The adventure

Ferro, as the smith turned out to be called, greeted them politely.
"I wondered when I would be seeing you," he started. When he saw their startled faces he continued, "Oh yes, I know about you. You've been the talk of Rapax Castle since your arrival in the Courtyard. Excuse my curiosity, but are you the interrogators the King requested? I am surprised that you have not yet become Templars. You would have less trouble with my brother and sister Rapax."
When their expressions changed from startled to confused, he continued more:
"But you haven't come here for conversation, have you? You must want my weapons and armour?"
They examined his offering but pressed him for information as delicately as they could. They found out that the Templars were typically Rapax, but not always; that they were devoted to Al-Sedexus. The Rapax King was away with the army, and had captured a T'Rang and an Umpani who wouldn't talk. He refused to talk about his brother, Antone, saying that he can speak for himself, and was not to be drawn further.
His selection of goods was impressive, and they spent a great deal of their money on some of his best items. They bought a golden breastplate for Karen, some platinum greaves that they gave to Vi, robes of rejuvenation and some snakeskin boots for Quentin, a cloak of many colours for RFS and, most prized of all, an Infinity Helm that they gave to Shu Ting. This precious item was imbued with potent regenerative magic, giving her a seemingly endless supply of energy, restoring her health and also capable of replenishing magic; the robes of rejuvenation were the next best buy, but did all these things on a much lesser scale.
They heard some footsteps, and Salva saw on his scanner a horde of Rapax approaching. They retreated further into the armoury stores. At the back of the armoury they found a heavy lift that could haul items up to a second floor built into the capacious space of the armoury. They used it to winch themselves up but the half-floor was hardly a decent retreat, and hiding in a corner seemed a bad way to impress Ferro.
They jumped down again and rushed past the closest entrance onto the corridor, and back to the room that served more as Ferro's display room than the smithy proper, which had its own entrance onto the corridor. According to Salva's scanner, some of the Rapax were coming down the short, L-shaped connecting corridor. They ambushed the leading Rapax in that connecting corridor, starting a battle with three Rapax warlocks, 6 samurai, 9 beserkers and a courtesan. In the corridor they were happily slicing the beserkers apart one by one, stepping over the bodies and getting closer to the crowd in the main corridor, but Salva noticed that two beserkers had run round to the other side, and they could hear them slicing into Ferro.
Ferro needed protecting, and they had to run back to use their healing magic on Ferro.
Quentin found a use for a spell that he had been practising, but had thought would not be very useful. He called it 'eye for an eye', and, following his principles of justice (much to Margreet's annoyance) it would reflect a spell back on the caster and allies, ensuring that everyone was affected by a spell. He used it a number of times over the battle, and it proved very effective, the warlocks and courtesan casting powerful immobilising spells repeatedly, which affected the friends little, thanks to their protective magic, but kept the hordes occupied so that only a trickle came at once.
The best effect of it was to freeze the two beserkers attacking Ferro, who formed a wall of flesh protecting him from others, who would charge the friends instead, and die very quickly.
The last ones to die were the courtesan and a warlock who had followed the two beserkers round the other entrance.

The friends, burdened by their loot from the courtyard, teleported back to Arnika, and sold it on to Antone and He'Li. Salva, whose ability to work magic into his gadgets was growing all the time, adjoined the giant bellows from Ferro's forge to a hose that they had found, with a small portal to the ocean. He left it there, still wondering how it might be used.
In Arnika, they found that the Savant had created an even better version of his android, called slashers. They packed quite a punch, but were sadly unable to land their punches, little RFS, a supposedly inferior version, showing that good repair and a learning environment were far more important by tearing a slasher apart himself.
Quentin teleported them back to the armoury, where the guard was still waiting.
Eventually he moved on, and they left quickly, to avoid entangling Ferro in any disagreements with the other inhabitants: if he could make another infinity helm and more snakeskin boots they would be must-buy items.
They passed through the main entrance hall, renewing their magical enchantments there, and came to another large chamber, surrounded by a balcony, to which there were two ramps, both opposite the entrance they were spying around the corner of, but opposite each other on the sides of the room. Between them was a great throne, by which stood three archers and three guards. The friends charged these archers, putting their backs to the wall by the throne and getting their blows in before any of the Rapax in the room could respond.
The fight was leasy. Without magical support the Rapax in the room were so much meat to be butchered; Shu Ting had learned quickly the weaknesses of the Rapax form, landing a number of finely-aimed critical strikes. Despite their magical equipment, the fight was tiring, and Quentin did need to use his magic to boost their flagging muscles, but they eventually stepped over the slippery piles of gore, collecting a few undamaged things the rapax had been carrying.
They continued to explore the castle, finding the kitchens with some unpleasant hanging meat, still in the shape of trynnie and Higardi, and a jar of pickled trynnie. They used Salva's scanner to hunt down more Rapax roaming the corridors of the ground floor, before talking to the impassive Rapax guarding the entrances on the balcony around the throne room.
These were temple guards, and when the friends agreed to be initiates to be Rapax Templars they allowed them in to the complex, where they met Al-Adryian, the initiate master. He set them to collect the three items of Al-Sedexus' Canezou from the temple, each of which was guarded by two elemental lords and a priestess, who asked them a riddle before unlocking the entrance to the next room.
The elemental lords were easy kills, and the riddles as untaxing:

'Although I am always with you, only one side do I show. Lest you see my other side where long red rivers flow. And though I feel all things, I have not a mind to know. Think well upon it now, my name, and knowing, tell me so.'

'Everything that I know, you know it, too. Yet I gain nothing lest it first comes through you. No paper walls confine me, yet a thousand stories I own. Tell me now, who am I that lives in a lonely cage of bone?'

'I have four rooms, but tables and chairs you'll not find. I am credited with feelings, yet they are not truly mine. I could be called a drummer, steady, strong, and true. And when I finish my work here, so, too, do you.'

The adventure

The roughly-hewn archway led along a curving ravine and eventually they saw, ahead, the ravine blocked by two well-built walls with a gap in the middle, forming an uncovered corridor between the crenellated walls. Standing in front of this corridor were two sentries. The friends managed to charge these without them getting away to raise the alarm, and caught their breath at the foot of one of the walls whilst Salva's scanner showed a patrol coming along the top of the built walkway. They neglected to look straight down, and walked away, giving the friends time to catch a patrol of 3 Rapax in the corridor. They took a chance and continued along the corridor, which turned to the left. At the corner a bowman leaned over and saw them, taking a couple of shots, but they started running and reached the main doors, which were on the right at the end of the death trap, as 3 patrols and a samurai leader tried to close them. They died quickly, and the friends barged inside the castle as the bowman alerted the rest of the guards.
Inside the doors there were two ramps up onto the ramparts, and the friends ran up one, slaughtering two bowmen at the top of the ramp and using the crenellations to protect themselves from the archers further out on the ramparts. They strode along to the turn onto one side of the ramparts, which were split by the ravine, choosing that side because they could see an entrance that looked like a barrack-room carved into the rocky cliff-face.
At the corner they were met by a charging patrol, which didn't hold them up at all, Shu Ting scoring another quick kill, perhaps because he hadn't seen her below the wall. The next one got knocked out by Karen, but while they chopped him up one caught them from behind, slashing Salva in the back. It took some fancy footwork to turn around and get RFS and Karen at him, and he got good slashes at Quentin and Shu Ting as the party turned. With the help of Salva's regenerating stone, and Quentin's restful magic, they survived the rear assault. Everyone else, feeling full of energy again, quickly slaughtered two bowmen who had come forwards to get better shots, and towards whom they had been advancing whilst fighting their rearguard action. The scattering of bowmen left they picked off one by one before looting the barracks.
Finally they entered the castle through the second great set of metal-studden doors, coming to a small antechamber. This they looted for a few things stored in the entrance to the castle before entering the main entrance hall. This had two exits at the far end, one on each side.
They took the right, which opened onto a long corridor parralel with, but stretching beyond, the main hall. They managed to leap across it and through an entranceway not quite opposite, thinking that they had escaped the notice of a patrol that they had seen further down the corridor.
They looked around and saw that they had entered a room with a giant furnace in it. In another room adjoining it a Rapax smith was regarding them with curiosity, but not hostility. They approached him and started talking.

The adventure

The friends offloaded their valuable haul to Antone, and mixed up a few more potions from what they'd managed to find. Salva took some time to tinker with his gun once again, as he had been doing whenever they had free time, but this time his tinkering impinged onto the others because he announced that he'd like now to use arrows or quarrels, rather than the spiked stones that he shared with Margreet and Quentin for their slings.
They hunted some of the Savant's orbs in the spaceport and met some new types of androids outside again; android beserkers and gunners. They were quickly demolished by two Higardi patrols, Myles and the friends. They picked up the giant silver nugget from their room in He'Li's inn, and Quentin teleported them back to Rapax Rift, annoying Vi.
"I told you that I don't like being here!" she barked at them
"I'm sorry," admitted Quentin. "I just feel some sort of deep bond between us and I don't want to cut it."
The comment induced choking sounds from beside them.
They realised that there were parts of the rift that they hadn't explored, so they found their way over, and there, having killed two undead rapax corpses, they met the last prisoner in a separate cell, called Rafe. Rafe was much more sane than the others that they had freed. He explained that he was marked for sacrifice to the lava lord and that only the staff of ash could remove the mark; until then he could not leave the rift safely. Al-Sedexus holds all prisoner. It was his opinion that her cult had taken over the Rapax, and that from worshipping her they were now ruled by her. He didn't believe, or comprehend, when they told him that the Lava Lord was dead, but when Quentin produced the staff of ash he was overjoyed.
"Now unlock my cage," he asked, eagerly. "These bars are all that stand between me and my freedom."
His cage was controlled by a combination lock of three dials. Thankfully, each dial only had three options. They unlocked it on the 24th attempt.
Rafe was overjoyed, but stayed to teach them about the rift for a few minutes. He explained that the beckoning stone summoned Al-Sedexus' creature, and that only in his presence would the door to her chamber open. He explained that the Templar Rapax had managed to get the Rapax to march on the rest of Dominus, led by Al-Sedexus' desires and against sensible judgement.
He finally, however, grew too fearful of being caught by Rapax patrols or the lava lord himself, and fled, never to be seen again.

