Towards the end of the debrief, the students received a letter from Tera. She apologized but said she was tied up with some other matters and had to reschedule their meeting to March 2.

March 1

Early in the morning, Malif visited Alana at the jail. "I got myself in kind of a jam, Malif. I was wandering around outside of town when I spotted a cave I hadn't noticed before. Being curious, I checked it out. Turns out there was a stiff in the cave, looked recently killed and partially eaten. He had a nice leather tunic and I'm pretty sure he didn't need it anymore, so... I took it. As I was getting the tunic off, I heard something from deeper in the cave.

"I figure whatever killed this guy could probably kill me too, so I grabbed the tunic and ran. I was feeling pretty good about the day when I got back into town. I didn't step more than 100 feet into town when some guards came up and arrested me! Turns out they think I stole the tunic!

"They didn't believe me when I told them I just found it off a dead guy and they hauled me off to jail. My hearing is March 10. I tried to get a couple friends to try and gather more evidence from the cave... there was a pouch a little farther in I didn't have time to look through... but they are all too chicken to go in.

"Anyways, I'm almost out of options. But then I remembered you! Certainly took you long enough to get here though," she teased.

Malif said he would look into it and made no guarentees but would see what he could do. He woke Vaugner and together they went out to check out the cave based on the directions Alana had provided.

Sure enough, there was a cave, and a foreboding one at that. Deciding that perhaps it would be better to have backup, they decided to mention it to the rest of the party later.

Meanwhile, Kestrel sought out Pippy in the morning before training. Sure enough Pippy was hawking more stones. Kestrel pressed Pippy for more information. Pippy replied that he and his friends had each gotten a couple stones from a traveling wizard and reaffirmed that they made great toys. Pippy had no further information about the traveling wizard, but offered to sell Kestrel another rock for 7sp or two for 1gp.

A bit puzzled, Kestrel visited Rina. She laughed and said that Pippy had sold her one too ("It hasn't done anything yet though, except grow a little fur"), and that they seemed innocuous enough. She did notice, though, that a lot of them seemed to be on sale from the various street urchins.

For the rest of the day, each of them trained with their respective tutors. Malif and Vaugner were both impressed by Kestrel's prowess and chose to learn more about the fighting arts. The rest of the party expanded upon their previous vocation.

Throughout the day, each party member received a letter requesting their presence that night back at the keep. The party was split up, and each person was asked to re-account for their travels. As an additional oddity, a Belar was present this time in addition to their human questioners. During each interview, there were many reassurances that the party did nothing wrong and weren't in trouble, but they wanted to make sure they didn't overlook anything in the initial interview.

Late at night they were released. Finally tomorrow they would be able to ask Tera their questions!