The Golden Bay. What a city it is. Here, visitors stray from all over the world looking to make a fortune at the card tables of the Smiling Lady. The massive casino is the economic center of the bay, and a flourishing community has grown around it – innkeepers, taverns, merchants, artisans, and the like. I, myself, came to the shores of the Golden Bay seeking to make a quick buck, though not by trying my hand against the House.

Anyone with a shred of intelligence knows that beating the House at its own game is near impossible, and cheating is an offense punishable by death. A fair share of well-meaning people have either met their demise here or become enslaved through indentured servitude. I’m not sure which is worse. While growing fat off the House is a possibility, it was a risk I was unwilling to take, and so I headed into the neighborhood known as the Bluffs – a place called home by many families who had risen too quickly from poverty, propelled into wealth by luck – to seek my own income from tutoring and fortune-telling.

However, even staying in the Golden Bay a few months is a gamble in itself, as the House rules here, and money talks. I’m not sure who reported me or why – perhaps some big name’s son who disliked the fortune in his stars, or a housewife jealous of the time I spent with her children teaching them to read – but I was arrested and taken to the city jail. And the thing about the jailhouse in the Golden Bay is that once you go in, you don’t come back out, regardless of the severity of the crime committed. Everyone becomes an example.

I have been through too many adventures and wiggled my way out of too many life-and-death situations to simply allow myself to die in a public execution, however. These corrupt mongrels were staining their hands with the blood of innocents, and for what? Personal grudges? Cheating unfair odds? Money? Thankfully, my fellow inmates had similar ideas – though their intentions may differ – and the bizarre menagerie of our combined abilities provided us an escape route.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. While I am merely scribbling these entries in the blank pages left in my spell book for my own records, I like to flatter myself with the idea that, maybe, someone will find and read this account.

My name is Piscín Bán. I am the daughter of the moon elf Ragaire and the high elf Caitriona. I inherited the silver hair, blue cast to my skin, and my demeanor from my father, as well as his talent with magic and the blade. You see, I am not any kind of wizard. I am what they call a Bladesinger, and like my father before me, and his ancestors before him, I inherited his shortsword when I came of age and completed my apprenticeship under him.

Most of us in the jail shared a cell. My companion was a gnome artificer, who spent much of the evening piecing together a contraption. As characteristic of a gnome she was small and a bit chubby, with green eyes and a head of short but thick black hair.

There were two I could not see in the cell beside us, who turned out to be a soft-spoken elven paladin and a rather dull earth genasi. The paladin was a tall and muscular wood elf, with a particularly gentle voice and pretty features – far more sophisticated than any wood elf I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, the earth genasi had skin all grey and mottled in various places, with mineral veins of silver running along his body.

Perpendicular to them was a lone man in a cell all to himself. Across the jail I could see he was a white-haired half-elf, but with the strangest hue of purple on his skin. Not only that, but he was also wearing the uniform of the city’s law enforcement officers. Next to him was the cell containing our equipment (except for the invisible Ring of Mind-Shielding I kept on my left hand).

Across from me I could see a regal tiefling woman with an eyepatch and black antlers, alone in her cell as well. She seemed almost bored. Beside her cell, I could see another in which a human girl and a metal man that reeked of artificer magic in a cell stood together. I had heard stories of Warforged before, but never seen one up close; the human girl was overall normal, but quite pretty, with sheets of windblown flaxen hair falling around her shoulders, vivid blue eyes, and deep dimples.

The cell perpendicular to them held the strangest man I’d ever seen.

He was the only prisoner with one hand chained to the wall. The guards in front of his cell were the largest of all, and even they looked nervous. At first glance he seemed human, but as you looked closer, he appeared more and more unsettling; when he smiled, which he did quite often, his too-wide lips revealed rows of sharp, spiny teeth, and his skin and hair were always waterlogged and dripping. His frequent smiles never lit up his eyes. When I asked the man what he was, he simply shrugged coyly.

The man did not waste any time beginning to bargain with us. “If one of you could get me a weapon, I could get out of here,” he claimed.

Each time he whispered of escape, the guards posted at all of our cells would shout disdainfully and bang their lances against the bars, but the stranger continued to speak to us regardless. The only person who seemed to take note of him was the human girl, who immediately became quite taken with him despite his disturbing appearance. Many of the other prisoners simply spoke among themselves – lamenting their fate, blaming one another, or trying to plot a way out.

After a bit of time listening to us, the tiefling woman drew close to the bars of her cell, wrapping her hands elegantly around them as she grinned out at us. She enthusiastically exclaimed, “You all sound like an interesting bunch!”

