24 Chirreb 4385: Arguing and Planning: Two Bad Things that Go Inevitably Together

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Since we didn't have any GOOD ideas, we used Outcast's. We found the Herethroy hiding with their seed grain. They didn't have any retired adventurers but several of them had militia training and were willing to help us if we had a plan. Also Trust healed a bunch of them who'd been injured which increased their opinion of their odds of survival against the ghempoch a lot.

We wanted to ambush the ghempoch down by the river but we really needed Secret's help to draw the ghempoch there without the ambush being seen. We could TRY it without magic but it would be a lot more dangerous and the norren was the only one with enough Illusidor to pull it off with magic. And she didn't want to use her magic to get the ghempoch killed.

"But you used it against him earlier!" I said to her.

"That was different! I needed to help my friends -- "

"You need to help us now!" one of the Herethroy said. "It's going to come back and kill us!" I didn't point out that the Herethroy weren't exactly her friends since that didn't seem helpful.

" -- and I wasn't getting him hurt. Just distracting him for a little bit."

"You used Mentador on it and now you're worried about just killing it?" The village primes were incredulous.

"The spell was only for a minute and didn't do him any lingering harm. You're talking about killing him forever."

"... and you think that's worse?"

So they all talked and discussed and argued mostly in that super-polite way Herethroy argue where whoever disagrees last loses. In the end we had to agree that if we killed the ghempoch, we'd bring him back to life and give Secret a chance to reason with him before we killed him permanently. I don't know if I really think that'll work but I was kind of on her side actually. When I talked to the ghempoch, he didn't seem like he WANTED to kill primes so much as he HAD to. When I told him the people in the dam were norren, I think he only believed me because he wanted it to be true. He wanted an excuse not to have to hurt us so as soon as I offered one, he took it.

By the time that was settled, it was pretty late at night and Trust was low on cley from so much healing so we figured we'd better wait for dawn. We bound a bunch of spells for the fight tomorrow like the protection from fire spell Outcast knew and some bound spells to be set off by the ambush like tuftears suggested. Then we took shifts on watch inside the Herethroy hiding place and I wrote all this down during mine.

Wish us luck for tomorrow because we'll need it!