We finally (oops!) took a peek in Mortinser's message book. Turns out he sent us a message a WHILE ago saying there'd be an adventurer's guild meeting up north in July. Time to get moving.

Pippi gave us some advice for dealing with the northerners. He said, be aggressive, otherwise they won't respect you. I like that advice; I've never had much patience for diplomacy. "Surrender or die" is good with me. I hope Pippi wasn't kidding, the way Uncle Plato was when he taught my father a few words of Dwarvish. He gave Dad a Dwarvish phrase for "thank you kindly, great sir" which REALLY meant "move over, you insignificant little man". Luckily, Dad never got out much, so he's still alive to tell the tale.

On the way north, we found something useful to do: we're cleaning out a den of giant ants (pretty scary giant ants, at that!). A merchant got bushwacked by ants; if we can recover his body we'll get a couple thousand gold pieces, and best of all, there may be some magic items to recover.

So we've lured three successive groups of ants out of their nest, and disposed of them. The third group was quite difficult, since it included three ant-spider combos (mutants? magical creations?). Using the great Dumbass taxonomy that Errol has taught me, I immediately classified these as belonging to the "goo" genus. Turns out they were marginal members of the goo family, since they only gooed when dying. So I'm thinking of proposing to Errol that there should a third genus, called something like "death". I don't want him to laugh at me, though: his knowledge of Dumbass things is so much greater than mine.

Highlights of our fights against the ants: