NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3403838" data-attributes="member: 3448">As the interrogation finished, the first reports came back from the battle in Pottersflat.  <<Lady, we have the one we followed in custody.>><<How did the battle go?>><<It was most strange, lady, and the combat was fierce.>><<Did you take losses?>><<Among the gliders, yes.  We have hang-gliders who fly through the air, to drop nets and such from above.  One of the glider pilots was struck by a dart, and there was nothing left of him but dust.  There is also now a forty-five foot tall mushroom in Pottersflat…>><<Make sure no one eats it!  Keep people away from it.>><<Oh, we know, lady.  We put up a fence of sorts.  But it’s moving.  At first we thought it was just swaying in the wind, but now it is clear that it is shuffling towards the fence, moving about six inches an hour.>><<Was that also someone?  Were there other casualties?>><<No, lady.  That was a horse.  After the Harlequin struck the horse with a dart, he was so shocked by its transformation that we were able to get to him before he could act again.  But that was after he had gotten to the stash of darts, and done for that glider.>><<We’ll send a mage to clean up the mess.>>The mage eventually reported back.  He teleported the darts into a volcano, destroying them completely.  As for the enormous mushroom, he tried to polymorph it back into its natural form.  This was a little less successful.  It was a horse again, but a fourteen foot tall horse, with shelf-fungi in place of its tail.  Still, it seemed greatly relieved to be close to its original form.With the short term crises fairly well dealt with, Kit finally had time to deal with one of the longer term concerns that she had been worrying about.  Princess Kaitlyn’s thoughts, as well as a few other things she had heard, suggested that there were negative rumors circulating about Alistair.  She spoke with a few of the people in her network and set out to find out precisely what it was that was being said.The results displeased her greatly.  The overall consensus was that Alistair looked remarkably normal for someone that dissipated; if anything, people found it all the more frightening that he could be so personable yet had done those beatings up north.  Dreading what she would learn, Kit pressed her contacts for more information.  They told her that there were hushed conversations about the condition of some young women along Alistair’s route who he had mistreated badly.  If the rumors were to be believed, he had savaged them mercilessly.  A few people were also reporting rumors that he had taken a succubus as a lover in the north, but the reports of violence and brutality were much more widespread.As she widened her investigation, she discovered at least some good news:  the rumors were almost entirely limited to foreigners.  Among the Canberrans, he was typically simply viewed as having a healthy appetite, with some viewing his escapades as slightly scandalous but the understandable follies of youth, while others viewed it as a sign of vigor and virility that the Archduchy should be proud of.  Kit’s agents somewhat awkwardly told her that her identity as his current lover was common knowledge throughout the Archduchy-- the lower classes talked about it openly, often in the most romantic terms, while the upper classes pretended not to know, to avoid any awkwardness when Alistair married, but all clearly did.Kit burned with anger about the rumors, both horrified by their content and positive that someone was deliberately smearing Alistair’s reputation.  Something would need to be done to put the rumors to rest.  But before she could plan a counter-campaign, she needed to know who was behind it.  Casual questions turned up no definitive answers, but some geographic information.  The rumors were almost all among people to the north of Canberry, although a few had spread among the delegations within the City.  The further north a group originated, the worse the rumors were liable to be, with the furthest north delegations dreading their coming interactions with a malevolent monster.  But the pattern was not uniform-- there were hardly any rumors among the delegations from Masque or Hanal, although that might be a matter of the servants knowing better than to speak of the depravities of the nobles, lest they find out precisely how depraved they could be.  Speaking ill of your betters in Hanal is punishable by death, with the cardinal principle that the greater the truth, the greater the libel.  Still, it seemed like Enclaves was a likely point on which to focus further investigations.End Session 16</blockquote>

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