Alaara sat with her back against a strong oak tree nestled next to her spot in camp, her head bent low over her journal as she stared at it. How many days had it been since she'd been infected by an illithid tadpole? How many days had it been since finding her companions? Surely the number she had ticked onto the cover page was wrong. A few weeks' time didn't seem long enough for many reasons, but it was truth regardless. She'd been meticulous in logging each and every night she survived. Alaara huffed and flipped the journal open to a set of blank pages. She needed to focus her mind on anything else but the ever-growing list of things that needed doing. She needed to take notes, she needed to write. She needed to compose.
If anything was her sanctuary, writing was it. Music, stories, it didn't matter which. Tonight, music felt appropriate. Melancholic notes flitted here and there in her mind and she threw them onto hastily-drawn bars as they came to her. But what she really needed were lyrics to put the stray notes to. A bard's song without lyrics held power aplenty, but one with them felt significantly more so, at least to her. A song with lyrics could be emotionally charged twice over, instrument and voice melding as partners, both yearning to get a message out to anyone willing to listen.
Something or someone would need to trigger the beginning of that melding. What that something was had yet to reveal itself, and so it was that Alaara looked up from her journal and watched and waited for it. As she did so, she jotted little notes here and there about her companions. Such tidbits could be returned to at a later date and woven into the fabric of her creations.
She first caught sight of Lae'zel arm wrestling with Karlach, her expression grim. Into her notebook went a little note about that. She then took notes about Wyll, who was telling a tale about his heroics as the Blade of Frontiers. Shadowheart, Astarion, and Halsin were all paying attention, but even from where she sat, Alaara could tell Astarion was smirking to himself, biting his tongue to keep from saying too many sassy remarks and halting the story's progress. Shadowheart's smile, Halsin's rapt attention, and Astarion's cheekiness were all documented. And Gale of Waterdeep. What was he doing during all of this? He was-
Alaara looked around. Where was Gale? His tent seemed vacant, he wasn't standing over the cook pot, and he certainly wasn't with the rest of the party. Maybe he was off doing secret wizard stuff in another dimension? Was that a thing wizards really did? Tavern patrons were hardly paragons of information when it came to, well, anything but food and drink, but their mutterings about wizards were all she had to go on. That, and the scant few fact books she'd come across in the realms. Volo had written a rather colorful account of wizards, but he was well known to over-embellish and change facts to better suit his narrative. Such had only been staunchly affirmed when she'd met him in the grove writing blatant falsehoods about a bear of all creatures.
She looked back down at her journal. If only Gale was around, she could spend the rest of the evening picking his brain. He could tell her all about himself and other wizards. What he told her would be truths too, not just tall tales and outright lies. He could tell her about lots of other things too if he wasn't being a braggart. Given his collection of tomes he refused to travel without, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
As she sat and thought so very hard to herself, she left a sea of black dots on her journal's pages without actively realizing it. So engrossed was she that she didn't realize she was no longer alone...
