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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 1747" data-attributes="member: 150">Brindinford Part IV: Not a plans kind of operationWe left our heroes last time on the ground floor of the Reality Wrinkle, listening to movement upstairs as the residents prepared for attack. One lone voice spoke up. Minimonk, not feeling particularly safe without Uri along for the ride, suggested “maybe we should go back to the halflings now?” Irk just looked at the halfling for a long moment, then hefted his axe. “I’ll go first.” And he hit the stairs at a run. Eli followed close behind, and the rest hurried to keep up.Irk charged up the stairs and into the main room on the second level, where two sorcerers were waiting for him. Their spells went off, and the festivities began in earnest. Their opening gambit was a Melf’s Acid Arrow and Glitterdust. Irk shrugged off the blindness, but started taking damage from the acid. Right behind him on the stairs, Eli was blinded by the Glitterdust. He threw his back up against the wall and yelled for the others to go on by, while he stashed his bow and drew his long and short swords. Apparently he was less dangerous blind with swords than his bow. At any rate, what should have turned into a simple matter of Irk introducing two sorcerers to his axe, got more complicated quickly, as a stream of elementals started pouring down the stairs from the top floor of the building, cutting off Irk from the rest of the party, and facing Minimonk, who was the next member of the party to make it to the top of the stairs (ducking deftly under Eli’s blind blades). At the bottom of the stairs, Pah and Modeir stood. Pah tucked one pistol under her arm and began reloading the other. Modeir listened to the sounds of fighting, Irk’s steady stream of profanity and Eli’s fumbling on the stairs. He was obviously struggling with the decision to head up the stairs, not really wanting to go, but also not willing to appear afraid in front of Pah, who he seemed to have more than a crush on. “Well, get up there,” Pah said. Modeir gulped and charged up the stairs.Soon, Irk was taking a beating. He continued to hack away at the sorcerers, while they stepped back each round and peppered him with Magic missiles. Between that and the acid arrow, he was taking a beating. He finished one, the other tried another glitterdust, and managed to blind him this time, but it didn’t buy the hapless sorcerer any more time against Irk.The fight on the stairs raged on as well. Minimonk stood his ground round after round, trading near (and not-so-near) misses with the earth elemental, while Eli slipped by to help out from behind, and then Modeir slipped by to add his blade to the fight. By this time a total of four earth elementals and two air elementals were in the room making space very tight. Pah did her best to get into the action, but was repeatedly unable to tumble into a position where she could strike. A third Sorcerer had come down the stairs as well, who traded damage with Eli but was eventually put down. Then, while the fight with the small army of elementals was going on, there was a large thump on the floor above. No one had much idea what it was, but it didn’t take long to find out that it was another big worm thing with tentacles and a sphincter mouth. It slithered down the stairs a bit – just showing it’s head – and the first thing it encountered while the party was cleaning up elementals was poor Modeir, standing at the foot of the stairs and still trying to help Minimonk with the earth elemental. It was a matter of seconds before those brutal tentacles tore Modeir into little pieces. Tiny, mangled, lumpy, little pieces. This death, however, did make room for Pah to finally enter the room. She ended up, of course, in the one place she did not want to be – standing right over Modeir’s corpse and facing the tentacles herself. She took a shot at the worm, avoided being grappled by the biting tentacles, took another shot, and tumbled out of the way again, as Irk, finally having cut his way back to the party, closed with the worm.Irk chopped away at it, everyone else did what they could, and a few rounds later it was a final shot from one of Pah’s pistols that finished the worm. The group took stock, standing amid piles of dirt, dead sorcerers, and the worm’s corpse, which returned to it’s own plane a few moments later. Pah took Modeir’s death harder than that the others, thinking more kindly of him now that he was dead than she had while he was alive and mooning over her. The party did their best to gather up the bigger pieces of his body to return them to his mother.While they looted the bodies, they heard a pounding and the sound of broken glass coming from upstairs. Pah snuck upstairs to take a look. Peeking around the corner up there, she saw more trouble. There was a screen of earth elementals standing guard over another pair of elementals carrying the unconscious body of a woman in a breastplate, a fifth earth elemental that was trying to pound a hole in the wall (trying to make an exit where there was none) and the lead Sorceress overseeing it all. Pah gulped, pulled out her pistol, and took a shot at the Sorceress, over the heads of her screen of elementals. The rest of the party charged up the stairs, and despite the difficulty of the shot (lots of cover from intervening elementals) they managed to pick off the Sorceress before she was able to do much, and made short work of the elementals as well. They found themselves standing on the top floor of the now-empty house, all battered within an inch of their lives. They had some loot to carry, a dead body (or most of one) and the woman, who seemed mostly unconscious. They gave her their past potion of cure light wounds to try to revive her – and it did help get her on her feet, but she was till deeply altered, babbling gibberish. They put her on a leash and lead her out of the building. Once out on the street she seemed to recover her senses, and it wasn’t too long before she was able to talk to them, and tell them her name. Alein. A paladin, she was the one to operated the now-abandoned shrine the party had hidden in the night after everything went to hell in Brindinford. She didn’t have much to tell – she’d been trying to investigate some odd doings in town, then one night the shrine was attacked and she’d been the prisoner of the sorceress ever since. They told her about rescuing her apprentice, who was not missing, and the attack at the Shrine. And she had one more question.