Milo - man with a past... and a future?

Events as reported by Milo...

Okay, we were at the Landing. Toric returned from his trip to the school with a bit of info on Milo's arrival. The records were noticeably less complete than would be expected from a Chauntean run school. (It's a side effect of keeping track of crop rotation and animal husbandry lists and the like. They keep meticulous records.)

What he was able to find out was kinda mysterious stuff. The woman's body found with Milo was dressed in lower class rags but her hands had no callouses or scars one would associate with that kind of hard living. Also, she smelled of herbs and sulfur and the like and there was what appeared to be the remains of a spell component pouch among her belongings, so she was likely a caster. She had several stab wounds that weren't fatal in and of themselves. It looks like her assailant definitely wanted her to know she was being killed. The killing blow (And even this one would have left somebody to die a long slow painful death.) started just above one hip and crossed upward to just below the opposite breast, almost severing the spine. From the description, Toric figured the weapon to have been some kind of serrated short sword. Her killer was strong as an ogre and probably more than 7' tall. (Toric got some incredibly high rolls on his skill checks when he was looking up info.) The other odd thing was that, even though the body was sent to the morgue and registered, there was absolutely no record of the body ever being buried. Also, a mysterious individual showed up exactly one year after Milo's arrival. Other than presumably human and male, there was very little description of this person. He donated 500 gp to the school, in exchange for a guarentee of Milo's care and education. A matching donation was made every five years, to the day, after that.

Toric also tried to find any info on the name Blackheart but only got sketchy info. (Boned the roll.) "The Blackheart" seems to be both a title and a name for an infamous orc warlord of the North. Seems to be head of a nomadic mercenary orc tribe that takes the entire tribe along.

Anyway, we all thanked Toric for his efforts and file the info away for possible further exploration. We decide that our immediate thing to take care of is to go visit "our friends" up river to see how they're doing and so we can introduce them to the rest of our group and stop referring to them so mysteriously. (We were all feeling kinda guilty about keeping secrets from folks who we trust with our lives.) So we packed up a bunch of the cookies and such that Eren baked up in her frenzy and we set out toward the dwarf hold.

After we made camp for the night, toward the end of thrid watch, somebody detected somebody approaching camp. We all got up and quickly figured out this appeared to be a somewhat powerful caster and evil. We spread out and stealth toward the target. Milo realized the target was finding its way with a staff, as if blind, and he recognized the smell. He mentally signaled the others to keep down and quiet as he stood up and asked the orc witch what she'd come for this time.

The witch did the deep and mysterious thing as she basically did an evil version of a smudging ceremony, wafting the stinking smoke toward Milo. He tried but he just couldn't get out of the way of the smoke. The orc witch (female shaman?) kept going on about some kind of prophecy about the Dark Soul and the Blackheart coming together and bringing forth black times, or something like that. (I really can't remember, darn it. I'm hoping somebody else took better notes than I did while Adam and I were roleplaying this scene. It was fun.)

The story seemed to be that there was a big confrontation coming between Milo and some other mysterious HE. (I kept on thinking she meant The Blackheart but it could have also meant some unknown sibling or something.) That darn witch couldn't have vagued things up much more. She said this had to be a one-on-one battle and Milo was to make sure his companions understood this. (Most of the groups reaction to that was "Yeah, right. Since when do we let the evil guys set the rules?") She said the confrontation would be within the tenday if we remained where we were.

Milo did some posturing along the lines of "So, give me a reason why I shouldn't kill you right here and now." in hopes of getting some info out of her. She didn't really flinch. (Milo had done a pretty good Sense Motive earlier and felt she wasn't lying because she seemed really psyched about taking part in this whole prophesized event.) The clincher was when she said "Well, then you wouldn't know..." Milo figured she seemed to be playing neutral at the moment and hadn't done anything more than be evil (Not always enough for him to just kill somebody out of hand.) and he'd hate to kill her now and find out there was some super important bit of information that only she had. And, he just had to find out what the heck was going on, so he told her to get lost.

After that, there was a group meeting about what we should do. We decided to try and find a more defensible spot for this and, after looking around, found ourselves at that ruined dwarf outpost where the characters fought those ghouls last year. Jaana casts her spell to commune with the surrounding nature and locates a pyrohydra lair to the north of our position. There is some debate about whether or not we should take that critter on to make sure it doesn't jump us while it is hunting and we are trying to prepare. Milo realizes somewhere along this time that he just KNOWS where his adversary is and how fast he is coming, directly toward him. He doesn't want to lead the adversary to the dwarf hold but somebody asks him if the adversary might not run into his friends place before it got to him? Milo realized the hold was in fact on a straight line between him and the adversary, so we decide to go to the dwarf hold. (Besides, we got cookies to deliver.) Kind of hoping that we can hit the adversary somewhere along the line BEFORE it gets to the dwarf hold. The idea that the adversary's group might be connected with the orc troop we drove out of the dwarf hold last year and might actually be headed directly for the hold was the deciding factor.

It's about this time that we start thinking that the adversary, who we are kind of assuming is The Blackheart in one incarnation or another at this point, might have a big ol' bunch of orcs with him. We also realize that the travel path he is on will take him through the northern edge of the Mistwood, so that puts Kyra a bit on edge. Kyra and Theeg move ahead as fast as they can, with the rest following soon behind.

We came to a stopping point shortly after everybody arrived at the dwarf hold. We were finally able to reveal the whole story to Larkin and Jaana and Toric so we could speak freely. We find out the dwarf population has grown to about 75, but 5 have recently gone missing in the lower reaches. (Something else going on. Hmm. Definitely fodder for future investigation and adventure.) Kyra used her tree stride boots to pop off to warn her prince. Hopefully, this warning will carry more weight now than the last time we tried to warn the wild elves about orcs.

The assumed reason for Eren's absence was that she was off recruiting for staff at Illchin's Landing. Don't forget Adam's thing about giving some xp for a story or whatever about what your character was doing in their absence. And, while we didn't tell the twins exactly where we were going, we did say we were off to our friends' place upriver and we had talked about going to see the dwarves when Eren was present.