“Thalia?” The strange man’s tone immediately shifted from one of charming manipulation to disgusted annoyance. “Thalia, I can hear you.”

Judging from his disdainful and bickering interactions with the tiefling woman, I picked up his name – Grinfish.

The tiefling, Thalia, propositioned us, much to the guards’ dismay, going on to claim herself as a member of the pirate crew of Black Bess. The guards began to bang on the bars to quiet more talk of escape, but it was too late; Thalia had already promised us that her mates were coming to free her, and us, too, if we so wished.

The idea of toppling a corrupt institution only to sow the seeds of mayhem was distasteful to me, of course, but I also was entirely uninterested in handing a rather unsettling criminal a weapon. I had thankfully prepared Misty Step that morning, but was waiting for a distraction.

Then, suddenly, everything seemed to happen at once. Some of these occurrences may be out of chronological order, but I will try to remember them to the best of my abilities.

The human girl used everything in her arsenal to woo one of the guards. This included giving away her identity as Francesca Landon, a noblewoman; promising him a ransom for her safe return to her family, a blatant lie, as everyone knows the Landons’ daughter ran away from home years ago; and using her beauty and musical talent to persuade him to give her a knife. You know, for self-defense, “because no proper noble house’s daughter should be unarmed in a cell with a bunch of ruffians.”

The artificer in my cell, whose name I found to be Gimbal, finished her contraption and shoved it into an unsuspecting guard’s pocket. She set off what turned out to be an alarm, scaring the guard and causing the others to shift their attention.

The earth genasi and his elven cell mate attempted to break down the cell door together, only to fail miserably and fall on their bottoms. All I heard was an obnoxious clang and the elf crying out in pain after the genasi accidentally flung a hardened, rock-like hand into his face.

Francesca – or rather, Frankie, as I later learned she prefers to be called – promptly passed the dagger to Grinfish. The man immediately seemed to go mad with power, stretching the blade of the dagger into an elongated sword with strange magic and slicing cleanly through his chain. He easily blasted the door of his cell off its hinges and set Frankie and her cellmate, the Warforged named Nickel, free.

I summoned my magic, white mist surrounding and teleporting me into the equipment cell to retrieve my belongings. I grabbed the artificer’s tools as well, a reward for providing me with the necessary distraction.

In the midst of the excitement, I began to hear distant shouting and the clanging of weapons down the corridors of the jailhouse. As promised by Thalia, a band of pirates with similar features – of tiefling ancestry and bearing black antlers – rushed into the room, easily subduing the guardsmen. They set Thalia herself free, and as soon as they handed her a weapon she turned to strike Grinfish himself.

The two became embroiled in their own battle, a battle that seemed far more personal – and equally matched.

Outside, a thunderstorm rolled in. I am no stranger to coastline storms, but this was one of the most powerful I have ever experienced. The rafters and pillars trembled under its might. The wood elf, who I could now see from the equipment cell, cowered fearfully from the thunder that crashed overhead.

While I was waiting for someone to free me from the equipment cell, I saw something strange – a ghostlike woman, perhaps a goddess or spirit, 12 feet in height, who came into the room unnoticed by anyone but myself, to my knowledge. I watched her dig her nails into the rafters just as a lightning bolt struck the building, tearing off half the roof. Sheets of rain muddied the ground and wind wracked the groaning jailhouse, weakening the remaining walls.

Somehow, all of us got out of our cells. Some of us stole keys from the guards, others broke free. I’m not entirely sure how we all became gathered together and retrieved our things.

Grinfish vanished in the middle of his fight with Thalia. After the guards were dead, courtesy of the pirates, Thalia turned to us and issued a warning; “Join us, or be marked for death.”

Instead of accepting her proposal, we crashed through a weak spot in the wall, and fled through the city streets. Most of our group departed to hide at a shady inn known as the Lazy Eye. The half-elf, whose curious lilac skin I could now see more vividly in the light, invited the rest of us to come back to his home in the city.

I am writing this on a blank page from the comfort of a bedroom graciously gifted to me by two women known as Ma and Mother. I am unsure whether they are actually Quenim’s parental figures – Quenim being the name of the half-elf – but at least one of them is a skilled magician far above my capabilities, judging from their archive of tomes.

The others who came with me were only Quenim himself and the metal man, a visitor from the countryside named Nickel. The Warforged is apparently, er, farm equipment.

The threat of Black Bess’s flag and our status as outlaws on the run looms high over our heads. The identities of my companions remain largely a mystery. And what of the strange man Grinfish or his age-old feud with the pirate Thalia? I have too many questions and not enough answers. My mind is abuzz with curiosity, but for now, I must rest.

Signed,

Piscín Bán