Feverborne

We left the poor dead wererat girl down in the sewers. Bringing her up to the surface and trying to collect a reward for a dead girl whose wounds matched our own silver weapons would be awkward at best, and very very awkwardly fatal for us at worst. Once back on the surface we took stock of the situation. My magic sword didn’t work, Ygnas’ god was slacking off on the job, and our halfling had just walked off, admittedly after doing well for such a stout fellow. We were all hurt, I was feeling feverish, and without healing spells it would take time to heal back to fighting trim. Ygnas was complaining about her mace being broken, too. (How do you break a mace?) We decided to sleep on it and look at options in the morning.

In the morning, I had a new option to consider: whiskers, teeth, claws and a snout. I declined, which took the second of the two potions gifted to us by Cloacina. I hope we don’t need any more.

Both of us were low on funds, so we sold one of the remaining platinum ingots and divided it between us. We found a place for Ygnas to get her mace repaired, had a wrench made to fit the valve controls the rats had removed, and were wandering through the city trying to figure out how to fix a broken god when we caught sight of a procession of prisoners led by a noble and a small force of guards. The crowd said they were bandits due to be executed.

As my old friend Basldric of the Helix unbdertaker’s association was fond of saying, I was struck in the face by a very cunning plan. We followed the procession to the public square where the execution was to be held. I tried to intervene with the guard to get the prisoners released into my care, but that failed miserably. Ygnas had better luck convincing the noble, and the guard was more willing to accept a bribe when presented with a fait accompli. I had my force of four unarmed and unarmored bandits.

I also had a very inconvenient parade following me. The guard was not at all impressed when I tried to recruit more volunteers from the crowd, but they followed us to the sewer entrance. I specifically led the parade to the smelliest and most awful entrance, and the crowd enjoyed pushing the bandits into the sewer pipes in lieu of the execution. Then, I had a tense conversation with the bandits, where I explained what would really be happening. They were not enthusiastic but agreed with the promise of 1gp each, per person per day. I agreed, and sent Ygnas to fetch 14 days of rations and meet us at the other entrance, the one with the moaning wind. She left, muttering something about marshmellows roasting on an open fire. Strange lady, that one.

Somewhere in the confusion we noticed a new person in the group, who – when called out on his presence – introduced himself as Turblec Pluck, a wizard looking for his brother who had left the city after joining up with the Glorious Blades. He had noticed the disturbance, recognized one or both of us as members of the Glorious Blades, and asked to join up in hopes of meeting up with his brother at some point. We warned him that we hadn’t even met his brother and that we were planning to fight wererats in the sewers and he would probably die. He seemed remarkably unconcerned by the idea of a smelly death forgotten by man and consumed by beast, so he will fit right in.

Ygnas returned, smelling of smoke and brandishing a new holy symbol. Young Thomas looked shaken. I’m not going to ask.

Before descending, we acquired another batch of rations and tried one combination of valve settings we had previously overlooked. It did nothing we could identify.