70. Republic of Lies

* The party and their crew arrive at Rascal's fort on the island of Many Apples in the Pirate Republic on Midsummer's Day. Rascal, a former Rumidian, is gearing up for a big celebration that day, and he invites the group in for some food, drink, and a catch up before the party kicks off. Rascal explains the chaotic happenings around the world as he understands them:
	+ Firstly, Rascal congratulates the group on becoming named men and women for what they did up in the Northern Margraviate. He says that conditions up there seem to be heading more and more towards a full separatist war. The empire is moving hard to push back such sentiment.
	+ In addition, at the other end of the world, the Rumid-Sultanese tensions continue to escalate, fuelled in no small part by the growing ambitions and influence of 'the Company.'
	+ In an unprecedented move, Mother Shandy has declared total war on Svavil the Iron King, apparently even sending Nogg's *Behemoth* and Breakneck Zephyr's *Cutting Wind* into the Calm Blue, Svavil's territory. Rascal has no idea how she hopes to face the Ironoars in their domain when the wind runs out; in general, the two lords have lived in stalemate with each other for so long because they are so much stronger within their own territories.
	+ After the party left the Pirate Republic last summer, tensions quickly rose. Eventually, Mary Freed, the Blind Butcher, and Gaia Gold-Eater declared war on the Dark Doctor and Shortshanks. The fighting took place within Sawtooth Basin itself and it was fucking chaos for a while. At the end of it, perhaps unsurprisingly, the old guard of the council were victorious and the losing duo were totally wiped out. The Jack of Bones disappeared without a trace during the chaos, Madog the Inferno lumbered away from the Republic with his island-sized ship soon after it all started quieting down, and Rascal and Feverfletch mostly stayed out of the whole affair. When the dust had settled, the remaining councillors decided to carry on as a Council of Five.
	+ Since then - so for the last half a year or so - the number of raids that Roger's People have been conducting have increased dramatically. They're hitting the Western Margraviate and the Plantation Belt harder than Rascal ever remembers them doing before, and in many ways the Republic is abuzz and thriving again, suggesting they were entering a new age of piracy. That said, it's much more of an 'every man for himself' sort of attitude now, apparently. Rascal ended up consolidating his hold on Many Apples, inviting the pirates there into his group officially or otherwise kicking them off the island if they didn't want to join. Rascal tells the group to watch themselves more carefully if they plan to go to Freetown, saying it's a lot more cutthroat these days.
	+ With the increased keenness to raid, and with Shandy busy fighting Svavil in earnest, Rascal is again championing an argument to attack some of her islands, thinking they are ripe for plundering these days.
	+ Rascal also betrays some surprise that the group is interested in witches, which seems like a weird thing for him to say given the group's last visit to the Republic. Still, they let it slide and tell him about their time spent at the Roof of the World and their victory over the coven there.
	+ Rascal concludes by saying that with all the conflict and chaos around, there really has never been a better time to be a pirate. And speaking of, he says they successfully offloaded the galleons he and the group had taken from the cannibals that lived on the Cherries. He'd make sure to give the group their cut.
* From there, the group partied long into the night, welcoming in the new Rumidian year with drinking and feasting, dancing and music, griffon rides through the night, and storytelling aplenty.
	+ Late into the night, Pyt and Wilfred go up to the fort's battlements with Rascal, all of them very drunk. From there, Rascal stares at the moon, weeps, and sings a song about his father. Apparently it was a Midsummer tradition of his.
	+ Pyt and Wilfred sneak away, leaving Rascal to it. In the wake of the uncomfortable moment, Pyt asks Wilfred if he'd like him to remove the memory. When Wilfred says 'yeah actually, that'd be nice,' Pyt changes the memory so that Wilfred thinks Rascal asked him up to the battlements alone then got naked and sang a song directed at the gnome. In the fake memory, Pyt arrived after it was all over. When the spell work was done, Wilfred was annoyed at Pyt, thinking the bard didn't remove the memory like he said he would!
	+ In the drunken early hours of the morning, Aerendyl lets slip an innocuous line: 'Time of Madness, here we come.' A few of the others remark on it through the alcohol haze, with Pyt mentioning there was a bardic saying he'd never known the meaning of before: 'In times of madness, the poet rules.' Anyway, Pyt wasn't much of a poet, preferring the prose forms.
	+ Pyt departs soon after that, heading back to his room on the Drunken Dragon. He uncorks a fresh bottle and gets to work on part three of his ten-part opus, the Truth Behind the Tantrums. In the morning, he finds that while it's in need of a heavy edit, the contents are pretty good!
