Zoom 2021-06-03 21:00

==Remains of Day 103==
* Umar and Bazin go to the Temple of Shanah and ask for an urgent message to be sent to Saratak saying “The Elves have the item from the box, and we have a sapling.” This message should also be sent to the First Sword.
* The party also sends a message to Alveran command – the contents and ‘addressee’ can be determined after the Zoom session.
* Quercuis and Joshua go to see Phinon again, but he is not around – he’s ‘out and about’.
* In the evening, the party (with Dougal as chief interlocutor) ‘have it out’ with Francis, and the ‘charges’ that Francis brought against the party. You can watch the Zoom session if you like, or Steve may care to write it up – but the end result is that although Francis still has reservations about the party, he considers that their goals are still sufficiently in line with his own (and the Alveran cause) for him to continuing supporting them. He even offers to apologise to the Elf that he wounded, should we ever find him.
* After a bit of a rest, Garaf identifies the items from the box:
** The 3 scrolls are all of Word of Recall – of Hahsandra, Wyldwood and Shanah. They appear to be been made around roughly the same time (say about 10 years ago), and the Wyldwood scroll is in Onwen’s script. [Comment: Remember that the Elves first arrived 10 years before the invasion.]
** The Necklace (normal magic, no runes) – 100% spell casting success chance (includes reading scrolls). So 100% success chance for Augury, teleport, [Dispel Magic?] etc. NB Normal 24 hour activation rule applies, only 1 necklace can be worn at a time. [Further thoughts: If the Elves had had this when casting the GSOV, they might have avoided all the side effects and the Cracks of Doom. Oh well. But there again, the fact that it is in the box implies it has a strong Elven connection...]
==The Next day (Day 104)==
At about 11 o’clock there is a knock at the front door. The party goes into standard panic/battle preparedness mode as Caradoc nips out the back door – only to be intercepted by a street urchin who gives him another roughly Wyldwood-inscribed gold coin and passes on the message “If you want to talk about this, bring you and your mates along to the Dunes at midday and ask for the ‘Blue Room’”. (Another urchin had been stationed at the front door.)
All the party decide to go along – except Caradoc who stays behind to ‘guard the fort’, and in case Phinon turns up. We have to pay the snooty doorman 5cp to get into the Dunes, and are shown to the Blue Room, which is decorated in …. blue. It is set up as a ‘boardroom’, with a single female Elf sitting with her back to the far wall. Her name is Sereph, and she if the Elf who gave Caradoc the gold coin. We take our places around the table, and her opening gambit after asking about Caradoc is: “You shouldn’t be so predictable” - referring to Caradoc’s sorties out the rear door when someone knocks on the front door.
She continues by saying that ‘she hasn’t got long, as she is supposed to be arranging transport. Kilan (her Elven companion) has the brooch – she apologies for their haste at the Diamond Fort, but we had to get the brooch into the possession of a Hahsandra cleric very quickly. Otherwise, it would have turned into a full-blown Manifest, which having been kept in a box for many years would emerge without knowing the current situation, but with the prejudiced view that “Elves are Uber, and everything else should be slaughtered”.’
The party continue questioning Sereph, who explains that Hashandra took part in casting the Spell of Voids and the Spell of Forgetting and she used the Manifest Avatar (which Sorlor made available to her) – so it was intimately tied up with the spells, whilst also maintaining a back-door or loophole that would allow the Elves to circumvent it.
The purpose of the Spell of Forgetting was to hide the fact that they had left some agents behind – and if they were seen, they would be forgotten/ignored. It was just to cover up a few ‘loose-ends’. Sereph thinks it was quite elegant. We consider it over-kill.
There are factions within the Elves. They all believe that the Elves have a place on North Island, but:
* Faction 1: Believe that Elves should rule and conquer everyone else. Those ‘lunatics’ (Sereph’s word) are led primarily by Solor, supported by Renzel. They are reluctant signatories to the Alveran alliance – only agreeing because invading North Island was not as easy as they first thought, and becasue they failed to bring the Empress through on the first attempted summoning. Also, they hadn’t realised that breaking the GSOV would bring back the Wild.
* Faction 2: Those like Sereph who try to follow the Wyldwood ways. Led by the priest in Stormhaven who has been allowed to keep the church open there. This faction is tolerated (not persecuted) but they just get given all the shit jobs to do.
