“Now, that was not nice. But, I guess you’re right, it could bring troubles if someone spreads lies about us, especially if the lie is that we ruthlessly murdered a bunch of idiot kids.” I said to Lenore, once the orc fully stopped twitching.

“And they tried to kill me. Just for that, I wanted to kill her.” Lenore added, landing on my shoulder and vanishing into her Hallow.

“But that wasn’t the main reason, was it?” I asked her, now conversing mentally.

“No, not really. I was just as curious about the new ability I gained when crossing the first Divide.” she answered, and I could almost hear the smugness in her voice, an unspoken challenge to my understanding of magic and my power of observation.

“You mean the mix of wind and death-magic? Or the fact that you imbued her with your energy, almost like a puppet?” I asked, forming my preliminary observations into words. Guessing that Lenore was using Wind-Magic was easy, she was a bird after all, and it seemed obvious that her crossing of the divide in the way she had, had strengthened the Death-Magic she had. Adding to that the fact that the orc had twitched some time after I had gained the EXP and that smell of magic on the corpse made guessing at some sort of zombification the most plausible answer.

“So you noticed.” She cawed quite happily, “Yes, I can make those I kill obey me, at least for some time.”

“We will have to explore what we can do together, as soon as I have my hair back. And once my magic is back, I’d love to experiment with the information we have gotten in the Magic Store.” I told her, grinning.

“You are being creepy again.” Adra said, pulling my attention back to the outside world. “So, some village that supports banditery. Want to deal with that?”

“Why would we? I mean, we killed those idiots because they attacked us, I have no desire to tell their parents about their death.” I answered, unsure what Adra was suggesting.

“Unless you believe that we were the first travellers that they attacked, they got loot. And that loot is in their village. I’d suggest to make sure no more bandits emerge from that place. How long do you need to get your magic back?” she clarified, making me chuckle a little, at her ruthlessness. There were times when she was slow to start with violence, but once she got going, she was worse than me. Just as I thought that, she walked over to the pack-elks, killing both of them with precise stabs of her spear.

“Don’t you think we could have used those?” I asked, thinking of Sigmir running next to our mounts all the time.

“Not really, dumb animals would hardly be able to keep up with us. More trouble than they are worth.” she responded with a shrug.

I was curious what Sigmir and Rai thought about essentially raiding a village, as punishment for their banditery Rai looked a little uncomfortable, while Sigmir spoke up.

“They chose their path, and bandits are a scourge - their village deserves to be eradicated.” she stated with the utmost conviction. When I looked back to Rai, he just shrugged.

“Sure, but if we want to take on a whole village, we need to be smart about it.” was my only caveat. A village with ten teenagers would have at least a hundred people, or so I’d guess, but I wasn’t sure what qualified as teenagers amongst orcs, or if those ten were all there had been. Thus, my caveat about being smart - or, maybe more importantly, careful about any attack. In addition, I was not sure if looking for a fight here, this close to Kolyug, was a smart idea - we had essentially fled the city because I was afraid of the spellcaster who had created the infernal bear, and now we were stopping only a few days of forced marching away from the city, to pick a needless fight with a village - or ‘group of bandits’, depending on your definition. And still, I wanted to do it, wanted to punish them for their banditery.

Rai and Adra started tracking the trail left by the idiot teenagers, and again, a blind man could have followed it using a stick. But it got me to thinking, there had been the offer from Pantheon, regarding an advertisement, featuring just me. If I could spin it right, I might be able to make a red herring of things, while adding some rather cool footage. I would have to look at the exact guidelines they had for making such their advertisement; the previous two had depicted the player-characters as heroic or at least neutral beings - would they mind if I bucked the trend?

Smirking and in a mental discussion with Lenore, I followed behind the others, until they stopped me with a raised hand. In front of us, nestled between two hills, was the village. It looked small, I’d be surprised if there were more than seventy people living in it, so they had already lost a good chunk of their people and combatants. Counting the houses, there were twelve buildings that looked like, well, they were built for people. I wasn’t quite firm on my northern barbaric orc architecture but was quite certain that the buildings without chimney would not make for comfortable living. We would have to watch for some time, to get a better idea about the amount of people living in town, how many of those were combatants that might be dangerous and so on, at least if we wanted to bring the fight to them.

Looking down, there were a few people milling about, some of them in good clothing that seemed rather out of place. It pushed away the last doubts I had, about it being a normal village, making me agree with Adra that it was little more than a group of bandits that had settled down, maybe put down roots.

“We will wait for the night, maybe even the night after.” I told the others and we carefully retreated, while making our way up one of the hills.

“Rai, you keep an eye on them, for now.” I told my disciple, who nodded and went back towards the tree line.

We found a protected hole in which we could make our camp, hidden from view and protected from the weather. We made camp there, even if it was only a cold camp, smoke might give us away, but a couple of fir-branches allowed us to create a roof, trapping warmth in with us. The cold was far more problematic for Adra and Rai, compared to Sigmir and me, so we made a plan that Sigmir would sleep now, while I logged out, to deal with a things in the real world.

I had a few things I wanted to do before leaving the capsule, all of them having to do with video editing. The first, and most whimsical, was to take the clip of Lenore bombing the stooges while they were locked up, setting it to slow motion and adding some needlessly dramatic music to the clip, making it more a funny gag than anything else. Of course, the butt of the joke were the three stooges, so I was happy with the result. The next, obvious, step was to post it on the forum, with a remark about justice being served.

When I got there, the stooges had already made a thread, complaining about ingame systems of punishment, making me chuckle quite a bit. But their thread was the perfect backdrop, as they didn’t specify what had actually happened, only that it sucked to have a game and being unable to play it because of some stupid punishment. It seemed to me, that they desperately wanted to be laughed at and I was happy to oblige them with their desire.

Afterwards, I looked at the rules for advertisement and noticed that there was a request to tell a bit of a story. Interestingly, there was no actual rule against gore and violence, I had assumed something like that when Tobiuno had cut his advertisement right when the action started, only to have it featured in a highlight-reel. After the last, I had asked that I would be consulted in the future, if my material was used. Of course, I had no leverage on that, it would be purely a courtesy, but I had some hope that they might oblige, if I got them useful promotion-material in my own videos.

The last part I wanted to do, before climbing out of my capsule, was to look over the footage from the bandit fight, I had a bit of a plan for my own video and I hoped to use some of that footage in it. I was quite happy with what I found, there were a few short clips I could use, to set the stage. My idea for a video was more along the lines of grim, dark avenger instead of straight-up villain, so I needed some sort of original motivation for the actions shown later.

Afterwards, I left my capsule to take care of things in the real world, I had made a commitment to myself to get more training and I needed to stick to it. Once the beta ended, I wanted to get some good stats on character-creation - and for that, I needed to keep in shape.