June Results
Update - July 1, Year 1
Dominic - Visit Castle Pisch for Negotiations
You convince Nikolai to let you take a shot at influencing Dita under the guise of helping her, but now you're going to be blamed if she runs off.
You agree to meet with Baron Balzar's daughter Zarana to investigate the possibility of a marriage alliance. Gavrilla is now expecting to hear a proposal from you by September, and is likely to start pressuring you to marry if she doesn't hear anything by then.
You and Gavrilla make short work of Nikolai's passive resistance, and make arrangements for Chesna to travel to the capital with her mother for her debut. Chesna gives you all the credit for this and is quite grateful, although she jokes that she doubts any of the men in the capital will measure up to you. Lala seems more inclined to give Gavrilla credit for taking care of things, but she seems happy enough with the outcome.
Gavrilla agrees to begin feeding you adventure leads that would benefit the family one way or another. There will probably be several of them in the next few months, then it will slow down to one every 4-6 months.
You inform the dwarves that Corzu will can take in a few dozen refugees next year, and offer to deal with any exotic or magical individuals that would be hard to place elsewhere.
Dominic - Adventure: The Cleansing of Corzu
With the aid of the two Chosen (Emma and Inga) you execute Atalaya and remove both haunts. You then perform the final ritual to establish your magical claim over Corzu, and select the following two benefits:
Stat bonus while in Corzu: +1 Soul
Sense supernatural evil within 1 mile while in Corzu
Dominic - Teach Dita Swordsmanship
Dita proves to be quite talented with a blade, and thanks to her magic she actually has the raw strength to be able to fight male opponents without being overwhelmed. She makes good progress this turn, although she has a long way to go before she's an expect.
Teaching swordsmanship also counts as training time for you, bringing your skill up to 3 [+3/16]. It also provides an opportunity to build a closer relationship with Dita, who seems to enjoy getting sweaty and beating each other up a lot more than you'd expect from a proper noble lady. But then, she's not exactly proper.
By the end of the month you feel that you've finally gotten through to Dita, and convinced her that you actually want to help her even if it causes you trouble. She actually cries a little when she realizes you're serious, before hugging you and thanking you profusely.
But perhaps the most surprising thing about this interlude is the fact that by the end of the month you're catching her checking you out on a pretty regular basis, especially on hot afternoons when you decide to dispense with your shirt during sparring practice. Apparently her interests don't exclusively run to girls?
Bialas - Train Troops: Skill (Spearmen)
Bialis manages to impress some basic skills on your raw recruits.
Jaroslaw - Recruit Troops (Archers)
Success. But he had to make a tour of Igal and the hamlets to find enough volunteers, and he reports that you're starting to run short on manpower now. Future recruiting will probably be more difficult.
Dita - Train: Swordsmanship
Dita greatly enjoys training under you, although you'd swear she actually gets turned on every time you beat her in a sparring match. Her skill improves to Swordsmanship 1 [+3/4].
Katiana - Construction
The granary construction continues on schedule, although Kat had to work some late nights to make up for the time spent adventuring.
At this point you're finally starting to get a feel for Kat's abilities, and the mystery of her extra actions is becoming clear. It looks like Kat gets a partial second action every turn, which she can use for short adventures or personal projects she feels highly motivated to pursue. She also has a talent for turning any unusual event into an adventure, which was what she was doing when she first arrived. So while you can only assign her one action per turn, she'll tend to get other things done on the side.
Traian - Train: Merchant
Traian masters the accounting and planning aspects of this skill easily enough, but he sucks at the people side. You can probably rely on him to make purchases without getting cheated now, but he's never going to be good at socializing.
Order: Pass Chesna 100 SP to acquire Kat's goods from Baron Timis
Chesna gleefully presents you with a bundle of books and papers while you're visiting with Gavrilla. It seems Timis was happy to be rid of the potentially incriminating documents, and it only cost 70 SP. Katiana will be thrilled to have her grimoire and research notes back.
Order: Equip the Chosen properly
Getting them clothing, weapons and general supplies is easily done. Properly fitted armor and special weapons will take a few weeks, but both Chosen now plan to return to Corzu to resupply periodically so that won't be a problem.
Order: Write a letter to our father accepting his offer for a seneschal.
Done. You can expect your new retainer to arrive around the end of this month.
Order: In Eztergrom find a reputable book merchant and establish that you are interested in purchasing books on Roman engineering and armies, along with books on India and the Middle East.
