Meeting With the Greae, For Real This Time

We hang out in jail for a while chatting with the crazy Swanmays. She tells us about this really cool Throk party that's going to be going on in the City of Dreams and fills us in on who Throk's Seven. It seems there is discussion in the Throkian ranks about the wisdom of mercy. Maybe they should just murder captives and so on? She tell us that previous Throkian venegence parties have done a poor job of rounding up the Old Party, so he is summoning the Seven to do it better. They're going to hack a Dream Dungeon to get some sweet stuff, and then go out and kick ass. The good news is that they think Harald has one eye and is probably dead, while Gregoria seems to have disintegrated. She also gives us some useful info on the lay of the land down here, though it will soon be revealed that the swanmays have done some construction since her madness.

The other Swanmays then come down, looking somewhat confused, and tell us that the Greae will meet with us if we can fill certain conditions. First, we have to find them within an hour of being released, and secondly we have to survive five rounds in combat with them. TrapoII luckily hears the secret third condition, which is that after 10 rounds the Swanmays will be hunting us. We cheerfully agree to these conditions, and get to work healing ourselves up and memorising some spells.

A couple of rest periods later, we head off. Harald follows the Throkian Sirini's directions, but finds a three way intersection where she said there would be a four way intersection, with the direction we want to go being the impassable fourth way. A breif inspection reveals it to a newly constructed wall. Ailyll stone shapes through what turns out to be 10 feet of solid rock, while Harald turns one of her wasps into a giant ooze and webs off the passageway. Turns out the ooze was happier as a wasp, and it starts to try to break through the webs to attack Harald. We all wiggle through a narrow hole that Ailyll Stone Shaped through the new wall, leaving our larger equipment and armour behind. Poor Merlinda is simply too wide to fit, so she is left behind to guard the passage and hope the ooze doesn't make it through the webs too fast.

Once through Ailyll Locates eyes, and detects one straight ahead and eight more nearby. We keep following the eyes until we come up to a giant room with about a 20 foot drop to the floor. The ground is covered with some sort of nasty red globs which are neither plant nor animal, and man does it stink in here. Harald starts ferrying us across when Ailyll detects some other eyes coming at us. Good thing that's what we were detecting, so we are totally not surprised when eight bat-winged flying eyeballs come out to attack us. They claw and tail and blink at us, and try to weep some blood on Harald. Harald knocks them out pretty quickly with some colour spray, and we leave some snakes to munch on them as we carry on. Someone shoots some arrows at us as we pass, but they don't seem to be pursuing so we leave them be. We follow another long passageway and come out to a second big room.

In here are three "excitingly figured" young-looking ladies with grey hair and a single eye and tooth between them. Explaining that we are only doing it because they told us to, we charge in to attack. They resist most of our first round of spells, but we do manage to slow one of them before another points the eye at us. Man is that eye scary. Only Ailyll makes her save, but she is able to remove Harald, Mamun and TrapoII's fear before they get to far with her fancy hat. Gwyn keeps running, narrowly missing those nasty red blobs as she topples into the giant room again. The half-digested eyeballs are sitting next to a pile of sticks, and it stinks even worse than it did before. The rest of the party keeps on fighting. Harald gets his stats halved and that tooth does a pile of damage to TrapoII and Mamun. Mamun heroically slices off one of the Greae's arms, causing her to drop their eye. Unseen scoops it up into a bag as the Greae say "oh no! Not again". Without their eye they have a bit more trouble, and we are able to survive the prescribed five rounds before everyone but Harald flees a second round of fears. Luckily, despite his reduced charisma the Greae keep their word and stop attacking Harald. Mamun and Ailyll run to check up on Merlinda and are barely able to save her from the nasty ooze, then they all head back to chat with the Greae. They tell us a bunch of cool stuff:

• This is a clockwork world, it keeps going on unchanged. Those who become powerful enough to change it lose the ambition, and those who have the ambition lack the power. The queens become pawns: the Masons had the power but they turned conservative, as did the Pythagoreans before them, Evelake now follows others' bidding, Otto II died before he could change things, Basil II lost someone he loved, and with her his will, and the Agathersi became bound by meaningless rules until they succumbed to evil. She gives us a list of 20 Parties That Can Change the World and we are rather proud to find our own group on the list. That, they explain, is why they were even willing to talk to us in the first place.

• We keep getting woe on our apple quest because each apple weighs upwards of 1700 pounds, rather more than we can carry. The dragon is tough but not so clever and could maybe be tricked. The other gardens of Hera might be less well guarded, but they don't seem to really know much about them. The one in the South is a mystery, as the three women who went to found it never came back. One in the North is guarded by the Goddess Eidon, and it is found South of the Stone Black and High, maybe around Yggdrasil. There is also a garden in the East, but they don't know how far East.

• To appraise our magic items we should consult Hesakaiakons, found in any fancy well-stocked library. These are texts that describe famous magic items. They were all the rage a while back.

We thank the Greae for their help and head back out, assuring the Swanmays that we have survived our five rounds and they can stop shooting at us now. All in all, we're pretty excited about actually accomplishing some objectives without losing a single thief.

Meanwhile, the crew of the S.S Trap fight off some fishmen and find out how little a lot of experience becomes when you divide it by 20 odd thieves.