[18e04] Tailin' Taelin

I’m so excited I start flapping my wings like a hummingbird. I know these guys! “Noffindorfs! It’s them!” I call down to Bec, as quietly as I can. Nobody noticed anything. I’m sneaky! =D

The three rainbow guys proceed through the office and are greeted by Taelin. I can’t hear a thing inside. They go upstairs.

That seems like a good opportunity to head down and tell Bec what’s going on. She’s even heard of the Noffindorfs. They sure are well-gnome! Hehehe.

Once I’m done filling in Bec, I fly back up to see if I can listen through the windows up there. I can still smell the coffee pot out here, but I’m pretty much down-window, hehehe.

Meanwhile, across the street, Oz and Freki are watching the entrance to see who’s coming and going. Suddenly there’s a scraping sound behind them. It’s Vex, with food.

Vondal wonders where Bec and I are, and gets something like a psychic flash that reveals where we are, and in relation, where Kerwin is and how he is accompanied by gnomes. Kerwin, it turns out, even feels stinky. That’s really some curse, that coffee pot curse. Vondal sends a message to Bec, who replies telling him that the Noffindorfs are in there with Kerwin.

While he’s doing WORK, Freki and Oz tuck into the food. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?!

But you know, Oz is a hobbit and Freki is hungry like the wolf, so they just start eating.

Vex starts explaining the food. It starts with “saltbreak,” the foundation of the meal. It’s salty, but there’s a hint of the air before a storm. There are a variety of dishes, including “cold ember broth” and brimstone pickles. Why are they on this date with Vex, and not me? Unfair!

Obviously, I am not enjoying any of this, as I’m straining my ears to hear what’s happening in Kerwin’s office. “We are prepared to make you a substantial offer. We understand your reluctance to part with the artifact, but as it so happens, we have a personal interest in this and are prepared to double our previous offer. With this you could retire and live comfortably for the rest of your life. And in addition, we can offer you a cure?”

Kerwin thinks the very idea is preposterous, but the Noffindorfs claim they never fail at their endeavors. Kerwin wants his contracts expert to look at it. “Taelin! Get in here!” he calls.

The green Noffindorf was trembling slightly when they placed the contract. From the indigo girl (hehe) I sense something like desperation.

Taelin comes in and says “Yes?” She sounds…strange. She looks like she’s about to cry. Her eyes are moist. And yet, beneath the tears…she’s furious. My estimation of her improves, and I also feel bad for her. We’ve got to get her out of this. She flips the pages like a speed reader and declares it perfect.

“Wow, a ringing endorsement! That’s very rare from you, Taelin!” says Kerwin, and reads a couple of pages. “I’ve seen enough. No deal.”

“What do you mean no deal? This is an offer that we cannot improve upon. Surely you understand that.”

Kerwin does indeed, but he doesn’t want it. He would be interested to know if they can prove they can cure his condition. The Noffindorfs can barely contain their rage at being refused, but they leave without violence.

All of a sudden in the quiet, I realize there’s a flapping sound. One of my wings is hitting the wall! Oh no!!! Kerwin stands up and whirls around, scrutizing the space where I would obviously be if I were visible. Y-i-i-i-k-e-s!

Kerwin starts whistling. It sounds purposeful, but not necessarily loud. Nothing happens. He says “Stupid imps!” and closes the window, locking it. Ooh, that’s a good cover for me. If anyone asks, that was an imp in the back alley and not someone with no stealth skill whatsoever. The odor from the coffee pot lessens after the window shuts.

Across the street, Vondal notes that the rainbow gnomes have left the building looking dejected. Bec tells him telepathically that Kerwin came to the window and closed it. She doesn’t know whether he saw me or not. But it’s only moments before I’m on the ground. I quickly fill her in, and we wonder if maybe Taelin would like a drink or seven. I bet she would!

