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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Damon Griffin" data-source="post: 2645673" data-attributes="member: 3568">Paladin's Journal - Entry 1The journal of Sir Alcee ThibodeauxIf found, please return to Lord Aristide Thibodeaux at his keep near OakhurstMy name is Alcee Thibodeaux.  My friends mostly call me Tib, on account of my older bother Alcide is usually called Al.  I guess maybe they will have to quit using that nickname, though, at least around any strangers, because I am now invested as a paladin and nicknames seem maybe disrespectful of the uniform.  But I don’t mind as long as it’s just us Oakhurst folks.There’s an old sunken ruin near our village, and goblins live there.  Once or twice a year they come out to auction off some kind of magic apple, and in between times they come out to raid and steal from folks, travelers and passersby mostly.  Folks who bought the seeds tried planting them, and saplings did grow, but seems like someone always came before long and stole them away.  I’d been away from home for a couple years, with just a few short visits, working at becoming a paladin, which I guess was my calling.  One of the other paladins at the monastery was called Sir Braford.  He finished up his training just a couple weeks before me, and was set to guarding some of these saplings that the priests were growing in a greenhouse at the monastery.  While he was on guard, someone stole the saplings, which made him pretty embarrassed, and hot to do something about it.Ten days ago, Sir Braford and a wilderness scout friend of his went off to Oakhurst wanting to see about getting some of the special apples, but after a week they hadn’t come back, so I was sent back home to see what might have happened to them.  When I got to Oakhurst I found out they’d taken on two of the Hucreles as guides – no doubt Talgen was bragging about how he knew the area so good – and left for the ruin a week before.  Nobody’d heard from them since, and a few people were organizing a small search party, which I joined.Gerik, the innkeeper’s nephew, and Lance Hawthorne I grew up with.  Winter, the wizard, and Wulfgrim the dwarf priest, I recognized of course, but I never really knew them except to say good day to until now.  We brought Jack, a cattleman from daddy’s keep, along with us and set out the next morning.We got to the place around midday and lowered ourselves down into the dark using a rope that’d been recently left behind.  Wulfgrim went down first, using some handholds the goblins put into the walls, and was attacked by wicked big rats – biggest I ever hope to see – as soon as he reached the first ledge.  But we all got down okay and followed some stone stairs to a wide place with lots more wreckage.  There some kind of trap rigged over a pit and another big rat at the bottom, but none of us got hurt.  There were some chewed up bodies down in the pit and we couldn’t tell at first if they weren’t the people we were looking for, so Gerik killed the rat with his crossbow and went down to check.  It was goblin bodies.  We moved around exploring, and found some more dead goblins, probably killed by the group we were looking for.  We ran into a fancy door that apparently needed a special key to open, and some kind of water imp and then we came upon a lone kobold.  He was a miserable creature, who’d apparently been responsible for guarding a baby dragon his people kept as a pet.  The goblins had come and stole the dragon two days before, and he’d just sat down and cried about it since then.  Winter seemed to think kobolds couldn’t ever be trusted, but Meepo (that was his name) just seemed pitiable to me, and besides Mama always said you should always think the best of folks until they give you a reason to do otherwise, because you can’t see into someone else’s heart.  Actually, since I got the calling, I can see into people’s hearts, a little, but I still do like I was taught until a person gives me a reason to suspect him.  Anyways, we asked him about the Hucreles and the others, and he said he didn’t know about them but his boss woman Yusdrayl would know, so we went and spoke to her.  She said she’d seen them but the goblins took them.  We said if they’d point the way to the goblins so we could make good time with our search, we’d keep an eye out for their pet dragon at the same time.  The boss woman said okay and Meepo came along to take us by the short route.  Well, the short way ain’t always the best way, as we soon found out.  In pretty short order we’d had to kill a bunch of goblins and a few hobgoblins, and then hightail it back to the kobolds’ patch because we got ourselves outnumbered.  Gerik was in a world of hurt by then and Winter got beat up some, too.  We brought back a couple of goblins as prisoners and when they were questioned they said two of the people we were looking for was already dead.  One of the men had been killed in a fight, and another mouthed off and got himself killed for his trouble.  Lance thinks that was Talgen, and I’ll bet my boots he's right.  Sharwyn Hucrele was still alive last the goblins saw, and the other man, but their goblin boss had given them to someone called Belak, who makes the special apples.  Belak is apparently a human like us, but strange, and he’s lived down there among the goblins for the past dozen years or so.  We stayed the night in one of the kobolds’ spare rooms and Wulfgrim got Gerik and Winter healed up the next morning.  My hearing ain’t too good, and I might have misunderstood, but a couple of times I thought I heard Winter making suggestions about the goblins, or the kobolds, that I wouldn’t agree with.  But maybe he was kidding, too.  That wizard has a strange sense of humor, I think.There was a key on the wall in the hall where we talked to the kobold boss woman, and she let us borrow it to try that door we hadn’t been able to open the day before, after we promised to give her half of whatever goods we found back there.  The first thing we found was a big glowing ball that made terrible sounds that made Winter want to run away from it.  