VicsHacienda
Explorer
The Laboratory in the Wind, Except It's Not
A tower rises from jagged rocks, sixty paces high. A balcony can be seen. We hope Caella is too busy to look out the windows. Strong winds blow from above. We approach, while Viggo sees through his familiar's eyes. I take his arm and walk alongside, moving the blinded wizard along.
The familiar cannot see inside, and there appears to be no other entrances at ground level. A trap door is on top of the tower. The owl circles the balcony, which is blocked by tapestries and draperies. Should we knock? We are here to confront her for kidnapping people from the town, according to Pilus.
Fafnir steps up to bang on the door, and promptly falls into an opening that suddenly yawns before him. Who's building a pit before a laboratory? But the fall is worse than that, for he plummets into nothing! It is as if the ground has swallowed him. I try to leap forward to grab him, but Viggo is faster, and casts a weird form of feather fall, which lets Fafnir sprout wing flaps that glide him down gently.
I step ahead carefully, testing the ground. The stone edifice is solid for me, but the others have deduced that the tower is an illusion. I can tell the ground ahead tapers and dies.
Once we realize the deception, we can see down into a wide pit sixty paces down, with a bed of icy spikes. A solid door stands to the east. Fafnir has settled on the ice below, surrounded by bluish bearded creatures like ice dwarves. Trevor carefully slides down, using his whip and his boots and his luck, and crashes with some grace onto the snow below. He peers at the creatures, and falls into a defensive stance.
One of the ice dwarves blasts a chilling wind at Trevor, who grits his teeth against the cold. Another blasts Fafnir, whose boots protect him.
Viggo casts vital conduit, and a pulsing, living orifice of tissue opens up, creating a passage between the lip of the chasm and the pit below. A fleshy door opens at the opposite end. It is warm and can be traversed, but I do not love this spell or its aesthetic. Viggo seems to love accomplishing things in the most uncomfortable manner.
Osnald leaps through and runs, granting bardic inspiration to Trevor at the bottom of the unholy passage.
Fafnir heals himself with a second wind, and brings forth his swirling angelic bullish heads. Two of the dwarves are within their reach. One of them unleashes his chilling wind, which roars across the pit floor; its full force slams into the cleric. Another does so from the shadows.
Trevor whips the creature nearest him, holding it in place. It responds with a cold blast, and Trevor takes the brunt of it. With hunter's mark flaring, I fire an arrow into the creature's chest, then another into its mouth. It sinks, dead. Trevor recoils his whip. He advances to the second creature and lays into it with scimitar and shortsword. It lays some form of magical misfortune upon him for touching it. It then slams him with its fists. The Living Blade responds with the Forest's Rebuke, turning its damage back on it and killing it. Trevor looks down, watching its icy composition melt. He recognizes it as a dwarf from Seaquen, somehow transformed into this mishap creature.
Fafnir's angels beat up on another of the mishaps, who tries to slam the cleric but bruises its fists against his armor. Viggo, remaining up at the top of the cliff with me (for different reasons, but he doesn't want to be near his opponents either), throws a mind whip below and holds the creatures in place. Osnald heals Trevor with a healing word and mocks the mishap in the shadows.
Fafnir swings Einherjar with a booming blade, and invokes the curse even while it dies. He moves carefully so as not to include any friends in another cold blast. His angels batter another mishap, which breathes cold on him.
The mishap in the shadows, slowed by Viggo's spell, breathes cold as well onto Fafnir, who is bloodied by blizzards. I slay it with two arrows, pinning it to the cave wall. Ice sloughs from its body, revealing a human.
Trevor closes with the last mishap, plunging his shortsword and slashing with the Living Blade. It dies under wood and steel. "I thought they smelled bad on the outside!" he cries.
