Most of the day passed relatively without incident, but then... Well, let's just say that there is in fact a reason that I'm currently writing this from a rowboat, shall we?

One of the more unusual pieces of cargo on the Sunset Empire was a black leopard. I'm not really much of an animal lover, but still, it was really an amazing thing and I wasn't particularly happy about it being caged. Leighla was even more upset, but I suspect we could have dealt with that for the duration of our trip. What precipitated the crisis was that the crew was taunting the beast, almost to the point of torturing it! Leighla and I both found this somewhat less than worthy of our acceptance, so we went up to confront the evil little twit who was engaged in this unsavory activity. Her name was Agar, and she had been the one up at the crow's nest with me yesterday, but she was a lot less friendly than she'd been earlier... Leighla tried to get her to stop, Agar took great exception to this, and it soon looked like they would come to blows! It was at this point, of course, that the brave, noble Captain Stewart came to interfere and decided that it would be fun to chain Leighla to the mast!

THIS was certainly an unpleasant development, but Leighla took it like a true elf (I'm so proud of her!). She made the captain promise to keep the crew away from the cage, and then she gave herself over to be chained, in order to protect the rest of us. Prihelm, though, was still feeling the desire to be protective of us ladies (i.e. he was still suffering from a severe case of testosterone poisoning), so he tried to stop the captain from chaining Leighla up! So now the captain was pretty upset with Prihelm too, and ordered the poor boy beaten. I can't say that I entirely approve of Prihelm's interference, but to me, the captain crossed the line when he had his passengers beaten! Since I didn't want to get involved in a brawl against such vastly superior numbers, I snuck into the captain's quarters and, uh, expressed my disgust with him in my own little way...

Meanwhile, Haley had managed to get herself into trouble as well! I can't believe they beat up a lady like that! And then they ordered Leighla gagged, and she racked Dirk so hard that I'm convinced he'll never speak in a baritone again in his entire life! That'll teach him to mess with us elven women! Of course, I am generously assuming he's bright enough to learn, which might be a debatable assumption: Dirk is quite the idiot!

Well, at this point, there wasn't much I could do. I'd been entertaining thoughts of freeing the panther and letting it tear the crew to shreds, but I couldn't get over there. And I wasn't about to let these bastards hurt my friends any more! So I told them to stop and we would willingly leave their ship (the captain had sent a couple of men down to get a boat so that he could put us over the side), and that if any of them touched one of us again, he wouldn't live to see the morning. Stewart didn't take well to this, and he ordered Singe to kill me (oh, this is a good way of honoring your business contracts, you fat toad!!), but of course, an arrow through his knees dissuaded our lovely cook... At this point, I think Stewart realized that I was serious and that even though he'd eventually defeat us, it'd cost him half of his crew, so he agreed to let us go with enough food and water for a few days, and here we are. I won't even go into Leighla's attempts to free the cat, largely because they were too embarrassing for her, but also because if I don't start helping with the oars sometime soon, Haley's going to kill me...