Kay’s Journal - 6/10/22
We get to the tent city after finishing off the dinosaur. The residents aren’t hostile, but they are distrustful – usually people dressed like us show up to cause trouble. Pujol starts playing his harp to try to improve the mood, and it helps. People begin to gather around Pujol, and more residents emerge from their tents.
Gooseneck helps Margaret hand out soup. CornCob surveys the crowd, looking for people who stick out. He sees a couple people who might be smugglers. Fathom keeps an ear open for people talking about Bentor. I look around the camp with the goggles, and see one magical tent. It looks like it has magic similar to a bag of holding; maybe it’s bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside, or maybe it rolls up very small.
CornCob goes to talk to the maybe smugglers. He has trouble placing their accents. They ask if he’s sailing; he says yes. They ask if he’s looking for goods or labor. CornCob tells them we’re doing exploration and research – well, not here, right here we’re just on shore leave – but that’s what the ship is doing overall. They agree to talk some more over some wine. CornCob gets Gooseneck to go with him for the conversation.
Fathom and I go to look at the slaad brothers’ ex-tent. Margaret takes us to a small red tent. It’s just tall enough to stand up in, but no more. Fathom asks how they decide who gets what tent, and they just distribute what’s available to those who need one.
Margaret knocks, tells the resident of the tent that supper is ready, and then asks if we can look around the tent. He’s fine with it; he doesn’t actually seem to care at all. We ask him if the last residents left anything behind, and he points us to a small piece of cloth that he put in a chest. We look around inside the tent. It’s pretty bare in there – two cots, a chest, a tiny table, two stumps that would do for seating, and a weaving project of some kind that’s been done poorly. Bedding has been hung up so that bugs/snakes can’t get in there.
We open the chest and see the cloth. It’s about the size of a beach towel, maybe 4’ x 2.5’. There’s a lotus pattern woven into the cloth. Every third petal has been dyed after the weaving was done. Fathom leaves the guy 10 silver and takes the cloth.
Pujol wraps up his song. A 5-6 year old kid come up to check him, and the harp, out. Pujol plays some kid songs.
Gooseneck and CornCob talk to the maybe-smugglers. The maybe-smugglers seem to be trying to figure Gooseneck and CornCob out. They were hands on a ship, but stopped doing that when they found a better opportunity being ‘porters’ on ships occasionally. Gooseneck asks about the sladd crewmen. They say the brothers were there about a month. They dealt with the brothers a bit; got them some clothes, and they hunted with everyone else. Gooseneck asks if there was anything alarming about them – no. Just one odd thing: they went bathing daily, but didn’t always come back clean. They were looking for long term jobs.
Gooseneck asks if people looking for work go through or around Bentor. They say feelings are mixed. He’s both villain and hero to people here. Some think he wants to see that pay and jobs are fair. Others think they can do better without him. Bentor takes a finder’s fee from the ships captains. Gooseneck asks about hands who don’t want to go through Bentor. We need deckhands and a helmsperson. They know a few candidates for deckhands, but not a helmsperson. They suggest a gnome who lives in the tent city, a fiery lass, maybe a couple others. CornCob brings out a drawing of the tattoos from the guy from the ship who did the rubbing. He asks the maybe-smugglers about it. One of them thinks he’s seen it before, maybe on someone bathing over in the stream by the falls.
Gooseneck sets up a meeting with the candidates. The maybe-smugglers are Sirella and Creanna.
Back in the tent, I look for hiding places. The bed frame has a little makeshift headboard that has a centerpiece. The top of one of the supports as a plug in the top. I get the plug out; it has threads like a screw. Underneath, there’s a hollow with a mildewy piece of parchment. I pull it out; it’s a rolled-up scroll. I tuck it away to look at later.
A young girl comes up to the table; it’s the fiery girl Sirella mentioned. She says her name is Mint and she can tie knots, swab decks, whatever. CornCob offers to introduce her to the captain. Mint wants nothing to do with Bentor, but will be glad to talk to the captain.
