King Eroan’s daughter, Ava is missing, and he wants us to find her.  ‘Us’ being the interesting characters I mentioned earlier.  We have Skye, a forest druid, Fingers, a thief and Dyrian, Eva’s brother and a trained fighter.

 

We started out by visiting the local inn.  There was a bard playing there named Brittle and Fingers thought it was odd that a bard wearing such rag-tag clothes should have such an expensive lute.  He wanted to steal it.  He said it could be a possible clue to finding the princess (this of course was highly unlikely and if I wasn’t already uneasy about Fingers this made me all the more so).  Skye talked him out theft but she suggested he should talk to Brittle to see if he knew anything about the whereabouts of the princess.

 

Brittle ended up relating a tale about a sea king who had befriended him and given him the lute.  During the story, he mentioned a place called Fisherman’s Cliff so we decided to continue our search there.  However, other patrons at the inn had told us of a path that the princess liked to walk in the morning so went there first and discovered a cave just off the path.

 

I led the way into the cave and found a room filled with wererats.  We killed them all and continued deeper into the cave.  On a table outside a locked door, we found a candle and piece of paper with writing on it that just seemed like gibberish.  Fingers picked the lock and discover a man asleep on a cot in the corner of the room, but of course what Fingers found more interesting was the chest at the foot of cot.  He crept into the room and tried to unlock the chest but he must have made some kind of noise and the man woke up.

 

“Who are you!!?” The man demanded.

 

It wasn’t long before the man found out that we had killed all the wererats in the cave and he exploded with anger.

 

“MY RATS!!! HOW DARE YOU KILL MY RATS!!! I WILL KILL YOU FOR THAT!!!”

 

The man transformed into a wererat hybrid and attacked Fingers.  The rest of us now had no choice but join in the fray and the creature was soon dead.

 

We located his journal and found that the man’s name was Murry.  He had been bullied as a kid because he was only a halfling and he retreated to this cave to live the life of a hermit.  At first he had tried to rid the cave of wererats  but he and the wererats came to understand each other and as the years went by, he became their guardian.  He had suffered so many bites that he himself became a wererat hybrid.

 

As the entries went on Murry’s thoughts became more and more scattered until they descended into the same gibberish we had seen on scrap of paper on the table outside the room.

 

We left the cave and continued our search for Fisherman’s Cliff.  Fingers said he had seen something shiny in the woods and went to investigate.  He was attacked by some kind of vine creature.  We left the path to help him and found ourselves ensnared by more vine creatures.  We finally fought them off and to our horror found a pile of dead bodies presumably victims of the vine creatures.  Among the dead, we found a cache of weapons including a throwing axe that I wanted to keep.  Skye warned me about using it until we can find a wizard who can tell us if the weapons are cursed.

 

We also found a map.

 

We decided to postpone our search for Fisherman’s Cliff and followed the map to a clearing where there stood a tree elemental.  Sky seemed to recognize him.  She approached and the elemental gave her something.  Fingers did the same but came back empty-handed.  And then I thought I saw something familiar entangled in the creatures branches.  It was Cora stone!  I could swear the elemental was smiling at me.  Olu had put his stamp of approval on our mission.  I am very however still very concerned about Fingers….

 

We have decided to spend the night in the clearing.