Salva's scanner allowed them to ambush 4 samurais and 8 veterans just coming out of one of the roughly-hewn corridors that led to the prisoners' area. Shu Ting placed a perfect blow through the head of the lead samurai, and in the tight corridor Quentin's magical ego whip caused bubbling blood to stream out of a number of muzzles. Margreet cast her quicksand spell, but it failed.
The samurais were too tough to be scared by a clean kill and a bit of magic, and magically webbed Karen and Quentin. 6 of the veterans, on the other hand, retreated towards the other end of the corridor. RFS and Shu Ting did a double-team move on one of the remaining veterans, and the combined effects of the samurais' magic missiles and whirlwinds killed RFS. Karen had quickly broken free of her webbing, and the chums were finishing off the samurais when the veterans returned. Quentin finished the last samurai off, and turned to reboot RFS leaving the others in a slog-fest of crunching blows, out of which there could only be one winner: Karen. Salva's regenerating stone was necessary twice, to heal their wounds from the samurais' magic, and during the fighting, and Quentin aided them with another spell from his expanding magical arsenal, this time leaching away their exhaustion, which was a concern for the energetic Shu Ting and RFS, and for Salva, whose stone sapped a lot of his stamina.
One of the veterans trapped Salva against the wall of the corridor and sliced him up. Moments before he expired Margreet healed him to new, but he fainted with the amazing changes he was undergoing, and the rapax killed him with two more blows. By this time only one other veteran was alive, and the juggernaught of the friends mowed it down, Vi caught Salva's mortal enemy with her mystic spear before anyone had a chance to close with it, and Quentin raised Salva from the dead once more.

They made their way back through the rift, encountering plenty more rapax. At first three veterans on their own provided mere practice at finding soft spots for Shu Ting, but then they ambushed a troop of 7 patrols and three initiates. The group gradually surrounded the friends, but died too quickly for it to be worrying. Further along they met another such patrol, and they were seen before they had managed to completely spring their ambush. Perhaps simply attacking the lead enemy, or perhaps showing unusual acumen, but probably from the acute mental haemorrhaging Quentin caused in them, they focussed their efforts on Shu Ting, but failed to hit the whirling bundle of death except on her swords or armour. The end of the fight consisted of inventing new ways to chop up rapax, their unconscious bodies lying in the corridor where they had fallen, helped by the mental blasting and the toxic cloud Margreet cast over them. Despite their attacks, Shu Ting even found time to aim the siege arbalest she carried in place of a crossbow well enough to rip a throat out of one of the initiates from a distance.

Once again burdened by looted metalwork they decided not to bother returning to Antone to sell it on, and entered the Rapax Courtyard.

The adventure

Karen, Shu Ting, and RFS were about to step through the entrance when Quentin spotted that one of the metal plaques surrounding the doorway was hinged rather than simply bolted into the wall. They set Salva on the job, but the plate opened without incident. However, underneath it was a complicated mechanism with a number of traps set to trigger if someone fiddled with it. Salva fiddled with it, but with the traps first, pushing a few levers and disconnecting some crank rods to see what might happen.
The bubbling sound stopped and they saw that the two lava pools had drained away; they could only assume that the whole antechamber had been a trap to drown people in lava.

They passed through carefully and safely into another hall with a statue of a four-armed demoness facing them from an alcove. Two ramps led up the sides of the tall room to a platform above the alcove, which stretched beyond their view. Salva's scanner showed rapax further ahead, presumably up the ramps, but Quentin decided to have a look at the statue.
AS well as finding some of his special healing powder hidden behind her, he also got a good glance of the careful artistry of the naked statue.
"She is rather fine, isn't she?" admitted Margreet, coming over for a look.
"Oh come on!" exclaimed Karen, "Haven't you enough to ogle?" She spared a glance for Vi, who was quite innocently unaware of anything other than a search for hidden items.
Margreet had a grope of her own of Al-Sedexus' behind, picking up some potions from the other side from Quentin.
They sneaked up one of the ramps, along a wall of the cave that extended along behind the platform, and to two protruding pillars, behind which they hid as the enemies approached, chanting some strange hymn to their demon.
As the sound of footsteps became audible, along with the rhythmic chanting, they could judge without Salva's scanner when the leap out.
They ambushed the procession, led by the high priestess, and Shu Ting did for the matriarch, yet again displaying her profound respect for religious authority. The five priestesses remaining required simple butchery, which the friends were happy to give, Shu Ting bagging another couple, giving her three of the six.
"Those were very neat decapitations." Quentin observed, looking at two heads of the high priestess and one of her initiates. "It takes the phrase 'the head of the church' to a whole new level."
Shu Ting snorted.
The high priestess had been carrying a staff of flame, which Margreet eyed greedily. No-one else laid a claim to it, so she swapped her ebon staff for it, the new weapon being hugely better; a truly powerful artefact.She had also had a small wand, a flamequencher wand, from its effect on the staff, which they kept.
They sorted through some of the metalwork that they had accumulated, finding that some of the gauntlets were mildly magical 'Mantis gloves', which Karen and Vi decided that they could use. They picked up a helm of insight, that aided psionic powers, but Quentin declined to swap it for his brilliant Brilliant Helm. Vi swapped some of her plate mail for slightly better-looking versions, and they packed the rest up carefully for carrying home.
Salva successfully disarmed the anti-magic trap on the first chest, but tripped the curse on the next one seven times. The friends appreciated the aid of the regenerating stone, but the smell of burning, dripped flesh that accumulated on the ground around them became quite pungent, so they were very glad when he finally prised the lid open. The chests held nothing of interest, very frustratingly.
Weighed down by their load, they followed another corridor from the balcony down, past two sentries and to an island in the lava where a staff was locked in a cage of fire.
"That's it!" said Salva
"That's what?" asked Quentin
"They go to all this effort to lock it up, so it must be valuable!"
"Or dangerous." pointed out Shu Ting, but Margreet had the flamequencher wand, and, accompanied by Karen, she used it to suppress the flaming cage. Quentin strode over and grabbed the staff as the ground started shaking.
"What have you done?!" shrieked Vi
"I hope it's not erupting" Salva agreed.
"This is worthless" declared Quentin "It's just ash."

The shaking began to differentiate itself into separate thunderings, like individual impacts, and they were interrupted in their worrying about an eruption to find themselves facing an angry giant of crusted lava, the red of the molten rock glowing softly through the cracks of his body.
"He needs to come to the gym with us." was all Quentin could manage to utter, eyeing up his wobbling pot-belly. At the thought all fear he might have induced dissipated, and they attacked the beastie, who summoned three fire elementals to join him.
Quentin used the potent fiery magic of the place to cast a powerful spell that magically sped them all up, and they easily avoided the ponderous sweeps of his club, or his searching feet, and chopped him up, knocking pieces of half-solid rock out of him a little at a time.
He died slowly, it seemed, to them, but actually quite quickly, and the fire elementals they finished off afterwards.
They found that they were cut off from everywhere else by pools and streams of lava, so they returned to the two portals, where Quentin, who after some examination had worked out how to turn his magic to this teleporting trick, set his homing mark. They took the second one, appearing in front of a sealed stone door with a strange indentation in it, and capped by a magnificent golden statue of a demon, very much like Bela.
Remembering the door to the meditation room in Trynton, they tried a faintly magical artefact they had picked up from their trawl through the holy complexes which called itself, rather ominously, the beckoning stone. Its unengraved side fitted the indentation perfectly, and immediately the cliff face in which the great stone door was set began to shed rubble, driving them back.
From a small distance they could see the golden statue raise its arms, the cracking sound of its magical joints echoing across the rift, and leap down in front of the now open stone door.
El Dorado wasn't a hard fight at all. Gold is much softer than steel, and less painful than drips of lava. Salva did need to use the regenerating stone once, but they'd have killed it anyway. When Bloodlust finally bit some more gold away to reveal where a heart might have been the golden monstrosity creaked and fell, shattering into fragments that scattered into cracks and crevices. They retrieved a few gold nuggets, but much of it had vanished, perhaps into the lava.
They peered into the chamber revealed by the open door, and saw inside a beautiful round room, separated into an inner circle and outer circle by a colonnade of giant pillars, the demonic form of Al-Sedexus, the demon goddess, herself. They had left Demonsbane in Arnika, and she seemed unaware or unconcerned by the light streaming in through the doorway, so they sneaked away, killing 4 rapax soldiers on the way.

As they came to an archway, they realised that this was leading to Rapax Castle, and they decided to unburden themselves before infiltrating such a formidable place. Margreet teleported them back to Arnika, via her homing site at the T'Rang teleporter in Marten's Bluff.

The adventure

The friends returned over the bridges to the stone ledge in front of the initiates' quarters and climbed down a gently sloping section to the rocky floor below. They had a fight with three rapax veterans and two beserkers, but nothing could stand up to Karen, Shu Ting, RFS and Quentin in close combat. They wandered down a little corridor, past a lava pit that led to another corridor, ambushing two initiates and two veterans in a carefully-carved cave of hot baths and steam. While Salva was watching for trouble they had a quick wash, the heat of the lava outside and the fighting having been unpleasant.
When they were done he showed that he had occupied himself carefully, and explained that pushing out a support could bring the ceiling down over the lava pit, allowing them to cross safely. There was some doubt, but Karen proved the point by knocking it through. When the dust settled Karen needed another wash, but the lava pit was indeed bridged by fallen rock.
"See! I said so." Salva continued to press his point, "It is simple; the pit opening had made the support already weak."
"Are you saying I couldn't break a proper support?" Karen interjected
"Yes," Salva began, before realising where this might lead, "No, no. It is not needed." He saved himself, as Karen manically approached another one.
This adjoining corridor twisted and turned, and using Salva's scanner they ambushed a band who were just coming up to a corner. This group of rapax consisted of 9 initiates and a priestess. They killed three immediately and slaughtered the others in rapid progression, advancing along the corridor. The initiates' spells were noticeable, but not worrying. One managed to cast a spell of silence on Salva (which no-one noticed) and Margreet, but she didn't need to cast spells anyway; the rapax died too quickly under their weapons. The priestess was last.
Further up the twisting corridor they found a votive chamber of some sort, with rapax inside. They enticed the creatures out of the chamber by peering unsubtly round the entrance arch, and caught them as they approached. Shu Ting killed the priestess with one blow as they leapt around the corner, followed by RFS, but an initiate managed to catch them in magical webbing. Karen killed two initiates with Bloodlust (and blood-lust), outdoing Shu Ting's impressive start, and the remaining three were no challenge.
At the end of the corridor they came to two door-sized frames, of finely moulded silver, each of which rested against a silver stand. They could have been full-length mirrors, except that in place of the actual mirror there was a shimmering film of magic. Margreet and Quentin recognised the portals, but in case anyone was in doubt, Vi piped up
"Which teleportal should we take? We've no idea whether they'll take us further in or out of this forsaken place!"
Margreet had a long stare at one and Quentin the other, and they decided, after some examination, that one took them to a balcony and another to a stone door, so the whole party stepped onto the balcony, where they were immediately set apon by 2 priestesses. Apart from the surprise, it wasn't a problem for Karen, Shu Ting and RFS, who were first through.The priestesses, for some reason, perhaps foolishly underestimating the little balls of fury, tried to cast their magic on Quentin as he came through. It failed to take hold of the rapidly maturing wizard, and the priestesses were diced to ribbons with barely an attempt to fight.
The door to the balcony was locked, but thankfully the rift key that they had found earlier fitted the lock. Ahead of them was some sort of entrance chamber with two giant pots of lava on each side, enclosed by two small entrances; the one in front of them and the one at the other end.

