Operation From The Ladle To The Slave

We were able to book passage to Ithmong, one of the ports in Lapaliiya from which we would, if we successfully made landfall, travel overland to Halruaa. There was only one problem: it was a slave transport.

Now, personally, I had no problem with that. Slavery is legal in this area, and regardless of what I thought of the practice, it was not really any of my business. But Ilyich, Caine and Joan all decided that they were going to do something rash. I thought it was a bad idea, and I said so, but the consensus of the group was against me, so I agreed to be a part of it.

The plan was to have five parts. The first part, which I was well-equipped to take care of, was to poison the crew. Ilyich had taken and refined a certain amount of venom from the wyverns, and that diluted into the crew's stew would make many of them sick with little chance of actually killing them. This would need to occur some hours before the rest of the plan was carried out, to allow time for the oncoming crew shift to dine and suffer the effects of the poison.

The second part was to create a distraction on deck. We wanted to have as many eyes looking up as possible, while we got up to shenanigans belowdecks.

The third part was to incapacitate the captain. Caine and Buff would perform this duty. They would catch the captain in his cabin and, I hoped, take him out of the picture without killing him.

The fourth part was to deal with the other passengers. More about them in a moment.

The fifth part was to kill or incapacitate the slave overseers and free the slaves.

I'm sure you're wondering at this point - with such a detailed plan, how could it possibly go wrong? And that's a very good question. It actually didn't, which surprised me. There were more dead crew than I liked, but we did manage to free the slaves in the end.

We spent most of the voyage reconnoitering the ship - determining how the crew was organised, whether we could incite them into a mutiny, how they were armed. It was a very tightly run ship - the crew reported to the Overseers, who reported to the Captain, in two long shifts. Only the overseers were routinely armed, and only in order to intimidate the captive slaves. We determined the captain's routine and decided that we would set our plan in motion at the beginning of the night shift. We also determined that there were probably fifty or sixty slaves held belowdecks.

I mentioned that there were other passengers on board. Joan tried to introduce herself to them, but that only prompted a very stern warning from the captain to leave them alone. By doing a quick flyby past their stateroom window, I was able to determine that there were four of them, and the stateroom was richly furnished - better even than the captain's cabin. We surmised that they were the slave owners.

So, with reluctance I set the plan in motion, the day before we were due to make port. It started by conjuring up an invisible servant, which I did via ritual. The servant took the vial of poison while I went to the galley and approached the cook, claiming that the glowing magically conjured apple I was holding was mystical medicine that I required in my stew for that meal. Fortunately, I was able to keep the cook's (and the cook's assistant's) attention while my servant emptied the vial into the crew's stewpot then stowed the empty vial amongst other containers on the shelf. Stage one complete.

When it was clear that the oncoming shift were all sick to some degree, the captain went to the galley to investigate what might have been the cause of the mysterious illness. As he was returning to his cabin, the second stage was initiated by Joan. Somehow she managed to throw flame into the ship's rigging, creating a commotion on deck and drawing most of the sailors out. There were overseers in the fo'c'sle and poop deck, and another amidships by the mast.

As this was happening, Caine and Buff ambushed the captain, and I sealed the slave owners into their cabin with wedges and magical webs. And the fight was joined.

I had hopes of keeping the fighting non-lethal - I was able to put several crew members into a mystical sleep - when a pair of large constructs burst from the stateroom. Fortunately they became caught in my webbing, giving time for Joan, Joan's mystical lion, and Ilyich to finish off the overseers on deck and intimidate the rest of the crew into surrendering.

Caine, bearing the magical greatsword which I'm sure isn't having the best effect on his sanity, started hewing at the constructs, pushing one of them overboard. The slave owners were the last to surrender.

The ship was ours.

Buff started freeing the slaves with keys that we found in the hold and on the captain's person while I flew aft to retrieve the ship's navigator, who had jumped overboard.

The original plan was for the ship to transfer its cargo - the slaves - to another ship from Lapaliiya at sea rather than put in to port. I'm not entirely sure what the new plan is. The slaves have been freed, but I'm not sure how many of them are sailors. Many of the ship's original crew survived, including all of the second shift, but the captain and the overseers had all been killed. I think Caine's plan included somehow turning the ship over to them, or maybe to the slave owners, but I'm not sure how well that will work. Many slaves have known only a life of slavery, and do not know how to be free. It's also not at all certain that the slave owner will keep his covenant to get out of the slave trade. We could be simply handing the slaves back to those who had enslaved them.

I guess we will find out.