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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffwik" data-source="post: 4603228" data-attributes="member: 9739">DAY TWELVE, morning?. I cannot move, so I am dictating this entry in my head, to transcribe it later if and when our captors free us.DAY TWELVE, morning? (later). I passed out, I think. It is later than it was.DAY TWELVE, time unknown. Our most recent crisis seems to have ended, with only one death; now is as good a time as any to chronicle the events of the day.Yesterday evening, we proceeded to travel northwards along the bank of the river -- which in my utilitarian vernacular I name simply the River, marked by a capital letter -- but were soon set upon by another pack of the fast-moving sextellegers. They surrounded us and chewed us up. I for my part was almost useless, as the sextellegers seem to be resistant to my psychic magic. We fought valiantly, but before long Throg lay insensible on the ground, worried by the claws of a pair of the beasts, and Grog stood alone over Rhogash's bleeding body at the center of a swarm of a half-dozen of the foul beasts, with Cadre and myself skirting the edges of the fight and attempting to assist with magic.I considered leaping into the River and floating downstream from known to unknown peril, leaving my comrades to die -- not a choice I relish! -- when a hunting party of close to two dozen of the humaniform creatures I had dubbed "mutons" crested a hill to the north. They drove off the sextellegers, and took us prisoner -- though Grog and I at least resisted their snares until we were beaten blue.When I regained consciousness, earlier today (I believe it is one day later; Cadre confirms this, and he declined to resist the tyranny of the nets, perhaps fittingly given his birthplace in the Hive) we were all of us bound in a wet and dank earthy cave, lit by phosphorescent moss or fungus that streaked up the walls and across the ceiling. What we could see was a single chamber, perhaps forty feet in diameter and roughly that high, with a single passage up and out guarded by two of the Floxii -- though then I knew them as mutons.The Floxii did not respond to our cries or statements, but we quickly learned we were not alone: another prisoner of the Floxii shared our cell, a female Planet cultist named Zakiya. Zakiya reluctantly agreed to share intelligence with us, and admitted that she had been part of a "farming" expedition of the shadar-kai cultists into this region, and that her group had fought and been defeated by the Floxii, with her alone escaped alive to tell us. She asserted that the Floxii were unintelligent, merely mimicking humanoid habits, pointing out that they do not seem to understand or speak the Common Tongue of Toril-that-Was. She further asserted that soon enough she would be receiving a sending from her comrades in the Planet cult, and that they would rescue her if only she could explain her rough location.The Floxii impassively ignored our words, though they reacted badly when Throg broke free of his bonds and tried to force his way out of the cell. They spewed up more of the soft sticky flexible net, and all but buried him in it. Meanwhile we shared with Zakiya what little we knew, and questioned her more about her group's "farming" activities, but the true nature of the situation did not become clear until later, when a Floxi -- I assume an elder or leader of theirs -- stormed into our cell and jabbered inexplicably at me.We realized right quick that the elder was holding the sextelleger brain or organ, which the day before I had cut out of the beast, and was enraged by my possession of it. Zakiya seemed nonplussed, and we got out of her that the Floxii -- again, we still called them mutons at this point -- the Floxii possess similar organs, and that the shadar-kai hunt the Floxii for these organs, which they use in alchemical preparations.The real situation became clear: we were not prisoners of mindless unintelligent apes, as Zakiya would have us believe, but rather we were under arrest for the suspected murder of Floxii! The elder jabbered at us, and we heard the phrase "shadar-kai," which we took pains to distance ourselves from. The elder seemed dubious, however, and set some giant spiders on us.I write that in a blase tone, as if I were often fighting giant spiders while bound hand and foot, but no, it was not a simple matter. Rhogash and Throg were injected by the spider with, as near as we can figure out, some kind of slow-acting poison which is likely to be spider-eggs. I was able to burn off our bonds, which was helpful, but still fighting unarmed and unarmored is far from the ideal tactical situation.Eventually everything was sorted out, thanks -- as near as I can tell -- to a few sendings between Vlad back in Valley, and Cadre and Rhogash. Vlad was in contact with Irina, who has learned some amount of the Floxii language -- for example, we learned indirectly from her that they call themselves Floxii. After