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4/16/500

Shipwrecked

by Bellie Stoutleg

Boarding Domition's ship and setting sail at the beginning of the day.
Offering to lift the crew's spirits with a musical performance below deck.
Cut the performance short when Dirge and I heard the clamor of fighting on upper deck...Two monstrous sea hags (thought to be mythical beasts) were boarding the ship. The party managed to fight them off successfully.
Went back downstairs to find the crew all cowering in fear, leaving the ship totally unmanned, and several surprises... A captain who had died of a heart attack; and Domition in his quarters drugged into a deep sleep by some cordial of poisonous gas left in his room. Thirdly and finally a set of detailed documents ousn Domition's table showing detailed diagrams and facts about monsters, that were long assumed to be the stuff of legend.
For my part I worked to encourage some of the crew to get back to work so that the ship wouldn't inadvertantly crash, and also tried to implore Dirge not to steal the monster documents... When he refused to listen, I used a song of Creation to create a counterfeit set, so that it would at least be a while before the vicar noticed they were missing. We stirred Domition awake, and he was evidently enraged about our allowing the crew up on deck to see the dead sea hags before we pushed them overboard. He demanded we dispose of the bodies immediately. Our party got into a little debate above deck about whether to defy his orders or not, but we decided to push them overboard, (or in Mel's case smash a body to smithereens and then sweep up the pieces)...
The crew above deck were still too petrified with fear to actually man the ship, and even the first mate downstairs-- who was not the default captain-- refused to go above deck, but he appointed me first mate (with all my years of sailing experience! Ha!) and left me to go upstairs and rile the men into action. After considerable effort and encouragement I managed to do so. I later gave some sailors a rest by performing some experimental poetry about my homeland for them, but this was a distraction and a cover for Wolfgar to hold a secret meeting with a fellow dwarf downstairs, who shared with him that he too thought Domition was a terribly evil person, that he believes our quest to find the Evangelii is impossible and the goal of saving the Blue rose unnecessary. In the meantime Dirge had been hiding out somewhere else below deck reading as much as he could out of the monster documents. At the end of it, he sent out his owl friend to take them to a place where they could be copied down and disseminated out to the world.
While discussing what to do with this new information, we heard the Vicar shout in anger about his missing documents from below deck. We all scrambled to come to a decision about how to respond to the crisis of the stolen documents. Dirge brought up the suggestion to assassinate the Vicar, but thankfully no one else in the party seemed willing to go this far (I was pleasantly surprised to find Torsten even resisting this path.) Instead we decided to be truthful about the fact that we found the documents, but to lie and say that realizing how dangerous they were we decided to tear up the documents and throw them overboard. Domition did not accept this explanation, and threatened to bring us all to justice. At this point I could see our whole group begin to get defensive ready for a fight. I tried desperately to calm the emotions of the vicar, and the captain with a spell, but as soon as I got the spell off I suddenly grew quite dizzy and I was out like a rock....