Vondal and co. watch the Noffindorfs get in their vehicle. It has cool doors that open up somehow. Wild! The boys are getting ready to follow it, when it suddenly collapses in on itself and vanishes without a trace. Vondal updates Bec that they have departed this plane of existence.

Bec tells him that we have a plan. If Taelin comes out, tail her. They will be tailin’ Taelin. We’re going to get her liquored up and find out of what she needs to unburden herself. “Bec’s plan is to seduce Sad Woman with alcohol and get her to spill her boss’s secrets.” I mean, it sounds kinda dumb when you say it like that, but this is a solid plan!

I fly back up to see where Taelin is. Kerwin bellows for her attendance again. She’s sitting at her desk, looking at a sheet of paper. She stands up, opens a drawer in her desk, and pulls out a little bag that she ties to her belt. She walks resolutely to the stairs.

I follow her up, naturally, and fly around to the window that’s still open. Now she’s wearing a mask that covers her mouth and nose.

Kerwin is confused about why she’s wearing a mask. She says the harbor mask is aggravating her lungs. The mask looks like a leather and brass safety mask. Even so,

He tells her the contract had defects, and as an expert, she should have known better. So why did she give him blatant bad advice? They’re staring daggers at each other. I lean forward and my nose touches the glass. I quickly move back.

She thinks it would be good for him to take the deal. He tells her she should stay professional. She says this is the kind of contract he’s been waiting for. He’s disappointed, sure, but he doesn’t believe they can follow through on their promises. They back-and-forth a bit, and he refuses to part with the coffee pot for even a single day. She looks disappointed, but resolute. She pulls out a knife and stabs him straight in the chest.

Vondal tells Bec that nothing’s going on out front. Nobody’s come out yet.

A gross yellow ooze comes out of the wound. She wipes the knife on him, resheaths the knife, and puts it back in the little bag. “Holy crap holy crap holy crap! I really did it! I gotta get out of here!” She grabs the coffee pot and stuffs it into the bag.

(“Telling dad jokes without being a father is a real…faux pa” says Nate, out of game. “What do you call an alligator in a vest? An in-vesti-gator” says Allen. I just wanted to note that.)

I flap the hell back to the ground, while Bec and Vondal make plans to follow Taelin.

She tries to tell me the guys are tailin’ Taelin, but I interrupt to tell him Taelin killed him! She killed Kerwin! Stabbed him right in the chest! Bec still wants to go through with the plan. OK! Coolcoolcool!

With Vondal’s direction, we work our way through the streets to intercept Taelin “by accident.” Freki and Oz follow on the rooftops. Freki notices Vex slipping around a corner.

Bec makes herself visible again and goes over to talk to Taelin. “Heeeeeyyyyy gurl!” she says.

Taelin jumps. “What are you doing here?” she demands.

Bec says we came back to see her, because she was so pleasant before. Would she care for a drink?

About this time, it occurs to me, I may have been able to help Kerwin. Maybe. He did seem awfully dead.

Taelin tries to say it’s been a long day and maybe another time, but I jump in and ask if she could show us a good place for a drink. “Oh, this isn’t the right part of town for that! Not for people like us,” says Taelin, and adds that we should keep moving. Weird for a legit business to be located in a shady area, but I guess it isn’t exactly a legit business.

Oz artlessly falls off a building into the street in front of us. He wants drinks too! He mentions how each bar seems to have a color theme, which reminds him he’s still dressed like Kerwin, haha. As soon as he changes his clothes, Taelin visibly exhales.

“Where did you come from?” Taelin asks hesitantly.

Then Freki pops out of nowhere, like that helps. “We were just playing this game, because he’s so small…I just throw him as hard as I can. We call it jumpy-tossy.”

“What do you want from me?” she asks, now sounding genuinely perplexed.

Bec says we wanted to make sure she’s okay, since her work environment is awkward.”

“It’s not awkward at all, I love my job,” she says smoothly.

“Are there any more of you?” she asks, as we get underway again.

