Mistrustful Kubians throw their best hope for justice into a sunless pit, which is just where they want to be

Early afternoon of the 19th:

Dear Diary,

Everything old is new again. I began this journey intent on serving the bodily needs of the poor—insisting that we need to better serve them by serving them a diet of beans, which everyone knows are both inexpensive and good for one’s constitution. Now, I find myself attempting to serve the spiritual needs of this spiritually poor world by giving people magic beans. Maybe this is why Jesus has given me magic spells. Each day I give a bean to a weasle. I gave a bean to Archon and one to the white snake as we left. We went to Kub, and I gave a bean to the crying widow of some dead guy. If I am embarking upon some new bean ministry, I should probably also give goober a bean each day. That’s why they call him goober, right? The best way to convert someone, is by giving them magical legume that sate their appetite once a day.

Anyway—we show up at Kub and there’s a funeral procession. Zombres tries to play the benevolent detective whir these turkik people insist that we are jewish spies from Kazeria who have murdered once and will murder again. I guess, for the sake of the record, I should log the clues Zombres uncovered. This guy was murdered with a note that read “He should have been perspiring [aspiring]” so he was probably murdered by some fitness guru. The murderer was in the room when we found this clue out, and she had red hair but vanished when she found out we were on to her. Oh—she’s also a neck biter.

In the end it was up to me to save the day again. Clearly these people needed to blame someone for this murder so that they could go about their lives. Also, the way they deal with murderers is to throw them into the dungeon that we were trying to get into. So, I confessed. Well, I told Zombres about my smarty pants idea and he did—because he was the only one who could actually converse with these folks.

It was all going perfectly well until Karl saw the most beautiful gem in the world, broke free of his captors, and — actually it continued to go perfectly well after that too. He fell into the hole, and we were shoved into the hold.

It was pretty dark in this place, and we fought some web golums. Then we found a room where there were some spiders. I made one of them shut up, because I thought it was goat headed, and we just punched a punch of other ones. One grabbed gwyn by the back and it frightened the pants off of me, but mores gershom who ran away. I punched the one that got gwyn, but not before he fell asleep. Fat lot of good he did us.

In the end, we beat them up and are probably going to go charging into the room that the goat headed quiet one is in. Before we do that, though, I thought I would mention something about trust. I was thinking—we earned Archon’s trust by beating him up. We earned the priest of Kub’s non-trust by being outsiders. I guess, everyone needs to have some sort of rule for determining who they will give their trust to. The second we came down here, these guys just started to attack us. So—we don’t trust them and attack them back. But—maybe they took our being here as a declaration of intent to attack. In that case, they’re no different than the people at Kub. A little funereal veneer of civilization, but they did to us the same thing these spiders did for the same reason. I think these people and spiders were made for each other. So, these guys follow the maxim “trust no one” or “trust no one new.” It doesn’t seem to work very well, because we were trying to show them the murderer, and they let her go because she looked not-new, and we looked new. Archon’s rule of ‘trust only those people who can beat you up” seems to work pretty well. But—I don’t like that. You always have to start out on the wrong foot. Even the most well intentioned battles can end with Morkoth’s head flying off and one party stealing all the ancient magical swords of the other. No, I need some other rule. Maybe I should follow the maxim “trust everyone” with some modifications—like not when they try to kill you. Well—Hmm. Rahu told me to dig him out of the sand, and that wasn’t a good idea. No, that maxim won’t work either. OH! Okay—I am going about this all the wrong way. “trust only the trustworthy.” That’s obviously the right answer. Now I just need to come up with a rule for determining who is and is not trustworthy.

For now, though, I have to go. Thanks for listening Diary.