Envisioner
Explorer
(Incidentally I missed that Robyn was a half-elf when I put the guard captain in here; I'd have made him a full elf if I'd thought of that, just for clarity. I assume that Dumos's one-word question was aimed at Captain Elferica here.)
As you walk a short distance into the town square, the obvious extent of the disaster the city has suffered becomes obvious, and the two massive carcasses come more clearly into view; while they've been stripped of every scale where it was even vaguely intact, there's enough charred or corroded or otherwise ruined hide in view that they can now be clearly identified as two dragons, one black and one red, both long since beheaded and otherwise butchered by the miserable, masked and fully-suited and thoroughly blood-splattered work crews that are taking them apart and trying to get them cleared away. The black one appears considerably smaller (roughly thrice the size of a horse) and stinks significantly worst, so the laborers have gotten that one down to barely more than a skeleton; the red still has plenty of livid meat left on the massive bones, slowly dripping mostly-congealed blood, thus that even the partially-stripped corpse probably outmasses a live oliphaunt. Besides the workers on the scaffold, nearly every person you see is working on rebuilding the town's more important buildings; women, children, and others who lack the skills to wield a hammer (or the stomach to use a meat cleaver) are rushing back and forth with supplies for the construction crews and the corpse-removal detail. You take in this entire sight over quite a length walk into the town's atypically underpopulated market square, as the caped guardsman vociferously fills you in on recent happenings.
"This town has been through quite the wringer. It seems that for months, the Cult of the Dragon has been infiltrating Westwater's citizenry and government, particularly the militia's command structure. We never had a clue there was anything strange about the individuals who started to trickle in a year or so ago; they showed all sorts of civic pride, took on the least desirable duties, volunteered for extra shifts, and generally behaved like model citizens. Naturally, this meant a few of them were elevated to positions of some authority, whereupon they began quietly promoting others of the same contingent, who were not suspected of having any prearranged relationship with them, having arrived from different directions at different times. It was a more or less perfectly executed plan; they were probably only a few weeks or even days away from staging a complete takeover and lockdown of the entire city.
"And then, the morning before yesterday, some random red dragon, who we'd had no idea was sleeping in the mountains to the Northeast for something like a century, woke up and decided he was going to make our fair municipality his first conquest. Flew down right in the middle of the town square and started making the typical arch-villain speech...'you live only to amuse me, tremble before my glory, give me all your treasure, even the slightest defiance means death', the whole spiel. Well, I guess these cultists didn't worship that particular dragon - he naturally announced his name right off the bat, all twelve syllables of it, but none of us had ever heard of him, seemingly including the invaders. Rather than have their obviously-well-planned conquest snatched away by some wandering monster at the last moment, they apparently decided to launch their operation on the spot, before they were quite ready. Their soldiers, wearing armor that they'd clearly donned in a hurry, came streaming out of every barracks door and converged on the red, like so many mosquitos trying to bite a grown man to death. Meanwhile, some of their spellcasting buddies used up every scroll they could loot from our magic stores, and managed to call in one of the wyrms that the cult did have some kind of influence over; he came winging in from the northwest after just a few minutes of the firedrake slaughtering the cult's warriors by the dozen, while they did their best to harry him in a well-executed but clearly desperate delaying action.
"The new arrival was much younger and weaker than the red, and probably exhausted from the long flight, but the red never saw him coming and he made an absolutely devastating surprise attack on the old bastard, who was cut up pretty bad due to the cult's sheer numbers, even though about ten of them died for every one that managed to score a decent blow through his armored scales. The two dragons fought for most of an hour, drenching the whole market in blood and fire and acid; most of the property damage you see is the result of that struggle. In the end, the red managed to kill the black, but was barely standing by then; the cultists had been hiding and patching up their wounds the whole time, so they sortied back out and finished off the 'not-theirs' dragons, by which time the loyalists in our own militia (who were presumably a day or three away from getting a 'join us or die' speech as the cult army launched their intended takeover) had managed to get organized and converge on the site. Rather than surrender, the last couple dozen warriors barricaded themselves in a storehouse and set off some kind of alchemo-magical bomb, leaving us no prisoners to interrogate and barely any leftover gear we could salvage. The town did manage to arrest a few of the less combative cultists, but they were also the most fanatically loyal and obviously insane, so we haven't been able to get anything useful out of them."