The political system

Spin
We have spin doctors whose whole job is to distort the truth, hide facts and present illusions. Why they're called 'doctors' I don't know, but an English graduate could probably tell you something profound about ignorance, bliss and the link of these two to good health.
Politicians co-operate and support the popular media in their focus on sensation, rather than fighting it. One politician alone cannot fight this plague, as Gordon Brown has discovered; he tried to present himself as a solid, reliable man of facts and numbers, and the press jumped on him with a ferocity and glee reminiscent of a pack of hyenas giggling and snarling over an antelope. Perhaps Tony Blair had trained them too well, and they had grown too accustomed to being hand-fed pretty stories, human interest (one of the banes of modern life) and smiling photo opportunities.
Like a pack of brattish children, they rebelled when they found that they had to make their own human interest (it never occurring to the well-trained lap-dogs of Bush's lap-dog that this might not be necessary for every news item ever) and made it spitefully.

'Increasingly, sensationalism, gossip, manufactured controversy have become our agenda instead of the best obtainable version of the truth. We've become frivolous.'--Carl Bernstein, talking about the news media

'Some credit for our illiteracy must be given to the rhetorical skills of those who make it their business to manipulate the press and public opinion. One of those rhetorical skills is the ability to create the stereotype of ... an arrogant, repressive, protective, authoritarian character. The manipulators also know that appealing to emotions is more effective than appealing to relevant evidence. They know that feeding prejudices and biases is more effective than trying to convince people that they must overcome their natural biases if they are to find the truth. They know that by creating doubt they create uncertainty, and uncertainty is their best ally.' - The Skeptic's Dictionary

We have, then, politicians and media organisations who value controversy over truth, getting alternative views over true balance, appearance over reality and false belief over honesty. Career politicians, in order to beat those who have learned to play on emotions, must adopt the same tactics. Sensible points are rebuffed with ad hominem arguments every day, only reinforcing the presidential, character-based system of election which we do not actually have. At a more subtle level, people spend more time pointing out that the others have been wrong than ever addressing issues such as improvements on what others have done, why they were wrong or why the speaker is right. It is, apparently, all the public can understand: this person is wrong because so many people were disadvantaged.
We are apparently not allowed to hear discussions of underlying principles, mature comparisons of practical benefits, disadvantages and possible abuses; we must simply trust Dave and Gordon that such a thing is true.
And we do. We trust everyone when they throw mud at everyone else, and no-one when they try to wipe the mud off. You get burned when you play with fire. So we know that they're all untrustworthy liars because that's what they all tell us!

So politicians have no incentive to tell the truth: telling the truth requires a sort of compromise between two extreme positions: each side presents a sober analysis of the facts, and people have to engage with these and judge them carefully. If one side decides to have a screaming abjab about it, and the other tries to be reasonable, then the compromise people reach is that there's no smoke without fire, a lesson we've learned from the politicians and their sly aspersions about each other, and we believe that something is wrong with it on the basis of emotional appeals. The other side, then, can't have the compromise actually be pulled so far to the other side's position, so they must use emotional rhetoric too, pandering to people's base instincts and short-circuiting rationality, rather than fighting off these inevitable temptations. Do it just once, with the best of intentions about winning an important issue, and it's a the step on a road to hell; winning becomes the priority, not truth or the national good.

Once we have the public trained to accept the easy soundbite over the sensible approach we no longer have any sort of contest of politics, but a childish fight over who can make the best quips and who has the best phrases. This is the level of politics: the sort of argumental style that most people would recognise as suitable for 6-year olds, were they not already invested in the emotional triggers of party-political bitching. We have films that make fun of children having name-calling competitions:

"You're manipulative"

"You're a class warrior”

"You're shallow" (great is truth and it shall prevail a bit) and so on.

And yet when it's our politicians it is considered the height of intellectual engagement.

Another acquaintance of mine wrote this rather succinct summary of journalism:

'The media fact-checking the claims made by politicians and outing them when they've found lies is called journalism. Just reporting: This side said: 'X', the other side said: 'Y' is not unbiased, not balanced; not real journalism. It's being a political tool.'

We have implicitly accepted the principle that balance and fairness involve giving two sides of an argument equal time. This is the principle that suggests that when someone claims that the sky is lime green, we should listen carefully and waste our time. The BBC, I'm sure, would give him as much airtime as someone they'd found to present the alternative argument. Other news reporters would probably create a 'docu-drama' about 'the man who thinks that the sky is green', repeating themselves every five minutes to make one interview last an hour.
To take a slightly more political example, it's the principle that tells us to give creationists, homeopaths, quacks and lunatics equal consideration with experts. In one way I agree that it is possible for an expert to be wrong and that someone unqualified could be closer to the truth, and I abhor the unquestioning acceptance of experts' opinions. On the other hand, experts do tend to be right, and to regard the pronouncements of years of study and hard work as equal to the pronouncements of self-interested con-men speaks of a scepticism bordering on the solipsistic or else of raving stupidity. And yet the belief that all opinions must be heard and respected is a fundamental principle of modern political and cultural dialogue.
There's a whole new essay to be written on the difference between respecting a person and respecting all his opinions, and how much account ought to be taken of how much a person associates himself with the validity of his opinions, and another essay again, which people have indeed written, to be written about the other side of wacky groups' promotion of their beliefs: the nation's outrageous libel laws.

But to return to our political system, we have a set of cultural values, against which the politicians and media do not fight, and which they actively promote, that are at odds with rational, fair and balanced debate. The prevalence of rhetoric to persuade, rather than reason, has become so great that reason is sometimes not even given a nod. When a politician is reasonable, he can even be accused of wheedling! At the same time as we have a prevalence of rhetoric, which can be used anyone with a chance to speak to an audience to persuade them of his views, we have a system which automatically gives every fool (and his dog) the audience he needs, by giving every side of a debate an airing, no matter how ridiculous. Every opinion is worthwhile... every opinion valid! With that sort of belief, it's no wonder that radical preachers declaim against the cultural state of the country. We not only deliberately hide any sort of cultural common sense by giving everyone a right to spout nonsense but the very same principle gives these people the right to preach against the country's basic principles (if any exist).
Finally, we have a national obsession with human interest and drama. People are fed dross with no content except the ability to laugh at the other fools on the other side of the camera; they gorge themselves viewing others' thrills and failures and politicians, rather than protecting politics from this insidious way of relating to others solely as stories to be enjoyed, have embraced it whole-heartedly. I would like to think that with some nudging the population could quite easily learn to respect politicians for their work and opinions (as with Dr. Evan Harris, my own MP), without feeling the need to like them because of their caring, sharing news conferences.
So instead of lambasting an opponent at every opportunity, because he hasn't expressed sympathy for the latest murder victims or spoken out about a particular sob story, it would be nice to see politicians stand up for principles rather than put party-political bickering and point-scoring above every concern.
No wonder people have no faith in politics when no politician is above petty backstabbing and power-games. It might make for good news, with power-games, cabinet rebellions and snide comments about others holding plenty of human interest, and it might even benefit the individual politician, whose name gets around, hopefully associated with wit and wisdom (although name-recognition is as important as what it's known for), but it does a disservice to all politics, by making it a game of personal relationships, broken trust or negative comment and insult at any cost.

It's another facet of the over-arching focus on character and a presidential, 'elected dictator' style of politics that has conquered our freedom, democracy and culture more surely than the Nazis or Soviets ever could have done. With politics a game of strutting peacocks displaying their lack of distinctive character and their speech-writers' wits, it's no surprise that people regard The Palace of Westminster a place far removed from ordinary life, populated by a modern version of an out-of-touch oligarchy. Everything about the personal relationships in which 'the people' have no part, the personal attacks and partisan party politics distances MPs at least as surely as being 'mere' avatars of opinion, representing people.

As I've hinted again, this also ties back in with my previous comments about the problems of party politics, which sap the possibility of displaying true character: different principles and interests. Aspiring career politicians must adhere to the party line, emphasising what has been determined to be the topic of the week and promoting what is flavour of the moment. News stories are leaked and prepared on a party basis, making it easy for the media, who, as described previously, act as political tools rather than taking the hard road of doing real journalism. Clearly I have problems with the media's attitude to politics too, but without politicians and their parties behaving in such an irresponsible manner they wouldn't have a chance to lap up whatever they're spoon-fed.
This might explain why politicians seem to be insipid, vapid, shallow drones, but is precisely the wrong sort of characterlessness. Personal attacks, possible anger tantrums and marital fashion are how to distinguish a politician; he can't show his probity or intellectual achievements because everything good is food to power the party and his great leader, but he can suffer from barbs and mud-slinging. Characterless politicians live in the shadow of the party, their personal beliefs hidden for the sake of the appearance of party unity.
And yet Ken Clarke, whose opinions were at odds with many of the Conservatives, is one of the best-respected members of the party. How odd. When people actually discover someone with enough character to hold a differing opinion whilst still being allied to those who think differently they respect him!
It's an example for us all.

The political system

Why are people so apathetic? Why are politicians hated and politics derided?

