I Don't Think You're Doing it Right
Having saved the town from the murderous threat of the marrowbreakers we are summoned to appear before the king. An honour indeed! It's a little peculiar that fifteen guards come to Dexter's home in the middle of the night to summon us on personal orders from the king, but one does not question the king.
'You are to come immediately on orders from the king. Get dressed. You are to bring no armour and no weapons.'
Tal doesn't like the sound of this, 'I'm not comfortable being entirely unarmed,' he mumbles and puts on his belt with a ceremonial dagger hanging off it.
'You, no weapons. Take it off', one of the supervising guards tells him.
'Hrm, okay. I'm sure a rope and grappling hook is okay though.'
'No weapons.'
'Just a net, then.'
'No weapons.'
As Tal goes through most of his personal possessions and anything lying around in his room to see what he can and, mostly, cannot take, someone else mumbles 'maybe we should classify Tal as an offensive weapon and declare that we can't take him.' Eventually, Tal runs out of pointy items, heavy metallic items, and everything explicitly listed on the weapon charts to try to take with him, and we are led to the keep.
Naturally, we were misled slightly. The 'orders of the king' were not quite what we expected and instead of receiving a personal blessing from the king for saving his people from vicious monsters we were instead thrown in to cells and told to wait for the torturer. Maybe it was wrong to mention the giant metal tyrant that we inadvertently let loose who wants to enslave all of humanity.
The situation didn't look too bleak, though. When the torturer turned up we were greeted with an evil-looking fellow covered in scars.
'Wait a minute. Why is the torturer covered in scars? How does he torture people? 'Tell me what I need to know or I'll make this very painful!' <snick> 'Argh. Yes, you don't like the sight of blood do you? Answer my questions or I'll cut off one of my fingers! Bwa-ha-ha-ooh, I'm feeling a bit woozy...' I don't think he's doing it right.'
Unperturbed by this mocking, the torturer takes Ann-See from her cell, but not without Ann-See knocking out three guards first as they try to manacle her, and leads her off to his chamber. A couple of hours pass, and a few screams are heard, before Ann-See is brought back. Two guards have to physically drag her from the chamber back to the cell, where she slumps on the ground. Once the cell door closes we switch from the common tongue to a language the guards will not understand and ask Ann-See if she's okay.
'They didn't even ask me any questions', she forces out in a frail voice. 'Naw, I'm just kidding, I'm fine. He scratched me a bit compared to all the fights we've had with the marrowbreakers recently, it's no big deal. He wanted to know if I was a member of the Red Hand Gang, that's all.'
The plot thicks.