Editing Journal 1: Aid in Lilingbroke (section)

== 23 Lowspring 807 ==
Yesterday, we were told that our job today is to guard the diplomat's carriage while they negotiate with the mayor and the Ork leaders about land and water rights to avoid war. When we came out of the inn, the meeting was already starting. We saw the orks going into the meeting hall, and there was a large crowd of villagers yelling and throwing things at them. There seems to be some bad blood between the humans and halflings of the town and the orks. I hope they can come to an agreement. Now that the meeting has started, the crowd is starting to thin out. I am sitting here by the carriage, making sure no one touches it, but Glendower keeps going on and on about something being wrong. She doesn't trust the orks or the diplomats, she keeps saying that someone is hiding something. I've mostly been tuning it out while she convinces Aalari that she's right. She even tried opening the carriage, but there's some kind of electric trap on the door handle and she got zapped. Serves her right. Our job is to protect the carriage, not break into it. Her suspicions are getting out of hand. Now she's on the roof of the meeting hall and waving her hands at me. I guess it can't hurt to go over there and see what she wants.

Something very tragic just happened. Glendower convinced me to go up to the roof with her, and Aalari walked away from the carriage to watch us. Glendower pried up a roof tile so she could listen in on the meeting, and, as expected, they're talking about land rights, but she won't let this go. She keeps saying people are missing from the meeting, but we can only see a tiny piece of the room. While we weren't watching the carriage, a villager tried to get into it. He was caught by the electricity trap and his hand got stuck. I got off the roof and ran over to him as fast as I could, but by the time I got there, the trap had killed him. This was our fault. If we had been doing our jobs and watched the carriage, that poor man would still be alive. I don't know what Glendower's problem is, but I'm tired of her seeing conspiracies everywhere. From now on, I do my job and watch the carriage. Maybe I can convince these three mercenaries who are riding into town right now to help me, since my teammates won't. Wait, did they just say something about lighting the meeting house on fire?

False alarm. Sort of. I talked to the mercenaries. They aren't planning anything, they just don't trust the orcs. They think they're going to betray the townsfolk, but I'm sure they're wrong. As we went to the tavern, we were joined by the half-ork Bula from the guild. When we left, we couldn't find her, so we went without her, but apparently she ran all the way here to catch up with us. She went into the tavern with us as we followed the three mercenaries. Before we could get much out of them, we were interrupted by two of the Otorok orks coming in for a drink. The mercenaries didn't like them being here, and we had to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. Once that was settled, I left the girls inside to try to get some information out of the orks while I went back to watch the carriage. But something strange happened out here. I saw another farmer going to try to open the carriage door, but when I jumped up to stop him, it turned out to be the mayor dressed in farmer's clothes. When I asked him what he was doing, he avoided the question and made up an excuse to walk away. I followed him for a bit, but he was just shaking hands and sucking up to the farmers around the town. But eventually, he circled back to the square and tried to open the carriage again. I had to stop him again, and this time he actually ran away. I think Glendower might have the right idea, but she's focusing on the wrong people. There's clearly something shady about the mayor. Once the mayor was gone, I noticed that our cart and Steve the donkee were gone. I followed the cart tracks until they left the road and led into a small copse of trees. That's where I found the cart, but Steve was gone. I marked his tracks so I could come back and find him later and went back to the town square. That's when I called the rest of the group out of the tavern so we could talk about this. They came out very drunk and without much information, but I tried to keep them focused long enough to tell them what happened. We decided to leave Bula to guard the carriage while we hatched a plan to investigate the mayor's house. Aalari and I were to get the mayor out of the house and keep him distracted while Glendower sneaked in through the back.

While we talked to the mayor, Aalari decided to charm him to get some straight answers out of him. He wasn't happy about that when it wore off, but we managed to find out that he isn't up to anything particularly suspicious. He really is just looking out for the safety of his town, and once the charm wore off, we managed to convince him that we were too. During this conversation, I found Steve the Donkee running through the field we were walking in, being chased by a couple of kids. The kids said they found him running around and I saw no reason to doubt them. I shooed away the kids and reclaimed our animal. We met up with Glendower, who revealed that she found a few unusual items in the mayor's house: an unusual orb and a magic scroll. While we were chatting with the mayor, Bula met up with the diplomats as they broke for lunch. The negotiations are not going too well, but, again, there was no sign of anything sinister. It wasn't until after the mayor and the diplomats cleared out of the tavern that we got our first real lead. The kid who works at the tavern, Dominik, said that he overheard the drunk orks talking about a bomb. This was alarming, so we knew we had to do something about it. First we searched for anything suspicious around the meeting house, but when that failed, we knew we needed more information. I woke up the orks and tried to get some information out of them, but that kind of backfired when Glendower's interrogation methods got a little too violent. The orks responded in kind, and, unfortunately, we were forced to kill one of them. The other we managed to knock unconscious.

Intellectually, I think I knew going into this trip that I might have to fight people to survive, but I never really considered the impact of what that meant. I helped kill someone today. I don't like the way that feels. But I suppose that is a necessary evil of the life that I have chosen for myself, and there is no going back from that now. I do not have time to worry about it right now because we still have to deal with this bomb. We stashed the body in the cellar of the inn, and we tied up the other one and took it up to Glendower's room. After a somewhat difficult (and gross) interrogation, we learned that the Otorok do have a plan to bomb the meeting house, but the bomb has not been placed, or even assembled yet. We are to go to a meeting point at midnight to find out more about this plot, so now we must wait.