Somehow I knew that just leaving Arzias, the lizard person, by herself was going to be upsetting to Trakban and Fortuna, but the truth was I wasn’t quite sure what to do with her. After all, she seemed friendly enough towards us among the living. It was just the dead pirates that she felt particularly hungry for. Eventually we decided that for the sake of respecting the living (and because it was actually kinda gross), we were going to throw the dead pirates overboard and start trying to clean the ship up for our journey to Plauros.

Our new guest wasn’t super into the idea, though, and she made that very clear with each body we threw into the sea as we sailed further and further out of Kokiraki’s port. In all honesty, she did make a decent point about the pirates not using their own bodies at the moment, but by the same token I just felt wrong about it, like that’s an aspect of culture I just don’t feel quite ready to accept.

At least, that’s how it was until we finally got a chance to talk with her a little while later. When we finally decided to sit down with Arzias and ask her just what she was doing on a random pirate ship in a small port city, far away from any lizardfolk camps, she explained that she was captured by the pirates. Why? Beats me, but there she was.

“But,” she said after explaining everything, “crazy thing, me already leave home village. Big…ummm…not sure how say in common tongue, but it use Arzias tongue words fire and mountain. Anyway, fire mountain on island gonna blow. Me not know how to fix, but me wanted to find help.”

A fire mountain on an island…she must have been referring to a volcano of some kind somewhere. That could be another side-effect of the elements being all out of whack. I filed this away in the “Notes” portion of my brain that was slowly growing into a “Quest Log”, as it could be a clue of some kind. Maybe some wizard somewhere would be able to calm the volcano. Though maybe it would solve itself if the Heroes somehow restored the Fire and Earth Gems? I wasn’t quite sure how magic rocks would affect natural processes like seismic activity beyond, “It’s magic! No more questions!”

Though to be honest, even after asking for some clarification on this stuff from higher ranking wizards, a lot of it does sort of boil down to, “It’s magic! No further questions!” Which isn’t exactly what I’d call satisfying, but I mean, I didn’t make the rules. I’m just trying to understand them well enough to tell a story here!

Anyway, returning to the story…

“What kind of help would you be able to find for a…umm…a fire mountain?” Trakban said, trying not to overwhelm Arzias with new words. “As a natural phenomenon–” Trakban met my eyes and I shook my head, “ahem, as something that just happens, what help were you hoping to find?”

“Maybe some…magic guy?” Arzias said, uncertainly. “Me village no have magic guy, but maybe me can find magic guy in other place! Yeah! Me join you guys on quest!”

“You don’t even know where we’re going!” Fortuna said, shaking her head. “It’s going to be dangerous. We’re going to Plauros. It’s a place with vampires and other scary stuff like that.”

“Me just got captured by pirates. Me think me be fine with vampires,” Arzias responded bluntly, perfectly nailing the tone of voice one would take when talking back to someone in the common tongue. It must be a cross-cultural thing. “In fact, you no even need feed me. Me just eat bad guys you kill! Also maybe eat you when you die!”

“Absolutely not!” Trakban fired back.

“Yeah, let’s…just focus on the bad guys for now,” I awkwardly said.

“Ah, me understand, you no plan on dying. Me get it,” Arzias said before muttering…something. I’m guessing it was an aside in her own language about how she would totally eat us when we died. “So when we get to Plauros?” Arzias asked excitedly.

“That’s what I want to figure out,” I replied. “Do you know if the pirates kept a map or a sea chart or something down here?”

Arzias stayed silent for a bit, making me wonder if she understood my question, before answering, “Yeah, boss pirate man probably have map in his room.”

Right. That makes sense. He’d probably have all the necessary seafaring equipment in his quarters. Assuming he had anything of the sort. “Do you know where that room is?”

“Oh yeah, me show you, follow me!”

Arzias led us through the bowels of the ship to what seemed to be the cleanest, most well-decorated and well-lit room aboard. Surely the room that would be claimed by the captain. In the room was a rather well-kept desk, a full bed, a standard chest for belongings, and two large curtained windows. Whoever stayed in here (me, definitely me) was going to need to remember those windows. I sat at the desk and began rifling through the drawers until I finally found what I was looking for, a large map of the seas surrounding the landmass on which Brightdale and Kokiraki sat. I won’t bore you with a geography lesson, but suffice it to say if winds were cooperative, we’d be in Plauros in about ten days. Which didn’t seem all that promising, but thankfully, Fortuna knew how to fish, apparently. Plus we had yet to see what the pirates had in their hold. Spoiler alert, while there was food, there was also a lot of alcohol. So much so I question how those pirates ever got any work done.

