[the drawings on this page show a short person with a topknot in front of a long line of bottles, most of which are empty. The short figure doens't look best pleased. It also shows a person in a kilt, a person with a braided beard and a person in armour and a cloak, recognizable as Connor, Yolven and Simona to those who know them, getting pelted by what is apparently rotten fruit by the short person as they try to read from some kind of parchment. They all show extremely sanctimonious facial expressions. At the very end is a grizzly, horribly detailed drawing of a strange looking knight with a barrel-helmet on his head, apparently glowing eyes and with black roses all around him. Including an engraved black rose on his chestpiece. It's a large, rather detailed drawing and easily recognizable as Lord Soth]
"Urghhh ...
Just when you think the world is getting back to working properly, your friends turn out to not be your friends anyway.
This is getting a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit tiresome, world. Stop this!
Okay, so here's the deal. Azshara's in hiding. She's been in hiding for about a week now and there's plenty of reason for it, obviously. She's still wanted, and while it doesn't look like Vallaki is going to go down in fire and flames -tomorrow-, OTHER problems have popped up. Because of course they have! It'd be too much to ask for a couple of days of sunshine so we could all go down to Lake Zarovich, have a picnic and catch some sun, wouldn't it?
Instead, we've got Soth coming back. Lord of the Black Rose himself, the man who could've stopped the Cataclysm on Krynn and who didn't, because someone lied to him about his wife and child. NOT the proudest moment of the Solamnic orders of knighthood, ladies and gentlekender. NOT their proudest moment!
And now he's coming back, it seems.
Yay! Wonderful. Great. Let's wave some banners around.
Yipee.
Hooray.
Yahoo!
Blech ...
At least most people seem to be pulling in the right direction on -that- one. How very nice of them to -JUST FOR ONCE- get their heads on straight about something, and actually -work together- instead of against each other. I'm sure there are still -some- gits out there, Red Wuzzards of Hazard probably, who would loooove to ride this into doom, gloom, the endtimes, another cataclysm, an apocalypse or two and getting scolded by their moma for being bad boys, for all I know.
"Never try to reason with the insane," Uncle Trapspringer always said. "It'll just make them even madder."
Consequently, no one should ever try to reason with the Red Wuzzards.
They're not worth the time or effort.
In any case, as I wrote ... Azshara's been in hiding for a week or so. And she's nooooot gonna be happy when she comes back. Sure, she's going to laugh at it all and -pretend- it's all funny but unless the woman has taken complete leave of her senses ... and I'm pretty sure we're not -quite- there yet ... she's going to be upset at -this-!
Because who woulda thunk it ... turns out Simona, Connor and Yolven are a trio of -right- puddin's ...
People I -liked-. People I've spent LOADS of time with. People I've called friends and who have called -me- their friend.
Riiiiight.
If that's what they do to their friends, I guess I should be relieved they didn't call me an enemy, because whoa, there's gotta be -laws- against what they'd do then, EVEN by Barovian standards!
First ... I get a letter. "Please Cassie, I need to talk to you, it's really important!" from Simona.
So ... I go to find Simona, -right-? Because -she's my friend-. I figured she -might be in trouble-. So I'd -want to help-.
RIGHT?!
I find her. And Connor. Together. Talking. And oh sure, they really do need to talk to me. BOTH of them. Should've smelled the three-day-old trout at this point, really. But noooo, stupid little Cassie always has to walk into these things with her eyes open like a flippin' lemon, right?
Bother.
Anyway ... get a key to a room in the Lady's Rest, and we go upstairs to have a bit of a chinwag ... nothing major, right? Just them being all super-serious, with faces like grandma had died or somesuch.
We get into the room, the door is closed and OUT comes the flippin' parchment. I mean ... sheesh. Huge piece of parchment, it was, too. And Simona starts telling me that they've learned a lot of awful, terrible things about Azshara's religion. About the "Pallid Princess".
SHOULDA WALKED OUT THEN AND THERE, CASSIE!
Gahh ... dammit ...
Look, before I go on, I'm not as stupid as some people think. I figured out by now that there's got to be something really fishy going on with that religion, because Azshara -did- mention how they weren't popular on Golarion. So I put two and two together, see? Everything Azshara does is fun and great. She eats too much, she drinks too much ... and somehow manages to stay slender, the -git- ... and she bonks anything with a pulse, right?
So unless Golarion is a world of the worst kind of snogglefonzes and babblefnats, there's no -way- she should be persecuted for that. At most she should have had half the world's population running after her for tips on how to lose weight while stuffing your face with cream-cakes.
So CLEARLY something fishy is going on. Again, I'm not stupid.
But I recently had a pretty -spectacularly- uncomfortable conversation with an Ezrite and that reminded me very definitively of "sects".
So when Simona started talking about how Urgathoans are trying to live the lifestyle of the lich and famous, and how they ritually kill the people they do the humpyhumpy with, or how they force people to eat so much food that their bellies explode and they die in agony, or how they force the families of those who died in such a way to then eat their now-deceased loved ones and a whole lot of other disgusting -toss- like that, I was -stunned-.
I couldn't flippin' believe what I was -hearing-!
So I asked if they would let me answer, and I asked that if they -would- let me answer that they let me finish speaking -before- they interrupted me. They said they'd listen.
I started talking. I got ... a ways into it. Then they interrupted me.
I SHOULD HAVE WALKED OUT THE DOOR AT THAT POINT!
-Stupid- Cassie. Stupid!
Anyway, I told them to be quiet and let me talk instead, because they -promised- to hear me out.
I looked straight at Simona and told her that the evening before, I had been informed that I was apparently wanted by the Garda to the sound of twenty thousand clinking fang, for attempting to murder a garda with someone called Morrigan in the Krofburg Mountains.
First of all, I have no idea who Morrigan is. Secondly, I was in Barovia Village in the Blood an' Vine where AT LEAST fifteen people saw me get sloshed and singing silly songs ... memo to self: stop drinking tsuika, Cassie, it's not good for your dignity ... what little you have left.
Oh, thirdly, incidentally, I'm not into killing anyone. Everything I do these days, I do to try to avoid people dying. So obviously, I'd gone to talk to the Garda to hand myself in. Lance Controversy Dmitry was nice about it. "Oh, so someone is making up silly rumours about you? Congratulations, now you know what the life of a Garda is like!"
Except he isn't Lance Conception Dmitry anymore. He's Corporeal Dmitry, because his sister got fired or something. Miss Sorona is a lot nicer when she doesn't have to wear that uniform, anyway.
So I told Simona about this, right? Looked her straight in the face and told her I was clearly a murderer, and that someone wanted to pay twenty grand for me. She looked confused for a moment, and I pointed to the parchment, saying "that's what you have there. A rumour!"
Wouldn't you know who won the flippin' pony, though? She went -right- back to reading more atrocities off the page that Azshara was probably guilty of.
I was getting angry at this point. I told her and Connor flat out, that while I actually do believe that some people in Azshara's religion are probably capable of doing horrible things like that, that doesn't mean Azshara is. This felt like I was being told ... AGAIN ... to disown a friend, to stop interacting with them and to stab them in the back.
WHO DO THESE PEOPLE THINK I AM?! WHAT KIND OF CRETIN DO THEY TAKE ME FOR?
I'm not a Solamnic knight ... this isn't about -honour-. It's about caring about your friends!
DAMMIT!
Okay, anyway ... I tried to explain that there are different sects in different religions ... I mean, Simona is a Morninglordian, SHE OUGHTA FLIPPIN' KNOW ABOUT THIS! This shouldn't be news to her! This shouldn't be something 43 inches of Kender should be informing her about! This should be the first thing she got told after joining the temple school "Hello Simona, here's your scourge for self-flaggelation, your hair-shirt, your robes of discomfort and your sixty pounds of bare-essential-prayerbooks, and that icy cold cell over there is where you'll sleep in a fetal position for the next five years, trying to not get pneumonia and die, oh and by the way, THERE ARE SECTS WITHIN THIS CHURCH!"
'E GODS!
And that's when she pulled the dumbest move in the history of dumb moves:
She stood there, rolled up the scroll and said "Alright, I'll shelve this investigation. I don't think she's a bad person".
And I thought "Oh thank goodness, they listened to reason!"
And then she continued "But if she IS, there isn't a place in the Core where she can hide!"
Aaaat which point aforementioned 43 inches of Kender had just about had enough horsemanure for -one- night. So I got up and declared I was going to get drunk, and marched out.
