Life's Bazaar - Chapter 3
Life’s Bazaar - Chapter 3
OOC Notes:
Experience is 535xp. Welcome to second level.
This Week’s Adventure:
I was starting to see how Jazadirune was built according to distinctly gnomish construction philosophies. First you fill the place with overly elaborate, well-warded gear doors. Then you make a thousand un-warded secret doors that lead all over the place. Why? I suspect the secret door maker was a friend of someone important and so they made sure he had enough work to do. I fully expect that when we find the outhouse, there’ll be a secret door leading to another outhouse.
And as the group got the hang of finding them, they started using them in preference to any other means of moving about the place. I think this was in part because it seemed that the new residents didn’t know about or use them, and so it was a way of doing something unexpected, and in part because it was something new and they just needed to work it out of their systems.
And so they went from room to room, secret door to secret door. There was broken furniture, some alchemical equipment, and so on. They found a few trinkets here and there, including a threadbare grey sack out of which Glyphandar produced a small furry object that magically became a cat when thrown. I wasn’t sure what use that would be to anyone and it was obvious why the sack was left behind.
One room held another digging machine. The group approached it warily despite the fact that it seemed to be only half-constructed. And that lead to another secret door, which led to a hidden alchemical lab that wasn’t on the map. Before anyone could make a guess at why the gnomes had a secret alchemical lab, the found they had bigger problems.
There were some piles of rags in the room, and the rags suddenly started moving and looping. And attacking. One pile was just rags, while another seemed to have wrapped itself around the body of one of the skulking creatures and was moving around like a clumsy puppet, but not so clumsy that it didn’t cut Glyph across the nose with its rapier.
The fight grew very unpleasant very quickly. Elizabeth, Astrid and Tzaddik were doing their best to cut apart the rag pile, but it was hard to affect. Bellsin and Glyph were engaged with the skulker-rag, but they too were having a tough time of it. I was hoping that one of them would be destroyed so they could concentrate their efforts but neither of the rag creatures was cooperating with this plan.
Each time the creature lashed at Astrid, it tried to grab at her with small hooks that coated the rags. Luck and her strength kept the thing from completely ensnaring here, though it got close a couple times. After a great deal of slashing and cutting, and no small amount of spell and arrow support from Maris and Kris, the rags finally fell inert on the floor.
Meanwhile, Glyph used some alchemist fire, splashing himself and Bellsin with it in the process. Bellsin managed to get in behind it and do some serious damage to the skulker trapped in the rags – apparently it wasn’t actually dead. Between them, they managed to destroy the flesh long before the rags. It released the useless body to the floor and flew after Bellsin with a vengeance. Glyph withdrew, as he had been badly injured in the fight. The rags wrapped around Bellsin and were on the verge of suffocating him before Astrid, Tzaddik, and Elizabeth, having just finished off the other creature, jumped on Bellsin and began ripping the rags off. Even the three of them might not have been enough had the creature not been weakened by Maris’ strength-draining spell.
Glyph meanwhile was feeling the desperateness of the situation. He took the magic wand found earlier, and attempted to activate it without even knowing what it would do. He was successful, and a fan of flames shot out from the wand. He caught the creature in it, but also Elizabeth. (And from what I heard her say later, the carelessness of this caused her some distress.)
The rags were singed but not giving up yet. They flew at Glyph, perhaps to prevent being burned again, and swarmed all over him. Before they could suffocate him, everyone else swung desperately at the rags, and suddenly they flew apart and collapsed to the floor.
Everyone was breathing heavy and terrified. Krisfallion used the healing wand to repair most of the physical damage, but there was some pointed grumbling about Glyph being as much of a hazard as the enemies. The fact that he could have dropped a fireball on the entire group seemed to completely have escaped him.
Maris’ spells were exhausted, but thanks to the wand the group was reasonably well and elected to press on a bit longer. Elizabeth was starting to get a sense of how the rooms were laid out in conjunction with the tunnels and the secret passages. They managed to get themselves to come out near the other side of the large iron doors they found earlier, but were confronted by a wooden barricade – an improvised wall that was built from the remains of furniture and lab tables. At first, they thought the skulkers had walled off one access path to their territory, but the more they looked, the more they worried. The wall was built from the outside, and was so tightly built not even a rat could slip through.
The wall wasn’t built to keep people out – it was built to keep something in. Or at least so they feared. I wasn’t sure myself, but I was convinced enough that I didn’t look for myself or press the matter.
They finished poking around in one area of the map, tromping around through a room filled with mist and poisonous centipedes. But once that was done, they’d had enough for now. They again withdrew to the surface and stayed at Keegan’s shop.
The night was uneventful. The morning however was not. Most of the group looked well – better than well actually. But Glyph…
When he woke up, he wasn’t all there. He was fading away – partially transparent save for the blue runes floating around his head.
The Vanishing had noticed him. And it was going to take him.
Loot:
Rapier
Alchemist’s lab (500gp if we can get it out)
6 flasks of non-magical powder
3 flasks of hardened sludge
2 flasks of acid
20 tindertwigs
“U” key
tanglefoot bag
3 flasks alchemist’s fire
3 vials of antitoxin (net – subtracted the one used)
2 smokesticks
8 sunrods
thunderstone
2 applications universal solvent
silver bracelet (area J-11)
three citrines (area J-11)
glass vial of powder (area J-11)
digging machine power crystal