Actually, about that, I discovered something else in the captain’s desk. Something quite revealing, actually. Apparently the reason they spent so much time moored in Kokiraki, the reason they hadn’t left in such a long time, was because of a woman. Oh wait, it gets better. The woman the captain spent so much time pining after was Saida, the elf soldier in Captain Caskminer’s squad. Who had a girlfriend. And I’m not kidding, I found pages and pages of journal entries about how the captain was trying super hard to woo this elf girl, lamenting the fact that she wouldn’t even look his way or even dance with him, just not grasping the fact that she was 1) not interested in him, 2) not interested in men, and 3) was spoken for. Like c’mon man, take the hint, there are plenty of fish in the sea. Maybe Captain Caskminer would be more up his alley?

Edit: Okay, so apparently the girlfriend in question was Caskminer. Hadn’t quite gotten that vibe from them when I first met them, but still, an elf-dwarf romance. Good for them. Weird match, for sure, but good for them.

Anyway, we plotted our course and set sail, each claiming our cabins and setting up a rotation for piloting the ship while others were taking the time off. We made it a day. Pretend to be shocked, but managing a whole ship with four people is a bit of a headache, so as we sailed past Brightdale, we got the idea to try to take the ship in to hire a crew. I’m not going to bore you with an entire roster of crewmates, but suffice it to say that after a day or so in port (where nobody even asked why we randomly had a pirate ship, which was weird, but I mean, whatever), we had enough crew and supplies to keep the ship going for the length of the journey. Our return to Brightdale even inspired the soldiers in Brightdale to get off their butts and go help the soldiers in Kokiraki! Not sure why they couldn’t before, but I’m not their boss, and I’m not going to question their logic now.

Admittedly we did have to make Arzias agree to stay in the hold to not freak out our crew, but it didn’t take much to get her to be okay with it. “Me stay out of way,” she’d said. “Just need food. Me like the hold. It nice and quiet!” Which made things simple, although every couple days or so I’d get an update from the crew about “food disappearances”, which…okay, yeah, that was a bit of a complication, but I mean, I wasn’t exactly a pro at smuggling people at this point. Heck even now, I’m not fully convinced we got away without anyone in the crew learning about her down there. I’m guessing any crew members that found her down there chose not to say anything. I’d be more surprised if nobody found her than I would be if someone had discovered her little nest and chose not to mention it.

I don’t think I ever quite got used to her…shall we say…extravagant way of eating her meals. She didn’t particularly care if the food was cooked, and she often chose bits that we wouldn’t eat (fish heads, fish eggs, corpses, etc), but the oddest thing was the amount of effort she put into making a meal out of it. I’m not kidding. The first time we saw her about to chow down on that pirate corpse, all decked out in her bib with as nice a table as available, candles to boot, that was…like…her thing. “Food is food, but me want meal when me can,” is how she explained it to me. And to be honest, I’d have almost found it kind of adorable if the sheer variety of food she’d eat in this manner wasn’t so terrifying.

Dining with the crew was a little bit less horrifying. I mean, there certainly were no candlelit dinners, nor were there really bibs, and it’s not like we were eating five-star meals. Heck, we were lucky if we even got dessert, depending on how much Fortuna or Trakban were willing to cook (or how much help they were willing to accept), but the fact that most of what we ate was what most people would consider normal food made a world of difference.

There wasn’t much to say about the way Fortuna ate. I mean, she’s basically human. It’s not like the way she eats is any different from humans. I even asked her once if she could alter her tongue to change the way food tastes to her, and she just shrugged and said, “Alter it to what? I can only really compare my experiences with food against myself. No telling how another species’ taste buds, or even another person’s taste buds, would really impact my sense of taste.”

Trakban is just adorable. I mean, maybe it’s because his hands are huge, but the way he has to delicately handle his silverware is just precious. I made a note to purchase him a set of cooking and eating utensils that would be a proper match for a guy his size at some point. I mean, okay, to be fair, it’s not like his hands are twice that of a human’s or anything extravagant like that, but it looks about as silly as humans or elves using cookware for gnomes or goblins or other smaller races. It’s just a hair too small for him to use it effectively, and more than once I’ve seen him accidentally bend or break spoons while trying to eat with them. He probably wouldn’t appreciate my commentary on the matter, but I’m sure he knows I wouldn’t talk about something like this to embarrass him on purpose. Rather, it’s just showing how much I admire the big guy.

