<strong>-Helena Shaw - Magnimar - Underbridge-</strong><br/><br/>The warnings truly didn't do Underbridge justice.  It was a place where the sun's light barely deigned to stray, an ugly little scarred pockmark on the otherwise beautiful surface of Magnimar's landscape.  What few plants grew here were gnarled, ugly little black twists of vine, molds as thick as mortar, and the occasional patch of unhealthy mushrooms peering their knobby heads out from under sodden wood porches.<br/><br/>The people weren't much better than their surroundings.  Everyone looked upon their neighbor with suspicion or unveiled hostility, their nerves so tightly wound that the slightest brushing of a festering warf rat was enough to set them to shakes.  Conversations conducted by shadowy figures paused whenever Helena passed, glancing her way with dirty, nervous faces.  The occasional whore, face caked with enough makeup to cover the warts and blemishes both innate and disease-spawned, plied their bodies in front of brothels where the air was choked with too little perfume to cover up the rancid and omnipresent stench.  At they very least they added some much needed colour to the drab surroundings, casting rolls of velvet cloth in gaudy maroons and inky blues across rooftops and overhangs.<br/><br/>It was beside one such building that the druid found her goal, a seedy little dive attached to a series of unwholesome warehouses.  A worm-eaten sign hung over the door, the flaking paint arranged in a shape of a jovial smiling man in royal purple clothes.  The Friendly Merchant, a place of much infamy in Magnimar and beyond, was anything but friendly.  But if one wanted to hear of rumors and find directions, there was no man better to ask than the weasily little half-elf, Siov Cassimeel.<br/><br/><strong>-The Friendly Merchant-</strong>