"In touch with the ground
I'm on the hunt, I'm after you
Smell like I sound, I'm lost in a crowd
And I'm hungry like the wolf
Straddle the line in discord and rhyme
I'm on the hunt, I'm after you
Mouth is alive, with juices like wine
And I'm hungry like the wolf
Stalked in the forest, too close to hide
I'll be upon you by the moonlight side
High blood drumming on your skin, it's so tight
You feel my heat, I'm just a moment behind
And I'm hungry like the wolf..."
By the following morning, all seemed to be forgotten. Alurdel tried to diffuse any lingering tension over breakfast by helping himself to a sausage, snatching it from Gale's plate with a tentacle before he could cook it over the fire. Karlach smiled at his antics, and Shadowheart seemed relieved to see him eating something that wasn't brains.
Astariona and Gale were confused, so Alurdel tried to explain what he knew about illithid dietary habits. Mind flayers were obligate carnivores, preferring raw meat to cooked and organ meats over tough steaks. Aside from that requirement along with the need for brains every few weeks, they didn't much care what they ate since they had no sense of taste anyway.
"Ah, such a shame you can't indulge in my cooking anymore," Gale sighed theatrically.
"Don't worry, I've managed to survive this long without it, and I don't think I'm missing much," Astarion quipped. He seemed to have suppressed his misgivings about the mind flayer in their midst, at least for the moment. It was hard to maintain his suspicions with no concrete evidence of mental tampering, and Alurdel resolved to keep it that way. He'd try to control his temper today and avoid doing anything he wouldn't be able to take back so easily.
After breakfast, they resolved to actually accomplish some useful errands instead of repeating the previous day's wandering. First on the agenda was provisions. That morning, the party spent far too long searching for food of questionable quality that cost far too much. The presence of all the refugees milling about the outskirts of Rivington had strained the suburb's resources, and its regular inhabitants were conserving whatever they could or charging exorbitant prices.
Alurdel was able to convince one trader to sell them food at a reasonable cost, and in the process learned that he was capable of a more subtle form of mental suggestion in addition to brute-force domination. The trick was to whisper into the trader's mind in a voice that sounded just enough like his own to convince him that it had been his own idea to lower his prices all along. Granted, Alurdel wasn't sure he'd be able to repeat that trick on someone who actually knew he was a mind flayer and was on the lookout for mental intrusions…
After they dropped off their ill-gotten gains at camp, Jaheira went to send a message to a Harper contact in Rivington about the best way to bypass the Steel Watch and get into the city. The rest of the party decided to spend the afternoon replacing weapons and armor that were worse for wear after the battle at Moonrise.
"We could always stop by the Rivington General," Karlach suggested. "I remember it from years ago, but looks like it's still open."
No one had any better ideas, so they followed the fiery tiefling down half-remembered paths until they reached the general store - which wasn't quite as general as the name suggested. A smith named Gyldro Angleiron had purchased the shop years ago and converted its upper level into a workshop. The friendly dragonborn shopgirl said the owner could be found there, so they traipsed up the stairs in single file, emerging into a showroom filled with swords, axes, mauls, and…
anything else you could use to kill someone… Which should I use first? It's so hard to choose from all these shiny-sharp toys…
Alurdel cocked his head like a dog listening for an ultrasonic whistle. That last thought hadn't been his own, but a stray emanation coming from just outside the showroom.
He led the way, walking out through a swinging door and finding himself in an outdoor smithy on the rooftop, set up in the open air under a canopy for efficient cooling. The rest of his companions followed, though Karlach lagged behind to admire a particularly shiny double-bladed axe.
"Ah, you must be my latest customers," greeted a bald man with a bushy beard who must have been Gyldro Angleiron himself. "Welcome! What sort of weapons are you looking for? If you're not sure, I offer a personalized service to all my clients, to help you figure out the best weapon for you."
"I'm plenty happy with my bow and dagger," Astarion said, giving the man an odd look.
Alurdel, too, was a bit taken aback by the smith's enthusiasm. "I'm not in the market for a weapon," he said shortly. "Try asking Karlach or Shadowheart." He did briefly wonder if he should invest in a light blade, but quickly shot down the idea. He'd done well for himself in the battle against the doppelganger clowns at the circus, and as an ulitharid he had plenty of natural weapons.
"Ah, ye're being too hasty," the smith literally waggled a finger at him. He zeroed in on Alurdel specifically, shooting him a gap-toothed leer. "Just let me ask you a few questions. Tell me, how do you prefer to kill?"
What kind of question was that? There was something off about that smith. His surface thoughts were all muddled and interspersed with violent imagery, and the man gave off a sense of malicious glee.