Actually, he probably would find that last bit kinda condescending, if we’re being honest. Like, “Oh, the big bull man thinks he’s people, how adorable!” might be how it comes off, and that’s…not such a good look now that I think about it, but whatever, it’s in ink, and I feel like a lifetime of jabs about my height or the fact that, developmentally, I still kinda looked like a human child in terms of…well…you know…it makes me feel justified in a few jokes, as long as I can keep them more funny than they are offensive.

It’s all about balance. And it’s not an easy balance to find.

As we traveled west in the direction of Plauros, I noticed a shift in the climate. The sun spent most of her days hidden beyond a layer of gray (well, gray and red) clouds. Like what sunlight the Brightdale region got even before the pillar of light descended was blazing compared to this place. Not only that, but during the day, it felt like a constant drizzle was all we had to look forward to, and at night, the air chilled so much that one could see their breath escape into the cold, unforgiving air while breathing. It made me everlastingly grateful for what meager blankets I’d left for myself in the captain’s quarters after sharing them with the crew and my little entourage.

We sailed through about five days’ worth of this, until one day, when a similar pillar of light, this one a kind of earthy brownish yellow, descended upon the horizon in front of us. Evidently the Heroes had succeeded in slaying the vampire and saving the Earth Diamond. As the light descended upon the encroaching bit of land, I wish I could say the clouds above the region dispersed as they had above Brightdale, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Well, sort of. You see, the redness in the sky melted away, leaving a sort of dreary grayness to the skies above. Apparently this is just normal, some places just exist under constant cloud cover and rain, and I can’t begin to describe just how disappointing of a discovery that was.

Still, this raised a few questions regarding the future of our journey, and I called Trakban and Fortuna into my quarters to discuss this. Arzias, seeing people congregating in my quarters, also decided to invite herself along. Because.

“So you have seen the light as well,” Trakban said as he took a seat at a chair near my desk.

“Yeah, about that,” Fortuna began, “if they’ve already killed the vampire and saved the Earth Gem, won’t they be leaving Plauros soon?”

“Probably,” I said, frowning, “but it’s not like we know where they’re off to next. At any rate, we should reach the shore by the end of the day. Surely they won’t have shoved off by then. They’ll probably spend a couple days helping the region adjust to the fact that they just murdered the being in charge of the area. You know, install new rulers, help the citizens rebuild after the battle. We’ll probably be fine if we just keep going to Plauros.

“Right…except,” Fortuna continued, “what exactly is the goal here? I mean, I mainly signed up to help you steal the ship to earn my way out of paying my debt to Khiet.”

“I guess I forgot to tell you…” I sighed. “I’m trying to group up with the Heroes because I want to chronicle their adventures, but from the sound of things they already got their scribe. I didn’t have much of a chance to meet the guy, but he seemed really uninterested in letting the Heroes do their own thing.”

“What do you mean?” Fortuna asked, raising an eyebrow.

“So…when I got jumped by all those goblins and the Heroes saved me, there was another guy that kept badgering them to get a move on on their quest. Said something about them not having time to help every ‘lost child’ or something like that. I dunno. It made me really mad. He was a bard of some kind, though.”

“Huh…interesting,” Fortuna said, folding her arms and gazing off into the distance, before muttering something under her breath. Given some things we’d later come to learn about Fortuna, I’m pretty sure she said, “Maybe it’s him.” She then looked back at me and said in her normal speaking volume, “Okay Ilala, you’ve convinced me. I think I’m gonna follow this little quest through with you.”

“I’ve…convinced you?” I asked, confused.

“Yeah, you’ve convinced me. I want in.”

“But…why though? You’re free. You could have even gotten off back at Brightdale!” I pointed out.

“What can I say? I’m curious to see where this goes.” She put her hands on the back of her head and leaned back. Obviously playing things close to the chest. Even then, I could tell that she wasn’t being fully honest about her motivation for coming with me, but there were just enough variables in the equation I wasn’t ready to question it.

“All right,” I said. “Welcome aboard, in an official sense, I guess.” I chuckled. Little did I know we were going to need all the help we could get as soon as we arrived in Plauros, because although the Heroes slew the vampire that had taken over the region, there was still much work to be done to ensure safety for the people there.