Day 35 – To hunt a bandit 2: return to the drawing board

Im sat writing this on the 37th day since the murder of my father, during a quick stop at the friendly arm inn before we head west into the apparently "endless and trackless" Claokwood (more woods, yay). I realised that If me and Im are going to infiltrate this bandit camp I probably shouldn’t have a diary on me which talks all about how I am going to kill them. Good thinking Arwen.

So after the micro-fiasco with the first group of bandits we encountered me and Im went north into the Peldvale, where the raids were apparently even worse. You know what else was even worst – the stupid Peldvale not just woos but low lying woods with lakes and bogs and I got wet feet and my boots were practically ruined. It was horrible.

That being said we did actually find some more bandits after only about two hours of trudging through damp, muddy forest. I thought this time I better let Imoen do the talking, doesn’t take a braid as big as mine to realise that everyone here laughs at gnomes. She had no problem sweet talking this group of bandits into thinking we were here for the banditry. Helps that she has that savage black armour which makes her look like a badass bandit.

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more gnome h8ters

These morons took us straight back to the camp. I cannot quite believe it worked. Strangers show up and you just lead them back to your super secret camp, lmao. Plus, we struck gold: he introduced us to Tazok! The person mentioned in Tranzig’s letter. Tazok was deffo in charge round here. Only downside is he was this mean looking ogre, huge sword, brutal armour, more than twice as tall as I am, hell, almost twice as tall as Imoen is. I did NOT think this was the time to start slinging spells – that’s not how assassins operate, shoot ‘em in the back, not the front, obvs.

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um, yep, just some bandit wannabes, here to join your bandit actualbes

We thought we better get the, like “lay of the land” or whatever Gorion used to say – reconnaissance, reconnoiter, that sort of shit. I’m not going to go into all this detail about the camp except it was huge, at least, like a hundred bandits, including these two groups who are apparently famous: the Blacktalons and the Chill, both really well equiped. The Chill were also literal hobgoblins, eww. In fact the whole stupid camp was eww, it was muddy and it stunk like actual shit, plus we’d overheard that Tazok had left and there was no idea when he would be back so we had to change our plan – Tazok had a big tent that was guarded day and night, 24/7 rotations. That’s where we needed me and Im spent some time listening like super secret spies, trying to gather info from the less disgusting bandits, but, like there weren’t many women in the camp, if you get my drift so we “retreated” to an unoccupied tent to wait for the cover of darkness.