Swamped

You can't help but be drawn to the mission with the most potential for trouble. Besides, you still want to hear that juicy info Grey knows. You step up near him.

You can't help but notice it's not a very popular job. There's only two other knights going with you. Grey lets out a little sigh as he leads you off the barge.

"Right. So here's the plan in a little more detail. First, before we even get to the prisoners, we're going to want to get ahold of one of those machines. It'll be a lot easier to convince them this isn't a trick of some kind if we've got something to show them."

"That'll be the easy part," one of your companions says.

"Not if the attack isn't widespread yet." Grey glances at you. "We might have to slip in somewhere specific to find the things."

"It wasn't widespread when they caught Lisa." You see the look on Grey's face, and realized some details got skipped. "Oh, that's right, Lisa got found by a search party. Apparently when she was digging up that darkwood. And they brought her right to Ash. Um, that's when she dragged me along."

Grey just groans.

"Well. You can tell me where the attack was then, right?"

"Right. I can. Can't speak for what they did with the machines afterwards, though."

"Okay. Lead us there and we'll figure out how to proceed. After that, we go for the cell, distract the guards on duty, and I talk to the prisoners. That's mostly my problem, though it wouldn't hurt to come up with some details for the distraction."

"I was thinking a fake fight would be good," one of the knights beside you says. "We start pounding on each other near there, the guard comes out to break it up, we gang up on them."

"Well, if we can't think of anything better, we'll go with that," Grey shrugs. "For now, though, we've got to find those machines."

You lead the group back towards where the attack happened, trying to stay out of sight as best you can. There are holes in the floor, and a couple of knights standing around looking at them. But no sign of the actual machines.

"They're probably waiting to see if any more pop up," you whisper to Grey.

"That would be handy for us, but I hope it doesn't come to that. We need to figure out where the machines that turned up earlier went - whether they retreated or got confiscated."

He's got a point. How are you going to go about that?