10.2.22 - Identity Crisis

B: Basket is telling the story

P: Peytrice is telling the story

B: I woke up the next morning and began going about my royal duties, but when I had a few minutes to myself I spoke to my hand, trying to learn as much about it as I could. It told me it did not feel complete, like it was missing pieces. When I asked it to elaborate, it popped open on the side to reveal empty slots big enough for certain gemstones. My hand seemed to think that if I could find certain stones and cut them to fit, the hand might be able to do more things. Just then, Pey and Dense came looking for me because Marko and Peytrice had evidently “found Knit in the basement”.

P: We did! We found a big horned dude sitting on a throne in the basement. It seemed like he saw us and told us to come see him, but then these two weird looking dudes stepped out from where we were. Marko told me that he had just helped kill them because they tried hurting the princess shadow. The two people began to beg for mercy as they told the big dude about their deaths. He was very unhappy with them because they had failed to do Bast’s bidding and turned one into a much smaller demon thing and the other into a wolfy thing. Then, everything went dark in front of us, and we could see there was a window holding us back. Marko and I tried to see through it again but all we could find near us were two statues with candles by their bases. The whispers told me that one of the candles was newer than the others. We decided we should get out stuff and tell Shadow Mother where we were going before we came back down.

P: Dense found us first, as we were grabbing our backpacks. After we told him about the dude in the basement, he was not happy with us and told us we could not go fight the dude in the basement because he was named Knit and he had killed them before. We all went to find Shadow Mother to see what he thought we should do. Shadow Mother agreed with Dense that we couldn’t go because it was too dangerous, so he locked us in our rooms so that we couldn’t go. But, we went out the windows and went back to the scary altar room again. They followed us and a scary statue with a fire sword, that turned out to be Dense, came out of the darkness to take us back to our rooms. For our bedtime story, Shadow Mother told us about the day they fought Knit. He then stayed up for a little while to write his last will and peystament in case we did go talk to Knit.

P: In the morning, we woke up and Marko was gone. The whispers told me he had turned into a rat, but that seemed weird. We had stopped him from being food a long time ago. Shadow Mother tried to take him to the wizard, but Merlin was out and his door was electric. Dense went to find Klaub to fix Marko since he did it the first time, and Klaub was hanging out in the royal gardens (where they like to hide the frogs). Then the whispers told me about how Marko could hear lots of little voices when he was a rat, and that when he wanted to he could change between being him and being a rat whenever he wanted. He told us that he could hear that there were a lot of rats gathering at the throne room.

B: I was on my way to the throne room on some business I needed to discuss with my father when Pey, Dense, and Marko came around the corner, telling me there were lots of rats gathering here. When we entered, we could see that there were massive drapes hanging over the windows, blocking out all light and my father was sitting on the throne in his pajamas. After we entered, the rats began to coalesce into a form and the familiar tragedy and comedy masks of Gorgol appeared. He made threats towards us, so we attacked him; however, as we did, my father cried out in pain. Pey became very small and rode Pew through the room stabbing any rats to cross his path. Dense landed the final blow to Gorgol, and as he did that all the remaining rats in the room exploded, spraying everyone and everything in gore. The only thing that remained where Gorgol had stood was a wooden staff carved like a stack of rats. Pey picked it up only to drop it a few moments later saying that he didn’t want to be the lord of rats if he couldn’t be a lizard, and the staff turned into rats that scurried off into the sewers. We spent the better part of the evening helping the staff clean up as much of the throne room as possible after I took my father back to his room to rest. (Even Peytrice came to help. She is quite good at eating rats it seems.)

B: The next morning I was summoned to the spare throne room in order to manage a court visit, since my father was still under the weather. Glistening Sunrod of Golden Falcon Antiquities came to offer to pay off my debts to The Grove in exchange for a favor. He has been working with adventurers to find antiquities from the past to restore or preserve. However, most recently, his partner, Amara Lightfingers, had led an archeological dig at a pyramid after following the notions when they left, to a Bastion of Faith. This was located along the highway to the north. Sir Sunrod is concerned because he hasn’t heard from anyone in the party in about a week and a half and he had heard that someone saw a group of shady individuals had headed to the north within that time. Of course I agreed to help him and that I would be going to personally ensure that the job was taken care of.

P: While she was busy, Marko and I went exploring the palace playing a new game we came up with called Marko Pollo, where he makes himself a rat and goes somewhere small and then I try to find him. We found a bunch of cool old places that don’t look like they get used anymore, and we found some potions, gems, and other cool stuff.

(Level Up!)