Still, Alurdel briefly considered the question. In his current form, he'd only killed once before, to feed on the unconscious Githyanki in the Astral Prism. He hadn't actually been the one to strike the final blow on any of the doppelgangers back at the circus. But he had many of Past-Del's memories of killing others in battle, and it was those he drew upon to answer.
"I don't mind killing, but I prefer to keep it quick and clean. It's kill or be killed in this world, but there's no need to cause unnecessary suffering. Unless, of course, someone has done me wrong…" His disguised voice dropped from its usual monotone to something a little more threatening as it suddenly occurred to him what, exactly, may be wrong with the smith. Like the clown at the circus, this man was not what he appeared to be.
"Ah, how efficient of you," the smith effused. "Now tell me - how do you feel when you kill someone?"
Powerful. Untouchable. Unstoppable. Those were the first words that came to Alurdel's head. He could tell that these sorts of things were just what the demented smith was looking for, and they rang true enough to his own, albeit limited, experience. But four sets of eyes bored into the back of his head, and he knew that nobody - except possibly Astarion - would approve of a statement like that.
"Relieved," he said instead, channeling Past-Del as best he could. "Like I said, it's me or my enemies, and I intend to survive."
"All right," said the smith, rubbing his hands together. "Just one final question. Would you ever turn your blade on those closest to you?"
The man's facade cracked as an alarmingly wide smile pasted itself across his face. It was time to end this. "No," Alurdel said. "Unless, of course, it turned out that they were imposters…"
The smith's smile froze in place on his face. "And why would they be? You got much experience with something like that?"
"I think I'm about to," Alurdel said grimly. Behind him, Shadowheart gasped and Astarion drew his blade as his companions finally caught on to what was happening.
The smith cocked his head so far to the side that Alurdel was amazed he'd managed the position without breaking his neck. His features began to melt and run like overheated wax, fading into a more feminine appearance as his beard dissolved and his skin paled from ruddy tan to milk-white.
Alurdel was about to unleash a mind blast, but hesitated when he realized that some of his companions were also standing in the line of fire. Instead, his tentacles shot out from under his cloak and wrapped themselves around the false smith in a chokehold.
The doppelganger completed her transition back to Orin the Red just in time to find herself trapped in Alurdel's invisible grip. Only - it wasn't so invisible anymore. Gale's disguise spell had been up for nearly its full lifespan of eight hours, and the unseen tentacles so strongly stretched the suspension of disbelief that the whole illusion popped like a bubble.
Orin found herself restrained by an ulitharid that was now visible in all its glory. The changeling writhed and hissed like an angry cat, but she was held tightly in Alurdel's tentacles. "Wretched creature!" she shrieked. "You horrid slime-thing!" Was she actually trying to bite at his tentacles with her blunt little humanoid teeth? The woman truly was insane…
In addition to biting him, Orin was also trying to reach some kind of ring on one hand with the fingers of the other. Alurdel captured her wrist with another tentacle, glad he had six of them rather than a mere four.
The struggling prey triggered Alurdel's illithid instincts, and he salivated at the thought of crunching through the thin shell of her skull and consuming the deliciously demented brain within…
"Holy shit!" Karlach exclaimed from somewhere behind him, but her voice seemed as if it was coming from a great distance. The only things that were real in the world were himself and Orin.
"Hey, Del? What are you doing?" Shadowheart's voice rose in alarm as Orin's angry words morphed into shrieks of pain. Alurdel realized that he was drooling an illithid's flesh-dissolving enzyme onto her straw-colored hair.
Now that he had the changeling grappled, his tentacles seemed unwilling to release her, as if they had a mind of their own. It seemed like nothing more than a foregone conclusion that his ring of teeth would bite down onto the top of her skull…
"Oh, gods," Alurdel heard someone say faintly as his fantasy was realized with a single sickening crunch, and then he was pulled down by the undertow of Orin's thoughts and memories.
