Dear Diary
Looking back on the events of today give me a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart. Why you ask? well, I realised today that while I'm hardly the equal of any of the five Heroes of Hollow, I'm perhaps not as much of a burden as I had thought. Well, no, that's going to far. I am a burden, but at today I was a helpful burden. All in all, I've found three different ways in which I can help out in the Hollow Coterie, all this afternoon no less! The others even said that I was useful to have around. This means I can stay in the group and keep writing about their adventures. Yay! Oh yes! the group is called the Hollow Coterie, which is a wonderful name.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, being useful. I should write these things down in case some evil wizard erases my memory, then I won't be completely useless all of a sudden. First of all, being much smarter than me, and used to evil and danger and all sorts of nasty things, the Coterie are rather cautious when it comes to exploring caves and buildings, so much so that they tend to be overly careful progressing through uncharted territory. This is all well and good, but... boring! We do also have to get back to Hollow as soon as we can, remember? I found myself pressing ahead with Marigold and Ayeena in tow. Marigold can deal with any nasty surprises we might encounter, and Ayeena can stop anything hurting me too badly. It turns out I'm good for putting in the front, because I'm lucky enough to be able to see in the dark, and I'm the most expendable.
Pressing through the various caves below Highglum, we came across several sealed (but old and mouldy) barrels. I opened one and a massive cloud of dust exploded out of it, which smelled of something really quite nasty, I was quite a bit more careful opening the others, which were all equally horrible. There was also the skeleton of a dead rat in one of them.
Later we found more rats, and Vincent worked out that long ago there had probably been someone in this place doing some rather awful experiments with disease. I hope I don't get sick, having breathed in all that dust. We also found a barrel of lamp oil, which is still down there. I have plans for that tomorrow. The tunnels under Highglum led outwards to the two towers I drew the other day. Terato tells me the right one is entirely full of stirges and poop, so we should avoid it, since it's quite dangerous.
The left tower was far more exciting, containing magical treasure, odd stalagmites, a weird honeycomb wall of rock, and several traps pointing out the top which Ayeena had cautionned us against going through in the morning. She evidently has some kind of hero sense that told her going in through the top would have been a bad idea, since entering from the bottom was good enough for Marigold to take them all apart for us. How does she do that anyway? I'll have to ask. While we were looking around we did get attacked by a big scary earth creature, and several small flapping bat-people-things, and this is where I worked out another way to be useful. It turns out that while I'm no good whatsoever with this hammer, simply running around the fight tends to distract all the nasties. I suppose I'd be surprised as well facing five battle-hardened warriors supported by a weird terrified spiky-haired tiny girl who blatantly didn't belong in a fight.
Ayeena was amazing, and pretty much took down all the nasties single-handed while the rest of us could only stand and watch in awe. The whole fight was over in a moment, and I'm not even sure where I was for most of it. I do clearly remember being completely terrified when one of the flappy-bat-people-things redirected one of Terato's arrows mid-flight, right into Marigold! She'll bounced right back though, it takes more than that to stop Marigold.
Oops, I forgot the treasure. Terato now has a magic bow (fortunately after shooting Marigold, not before.) We didn't find anything else we could use, but Argent thinks the gemstones she found might be usable in some rituals.
Shortly after the battle was over, Vincent asked where the explosion had come from. He looked really confused about it, which in turn really confused me. I mean, ever since I was little, things have exploded when I've been scared of them, that's just how the world is. At least, I'd always thought that, but after talking with Vincent I found out it only happens for me. I think if I concentrate on it I can control it. Vincent said that because daddy was a wizard when he was alive, he must have taught me to do it somehow. Anyway, since this doesn't work for everyone, it'll probably be a third useful thing, like when, say, you find an entire corridor full of badly constructed skeletons. I actually managed to aim and blow a few of them up, before Ayeena and Vincent wiped out the rest of them with holy fire. Okay, so I wasn't needed after all, but at least it felt like I was helping. I still can't make it work without closing my eyes at the last second though.
Having finally cleaned out all the monsters from the monastery (apart from the stirges, we'll deal with them tomorrow.) we proceeded to find a tomb and an underground stream. Ayeena cleansed the tomb for Chantea, and Argent cleaned up the last influences of Shar from the underground stream. We now have a very large amount of water from the healing spring. We also found the scythe we needed to give back to the statue, but Chantea gave it straight back to us in thanks for fixing everything. Vincent now has a magic scythe, and we've also sewn some magic straps we found onto Marigold's armour. They look a bit funny, but their magic will protect her.
Well that's all for today! Highglum is cleansed, we have a huge stock of holy water, everyone is feeling good about themselves, and we seem to have come together as a team. Argent and Ayeena fought side by side today, and I never thought I'd see that. It's time to turn in so we can be up bright and early tomorrow to set out back to Hollow, and then we can set about fixing that curse. I'm sure there's more excitement to be had yet.
Until next time!
Piccolo.