I can't be certain, but I can offer my views on what's wrong with political system. This comes from a conversation I had recently which started out with lawyers.
We have one vote out of roughly 68,500 in our constituencies. We vote for one of four or five parties that have won any seats at all, but typically we live in constituencies in which we are hopelessly outnumbered by a solid block of people who can be relied apon to vote for one party, making that constituency a 'safe seat'. Therefore, for most people, to vote is pointless because if those people vote as they are almost certain to do the contrasting vote has no effect at all.
The first past the post system therefore encourages apathy by giving most votes no effect at all. Although individual votes can be said to have minimal effect compared to the whole 60,000,000 (or 44,000,000 who can vote), or even to the 27 million who did vote at the last election, a proportional representational system would make each vote useful, because they would all add to a party's total.
The benefits of our constituency system are supposed to be that we get representation for our area, and perhaps that we can pick our own candidates.
We clearly do not pick our candidates: we have centrally-dictated candidate lists, all-women short-lists, or even candidates parachuted in from elsewhere. In most places candidates are party members, selected by the fellow party members of the area. This requires a fee, making participation in candidate selection a privilege, not an integral part of the democratic process. Of course, we can vote for independent candidates, a benefit that PR does not give (in all implementations of which I know). Independent candidates, however, need very special circumstances in order to stand a chance of winning. This is one of the major benefits of our system, so I should take some time to examine why it never works.
Firstly, we have voter apathy; voters are not taking the time to investigate who wants what, and so an independent candidate has the disadvantage of not generally being known. Once apon a time, when a person could be known in an area the size of a constituency, an independent candidate might have been able to raise a sizeable following, but now he needs money for lots of advertising.
This is the second point: political parties receive large amounts of funding from donors and businesses, and a candidate representing one benefits from national spending and a local budget, as well as having a pre-arranged set of people to help with campaigning; in marginal seats, where a person's vote might have meaning, parties often send in campaign teams to help. People grow up with constant exposure to political parties and their supposed ideals, which counts as greater advertising and is a definite barrier to entry for new applicants, such as independent candidates.
Thirdly, and understandably, a deposit is required for a candidate to stand, to pay for the administrative costs of including the candidate in official documentation. This is refunded if the candidate does poll a relatively small proportion of the vote, but is deliberately sufficient to scare off those without spare cash. I don't think that it's a terrible idea: it's necessary to prevent everyone standing, but it will have bad effects too.
Of course, independent candidates suffer from the same disaffection with politics as other candidates and probably more so, since they rely on voters being interested enough in local issues to realise that the independent candidate represents the best option despite having less money for advertising. This disaffection is the subject of the whole post, so I won't go into it further.
Fourthly, independent candidates suffer from the same problem in parliament that voters have in constituencies. Even if the voters are motivated enough to elect one, he can do nothing much in parliament without the support of one of the behemoths of political parties; private members' bills are renowned for rarely becoming legislation; recent legislation in which ideas from local areas are taken by councils and proposed for consideration in law through a definite framework was said on Radio 4 to be a very rare example of a private member's bill actually making it all the way through.

So we can't have a nice load of independent candidates actually representing local interests. What's wrong with parties?
Political parties need cohesion. MPs are required to toe party lines, which can conflict with the best interests of the country or the constituency (or both, of course). Keeping the current system is justified because of the representation of individual regions, and the ability to have 'your own' MP who officially represents you (and 68,499 other people), rather than the other 60 million people. The whole purpose is lost if MPs are actually elected on the basis of national campaigns and policies.
MPs are co-erced into behaving by the party 'whips' through a number of mechanisms, on which I am not an expert. Examples include the whips' control of who goes on fact-finding expeditions (also called holidays) to foreign climes, placements on committees, which might either be a special interest of the MP, or have paid positions, and junior ministerial posts, which are both paid and good for the career (either in or out of parliament; 'revolving doors' is a phenomenon that I should address later).
Of course, behaving does not involve helping the party keep all its manifesto commitments, which are supposedly the basis of elections (now that we've established that they're not won by party candidates campaigning on local issues). Political parties don't even stick to these commitments. Labour's recent commitment not to introduce top-up fees for university education was utterly ignored once Labour came to power. If we can't rely on the promises that the political parties make, but we must vote for a party because independent candidates have so many problems, on what basis can we decide to vote?
I have heard people suggest that the presidential system of voting for candidates is a good way of understanding our current voting system: we elect people who we like, and trust them to run the country for us for five years. They suggest that people can't make manifestos to cover five years of events, with that much time necessarily containing unpredictable problems and crises, and that we shouldn't expect anything from manifestos.
To start with, I don't think that the unpredictable nature of five years makes manifestos not worth adhering to. It ought to be perfectly possible to be both trustworthy and reliable in dealing with promises and new events. At best, therefore, it merely adds another concern to an election.
But we don't elect a supreme leader whose judgement must be sound because of the power we let him wield. We elect, supposedly, one person to represent our region in a national assembly whose overall judgement must be sound. If we were to elect a supreme leader, I think we should just call it democratic tyranny and forget about parliament altogether, which is what Tony Blair has been working towards.
At the moment we do not elect a leader on the basis of his character. We don't elect the leader at all: the party leaders are chosen by party members (or by the currently sitting MPs), and we only get to choose a party. The party policies, meanwhile, are settled by a clique of movers and shakers at the head of each party.
So we do not have a presidential system because we do not vote for our supreme leader. We do not want a president, especially since we have not split the various jobs of running the country as clearly as the Americans have, so the president would have far too much power, because parliament has power over almost everything (that it hasn't yet signed to Brussels).
Furthermore, unforeseen events can be acted on under a set of principles that can indeed be enunciated beforehand, and promised. We would not need to vote by character if parties actually still had principles. All they have nowadays can be summarised by the recent campaign poster of Mr. Cameron, whose shining face dominates some vapid guff about cutting the deficit and not the NHS, as if some other party were truly promising the opposite.
We clearly have moved towards elections based on character, and not on principle, the parties espousing no principles, having few meaningful policies and not even keeping to them. This does not sit well with our system, all the benefits of which are in direct opposition to elections fought on the basis of a single leader. We have the worst of both worlds: elections fought with nothing solid and campaigns designed to appeal to the general population, and a system which is incredibly undemocratic when abused in such a way, and whose benefits are lost by national campaigning.
Just to illustrate how amazing the situation is, I will repeat it, with figures to demonstrate the point. We are electing our MPs on the de facto basis of PR campaigns that use the party leaders and worthless rhetoric (rather than solid argument) as their material. We are, therefore, electing parties nationally, as we would by PR. However, our current system was not designed for such shallow electoral processes, and we therefore have Labour in power, with 55% of the seats in parliament and 35% of the vote. The Conservatives got 32% of the vote and 31% of the seats and the Liberal Democrats 22% of the vote and less than half that, 9.6%, of the seats in parliament. We are running a PR system (both proportional representation and public relations) , as I have said, but we aren't even getting it right.
People argue that a PR system would give undue power to the minorities; that they can hold things up, or act as power brokers. I can't help but note that the current system is hardly fair and representative, with 40% of voters being misrepresented! It would be hard to get much worse, and I would far rather have power too spread out than too concentrated in the hands of, for example, Tony Blair.
He serves as a fine example of the folly of our system. We voted him in on either the basis of manifesto or character. A likeable man of good character should, we are told respond to events in a way that represents the population. This is why our presidential Blair went to war against the popular will because he wanted to make George Bush happy. Alternatively, we should forgive such mistakes, because we elected a party and its manifesto. This is why we got a string of broken promises, such as tuition fees and the breaking of the self-imposed golden rule of fiscal management.
We got signed up to Lisbon without getting a say in it and we got Northern Rock bailed out, at great cost and for no good purpose, because it would have harmed mainly Labour constituencies. Labour has multiplied the number of sweeteners available for whips to offer recalcitrant MPs, increased the renumeration for such perks (evading limits on MPs' incomes without actually being open about it, and again making it harder for independent MPs, who cannot be expected to get such positions as easily).

Our politicians clearly do not act in the national long-term interest, short-term interest, or for their constituencies. So what else might motivate them?
I could start in a number of places, but first I think I'll mention the incredible disaster that is PFI; the private finance initiatives that cost 3-4 times more, on average, and serve only to make the governments ledgers look good in the short term because they aren't recorded there as debt. Here we have politicians acting in their own interests: to make themselves look good: far better than actually ought to be possible. This fundamental dishonesty can be blamed on the media and the population, for getting so agitated over normal problems, but is within the politicians' power to avoid.
It has become known as 'spin'.

Objectivism

I listened to the president of the Ayn Rand foundation, Dr. Yaron Brook, give his talk yesterday. His views about the world of finance; how the recent crash can be attributed to excessively low interest rates in the previous 8 years, and how in 20-25 years we'll face a serious crisis in western economies, were quite sensible. His doctorate was in finance, after all.

The ethical aspects of objectivism, however, and his belief that the moral purpose of government is solely a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force, to prevent people using violence on each other, are all more questionable.
When pressed about why violence is so special, he answered that it is because it is the enemy of rational thought; his example was that a man with a gun in your back prevents you thinking and acting rationally. Given that he thinks that rational thought is a moral good, and anything that prevents this is wrong, this would be a reasonable argument, except for two problems:
1. That it is perfectly possible to think rationally with a gun in your back; it simply alters what the most selfish, rational action is: the best action for self-preservation is to do whatever prevents the man pulling the trigger.
2. It is not proven that violence is the only thing in the world that has this supposed effect. I can think of many things that act at least as strongly to constrain one's rational thought: emotional triggers; parenthood (which typically grows emotions in us), intimate relationships, disease, natural disasters, simple misfortune, emotional expression (an angry person triggers emotions in us, of fear, or corresponding frustration and anger, for example) or even economic force (such as owning all the vehicles in a region, forcing a person to stay in an area).

He became quite upset at being pressed on this issue, so I let it slide after a short discussion, and the responses I got were that economic force was simply a ridiculous situation that had never occurred, and that people who had problems with the entirely free market always had to come up with outlandish suggestions. He is clearly unfamiliar with the nature of thought experiments... well, perhaps not. Part of Objectivist philosophy involves a very optimistic, even naive, view of human nature: he believes that in a perfectly Objectivist society people will be kind, happy, prosperous and benevolent and that therefore there will not be economic force, because no-one will be mean enough to do such a thing.
Perhaps he would say that it is not in the rich man's rational self-interest. But at this point he is almost denying that people can have emotional goals, which in his talk he explicitly admitted: he said that desires are what we live for, and rationality is what we live by. If the rich man, once he is Objectivist, will never persecute anyone unfairly, or otherwise injure other people's lives with his wealth, then he will have changed hugely from the humanity we know today.

Any moral and political system can make itself work if it requires fundamental changes in the nature of humanity in order to work. If people could be relied apon to be kind and generous to each other, we'd hardly need society at all (which is what anarcho-communists believe, if their views were to be summarised in one sentence). Dr. Brook admitted that criminals will exist, which is why we need a government (perhaps funded by voluntary taxation; this was one option he agreed was feasible). However, he does not regard it as so wrong that it must necessarily be prevented that those disadvantaged by birth, disease, accident or natural calamity suffer and die without help. He would have help provided solely by charity.

Here he and I have a fundamental disagreement, but of a different sort from his differences from most people. I agree, unlike many, that this 'natural injustice' is not automatically the responsibility of a richer man. However, this is because I do not believe in universal moral laws or fundamental morality. In so far as moral laws do apply, it is because they have been agreed apon as the country's laws, and men can agree to provide a certain level of 'cover' for each other, with this taken by force if a man tries to keep what he has earned, without being wrong. That can wait for another post; the point here is that the only thing that justifies him not having a responsibility, in my view, is that no automatic responsibility exists, that there is no fundamental moral law.
He, however, explicitly agreed that there are fundamental moral laws regarding the goodness of rationality and the use of force; he said that the use of force in an island far, far away where everyone had agreed to live in such a society would still be wrong. I find this assertion as the same as any other moral assertion, such as the primacy of utilitarianism; it is unjustifiable.

