Vernon's taking some time off (perhaps he prefers mucking out stables to adventuring with us?), and we've hired a cleric named Aanar to take his place. The fool has signed on for a share of the treasure (!), but we will have to pay him heavily if we find artifacts and want to not share. Aanar can do some cleric stuff that Vernon couldn't; my favorite is what I call "hero's breakfast", whereby we all get a sumptuous breakfast AND some extra vitality AND resistance to poison AND it just plain tastes yummy. It also turns out he can do some good healing stuff too.

We meet up with Trixie (the red-headed water-walking bitch who kicked my ass due to her (wise) unwillingness to fight on dry land). Turns out she's an elf. She's a bit confused about what we're doing here, since we last "met" a couple of hundred years ago.