YEAH BABY!!! ORCHID'S BACK!!!

Dear Diary,
Holy MOLEY! SO much has happened, I'm not even really sure where to start. Sorry if my handwriting's messy, I'm still getting used to my new (old?) hands - but I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
I guess let's start at the beginning - Illy asked us to gather 'round and focus on her creepy book to see if we could figure out what was going on with whoever it was that helped with Golaff. Well, we did, and we were all transported to this freaky white void. My jeebies were thoroughly heebied, and that wasn't helped when this floating cloak appeared and started talking to us. It called itself a "friend from an outer plane" - but I dunno. It did this thing where a hand appeared out of it, but it wasn't attached to anything. Creepy. Not sure Illy has much of a choice, though. It's get help from whatever that thing was, or we face Gobsmack alone. Not that I'm scared - we could totally take him - but some extra help probably wouldn't hurt.
 
Anyway, enough about that. We left the weird purple tree and want back to The Hold. We made the rounds, saying goodbye to everyone before we left for Redbridge, and I gave a name to the doggy!! He's called Sprinkles and I love him. We also spoke to Forge, who continues to leave his name an aspiration rather than an accomplishment. It turns out he has a friend or two in Redbridge that we might be able to convince to come here and help him suck less. I like the guy, but apparently hard work isn't everything.
 
Ray used the Dreamwalker Ring on our magic flower and saw a vision of them growing on a mountaintop. They were struggling to grow in the cold, but every year someone came up to tend to them. Then some funky looking humanoids started growing out of them.
 
Before we left, I decided to pop in on the old lady and OOH BOY! I'm SO glad I did! We went in and I was expecting the usual imaginary tea party treatment, but she was surprisingly composed and... well.... present. We said hi, and then all of a sudden she TRANSFORMED!! INTO ORCHID!!!!!! That mean old wizard apparently decided that turning me into a bug and shipping me off to the Wildlands wasn't enough, so he went after Orchid and turned her from a dryad into a bumbling old human with enough lost marbles to trip a mammoth. And somehow me trying to magically search for her in that messed up tree was just enough to jog her memory and break whatever spell was put on her. I swear, if I ever gent my hands on that stinky, no-good, ugly poopy head, I'll strap him down and individually pluck each of his beard hairs until he's BALDER THAN A NEWBORN BABY!!!
 
Ahem. Anyway. Once she'd returned to her usual self, Orchid was kind enough to return the favour - I'm BACK to my usual bejewelled self - but something was slightly off. For some reason I had some white scales on my body. Now, Orchid didn't say much on the matter, but she showed a vision of my parents going into a building and leaving with me. So apparently I'm ADOPTED. Wild. Mum and Mama have some explaining to do. Oh yeah she also said something about a dragon? I dunno. But I can use really cool magic now!
 
But that's not all. She also upgraded my orchid so now it can check on both The Hold and Orchid's Forest. And it should actually work this time. I decided to leave our magic healing flower with her, and Ray showed her the vision about them. She got very excited and told us where the vision was - a mountain to the south, below Redbridge. I wonder what grows from these things for Orchid to get so worked up.
 
Finally, after saying goodbye to everyone, we left on our journey to the capital. We were on the road for quite a while, before stopping at a village about halfway through called Valenthorn. And lemme tell ya, the people here are WEIRD. We went to this one shop, and there were clocks EVERYWHERE. The guy running the place had a few screws loose and was pretty cagey about anything magic related. After some persuasion, he revealed that he's a magic tinkerer, and he even upgraded some magic items for us! Then we went outside and these adventurers came up to us out of nowhere. They introduced themselves as Sofalia the Firbolg bard, Charles the orc barbarian, Ryansworth the gnome wizard, Angusival the Satyr artificer, and Just Jack the Goblin cleric. Then they told us about an inn and just left.
 
We looked around a bit - Renjy found an altered wanted poster of himself - and went to sleep at the inn. a bad choice on our part, as we were woken up by horrific screaming and dead bodies around the place. These sneaky shadow creatures had killed everyone, including the adventurers we met earlier that day! Well, we did what we do and fought the things - which really sucked for Renjy as they drained the strength of their targets. Strength is his whole thing :( Anyway I was awesome with my cool new powers and we killed them fairly quickly, but then we saw this ghost out the window. We ran over as fast as we could, I stabbed it real good, and then it screamed and I was knocked out. Apparently Renjy was the one who managed to kill(?) it for once - I just think that's Ray being nice and letting him take credit. I'll believe it when I see it.
 
Anyway the townspeople came out to see what the ruckus was - which isn't great, cause right now it's just us and a bunch of bodies. Not a ghost in sight.
 
OK BYE!!