If she doesn't think Azshara is a bad person ... she doesn't -flippin'- need to qualify her statement with such a load of hogwash! Urgghhhhhhh!!
All the while Connor stood there smiling like a walrus after someone tells it where the herring-school is located ... biggest, dumbest, most -vacant- smile on his face imaginable. He didn't speak up -once- to stop the outrage. No, he was part of it, there to support Simona it seems. I have no idea why -two- tall people had to be present to inform FORTY THREE INCHES OF FLIPPIN' KENDER of something like this. Wow, I must be threatening and dangerous somehow.
Anyway, I went downstairs and bought as much beer and tsuika as I could carry ... yes, yes, I know, lay off the tsuika, Cassie ... sat down by a table and proceeded to get drunk because dammit, no one should have to listen to that kind of bollocks from their -supposed- friends.
Azshara is a lot of things. She's arrogant. She's too convinced of her own inability to make mistakes, most of the time. She's -completely- incapable of not throwing her clothes to the wind at the first sighting of anything -vaguely- attractive or at least -remotely- -interesting-, and she's a bit of a git in general.
But she's also incredibly generous, kind even to strangers, willing to help out and willing to put herself in harms way for those she cares about.
She's -not- -evil-.
Call her a cow to her face for all I care. Say you don't like her. Say you think the way she lives is amoral, disgusting or wrong ... that's a difference of opinion and that's your right, just as it's her right to summarily ignore you.
But accuse her of -cannibalism-?
Of plotting to murder people she sleeps with?
Of carrying out atrocious sacrifices against people in some cLICHé attempt at gaining immortality?
No! Just -no-! Enough!
I've talked to her several times about what she and I believe in. Mostly, it's about death. I think of it as the next big adventure. Azshara thinks it's the end. Full stop. Nothing. Not even darkness, just nothing, forever.
I think she's terrified of it.
So she celebrates life, by doing all the things she likes doing only thrice over. She likes good food? Okay, she'll buy the best and eat till she drops. Like good wine? She'll buy every bottle of a vintage she enjoys. And so on.
That isn't evil.
There are enough sects even in the local religions in the Core that the fact that some people can't understand the concept is -pathetic-.
But it's not even over yet.
As I sat there at the table in the Lady's Rest, wondering whether to start throwing empty bottles at the wall, the door opens and in walks none other than the Purple Pirate himself, Yolven.
I figured "Okay, at least there's someone I -can- talk to!" only to have it followed up with "But I don't really want to talk to anyone right now" and then "I want another beer".
But he sat down at my table without even getting invited and he looked like someone had killed his hamster.
Why do I have this feeling that his hamster would be named Boo?
Weird.
Anyway, he asked if I was okay, which I clearly wasn't, and then he asked what was wrong. So as opposed to Simona and Connor, -I- at least have enough integrity to not hang them out to dry in the middle of a public forum, so I told him that it wasn't particularly nice to learn that some of your friends may not be your friends anyway, and that I had just come from a situation where someone had accused someone I liked of some truly awful things.
"They're telling the truth about her, Cassie" was the first thing he said. "It's true, you know. I'm sorry."
And at that point I got up, said "Bye Yolven" and walked outside. He followed and I told him to sod off. He asked what I'd do if he didn't, and I told him there wasn't anything I -could- do, but I was -asking- him.
At least he had enough flippin' manners to take that hint with a clue-by-sixteen and walk back inside.
The saddest thing about the whole miserable affair is ... I would've helped them. In a -heartbeat-. If they had come to me and said "Cassie ... someone is accusing Azshara of some terrible, terrible things. We need to talk to her ... figure out what's going on. You know ... get her side of this whole thing" I would've jumped up, saluted and I would've been on the road to Mist Camp right then and there, even if I'd had to sprint all the way there in the pitch black with Blackpaw coming after me. I'd have done -anything- to help clear that up.
But that's not what they did.
They -accused- her.
This wasn't a "we need to talk to her" ... this was a "You shouldn't talk to her anymore because she's a horrible cannibal". This wasn't "We don't have all the information yet", it was "We've been told this, and we believe every word unquestioningly".
This wasn't even a -trial-.
This was -judgment-.
And they can take that and shove it so far up their derrieres that they'll be spitting parchment for a month for all I care.
Bollocks!"