As you walk a short distance into the town square, the obvious extent of the disaster the city has suffered becomes obvious, and the two massive carcasses come more clearly into view; while they've been stripped of every scale where it was even vaguely intact, there's enough charred or corroded or otherwise ruined hide in view that they can now be clearly identified as two dragons, one black and one red, both long since beheaded and otherwise butchered by the miserable, masked and fully-suited and thoroughly blood-splattered work crews that are taking them apart and trying to get them cleared away. The black one appears considerably smaller (roughly thrice the size of a horse) and stinks significantly worst, so the laborers have gotten that one down to barely more than a skeleton; the red still has plenty of livid meat left on the massive bones, slowly dripping mostly-congealed blood, thus that even the partially-stripped corpse probably outmasses a live oliphaunt. Besides the workers on the scaffold, nearly every person you see is working on rebuilding the town's more important buildings; women, children, and others who lack the skills to wield a hammer (or the stomach to use a meat cleaver) are rushing back and forth with supplies for the construction crews and the corpse-removal detail. You take in this entire sight over quite a length walk into the town's atypically underpopulated market square, as the caped guardsman vociferously fills you in on recent happenings.
"This town has been through quite the wringer. It seems that for months, the Cult of the Dragon has been infiltrating Westwater's citizenry and government, particularly the militia's command structure. We never had a clue there was anything strange about the individuals who started to trickle in a year or so ago; they showed all sorts of civic pride, took on the least desirable duties, volunteered for extra shifts, and generally behaved like model citizens. Naturally, this meant a few of them were elevated to positions of some authority, whereupon they began quietly promoting others of the same contingent, who were not suspected of having any prearranged relationship with them, having arrived from different directions at different times. It was a more or less perfectly executed plan; they were probably only a few weeks or even days away from staging a complete takeover and lockdown of the entire city.
"And then, the morning before yesterday, some random red dragon, who we'd had no idea was sleeping in the mountains to the Northeast for something like a century, woke up and decided he was going to make our fair municipality his first conquest. Flew down right in the middle of the town square and started making the typical arch-villain speech...'you live only to amuse me, tremble before my glory, give me all your treasure, even the slightest defiance means death', the whole spiel. Well, I guess these cultists didn't worship that particular dragon - he naturally announced his name right off the bat, all twelve syllables of it, but none of us had ever heard of him, seemingly including the invaders. Rather than have their obviously-well-planned conquest snatched away by some wandering monster at the last moment, they apparently decided to launch their operation on the spot, before they were quite ready. Their soldiers, wearing armor that they'd clearly donned in a hurry, came streaming out of every barracks door and converged on the red, like so many mosquitos trying to bite a grown man to death. Meanwhile, some of their spellcasting buddies used up every scroll they could loot from our magic stores, and managed to call in one of the wyrms that the cult did have some kind of influence over; he came winging in from the northwest after just a few minutes of the firedrake slaughtering the cult's warriors by the dozen, while they did their best to harry him in a well-executed but clearly desperate delaying action.
"The new arrival was much younger and weaker than the red, and probably exhausted from the long flight, but the red never saw him coming and he made an absolutely devastating surprise attack on the old bastard, who was cut up pretty bad due to the cult's sheer numbers, even though about ten of them died for every one that managed to score a decent blow through his armored scales. The two dragons fought for most of an hour, drenching the whole market in blood and fire and acid; most of the property damage you see is the result of that struggle. In the end, the red managed to kill the black, but was barely standing by then; the cultists had been hiding and patching up their wounds the whole time, so they sortied back out and finished off the 'not-theirs' dragons, by which time the loyalists in our own militia (who were presumably a day or three away from getting a 'join us or die' speech as the cult army launched their intended takeover) had managed to get organized and converge on the site. Rather than surrender, the last couple dozen warriors barricaded themselves in a storehouse and set off some kind of alchemo-magical bomb, leaving us no prisoners to interrogate and barely any leftover gear we could salvage. The town did manage to arrest a few of the less combative cultists, but they were also the most fanatically loyal and obviously insane, so we haven't been able to get anything useful out of them."
