87. The Sylvan Embassy

* The party, trapped in the Iron City of Dis, with bounties placed on their heads by Mephistopheles, and with their options dwindling, got a lifeline thrown to them after talking to a cat. It told them that they might make it out of Dis if they get to the Umbral Market, one of the very few blindspots Dispater has in the Fourth Hell. But the location of the market changes all the time, and the knowledge of where it is next going to appear itself is rare and highly valued. To that end, the cat told them they might have luck if they go to the Sylvan Embassy. With so many of the small group claiming descent from Faerie's folk, they should be welcomed inside without issue.... hopefully.
* Thus, Aerendyl, Clwyd, Pyt, and Wilfred find themselves stood at the beginning of a high-walled, thick, verdant hedge maze: the entrance to the Sylvan Embassy.
	+ Clwyd attempts to guide the group through the twisting hedge paths, but they quickly lose their way and have no idea where to go.
	+ Aerendyl turns into an owl and flies to the top of a hedge wall. The view out to the grounds of the embassy and also to the surrounding Hells is distorted and sickening to look at, almost as if he was feeling intense vertigo in all directions.
	+ Stubby hands push the thick leaves of the hedge wall aside to reveal a small, elfin face, right in front of where owl-Aerendyl is perched. The creature in the hedge hails Aerendyl in a snarky voice and tells him to get down quickly. Aerendyl ignores it and flies up in the air, and then immediately takes a large amount of psychic damage and plummets to the ground.
	+ The man in the hedge pops his face out at ground level, chastises Aerendyl for a fool, and then makes to return to the inner workings of his hedge before the party hail him and ask which way to go. He grumbles a bit but agrees to show them.
	+ Hedges in the distance shake a few times to guide the way. The party twist and turn through the maze, with new hedges giving a few shakes after each corner, until eventually the path leads into a sprawling, hard-walled hive of a building.
* Leaving the entrance maze, the party arrive go into the coccoon building. The room is filled with cobwebs. In fact, the room and perhaps even the building appear to be made entirely of webbing. They balance of thick crisscrossed webs at the entrance of the embassy's customs office.
	+ A family of three half-elves have been wrapped up to their necks in webbing to the side of the room. They greet the party affably as they arrive.
	+ Soon enough, a horde of hand-sized spiders come forth, their bodies milk white and their eyes bright and pale blue. The spiders chatter in their own way and start swarming over the party, making to tie up Wilfred's sword and Aerendyl's dagger with silk threads so they can't be removed from their scabbards without some effort, and even then the act of having done so would be evident thereafter.
	+ When it becomes apparent that the party have a lot more stuff on them warranting search and sealing than the average group that comes through, they are escorted to a separate room and a translator -- a creature with the torso and head of a small humanoid but the abdomen and legs of a spider -- helps them get through the process.
	+ All the party's effects are searched. Anything resembling a weapon or with the potential to cast magic is bagged in thick-clothed sacks and then stitched up so it can't be readily accessed. At the end of this, the items are then placed in carry bags for the party's benefit and they're told to keep the bags held visibly in their left hands.
	+ After this, the group are escorted out.
* After spending fifteen minutes in the hedge maze and over an hour getting through the spider security checkpoint, the party finally arrive at the embassy's grounds proper. Before them a party is raging. The band are an orchestra's worth of floating, autonomous instruments, the borders of the dancing area are lined with tables of fancy food and drink, and all manner of Sylvan creature is singing, dancing, and having a good time between where the party stand and the imposing white-walled building beyond.
	+ A satyr lady approaches the group and asks if they need help. It turns out she is actually a worker at the embassy. Despite this, she keeps breaking off to dance and laugh and enjoy the festivities even as she's guiding the four of them to the embassy building. The group decline to dance themselves -- none of them really feel in the mood for it at the moment.
	+ Inside, the embassy doesn't seem to be a building at all. The entrance more resembles a thick tropical forest, with towering trees, cascading ivy, soil and bed-leaf for flooring, and a thin mist in the air. Animals call in the near distance while insects chirp freely. Yet amongst all this, Sylvan creatures and their humanoid kin are also waiting to be served and seen to. Most of the embassy's booths and workstations are formed of living material and blend seamlessly into the landscape -- a kiosk in a tree trunk, a stone bolder for a seat, and so on.
	+ The party are a little cagey about explaining their current situation, but they quickly make it clear to their satyr guide that the two most common services of the embassy -- processing papers to traverse the Iron Bridge or notary and advocacy work in the case of signing Infernal contracts -- aren't exactly what they're looking for.
