Scaled Kinship
Twenty Sixth Day of the Fourth Month 293 AC
The experience of walking among the round houses, built from wood either crudely-hewn with stone tools or shaped into sinuous vaguely alien shapes with sorcery is at once familiar and strange. There is certainly fear in the growing number of greenish gold eyes looking out at you from the illusory protection of the structures, but there is nothing visceral about it, the boiling cauldron of emotions that so easily drives men to acts of villainy or valor. If you were to declare your intent to destroy this place and all within it you suspect those who would have the best odds running would take their chances with the jungle while the strongest fighters would face you to their dying breath, not out of some attempt to preserve the others but simply because a slim chance of survival is better than none.
Thankfully, morbid thoughts aside, your purpose here is far less grim, if not precisely easy to get across. They know enough of dragons to easily believe that one could have bested 'the Guide' as Tor presented himself to them. Convincing them that you had been sent by a living god, much less explaining what 'a kingdom beyond the sea' is takes considerably longer. Thus you and your companions spend the remainder of the day not only removing harmful enchantments and ensuring Tor had not left any unpleasant surprises in or near the village, but also arguing theology. If nothing else it is entertaining to watch Vee approach the conundrum.
"....I'm either lying or I'm telling the truth. Why'd I lie to talk you into doing something when I can just make you?"
Though Tor had spent an inordinate amount of time persuading his new followers of the falsehood of all gods, considering your suspicions that he served yet another forgotten ophidian deity in the end, you manage to get across your sincerity and good intentions as well as explain your origins in a way that makes sense to them. That you have to compare yourself to the petty tyrants of the jungle to do so leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, but you console yourself with the fact that they will learn better in time.
"Your tyranny is far from
petty," Varys hisses in your ear cheerfully. She had taken quite a shine to what she insisted on already calling your new subjects, by virtue of not just her own serpentine roots, but also sharing one particular ability with them that only Xor among your companions can match.
Rather than it being some mystical skill of Riz'Neth,
all the serpent kin can mind speak, leaving spoken language for either formal rhetoric, calls that need to be heard at more than a hundred feet, or sorcery. Perhaps even more impressively their scales can shed spells in a manner you had previously only seen in otherworldly spirits or magic-infused servitors. True age and arcane skill seems to be a factor in how strong the protection is, but considering how difficult such a ward is to weave with magic you still spend quite awhile considering the options...
"Were I in charge of your Inquisition and not the Lawmen I would likely hire all of them, Your Grace," Malarys notes. Then in a rare jest he adds, "I might even hire the eggs, to ensure they did not start off on some wasteful path..."
"So you are saying you don't want to hire them anyway?" Tyene offers with a teasing smile as she enters the house you had temporarily cleared for your own use.
"The task of a Lawman is usually either discrete investigation or deescalation of conflicts," the mage lord motions to the seven-foot-tall pillar of skulls mortared together in the center of the village. "I think most of them would be ill-suited to the task."
"We should take them back with us regardless to keep them safe," you muse aloud. Speaking to the tomb-dwellers also would not go amiss, though that is likely done after you had interrogated Tor in the presence of their lord, introducing him to your realm's nature and its power in the process.
What do you do next?
[] Interrogate Tor
-[] Write in
[] Get the serpentfolk to the Deep
-[] Write in
[] Write in
OOC: All serpentfolk have SR of 6+HD. Spellcasters (Arcane, divine, or practically any other class that grants a magical ability of any sort) bumps that to 11+HD. Further, all of them have Telepathy up to 100 ft. which doubles as a Tongues spell, though imperfectly and depending on their intelligence to decode the meaning. It's going to take a bit more time around them to get their full stat package, not to mention the differences between the different tribes. 
