Up at the fireside, Iuri clears his throat. "So, returning to Harkenvale. We next headed over to the tavern which was... less then friendly. To be fair, with all the infected—and a few of us infected, namely Connery—the suspicion was justified, though it was pretty easily removed by the purchase of expensive whiskey.

"The barkeep mentioned a problem over by the docks, so we went there and ran into a bunch of fish people. We dispatched them. There was a boat and an island not too far from shore, so we went and asked permission to use the boat.

"This is where things went... We get on the boat. We head to the island. There are barrels on the island. Hundreds of barrels." (It was only one hundred, actually, but it looked and felt like more.) "I tried to get some of the barrels open without us actually getting too close, thinking they might contain explosives, gunpowder, right?"

A dark shadow crosses Iuri's face.

"Gunpowder might have been easier. No, it wasn't gunpowder, it was..." He grimaces, grits his teeth, and finally spits it out: "Mimics."

A shudder visibly shivers Iuri's shoulders. He hates mimics.

"Of course, in the process of attempting to open a barrel, they were antagonized, and we ended up... I flew up into the air and just Fire Bolted the shit out of them for like ten minutes. And in the process we learned that the whole island was in fact also a mimic."

Iuri pauses here, groans, and rubs his eyes. He continues: "It was awful. It just took forever. And the rest of the party on the boat—honestly it would have been easier if they had just kept rowing away, but they kept trying to attack, which let the mimics get in range of them and made things harder. And the big mimic, the 'whole floating island' one, could spit acid. That was not fun.

"We did succeed in getting rid of the barrels in the end, causing a massive red tide of dead mimic blood and guts to wash up on the shore. That was fantastic. And then, we had to go check on that awful old man. There was one barrel on the island that wasn't a mimic, as a note, and was sort of a Barrel of Holding that contained tons of gold—some of which was also mimics?—and we were able to sort of put Conover in it? To help with the fact that he was infected and anyone near him was in danger of also being infected. The barrel helped block the infection.

"But when we went back to the old man, he was in a bad way and asked us to bring him medicine which turned out to be a brick of cocaine and then someone tried to open it and fumbled it and cocaine got into the air and drove Linoleum crazy and he ran off into the woods."

Iuri stops and stand there, staring blankly across the dining room.

"You know what, that's... That's enough for tonight." With that, Iuri walks off.