Here we turn to the question my friend asked: that capitalism is a good system with rational, self-interested actors, but how does one justify rational self-interest as a good ethical system?
The answer we were given was simply that he wouldn't enter into that discussion, it being too complex, and that one should read Ayn Rand's books. It is this question of why these moral assertions are universal, rather than any other assertion (or the admission that universal morality does not exist) that is the crux of the matter.
I haven't read the books, but I doubt that the justification is quite as good as the rest of the arguments.

The adventure

Very soon they found themselves under attack from 3 Rapax bowmen, who were accompanied by patrol 'men'. The patrols had a spell-book with them, and yet another magic shield, which the friends looted. They wandered along, guided by the lava flows, to a roughly-hewn tunnel, where they were ambushed by 6 fire ants, which dropped from a crack in the ceiling. They were no match for the friends, and one ran away, having to be hunted down. The tunnel led to a twisting ramp up to another tunnel, the opening of which was carved into the shape of a gaping, toothed mouth. Salva's scanner warned them that there were quite a few Rapax beyond the entrance. They peered around the corner and were hit by the spells of four Rapax samurais. They also saw some veteran soldiers and some bowmen. They retreated back, standing just to the side of the entrance to avoid arrows and spells, and to recover. The soldiers closed on them, with Quentin rendering two foaming wrecks (temporarily) with a violent mental blow. The first wave of four died quickly, and the second wave, which accommodated the recovering soldiers, were more formidable, but Shu Ting killed two with her first blows, placing them carefully for instant kills. With the back broken of the charge, the other died, leaving a few advancing bowmen, whose unarmoured bodies were more like sword practice than a threat. Salva did have to use his healing stone again, and then they sent RFS to entice the samurai towards them. He died from their spells, but the samurai got the message that their companions hadn't done the job, and they attacked the friends. Quentin killed two with his paralysing mace, and restarted RFS while the others killed the last two samurai.
They looted what undamaged weapons and armour they could, and continued along the carpeted passage, which led to three prison cells, separated from the main cave by lava pits, the noise of which prevented any talking to the three Rapax individuals in the cells. A sequence of rope bridges led out of the prison, across the rift. They could see ahead on the bridges two female Rapax, dressed in robes and veils. These two initiates to some sort of religion died without a fight, merely demonstrating that they knew some sort of magic, but not getting the chance to complete it.
The rope bridges led to a long carpeted corridor. The first junction had short corridors in either direction leading to closed doors. They took a left, and leapt inside, Salva's scanner showing one body beyond.
The unfortunate initiate was chopped apart, and the friends had time to look around her chamber. There was a fine four-poster bed, drawers and some stone shelves. The drawers contained underwear for Rapax women in holy orders, which gave them more information about the religion than they could have gleaned from the appearance of the initiates.
"Shame about her." Quentin said, looking down at the mangled body, "I like a fit young woman in her underwear. It reminds me of Xena, warrior princess."
"Who was that?" asked Vi
"A character from a story." Margreet started to explain.
"She looked a lot like you." Quentin added.
The next chamber was similar, except that they had to kill 3 initiates. One of them was wearing a fine set of plate metal gauntlets, intricately decorated and enchanted. Karen took these Mantis gloves and swapped them for her plain steel gauntlets. They also found a large key on one of the stone shelves.
"Where are all the men?" asked Shu Ting
"As if you want to know about men." Karen slipped in her reply, laughing.
"Perhaps they're not allowed here." suggested Margreet
"They've probably better things to do than join religions." was Quentin's offering.
Shu Ting and Karen jostled each other.
The next room opened onto 3 priestesses, whose chamber also contained a wand called a flamequencher wand, and the final room some more soon to be corpses. Even Margreet got a kill by bashing one with her staff.
At the end of the corridor they found three levers, which they pulled. Back at the prison, the prisoners were free to leave, but were cowering in their cells still. They wouldn't talk, but mumbled fearfully of Al-Sedexus and El Dorado. They seemed quite mad.

The adventure

The friends stayed to charm Screg some time longer. Representatives of a powerful empire, with whom one is about to be allied, deserve friendly treatment, and the introductions and courtesy were enjoyable, especially after some of the treatment that they had had on this new planet; the sorceresses sprang to mind.
The Mook, who were of a practical and rational frame of mind, were not deferent, as one might have expected from other humans, but their polite company was relaxing. They were very inquisitive, and the friends were finally able to explain of Grimpak's fate. The Mook were more upset about the loss of the data that he had been carrying than about the death of a member of their species, which although understandable, since none of them had known him, was another refreshing change from the human mentality.
They knew less than the friends about Dominus and the situation there, being a fairly isolationist culture, and certainly risk-averse: Grimpak's expedition was respected but only one of the Mook was even keen to step outside the building to do research amongst the flora and fauna of the planet, let alone travel unmapped areas of space.
They shared their knowledge of types of space propulsion and life support, most of which did seem to involve magic, although the Mook treated this as a force to be harnessed, rather than a spiritual aspect of life. They even helped Salva turn the glowing blue lazulite stone from the temple into a healing device, that could heal via an electrode attached to the skin. Salva hooked this newly fashioned regenerating stone to seven electrodes to heal them all at once, should it be necessary.

Of course, the friends couldn't outstay their welcome, having a message to deliver to Balbrak at the Umpani base, so reluctantly they tore themselves away from Arnika and onto another mission. They couldn't let events run away from them, having positioned themselves so fortuitously. They stopped in on Antone, who had nothing for them; if they wanted better equipment than they had, he said, they should visit his brother Ferro, the smith at Rapax castle, who had far better resources for good metalwork. They had to bribe He'Li again to keep silent about working for everyone, and help keep their secret, but given all that He'Li gave them in hospitality, and their standing arrangement for the sale of renewal potions, it was in effect a free potion, easily spared for a friend.

The friends trooped out of her bar with a wave, Salva bringing up the rear as usual, and getting a sly wink on his way out.
"She'll ask you to look at her plumbing next" Quentin mused,
"Yes, in her bedroom." Margreet added.
Karen, who had been dancing out of the doorway rather than watching their hostess, quickly latched onto the general idea
"Salva's got a girlfriend" she chanted.
"It was just a wink" he explained, "It would be for keeping our secret."
It was no use: his friends would have none of it.
"You should offer to show her your big gun." Quentin suggested
Shu Ting groaned.
"Or ask her help in polishing your sword!" added Margreet
Karen joined Shu Ting for the next groan.
"Yes. A good lick of polish..." Quentin began, but the groans turned to exclamations of disgust.
"Visual imagination, Quentin!" chided Shu Ting, her face contorted at the image.
"He'Li rubbing Salva's sword?" he persisted, in a tone of innocence.
"Stop it, please," Karen asked. Vi's confusion was plain, and Margreet put an arm round her and walked her to one side as they ambled along.

They teleported, via the T'Rang teleporter, to the Umpani base camp, and they gave Balbrak the alliance acceptance letter from Screg. He read it himself, and called 'upstairs', who ordered him to send his team up for a personal briefing from General Yamir.
"I'm proud of you, pups," he declared, the only break from his normally tough attitude "Now get going! The general doesn't like to be kept waiting."
He had given them log-in details for the Umpani computer system and access to its databanks, so on their way into the mountain they stopped at the whirring computer desks and had a quick browse of the briefing files, which explained a few things that had been mysterious.
There was an entry for Vi, again mentioning her possible relationship to a cosmic lord, and one for Bela, who was described as a Demon with personal knowledge of the cosmic lords or cosmic circle.
They learnt that the Umpani knew of an item that the Trynnie supposedly had, called the helm of serenity, that apparently must be worn in order to handle the Destinae Dominus; there were ongoing missions to retrieve it, to scout the Rapax territories and to map the underwater caves and Bayjin.
Finally, there was a detailed file on Z'Ant, whom they discovered to be a T'Rang queen, and therefore needing a different pronoun.
They took the long paths through the caves and lifts up to the General's Quarters and the operations room, where General Yamir thanked them personally for their successes. He wasn't finished with that, however: he gave them a scouting mission to find and rescue any remaining members of the caves exploratory team, led by Sergeant Glumph, and sent them to Rubble for underwater training.
While the general was in his personal office with his aides, pondering tactics, they raided the main offices, looting all the lockers of useful general supplies.
Underwater training consisted of a demonstration of diving kit, which Rubble was surprised to find the friends already knew: it seemed that the concept of scuba gear was a novel and rare one for Umpani soldiers. Vi was very unwilling to dive into the underwater caves, which she said led to Bayjin, so they used a teleport device in the restricted area of the general's quarters that took them to a large house, which might well once have been an inn, between Arnika and the monastery. There was a storage room there, and they kept one of the muskets and some musket balls, in case they would bring a good price in Arnika.
However, they passed Arnika by, and used the outlying house with the T'Rang teleporter to get to Marten's Bluff, and then to outside the Umpani base camp again, that being a quicker route to the mountains, they decided, than to go back to the general's quarters and through all the caves and the base camp.
They went to meet Bela again, feeling more confident now that they knew more about him. They bought another of his hugely expensive cloaks of many colours, which Quentin took, being the only one who hadn't a cloak yet. They also bought some potions from him, which they knew could form the basis of some of Margreet's alchemy. Based on the price of a meal and a drink, they had the equivalent of over £100,000 from the proceeds of their looting and Margreet (and Quentin)'s alchemy, even after buying the cloak for almost £20,000.

It was raining heavily, and Quentin was happy finally to have something waterproof to stop him from getting sodden; the flak jacket he wore was better than Karen's plate mail, or Shu Ting's To-sei-do, but they had cloaks too. On the mountainside they ran into a very dispirited pack of fire ants, backed by some more acid wings (types of flying serpent), whose affinity for water made them enjoy the rain. When they saw the friends the animals stopped their own chase and attacked, but were all killed. The friends met more acid wings, and some less dangerous flying serpents, all of which must have been attracted out by the heavy rain, like worms in the soil, wurms in the sky.
Cumulatively all these acid-spitting snakes would have been a problem, but Salva's regenerating stone kept them in good health, when they could spare a moment to hook themselves up to it. He found it quite exhausting to activate and use it, and began to sympathise with Quentin and Margreet, who knew all too well the sapping feeling of spell-casting. Quentin soon found himself sometimes needed to use his magic to restore Salva's energy, rather than health, because he felt so faint with hiking and using his gadgets at the same time.
There was a worrying moment when Margreet was badly injured and poisoned in a fight, and Salva was busy fencing with a serpent, but she used her own magic to heal herself and then cure herself; curing poisoning was something that they had needed, until now, pre-prepared potions to do.

