NBHK, my recollection of certain portions of this mission are somewhat incomplete, for reasons that will become obvious, but I hope that my account will still offer some insight into our ongoing investigations.

In a follow-up to last week’s mission, we visited The Eldeen Reaches to find and question Sylar Brask. According to Abernathy, Brask was a Dark Lantern, a covert operative for the King of Breland. Up until now he had been presumed dead in The Mourning.

We took The Lightning Rail to the shore of Lake Galifar and found an individual named Bill Brasskey advertising Jungle cruises: guided tours into The Eldeen Reaches. We were all intensely impressed with his resume, and decided to pay the fee for his services. He had not exagerrated his skills, and by the time we arrived on the other side of the lake he had already defeated a Kraken. The next day he would go on to singlehandedly defeat a massive Venus Fly-Trap and an Owlbear on the way into the woods. I could barely even manage to lift his machete to clear our path, he is a truly superhuman individual.

Unfortunately, the next day we discovered Bill’s weakness, an acute case of narcolepsy. We found him passed out in a clearing, being slowly wrapped up in vines and unable to break free. Thinking quickly, we used the intense reflection of sunlight off of his bald head to fry the source of the vines, and free him.

Arriving in the Shifter Village, we found it under assault from even more of the same fungal pods that had nearly consumed Bill. Their crops had been overtaken by these invasive creatures and the village was starving. Bill directed us to the “Watering Hole,” where we found Sylar Brask and the Elder of the village, Hellik; however he did not come with us himself, as apparently he has history with Brask, who does not like him.

Hellik and Brask were wary of us at first, but agreed to give us the information we came for if we could resolve the issue with the fungal pods, as all other teams that went to investigate had either failed to come back or mysteriously claimed that there was no problem upon returning.

Questioning this aforementioned returnee was quite strange, he was underneath a tent elsewhere in the village, shrouded in shadow and seemingly merged with the fungus. Sasha was able to hear him muttering “My mind is no longer my own, The Veiled Lady Waits,” as we approached, but after we begin speaking to him, he became downright chipper and refused to admit anything was wrong. According to him, the rest of his expedition simply died in a rockfall. Sasha examined his thoughts and saw that even those seemed to agree with his story, although there were some odd holes in the memory that indicated tampering.

Without anything more to learn from the infested man, we ventured to the cave from his memory to investigate for ourselves. Of note: Bill Brasskey did not accompany us for this part of the mission as he was busy engaging in relations with somebody’s wife. Evidently the cuckold did not mind as he simply respected Bill too much, and on the way out of the village we saw several of the results of these trysts in the past, each a near duplicate of the glorious man himself. I find myself unable to begrudge the man anything, he is simply too powerful for this world.

The fungal rot grew stronger as we approached the cave, and just as we thought, it was not collapsed like the infested man had claimed. We saw spores in the air and tried to protect ourselves from them by wrapping cloth around our mouths, but that ultimately ended up being for naught.

Mere minutes into the cave, rocks fell from the ceiling, instantly killing the rest of the group besides myself and Matilda. Rather, that is what our altered perception told us had happened. After the fact, I’m told that the two of us began behaving strangely, and the rest of the squad had to keep their distance from us to prevent us from hurting them as we sought revenge for their “deaths.” Within the depths of the cave, the five of us encountered a massive Fungal Queen, and though Matilda and I believed ourselves to be alone, we still fought to destroy it.

Even with two of us impaired and being forcibly shown horrific visions of dead loved ones, we were able to defeat what we now know was The Veiled Lady, and after she perished, our altered state of mind ended with her.

We burned the cave on our way out, and returned to the shifter village, where Sylar Brask told us the rest of his story: he had been working for Breland and infiltrated House Cannith as a spy. There, he saw the horrific experiments described in the notes. Since The Mourning, he has been following other instances of these defects, and believes that they are connected to Daelkyr, a kind of creature from the realm of madness, Xoriat. Apparently these creatures cause birth defects, and he believes they had a hand in The Mourning. In addition, the incidence of birth defects in The Eldeen Reaches is going up, and he worries it is due to their influence.

Thanking Brask for the information, we left him in peace within the village and found Bill Brasskey so he could guide us back home, leaving several extremely satisfied and pregnant women behind.

YLA, Toryn Viphonastar