SESSION 43D: ESCAPADES OF THE OGRE
October 25th, 2009
The 23rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
SEEKING THE FLAYER
Ranthir had a wand which allowed him to weave magical alarms. Moving systematically through the Banewarrens they laid down alarms at every major intersection, slowly cordoning off the complex. Ranthir also laid a glamer upon his eyes allowing him to see the hidden and the invisible, while Tee kept her sharp elven nose alert for any tell-tale scents.
They eventually reached the room with the massive iron cauldron. Activating her boots of levitation, Tee carried Ranthir up to look into the cauldron… and they spotted the flayer laying at the cauldron’s bottom.
But even in that instant, the flayer reached out into their minds and whispered, “Pass on. You see me not.”
“Yes I do!” Tee cried. And shot him.
The flayer lashed out with a mind blast, causing Tee to fall into the cauldron and Ranthir to land on the floor beside it.
Nasira hit the bottom of the cauldron with a spell that would heat the metal to dangerously hot temperatures. Unfortunately, the immense size of the cauldron delayed the effect to some extent.
Agnarr threw a rope over the top of the cauldron and braced it, allowing Tor to rapidly climb up to the cauldron’s lip… where he was promptly hit with a mind blast and fell backwards off the cauldron, striking his head on the floor as he fell into epileptic twitches.
Agnarr carefully backed up and then ran for the cauldron, leaping up to catch the rim and then hauling himself up. The flayer tried to hit him with another mind blast, but he shook it off and jumped down into the cauldron. Once there, he saw that, although Tee was beginning to burn from the heat of the metal (and the soles of his own feet were sore from it), the flayer was calmly floating three inches above the metal’s surface.
“Flying bastard!” Agnarr roared. “Flying squid bastard!”
In a few short, slashing blows from his sword he sliced the flayer up – its purplish-red blood spattering to boil upon the ever-heating metal. In the end, it was reduced to a pool of coagulate gore… which predictably soaked up into the back of Tee’s shirt before Agnarr finally picked her up and hauled her out of the cauldron.
ESCAPADES OF THE OGRE
With the flayer safely dead, they returned to the outer chamber where Elestra and Kalerecent were keeping an eye on Seeaeti and the mauled-but-still-regenerating ogre.
“Are we sure the flayer’s dead?” Elestra asked.
“Pretty sure,” Tor said.
“But is it regenerating like this one?”
Agnarr grunted. “Tee, turn around.”
Tee did.
“Okay, you see those squid guts all over her? It’s dead.”
Tee rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Agnarr.”
Agnarr called Seeaeti off the ogre so that it could successfully regenerate. They wanted to question it.
But when it woke up, it was the one asking the questions. “Who are you?”
They naturally refused to answer. But although they tried to question it, threaten it, intimidate it, and scare it, the ogre just kept on asking questions. “Who sent you? What do you want?” And so forth.
But they resolutely refused to answer.
“Ah,” the ogre said at last. “I see I will learn nothing here.”
And it turned into a gas… and then the gas itself vanished.
Nasira uttered a holy oath, banishing the invisibility effect. But this only resulted in causing the gas to reappear. Agnarr and Tor ran forward to attack it – and they may have even caused some damage to it as their swords ripped through it in arcs of fire and electricity (although, on the other hand, perhaps it was only wishful thinking on their part) – but then a magical darkness popped into existence.
There was mass confusion: Tor became convinced that he had the ogre cornered (although it turned out he was only cutting away at empty air). Tee raced to block the entrance to the Banewarrens, but more darkness popped up. Then one of the alarm spells Ranthir had laid went off and they all rushed to the spot to find… nothing at all. A few moments late another alarm went off back in the antechamber and they realized that they had been completely outmaneuvered. Although they pursued him down the tunnel, the ogre had disappeared.
MORNING MISSIVES
In the morning Ranthir tracked down two scrolls detailing the creation of missive tokens. One he used to create a new missive token for Kalerecent to make sure the Banewarrens remained secure; the other he would study so that he could create them at will in the future.
The morning newssheets reported that, prior to the Midtown kidnapping, children had been disappearing from the Warrens for weeks… but no one had been reporting on it. (It was just the Warrens, after all.)
The more sensational headlines, however, reported three more killings on the Columned Row in Oldtown. Like the priest the night before, the victims had had their heads ripped open.
“Did we do that?” Elestra asked.
“No. I’m pretty sure—Wait, when did it happen? No, that wasn’t us.”
The murderer was being referred to as the “Columned Row Killer”.
Not long after, Shim reported to them. Physical scouting around Porphyry House had found no other entrances. He had tried to track down the architect responsible for the building, but nobody knew who had designed or built the place.
He was able to tell them that Porphyry House had first opened 12 months earlier (in Kadal 789). It had replaced a smaller, less prestigious brothel that had previously been built on the same site. There were rumors that, since that time, Porphyry House had been trying to force other brothels out of business in an effort to corner the market. The place was particularly famed for reputedly being able to instantly cater to the most specific (and perverted) needs of its clients. Shim had also learned that a major orgy was to be held at the House on the 18th of Noctural.
Thanking Shim for what he had found, they focused their attention on forming a plan of action. They briefly revisited the idea of trying to break in through the sewers, but ended up rejecting it because they would need clairvoyance spells to pinpoint where to dig and they suspected such spells might trigger alarms within Porphyry House.
Instead they decided to use their stone-shaping spells to simply tunnel in through a side wall.
Running the Campaign: NPC Conversation Agendas – Campaign Journal: Session 43E
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
