Day 76: Moonday the 3rd, Kuthona, 4707

Dame Rebekah woke me up with coffee today. I never used to drink the stuff but now with the days being so busy anymore, it seemed almost required. Especially after the night last night. I woke up to find one positive thing, my wound was completely healed. I'm guessing that Dame Rebekah healed me before waking me up, but she didn't say anything about it. Faunra was around the fire in the tent showing off her newly created item to everyone. She had taken the needle-tooth of the Gar, wrapped where the handle would be with the night-belly boa hide (and made a sheath for it too!) and soaked the whole thing in witherweed oils for eight hours while focusing her will into it to make it magical.

Faunra told me that this item could erase any writing, magical or non-magical with the command word "Acurit". I had to suppress a laugh because it was the name of an eraser company back in the old world. Jonathan noted that he had a busy day of cooking, and that the fish, snake, and cougar meats were all smoked. Jonathan added that he would be spending the day frying the fish and making the meal for afternoon. Shalelu said that she would be spending the day finding out what she could about the Fort and the area around here. Faunra noted that she would be working on researching whatever she could to give us a leg up on whatever Novi meant with the word Kaiju.

I looked at her and told her that where I was from, Kaiju meant strange monster, but had unsubtle connotations of giant monsters. Faunra said that this might help, but that she still thought that she needed to research in her books. Dame Rebekah noted that she would be trying to do what she could to minimize the damage of our antics to the town. I said that I'd focus on getting all of our gear ready for moving on to the Fort. We all separated and did our own thing. I helped Jonathan to make what I could, but mainly I worked on updating this journal and all of my other notes. It's hard to believe that I've only been here seventy-six days. It seems like so much longer.

I disassembled the shack and got the heat stones and put them back into the bikes. After a few hours, Faunra said that she had discovered something about a legendary creature that was native to this area, something that was known back from her time. A hideous entity that was created by the Runelord Karzoug, the same individual who we had seen back at Thistletop, back in the old times to send against his enemies. Faunra noted that she didn't believe that this thing was still alive, but that since the weather patterns and legends line up, she noted that she looked into it and that this monster was indeed something known by her people as "affwys gwallgof" translated roughly as madness from the blackest depths.

Faunra said that she would keep looking into the capabilities of this monster, but it would take some more information. As far as she could tell, she knew that it would require looking further through her books. I thanked her for that and told her that if I came across any further information, I would pass it along to her as well. Faunra thanked me and went off to continue her research. I was putting together the new area of where the erasing would be done when a local came up and asked me what we were here for.

I looked at them and told them that my group were heroes from a town far away from here who had been ordered by the Lord-Mayor of Magnimar to come here and get information about Fort Rannick to try to find out why they had not sent any reports back that way. The person just kind of blanked out from there and asked why Jonathan and myself had traveled over to the location of the wreck and killed old Pink Eye. I didn't really see a reason to lie and told them that when we were solving some murders in Sandpoint and Magnimar, we had found that the victims had been marked with a seven pointed star before their deaths to take their souls and sacrifice them to some great evil. We needed the teeth of Old Pink Eye to make an item that we could use to erase the tattoos that we had seen here so that the people's souls would be free if they ever died.

The Local told me that a lot of the people that had those tattoos were seen going to that den of iniquity at the bottom of the lake, and that now that we had removed Pink Eye, looters could go and try to dredge up the coinage from the wreck. I told them that as we were leaving we saw other giant gars heading towards the boat, so it was likely that Erastil was taking care of that, and had allowed us to remove Pink Eye from the lake so that we could remove the tattoos from his repentant followers. I must have struck a good chord, because the local noted that they were going to be passing along the word that we would be doing Erastil's work in removing those tattoos from the people who had gotten them.

I winced at the thought of doing all of this for a town like this, but no one deserved to have their afterlife condemned for a momentary loss of rationality. I finished setting up the shack and helped the rest of the group set up for the fish fry. Jonathan was really in his element, making a wide bounty of foods from the carnivorous entries of fried gar, snake gumbo, and his lean Honey-Lemon Cougar, to his more vegetable based meals of braised turnip greens, sage crusted carrots, and baked parsnips. It didn't take long for the smells and word of all of this to spread.

I volunteered to stay in the shack to remove the tattoos, as I could tell that my presence was the least liked among the whole group. I could hear some festivities as someone from the village had started performing some local music after the townsfolk had wandered up and started eating. Faunra presented people with the free tattoo removal option, completely judgement free. It was a few minutes before one of the people who I had seen the first day came in and asked if I could remove tattoos. I told them that I was indeed the one, and that I could do it right now, if they could show me the tattoo. They raised their sleeve, and I pressed Pink Eye's fang against it and whispered the word. The tattoo disappeared before our eyes.

I thanked him for his time and he noted that he didn't really want to get it in the first place, but that it was a way to get discounts at the barge. He asked me to please not tell his wife, and that he only went there once or twice. I told him that it wasn't to me to judge someone, I was just providing a service for this community. He thanked me again and slowly the townsfolk filtered in. Some wanted the seven pointed start tattoo removed, others wanted tattoos from previous relationships or previous life choices removed. Quite a few "…" Forever tattoos were removed. It is comforting to know that relationships were just as temporary here as they were back on the old world. All in all, I think I removed around three hundred tattoos, and there was a line forming towards the end of the fish fry.

Jonathan donated the rest of Pink Eye to the town's Church of Erastil, since we didn't have a good way to preserve it, but kept the remainder of the anaconda and the cougar, now diminished to only thirty pounds between the two of them. We packed up from the event and headed back to our tents. We shared what information we had gathered from the event. Most of what we got was just pure rumors, a lot about the gambling barge, the Paradise, that sank or how there were people who were missing in the woods and they didn't know why. One person had thought that Black Magga, what they called the monster, sometimes came into the lake, but we all figured that to be impossible. From all of this, we figured that we needed to just head to Fort Rannick tomorrow, since we were getting next to no useful information from these people and were well aware that our welcome would be worn out by the end of the day tomorrow.

We followed our regular watch schedule and I took the first watch. It had only been a few days since I had last seen Savah, but it was weighing on me. I did spend some of my time looking over pictures that I had taken of her, but nothing happened other than that. I woke Jonathan up and decided to head to sleep.