It didn’t bother me at first, and I got it wrapped up to muffle the sound somewhat, but after a minute I took off running, too, and I wasn’t alone.  I went back and broke the thing to stop the noise, and didn’t that make Winter awful sore?  He thought we ought to have carried it along with us to scare goblins with, and it probably would have done that, but we couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t affect us again, even with candle wax in our ears. Through the next door the floor had been rigged to shoot arrows from the walls when anyone walked on it, and through the door after that we came to a room with a white marble statue of a dragon, and it spoke a riddle, which Winter answered straightaway, and opened up a secret door in the wall.  Through that door was a large room with more statues.  Life sized statues of men this time, and none of them spoke, but made from the same kind of marble rock as the dragon statue.  The room had six little alcoves and five of them had these statues.  At the far end of the room you could see an open archway and past the archway a green glowing light showed a big stone coffin in the next room, also made from that marble.  Just this side of the archway was a big pit, about ten feet across and as wide as the room.  It was maybe ten feet deep and we could see spikes at the bottom, and no clear way to get across it.Wulfgrim spotted a hidden door at the back of one of the alcoves, and there was a little closet of a room past it, and a trap door in the floor of that room.  Wulfgrim was mightily unimpressed with the stone crafting skills of whoever built that secret door and trap door.  Elves, he reckoned.  On the back wall of the closet was a message about a dragon priest who broke the law and got buried alive but still had his title and position. Below the trapdoor was a narrow tunnel, which Wulfgrim and Gerik explored.  When they found out it went twenty yards or so and came up in the stone coffin room, the rest of us followed, except for Jack who stayed behind to watch our backpacks and such that wouldn't fit while we crawled through the tunnel.Coming up into the coffin room, I checked and knew that evil was present, both in the coffin and somewhere up near the ceiling.  I couldn't see anything up there, but I knew sort of where it was and could tell when it moved.  When I said something about it, Wulfgrim tried slinging a rock at it, Winter tried to use a Sleep spell and Lance threw a bunch of dust in the air.  The only effect of any of this was to make my eyes water a little.  Winter hollered across to Jack to throw us a sack so we could try to catch the thing, but about that time Gerik moved over near the archway to take another look in the pit, and the evil presence I'd noted near the ceiling made a dive for him.  I hadn't been paying close enough attention to things, and didn't keep myself between him and it, like I should have.  When it attacked it became visible, and it was some kind of little winged devil or imp.  It clawed at Gerik and tried to bite him, and knocked him off the edge into the pit.  There was some more flailing around trying to hit the thing, but it didn't seem much bothered by us until Winter hit it with a frost bolt or some such spell, and it took off yelling something about how it was free now.  Jack climbed down into the pit to help Gerik, but fell and injured himself doing it.We got Jack and Gerik taken care of and out of the pit, and Garik came back around through the tunnel with some of our supplies in a sack, ready to open up the stone coffin.  Now, I was not altogether comfortable with the notion of breaking this coffin open, since desecrating graves ain't something honest folk should do.  But I knew there was something evil inside, and that meant the dragon priest - we figured that message on the wall was about whoever was in the coffin - wasn't dead, or not entirely so.  I heard stories about the undead while taking my paladin training.  Anyways, we got a bunch of candles lit, and stuffed some rags into bottles of oil and broke the hinges off the coffin, and then pushed away the lid.  Whatever was in there might've been a priest, but it wasn't no dragon, nor a human or goblin or dwarf or anything else I ever seen before.  Thinking about it later, I think it looked like a troll, something my daddy fought once and told us kids about several times.  We lit it up with the oil right away, but that didn't stop it climbing out of the coffin and trying to get at us.  The fight was pretty short, but a couple of the guys swore afterward they saw the thing healing itself of damage while we fought, without casting a spell or anything.  That'd fit with what daddy said about trolls, so after it went down, I cut off its head and even then we made sure all of it got burned up.  There were some metal scroll cases and little stone jars in the coffin, plus some coins and jewelry the thing had been wearing.  The stone jars had healing potions, which we used right away, and the scrolls had cleric spells that Wulfgrim might be able to use.   We were pretty beat up by this time, even after drinking the two potions, so we decided to crawl back through the tunnel and rest a while in the room across the pit.  It ended up being a long rest, because Winter and Wulfgrim needed to get their spells back. Winter would need to sleep for eight hours and then get up and study, and Wulfgrim has to pray at a certain time every day for his.   Gerik felt some of his muscles stiffening up a bit, he thought because of the imp's dirty claws, but he said it wasn't bad.   I'd completely lost track of the time by now, but I knew Wulfgrim had done his praying just a couple hours before, after we'd had our rest back in the kobolds' area.  So we've been in this room for near another full day, and we've talked about what we might do next, and made some wooden wedges in case we might need to block off a door quietly or quicker than we could with a spike.  I prayed to Heironeous to help me do better today -- I hadn't kept Garik from getting hurt last night, and hadn't been as much use as I should have in the fights with the little devil or the troll.</blockquote>

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