“We do have a man in a hole,” says Oz. Freki opens up the portable hole and Vondal crawls out.

Vondal introduces himself.

On our way, Oz smoothly sidles up to her and tries Panache. Honestly, it rarely fails. And yet…it fails. She says she’d tooooootally love to…some other time. Denied! LOL. LMAO. Hey, it happens to all guys sometimes!

Bec is attuned to magic that causes emotions in others, and she studied the cursed carafe. She knows, and none of the rest of us notice, that Taelin has kind of a shield against this kind of charm.

“We have to keep him talking!” Bec whispers to Vondal, through their secret telepathy.

“Ow! Ow! I was in that hole so long I pulled a hammy!” Vondal groans.

While Taelin is leaning over Vondal trying to help, Bec tells Oz why his Panache failed.

“Hold my spider!” says Vondal, handing Murky (in spider form) to her.

She’s surprisingly charmed by Murky, once she’s assured that it doesn’t bite.

Bec suggests that I heal Vondal. Oh yeah, that is what I do. I make a big show out of it. In the name of AVANDRA, be GONE, ye minions of hamstring pain! Vondal is still hamming it up, so Freki just picks him up and throws him over a shoulder.

At this point, Bec could really use a drink, as could I. Probably Taelin too, if we’re being honest.

A shady-looking man steps out of the shadows and says, “I know of a good bar, sweetheart. Want me to show you?”

The night took a dramatic turn when three of the Noffindorfs—infamous gnome magical architects in bright colored cloaks—arrived at Kerwin’s office building via a magical bubble vehicle and made a desperate pitch to purchase a mysterious artifact, offering double their previous bid and a promised cure for Kerwin’s condition. Callie observed the meeting invisibly from outside the window while Ozborn, Freki, Vondal, and their SPI contact Vex Morradine kept watch from a nearby rooftop. Kerwin refused the deal, skeptical of the cure and unwilling to give up the magical carafe, and the Noffindorfs departed disappointed—their vehicle vanishing instantly, foiling any attempt to follow. Shortly after, Callie witnessed a swift and irreversible act: Taelin, Kerwin’s own associate, pleaded one final time for him to accept the deal and abandon the carafe, and when he refused, she drove a dagger through his chest, wiped the blade clean, and slipped the carafe into her bag before walking out without a second glance.

The party scrambled to intercept Taelin as she exited the building, with Ozborn making a dramatically intentional rooftop dismount and Freki managing a far less graceful descent via drainpipe. Bec and Callie staged a casual street encounter with Taelin, while Ozborn attempted to use his supernatural charm on her—only for Bec to observe the magic deflect off an invisible mental barrier already wrapped around Taelin’s mind. To buy time for the protection to fade, Vondal feigned a leg cramp, used his familiar Murky in spider form to distract Taelin, and Callie launched into an elaborate theatrical healing performance that left Taelin wide-eyed and convinced. The group fell into step beside her through the dark streets of Trell, keeping up the ruse and waiting for her mental defenses to dissolve—all while knowing full well that she had just committed murder and that the stolen carafe was sitting in the bag at her hip.

The night took a sharp turn when a magical bubble vehicle glided silently up to Kerwin’s office building and disgorged three short, cloaked figures onto the street. Each wore a different color—yellow, green, and indigo—and moved with the implicit arrogance of people who had never once doubted their own importance. After the last of them stepped out, the indigo-cloaked figure raised a hand and the vehicle shrank impossibly into their palm, vanishing as though it had never existed. Callie, hovering invisibly outside the upper windows, recognized them immediately: the Noffindorfs, the infamous gnome magical architects whose rainbow cloaks were known across the world. She whisper-shouted the name down to her ally Bec below, whose sharp ears caught it, her memory supplying the rest—these were brilliant, obsessive craftspeople who worked for anyone with the right price and a sufficiently interesting challenge, and at least one of them was known to specialize in ciphers and codes.

