conversations: human
conversations:  Revving, a vast ignorance of light springs in the deepest reaches of the dawn. And the orange-white sky surfaces. It skims your lungs. Maybe you sigh, the day about you.
  
  The Elsir is far behind you and now runs somewhere to the south, the plain is ashen after winter. The group nearest you is already packing their bags (dragonborn catches your eye) and you see them hustle off, some people have already left. Many on horseback. Last night a few hurried on, not wanting to delay, but you knew you could reach the city in time easily. And so you settled by default into the campground the other forerunners had set and the ones behind you straggled in through the dusk, in ones, twos, or fives.
  
  You know you're cutting it close (this is as you take on the last westward jaunt and Overlook stammers into full view, sun in its eye)--today is the deadline for arrival--but so are many others; the campground collected at least fifty. Of all sorts. And you noticed a few of the loners lost no time making friends. Maybe at one point you nearly introduced yourself to the group camped next to you, a posse of dragonborn with tough glints in their stride; maybe you're only kidding yourself. Soon enough the gates come.
  
  Swarming around them where the land is not being sown, ramming up against the walls, engulfing the road is a kind of black cosmos of hovels, tents, iron pots, yells, streaked faces, and a moss-rimmed tower leaning somewhere in its midst. You've heard of this, it's the Shantytown, it's supposed to be a terrible place. But something has swept you up irregardless and irradiant of will, and no twenty minutes have passed but you are through swept into the first ring of Overlook. Two bells stab noon in your ear. And you catch some word it may be the din of around you, may be your own thoughts: Caer Overlook, that's where you're meant to report.
  
  The two bells repeat.
  
  Sweep 1: Up the Dwarfroad which continues through the city, first among blackish buildings clogged with smoke. Inside there is no reprieve before clamor, it seizes you.
  
  -Flash of a green coat
  -Through the crowd his eye
  -Dark skinned youth pushes you aside with some foreign laugh
  -Two humans in red hoods walk calm with heads fixed high and take a right
  -Green wink of vials between hands
  -High pitched thunder of dwarves
  -A man with a charred cheek preaching at a corner to some ragged young "Extraordinary death"
  -Was that a knife
  
  But most of all depredation. The Dwarfroad is kept fair but the streets that narrow away look like soot.
  
  Sweep 2:
  
  Maybe a thousand feet up and through the second gate you cross into a place branded with the stroke and din of trade. Steep market streets. First past the awning of smoke in the interior a hobbled warforged beating and beating the anvil, a mustache outside selling goods looks at you  Dart bright grin of a youth whose bare back recedes even in the cold of spring into the crowd and the awnings! They must be like this in no other city. Rows of gray and brown on gray and dun snap every half a street into brilliance of foreign merchants. It is like the geometry of a rainbow broken into points of light. And to say nothing of vermilion even the dun stands bold (as a blade of grass).
  
  Sweep 3:
  
  Overlook is built across a hill that crops sheer and alone from the pale plains in the shadow of the Stonehome Mountains. Four successive and frenetically geometrical (square) walls have been built around it, and peeking over the vast shouts of dwarven towers you glimpse the dome of its citadel.
  
  What's your order of business?
conversations: Exegesis:
conversations: human
conversations:  I begin making my way to Caer Overlook, keeping alert for any abberant behavior taking place near me.
conversations: Torgarn:
conversations: human
conversations:  In the shadow of the massy, open gates of the Caer, whose walls throw into shadow even the towers and manors of the upper city (shrieking bird-sized drakes rasp overhead, where flocks of them form or alight or scatter among the rooftops), you find there's a clear delegation to meet volunteers, marked by a grand orange banner signed with the blazon of Overlook. Underneath it is a smaller red banner. You learn that all recruits are to assemble in High Hall, within the citadel, at four bells—shortly before sundown. You'll be led in from its doors. Foreigners with weapons and violent magic are unlawful in the city was what the guards at the gate told you when they confiscated your weapons until you leave or acquire a permit. The city seethes with heroes.
  
  You have all afternoon until the assembly is called. Proceed as you like. You can find a map of the city without too much trouble; Travel House can guide you. Adventurers' guilds of which there are evidently many can grant you a permit and could contain others of your stripe. You could go to the mages' college if you wanted to gain a magic permit for any reason (no one recognizes incarnum) like research materials. Exploration. Talking to strangers. At the incarnites' lodge where you stopped a little while ago and were pointed the way they mentioned no enclaves here but a practitioner, Misa Sorai, who keeps herbs and is welcoming. Though you wonder whether she'd be someone of like temperament to you. There's always the inn. You find in any case that Stonehammer, the inner city where only dwarves live and live they do in houses of unbearably ancient stone is like seeing people eat from polished Minoan urns. Its streets are dark, foul and seem, somehow, both tomb-oppressive with age and like a city of Soviet architecture. Sounds of armament govern the air below, Pelor's mace above.
conversations: Exegesis: