(no subject)

Okay, scenario is as follows. An American woman marries a Canadian man and moves here illegally. She has a nine-year-old daughter, no ex appears to have any say in this child, and the child is also American. The school board (my employer) has denied the girl the right to attend school because, as an illegal alien, no one will be paying her fees. They want Mom to pay the fees ($9000 approximately) so she can go to school. Mom can't afford it, Stepdad can't even afford to sponsor his new wife properly or adopt the child let alone pay the fees, and the child has been homeschooled for two years as a result. She is not learning, probably because Mom doesn't know what she's doing and doesn't know how to find out. Oh, and the girl is special-needs, too, which means the education that's right for her would probably cost a lot more than the province would pay for to begin with.

[Poll #419060]

Actual weekend stuff

Note: If my pronouns are a bit mixed up, it's because I really like Velvet. She's my favourite character ever. I usually write journals for her in the first person, but this one is likely to be a bit mixed up.

Velvet died. (Insert dirge here.)

Our adventuring party returned to the Desmodo city after several days (game time) of looting the drow city, including the killing of three beholders. We got there to discover that someone looking like our ranger, Laucian (who had of course been with us the entire time) had killed the high priest/leader of the tribe while we were away. The rival trading group was undoubtedly behind the setup.

We turned Laucian in on condition that he receive a fair trial. (The person who actually plays Laucian was performing some sort of animal surgery at the time, and wasn't available to protest this.) Our elven illusionist proved that it is quite easy for a magic-user to make someone look like Laucian - using the simple tactic of making a roomful of bats all look like Laucian at the same time. He proved the point, and Laucian was about to be freed on lack of sufficient evidence. Roger Thursday, our cleric of St. Cuthbert, was acting as Laucian's lawyer. He turned around and accused the illusionist of the evil competition party of setting the whole thing up. The illusionist, fearing he was about to be discovered, agreed to single combat against Thursday and then jumped the gun, uttering a Word of Chaos spell. It had the effect of totally incapacitating all the bats for several rounds, as well as deafening any Lawful character.

Velvet is not lawful. She's chaotic good. So the word didn't affect her. It didn't affect Laucian, either, but he was still chained in the prisoner's box. So, good little thief that I am, I race to him and get him out of those chains pronto. I have a pretty formidable open-lock skill; these things just fell away.

Before I got the chance to do anything else, Laucian, Thursday and I were hit with two spells one right after the other. I was burned into charcoal, Laucian had four hit points left, and Thursday went from 106 to 17 in one round. (For those of you not familiar with D&D, when you reach 0, you're unconcious. When you reach -10, you're dead. I was at -30.)

We managed to kill most of the party, though their thief escaped. The spell she used was interesting - it was like one of those holes that cartoon characters used to pull out of their pockets, lay on the ground, and jump into. We don't know where she went, and we don't really care so long as she doesn't come back.

Remaining to be accomplished: we have to convince the bat priest that we should get the contract, since the other party is now dead. Thursday has to find ten minutes in his busy day to raise me from the dead (minus one constitution point, but I can handle that. It's better than being dead until we can get out of the Underdark and back to Greyhawk.) We need to heal everyone up, starting with Laucian and Eidolon (the illusionist - his few hit points were in the single-digits as well by the end of it all.) And last but definitely not least, we need to collect the treasure we left buried by the front gate of the city when we returned from the Drow city.

I must say, if Velvet had to die, this was a much nicer way for it to happen than the last time. Then, she died in the first five minutes of game time and her body got dragged off by monsters. The party spent the rest of the evening trying to rescue my body so that I wouldn't find myself turned into Undead, in which case a resurrection would be impossible, or eaten, which would just be nasty. They rescued the body four different times, and lost it again three of them. Then Eidolon got smart, opened my still-intact bag of holding (a magic item that looks like Santa's Sack and has the capacity of a walk-in closet) and stuffed my body into it. When the combat was over, they teleported out of there back to Greyhawk and got me resurrected.

The worst part about dying in D&D is seeing Piet put another little skull on his DM screen.