Alurdel saw snippets of her early life at the temple of Bhaal, which was quite frankly no place for a child to grow up. A blank-eyed little girl following at the heels of her mother and grandfather… Dodging kicks and blows from older urchins who'd been taken in by the cult, willing to participate in ritual murder for the promise of food and a place to sleep aside from the streets…
A slightly older but still prepubescent Orin, awakening late one night to find her mother's dagger pressed to the hollow of her throat. Half-awake, her catlike reflexes and innate proclivity for violence eclipsed any sense of horror or betrayal as she twisted out from under the knife and reached for her own blade, conveniently kept under a pillow…
Nearly grown now, artistically posing corpses in the way another young woman would have arranged mannequins or dolls…
Clutching a ruby-red stone to her breast, then depositing it carefully into a pocket with bloodied fingers before turning her attention back to the familiar white dragonborn that lay half-dead at her feet, crimson gore dripping from a gaping head wound and bubbling from his nostrils with each shallow breath…
Facing that very same dragonborn who leered at her with barely-restrained malice as Gortash paraded him around like a prized pet or a trophy husband… Hearing whispers among her own cultists of the prodigal son's return…
Orin's last coherent thought was a blind, seething rage at the way she'd been once again supplanted by a brother she'd thought long dead. And then the last of her mind guttered out like a candle, leaving Alurdel holding an empty, bloodied shell. He thrust her body away on reflex, then looked down at himself. His disguise had failed utterly, and his face was streaked with crimson just as it had been in the Astral Prism. But the primary difference between his first meal and this one was that his companions were watching.
No one moved. A brief glance at the minds around him told Alurdel that they were all still frozen in shock at the spectacle they had just witnessed. Oh dear. That really did look quite disturbing from an outside perspective…
Alurdel realized that he may have made a mistake by letting his base instincts get the better of him like that, but he refused to apologize for his essential nature. And, come to think of it, past-Del had once overheard some snippets of conversation between two Nourisher Creed illithids about how ravenous newborn illithids were. One of them had even eaten a thrall in the Ceremorphosis Unit when left unsupervised for too long…
"Well," Astarion cleared his throat. Behind his eyes, disgust warred with pragmatic relief at the death of an enemy. "That was rather unpleasant, yet effective. I applaud your initiative, darling."
Shadowheart expressed a similar sentiment. "Better Orin than any of us," she said grimly. "If the roles were reversed, she would have shown us no mercy."
Gale, however, looked faintly green. "I never realized," he muttered half to himself, then attempted to explain aloud. "I've long known how mind flayers feed, of course. But it's one thing to see it written in black ink on a page and another to be confronted with the visceral reality..."
"I did what I had to do," Alurdel said to justify his actions. "She was planning to kill and dismember us in about five different ways."
"No worries, soldier," Karlach shrugged. "Man, you've got lightning-quick reactions now! Mind flayers are pretty cool, once you get past the whole brain eating thing. I can't believe we managed to take down Orin already! Two Netherstones down, one to go."
"Speaking of which," Alurdel said, self-consciously wiping streaks of blood from his tentacles. "We need to check her knife. Gortash was plotting against her, trying to take back her stone and give it to Scion. We need to make sure he hasn't managed to steal it away from her."
Astarion bent over Orin's limp body and began searching for wherever she'd hidden the knife with the Netherstone set into its hilt. Her skintight armor didn't leave many hiding places to the imagination.
"How do you know?" Karlach asked.
Gale swallowed, taking control of himself once more as his thirst for knowledge overcame any lingering disgust. "I've read that mind flayers can gain information about their prey from eating their brains. Quite the effective interrogation technique..."
"For once, something written about illithids is true," Alurdel quipped.
"What do you mean, for once? I thought my information was relatively accurate. I got it from Wakeman."
Alurdel found himself plumbing heretofore unknown depths of Past-Del's memories, dredging up long-ago conversations between Eldriss and their Loretaker colleagues. "Wakeman is one of the better sources; it's Volo you have to watch out for. Years ago, there was talk in Oryndoll of actively spreading his treatise on illithids to humans on the surface in order to misinform them…"
Before anyone could ask just how Alurdel knew that, Astarion straightened up with Orin's crimson dagger in his hand and everyone let out simultaneous sighs of relief as they eyed the ruby stone glinting from its hilt. Gortash hadn't gotten the Netherstone yet.
Unless… "It's not a fake, is it?" Alurdel asked Gale to confirm.
"Not with that kind of magic radiating out of it…"
"We got to her before Gortash did, and now we have two Netherstones." Shadowheart graced Alurdel with a small smile. "Not bad, Del. Not bad at all."
Aside from Gale's momentary discomfiture, Alurdel's companions seemed to be taking this turn of events remarkably well. He supposed he was lucky that none of them seemed to have realized he'd reacted on instinct rather than reasoning.
However, the Emperor certainly knew. Alurdel had ignored him the previous night, closing his mind and not responding to the other illithid's requests to join him in the Astral Prism in his dreams. After that incident with the newborn in the windmill, Alurdel had been determined to give the Emperor the silent treatment for as long as possible.
But later that night after the events with Orin, Alurdel could avoid him no longer. The Emperor's incessant prodding at the edges of his mind was beginning to grow tiresome. And, though he hated to admit it, Alurdel had questions for the more experienced illithid…