You obtain a nice little collection of books about Roman practices, but information on the Middle East and India is harder to come by. The bookseller in Eztergrom promises to put the work out through his contacts about your request, and let you know what turns up.
Order: If any free time remains spend it getting to know Kat better
It's a busy month, but you find a few moments here and there.
Kat is an energetic, enthusiastic girl who always has more projects going than you can keep track of. She's much smarter than you first realized (Mind 3), which does fit better with the fact that she has Wizardry 4 at the age of 17. She has a lot of big plans for her magic - she talks about researching ways to enchant weapons, build golems, even grow castles like trees. You're not sure how much of that is actually possible, but she clearly intends to explore the limits of her magical potential.
She was terrified by your adventure together, but she's game for more expeditions if you need her. You get the feeling that she understands the practical benefits of XP vs. training, and is willing to take some risks in order to advance quickly. She also kind of enjoys crushing her enemies, especially if they're evil so she doesn't feel any need to exercise restraint.
On a personal level Kat tends to communicate through little hints and comments instead of just sitting down and talking about her concerns, which can sometimes be a little annoying. But she's affectionate and playful and a hell of a lot less inhibited than most Borjerians, which makes up for a lot. At this point she's made it pretty clear that she's willing to play second wife to a Borjerian noblewoman if need be, and she doesn't care if that's legal in Borjeria - as a priestess of Thoth she's empowered to perform her own marriage ritual, and that's good enough for her. She seems quite impressed with Dita, and has hinted a couple of times that she'd make a better wife than a Khersian zealot or an ornamental socialite.
Personal Life
Mira and Aldona miss you terribly whenever you travel, but that just means you get an enthusiastic welcome whenever you return home. They're both quite impressed by your heroic deeds, not to mention the number of beautiful and exotic women who hang around you. They're a bit afraid of Dita and the Chosen, and fiercely grateful to Kat for protecting them from Atalaya's curse. They also seem to think it's inevitable that you're going to add Kat to the harem at some point, but if anything they're looking forward to that - they seem to think she's a fine mentor and role model.
Overall life is good, but whatever you end up doing about a marriage alliance is going to complicate matters.
Hidden Lore Acquired - Chosen Empowerments
Your investigation of Emma's empowerment results in a number of interesting, alarming and potentially useful discoveries.
First, the mechanism of the empowerment is some sort of odd gender-specific enchantment. A huge fountain of magical energy fountains up in her womb and flows out from there to saturate her body and spirit, enhancing pretty much every aspect of her being. There's some sort of complicated interaction with her aura that tells the magic what to do, and interestingly enough the energy doesn't inherently have a holy aspect. You suspect that's because humans aren't inherently holy creatures, so constantly filling one with holy magic of that intensity would have unfortunate side effects.
But that aura sensitivity introduces a serious weakness, because it makes it possible for something other than Inovia herself to change what the empowerment does. You're pretty sure only a virgin could become a Chosen, because any contamination from someone else's aura would make the initial empowerment go haywire. Even now the presence of any aura other than her own there (i.e. from spells, or being pregnant, or even just having sex with a man) would either seriously weaken her or make her enhancements malfunction in unpredictable ways. A devious mage could turn her own power against her by introducing a carefully-designed artificial aura into the energy flow, telling the magic to change her in whatever way he might find useful. Given the amount of power involved it would probably be possible to have major effects in very little time.
Normally Emma is protected from such manipulation by a protective effect that makes her highly resistant to outside magic. But as you noted before, once she lets you in there aren't any further layers of defense. If you can heal her or buff her you can also do anything else you want to.
Studying the form Emma's empowerment magic takes gives you many clues about how to duplicate her abilities using your own sorcery. At this point you feel confident that you could research sensory enhancements, a movement buff or a better form of rapid healing based on these observations. You also suspect it would be possible to train a Chosen to alter the form that her enhancements take through meditation and visualization, although that would be easiest with one who had magical abilities.
One somewhat disturbing thing you note is that Emma's empowerment has a considerable effect on her emotions. You think the intent may have just been to make her enjoy killing monsters, but the actual effect is to make her sexually aroused by bloodshed and destruction. This is particularly unfortunate since her libido and sense of touch are as enhanced as everything else, but she doesn't dare actually have sex for fear of what the aura contamination would do to her powers.
Yeah. No wonder everyone thinks these girls are insane. You'd be pretty unstable too if you had to live like that for a few years.
Other Events
For once you don't have any other unexpected events.
Note: Status posts are still being updated.