* Faction 3: Led by Rasten in Willston – takes a ‘live and let live’ approach, feeling that the Elves should adapt to their current environment. When asked if Rasten is a seer, Sereph said ‘He seems to be able to anticipate trouble before it shits on his head’. Other Elven leaders think he’s a lunatic – but he is certainly nowhere near as mad as Saratak.
* Oranzer is currently the ‘top-dog’ Elf – and he is probably closest to Rasten. “Make the most of what we’ve got, and fit in as best we can.”
==Questers:==
Kilan is a ‘Quester’. Each non-aligned city has three or four Questers in it, at least one of whom will be a priest. (They get ‘cycled’ through cities posing as traders.) They have been looking for the brooch for ages. The Questers would know when the Manifest Avatar woke up – but Sereph knew even before then because “she had some vision of a tree shouting at her”. (ie the Oak – which Kilan is a bit ‘pissed-off’ about.) The Questers had been keeping a close eye on the area since hearing about “some old guy’s” death (presumably Onwen). It took them 8 minutes to get to the Diamond Fort.
Other info:
* The 5 legendary Doppelgangers are nothing to do with the Elves – they are now controlled by the Undead, having previously been controlled by a Vampyre (probably!).Legend 49 - The Bodychangers
* There are at least 3 other groups staking us out at the Diamond Fort. (One group may be Wyldwood)
* The Diamond Fort will be consecrated as a Wyldwood church in 3 weeks time.
* A full alliance has been signed between the Elves and Alvera.
* War is coming! Against who? Take your pick: Alvera vs Solara. Elves vs Solara. The Wild. The Undead?
* There have been a massive number of corpses generated lately – all the Wild cannon fodder thrown here to die. So a lot of Death Magic around – and a lot of convenient corpses.
* The Wild isn’t what it was – it has been fractured, and parts corrupted.
* Which came first the Wild or Wyldwood? Her reply: “Which side of the mirror is real?”. There was once a church which divided – and who split from whom is purely a matter of interpretation. [From Steve:] One other significant piece of non-information that Kilan Sereph conceded. Between Wild and Wyldwood, the elves think these two religions look to the same god(dess), but they do not know which, if any, the god(dess) might favour.
* Soratan died casting his escape spell. Elves tried following the Wild and failed. The Wild ‘gathered power’ while in the Void, and then with nothing else to do with it, turned on one another. Now they’re back – and they’ll be looking for allies.
* Most of the Wild were of a nihilistic, destructive mind set. The Wild coming back will be an extreme version of that – and so are likely to side with Ghoulagabba. The Elves think that they broke the Goblin spell of containment – more bodies to re-use.
* However, there are factions of the Wild opposing the nihilistic bunch – and an emissary of the Wild has arrived at Tobar. (We asked if this was the Lady In White, but Sereph didn’t know.)
* Sereph had only heard reports of the Lady in White – sounds like a Dragon Rider emissary: a Drake able to take humanoid form.
* Sereph was interested to hear of the second Drake (foot-prints) from the ‘bombsite’ - new info to her.
* The prickly version of the Wyldwood symbol on Onwen’s mithril symbol was the original Wyldwood symbol. (The Elves did not know about Onwen – being equally affected by the GSOV.)
* Sorlor is indeed a Dark Elf. Dark Elves are considered to be ‘lesser beings’ - not as ‘pure’ as the Elves. But merit is recognised within the empire, regardless.
* She has no information on Sallahan – considers it ‘somebody else’s problem’.
* She will be going back to Stormhaven as soon as possible.
==What’s the purpose of this meeting?==
Well, other than trying to make up for their ‘hurried’ recovery of the manifest it was for....
“I can’t remember – a giant told me to talk to you. He came to the house we were staying at (in White Beach) – he was quite twitchy and feverish. He said “If the tree spoke to me, I had to come to talk to you.” She is quite disturbed about not being able to remember.
Francis formally apologies to Sereph – she quite understands. 
She doesn’t have much advice on what we should do next – but assumes that the Tree trusts us to take the sapling to the ‘right place’. She thinks we have three main options:
* Go home
* Go to Tobar to find out more about Wyldwood
* Go to Stormhaven.
If she doesn’t leave White Beach immediately, she will reach out to us again. Others in the Elven Wyldwood faction will ‘make themselves known to you’ if we meet them - there are a couple of them who have managed to get ‘higher up’ in the Elven command chain.
==An Aside:==
We were interrupted by a butler after an hour saying our time was up: For 5gp more and a 1gp bribe, we paid for a further 10 minutes use of the room.