think that we should throw this problem right on Lao’s lap—or that of his daughter. All of this seems reasonable to me. Rather than any of that, though ,we travel to the far north and get ourselved involved in an epic battle of giant monsters in the middle of the snow. I’ll admit, it was fun to watch—but fun in that way that Plato describes in the Phaedrus where there is an awful thing and you can’t stop yourself form looking at it even though you know delight on pain is bad for your soul. I guess it’s good to be reminded that I too, as we all are, am just gross and full of dumb desires and uncontrollable passions even if I only eat beans. As our just and right punishment Zombres’ head is chopped off by the vorple sword. Oh—wait, no it was Marcella. Revived just in time to die.

We’d love to bring her back, but we have to keep our word to those 2 dudes in Africa (before we keep our word to the ugliest, and therefore the most endearing, of gods Chung Quel!). Oh—before that whole thing happens, I write a note to chung and burn it. I know he said it had to be in a Taoist temple, but I’ve tried to be serene and go with the flow and all that stuff my whole life, so maybe I’m a Taoist temple. I hope he got it. Anyway, we give marcella’s corpse to these two guys and go to find the perfect child. We come back with a 2 horned unicorn, but they are not fooled, this is no human child. They agree to hold on to it for us, with Marcella, while we go back. This we do. Zombres, again does this awesome thing with water where he pours it all into the mouth of the molloch statue and it fizzles out and I fly down with Gwyn who snatches the baby from the hole before it is burnt to a crisp to revive it! But then Dispater comes and tells us that we need to give another baby to molloch. Zombres is full of a rage I’ve only seen once in him before—and that time he turned into a fighter. This time he just summoned a megagriffen. Gwyn fought some mind demon, and the rest of us beat up on the molloch statue. Dispater screamed no, and Zombres screamed yes back at him. It was very polite of him, and I think it was th right thing to do—you should always respond when you’re addressed. So, we’re on the way back with this perfect baby now.