diary

[cellio]

Aug 11 (Wednesday)

Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I stayed in the inn Tuesday night. Everyone else did, and I was feeling a little too tipsy to walk home anyway. Jehan fed us breakfast, and then I noticed that Colm (that's the merchant) had set up his shop nearby.

He has a big mix of stuff. He did have some pretty bracelets and necklaces (and a ring) for not too much money -- well, not too much after we haggled for a while -- so I bought some. He also had some very pretty fabric, much nicer than the stuff we weave here. It's not wool, either; I think it's probably silk. I bought enough to make a couple shirts and a gown.

While I was shopping a woman with flowers in her hair and a wolf came in. She had another short guy with her, too. (Come to think of it, we never did see the two who fell through the floor with us after that night. This was definitely a different one. Grumpier. Maybe he's not a morning person.) They apparently just arrived in town and missed all the excitement, so Colm and I told the story again. Some of the other people who were there wandered into the shop, too. Liandra (the flower-lady) asked if we were going to go after the rat-men and most of us said yes, so she and her friend (Kyle) offered to join us. That sounded like a fine idea, especially as our cleric was nowhere to be found and Liandra said she knows about healing.

So anyway, we all got some gear together in the morning, and then we headed down through the hole in Jehan's floor. We found a tunnel leading to Jehan's store-room, and it's obvious that the rat-men have been stealing food and covering their tracks. We told Jehan about that later and he plugged up the hole.

There was a passage leading out from the "room" we fell into, so we followed it. We found a wall with a stone door (!) and spent a while trying to open it. While we were doing this, three rat-men (a patrol?) approached us from the other end of the hall and attacked. We killed two of them, but the third got away.

We decided that the still-unopened door could wait, and we headed down the hall in pursuit of rat-men.

We got ambushed. Badly. There were like a dozen rat-men, and one of them was doing all sorts of acrobatics and seemed to somehow always get behind one of us no matter what we did. Things got ugly. We did what we could; Prolix and I got off some spells to damage them, and Turok was making mince-meat of a bunch of them with that mucking big sword of his. I've never seen someone cut two opponents in half with a single blow before. But there were too many of them, and the last thing I remember from the fight is being gutted with a spear and thinking that now I know what my intestines look like.

I woke up much later in a bed in the tavern. Liandra told me we got everyone out and she healed the three of us who fell, but we'd need a bit of bed rest yet. I was really sore, so I wasn't about to argue with her. I fell back to sleep pretty quickly, and it was after breakfast when I woke up this morning. Not that breakfast sounded particularly appealing anyway.

Liandra says we're going to wait another day at least, and she cast some healing spells on me. So now I only feel sore and tired, not queasy.

But I can sit up and write now, and soon I'm going to practice some more with magic. I'm pretty good at moving a single object; I wonder if I can do two at a time.