Rolled 4, 10, 19, 18 = 51 (4d20)
>>5281441>Vote 1: keep the scroll (per roll), ask about the goddessYou resist the urge to look down at the scroll-case, still unopened in your bag, as you button it back up. The Priestess doesn’t notice it either, and if she did… Well, she has no reason to suspect where you got it, or what it might contain. Just to play it safe, you decide to distract her by sating your curiosity.
“You know, I have very little familiarity with your patron deity, despite her auspicious title,” you admit.
“Ah, I suppose the Dragonborn WOULD have a great interest in the Mother of Dragons, wouldn’t you?” she acknowledges.
‘More like Mother of Bugs,’ you think to yourself, though you nod respectfully.
“Our Lady is a keeper and preserver of life,” the Serpent Priestess explains. “In these dark days, when infertility is increasingly a problem and our people are isolated and scattered, she alone can grant us fertility, mitigate the deleterious effects of intra-clan breeding so that we can maintain our castes’ wondrous array of diverse skills…”
“She is also a goddess of home defence, is she not?” you ask.
The Serpent priestess nods enthusiastically. The crowd you have gathered turns their attention to her sermonizing, drawn by you but now captivated by her tales of great defensive battles and struggles to survive against the endless waves of fast-breeding surface scum… Of rookeries whose defenders fought off armies to preserve clutches of eggs which contained great leaders and heroes.
“One must wonder if a wonder like YOURSELF could even feasibly exist without her blessing,” The Serpent Priestess concludes.
You bow your head, accepting the compliment… But all this talk of racial purity, surface-mammal scum, and of the Lady of the Rookery defending all of Reptiliankind against the degeneracy above draws uncomfortable looks from the few Degenerate half-mammals—mostly half-humans, dark-skinned and visiting from your people’s Southern holdings—cannot help but give you conflicting feelings. After all, are you not TECHNCIALLY a Degenerate yourself? Besides, and far more importantly, are you not DRAGON? Where was this goddess when the last clutch of dragon eggs was smashed by barbarians, laves to the False ‘Gods’ of Light?
You raise the question politely, and the Serpent Priestess casts her gaze upwards and clasps her hands, as if praying to intercede for your youthful impetuousness with the Goddess.
“Young One,” she says benevolently, “you know that the Dark Gods do not give ‘gifts’. They make promises only in exchange for other promises. They help those who help themselves. Charity is weakness and foolishness, buying false strength and temporary advantage while breeding weakness.”
You nod. This is dogma, and you know it well.
“Then we will have to make ourselves worthy,” you say. “All of us, proving our worth to the Dark Gods… And Goddesses! ALL of The Lady’s beloved children…”
