>"I met a spider youkai near where I found this sword underground, and she had some interesting things to say. She seemed to imply that her people once lived above ground on Estval, but that the surfacers, that being the early inhabitants or perhaps the colonists from the central continents, had gone to war with them. Far as I can tell, the spiders got the worse of it."
>"As near as I can determine, they were responsible for the blight. So, if I can learn more about them, if there's anything to learn at all, that might bring me closer to understanding how this disease works, and how to stop it."
>"Well," she says, taking a rather poised tone, "I can say that if the colonists of Estval fought a war on their own soil, it was the briefest and most invisible of wars imaginable; there is simply no record of it happening at all. Nor, for that matter, do I know of any evidence that Estval itself was previously inhabited. There, I admit, I may not be
exhaustively informed of all pre-colonial findings, but there are certainly no sites either physically expansive or widely known. If this subterranean shrine you speak of indeed dates to this period, its import to the field would be quite considerable."
>Pull a wry grin. "In fact, you could say she's why I took a header off that bridge in the first place. Stubborn one she was, a right piece of work. as nasty as any rowdy Oni when she got riled up by seeing I had this little treasure, let me tell you."
>She regards you with a slight note of distaste. "I see."
>She shakes her head. "In any event, you may well have encountered a spider youkai beneath the island's surface - they are rare, but not unheard of - and she may well have told you exactly what you've since repeated to me, but this does not necessitate that
either of you have your facts entirely in order. And here, I think I may return to an earlier irregularity."
>She fixes you with a keen stare, her round golden eyes almost uncomfortably intent. "An outbreak of a rare and apparently incurable disease is not the sort of thing one expects to slip beneath the threshold of newsworthiness,
particularly when it is urgent enough to beget the dispatch of messengers to other lands in search of some slim chance of a solution. You said all options on Estval had been exhausted; this takes time. Time enough for word of a brewing crisis to outpace the agents of its resistance, I should think. It also strikes me as rather disingenuous to dismiss the risks for their 'merely' being isolated to Easthaven. The significance of that town's agricultural exports is not to be disregarded, and anything which devastated harvests there would have a consequent and considerable impact on the food supply of numerous settlements beyond its borders. This, of course, is not even considering the other inimical implications of such an event befalling a settlement under the personal vigil of a harvest goddess." She cranes her neck in towards you. "Are there perhaps other details you could share which might clarify these matters?"