In the main valley they used Salva's scanner to search for enemies, and thought that they'd ambush 9 scorchers. The scorchers, however, must have known exactly where they were, and were waiting with bated (and fiery) breath. Quentin's immobilisation spell, which he had managed to expand from needing focussing on one target to all enemies around him, saved them from a bad roasting, but they still got heavily burned as they chopped up the closest two. Salva's regenerating stone failed to activate just as they needed it: perhaps the pressure of the situation disturbed his concentration, and Margreet was slashed by a claw, and fell to the ground. Salva did manage to activate the stone, and was quite exhausted by saving Margreet who had not quite died, timing of death suddenly taking on a whole new importance. Her quicksand spell that she had been preparing in turn backfired, but the friends all managed to resist the strange tugging feeling they felt from the ground around them.
Regenerated by the stone, Shu Ting, Karen, RFS and Vi had ploughed through the tough lizards, and ST finished the last two off with showy thrusts and slashes with each of her swords.
Q, M gain levels!
They hunted down a granite golem on their way to the Rapax territories, and then did ambush four blistering scorchers, Shu Ting managing to pierce the eye socket of one before it had even flicked its eyes over to look directly at the ambush party. The other three died quickly, barely doing more than warming the dripping group of adventurers.

At the boundary of Rapax territory, which was clearly marked with purple Rapax flags, Vi once again exclaimed that she wouldn't enter the land of some of the most hostile and vicious beings known to the galaxy. After some discussion, they agreed that they shouldn't force her in, although the Rapax were hardly to be feared by people such as they had become.
They teleported to Marten's Bluff, and as Vi walked into the machine, with Shu Ting and RFS, they switched it to its last setting. This showed a picture with the very same purple flags that marked the boundaries of Rapax territory, so they had a shrewd idea of where they were going.

"Now how did we end up here!?" Vi shouted in annoyance "I'm not comfortable with this at all."
"I don't know what must have happened." Quentin patted her carefully on the shoulder
"Perhaps the teleporter still goes on the blink now and again. Don't worry though: you'll soon find that the Rapax die just as easily at the point of your spear at home as away."
"I don't want to fight armies of Rapax" she cried again, "I wanted to escape angry and vicious people when I ran away from the Dark Savant."
"If we see a whole army, they'll probably start arguing over who gets to go on a date with you, after being mesmorised by your face." he replied, the unsubtle compliment gleaning a rolling of her eyes, but at least shutting her up.
She followed them as they walked towards an area of little streams of lava.

GMO: food crops

I listened to the World Service's feature about GMOs in Europe, and, along with the industry insiders, I thought that the slow and unnecessary bureaucracy that is holding back European research was not at all justified by the skewed opinions of the public: the idea that genetically modified organisms could be harmful to those who eat them (or much more so than the normal version) is laughable.

And yet Greenpeace had a good point to make: that GMOs are designed with the predicate that they will be used in a modern farm, with vast monocultures and large-scale use of unsustainable fertilisers, made from oil. This agricultural system is destructive, unsustainable and therefore wrong, and it is pointless to support it, or do research to improve it.

And yet it is also wrong to hinder GM research simply because of the context. As with my post about relationships at work, we need to identify what is wrong, and target only that, not everything that can be associated with it. In the case of relationships at work, it is the discrimination and unfair treatment that is wrong, not the relationships. In this case, it is the modern farming system.

We should both change modern farming and allow GM research. There is nothing fundamental in the concept of modifiying organisms that limits the research to modern agricultural practices. If all the money spent delaying GM research as a whole were spent on GM research that would help crops in different agricultural set-ups, the case for changing western farming would be strengthened.
This would also support farming in the poorer parts of the world, where western monoculture is not the typical method of farming, and where this research would also be applicable.

It's wonderful when both sides are right. It's less wonderful when there's hostility because they don't realise it.

Relationships at work

Listening to the radio I came across a short consideration of whether it is right to have intimate relationships with work colleagues.
It seems ridiculous that people would consider it wrong. A person's private and intimate relationships are his own business, and nothing to do with his working life. The problem is that we wish to prevent favouritism and unjust promotions (or demotions/stagnation). The problem, then, should be addressed itself, rather than being tracked back to a potential source.

People can treat their colleagues fairly, whether or not they are in intimate relationships. We have workplace rules against bullying, and laws against both discrimination and harrassment. These are quite sufficient: if a person proves himself to be so incompetent that he cannot separate a relationship from his work, and breaks these rules, then he is to be punished.

I see no need to take a step back to try to 'save him from himself' and setp into his private life, and the private lives of other, more self-controlled people. It is an injustice perpetrated on them to have their lives ruled by the potential weaknesses of others. If a person knows himself to be weak, he might impose a rule on himself, but there should be no societal rule.

The idea that a person having a relationship is being dodgy is jumping the gun a little, and very repulsive. It is judging a person before the crime has been committed, rather like assuming that every Swiss man is a murderer because he owns a gun (I choose Switzerland because military service compels them to own a gun, although I think that these are stored in secure locations).

A long life

I saw this talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html
which, unlike Aubrey De Grey, claims that human life is limited to about 90. Well, Aubrey De Grey doesn't say that it's not currently limited: just that with research we could work to change the limits.

He talks about many things, but the most telling point was, I think, that little section about the stress response and the inflammatory state. Inflammation is directly linked to ageing, and connects stress to ageing. Things such as friendship help reduce stress; not individual points of stress, perhaps, but the background level of stress a person experiences, which, as Dan Buettner explains for exercise, is far more important than individual events, certainly in the context of a whole life.

The good diets and the lack of over-eating play into this again: obesity is directly linked with the inflammatory state. This might not be as well recognised as for stress, but is an assertion supported by a mountain of evidence of its own. The more overweight a person becomes, the more his body suffers from a systemic, chronic inflammatory state.

All the points he made boil down to effects on this one condition: the inflammatory state of the body. It is quite possible that the much-hyped longevity of starvation, in which animals fed on diets 20% of the normal, or other meagre diets, works via a lack inflammation, since the immune system is a hugely energy-demanding part of the body, consuming thousands of calories when fighting infection. Starvation, in the sterile setting of a laboratory animal house, will force the animal to shut the inessential immune system, and therefore forgo the inflammatory signals that lead to ageing.

Hints and tips, gleaned by statistical surveys of the elderly, might help a little with improving our life expectancy, but their primary purpose must always be to illuminate underlying mechanisms. There is no point to knowing an extra little habit can net you an average of 2 days' extra life if it is the one-hundredth habit you must incorporate into your life. We need these rules because once we have worked out, using complex statistical techniques, the common features to all long lives, they will guide us to a deeper understanding of the problem.
Many rules will take us back to old wives' tales and traditional Chinese medicine, in which the good rules are obscured by a vast catalogue of pointless commandments produced quite possibly with the best of intentions but with the effect of hiding truth, not revealing it. Once we have linked enough long lives to deduce sufficient rules, we must turn ourselves to deducing the links between the rules: a second level of linkage and deduction.

The adventure

The monks' leader introduced himself as Anselm, the leader of the Brotherhood of the Ascension, which sounded familiar to the chums: they were the people who had abandoned the monastery by which they had crashed.
He was a worried soul. He claimed that the time of The Ascension to be cosmic lords was at hand, but that the Destinae Dominus was irretrievably lost; he had searched near and wide, and lost many monks in the hostile lands. He had little to offer but his learning, which he shared with Quentin, teaching him about divine magic, in particular how to create a magical screen to protect a party from hostile magic. After their encounters with sprites, undead heads and the magical fire of the scorchers, this knowledge sounded invaluable to the friends, as indeed it was to prove.

They continued exploring the wilderness, and saw ahead of them two golems. Golems, they knew, they could fight easily, so they chased the creatures down, around behind an outcrop. Sadly, the golems were accompanied, and the friends ran right into a blistering scorcher, a more vicious version of the creatures they had already met. This proved to be more unfortunate for the scorcher than the friends, as up close their weapons killed it before its flames started much cooking at all. Feeling a little overheated, the friends finished off the two marble golems, only to be met by two gibbering heads, which had chased down the noise of the battle.
The heads would have been dangerous if their magic had turned Vi, Salva and Karen insane during a fight with a large golem, but it was only a small inconvenience, as Quentin and Shu Ting chased the floating monstrosities down.
The friends also hunted some flying snakes, before Salva spotted on his scanner some movement from within one of the hillocks in an open valley. As they approached the mound, they realised that it was a barrow, as presumably some of the others were too. Outside they found a skeleton, lying in the tunnel mouth, arm outstretched as if to crawl away. They took the vials of potion still lying by the bones and edged into the dark, twisting tunnel. As they came to a corner, they could just make out beyond the turn a larger chamber, and Salva's scanner showed that the creatures would be within. Quentin took a quick peek and identified two more gibbering heads and the colossal skeletal figure of a Death Lord. He quickly put up a protective spell, a soul shield, to guard against the nightmarish magic of the powerful undead. Margreet threw a firebomb into the room to attract their attention, and Karen and Shu Ting waited to pounce from within the limited protection of the doorway.
The Death Lord attempted to sap their souls away, and Quentin strained with his barrier, whilst the heads foolishly bobbed right into the doorway, where the girls were waiting. Karen chopped one apart, passing out from the combined exertion and the magical 'ego whip' the creature used to lacerate their minds. She never had much of an ego at the best of times. Shu Ting moved with lightning strikes to slaughter the other before it even saw her standing below it, its attention caught by the larger figures behind her. The Death Lord continued his soul-sucking, the spirit unaccustomed to such resistance, and the friends rapidly broke the tatty armour and bones of the giant skeleton, it starting to fight rather than play at magic far too late to save itself, although its giant's sword did make heavy contact with Karen.
The barrow contained three tombs and two trapped chests. Salva took a long time with the traps, which, he explained, were quite complicated and intricate. One was cursed, and the spell made their flesh decay and drip off, leaving zombie-like creatures exclaiming with pain, and Quentin, Vi and Margreet used their magic to heal the party. Tripping the curse did open the chest, revealing nothing worth so much pain. Salva also tripped the guardian trap on the second chest, summoning an elemental water lord, who killed him with two punches. Karen and Shu Ting managed to splash the elemental apart, and Salva was re-animated, Margreet watching Quentin closeley. This time, he was motivated to be a bit more careful and managed to slip the lid open without summoning another elemental. The treasure inside wasn't, in Salva's opinion, worth dying for, but the others were happy. Quentin managed to salvage two canned elementals from the trap mechanism, which was a cunning piece of spell-work.
Searching the tombs revealed the greatest treasure. They found an enchanted broadsword, a wonderful mace called Diamond Eyes, which Quentin kept, being the only one who used a mace, two magical ankhs, a ring and a wooden staff. The staff seemed normal, but the inscriptions around the stone coffin identified it as a 'Staff of Doom', a powerful weapon with the essence of death contained within it. Quentin could feel a curse in it, so although it was tempting for Margreet, who had become practised with her quarterstaff, to take it, they packed it away for keeping. Margreet had found a winterwand behind the waterfall, which suited her better.
They continued, through a troupe of fire ants, on to a little pathway, which led them into some Rapax guards. Salva stunned two with shots from his gun, allowing himself a little chuckle, Margreet stunned two with the effects of a toxic cloud, and Quentin paralysed two his a spell, leaving the battle more akin to a clean-up operation than a fight.
They passed the turn which Vi explained led to Rapax rift and other Rapax territories, and followed a little tunnel she knew of which was the entry to an abandoned mine. This one was fully blocked-up, but did take them through a pass to the areas Vi called the South-East wilderness.
Exploring took them close to three more flying snakes, these ones more magical creatures called acid wings. The friends chased them, eager to get a closer look at the undiscovered creatures, and ran into 5 tanto wasps as well. Margreet tried a new spell she had concocted which made the very land around absorb creatures, rendering them, quite literally, into fertiliser. It didn't work, perhaps because flying creatures would be a hard target for the land to soak up.
The buzzing enemies proved frustrating, but were eventually killed. Margreet continued to consider the spell, and Quentin explained resurrection to her.
Soon they came to a gazebo, a sign of habitation, which had ammunition and a magical instrument sitting in it. They looted it while no-one was around and followed a path up a hillside, Salva monitoring his scanner for life. He soon informed them that there were three creatures ahead, and the friends could see a paved plateau, so they rushed out, ambushing three of the siges who, with their pets, cause so much trouble on the Arnika-Trynton road. Quentin regretted not setting his stopwatch, as the women, caught entirely by surprise, died in what must be a record; the friends estimated 10 seconds. It took longer to clean the weapons than fight.

