What to do today

The week following the warehouse clearing, Artemis uses her university connections to track down a professor willing to teach her the Venerian language so she can really start digging into research for her dissertation on the relationships between the three ancient civilizations, from the point of view of Venera. It took her all week, but she was successful in convincing someone to teach her the language. Satisfied with now having a language teacher, she meets up with the Runebreakers at the start of the next week for whatever adventurer activities we end up doing. Meylin ends up finding the party at the guildhall and pulling us into a meeting.
 
The party got news about the status of the investigation. The party is in the clear, for now. Meylin does give the party a warning about using lethal force when not needed, and informs us that we are going to be watched closely due to the actions of some of our party members during the cultist warehouse incident. Taking the warning to heart, Theodan declares that he will be more careful of not murdering when not necessary. Satisfied, Meylin lets us go, telling us to go run off and kill some giant ants to relieve some stress. Yelling about a 'beach party! yeah!' Kalanar runs off to collect his gear from home. Maylin ignores him and tells us to go find a man name Lt. Ciderblock, who is in charge of dealing with the giant ants.
 
As we are heading out, meeting Kalanar along the way, Kaladar contemplates outloud the thought of tracking down the queen to deal with the colony more permanently, and for the possible huge rewards that may come from the feat. Artemis, thinks about it, and contributes to the thought by telling him how giant ant colonies typically are between 50 and 300 members, so, maybe not the best idea to take on a whole colony to get at the queen. Once we find the lieutenant, he directs us to either beach 3 or 5. heading that way. Making it the beach 3, Kalanar starts setting up a beach towel he decided to bring along for our 'beach party'. Kaladar seems to have noticed something though, and starts snickering at his brother, asking about if he's comfortable. Kaladar replies that yes, he is very comfortable just as a giant ant burst out of the sand.
 
The party fights off the first wave of them without much trouble. Artemis ends up deeply imbedding her spear into one after throwing it from above, and landing a drop kick on the imbedded spear from above. Prying her spear out of the corpse, she and Theoden work to start dismantling the corpses, and claiming the trophy parts as proof of defeat for the guild quest. As they are doing this, Kaladar agitates more giant ants into attacking. one bursting from the sand right next to Artemis in an attempt to attack her. They successfully fight off this second wave of attacks, though not without serious injury this time. Theoden had ended up being knocked out at one point. Thankfully, Pax was able to get to him quickly and provided healing before anything more tragic occurred.
 
the Runebreakers then debate the possibility of going after a queen ant. Theoden is against going while Kalanar is overenthusiastic about the idea. Artemis is more reluctant, they don't have any information about any nearby hives that is important to know for such a feat, such as the size of it. She does reluctantly give her consent to going after it, however only after taking a short break. Some of their party have been injured afterall.
 
After thinking over the idea to go after a queen, The party changes their mind about taking such actions today would be a bad idea, with some members of our party having exhausted their magic stores already. Instead, we return to the beach to relax and take out some more workers instead. We take out another group of 3 anteng, before we decide to call it a day and head back to town to turn in our proof of kills for the rewards. We were able to take out 11 in total today.
 
Back in town, we take the paintings we had acquired in the tunnels to an art history Professor on Artemis' university campus. They were appraised at being 5 gold each. He also gave us a recommendation on where we could take the art pieces to sell. Following his advice, Pax and Artemis took them to the auction house. There, they met the receptionist, who accepted the pieces to the next upcoming auction after Artemis mentioning the person who they had gotten the art appraised by. Getting that settled, Pax then makes an attempt to pass off a junk trophy from the guild test. She laughs at his attempt, amused by his antics. Artemis thanks her for her time, and gives her a wink before leaving. Maybe Artemis will come back if she ever needs some artifact for her thesis. They then retire for the night.