>>5198617>>5198797>>5199089You decide it is about time to check in on Lord Yosef. old, ennobled merchant is many things to you: the target of your Dark Gods’ eternal ire for his descent from the man who financed the crusade which toppled their champion; ‘V. Rilney’, the anonymous author who wrote a half-baked treatise about the very-real conspiracy of your Reptilian race to subvert and supplant surface society; your father’s father, driven to the precipice of madness by grief over your human parent’s untimely demise. Most relevant to your immediate situation, he is also a friend of the Archmage, and the one responsible for persuading him of the possibility of shapeshifting and inhuman agents in Hawksong… And, as you never got around to stealing or breaking them, he is still in possession of rare and valuable Glasses of True Sight.
You take possession of the halfling female who serves as cook to Lord Isaac Yosef: a Malalyn Warmfeet, she informs you when you take control and ask.
“Huh?” one of her fellow kitchen-staff asks.
“Pardon?” she replies, equally bewildered.
“You just stood up all stiff and said your name, like…” the other staffer, a fellow halfling female, imitates standing at attention, and says: “‘Malalyn Warmfeet’, like that. It was super weird.”
“Oh, I was… Just reminding myself to focus. Like when your parents say your full name, you know?”
You wait until the cook is able to make an excuse to exit to kitchen to ask her further questions: what has been happening, and what does she know about the events transpiring in Hawksong? And what ahs transpired between Yosef and Archmage?
“I’m not privy to all the little details,” she says, leaning forward to whisper despite your lack of actual physical presence in the bathroom with her. “I only know that some Paladins were murdered—PALADINS!—and another noble’s house bruned down, like that poor woman and the wererats that The Gray Press talked about. Oh, and that Master Yosef and The Archmage are meeting for breakfast RIGHT now!”
‘What?!’
“Well, more properly a second breakfast, given the requested food and timing, but you know how imprecise humans are about meal etiquette and terminology.”
‘He’ss there right now?’ you send, refocusing her attention on the salient details.
This halfling—Malalyn, you suppose, nods enthusiastically, causing your view through her eyes to bob up and down.
“How am I supposed to compete with MAGICAL cooking?” she demands. “I already know he’s going to be disappointed with my h'ordeuvres, I just KNOW it!”
You have bigger concerns than h'ordeuvres, to say the least. Still, this presents an opportunity.
