Expedition 33: Dead Men Tell No Tales

### Summary

The group, including our new followers Silvert and Yugmela, journeys to the inkwells to investigate a zombie problem.

### Detailed Writeup

On the prophesied Dark Day of the 8th of Titanus, we set out on my very first expedition into the Wilderness of The East. We're going to go find some creatures, and defeat them! I met Tolyr, Yugmela, and Uzmir, which all seem to be quite capable adventurers, though Yugmela seems to be under the tutelage of Tolyr as I am under the tutelage of Sir Jamie.

I'm excited to go kill some monsters, but Tolyr says that it's important to make sure they're hostile before we attack them. Sir Jamie doesn't really seem to have a strong opinion, though he might agree with Tolyr. He seems off today.

But ho, we see 15 shambling creatures coming over the top of the mountain - zombies! Tolyr destroys many with two fireballs, but they keep popping up. I finally get a hit in, but I don't kill it. Eventually we defeat them.

We wonder what they were doing - it looks like they were harvesting plants and firewood? That doesn't seem like something zombies do. Tolyr sends Annie to investigate - I'm confused about who Annie is, but it turns out she's Tolyr's microraptor familiar. Apparently Tolyr can see through her eyes. That's cool. She finds many more groups of zombies, along with a tower of smoke in the distance. We decide to pick these groups off one by one.

We approach the first group. They don't seem to be gathering plants - Annie goes to investigate again, and sees that they are going into some hole like a mine shaft, and gathering loads of ore and dumping it into a large cart. Unfortunately, Annie is struck by a zombie and dies.

The group spends a bit of time thinking about whether necromancy is inherently evil. Of course, I think necromancy is definitely evil - what could be eviler than raising the dead? But I don't speak up because I'm probably not that important. The group thinks and says that yes, the souls of the people who are now zombies are probably not at rest, and killing them would be a good action. Great, we get to go defeat them!

We approach the second group. There is an archer, who speaks in a strange language that Tolyr can magically understand, "Retreat! They have arrows!" and several zombies go into the mine. Arha, Tolyr, Sir Jamie and I form a line of fighters and kill them, and I even kill one!

I really want to go look in that mine. But Annie's dead, and we think we should scout first. So Yugmela creates a convincing illusion of all of us going into the mine, aided with sound from Tolyr. A heavily injured zombie with a bell emerges, and we kill it easily.

We don't think we can defeat them all right now, but we worry that they'll just reanimate the dead corpses, so we gather and burn them. It smells absolutely horrible, but only Yugmela is affected.

We then see several figures come from the mine and move towards the smoke we saw. We decide to refocus our attention to approach stealthily, and with the help of Tolyr casting invisibility on all of us except Uzmir and Sir Jamie, we succeed! It's really strange being invisible.

We see a squarish building, with a fire out front of it. There are so, so many zombies out front, as well as 5 larger figures, and 3 middling-sized figures with greyish-green skin and with longbows, who are seeming to direct the motion of the zombies. The zombies seem to be loading ore from a gigantic pile into a kiln.

We decide we should leave quietly rather than picking a fight now, and plan to come back in the sunlight when they're not outside gathering. I'm a little bummed, but I did get to kill a zombie and I realize I'm probably not much of a match for large hordes of zombies.

On the way home we run across a building built into the side of the mountain, which Uzmir explains to the group was a shrine to Durn, in which they did some sort of puzzle fight to find a room with a whole lot of weapons. It sounded super cool, but apparently Uzmir can make even a cool story sound tedious.