This time, it's Zed responding to the Kadlin situation.

There is something simplistic but magic about his use of NPC's in this one although I don't want to spoil too much. Zed is a character that keeps improving over time, which is the best you can hope for in these kind of games, I suppose.

 
There was something wrong with the soil and the plant growth, something that twanged unpleasantly in Zed's marrow and begged investigation. Something that could not be easily described to those who couldn't sense it: wildly accelerated growth of a plant foreign to this region, and the impression of someone forcing their will upon their surroundings. Zed found it was almost distasteful enough to warrant asking for assistance from Konall or Sir Fumblies - but he thought he hadn't enough detail to risk prodding those two (marginally figurative) warhorses.

Narrowing down the disturbance took more determination and focus than Zed would have imagined himself to possess; as the originator had been both blatant in his/her usage (providing a unique signal), and astonishing proficient at concealing nearly all of the magical residue. It took three gruelling hours of intense concentration to find his quarry - three hours of fine-tuning senses that could quickly shift him into a mental wonderland, and at the end of the hunt he'd found...

"A witch's private crop of toadstools, ayiee...", muttered the dark-skinned Ireacan to the fields of stalks and caps. Wiping his brow in the cool evening air, Zed felt as though he'd stepped into a lair spattered with cloying cobwebs and countless miniature spiders that covered him entirely, both invisible to the untrained eye. It was a telling omen that the magic inherent to the crop most definitively was not benign nor welcoming to his tentative probes. Though he took heed of the omen, Zed knelt and placed one hand on top of the soil, his voulge lying flat on the other side.

Casting his consciousness widely amongst the mushroom field, Zed endeavoured to use his affinity with the wild to research what could be done with the foreign fungi were they to mature and be harvested. Though it was slow in coming through the mutated plants, Zed got a glimpse of their function - Dryad's Toadstools; useful for dissolving powerful magical seals laid upon objects - when his analytical spell was disrupted by an abrupt physical relocation. Zed hardly registered the broad meaty hand lifting him off the ground before he was flung into the clearing and summarily caught in a fireball's blast radius.

"Flambe intruder - just like Ms. Bearsmasher instructed! Hey, why is he getting up, and not twitching like a dying corpse? Rosham, go slam him somewhere again, thanks."

The gigantic brute thundered over towards Zed with outstretched arms but Zed quickly slashed and tumbled out of the way. Taking a quick scan, Zed counted one mage in a chef's outfit, Rosham the huge goblin that had flung him and who was getting his momentum to charge Zed again, and a sneaky axe user who almost took his head off as an introduction. Zed responded by slamming the length of his weapon against the elite's ribcage which laid low the goblin, before having to face another sizzling fire blast. Withdrawing once more into his flame-resistant cloak, the temporarily-blinded adventurer evaded the brute's next charge by a narrow margin through observation of the preceding foot steps that resembled a minor quake.

<Okay, that was a fun work-out, and slightly revealing about who's involved here - time to be off now> reckoned Zed, moving even as his vision readjusted to the dim evening light and the last traces of the fire magic dwindled away. Acting on a cue from earlier, Zed dove back towards the closest patch of toadstools, taking a handful of pickings as he weaved away from the guard trio. From the loud bickering and terse orders given by the chef-mage, it seemed that he was right to guess that the guards wouldn't risk damaging their field over letting him escape whole. Now though, Zed had the opportunity to wonder just how many mushrooms were scheduled for harvest, and what could the Feline Empire possibly be trying to break through?

Pretty nice work, huh? We'll see Zed again later on in roleplaying. You know, it's November as I write this, and we're starting to get into what's expected to be the final mission for AIL.

I am not sure why I am even writing that here. I guess I just want to be like one of the webcomics that always talks at the end of a piece yet it's almost never about the series.