The Blog of Roon

For a one-off of Aryk’s (that’s actually going to go at least one more session), I took back the bow and quiver of Sabra Congreve. The problem at hand: taking out a serious bad dude with a nasty habit of killing whoever’s handy because it feeds his own health and strength. (Yup. Sounds very familiar. And not in a good way.)

Getting him alone was not going to be easy; his own associates kept a sharp eye on him because he’s on a hair trigger. (If only there were such oversight other places…)

For once, I actually came up with a workable plan. We all went to hide ourselves in a convenient alley. One of Aryk’s old school buddies, a (you should forgive the expression; you’ll see why in a moment) whiz at pranks, turned himself invisible and… hit the bad guy with an irresistible call of nature.

I’m so ashamed. Really dreadful of me. But it worked, I must say.

Renate is going to want Emilia Eaglebourne back one of these days. She’s finding out that celebrity has costs.

Luckily for her, the dragons decided not to make an issue of her impertinence after a well-regarded churchman backed her up. (And she was right.) She even managed to extort a minor political concession, though some dragon backchat about it (nobody speaks dragon but dragons, so I don’t know what was said) indicates that something a bit larger than Renate is going on there.

(Personally, I think the dragon backchat went something like, “Little brat. Got me over a barrel. Shame I can’t just eat her.” But I’m a bit jaundiced about Dragonhunt dragons.)

Aryk had an extremely curious talk with a churchman (same one who backed Renate up) about the young lady who showed up in his prologue and appeared again during the last zombie fight in the village. I sense some highly intriguing plot coming from that direction.

And then it was back to Ilium, for a wearying heroes’ welcome, a terrible nightmare for Rien that led to a waking nightmare for Renate, some living-arrangement shifts… and then, finally, the Four Rs got to keep a promise they made themselves and go dancing.

They had a lovely time. And we had a lovely time writing about their lovely time. A lovely time was had by all, basically. I can’t explain it. You had to be there. But it was lovely. Though I think Aryk is beginning to suspect what Caraggio LaPlace already does: that Renate and Rien are becoming something more than friends. Me? I have no comment on that score. There’s plot down that road too…

A soberer matter followed: a funeral for the murdered Reicherts. The Four Rs paid their respects, of course. Irrepressible Renate busily set Godfrey up with one of the surviving Reicherts, as well as setting in motion (she hopes) the rehabilitation of the reputation of the Thieves’ Guildmaster they saved from the bounty hunt.

And next time, accompanied by a Lan’yarian investigator whose irrepressibility trumps even Renate’s, the Four Rs go to war against the invading foreign crime syndicate.

In the meantime, I’m giggling my way through writing a society-page puff-piece about Renate, the kind of thing that’ll haunt her when she’s eighty (she should live so long to begin with).

Rennie’s a mouthy brat sometimes. Gets it from her player.

After the Four Rs (Renate, Rien, R-yk, and Ricard) disposed (with considerable help) of Public Enemies numbers One and Two, who had escaped the general carnage of the bounty hunt to terrorize a nearby village of noncombatants, all the bounty hunters came to town on the double to congratulate them—along with two dragons, one of whom is responsible for the disgusting bounty-hunt spectacle in the first place.

Practically the first words out of Renate’s mouth were an open rebuke. Not cricket to endanger noncombatants pointlessly, don’t you know. End game session on cliffhanger; the dragon’s reply is next week’s opening. Imagine a grimy, disheveled little wren bobbing her tail angrily and cheeping defiance to an immense, powerful silver-striped bronze cat with lazy, amused eyes, and you have some idea.

She’s right, of course, and she won’t back down even though the dragon in question is also her feudal lord. Still. It wasn’t politic. (Not that being politic would have gotten her anywhere, really.) She has an uncomfortable feeling the cat’s paw is going to come down at some point, but (here’s that hero streak again) better on her than the villagers.

What can I say? Sometimes you gotta stand up and take your lumps for doing the right thing. (I’ve got a couple of run-ins with my previous employer running on a loop in my head now. The moral situations and power disparities were, shall we say, not dissimilar.) I wish I could do it with the same dispatch and conviction as my little Rennie—but I will say that I have learned a bit about how to be politic in the last few years, and the lessons were worthwhile.