May 16 recap

Having captured Kif, the changeling auctioneer, the party forces him to lead them to the ship they use to ship prisoners. Kif leads them to the ship, a small, inelegant cog meant for short trips. The captain and crew are not around, so the party decides to take the ship themselves. Deciding not to leave him behind, Meva and Mika tie him up to use as collateral (with Gunther, Mika's dog, guarding him).

As they sail toward the fog-shrouded island of Trebaz Sinara to find Nevitash, they are quickly disoriented by the thick cover and have a hard time plotting their course. Meva takes the helm, having captained her own ship before, but even she is having difficulty navigating when she can't see well. Amahndar wisely uses his sunblade to help illuminate the path, and Alyosha cheerleads the crew on, but the ship quickly finds itself lost with no clear direction to go.

As the party examines its options, Laharal and Meva spot another ship approaching, and the party decides to hide in the cabins (while Mika takes the crow's nest) so the ship appears abandoned (and the other ship won't fire on them right away). Sure enough, the other ship docks with the party's ship, and aboard comes a group of rotting zombies, two elf archers, and an elf in skull facepaint. Seeing the zombies, Amahndar immediately charges out of his hiding space and attacks the zombies, and the party soon joins in the attack: Mika hurls her shuriken from the crow's nest, Alyosha teleports around the ships to snipe at the attackers, and Laharal and Meva fight off a pair of ghouls that sneak around to flank the party and attempt to drag them underwater. The ghouls and zombies are destroyed and hurled overboard, the two elf archers are killed, and the elf in skull facepaint is knocked unconscious (as the party wants him alive to interrogate). On the deck of the attacking ship is an altar to the Blood of Vol, which Amahndar and Alyosha promptly hurl overboard, and the party divides up the loot.

Going below decks on the Bloodsail ship, they find six people in chains, most of whom have clearly not eaten or been taken care of in some time. Among them is Nevitash, who Amahndar and Meva nurse back to health; most of the others are dead, so Amahndar gives a quick prayer to the Silver Flame and gives them a burial at sea. Rather than take Kif and the unconscious elf back to Port Verge with them, the party decides to take the Bloodsail ship for themselves, leaving Kif and the elf on their old ship to find their way back (giving them at least a fighting chance, instead of outright killing them or turning them over to the authorities). Kif argues that this is tantamount to murder, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. The party changes out the sails — as the crimson red sails of the Bloodsail ship would not be welcome in port — and heads back to Port Verge, eventually navigating through the fog and arriving back in town.

Nevitash says he did win the journal at the auction, and it's back in his room at a dingy inn — he put there before he was waylaid. The party goes to his room, only to find it ransacked. Nevitash searches the room and finds the journal, but half the pages have been ripped out. When the party asks what was on those pages, Nevitash admits he doesn't know — he hadn't finished reading before going out that night. Meva asks around the inn patrons, and it turns out Nevitash's room was broken into a few days ago. The party asks the innkeeper, and he says there were two men nosing around the room after it was broken into — local minstrels, by the looks of it.

The party decides to sleep for the night before investigating the next day. Mika arranges for a House Phiarlan artist to provide a sketch of the suspects, while Meva asks around town about musicians. Most of the local musicians are involved in crime, as it pays pretty well, but there's two brothers by the docks who recently came into some money. Alyosha goes to the House Tharashk post to hire an inquisitive to find out about the minstrels for him. A world-weary half-orc agrees to take his case to find out who took the pages from the journal.

The party meets up again to go after the minstrels that Meva found, with Mika's sketches in hand. There they find the brother musicians, performing on lutes as their trained falcons do tricks. Mika starts polishing her shuriken (i.e. lifting up her skirt some) while Amahndar asks nicely where they got their recent good fortunes from. Entranced by the view under Mika's skirt, the musicians have no problem revealing they were hired by a middleman to steal the pages out of the journal and put them in a safe deposit box in the local House Kundarak bank. They even helpfully provide the number of the box.

At the bank, Amahndar uses his aura of authority to inquire to the teller about who owns that particular box (with Meva acting as his secretary, Laharal as his owned golem, Alyosha as his entourage, and Mika as his slave girl/bodyguard). The dwarf teller informs him it belongs to Jahanah Drocin, a noblewoman who lives in Karrlakton, Karrnath, but she's unable to say what, if anything, is still in the box (bank policy).

As Jahanah Drocin is their only lead, and at Professor Burch's behest, the party sells their Bloodsail ship for a hefty profit and uses a portion of the money to fund a House Orien teleportation spell (thankfully halved because of Alyosha's membership discount) to Krona Peak (the nearest House Orien station), from which they can take a lightning rail to Vedykar and from there catch a caravan to Karrlakton and continue their search.

DM's Notes:

•Next D&D game I'm in, I'm definitely playing a world-weary half-orc detective.

•Though he didn't do anything super-noteworthy, Yorick the bat-winged skull makes his hilarious debut as Max's familiar.

•I checked the map and my books again and the lightning rail will go as far as Vedykar, not Vulyar (which shaves a few days off the journey).