Across the street, perched on a rooftop with a commanding view of the building’s entrance, Ozborn, Freki, and Vondal had been keeping watch when their SPI contact Vex Morradine scaled the three-story wall with breathtaking ease and set down a bag of food. Vondal hauled himself up after, managing the climb competently if not gracefully, and the group found themselves treated to an elaborate spread of Trellian cuisine—saltbrick flatbread with a faint metallic undertone, cold ember broth made from roasted bones and mineral water, brimstone pickles cured in sulfurous spring water, char-pressed fish from the cold deep waters around Minauros, and harbor devil eggs topped with fermented red bite pepper paste. Vex narrated each dish with the gravity of a sommelier while Ozborn ate everything within reach, and Vondal politely declined most of it in favor of his more familiar dwarven palate. Meanwhile, Vondal reached out through a whispered magical message to Bec, relaying that three gnomes had entered the building to meet with someone singular, bizarre, and strangely compelling.

Inside Kerwin’s private fourth-floor office, the Noffindorfs made their pitch. The indigo-cloaked figure spoke with an intensity that bordered on desperation, offering Kerwin double their previous bid for a mysterious artifact and sweetening the deal with a promised cure for his condition. The green-cloaked Noffindorf produced a thick sheaf of contract papers, and Kerwin summoned Taelin to review the legal details. Callie, pressing close to the cracked window to hear, observed Taelin’s face with unsettling clarity—tears glittered in her eyes, and beneath them burned a barely contained fury. She reviewed the contract rapidly and urged Kerwin to accept, but he refused, citing skepticism about the promised cure and his unwillingness to relinquish control of the magical carafe. The Noffindorfs left the contract behind and shuffled out looking disappointed, their magical vehicle imploding into nothingness the moment they were all inside, vanishing before anyone could think to follow.

The party’s brief plan to send their familiars—Caesar the monkey and Murky the spider—after the departing vehicle collapsed the moment it disappeared. Kerwin, meanwhile, had risen from his desk and walked to the window, staring out into the night with an unsettling intensity, his gaze passing almost directly over Callie’s invisible form. He let out a strange, escalating whistle before muttering something about stupid imps and locking the window shut. Callie, who had accidentally brushed a wing against the wall moments earlier, held perfectly still until he turned away. She then floated back up to the fourth-story window just in time to watch Taelin stride back into the office wearing an industrial leather and brass half-mask over her nose and mouth.

What followed was brief and irreversible. Kerwin berated Taelin for endorsing a contract he found defective, and she pleaded with him one last time to accept the deal, to put the carafe aside, to try to become more normal again. He refused, insisting the artifact’s effects on him were already permanent. Taelin went quiet for a moment, then said softly that he left her no choice at all. She drew a dagger from the small bag at her belt, and in one smooth motion drove it through his chest. Kerwin deflated slowly, yellow bile oozing from the wound as the air left him. Taelin wiped the blade clean on his clothing, sheathed it, and then opened her bag wide enough to slip the magical carafe inside, cinching it shut before striding out of the office without looking back.

Callie descended in a rush and relayed what she had witnessed to Bec, who immediately began coordinating the group. Vondal sent word to the rooftop team that Taelin was leaving the building, and the party scrambled to intercept her. Ozborn launched himself off the rooftop in a series of enthusiastic backflips before using his enchanted ring to drop the remaining distance to the street, landing in a dramatic pose that he absolutely intended. Freki attempted to leap between buildings, fell short, caught a drainpipe, and shimmied down to the ground with considerably less flair. Vondal was retrieved from a portable hole and the group reassembled on the street just as Taelin emerged from the building’s entrance.

