For starters, Arcadius has not been his usual self. He's been quiet. Very quiet. Which, considering everything that's happened, is quite surprising. I hope that he's feeling alright, though overall it might not have been a terrible thing.
We've lost Jacob, apparently for good. I sent him a missive, telling him where we were going. But two full days of searching led only to the loss of a couple of lantern archons I summoned to help us in the search, and a great deal of frustration. We don't know where he's gone, all of my method's for finding him have failed, and Pelor has responded to my pleas only with "bonk," which is not bloody helpful. He seems to think I know the correct answer, and I think I do, too. But I get the feeling that Pelor and I might have a different idea of what that answer is.
Everything that I've learned from Pelor says that, even if Jacob's done something stupid, we owe it to him to find him and make sure he's alright, make sure he at least gets to safety, even if he doesn't come with us. But if that's what Pelor wants us to do, he's sure not helping us.
So we finally left. There was nothing for us to do. We decided to travel near the edge of the kingdom, just this side of the mountains, where the border patrols are a bit more permissive and the land outside of the kingdom is nearby, just in case. There's the occasional band of gnolls, but we can deal with those.
Which is how we found gnoll tracks, decided to be of help, and ended up finding an army of gnolls surrounding a human keep.
This is where Arcadius's quiet seemed even stranger. I know that I sometimes am the one who decides when there is a moral quandary or what not, but I've always tried to let Arcadius make the decisions in battle. He's a paladin, by Pelor's beard, and that's what he's supposed to be doing. But instead he just stood around, waiting for us to come up with a plan.
Which we did, of sorts. Tupper was to scout out the area, see what the gnolls were up to, and make sure that they weren't, say, working for a good wizard and laying siege to a keep filled with fish worshiping bastards. We weren't sure how best to render aid, except for maybe to try and make a distraction to give the army inside a chance to attack or something. We almost did, when the bastards opened up a big old portal. But all they brought through was trees for some siege equipment, and they were finished before we had run foolishly to within a range where I could have destroyed the portal, so we backed up and luckily hadn't been spotted.
Which is how Tupper ended up playing scout.
Pelor works in mysterious ways. Sometime he makes you able to do things you never knew you could, to get through the situation somehow. Sometimes, he make you completely unable to do a damn thing. This time was that.
So I ended up in the gnoll camp, where they mistook Tupper for my slave and let him go, holding me responsible. And then had be hauled up over the keep's walls to try and negotiate a truce, the terms of which seemed to be "Open the gates, everybody dies." Not a lot of room for negotiation, honestly, so I didn't feel too bad telling the man in charge that we had a wee pack of paladins ready to attack if there was anything useful we could do. He was pretty clear the answer was no. And not just no, but the kind of "Please don't, because if you do we'll all die, and if you don't we'll get reinforcements" kind of no. And they'll get me back out tomorrow, where I can rejoin the party and try and banish whatever the hell spells the gnolls put on Tupper.
All in all, then, not too bad. Perhaps Pelor sent Arcadius's distraction, along with Tupper's incompetence.
At the end of the day, I suppose Pelor's still a god. And if he wasn't being mysterious and confusing most of the time, he wouldn't be doing his job.
But he'll get us through this. I'm pretty sure.
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