we repeated a phrase in their tongue which she relayed to us through Vlad, the Floxii brought to us a large, spherical Planetpearl, which shone with yellow light and from which Irina's voice spoke -- this surely was a communicator of the same type Yang tried to press into our hands back at the Hive. Also, Santiaggro and the others seem to have gotten a bit more intelligence out of Drahz the prisoner: we are instructed that to the west (beyond the forest, I expect) there is a location called "the Living Ocean." I shudder to imagine what this might be -- a single massive jelly monster, the size of a sea? A city of angry hostile merfolk? On its north side, or north shore, or to the north of it, there is some sort of ancient artifact, an ogre's weapon or a weapon for fighting ogres or a weapon guarded by ogres. The intelligence from Drahz was, it seems, vague.With Irina's help, we were able to convince the Floxii that we were not the villains the University and the Planet Cult are. Apparently like the shadar-kai, the colonists of New Hope have been hunting Floxii for their brainstems and calling them animal, too. Irina has defected or hidden among the Floxii or something along those lines -- she has a camp southwest of New Hope, which is our new destination. Once the Floxii understood that Zakiya and we were not together, and the Irina was willing to vouch for us but not her, and that she had been in sending contact with her comrades, they slew her.I cannot say I think that was a poor choice. She was quite unwilling to listen to reason, and refused to accept the evidence in front of her to admit that no, the Floxii are not insensate beasts but rather as intelligent as a bugbear certainly... even after it was undeniable that her people had been murdering sentient creatures and using their brainstems to fuel their dark rites, she insisted that the Floxii have no native right to exist, that because those whom the Planet Cult murdered could not defend their lives, they had no right to it. Thus the unethical core of the cult is revealed; they are the thieves, of life and property, which all wideawake men must defend against. No matter who you are, I was taught as a child, there will always be someone -- a taxman, a mugger, a murderer, a usurer -- who thinks himself your master, who thinks he has the right to take what is yours. From my cold dead hands as we say in Valley! From my cold dead hands you shall take my property, after I have fought and resisted your aggression to the last! How dare the University rob the Floxii in this way, just as the Planet Cult robs them of their lives and us of our safety! I am filled with self-righteous indignation, as F------ often says is my wont.I have performed the ritual of comprehend languages, which allows me to understand the strange bar-bar speech of the Floxii, and allows for crude communication as I pantomime to them. They tell us that beyond the River is the forest we saw, and that in the northwest of the forest -- which is also the most direct route to Irina's camp, from what we can gather -- are a type of beast they call the Hard-ya-hara, or something similar; it is a large leaping thing which dwells in the trees. If Rhogash and Throg consume the brain of one of these creatures, the eggs or poison inside them should be neutralized.We warned the Floxii about the sendings between Zakiya and the Planet Cult, prior to her execution (a fitting end to a quasicannibal!) and they assured us that they could conceal the entrance to their caves with some illusion, though whether it was magic or more proasic trickery I have no idea. Certainly the Floxii possess technology we do not, in controlling the growth of the extrusions of fungus in their cave -- brightening and dimming chambers at will, calling down walls of fungal growth which recede on command, like doors... I wonder: is, as the Planet Cultists claim, the fungus the Floxii manipulate is the same species (or organism!) as that which spills across the landscape in the fungal wastes between Valley and the Hive?The Floxii have fed us a gruel of some grayish substance -- it's not tasty, but it is filling. Tomorrow we leave them, and head out across the River into the forest. We all of us are filled with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. On the one hand, so far this part of the surface of Planet has proven just as hostile as the fungal wastes; had the Floxii not come across us and taken us captive back to their caves, we would have died out there, clawed to death by a dozen dozen sextellegers. And surely the knowledge that we were imprisoned and at the mercy of what we had reason to assume a hostile force -- for did they not beat Grog and I into unconsciousness when we failed to show a sufficiently servile demeanor? -- does not fill us with confidence. On the other hand, none of us have seen a forest with anything like the awesome majesty of what we sighted beyond the River...</blockquote>

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