Goratrix has thrown up a force shield around the Brucolac, and the restless mutterings of the ghosts just outside are escalating. Will the agents engage in the better part of valor and discreetly withdraw from this blighted underground wasteland for the time being? Or will they double down and keep fighting in spite of the odds?
Callie’s Notes
Bec’s unconscious form has been surrounded by some kind of enchantment, from the harp. Cal realizes it is affecting Bec’s body rather than her mind. It seems to be repelling the undead aura. Uh, I totally knew that.
Freki tries to slash at the Enoch mist, but he isn’t able to destroy it. It’s kind of hard to hit an incorporeal thing with your hands, you know?
“You fools! If he dies, we die!” Goratrix yells out the door at his allies. Despite his words, he seems pretty happy with Enoch being almost dead…er. He’s coming towards us!
Cal has the feeling that something monumental is going to happen. But what?! He moves closer to me, to protect me if he can.
The Brucolac does something that intensifies the horrible aura in this place. Help, help! I’m being oppressed!
A somewhat Roger-shaped tentacle squiggles out and blorps Vondal out. Vondal says “We gotta get out of here! This is place is gonna blow!”
Things seem to be going not necessarily to our advantage, so I call out to my team to get over to me. If we can all hold hands, I’m sure I can get us all out of here.
Enoch continues to try to move down. Freki can now see where he’s going, toward a crack in the foundation. He takes the opportunity to slash again at the mist and rakes through it, destroying it. Goratrix is pleased, the creep. RIP my dinner buddy.
Oz tries to cartwheel over to me, but trips and falls on his face. We all treat that with the solemnity it deserves.
Then the ghosts come screaming in! They aren’t mindless, more like a hive or something. They’re all focused on one thing, but their movements are so chaotic it’s hard to tell what they want. The ghost that looks like Goratrix moans in anticipation and reaches toward Goratrix. The ghost is drawn to him, but Goratrix looks at it with deep horror and loathing. The ghost may be a remnant of whatever Goratrix was before he was a vampire.
Freki wants to hold Goratrix so the ghost can get him. I know that ghosts are usually tied to some kind of emotion. These ghosts are very emotional and they’re known for flipping out and terrifying or posessing people. They want to be inside this place and if they fill it up with their ectoplasm, that’s probably not going to be a wonderful environment for us livvies. But anyway, Freki wants to see what happens if Goratrix’s ghost gets ahold of his body, so he grapples Goratrix.
“No! This must not happen!” Goratrix tries to wrench himself out of Freki’s grasp. He says, “I’m sorry, my liege” and tries to teleport away. Freki takes the opportunity to grab at him again. He disappears, but whatever Freki did to him had some effect. He might have messed up his spell. There’s a strange void where he was standing, like a little hole in the world.
Cal decides to slash at the little void spot, rather than doing something as sensible as GETTING THE HELL OUT OF HERE. The whole place shudders when he does. Cal and Freki are waving the ghost home, toward the…portal? I guess we can call it a portal.
The Brucolac is continuing to concentrate and his clothes are stitching themselves back together.
Vondal asks me what the plan is. I tell him I can get us out of here at any time, but we all have to be touching and Cal and Freki don’t seem like they’re done here. Meanwhile, Bec needs to be stabilized. I run over and cast Cure Wounds. The atmosphere over here is less oppressive, I guess because of the harp effect? There aren’t any ghosts nearby, which is good.
The Goratrix ghost is sucked into the rift that Cal made. Cal senses deep fulfillment for just a moment as the ghost enters the portal.
The rest of the ghosts have filled up this space, which…that is a lot of ghosts, man. Cal, Freki, and Vondal are all in the ghost soup, which probably smells musty, if I had to guess. Freki makes it over to us. Then Cal uses his whip to grab Vondal and drags him along. Oz has already made it, after picking his way carefully and doing no cartwheels whatsoever.
The Brucolac’s will presses against my mind. Ooh, I kind of want to be his friend. I bet his dinner conversation is incredible. Wait, no! No, no, I resist!
The Brucolac uses his horrible absorption attack again. Cal and I resist, but Bec faints again.
This is pretty bad! I tell everybody that if they want to come with me, I’m teleporting the hell out of here. We teleport the hell out of there! The horrible feeling of oppression is gone, and we’re back in SPI HQ. Nobody is dead, surprisingly, though Vondal and Cal look exhausted. We’re in the women’s dorm, which is where I set up the shrine. Avandra is a little bigger than Erathis, but I’m not going to rock the boat.
Cassandra is there, asleep. When we appear, she summons a light and asks if we’re okay. Cassandra starts healing Bec and asks what happened. Oh boy, where to begin? Cal says we met the Brucolac, but she’s still stuck on our mission at the manor. Man, that feels like a year ago! While Cassandra is working on the healing, she’s astounded by how damaged we all are. We try to explain, but we don’t get far before she says we should get Mallory. That’s a good idea. We probably don’t have it in us to tell this story twice.
Cal asks if Oz is doing okay, because he doesn’t seem quite like himself lately. She casts Detect Magic and says he seems a little bit…cursed. Unlucky. His luck has abandoned him. She suggests he try to sleep it off and she’ll check on him later. He grumbles that he doesn’t need anyone checking up on him and stumbles away. Um, okay? Cassandra also thinks that Oz is “more like the rest of you,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Bec says the Celestial Hand told her to help Vondal get the hourglass. Cassandra doesn’t know what is a Celestial Hand, so Bec shows it to her and explains that it used to be the Hand of Vecna. Cassandra tests it with Detect Evil, but it’s not evil anymore.
Mallory is like, “Let’s talk about things in order.” That’s why he’s the boss.
