Hello, Everyone!
How have you been? I’ve managed to fix my scanner and reupload all the bad-quality illustrations for the past several episodes of Mary’s story. However, I haven't made the next few drawings, so you’ll have to get by with the place-holder picture. I think I should make a better one so that I’m not embarrassed every time that I have to use it XD
Last time, our heroes went to see the person who’d been thought responsible for the kidnappings around Myth Adofhaer (and the Undead attacks all over Eastern Erathos, somehow we seem to have forgotten about those). They found him in a pitiful state, having spent six years locked-up in prison for something he claimed he hadn’t done. He told them that he hadn’t been himself during that period, and he recounted the little he remembered around his capture. It turned out that the elven woman Dorina Dwendel had used as bait was still around, and our heroes decided to pay her a visit next.
The guard took Maquiel off the tree completely and carried him to his bed. Mary stayed in the cell with him and let her friends and Tesaya wander the city for a while. She wanted to make sure the prisoner was taken care of, and be there if he needed more of her calming spells.
She sat by his bed and watched him fall asleep. It didn't take long, the man was really exhausted. When she made sure his breathing was deep and steady, Mary took out her journal and tried to make sense of all they'd learned so far.
They’d found out a lot about the abductions six years ago, as well as all the ones before that. The fact that they were so different than the cases outside of Myth Adofhaer made Mary wonder whether they were actually the same thing. They could as well have been two separate sets of attacks, with completely different goals and perpetrators. The only thing they had in common was the timing - six years apart. Which, admittedly, seemed like too big of a coincidence to be entirely random.
But who knew?
The other thing on Mary’s mind were the souls of the kidnapped elves. Why hadn't they reincarnated? Were they really destroyed? She shuddered, remembering the graphite dagger that the Children of Terpesh had wielded. Or, if not that, maybe the souls were somehow extracted and used as components for some dark spell, like what'd happened to Moira's husband? After all, he hadn't come back either.
The third alternative--the least fatal-sounding one--was that the kidnapped were alive, but kept somewhere against their will. Mary couldn’t stop thinking about Moira and Dalia and being taken towards Menzoberranzan. After all, the Drow were known for having people as slaves. Pretty blonde girls--like the kidnapped ones--did sound like perfect slave-material.
Could that be somehow worse than death?
However, the souls were only part of the puzzle. There was the whole Dorina mystery. Everything Mary had known about lord Dwendel’s daughter had come crashing down the moment she realized she was last evening’s attacker. Why would she do that? Was she brainwashed or possessed? Bruno seemed to think so. But maybe, Mary thought, Dorina was, in fact, a bad person who had just been a very good actor. How could they trust anyone, now that the person known for their kindness and mercy was doing… this?
Maquiel shuffled in his sleep. Mary looked at him and smiled, albeit with a heavy heart. She thought about their fight with Dorina and how stupid she'd felt for giving up the Hold Person spell. But instead, she was able to calm someone’s emotions now, and the good it had done to Maquiel Prouvier was a thousand times better than any advantage in a fight she could have had.
Tesaya, Bruno and Aurum came back a couple of hours later, and brought a nice dish of grilled vegetables. Bruno complained that everything in the elven restaurants was meatless and he missed his rat-on-a-stick. Mary wondered about the rabbits Tesaya had cooked for them the other day. It was strange. But maybe their hostess’ way of living was just different from the rest of Myth Adofhaer’s, just like Tesaya herself was different from the other elves.
Aurum told her about an interesting statue they’d seen in a park. It was of a human woman that had helped the elves with a dangerous situation years ago. Dorina Dwendel had a statue, too, Tesaya said, somewhere else in the city. It seemed that the elves made a lot of monuments, for the people they deemed ‘useful’.
“Hopefully we’ll become famous here, too,” Aurum said. “Just listen to the sound of it: ‘Sir Aurum the Great, Hero of Belfast AND Myth Adofhaer’!” He grinned.
The next stop of their investigation was Lyria Thei, the woman used by Dorina to capture Maquiel. (Or, you know, her accomplice. Mary was finding it hard to believe anything she’d been told anymore.) They found the woman at her post. She was patrolling one of the residential neighbourhoods of the city. She had beautiful blonde hair and reminded Mary of Lanna.
“I was expecting you to come find me,” the woman said.
They asked her about Dorina's plan six years ago. Lord Dwendel’s daughter came to the guards' headquarters soon after she’d started working on the case, and asked for a woman who matched the profile of the kidnapped girls. Lyria volunteered. They dressed her up in a more provocative fashion--at that time they thought that might have something to do with the abductions--and posted her on a bench in one of the city parks.
Only about ten or fifteen minutes later, Maquiel Prouvier passed by. He looked like he was just taking an evening stroll but when he got close enough, he suddenly leapt and grabbed Lyria, trying to gag and immobilize her.
Dorina was hiding close by, she jumped Maquiel and neutralized him in mere seconds.
“Did Prouvier resist the arrest?” Mary asked. She was thinking that if he had already ‘not been himself’, as he'd said back in his cell, he might have let himself be caught.
“Now that I think about it,” Lyria said, “it was a pretty easy capture. Prouvier didn’t put up much of a fight, but I thought it was because of Agent Dwendel’s ability."
"Ability?"
"She could pass through all defences and people couldn't do anything to counter her. Everyone knew of this, of course, but it was another thing to see it with your own eyes."
Or feel it, Mary thought and looked at Aurum who had still not recovered completely from Dorina's assault.
"How did Prouvier act when she captured him?" she asked. "Was he scared or violent?"
"No," Lyria said. "He was strangely calm, gleeful even. He didn't say a word but he looked at us with such impudence! It was… strange."
"And Dorina? How did she behave?"
“Oh, Miss Dwendel was calm and confident the whole time. Really professional! We were all impressed by the speed she managed to solve the case!”
Of course she did it fast, Mary thought sourly. She was IN on it, and had poor Maquiel as the scapegoat.
The only other thing they could find out by talking to Lyria Thei was that when he was captured, Maquiel had a teleportation scroll in his possession. He insisted that he’d made the spell by himself but everyone knew that he wasn’t capable of such intricate magic.
That sparked Mary’s interest. If there was a physical scroll, there were probably ways to track where it was supposed to go. She made a mental note to find out more about it.
Sooo :-) When we were playing, this was the point around which the game got kinda frustratingly slow. It seemed like it was going nowhere, and our characters were hardly making any progress at all. The whole thing turned out more difficult than we were expecting.
Does it feel like this when you read it?
It’s hard to design a mystery like this. We're lucky that our DM really thought it through, and got us to a very satisfying conclusion! You’ll see!
I hope you stick with us for the next part of our D&D adventure!
See you then!
Take care and be well!
(Also, here's a link to the Chapter Guide and the Glossary for the series. You're welcome!)
An important disclaimer: These are my notes from a D&D game turned into a narrative. All the worldbuilding and NPC encounters belong to our DM, and all the actions of the other main characters (Aurum and Bruno) belong to my co-players. My contribution to the story is only everything Mary-related (actions, reactions, inner thoughts), as well as the writing itself.