	+ No, what they need is actually some specialist consultancy, and so they are escorted to a side room -- more zen rock garden than room in fact, with walls of hanging ivy and a gentle stream flowing through the place. There they wait for their consultant. And in all they end up waiting for an hour and a half.
* Nearly three hours after they first stepped into the embassy's grounds, the party are met by their conflict-management consultant.
	+ She's a cheery autumn eladrin named Annodoura, or Ann for short. Her skin is stained a soft reddish-brown, indicating she's an eladrin that has spent a very long time in this one season.
	+ She sweeps into the room in a hurry, accompanied by a changeling assistant, who is there to assist with putting faces to names as needed and to scribe, and a veritable army of pixies carrying many, many books. Half the pixies resemble humanoid-butterfly hybrids while the others are humanoid-moths. The former, Ann tells them, are the mandatory representatives of the Dawn, while the latter are those of Dusk. Both courts insist on having representatives in matters of special circumstances, mostly for posterity's sake more than anything else. But while they are doing that, Ann will also be putting them to work, and so they're there for ferrying messages and providing references in their literature as needed.
	+ Ann is soft spoken, amicable in every sense, and happy to let the party tell her as little or as much about their situation as they are comfortable doing. However, she tells them she's going to be at her most effective if they're forthright with their information.
	+ When the party tells her they're wanted by Mephistopheles, she blanches briefly and quickly gets her smile back in place. She whips out a small ornate box and removes four green oak leaves from within. She has the party pin them to their persons and tells them that they'll experience Faerie's time dilation as a result: each day in the embassy will now only be a single minute outside it. However, the Ambassador's power isn't limitless! The leaves will redden and then wither over the course of a week and then time will be as normal for them once more.
	+ Ann remarks how wonderfully complicated these situations can get, what with the 'hyper-subjectivity' of time in the Hells on top of Faerie time dilation! She tells them that Dis is currently their plane of reference, so they should avoid contacting anyone currently there, and to be safe, anyone in the Hells altogether.
* With Annodoura having bought them a lot of time and apparently very keen to help, the party all but tell her everything about their current predicament and she dives into talking them through their options and filling in the blanks of any pertinent information they seem to be lacking. Though she says she's keen to avoid any and all manner of serious diplomatic incidents (hence immediately making use of time dilation when the severity of the party's situation became apparent), she's pretty casual about offering advice on how to do questionable things when they come up.
	+ Regarding Red Rona:
		- The party are concerned that the hell hag has betrayed them. Ann tells them that this would be against the pattern established by her past actions, but it's hard to be certain.
		- In either case, the question of how they would find the imp they're supposed to deliver the organs they owe her is resolved. Ann figures out that when the rune marks Rona gave the group are applied and the organ is separated from the host, the imp will be summoned.
	+ Regarding the bargain with Rona:
		- Ann points out that the party are in a position to potentially garner the assistance of a strong ally in Zadimus while also fulfilling their obligations to Rona without one of them having to maim themselves.
		- She advises that if they go to meet Zadimus, they might offer him his freedom from his prison in exchange for his eye. Since the vampire has been sentenced to 'nine lifetimes of torture' which he's only a few centuries into, and since Bagrellan has been ensuring these lifetimes are measured against elf lives, the vampire should surely be keep to take any opportunity to escape. Thus, Ann says that part of their negotiating should involve mentioning that the party and Zadimus are all wanted in the Hells and could help each other.
		- They should extract a Sylvan oath from the vampire to ensure he will not charm or harm them while they escape, and that they'll all attempt to escape together.
		- Until they have such an agreement from him, they should be wary of him charming them, even as he is bound in the prison.
	+ Regarding escaping from the Hells:
		- Ann says relying on others to plane shift them is ill advised.
			* At best, the party are now known to have reneged on contracts, meaning any promise they make of possible future services in exchange for the plane shift won't hold a lot of water.
			* Further, whatever they did trade would have to be worth more to the caster than the bounty being offered for the party.
			* And most importantly, any plane shift could as easily transport the group to the entrance of the Spire of Mephistar as it could take them back to Terca Mahres. They could easily be betrayed and handed over to an archdevil keen to have them.
		- The Iron Bridges don't seem like a viable option to Ann any more. Maybe before Mehistopheles went public, but now that there's so much scrutiny around the party (simply knowing where they are in Dis might be worth a lot of money/souls to entrepreneurial folk, after all) it seems all together quite impossible for them to sneak through the areas of anti-magic and the gatekeepers without someone noticing its them.
		- That leaves climbing up to the top of Hell.
