Answers in the Wind
17th of Lamashan 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)
An hour's work leaves you with a strange numbness in your wrist from holding the charcoal stick in an unaccustomed manner and swirling script scrawled across half a dozen pages, the merest fraction of it recognizable:
Truth from the shadows, a whisper is heard
As poisonous secrets to light shall come.
A company broken, a friendship undone
Blood shall be called for, blood shall be spilled.
As glimpses of the future go this is in many ways startlingly direct, and the warning would be heeded, at least if Sirim is the one to deliver it in his guise as Mina's familiar. The one hearing this out has to be Captain Mel, since she is the only one you had considered telling who can be friends with the ship's cook. After that things get murky. The man himself will at least bleed for the transgression, but you still don't know what that is. Would it be worth the uproar on the ship when you are so near your destination?
"Stop," Sirim sends the thought, sharp with emphases into the minds all around, the closest he can come to a silent shout.
"Called for, it says, spilled. Who is to call? If the captain judges than she need not make a call, a request."
"Gavhaul?" you half-ask, you could well imagine the agent being very strict about any strangeness around his food and drink.
"Or us, we could call for the cook to be punished if whatever we find is bad enough," Mina offers, a little reluctantly. "I don't think the mercenaries...? Where did he even find them?"
To your surprise it's Gorok who answers: "Mendev, the bastion against demons. They made war there and did not win, little wonder. Demons take the land on which their blood is shed. They do not wish to fight for the great spirits, the gods of the land, only for coin." He stops, tail slashing thoughtfully. "I think some of them do not wish to fight at all, but it is all they know how to do."
"What about the dwarf, Urgor?" you ask, recalling how quick with his axe he had been when he thought Sirim was one of the unliving. "Would he call for blood?"
"What for?" Cob asks the question that still lingers in the back of everyone's minds. In some ways knowing some of the future is more confusing than knowing none of it, like a spit of land advancing into the cold and roiling seas, all but surrounded.
"We could just not eat anything from the galley until we make it to port," Mina offers, though without much enthusiasm. Most of what you have for provisioning is scraps of scraps, enough to keep body and soul together, but not by much. Not to mention how strange it would be to suddenly refuse food.
"Perhaps we could confront the cook himself, if he does not give us the answers we require inform the captain," Sirim proposes, 'blackmail' as the surface tongue has it. Strange that it implies most such compulsions are done in writing, or perhaps involve writing.
Ah... I'm trying to distract myself picking at words. You shake your head as though to banish the thought physically from between your ears. The fact of the matter is you had not been harmed in this whole affair, no one has besides the dead snakes. Is it worth string the pot just to see if a morsel will fall out?
What do you do?
[] Inform Mel (You will most likely be believed)
[] Inform Gavhaul
[] Confront the ship's cook with knowledge of the dead snakes and the implication that the captain would punish him for it
[] Write in
OOC: And here we see one of the less dramatic limitations of divination. While yes it can lead one to doom by over-reliance it, far more commonly in the Age of Lost Omens just does not have as many details as the one using it might hope for. You have seen down one line of the future, but that future can yet be changed or turned aside from.
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