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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffwik" data-source="post: 4603225" data-attributes="member: 9739">DAY EIGHT, midafternoon. This morning we took Bilik and Belig as well as two dragonborn, Thuash and Tinath, out into the fungus for a training exercise (apparently Byuchyuch and Balk will be in another team, and I misheard the planning). I say we, meaning myself, Rhogash, Grog and Throg, and the immigrant Cadre. The training exercise was intended to teach the guards how to navigate in the fungus, how to spot and kill mindworms, and so on -- it did not go entirely as planned, however. I would say it went better.We did not sight any living mindworm boils, but in patrolling the territory around Valley we soon discovered a number of dismembered boils, worms sliced open and the Planetpearl caviar within scooped out. Our suspicions were raised, then confirmed. We crested a hill perhaps a mile from Valley to see a curious sight, to wit: a group of five Planet Cultists performing some kind of strange and exotic ritual about a gyrating wormy fungal beast. The clear conclusion to draw was that these shadar-kai villains possessed the capacity to tame and command mindworms (which hardly contrasted with what we knew of them) and that, performing this rite so close to Valley, they were doubtless intending to bring the mindworms down upon us. It is therefore entirely reasonable that we ambushed them.Truly it is fortunate we struck when we did; by interrupting the rite we apparently stopped the mindworm from fighting alongside the cultists. In point of fact it struck apparently randomly, more at us than at the cultists largely because by the time it joined the fight we were already the apparent victors... I have no interest in providing blow-by-blow accounts of the many battles we engage in, here on this thrice-cursed Planet, but I recall that it seemed that while the rite was still underway (and the cultists attempted to salvage the rite even after we had slain one of their number) the mindworm was held, and did not engage in the combat.Soon enough however it was slain, along with all the cultists save one, whose escape we thwarted (thanks to a timely ray of frost on my part and the august javelins of distance we salvaged from Yang's guards). He -- the prisoner's name is Drahz -- we took captive, and dragged back to Valley for interrogation.Kato and the others are still questioning him, even now, but I have grown weary of his bizarre religious rhetoric. Drahz claims that his people, the shadar-kai, are the favored ones of Planet, which they worship as divine. He spoke of a coming apotheosis, when the favored people will lead all the folk of Planet to godhood, or perhaps that the favored people will become gods suitable for worship by the rest of us; it wasn't entirely clear. The Planet-god they worship, apparently, is the fungus itself, which extends deep into the earth, below the sea, into the mountains, and bursts up into the sky. When we walk across the fungus, we walk across its skin, or its brain, or some other mad thing.While I cannot deny that magic here seems to differ from what I have been taught about Toril-that-Was, leaping to the conclusion that it is all due to the psychic interference from a mind literally larger than anything we can imagine... that we live on the skin of an awakening God... that just seems, in a word, crazy.</blockquote>

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