Pirates and Murderers

Dear Charisse,

I have to clarify some things, then ask you a bunch of things.

First off, there were key pieces of information I was missing about the Swiftblade Warband - I guess it was just stuff they talked about before I got there, or assumed were common knowledge. Either way, I didn't get all the information about things until way later, after unintentionally making the warband look bad.

They're all members of a group called the Swiftshadow Company. I knew the name sounded familiar, the Swiftshadow part, but I couldn't remember why until after this was brought up. They're pirates, as in actual pirates, not just metaphorically. I suppose it's not so terrible, they seem to be focused on mercenary work right now, and they're currently helping out a group of Norn refugees.

I guess for the right price, mercenaries can be kind. Though I don't think that we're getting paid nearly what non-refugees can pay for work, so I think there is a lot more good to this Swiftshadow Company than bad.

Anyways, the Company owns the airship, and they only metaphorically stole it from the Pact. It's all Pact design at it's core, but quite modified from the run of the mill ships the Pact currently has. The frame's bigger too, which makes the ship bigger, and require more power. Apparently they were working for the Pact, as an airship crew, but got screwed in their deal and had to build their own from the ground up.

Over the past few months, they've seen a steady influx of Charr. Some have their warbands still, mostly the ones formed by their Fahrar fellows, some damn-near Gladium. Sargin Sunblood, the Legionnaire, decided to form a warband as an off-shoot of the Company.

That kinda explains the confusion with the rules. They were written by the First Mate of the Swiftshadow, someone whose apparently lost in the Underworld right now, and I was being brought onto the crew as another airship technician, but apparently one of the few whose actually worked on an airship before. I was made a member of the warband, so I am also a Swiftblade, but that's a very rare thing as of yet.

Now, I'm sure that last bit got your attention. Yes, apparently some crew members - all Norns, oddly - somehow managed to get lost in the Underworld or something like that. I barely was able to figure out much by reading over some notations made by the crew. They were going to be going after them, and it involved a lot of crazy complex ritual stuff by some guy named Abasur Mortis; haven't heard if they were successful or not.

I'm not really sure how pleased Grenth would be by the fact there are non-dead beings in His realm, particularly those who do not follow the Faith of the Six. He wouldn't be upset at them rescuing the Norn, would He? Since the Norn aren't technically His? It's a bit confusing, and I want nothing to do with the actual process of getting into the Underworld, don't think they'd let the new girl help anyways, but...kinda worried about what may come of it all, from a spiritual standpoint.

The other question I have relates back to that whole mercenary work I was telling you about. The first job I went on with them was to destroy a bunch of listening stations the Molten Alliance made; I'm working on securing a full, more or less undamaged sonic parascope so I can reverse engineer it, but I just barely got the electro-magnetic pulsation devices working, so I haven't got one yet. As I was saying, we destroyed a bunch of them, and they collected the recordings while I collected bits to try and reconstruct one of these things.

Once we'd cleared the area where our future operations will be taking place, the crew handed over all the recordings we got. The Vigil is way into trying to get rid of the Alliance, so they started listening to the fresh data immediately, before we even left.

Apparently, there's a huge homestead in the upper part of Wayfarer's - near Dolyak Pass, if you go looking at a map - where the Molten Alliance has made a sort of central stronghold for their operations in that part of the Shiverpeaks. The recording was talking about how some Norn died out near it, and their kin went investigating and found out how bad things really were. I'm really concerned about that, given it's right in the middle of where our operations are going to be, but everyone seems rather obsessed with the second recording we overheard.

The second recording had two people talking, a man and a woman. They were discussing a pregnant woman they planned on sacrificing; the man said that her blood was a powerful sacrifice, and it was kind of confusing to me. Do these things have some sort of rating system to them? Is the blood of one type of person more important than another? How would a pregnant woman's blood be more powerful than a woman who isn't? What kind of entities want blood sacrifices, anyway?

I don't recall you ever telling me that our Gods wished for us to sacrifice the living to them, so I don't think it's any of them. I don't think that the Norn animal spirits require that. Only ever heard of the Flame Legion doing anything like that, really, but these people did not talk like Charr.

Something weird is going on with it though. Immediately after, we were all told to get back to the cove - where the Swiftshadow docks - and then everyone was trying to keep things quiet. They knew something about it, and I found out the next day why.

We did this thing called a "Spirit Soak". They were doing it to purify the bodies of the people going into the Underworld. I don't quite see how it purifies them though, I mean, the chemical contents of those hot springs were horrid - most of that stuff causes burns and explosions! But, there were lots of people there, I think both crew and friends there of, and toward the end, I realised one of the voices speaking was on the recording!

I tried to point this out to the Legionnaire, and another Charr there freaked out. So did Sargin - he put his paw over my mouth and wouldn't let me talk until the lady left. He had some new Charr I hadn't seen drag me off, turns out the guy was a damn bleeder and sat there threatening to rip me apart, the way bleeders do. He's kinda runty compared to some of the bleeders who've threatened to kill me, so I wasn't all that concerned about the threats.

No one seemed to care about the fact that the lady on the recording was there, though the Quartermaster for the Swiftshadow proper was going with the mercenary captain to talk to her. I really hope they locked her up so that poor woman doesn't get killed. I haven't heard anything else about it, and haven't seen the woman since so...I really hope they got rid of her.

Anyways, I have to try and get myself one of those parascopes so...I'll leave it at that for right now.

Love,
Tyra