	+ They all wake up very hungover and Aerendyl dishes out some *lesser restoration* spells to sort them all out.
	+ They find Rascal passed out on the deck of their ship, curled around a weighty velvet coin purse. Aerendyl casts *lesser restoration* on him before they wake him up. From there, Rascal's a bit out of sorts, but he gives the group the purse, it being their cut from the ship sales, minus a bit for handling and whatever else his quartermaster Johanna said they needed to take. It still left the bag with 550 platinum pieces for the group though.
	+ After that, Rascal took his leave, vowing to find something to do for the day now that he didn't have to deal with a hangover from the Hells.
* It's Sunwane 1, the day after Midsummer. The group sail from Many Apples to Freetown. Wilfred casts *seeming* on the party, making them look like a human family: Pyt as the mother, Aerendyl the manly father, and himself and Clwyd as children.
	+ Aerendyl scries on Mennick on the way over, seeing the man hunched over a desk filled with stacks of paper in a dimly lit room, muttering to himself quietly, frantically scribbling in places.
	+ Taylor goes to get the group rations for the sailing ahead while the party go about their business. The rest of the crew stay behind to watch the ship in Freetown's leeward docks.
	+ The party head to Mennick's Real News. Mennick answers the door and is unphased by their illusory disguises; the man lives his life scrutinising people for magical duplicity as a matter of course. Inside, the triplets and Barrel are monging out in the front room while Mennick frantically works over his notes in the back. Mennick looks like shit. He's an awful mix of tired and wired, and he brews up more *kaf* even as the party are visiting him, saying it has a weird name and a bitter taste and comes all the way from the Sultanates, but it's doing wonders for his alertness.
	+ The truther is convinced that something is fishy about the news in the Republic: he's sure that some of his writings have been modified, though the handwriting, word choice, syntax, and all else appears to be in line with his expectations.
	+ After a bit of inquiring, Pyt learns that Mennick doesn't remember the party coming to the Pirate Republic to deal with the witches before. Further, his extensive journal entries make no reference of it either, and as far as Mennick is aware, June the Maiden, the Night Mother, and Old Mackerel are still in their respective places doing as they were, receiving tribute from the Republic's council.
	+ They leave Mennick's Real News, pondering the strangeness of what they'd heard, combined with Rascal having not known about the group's past with witches either.
	+ Thinking some memory modification must be afoot, they ask around, trying to get some of their diamonds dusted so that Aerendyl could cast *greater restoration* on Mennick. Wilfred and Pyt find someone able to do it, but he's asking way too much money - the new Freetown was indeed less friendly than before. Further, with their brazen enquiries, they gained the attention of 7 others who were looking to jump the parent and child apparently lugging around several hundred golds' worth of diamonds. Pyt catches the seven toughs and the jeweller pirate in a *mass suggestion* spell, making them cut and powder the diamonds for free, and all the while they were to do it happily. They do this over the course of a few hours, then when they're done and the diamond dust is pouched up and the spell ends, Wilfred teleports them both away with a new spell of his, *scatter*, after Pyt grabs the pouch. After that, Wilfred simply dropped his *seeming* spell and the pair acted casual as the eight pirates frantically ran around looking for them.
	+ They go back to their ship to meet up with everyone. Then Wilfred does another *seeming*: Clwyd is covered in the guise of the old halfling woman they'd met in Dunvegan Keep, Mrs Porridgepot; Aerendyl looks like Garret; Pyt is Mennick; and Wilfred is an imaginary third Tenpenny sibling.
	+ They return to Mennick's Real News with the diamond dust and Aerendyl casts *greater restoration* on Mennick, having to move quickly to touch the jumpy, cautious man. Through the power of the spell, Aerendyl is shocked at the extensiveness and subtlety of the magic affecting Mennick's memory. It wasn't entirely dissimilar to the marks left by Pyt's *modify memory* spell, but there was so much of it, tweaking tonnes of the truther's memories through such a large span of time.
	+ Aerendyl picks the moment the party told Mennick they were going to hunt the witches of Sawtooth Basin and restored the memory to its original form. Mennick puzzles over the incongruous memories in his head now, confirms that someone has put in vast work to hide the truth of Sawtooth Basin - since none of Mennick's tweaked memories contradicted anything the other Rum Runners thought - and vows to get to the bottom of it.
