Lundar's Library

Day 244, Year 541 of the Ascendancy

The long awaited Chaos Storm has arrived in the lands at last, and the
Foot Hills exploration party was finally able to return to Puddleby. I
can’t say how good it feels to be finally back in town again! It is
really is quite amazing how much one can miss our little mud puddle
infested domicile. My diary
detailing our adventures in the Foot Hills is almost complete, and I
hope to have it finished in another day or so. Anyway, our whole party
was happy to be back, but of course we couldn’t stand around
reminiscing forever. We had to spend all our hard earned money!

Day 244, Year 541 of the Ascendancy
(April 18th, 2001)

The first thing that I had to do was get myself a
new outfit! Ever since I ventured into the Foot Hills, and suddenly
found myself a very wealthy man, I have been dying to get myself a new,
stylish set of clothes. Over the last couple of days, I have been
tinkering with Stylus, and I was finally able to come up with a very
trendy outfit for myself, and today, I finally got the chance to try
them on. Woohoo! I look cool! :p After that, I couldn’t think anything
else to spend my money on, so I decided to deposit some of it in the
bank.

My bank account has been very empty for a while
now, what with my crazy gambling and spending habbits. Today however, I
was finally able to get some coins in there. I now have a little over
5000 coins in my account, and another 500 or so coins in my purse, for
spending money. For some reason though, I still wasn’t quite satisfied.
Then reason dawned on me.

My belief is that the Foot Hills expedition has
turned me into a rank whore. Fourteen days of nothing but monkey
whacking will do that to a person. Before, I used to be content with
just sitting in town, locating the occasional fallen exile, but not any
more. I heard over the sunstone that there was a party hunting in the
‘Noids, and I rushed to join them. The group there was pretty small,
but sufficient for the task at hand. We hunted in the Arachnoid Caverns
until I was felled by a sudden spawn of Purple ‘Noids, and had to be
rescued by an army of twenty exiles. One new thing about the ‘Noids,
though. The mandibles that were previously useless to us exiles
suddenly had a coin value. Sure, the prices were only about 1-5c per
mandible, but that’s still better than nothing. Someone must have found
a buyer for the useless junk.

After the ‘Noids, we all headed for the Dark
Temple on Ash Island. We were greeted there by a horde of undine, and a
pair of Darshak Liches. At first, I was felled very quickly by the
Liches, being unfamiliar with the procedure for slaying them, but
eventually I learned the propper way to bring down a Lich, and helped
to vanquish the two Liches present. It was then decided that we should
hunt in the Astral Plane while we were there, and hunt for some Astral
Guardians. My new rank whore tendancies couldn’t disagree. We made our
way to the entrance of the Astral, dispatching a few Wraiths that we
met along the way. We then jumped into the magical cloud that leads
into the Astral Plane.

We were in luck. There were two Astral Guardians
present on the Plane, and we quickly surrounded them, and began to
swing away. We were eventually able to destroy both of the Guardians,
and I even received a one coin bounty on one of them. Then it was time
to return home. The only problem was, we didn’t know which way home
was. We all wandered around the Astral Plane blindly, but none of us
could find the exit. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by a red,
glowing mist, and before I knew, I was sent straight to the Abyss.

I cursed to myself, and prayed to the gods, but I
knew it was no use. I muttered an obscenity at the congregation of Fire
Rats that chewed on my flesh, and departed my body to Purgatory.
*Sigh*, depart # 108. Before I knew it though, I was in town.

When I stepped out of the temple, still miffed
about my fate, it seemed that there was something going on in Town
Center. There was a crowd of about fourty exiles, all gathered around
something. I skillfully weaved myself through the crowd, and craned my
neck past some stubborn exiles, and saw what all the fuss about. There,
in the middle of Town Center lay the carcasses of several large Myrm.
Standing next to them were two exiles I had never seen before: a Fen by
the name of Dentir Longtooth, and a female dwarf by the name of Calti
Pouder. They seemed to be arguing on the price for something, and the
discussion was getting very heated.

It turns out that Dentir is an old friend of the
skinner Skea Brightfur, but he specializes in the removal of mandibles.
Dentir was giving a demonstration of how to remove the mandibles(not
teeth, as some ignorant exiles call them) from the assorted Myrm
carcasses. Finally, the two agreed upon a price for the mandibles, and
Dentir returned to giving more demonstrations. It seems that Calti
wants the mandibles to create some kind of magical substance called
“Kyten”. Whatever the heck that is, I do not know. We live in
interesting times.