i promised myself and a couple other ponies that i'd write some things down while on this research mission
for the record i'm looking for the magic to bind my me-ness to a new body that i'm making one piece at a time out of porcelain and copper and spell infusions that i apparently have a head for
anyhow this means medya and i are venturing outside the everglow and into some distant land called khorvaire
and they only just got over a war
i'll be brief
this morning medya and i put on our bags full of books and tools and glitterreed and gryphon snacks and headed to "the hedge"
the hedge is what we call the border between worlds because important things get simple names you can confuse with ordinary things and you just have to figure it out from context
i didn't come up with that it was like that when i got here
anyhow once on the other side we took a steamship to "sharn"
sharn is like a stack of pancakes if the pancakes were floating layers of really dense city each of which is bigger than viljatown
medya decided that the best thing for her to do was find us some lodging
i decided that the best thing for me to do was get overwhelmed by everything and spend a couple minutes staring at two forged having a rough play-fight like violence buskers
best place to start asking if anyone's seen a pacifist friend
actually i was concerned because one of them got hurt in a way that seemed kind of gruesome but they were good to walk to their favorite repair shop so i followed to make sure they got there
i wanted to ask all the questions about how it was for a forged while being repaired but i'm told that would be rude so i asked about "ploughshare"
they're the pacifist forged i mentioned and my plan was to ask them to help us with the search
this is getting too long
so the one i escorted is "spark" and the one at the repair shop goes by "bell" and i also met one named "relic" and i do not know what their story is yet
i cannot overstate how tall they all are
and i met a human (i think he is but i'd only seen rough sketches until today) named "zer-atæsh"
bell fixed up spark but asked for help with an errand in the city
the short form is that while trying to help spark and bell out we all ended up in a bad area
considering the size of sharn there might be eight or nine bad areas but this was one of them
a gang of five bipedal types decided to sing the old pay-the-toll-to-get-past-us number and when we told them we didn't like that song they pulled daggers on us
seriously they escalated things that quickly and one of them came right at me
i reared up to try and knock the knife out of their hand but they managed to put a huge gouge in my inner left pastern by which i mean the ceramic plate there
it's a good thing i waited to travel until i completed the shell of my front legs because right now it's like armor over my flesh-and-bone legs and that would have been a bad cut
i still got a heck of a bruise
anyhow this is where it gets extra bizarre for me
"double deal" is the pony who helped us prepare for all this
he gave us training in some basic defensive skills and a couple offensive ones and he's the reason i built crossbows into both cannon plates
yes i know the translation is kind of funny but that's what that part of the leg is called here and i didn't name it
so after that thug knifed me i panicked and instead of running away or casting my snare spell or any of that
i aimed at him and told him to drop the knife
i don't know if he was scared of me or if something else spooked him or what but he took off running with the other two who hadn't already been taken down by our side
i remember how everything looked but i was so rattled it took a bit to get my head back together and to be honest i don't think i'll ever forget that stomach-dropping sense of a fight breaking out around me
or getting knifed that was a pretty new experience too
so anyhow zer' seems to have some kind of healing magic that doesn't feel like magic and i'll ask him about that but i was too rattled earlier
so i'm okay physically
and i'll never forget how confident medya looked when she was up on her hinds and holding her own crossbow
gryphons really are built for combat i guess
after that we finished everything up without further interruption
we all went back to bell's forge and i repaired the damaged plate without too much trouble
and then the search for ploughshare was finally over because they seriously just happened to stop by while we were there but i'll tell more about that later
so that was an exciting day
welcome to khorvaire i guess