	+ After they let slip that they have a magic book that records everything said in Sawtooth Basin over the last year, Mennick makes them bring it to him. Clwyd goes back to the ship *again* and gets it.
	+ Aerendyl summons his quicklings and sends them to check out Mackerel's island and report back to him. 30 minutes later or so, they return and say that the place appears uninhabited and nature has begun to reclaim it. He then dismisses them.
	+ When Clwyd returns, the party give it to Mennick on the condition that he tells them anything he discovers pertaining to this mystery and that he sleeps, because he looks like shit. He reluctantly agrees and then starts pouring over the book.
	+ Meanwhile, during her walk Clwyd remembered that Nix was in the Republic after the party left and he might have information on these mysteries. After a few *sendings* to the cambion, he agrees to meet them the following day, saying that he was 50:50 on whether the party 'would be included in the deal or not'. He tells Clwyd he can explain a few things. They plan to meet in Freetown in a discreet manner.
* With their afternoon, the group sail over to Lovely Gallows to speak to Feverfletch.
	+ The mysterious mage meets them at the door of her house, invites them inside, but apologises because she's in the middle of a lesson currently. Wilfred asks to sit in on it and Feverfletch doesn't object to him auditing the lesson, though she assures him it's merely some necromantic fundamentals that he has already covered. In her study, Wilfred sees that the student is none other than Little Crow, a woman he had last seen in the company of Ingela de Beri, Lady Luck, back on the party's first visit to Tortuga.
	+ Once the lesson is completed and Little Crow takes her leave - showing herself to the rest of the party on her way out; they're being brought refreshments by various animated constructs in Feverfletch's service - she reveals to Wilfred that she has sworn Sylvan oaths regarding the mysteries the party had began to unravel. She assures him that she made the oaths of her own volition and that they are serving her well, and also cautions that what he is looking into is dangerous in many ways. Speaking around her oaths, she is able to tell him that people that have uncovered some shades of the truth 'have been the subject of recent news.'
	+ After that, the duo swap notes on their necromantic research. Feverfletch was still the teacher in this regard, but with so much of the art form's secrets having been hidden from the world for so long, much remained a mystery to her. Wilfred's new necromancy spell, for one thing, was new to her, and she copied it into her own spellbook greedily. In turn, she taught Wilfred a powerful necromancy spell now that his wizarding abilities had risen to new heights since their last meeting: and so Wilfred copied down the *circle of death* spell. After that, she again encouraged Wilfred to spread the art form to others keen to learn if a chance should arise.
* Following Feverfletch's warnings, the group starts to worry about Mennick. They sail back to Freetown, go to Mennick's Real News *again*, and after a bit of an argument, Pyt convinces Mennick to come with them and sequester himself away aboard *the Drunken Dragon*. It takes a long time to pack up all the notes and materials Mennick insists on taking with him, but the truther doesn't stop for any goodbyes as they depart. When they get to the party's ship, Mennick takes over Pyt's room, spreading his notes out about the floor, walls, and desk. He asks if Pyt might find some non-perishables to leave in the corner for him, then hunches over the Sawtooth Basin transcript again, magnifying lens close in hand.
* The next day, Sunwane 2, the group meet Nix my the rooftop water butt where they'd first met the Jack of Bones. The cambion arrives wearing the guise of an ordinary looking dark-skinned human man, apparently alone. And then he tells them what happened in the Pirate Republic last year, after they left.
	+ The party had released 14 imps from the Fourth Hell into the Republic during a time of panic and upheaval. Dispater, the Lord of the Fourth, excels in maintaining secrets above all else. There were perhaps no better-suited fiends to have a foot in the door during the Republic's particular problem - and that meant Nix was on the back foot.
	+ The imps eventually put the old guard of the Council of Nine, Mary Freed, the Blind Butcher, and Gaia Gold-Eater, in contact with their master, Titivillus, the Prince of Red Scribes, a duke of the Fourth and a master of manipulating histories. That trio of councillors apparently had the most stake in the Republic, and Titivillus can be a shrewd deal maker when the conditions are favourable for him.
	+ They came to a deal. Titivillus would protect the secret of the Republic, that the witches were dead and it was quite defenceless in the face of the great powers of the world, but it came with conditions on the part of the councillors. The first condition was that they kill the Dark Doctor - apparently a consort of demons in some way. And the second was that they deal with any loose ends that appeared immediately after the narrative alteration Titivillus would conduct; those closest to the events he was obfuscating would have the highest chance of resisting his effects, and these would either need to be brought into the deal in a way that satisfied both parties or else killed.
