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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1103501" data-attributes="member: 1210">The Sea Hag!From the larder where they’d shown Flipper her brother’s body, our heroes (ah, what irony) descended into a series of three chambers shaped into the coral.  Two were merely empty, but one held small cages.  Another passage led them into a large chamber with another series of drowned ones, five in number!  Furious battle was joined in the greasy water.  Lyr’s harpoon proved deadly and true, Vido fought with two blades in a deadly whirlwind, and Malford stabbed with shortsword and dagger.  Chanti, too, proved efficacious, and Flipper butted her long nose furiously at the sea zombies.  Soon they were destroyed, and a quick search turned up a blocked exit. About an hour of hard labor later, the party had excavated enough rocks from the coral passage that they reached another branch of the tunnel.  This led to a long ascent to an area with a bubble of air in the top part of the chamber, along with shackles set in the wall near it.  “Interesting,” remarked Lyr.  Galiger scoffed at her but studied the shackles with interest.  Flipper refilled her lungs.The party went on, there being two more exits from the chamber with the bubble.  As they moved out, a weird creature that seemed made from the coral itself attacked, surprising them!  Again there was battle; the creature swung jagged coral appendages at them, tearing their flesh.  Chanti closed corps a corps with it, stabbing viciously, and Flipper smashed it from behind.  Galiger stabbed at it with his spear, his axe having already proved useless underwater.  The monster roared bubbles and struck Chanti, who stumbled and fell unconscious, floating helplessly.  With a cry, Galiger struck a final blow and the monster fell dead, his spear in its midsection.  “No one kills a follower of Bleak!” he cried angrily.  A brief discussion ensued, and the party returned to Captain Drake’s vessel to heal and recuperate.  Flipper was the only cleric with healing spells, so she did her best, but everyone was scraped and bruised or worse.  So she worked mosty to bring Chanti around.The next day, the party descended again.  They investigated the other exit from the bubble chamber and found a chest of corroded iron, within which were 10,000 silvers, a ruby, a sapphire (which Malford badly misappraised as worth only half its value) and an opal- a total value of about 3000 gp!  “This is probably enough to buy our ship,” Malford remarks, and the whole group perks up at the thought.  They’ll be pirates!  Arr!Still, they’d seen no sign of the spell they were after.  Returning to the tunnel they’d excavated, Vido pointed out that, within the coral, it was still full of rocks below them.  They began excavating and found that it did indeed descend further.  Heartened, our heroes started pulling yet more rocks out, and in about another hour of hard work, they came to the bottom.  On each side is another blocked passage.  Groaning in frustration, the party started on first one- which led to the bloated corpse of a sea elf surrounded by instruments of torture (which Galiger and Lyr snatched up greedily).  Then they got to work clearing the next passage, and as they did so, they discovered the killer of the sea elves.  Her name was Vellis, and she was a sea hag.  The very sight of her was so ghastly that the party quailed and weakened, and she screeched out at them, clawing with her black nails, gouging the face of Vido badly.  The ranger/mage cried out, falling back, the strength fleeing from his limbs, and Chanti, Flipper, Malford and Galiger all likewise flet their strength leave them.  They battled Vellis weakly, but she slapped them about like fish.  A minor wound from Malford’s dagger angered her; another, worse blow, from Lyr’s harpoon, and she was furious.  But she was outnumbered.  Even taking Malford and the still-wounded Chanti down, she couldn’t withstand the party- especially Lyr, unweakened, and her deadly harpoon.  Piercing again and again, the cannibal-priestess screamed in grim triumph as she savagely thrust a final time and drove her barbed harpoon completely through Vellis, then drew forth a dagger and frenziedly pulled her heart from her body and consumed it, crowing in triumph.A little investigation found a number of lootworthy items on the sea hag, including a sealed scroll tube- hopefully containing the scroll they needed!- a ring of worked whalebone set with a white pearl, another ring, this one of shark’s teeth set with a loop of gold, and a dagger of weird silvery iron.  (This, Malford told them with his alchemist’s knowledge, was silveriron- a special magical alloy of cold iron and silver, worked together without heat.)  Within a whalebone chest they found close to another thousand gold and 33 pp, as well as a key which they took (but never subsequently found the hidden chamber which it opened, alas).Then back up to Captain Drake’s boat they went.  They dried the scroll tube thoroughly, and opening it up found it did indeed have the scroll their employer sought.  Drake happily took them back to port.  Chanticleer noticed a wanted poster and raised an eyebrow; the party had a decent price on their heads already.  They finished their business with Valkor, received their payment and then decided to vacate Forinthia; things were getting too hot for them.  “Where shall we go?” Galiger asked.  Together, the group poured over a map.  Forinthia, naturally, was in the center, as was fitting for the center of the world.  To the west, there were a couple of reasonably-sized isles, Balramamous and Winwillow; to the east, another, Aerisa.  Nothing was north for thousands of miles.  South was Gorel, an isle full of elves subverted by the Forinthian Empire.Malford suggests, “What about Gorel?  Probably the elves there are no friends to Forinthia; I’ll bet we can hide out there fairly easily.”  The group agreed, and a discrete meeting with Captain Drake allowed them to come to terms.  Soon they were sailing south....Next Time: The party officially becomes pirates!</blockquote>

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