Turn 13, A Dark VillageEmilia, not willing to give up on finding the pole she needs, looks around the debris some more, with exactly the amount of care she has displayed thus far. And would you look at that, there is indeed a pole in the debris - a splintered part of a wooden support beam, it looks like. Very heavy, but seemingly quite suitable for her purposes otherwise. She grabs it in both hands and just barely manages to lift it, and opts to drag it over to the next house down the street.
And then, with a mighty poke of the thing that requires a running start to actually get any momentum, she smacks the thing into the facade of the rotten building, finding it rather rickety, but ultimately capable of withstanding a bit of punishment. Putting the pole down on the ground, she looks inside the house, noticing that her violent poke with the pole seems to have dislodged the door a little, simplifying the gaining of access. Walking inside, she notices that the building smells of mold and dust, and also faintly of corpses - proceeding along carefully, the house creaking all along her, she eventually comes to a dining room, where she notices a conspicuous hole in the floor where the wooden planks forming the floor have been pulled off, and underneath it is dirt - a rather small mound of dirt, about half as long as a grave with the edges slightly sinking into the earth, clearly indicating that something might be buried here.
* * * * *
Edwin follows the man into the wooden keep, the gate closing behind them. Within the wooden structure things are, to put it mildly, rather dark. In fact, were it not for the man guiding him, Edwin doesn't think he could find anything in here - the interior of the place just seems like a disorderly mess of rooms and passageways like none he's ever seen before, and the man guides him up several ladders before they finally come to a slightly better-lit area, if only because it seems to have a few narrow windows - a tavern of some kind, it seems like. A woman very similar in looks to the man leading him along waves to them as they enter, saying something incomprehensible, which the man answers with some variation of the same, plus a request of some kind. Edwin is quickly led to a wooden table, and in the near-darkness of the room the man begins to speak to him after they are brought some nice, hot tea.
"You said you had tales. How did you find the path?" the man asks, leaning forward after taking a sip of tea.
* * * * *
Derek, not one to gawk at a place like Bellstarae for longer than is strictly necessary, quickly formulates a plan.
"We should probably find a nice place to stay, and we should probably first check our funds and see what we can do to increase them – we need enough food to get up the mountain. Twould also be a good idea to increase the locals' belief in the goodness of Karse, of course!" he says, and checks his current financial resources, kept within a pouch he wears like a necklace. Ehran and Sweetie have similar things with them, and it appears that Sweetie has most of the group's resources in terms of money - she lends both Derek and Ehran sizable sums of her own seemingly infinite little pouch of money, and merely laughs when Ehran wonders where she gets all her money.
A quick search of this district of town reveals that there are several inns to choose from, and a quick inspection of the ale supplies in each reveals that the one with the best ale is, no doubt, the Firrtin Tivvy Aen, a very cozy sort of place with rather friendly staff as far as the three can tell. And they seem to understand the language of Sweetie's guilders, so an understanding is quickly reached with them with the aid of some copious gesturing and a lot of gibbering.
Meanwhile, Derek observes that nobody really seems to mind at all that the three of them are almost completely naked - Sweetie seems to turn a few heads, granted, but otherwise most people are merely a bit amused by them. They are perceived as funny foreigners, it seems.
I added a new potential miracle to the first post, Comprehend Language, since that seems like it may become quite relevant at some point.
Derek: 5 MP
Emilia: 4 MP
Edwin: 2 MP