We explain that when we cleansed the Necronomicon, it seems to have created a rebound effect on the Lich, who is the one who defiled it to begin with. Vondal says, “Oh! We got a new employee!” He holds up the Wand of Wonder and squirts out Roger. His long neck with all the heads is shorter now. The heads all look around while Roger tries to get his bearings. He sighs. “It feels strange here.” Vondal suggests it may be the lack of the Flux. He hates it, what a surprise. At least he has Vondal to look after him.
Anyway, Bec goes on to explain that we also found a chart with symbols and gods, and figurines of us (weird!). The rows and columns showed the divine domains and where each of us lies in relation to them. One god was missing. Talos said we were “god-touched.” Mallory says maybe the missing god was distilled into divine essence that we saw at the manor the first time we were there. Prompted by Mallory’s speculation, Vondal brings up what he saw in the portrait at the defiled church. The vision was of three elves and a halfling (Yondola), trying to perform a ritual on top of a tower. They were using a ring as a focus to try to make everything good again. One of the elves sabotaged the ritual, however, and something terrible happened. Vondal believes it was the birth of the Flux.
Cal also had a vision of the forging of the Arkenstone with his sword. “Mother, we will make them remember.” He can’t remember who Mother is. He asked the Brucolac, but he also couldn’t remember.
Then we get back to the problems we had at the manor. We explain how we defeated Lady Nightshade, and Cal shows Mallory the head.
"Ye gods!" says Mallory.
"I got some other stuff in here you might want," says Cal.
"Is it more heads?" said Mallory.
It is not more heads. Anyway, then we explain how we julienned the former Lich (but didn’t destroy him) because he is a powerful force for good in Arallu, even if he doesn’t want to be. We also tossed Malachi out of the mansion, killing him, but we left his body there, so the vampires grabbed it for their own purposes. We’ll get to it!
Cassandra gets her notebook and a pen and magicks it to take notes. Freki rolls his eyes at this flagrant magic use. We tell her about the room full of all kinds of magic artifacts, the hunt, Sophie, and the Soulbound Rest with the Brucolac in the sarcophagus, and how that place has probably imploded into Flux by now.
Mallory tells us that they’ve been busy too, okay! The hurricane situation has continued to develop and “the other thing is ongoing I guess,” which doesn’t sound very much like the Mallory we’ve come to know and love. Bec and I side-eye each other. He seems like he’s got brain scramblies, but why? When we try to think about the third thing that we could have investigated, all we can remember is goblins encased in…stuff? Something? It was the dwarves who called for help, but the details are fuzzy.
We all need some sleep. Cassandra suggests that Vondal check on Oz, scan him for dark magic, you know, the usual. Vondal gives him a confident poke, but Oz just snores. Freki goes to steal Oz’s dagger of venom. He doesn’t stir. Freki is disturbed and calls for the rest of us. He’s not convinced that Oz is just asleep. He pockets the dagger anyway, LOL. Cassandra thinks Oz’s aura seems strengthened, like it’s growing into a new shape.
“Will he become a monk?” Freki asks. “Ha ha, probably not,” says Cassandra.
Before heading to bed, I thank my goddesses at the shrine and feel them smile upon me. They’re the best!
Freki tries to commune with his bird friends and they seem to be safe.
Bec focuses on the Celestial Hand to see if anything is emanating from it. “Can you hear that?” says a faint voice. She can also hear a thump-thump sound, like someone knocking. From the same direction, she can hear, “Is anybody in there? Help! Open the door!” It sounds kind of like it’s coming from downstairs, at the base of the tower.
“Well, this was a bad frickin’ idea,” Bec thinks. She asks me if I hear anything, but I don’t. Nevertheless, now Bec can’t sleep, so we buddy up and head downstairs to see if anybody is in trouble down there.
The Celestial Hand points the way to some stuff that just looks like junk to me. Bec assures me that there’s a symbol there. It’s the symbol of Vecna, which she draws for me to demonstrate. She thinks it’s drawn onto a trap door, which I also can’t see. I try touching the hand and suddenly I can hear it too!!!! Great, now I can’t sleep either.
One of the voices in the hand tells Bec that “she” (Vecna) does not want Bec to open this door and reveal this secret. As Bec tries to open the door, the Hand touches it and the trap door unseals. Now I can see it even without the Hand! It’s unsealed, but not open as such.
I do a Sending to Freki, who is the least digested of our team: “Bec heard something from the basement. Get everyone you can and come down now!”
When everyone is assembled, Bec explains that she heard voices from the hand that led her to the trap door.
Mallory is like, “Haha TRAP door.” He orders us all to use every skill we have to figure out if this is a stupid idea or not. I do a spread of cards to find out if opening the door is a good course of action or not. The cards give me the Hermit, reversed: loneliness and isolation. Meanwhile, Freki sniffs the place. It smells dank and musty, like a cave, and he thinks he catches a whiff of Flux (though that could just be from outside the tower).
Cassandra touches the Hand to hear the voices. Cal knocks on the trap door. It sounds more hollow towards the middle.
Cassandra wants to open the door. Bec really wants to open the door. As far as any of us can tell, this (probably) won’t kill us. We’re opening the door.
Bec tries to use Mage Hand to open the door. The Celestial Hand wants to help. Bec takes it out and it becomes her hand. She uses it to open the trap door, just lifting it straight up. There’s a ladder leading down.
At the bottom is a woman. She climbs up the ladder. It’s a red-haired dwarf. Her name is Rubinia Elka. She’s a necromancer, or, well, “not” a necromancer. She is wearing an amulet that looks familiar, because it’s in our evidence locker. The last time we spoke to her, we talked about the Dwarven clan of Aldrimor.
“Oh, thank the gods!” she says. “The others are still down there. Lorelei, Audreth, and Mallory.”
She looks at all of us and stops at Mallory, astonished. What. Is. Happening.