The gnome shows up for his interview. He’s smaller than Pujol. Gooseneck says we are looking for a helmsman. The gnome says he can do it. He’s served on 2 or 3 ships. He wants 2.5 copper/day. His name is Trent. Fathom asks him about the guy who’s tent we were searching. Trent thinks he’s fine.
With these two, Ray (the guy from the tent), and the two women from the bar, we have our 5 candidates. Ray is interested. He wants food and to be told what to do. Doesn’t care about the salary. He’s worked on a ship before, the last ship he was on was the Baroness. He’s from the south end of the continent. Where he’s from the sea is teal, then gets dark and stays that way.
We ask Margaret about the slaad brothers and the bathing. She says they went a couple times a day, but she didn’t pay much attention. Most people bathe by the falls.
I look at the scroll with the goggles. There’s a series of five distinct areas with magic runes. With regular light, there’s a labyrinth detailed out in charcoal. It looks like the stuff was added on over time. It looks like there’s at least one rune per different type of ink. The runes do correlate to the colored sections of lotus flowers in the towel. There also seems to be an unmapped/missing section on the scroll.
The labyrinth looks like an amateur map. It looks like the entrance to the labyrinth in near the waterfalls. All the various markings are in the same hand – one person drew it all.
In the morning, we take our candidates to meet the captain. We go along the t-rex path rather than through the town. The captain talks to them. We show the map to Morgot and see if he wants to come along, and he’s up for it. Morgot thinks the lotus towel is some kind of code.
We have Morgot transcribe the runes and lotus stuff to show to Brooks. Maybe she’ll have an idea what it is. Fathom looks at the runes. They are not written in infernal, but each one refers to a layer of the Abyss. The map maker thought of the places as layers of hell, whether or not it really aligns to that.
We go ask Brooks about the symbols from the map. Tell her we stumbled across them. Then we describe the lotus and ask if there’s any correlation. She doesn’t have anything obvious. Then we ask about the tattoos as well. One of the tattoos was a rose. Then we show her the towel. She tells us about lotus symbology, lotus = rebirth, separation from the dirty parts of the world.
The colored parts of the lotus is different shades of green. CornCob’s religious experience doesn’t include this particular lotus symbology.
The towel does look like it could be an infant or child blanket, and the lotus symbol was rebirth?
We go back to the hot springs to talk to Margaret. We ask her about the runes – any local legends of note? She tells us the ruins around are from ancient lizardfolk. The ones by the T-Rex were a temple. They are now very incomplete. There are more ruins inland. Hundreds of years ago, a great lizardfolk tribe lived here. It’s not known why they left. Margaret might be able to lead us to some other ruins. She says there are some by the bathing falls as well.
We go to the waterfall. We think the entrance to the labyrinth must be close. I see a piton up in a rock in the waterfall – I think it’s about half way up. Morgot agrees. He thinks the labyrinth is behind the waterfall.
Pujol thinks they might have climbing and/or other gear stowed around. We search for any hidden equipment. CornCob finds it at the bottom of the pool under the waterfall. There’s a chest wrapped in oil cloth. We open the chest and find a key carved out of stone. There’s lots of metal in the stone, like an ore of some kind. It is magnetic. The carving is definitely lizardfolk in origin. The key doesn’t point to anywhere down here.
We try to find a way to the top of the waterfall. There’s a roundabout path that would get to the top, but it would take a while. A good climber would be able to climb faster. Fathom casts Fly on Gooseneck, who goes up to where the piton is. He ties a rope off to it. He also sees an area where we could climb in behind that waterfall. It looks like people have traversed that path. Gooseneck goes back there and finds the remnants of a carved platform. There’s a lizardman mouth carved in the wall that looks like the perfect size to stick an arm into. The opening for the key is in there. Gooseneck reaches in and puts the key in the lock. The door starts to open.
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