	+ Feverfletch was one that resisted the effects, but the Republic serves her own needs well, she had no moral quandaries about others having made deals with devils, her subordinates were all faultlessly loyal constructs so they wouldn't spill the secrets, and she herself was content to swear some Sylvan Oaths that guaranteed she wouldn't jeopardise the deal or the secret.
	+ Shortshanks was another that resisted, likely due to his gnomish heritage. He was less amenable to negotiation, and his subordinates were too great in number in any case. As such, the trio of councillors went to war with him as well as the Dark Doctor, as the party had heard.
	+ Rascal and his associates in the know all fell for the alteration. Should they learn the truth in any way, Nix suspects their necks would be next on the chopping block.
	+ And all the while, Madog the Inferno had been negotiating his own deal with Titivillus. Madog wanted what he deemed as 'goblin technology' to remain a secret and an edge that goblins would have on others. He had Titivillus obfuscate any non-goblin's understanding of guns, gunpowder, and scorcher engines, and was told that the only loose ends would be people with such knowledge already in their heads. The first condition for the deal was that Madog cannot jeopardise the deal made between the trio of councillors and Titivillus; the second was that he would offer 100 strong and hardy goblins to join the Court of Red Scribes, who would attempt to undergo a transformation Titivillus had uncovered in lost lore through the use of demon ichor; and the third condition was the Madog himself join under Titivillus. Not all of the goblins survived the demon ichor, but those that did are now called the Four and Forty. Madog succeeded in his negotiations to the extent that he maintains command of them, even in their new fiendish forms, until his death. And after that, he'd be their commander, and they'd all serve the Prince of Red Scribes.
	+ Pyt asked Nix how he was so well informed of these events. Nix then revealed that he'd helped facilitate them. After beginning a shadow war with the agents of the Fourth while they were attempting to set up their dealings, Nix and Titivillus came to an arrangement for a ceasefire: Nix and his associates would be exempt from the narrative alteration, House Telphousila and the Court of Red Scribes would engage in favourable relations with one another, and in turn Nix would not only stop jeopardising the Fourth's deals, but would help facilitate them.
	+ As such, House Telphousila now has a direct connection with a much higher ranking, powerful infernal institution on the Hell above them, and that connection lasts so long as the other two contracts - one struck between Mary Freed, the Blind Butcher, Gaia Gold-Eater and Titivillus; and the other struck between Madog the Inferno and Titivillus - are in effect.
	+ Nix tells the group he knows how much they love their secret knowledge and lost lores. Since they did indeed count as 'his associates,' as confirmed by their memories remaining intact, they would be able to go and enjoy Titivillus's repositories some time. To that extent, Nix said, they were welcome.
	+ Nix heard some of what the party had been up to since their last meeting, with Clwyd telling him that they'd beaten the tundra witches soundly - but deftly avoiding the topic of Silver Dragons or the end of the world. Nix again remarked that she was doing wonders for the growth of the hellfire within her and that in turn would mean prosperity for the household. In short, he said she'd done well.
	+ Nix takes his leave soon after that.
	+ In his wake, the party ponder on the information. Clwyd doesn't know where the situation leaves her and Madog any more, the party worries that they've endangered Mennick a great deal, and they mention the possibility of using some of the genie wishes Pyt wants to get hold of to undo more than the one contract.
	+ Wilfred then casts *true seeing* and spots Dimitri in the corner of the rooftop, listening to them debrief after their talk with Nix. The imp shrugs his shoulders a bit, tells them he's just doing his job, and then when asked explains that it's not uncommon for mortal warlocks to get more powerful and then begin trying to weasel their way out of the deals they've made before it's time to pay up. To that end, he points out them mentioning using genie wishes to undo contracts, and at that point Pyt casts *modify memory* on the imp again, making him think they'd caught him straight away.
* The party go back to *the Drunken Dragon* and set sail from Freetown soon after that. Their heading was the city of New Baronae, capital of the Western Margraviate and home of one Halcyon Cill. They hoped to return Cormorant's guns to the artificer as per the old pirate's will. They'd also heard from Mennick that the man made Log Pins, so perhaps he'd be able to provide them with the means of travelling onward from there, first to the island of Oleantis in Lake Makuahine, and then to Spice Town beyond the Southern Margraviate, the home of Pirate Lord Ibn Qahbe, the only one that could make Wilfred a lineage log pin.