We have come to some interesting discoveries with the wrapping up of this first mission of ours on Opali. I was unfortunately quite busy with a number of things of late so I have been lax in updating my journal. As a result, there may be rather less detail than is normally the case. Looking to my last entry I see I stopped with the apprehension of the doppleganger we found impersonating Miss Loopmottin Daergal. We discussed matters with the police and arranged for means of keeping the thing confined, warning them against its telepathic abilities and the like. To make sure nothing was overlooked, we went back to the G.A.P. offices and Kelmar apparently noticed the presence of the real Loopmottin Daergal's ghost.
According to her, relayed by Kelmar, she'd been trying to get people to notice the imposter for months and the only thing she'd been able to do is stir up a particular lunatic. And that gave us a link to our lovely little vigilante, the Haberdashing who turns out to be an eccentric middle-aged goblin who is the last scion of a wealthy family and operates out of a cavern that is underneath his mansion. And his name is Brewswine.
So, yes. We found ourselves going to the Hat Cave. The local authorities backed off on going with us, noting that the underground regions of the city are quite dangerous. They did help us find the passage down, however. These caverns are very much not the place I would set a secret operation, at least not without a thorough cleaning first. The first thing we ran into was a pack of white and blue spiders the size of small horses. They faded in and out of the prime material plane as they snapped at us and tried to whittle us down to where they could take us for their larder. I believe the things are referred to as phase spiders in many places.
Following Kelmar, along the left side of the cavern, we next hit an alcove of animated refuse and plants. Shambling mounds are terrible things and they are often a sign of deeper and more terrible things. Entities of rot and decay. Other times, they are a simple accident of fate. In any case, they are a dangerous foe to face and it was only through luck and an effort to keep the things off balance so that they couldn't engulf any of our people.
That forced us to take a time to rest and catch our breath. I was worried that we would be missing our quarry as we held off moving forward for half an hour. I had already expended some effort to give some of us a similar respite over the course of five minutes. Traveling again, Kelmar reached the limits of his preternatural tracking abilities and we had a direction but still had to search. We almost walked into another battle but Kelmar and Nezeri called a warning that something called a carrion crawler laired there. I have since researched the things and am glad that we avoided that confrontation.
From there, we found the target of our search in the back of a sizeable chamber talking to a woman of some sort. At the moment her features were not all that clear, but I would later see that she was a triton. This struck me as odd at the time, but we were currently in the process of approaching as quietly as possible. Kelmar later reported that the triton saw us coming and even winked at him. Given her later interaction with me, I believe that. Regardless, Brewswine himself noticed us eventually and the fight was on.
I limned them both in Faerie Fire which drew in the fire from the rest of my allies. Kelmar showed his deadly accuracy with a bow, setting up the vigilante for a strike from Medi to take him out of the fight. That left us to play cat and mouse with the triton. She struck me with a familiar blast of purple energy but after that she was forced to back off and I was unable to get a line of sight on her. She eventually escaped through an underground stream. Kelmar almost tried to follow her but thought better of it.
From that things just started going in a variety of ways. There were two strange crystals in the back of the cave, three actually, but one of them had cracked open. Nezeri and I started forward to examine them and I got close enough to note the cracked crystal had dust on it while the others didn't before the crystals started to glow and dissolve. I've seen things like this go quite bad before and stepped way back while Nezeri characteristically just started commenting on the situation going on. Fortunately, the only thing that happened were two purple elves were released and fell forward to the ground. I'd met elves like him before once or twice, those I had met had been actively psionic.
These two were brother and sister by the name of Andraste and Varis. As it turned out, they had another sibling, a brother, who was now missing. Likely he had been in the other crystal. In addition, they were more of Istryx's devas. We had immediately felt a sense of familiarity for them, which, in retrospect we'd picked up from each other, but it was further confirmed by Istryx herself when we went back to the tower. The tower is bigger again, by the way, and our monthly stipend has increased as a result. This will be interesting moving forward as we now have enough people to take on multiple missions at once I believe which will be useful given other things we learned. They were both recovering from their long stasis when last I saw.
I questioned the vigilante in the form of his triton partner and confirmed what I had suspected. He was a vigilante that had stumbled over evidence of a conspiracy due to the ghost and his brain cracked, taking him to harm innocents. I know how easy it is to do that, how hard it is to make sure that you are following real threats and attacking real evils. Had I not fallen in with Department 7 then I might have become a similar such murderer. There but for the grace of God go I. I may have been a bit unnecessarily harsh with him and unwisely revealed the face of this persona to him and talked about the deva. That may come back to bite me later, but I hope not. In any case he didn't have any really useful information for us, though I found some stuff to relay to the police.
This leaves the last bit of information I uncovered. The night before interrogating Brewswine, that triton sent me a dream, which is a significantly powerful display of magic. Her name is Wolyn. I've met a handful of tritons. They're usually champions of good, but they have a tendency to be a bit overbearing and insufferable. They expect to be recognized as champions of good no matter how obscure they are to most prime material words and get a bit huffy when people don't know who they are.
Wolyn is a different brand of this sort of attitude. She's playing a dangerous game, at least, that is assuming she is playing straight with us. She claims that an eldritch entity offered her a choice: become its servant or it would destroy her home city. She took the bargain and has been, by her testimony, trying to sabotage the plans of her side ever since. She had pointed the vigilante at G.A.P. as a way to draw attention to her agent there. She developed the necromantic spell and it's weak nature to draw attention to the world. And she pointed the way to the Abolist's Tower to set him up for being taken down.
According to her, Eastman is looking for a sphere, that sphere Istryx's mother sent away from the Lost. He thinks its in one of Istryx's temples but Wolyn thinks that's too obvious. She gave me images of five worlds, including Opali, where he is focusing his search and destroying temples. These are our leads for at least exposing Eastman to the other deva.
In the mean time, we have not reported Wolyn's existence to the Center. This puts us in a dangerous position but it is one that I am familair with. We can't report her existence just in case she is up front because we know the deva are infiltrated. We can't even tell the devas we're pretty sure are on our side. The risk is too great. That means we are technically holding back information from the Center. On the plus side, we're deva of the goddess of secrets, so this sort of behavior won't be too unexpected. Which just means that people are going to be looking for that sort of thing.
Wolyn might be playing straight with us, and I've known warlocks to outsmart their patrons, but it's always a dangerous line. Wolyn might be getting played herself without realizing it. It's just way too dangerous to take her at face value, but also way too dangerous to just expose her.
Ah, cults.
I hate cults.
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