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New
Allies
Progression:
* Mission: Kodonur Crossroads
* Quests: Mysterious Message;
For a Price; No me, no Kormir; Secrets in the Shadow; To Kill a Demon
Wyrm
- 30 Jun 2007
We get turned in to the Kournans. They throw us in a prison
cell. They don't take our weapons away. Idiots. I'm not sure if Wirr and Ginger
realize they're prisoners right now, they seem a bit too cheerful. Our "guards"
lock us up and then walk away. Are they sure they're in the right profession?
Less than a minute later, one of Zhed's friends shows up an lets us out of the
cell. We step out into the fresh air as free men, and women, and centaurs, once
again after having been prisoners for a grand total of about five minutes. No
wonder Kourna needs the aid of demons. Freeing
the centaurs is easy. All we have to do is kill the taskmasters holding the keys
to get them out. Things go fine until we get about half-way done, at which point
a minor miscalculation winds up pitting us against just about every guard left
in the place. That battle takes a pretty long time and we have to burn quite a
few res sigs to make it through. It was a little too close for comfort, but luckily
everything worked out. We stop for a minute to catch our breaths and then continue
on. Nearby
we spot one of the chief taskmasters and decide to take him on. He's a bit tougher
than the others, especially with his elite guards nearby, but he goes down just
the same. We head south for the final prison cells and find another chief taskmaster
and his elite guards. He, too, goes down rather quickly. When we only have one
cell left to open, I spot a third taskmaster boss behind the fort and so we go
kill him as well. He's a bit tougher than the others but still goes down nonetheless.
With him out of the way we go free the last of the centaurs. All
we have left to do is assault the fort and kill the head prison jailer taskmasters.
And their army. This should be easy, after that minor fiasco we had earlier. Fortunately,
our res sigs have been recharged with the victories over the taskmaster bosses.
I have a feeling quite a few of them have Ginger's name on them. We start the
attack and are beating on the first wave when all of a sudden the next wave joins
in. Things get a little chaotic. Res sigs get burned up. Kournans are slowly whittled
down to a more reasonable size. Soon we start working on the head taskmasters
that old guy wants us to take down. A while later, they're gone. We march out
successful. Jenova and Wirr needed more res sigs than Ginger did. That was unexpected.
Zhed is still following us around. Great. We
get back to the sanctuary and Lonai lets us know a djinn sent us a message saying
something about helping us get to Vabbi. That's almost the strangest thing I've
ever heard, but if it's genuine then this could be the break we've been hoping
for. It says to wait for the contact at the Palawa Joko monument nearby in Jahai
Bluffs. A minute or so after we get there, the old guy from before shows up. Master
of Whispers, he calls himself. With him is that corsair that helped us get the
injured back to Istan. They seem like an interesting pair. I guess allies are
allies. They
both have propositions for us. The corsair, Margrid, tells us that Kormir is alive
and waiting to be rescued while the old guy, Whispers, wants us to help him kill
a really big demon that's blocking passage to Vabbi. Most of us decide to work
with Margrid, but Zayisha decides to see what Whispers wants us to do. And so,
the party splits up. Zayisha goes off with Whispers and the rest of us go off
with Margrid. Going
with Margrid proves to be a pretty interesting adventure and we get to see how
the Corsair work. It's not too different from the way the sunspears work, only
with more violence among the ranks. She takes us to meet her scout, who's supposed
to have a map of Gandara. Instead, he has a black eye. The poor guy. He tells
us who took the map from him and Margrid leads us off again. We hit a snag on
the way there with the local wildlife. Without going into details, let's just
say we burn a few res sigs. Eventually, we wind up meeting Margrid's other contact,
who needs a little motivation to hand over the map. A few bruises later, he obliges. Now
that we've got the map for Gandara, all we have to do is figure out a way to get
in. Successfully, that is. We show the map to another of Margrid's contacts who
suggests we take the uniforms from a nearby patrol and sneak in. In theory that
should work better than trying to storm in like we did last time. We go and retrieve
the uniforms from the patrol after knocking them senseless. Margrid calls it armor,
but really it's just something to put on over our armor. We're
just about ready to go in after Kormir when Zayisha shows up. Turns out she finished
her tasks with Whispers and wanted to see how we were doing before going after
that demon. When we asked her what those tasks were, all she said was that it
involved talking to a djinn, following it around and killing a bunch of moving
rocks. Ok, glad we went our way then. In any case, her timing is great, so we
bring her along with us. Margrid's taken a liking to us, it seems, and decides
that she'll tag along with us from here on out. She still wants that diadem from
Gandara, though. Her corsair ways do tend to coincide with our own methods. In
any case, it's now time for us to go in and get Kormir back. 
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