07/29/2026
The Students of Life and Death quickly pieced together the most likelu culprit of Val's disappearance was the vendor who showed such great interest in Sprocket, Jacque.
They found the sunglasses shop closed up, but Ridley located a false back to the stand, and a tunnel leading down beneath the Jemenda street covered by an illusory wall that numbed his hand when he reached through it.
Next to this wall, the group found a small mushroom that, upon closer inspection, was actually a small Fungril person named Poggle.
Poggle explained that he was a spy for a woman named Penelo, who had a vast mycelial network of mushroom spies across Jemenda. Poggle was not supposed to tell them this, but he was new to spy game and didn't quite understand that the information was private.
Due to the network, Poggle also explained that Penelo was watching them through Poggle even then.
The orc who had been watching them earlier showed his face again, and the group tracked him down. Confronting him while he tried to escape into a crowd, th orc relented in his escape and chose to talk to the group in a vacant alley.
He explained his name was Venga, and he'd been looking for Penelo, as she had information he needed. He believed Penelo knew the location of Orga, a powerful entity buried in the desert.
Venga was apparently part of an order known as the Skylights, a group that fought off the shades of Orga.
He also explained that Penelo was a criminal mastermind, and Gwenna remembered stories a crime boss in Jemenda that rose to power in recent years by selling Tungsteel to Trine in exchange for automaton creates, which explained Jacque's interest in Sprocket and Val.
Ridley scried on Val, seeing her in a mossy, mushroom ridden underground lair, so the group made a plan with Venga to infiltrate through the false wall in Jacque's stall.
However, knowing the atmosphere was filled with poisonous spores, Otho entered the tunnel to collect some to create an antidote with Ridley, but the trap that numbed Ridley's hand also affected Otho, paralyzing him momentarily and sending him sliding down the tunnel.
At the bottom, Otho found a guardian beast awaiting him.