Bec and Callie staged a casual encounter, pretending they had simply hoped to run into her outside of work. Taelin seemed guarded but not immediately suspicious, warning them that the local taverns were not suitable for people like them and offering to lead them somewhere better. Ozborn fell into step beside her and turned on his full supernatural charm, but something was wrong—her posture didn’t shift the way it always did when his gift took hold. Bec, watching closely, saw the arcane energies of his charm wash over Taelin and strike an invisible barrier, a custom-tailored magical protection actively wrapped around her mind. It was already fading, but it hadn’t broken yet.

Vondal, understanding the need to stall without being told, suddenly doubled over with a dramatic leg cramp, drawing Taelin’s genuine concern. He then placed Murky—currently in spider form—onto her outstretched hand as a distraction. Callie seized the moment to perform an elaborate theatrical healing over Vondal, invoking divine authority with sweeping gestures and solemn proclamations, and Taelin watched the whole spectacle with wide eyes, apparently convinced. The group continued walking together through the dark streets of Trell, waiting for the magical barrier around Taelin’s mind to dissolve completely, none of them letting on that they knew exactly what she had done in that office—or that the carafe she had stolen was sitting in the bag at her hip.

Last we left off, our party found themselves deep in the shadowed streets of Trell, keeping a careful vigil on the office building of one Kerwin Ulvas—a singular and unsettling figure whose connection to a mysterious magical carafe had drawn the attention of powerful forces. From rooftop and window alike, the group watched as three gnomish figures in colored cloaks—the infamous Noffindorfs, magical architects of considerable renown—arrived in a vehicle that vanished like smoke and made their pitch to Kerwin directly, offering double their previous bid and the promise of a cure for his condition. He refused them, and they departed disappointed, their vehicle imploding into nothing before anyone could give chase.

What none of them were prepared for was what came next. Callie, hovering invisibly at the fourth-floor window, bore silent witness as Kerwin’s own assistant Taelin—tears in her eyes and fury barely contained beneath them—made one final plea for him to let go of the carafe and step back from the edge of whatever he had become. When he refused, she drove a dagger through his chest with quiet, terrible resolve, wiped the blade clean, slipped the carafe into her bag, and walked out of the building without a backward glance.

Now the party has reassembled on the street below, falling into step beside Taelin with carefully constructed smiles and a spider, a theatrical healing, and a supernatural charm that has not quite found its purchase—not yet. They walk together through the dark city, waiting, watching, and holding their breath, knowing full well that the woman beside them is a killer, and that the stolen artifact swings gently at her hip with every step she takes…

Three gnomes in bright cloaks came to call,
Their bubble-car shrank to nothing at all.
They offered a cure,
But Kerwin said “Sure—no,”
And the Noffindorfs left down the hall.

Poor Taelin had tears in her eyes,
Beneath them burned fury in disguise.
She begged him to quit,
He refused every bit,
So she stabbed him and took her prize.

Callie watched from the window above,
Then dove down to warn those she loved.
Ozborn flipped off the roof,
Freki gave us the proof
That drainpipes beat grace push-comes-to-shove.

Ozborn turned on his charm with a grin,
But the magic just couldn’t get in—
A ward on her mind
Left his gift far behind,
Though its edges were wearing quite thin.

Now they walk through the dark streets of Trell,
With a murderer under their spell—
Well, almost in place,
With a spider-like grace,
And a carafe they’re not meant to tell.

When last we left our intrepid group of definitely-not-suspicious loiterers, they were staking out an office building in Trell while eating what can only be described as a sulfur-forward charcuterie board, courtesy of their SPI contact Vex. The evening’s entertainment included three color-coded gnome architects arriving in a magic bubble car, one (1) dramatic assassination witnessed through a cracked window, and Ozborn doing backflips off a roof because of course he did. Freki also attempted a rooftop leap, caught a drainpipe, and we will leave it at that.

Now the whole gang is casually strolling through the city streets next to Taelin—who has just murdered her boss and stolen a magical artifact and is absolutely not acting weird about it—while they wait for the invisible brain-shield around her mind to wear off so Ozborn’s charm can actually work. It’s fine. Everything is fine. The spider was a nice touch.