Looking around them, they saw that these had been patrolling, or perhaps just walking, outside the front of a giant temple. If this was the home of the evil sorceresses, the friends were keen to express their gratitude for the friendly welcome that the black magic users had given them. The entrances both opened onto a semi-circular corridor that joined them together, half-way along which was the towering opening into the vault of the black cathedral. In the wall opposite this entrance was a glowing blue stone, which the friends decided that they would pilfer. Or rather, Salva decided to grab, and the friends, running across the entrance, dragged him away with. One glance inside the leaping arches of the main aisle had revealed a number of cultists, two Death Lords and a Sorceress Queen holding some sort of vile communion. That they had been disturbed was revealed by their movements on the scanner. However, the service had some sort of pull for them, because instead of chasing the friends down, after walking a little way up the long aisle, it looked like they were returning. This did not suit the friends, who decided that enticing them into the narrower confines of the entrance corridor would be preferable to charging into the open vaults of the cathedral, to be exposed to everything that could be thrown at them. A few more unsubtle peaks around the corner achieved this goal nicely, with the sorceress queen leading the way, a better result than they could have hoped. She was likely to have the worst magic, and a few sword holes in her would help the friends deal with the threat she presented. Once again, Quentin concentrated on his magic screen and soul shield, and the four combatants, Vi, RFS, Shu Ting and Karen, killed the queen quickly, although not before she had called down a firestorm on the group. Fighting through the flames, they also knocked apart a Death Lord who blocked the entrance, he and his fellow giant concentrating more on draining their will to live soul-to-soul than fighting with their 8 foot swords. This was a mistake.
The cultists had all summoned elementals to fight for them, and encouraged the elementals to lead the way as they all closed on the entrance. Two ran around the other way, to get at the friends from behind, a large fire elemental closing on Salva at the back. They were beset from all sides, unsure where to strike first. Salva was proving no match for the elemental, which was quite at home in the magical flames.
This prompted Margreet to put as much power as she could into her new quicksand spell, the centre of which she aimed just at the entrance-way, timed by Salva, who was still using his scanner to check who was where in the hall. This time it worked beautifully, with many cultists and elementals sinking into the stone with fearful screams. No doubt their souls would haunt the places where they had been trapped, but someone else could worry about that some other time.
The firestorm, however, was taking its toll and Quentin, gasping and sweating, collapsed dead from the burning heat. RFS died immediately, his android mind providing no resistance at all to the Death Lord's insistent death magic. The others, the magic corrupting their minds with fear, fled, stumbling over Salva's dead body and dragging it with them, grateful that the fire elemental blocking their retreat had succumbed to the quicksand spell, even if it had injured Salva too badly first.
Margreet, in between using the last of her healing magic to save herself from dying fromt he firestorm, which followed them outside, desperately snatched the resurrection powder from Quentin's still hot body. Bearing in mind his hurried explanations of how he thought it worked, she sprinkled it into his face. He was alive instantly, saying
"I had hoped that would never be needed for me, but I made sure it would work for anyone on me, just in case. You have to put a little bit of soul into the use..."
He spoke as he was helped to his feet, but there wasn't time for much conversation. Karen had been killed by a punch from an earth elemental and Shu Ting was gamely holding the beast up while Vi healed her own burned and battered body. With Vi healed and Quentin and Margreet back in action the elemental that had chased them, and the cultist with it, died promptly. The Death Lord, the last of the crowd, didn't appear as the friends gasped the fresh air, the firestorm finally wearing itself out after the death of its summoner.
With some trepidation, and with what help Quentin could offer, Margreet attempted a resurrection spell of her own, not tied to rare and difficult to use powders. It certainly worked on Karen, who rolled onto her feet in time to help Shu Ting and Vi kill the stragglers from the crowd of cultists and summoned elementals.
With the Death Lord trapped, perhaps, inside the temple, the friends took a minute or so to rest and re-animate Salva, and then RFS (whose re-animation was more a jump-start than life itself). All together once again, they slaughtered the Death Lord in the temple, and explored the nave. Up in two pulpits they found some valuable potions, which Margreet stashed away and a strange metal belt, which Salva laid claim to for future gadgetry. A corridor led away from the choir, and following it them ambushed four mummies, including one known as 'The Scythe'. The undead proved no match for the friends, and the tomb they guarded was looted. Whoever had been buried here, his equipment was certainly superb, and not at all what one would expect from a hero of dark magic. His magical plate armour Karen took, his dark, almost black, sword, Fang, Shu Ting took, it being twice as good as the worthy Demonsbane that is itself a fine weapon.
The magical crusader's helm, granting protection from dark magic, they kept, but the metal was dented and weak, so they hoped the reinforce it or copy the magic, rather than use it. Finally, they gave RFS some boomerange shuriken. His ability to cause damage with thrown objects was minimal, so something enchanted to return to him was a perfect was to avoid wasting money on endless ammunition.

On the paved path next to the gazebo they fought four vampire bats, which proved little match for them. They followed a gravelled path over a hilltop, to another valley below, where they attacked a brute hogar. The large, muscular, bull-like creature knocked out Shu Ting in its first charge. Quentin re-awoke her with some magical smelling salts, the perfume of which was too much for her little nose. The hogar's thick skin took the punishment, knocking out in turn Vi, Quentin, Margreet and then Shu Ting again. Only Karen's sturdy constitution and armour, and Salva's bullfighting knowledge, kept the hogar under assault, and finally killed it.
They waited for Margreet and Quentin to awake, carrying them away when some nightmares came in sight. The mythical horses didn't pursue; perhaps they were merely being territorial.

As soon as Margreet woke she teleported the tired, hungry and exhausted group back to Marten's Bluff. They dragged their heavy loads to Sadok, where they sold a good deal of it, Sadok's prices proving very good. A little lighter on their feet, they used the T'Rang teleporter to travel to Arnika, where they collected from Antone the ebon staff and steelhide armour that they had commissioned, offering in exchange some of the fine haul they still had; he accepted a giant's sword from a Death Lord as almost full payment for both items. They rested in He'Li's inn for quite a while, relaxing with drinks, Margreet also fiddling with their potions. She sent Shu Ting to Anna for any potion ingredients she might have, and Quentin went to Lord Braffit, from whom he hoped he might purchase some more spellbooks. However, he had no more that Quentin or Margreet did not already know, so he settled down to prepare some of the easier potions before Margreet finished the more advanced alchemy.
They sold the potions to He'Li, as agreed, and Shu Ting told of their adventures, her loud recounting even drawing Myles in from outside. Eventually, with a little Dutch courage, they wandered over to the Town Hall and delivered the Umpani's alliance offer to Screg. As Quentin had suggested, Screg saw nothing wrong with accepting them as official representatives of the Imperial Umpani Federation, and drafted an alliance acceptance at once.
The friends returned to sleep at He'Li's happy, after a few days' good achievements. They sorted their room, arranged what they'd take with them on the next expedition, and lay down for a well-deserved rest.

The adventure

Scores so far:
'daisho master' Shu Ting: 236 kills, 4 deaths, attack rating 38
'gladiator' Karen: 305 kills, 0 deaths, AR 38
'chevalier' Vi: 77 kills, 0 deaths, AR 34
'magistrate' Quentin: 78 kills, 0 deaths, AR 34
Shaman Margreet: 71 kills, 1 death, AR 27
'toolmaster' Salva: 65 kills, 1 death, AR 37

The unhappy band of friends returned to the only place that they had previously seen those blue flowers, and found Crock, who was rather agitated. He needed, it seemed, a favour, and was willing to help them find their friend in exchange. He was scared by the arrival in the swamp of a creature named Brekek, a frog as large as a house and 'killer of scores of men better'n ye'.
They trooped out into the swamp, soon encountering a large golem called an oozite. The creature should have presented a challenge, but the friends were not in a good mood, and it didn't even have a chance to run away. Thinking about their earlier explorations of the swamp, they recalled a secluded pool that might well be a nice lair for a giant frog, and there they did indeed find a creature as large as a house. Admittedly that house would have to be something more like a small bungalow than a real home, but the description was too accurate for this to be anything other than Brekek.
His misty breath was powerfully poisonous, and Quentin and Salva took the brunt of it; they spent the fight pouring potions over their rapdily bubbling skin. Having exhaled this vaporous poison, however, Brekek seemed to present little danger, and RFS, Vi and Karen chopped him up, it taking some time to wound him enough to end the fight. They brought one of his giant legs back with them, encountering on the way some bipedal, webbed-limbed creatures that looked a lot like the Rynjin that they had heard inhabited the island of Bayjin off shore. They were remarkably dangerous for their small size, their speed, agility and long legs allowing them to kick like a mule without getting too close.
Nonetheless, they were dispatched, and Crock gratefully received the giant leg, dragging it to his kitchen for later. He said that he'd just go and make some enquiries, and a couple of minutes later returned trailling a sleepy Shu Ting, who he claimed he was startled to find tied up in his bedroom. The old man tried to explain that the T'Rang must be trying to pin a kidnapping on him, and exhorted them not to forsake their friendship just because of this. It must be a very sad life when one believes it necessary to use kidnapping to get help, rather than just ask.
They bought another amulet of healing from him; where he acquired these wonderful artefacts they wished they knew, for they wouldn't need to keep him alive if they did, and also bought an ankh of speed and another mana stone.
"He fancies you!" teased Quentin. Shu Ting snorted.
"I bet he's taken very few ladies to his bedroom in the last 50 years. You must be very special."
Shu Ting, still recovering from her outrage at being abducted, was left at a loss, so Margreet replied for her
"Of course she's special! We knew that already."

