Elves should have mathematicians, too

I could post about how job-hunting is terrifying, and so is trying to make sure I have/will have done everything needed to graduate by the appropriate deadlines, or about how I have forty students in my class and the next largest section only has 30, but instead I'm going to pretend like life is all frivolity and happy butterflies and ask for advice about D&D.

So, through a series of less-questionable decisions than last time (at least the ones I was responsible for), half of the party seems to have found itself in a situation where it needs to rescue the other half and maybe some NPCs from mostly unknown conditions in the middle of a pretty much unfriendly country.

The rescuers: Ath, human rogue 1/paladin 4, and Rino, half-elf scout 5(? If he's multi-classed I don't know about it). Known collectively as "Team 7 strength". Also Sombra, Emgeri's greyhound animal companion.

The rescuees: Emgeri, human fighter 1/ranger 4; Perk, over-excited tiny person cleric/bard 5 (I don't know what the proportions are); Henry, human NPC performer previously seen as my nano protagonist; and Rusty, human NPC somehow associated to Perk and Henry's band of travelling minstrels.

They're listed about in the order we care about getting them out of there -- we don't want to leave anyone behind, but we barely know the NPCs at all, so we're not about to get killed saving them from a fate that's better than death.

The situation: On our way to the Elven Ends of the Earth, we were forced* to travel through Orkinya, aka No-Magic Land. It seems to be a theocracy of sorts, as uncooperatively monotheistic as it's possible to be in D&D ("all the other gods are evil"), big on avoiding sin (and it seems sin = just about everything), and any magic that's not from their god is EVIL. (And only certain people are allowed to do their god-magic.) And they don't travel much at all, so any strangers will stick out like crazy.

They somehow detect any use of magic in their territory, and send out elite squads to arrest the people responsible. And maybe innocent bystanders as well. We're still not entirely sure what happened when they captured us. (Out of character, we know it's because Rino's thunderstone, while nonmagical, sounded a lot like magic.)

So we were captured, and thrown into a dungeon. Oddly, they didn't take any of our stuff. Ath concluded that they must've wanted us to escape, but he didn't see what else we could do . . .

So we escaped. Only the party got very separated while doing so, and Emgeri never showed up at the rendezvous outside the city. We can only assume he got recaptured . . .

Perk showed up at the rendezvous with Henry and Rusty by sheer coincidence, since she didn't know about it, but she showed up trailing Orkinyan guards who recaptured Henry and Rusty, and she decided to go back after them without telling anyone . . .

The resources: Three or more people who escaped Orkinyan prison by pretending to convert to the Orkinyan religion, who are happy to tell us everything they know. Any reasonably available non-magic items (we're at a town outside the border and could purchase things), or magic items although they'd probably just get us in trouble. The random stuff we're carrying.

Ath's plans tend to involve lots of lying. He just can't figure out what lie to use. Rino's tend to involve explosions.

. . . Anyone have any brilliant ideas?


*To be fair, we could have taken a boat, but Emgeri gets seasick, and we could've gone north, but that would've been perilously close to a town Ath was banished from . . .

Rather than subjecting you all to an incredibly long rant about the algebra review class, I'm going to post some character questions before doing homework. That's not to say the rant won't happen eventually. Just not tonight*, if I'm ever to get the homework done.

The characters:
Serge Aliri-Keran - totally not a shaman. Nope, he's not talking to animals, why would you say such a thing?
Orlando Neila - a trusted employee of Green Man Pharmaceuticals.
Emeryis - a traveling player and trainee paladin.
Harmonia - a telegraph operator with violent vigilante tendencies.
Lucian Thorne Dawson - He's a programmer, and he's afraid of germs.
Jeanne - She's best described as a muddy peasant. But she might want to be a paladin.
Brin Lankari - Light-side Jedi who flirts with anything that moves.
Hans - Rainer's bâtman/squire/minion.
Rainer - regent, heir, and commander of the armies for the four-year-old Duke of Valdorpf.
Steliana - another pretender to the duchy of Valdorpf.

( The questions: )

I have been delaying, and delaying, and delaying continuing to work on this, because Emeryis' shirt is supposed to be sort of a dark red and the closest chalk pastel I had was sort of a pale brick color. OR SO I THOUGHT. I eventually made it to Michael's yesterday afternoon, and ended up buying a whole box of chalk pastels (the small box, not the large one, which still cost rather more than I wanted it to) since they didn't sell them individually.

I start coloring this evening, and it is apparent pretty quickly that the color I am using would probably be properly described as rose. A bit of looking in my old boxes of chalk pastels reveals that I actually had this color before going shopping. Um . . . oops?

Well, it's not like I don't use chalk pastels.

So here will begin Adventures in Color Blending. There may be occasional updates.

Does anyone know what that fabric that's different colors from different angles is called, and do they make it in things other than just solid colors?

So, Victoria basically tells Jamie to shut up when he suggests that she wear a mini-skirt. Of course, this is the episode after she wears . . . well, let's just say it's not a Victorian dress. And she's wearing knee-breeches during the conversation in question.

But the thing is, the next two outfits she wears involve increasingly short skirts. So I'm sitting here reading these photo-novels and coming up with (ridiculous) alternative suggestions for dialogue. Most of which involve the length of Victoria's skirts (Jamie: I convinced her to wear a short skirt. You wouldn't believe how much talking that took!).

Also, I didn't realize Brigadier Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart was in The Web of Fear until he showed up. And now I keep getting confused because they refer to him as 'Colonel'.

The internet seems to be grumpier than it was yesterday . . .

Victoria can pick locks with hairpins! (I'm not bothering to wonder why she has hairpins, since her hair seems to be in a ponytail . . .)

. . . I haven't done much of anything academically productive this weekend. I suppose that doesn't really make it any different from most other weekends, but . . . I guess I should get off the internet and sleep at some point, so I can do work in the morning.