	+ Regarding the Umbral Market:
		- Ann agrees that it would be a great way for the party to get away from Dis. So long as they have the capital to remain as paying customers, they'd be welcomed in the market and could enjoy themselves in luxury until the market gets them close to an exit up to Minauros, the Third Hell.
		- The embassy could certainly find out where the market was going to be held, but such an undertaking would be expensive.
	+ Ann is fairly confident that Mephistopheles's announcement only really represents an issue in Dis, the Hell City:
		- The swamps of Minauros in the layer above them aren't nearly so inhabited, and those that are there are too busy suffering the swamp to be interested in the party.
		- And the two layers above that are far more focused on the war effort than on any sort of Infernal politicking. Thus, if the party make it out of Dis, they'll only really need to content with the pursuit the Lord of the Fifth is sending after them.
	+ Regarding the journey from the Sylvan Embassy to the Umbral Market:
		- The party will need to get the Hell Train. This will cut down their journey through the world-sized city of Dis from a matter of weeks or months (or maybe even years) to a matter of hours and days.
		- To ride the train, again, they'll need capital.
		- Ann also gives some info about the Hell Train network:
			* It is owned and ran by a pit fiend.
			* The major stations will have an amnizu overseeing them.
			* The minor stations will have bone devils or horned devils in charge of them.
		- The party should also be advised on the major bounty hunters known to be in the area:
			* The Huntsman: one of the enigmatic shaytan, huntsmen seem to live for the sake of the glorious hunt. One such creature is in the inner ring of Dis. It is accompanied by a netherlasher, a fiendish dog-like creature that can prevent creatures from teleporting when it is near.
			* The Tinker: a deep gnome who wears a helmed horror as armour and has a powerful spider construct in his keeping.
			* The Ratcatchers: Dispater, keen in his paranoia to make use of the legendary sight of felines, *awakened* a number of cats and then made them warlocks. Some of them live in the area and have been known to enjoy a hunt from time to time, when their baser animal instincts take them over.
				+ The cat the party talked to, it turns out, was a bounty hunter. He just didn't know the party had a nice bounty on them when they landed in his lap.
	+ Regarding capital:
		- The embassy are capable of issuing loans to Sylvan groups in need, but these need to be backed by some household or seat of power in Faerie.
		- When Ann asks the group if they have any such place that might sponsor them in their time of need, the party come up with two options: House Galanodel of Mithanmelar, the Autumn City -- Aerendyl's home -- and the Wings of the Spine Woods, the sprites they'd saved from Old Mackerel's chess board who had saluted them and said they'd remember their debt.
		- Annodoura checks both leads for the group. They wait a while and then the responses come:
		- House Galanodel, Ann is sorry to say, appears to be no more. However, there are a number of prominent households in the Autumn City that keep open accounts with the embassy, always keen to earn a few debts and favours.
		- However, the response from the Spine Woods is far more positive!
	+ The reply from the Monarchs of the Spine Woods when the party petitioned for help:
		- The monarchs of the Spine Woods say the party are to be dubbed as 'Spritefriend,' and that for this predicament they find themselves in, they may make use of the throne's coffers as if they were fully decorated veterans of the Kingdom of the Spine Woods.
		- The monarchs ask only that when the party are able, they consider travelling to the Spine Woods one day so that they all may break bread, revel, and enjoy what Sylvan hospitality the throne can provide. This, they stress, is no debt or obligation; it is merely a humble request, from friend to friend.
* The changeling assistant does the necessary calculations and totals out that the party are entitled to 112 soul coins each. Subtracting necessary fees, they are left with 104 soul coins each. With this, they learn which train station they are to ride the train to and where to go from there to get to the place where the Umbral Market will be convening. Aerendyl also gets enough mistletoe to cast goodberry for the foreseeable future -- he is told it should last up until the party encounter the Styx again.
* After this, the party decide to stay in the tree house lodgings they are offered in the embassy for the whole of the week they have under the effects of time dilation. They sleep off their exhaustion and get ready to raid the prison's of Capo Bagrellan's estate.
	+ Wilfred sends a couple messages to Poop. The brownie is in a pretty cheery mood and tells Wilfred he's making some things. Wilfred then messages Alric, asking him to pick up some brown stuff for Poop if he can.
* When it's time for the party to leave the embassy a week later by their reckoning (and only three hours since they entered the place by the reckoning of the rest of the Hells), Wilfred casts *nondetection* on them all, Pyt turns them all invisible, and Aerendyl casts *wind* *walk* on them all. Wilfred puts up a telepathic bond so they can navigate between themselves, even if Dispater will be listening in, and together they make their way to the Bagrellan estate.