"If Rayne is willing to give you a chance," Zombs said slowly, "then so will I." The others murmured in assent.<br/><br/>Ishtar finally rose back up. "Thank you," she whispered, "here, I know this doesn't undo what I have done, but this is the payment for the six women I sent to Telethrax - I hope it will contribute to their rescue," she said, as a large pile of gold materialized at her feet.<br/><br/>Zombs turned to address the rest of the players. "Nobody mention the GM. It'll destroy morale if the others find out that they're being trapped here deliberately. I don't like keeping them in the dark, but ignorance is bliss, and as long as they don't know the truth, there is hope in uncertainty."<br/><br/><hr/><br/><em>(Gain 6400 XP (ding!) for recruiting a new ally and setting a succubus on the path to redemption, and 5000 GP for her share of the gold!<br/><br/>And we're back to downtime events, spread out over several days of rest and preparation.)</em><br/><br/><hr/><br/><strong>Cleaning up the bazaar</strong><br/><br/>"We're back!" Sabrith announced. She and Grogza were carrying heavily laden sacks over their backs. "We made a clean sweep through the market, took out the last golem and the rest of the zombies, but we didn't find any other players though. On the other hand, we scrounged up all the loot we could get our hands on, mostly crafting materials, which should keep Lizzy busy for a long time."<br/><br/><hr/><br/><strong>New allies</strong><br/><br/>It wasn't too long before Charlatania and XxxHawtAzn69xxX (Hawtness for short, as she said herself) were up and about.<br/><br/>"I sort of remember," Charlatania said, shuddering as she recalled memories, but she soldiered on. "It's a bit hazy, like a bad dream, but I was caught by the walking iron maiden for... I don't know how long really, it was all dicks inside and I was cumming the whole time. Then it finally released me, and all I could think of was needing more cock, it was this huge desperate desire that made it impossible to concentrate on anything else, and I don't even swing that way!"<br/><br/>"I don't know about anyone's brother, but an elven ranger bought me some time," Hawtness added. "We were cornered in a dead end alley, and she just pumped adamantine arrows into the golem and drew its attention, giving me time to slip around it... but it wasn't enough, the last I saw, the golem had grabbed her and..." her voice broke, and she had a pause for a moment to regain her breath. "I ran and ran, I didn't even think to get her name at the time... too bad I got trapped again the next day, between the golem and a zombie horde, if I'd known I'd have picked death by zombies instead. Thank you for rescuing us, you know the thing people say about a fate worse than death? Well, now I can say for sure, that it's true."<br/><br/><hr/><br/><strong>Magic item crafting</strong><br/><br/>"Here you go," Lizzy said, as she opened up a trade window with Rayne to transfer official ownership of her ordered items over to her.<br/><br/>"Is that hair from Dixon? I can make a cloak of griffon mane with it. Don't ask how a handful of hair turns into a full-length cloak, though, because all I can say is: don't be a smith if you don't want to break immersion in this game. The same ingot of metal can turn into a tiny dagger or a huge greatsword, conservation of mass is the exception rather than the rule... sorry, I'm rambling. Do you want an enchantment on it as well "You need anything else, just let me know.<br/><br/><em>(Outfit and underwear repaired! Obtained: 10 adamantine arrows, 2 greater hushing arrows, 1 mind sentinel medallion. Lost: 2800 GP)</em><br/><br/><hr/><br/><strong>Ishtar's debriefing</strong><br/><br/>The high-leveled players - Rayne, Starstrike, Zombs, Grogza, and Sabrith - together with Ishtar, were gathered in the room in the castle where, appropriately enough, the ruler would have plotted strategy with his generals and advisers. They were sitting around a table upon which surface a scale model of Port Lannis and the surrounding lands was built, the kind of thing that a general would use to place little tokens representing soldiers and plan out a battle. Zombs had found some miniatures somewhere, and represented the players' influence over the city by blue figurines of the common humanoid races, while the monster-infested streets were occupied by red monstrous tokens. The area occupied by the blue team, just the fort, was dwarfed by the sea of red that covered the rest of the city save the bazaar.<br/><br/>"Alright, the first and most obvious question, who is Telathrax exactly?" Zombs asked.<br/><br/>"Telathrax is a fully grown black dragon," Ishtar explained. "He has a lair at the very bottom of the city's sewer network, which he uses as his base of operations. His goal is to destroy Port Lannis and turn the land back into the boggy swamp that it was before people arrived, drained the marsh, and built the city on top of it. To do that, he first has to rid the city of all the people like... you, the ones who possess separate bodies and souls. And to achieve that, he is using breeders to saturate the city with monsters."<br/><br/>"By breeders, do you mean..." Starstrike piped up, then trailed off, leaving the question implied.<br/><br/>"People who are impregnated by monsters and then give birth or lay their eggs. When I visited to... sell the ones I had captured, Telathrax boasted that each of them could spawn a monster once every four hours, twenty-four hours a day, non-stop as long as there were studs to breed them. He already had ten at that time, and together with the six I sold to him, he would have sixteen breeders, not including any others he might have obtained since then."<br/><br/>"That's almost a hundred monsters a day," Zombs exhaled loudly. "Which matches up with what we've seen so far. So why is he releasing all of them as they are being... born, instead of gathering them into one huge army and steamrollering us all at once?"<br/><br/>"While Telathrax was boasting about his rate of production, he was also complaining that the monsters spawned had no discipline and were too difficult to control in large numbers. He mentioned that with the number of breeders he had, he could just let the monsters swarm the streets of the city and build up the sheer numbers to overwhelm the defenders, either though pressure or attrition."<br/><br/>"Is that true?" Sabrith asked, glancing at Zombs.<br/><br/>He sighed. "Unfortunately, yes. We are doing fine for now, clearing out the monsters in the immediate vicinity of the fort, but all the places we can't reach the monsters are building up. Eventually, by sheer chance if nothing else, a whole bunch of them will decide to move in our direction all at once, and then we'll have a siege on our hands. Replace 'monsters' with 'zombies', and you can see why we'll be facing an apocalyptic situation, sooner or later."