They returned to Marten's Bluff, passing by a waterlogged cave, in which they met two vicious four-armed (tentacled), large-mouthed predators. Thankfully the creatures had no training in fighting, and their little horde of travellers items was looted. In Marten's Bluff the friends encountered some more spirits, who once again had trouble with RFS, and then used a pulse pick they had found to scramble the electromagnetic locks on some doors in the T'Rang areas. However, these led to control rooms for the mothership, rather than interesting loot, and the friends rather dejectedly left again.

On their way to Trynton through the swamp they found a thick black mass of tar which had erupted to the surface, and Quentin and Salva filled some of their empty jars with the stuff, adding little fuses to make Molotov cocktails.

In Trynton they used the mystery potion from Fuzzfas, and the zuzu petals that they had eventually picked, to enter the illusion that all the Trynnies to whom they had spoken had recommended they try: The Seventh Bough. The Shaman appeared to them and explained that they were the fabled 3rd messengers, as the robot Aletheides had told them in the monastery, and that it was their destony to find the Destinae Dominus. He told them to find Marten's idol and his words, and to meet him again. He faded from view and the friends eventually realised that the illusion was over.
They stumbled out of the meditation room into Trynton again, and went up to the sealed room they had found before, with the plinth in front of it. Here they placed Marten's idol, which had cost them Shu Ting's abduction to obtain, and the door opened. They spoke to the real shaman, who asked them what Marten's words were. Remembering the ancient diary, they repeated the message 'eternal trust survives the soul'.
The shaman entered into a rant about Marten and the trust given to the shamen of Trynton to hold the helm of serenity until his messengers came to collect it. The shaman gave them a key, and seemed somewhat deflated when he remarked that the whole purpose of his life was over. They left the aged furball, whose bright-eyed belief in their destiny was somewhat disturbing, and Margreet teleported them to the T'Rang teleported, from which they went to the Umpani base, the piece of T'Rang hand seeming sufficiently '100% T'Rang to satisfy sergeant Balbrak.

Indeed it was, although he was also rather disgusted, and hurried them off with an indoors pass to do further training with sergeant Rubble upstairs. Inside Mt. Gigas a lift took them to a cave complex, which they explored thoroughly, even finding a secret door and a blocked-in cave that the Umpani had managed to overlook. The goodies were few, but the friends were happy to think that they were more observant than a whole army of a galactic trading cartel.
They also came to a passage that was marked 'Danger. Unexplored territories!' This excited the mercenary band of explorers, and they wandered each of the links in the maze of interconnected tunnels, Quentin mapping the place as they walked. Salva's scanner, which he had rejigged slightly himself, was very helpful, showing where enemy life-forms were, even through the rocks, and allowing them to ambush and avoid the caverns' wildlife. Things such as bat vampires, vampire bats, numerous slimes and chameleon rats all suffered at their hands. It was also his scanner that showed life below them, and eventually they found a hidden hole which led, once they had strung a rope down, to a giant cavern. Down here they didn't find spectacular loot, much to their disappointment, but they did find themselves trapped by four black slimes.
They hid behind a boulder, wondering how they'd kill the slimes before they could spray their blinding clouds of gases and digest them at leisure. When Salva's scanner said that the slimes were close, the friends leapt out at the creatures. Shu Ting moved with the speed of lightning, striking one so quickly that her movements could hardly be seen. Karen and RFS killed another. Margreet managed to disrupt whatever passed for sensory apparatus of a third, which fled, and the last only managed to spray its blinding goo into Quentin's rucksack before the thing was smothered and soon killed.
They hunted down the last one in revenge for being chased into a corner.

Eventually they returned to explored areas, and the lift further up the mountain to the training areas. Once Salva had fixed the card reader to let them in, Sergeant Rubble gave them a rocket launcher and set them to kill three training dummies on the target range. The dummies were held together well, and they used all the rockets he had given them, and a fair number of arrows, before the things fell over.
Rubble wasn't happy with weapons training, however. He wanted covert tactics training too. This, he explained, involved a darkened course with 5 flags in it. There were also 5 critters. Once in, they'd have to find all the flags and the way out, fighting what they found on the way. The training sounded more like testing to Quentin, but disagreeing with the sergeant was hardly an option, so they wandered in. Very soon they were ambushed by a morax, an undead spirit-like creature, but with a spine and rotting flesh. Being undead probably explained why Salva's scanner hadn't picked it up. Its powerful magic was no match for Bloodlust, and when everyone else had recovered, Karen showed them the flag the morax had been guarding.
The next three creatures were easier, not harder, and the friends wondered who had created this test. The last creature showed up clearly on Salva's scanner, and they ambushed it, sprinting around a corner. They had not expected to find a giant, one-eyed snake, wielding a huge scimitar in its arms. However, the Djinn seemed peculiarly susceptible to demonsband, Shu Ting's sword, and was unable to concentrate on doing anything other than scream in agony as she thrust into it.
They kept the flag, the djinn eye, which they knew to be regarded as a lucky charm on Dominus, and left the operations caves, via Rubble, who was put out at their easy success in his training mission. He sent them back to Balbrak, who had, he said, mentioned that he wanted this team for something special.

Balbrak had indeed something special: he had an alliance letter from general Yamir to the Mook, and wanted it delivered and the response returned. The friends were a little worried by this, as they walked outside, since they had already delivered a message from the T'Rang, but Quentin explained that they could simply declare themselves messengers on Dominus, fetching and carrying important messages that (other) non-natives might struggle to deliver, what with the hostile wildlife attacking everyone.
They decided not to open that box of problems quite yet, and instead headed over to a point on a tall cliff that joined the grassy northern wilderness to a mountain ledge, from which stretched a treacherous path into the mountain wilderness beyond.
To get to the mountain ledge they needed to cross a very long rope bridge, and as they started they saw a marble golem hunkered down in the middle of the bridge. They prepared for a tricky fight, but the swaying of the bridge seemed to trouble the golem more than them, and eventually Shu Ting managed to duck a swing of its giant fist, and Vi prodded it off the bridge with her spear. It ripped the bridge so that they had to step along a mere two strands of rope for some distance, but eventually they found the mountain path and ventured out into the mountain wilderness.
4 leaf sprites later, as they climbed the mountainside, they came to a camp-fire and a horrific Dragon-man. Like a cross between a demon and a dragon, as large as Brekek and shooting fireworks from his fingers for, it seemed, amusement, he startled the friends by welcoming them with
"At last! I thought you'd never arrive"
Shocked into letting him continue, they learned from Bela that he wanted their acquiescence in a plan of his. He explained that he was interested in the cosmic circle for 'personal reasons' and the Dark Savant because of the Savant's interest in the cosmic circle. He had a theory about the Dark Savant that he wanted to test, but would require not killing the Savant until all three artefacts were rightfully placed in Ascension Peak, the ruined archway behind him being the prescribed entrance to the holy site.
Given the possibilities of refusing, they agreed, to Bela's delight. "I knew you would: that is why I chose you over the others. Why did I not choose the Umpani or T'Rang, who have many more men? Because they also have much more greed."
Although this explanation was hardly satisfactory, and they couldn't worm much out of Bela about this theory of his, they did find that he was willing to sell some exceptional magic items. They had, by this time, quite a stash of gold and jewels, and paid some 200,000 gold pieces, or the equivalent (2/3 of their horde), for a powerfully magic-resistant cloak called a cloak of many colours, some more potion ingredients and some enchanted stones to use with the wrist rocket and sling.

At the base of the mountain they saw a granite golem, and were sneaking up on it when Salva saw behind them a pack of (giant, unsurprisingly) lizards, cutting off their escape. The golem had noticed their bait, so they had to fight it. They killed it as quickly as they could, by which time the scorchers had closed on them. The lizards could breathe an arc of fire which singed everyone in the group. Margreet cast a great toxic cloud at them, and Quentin managed to paralyse a few, but when, after killing one, they realised that they were going to get cooked too soon, they had to run back up the mountain, using the rocks as cover from the flames. Eventually they had enough respite to heal, after which they successfully ambushed the stalking scorchers, who had followed their prey up the hillside. When not taken from behind, the friends found killing the creatures much easier, but still, with Quentin, Margreet and Vi's magic exhausted, and with more injuries to heal, they needed rest.
They camped by Bela, and were woken twice by sprites, who they managed to fight off, no thanks to Bela, who seemed uninterested in mundane matters like others' deaths. Perhaps he didn't realise that sprites could possibly pose a threat to anyone. It was hard to understand, but since he had more magic items to purchase, and looked too much to fight themselves, they let him be.

Fully rested and healed, they walked back down the mountain, killing on their way three flying snakes called acid wings. As they followed the passsable terrain at the base of the mountain they came to a waterfall, behind which they found a remarkable stash of items. Shu Ting took and enchanted wakizashi as her off-hand weapon, to replace the dull unmagical blade she had, and Margreet took a magical wand to use for spellcasting and fighting, rather than the boring quarterstaff which had, until now, been her support.
They had finished admiring the treasures when through the splashing of the waterfall, peering into the cave, they saw the gaping maw of another scorcher. They were trapped in a perfect place for roasting!
Quentin pulled off a saving spell, paralysing five of the six creatures; the last, which was the one that had started to roast them inside, Karen knocked out with a powerful slash to its head. The paralysis didn't last long, but by the time it was wearing off they'd killed three already, and had splashed into the waterfall basin, where the vapour protected them from the worst of the flames.

They continued exploring the region, and hearing sounds of fighting ahead, hurried to examine what was happening. They startled some Rapax, who had backed some Higardi monks into a corner of a cave. The Rapax died quickly, Quentin's immobilising spell once again proving invaluable not only for helping Karen and Shu Ting (and now RFS and Vi) to hack enemies apart, but also in saving the monks from their fate.