“Have any of you seen a big white warhorse hanging around?”“Uh, no,” said Irk.“Well,” said Minimonk, “We did eat something last night that tasted a bit like horse.”“That is not funny,” Alein insisted, waving a finger at Minimonk while the rest of the party laughed. “You’re a bad man.”Anyway, on the way back they ran into a small group of militiamen that Irk scared off with a quick “boo.” And they limped back onto the Halfling raft village.They took stock there. Alein was able to heal them a little, they drank the last of their potion stash, but things were definitely grim for the battered heroes. They decided to lay low for a while and try to recover.They poked around with their loot a bit. They managed to figure out a few items without bothering with identify spells. In one case, Pah was making a simple jump from one raft to another, wearing a ring she’d claimed that was carved with a frog motif, and instead of jumping to then next raft, she jumped over the entire raft and ended up in the river beyond. The others quickly tossed a rope to her as the current pulled her by, and she started experimenting more carefully with the powers of that ring.Later that night, Minimonk, on guard duty, saw some motion on shore. He snuck over to a position where he could get a closer look, and saw something very disturbing. A band of seven humanoid figures, in the darkness, were gathered and talking, gesturing at the halfling river village. While he was watching a huge, familiar figure – the ogre mage – stepped out of the shadows and began giving orders. That was enough for Minimonk. He slinked back to the party, woke them up, and reported what he’d seen. They quickly decided to alert Dentheira, who set some halfling lookouts. They managed to find enough silver daggers around for each member of the party who was without an enchanted weapon to have something to fight with. Uri was still working on the battleaxe, and was not available. There was a lot of discussion about what to do, including an attack on the group of villains while they were plotting their attack.“That’s the Ogre Mage, we almost killed him last time,” said Pah.“There’s a LOT of stuff we’ve ALMOST killed,” said Minimonk. “That’s like our stategery.” [sic – read this as “stra-tee-ger-ee, as Saturday Night Live’s Will Farrell said it as George W. Bush]Thanks to Minimonk spotting the Wererats gathering early, the party had enough time to get in position to meet the wererat attack. There were seven wererats in all, and they raced into various gaps on the edge of the halfling village, where they were met by the hiding heroes. The two center areas were covered by Irk and Alein, who managed to hold their ground against a pair of wererats each, although putting the rats down was slow going. On the upstream flank Eli managed to stay hidden while the leader of the wererats went past him. He struck from behind, which got the leader’s attention, but in a moment another rat appeared behind Eli and he found himself flanked and in very dire straits. The Downstream end, where Minimonk and Pah were waiting, was the one gap that was not attacked with two rats – a single wererat attacked that flank, and Minimonk, sniping down from the rooftop, actually managed to hurt him with well placed silver-tipped crossbow bolts. Pah took a double move to take huge bounding leaps to try to move to the other flank to assist Eli, but was not able to reach him before he was reduced to 0 hit points by the rats. It looked grim for Eli, who decided to play dead. Pah, armed only with a dagger, showed up just in time to prevent a coup de grace, but was herself in bit trouble facing the pair of rats that had laid Eli low. At that moment, Minimonk, who had just finished the rat on his end, was turning to try to lend aid to the rest of the party, when the Ogre Mage suddenly appeared right behind him (had been invisible). The Big Beefy One cast Charm Person on Minimonk. Minimonk blew his save. Irk, who had finally finished the two who had attacked him, climbed to the roof where Minimonk and the Ogre Mage were talking, tried help Minimonk, but things were going badly up there. The Ogre Mage told Minimonk that the attack was a trap, that the Ogre Mage could take him to safety, if MM would come with the Ogre Mage. Minimonk was allowed a second save, as this was an unlikely request, but he failed again, and right before Irk’s startled eyes he jumped into the Ogre Mage’s waiting arms. Irk was able to take a swat at the Ogre Mage, but then the villain swept Minimonk up in his arms and flew away, over the wall and back towards the baron’s keep. And then the cavalry arrived (can you say deux ex machina? I knew you could). Pah was in real trouble, Eli was in not shape to help, Alien was still struggling with her opponents. A pair of arrows streaked out of the darkness, taking the Wererat leader out. Then another pair took out the other rat facing Pah. In moments the tide shifted against as the remaining heroes turned to help Alien and finish the last of the rats. The Mystery archer appeared while the party finished the rats, giving a potion of healing to Eli and introducing herself. She was Maravos, the tutor and member of the Order of the Shooting Stars that Eli had come to Brindinford looking for. While Eli rested against the wall of the houseboat, Maravos and Talia, Eli’s borrowed bow, exchanged notes about Eli. Apparently the bow had been along as an observer, evaluating Eli’s fitness for the order. And, with the exception of his bad habit of getting knocked unconscious in combat, Talia gave him a favorable report. But it wasn’t all good news. Most of the party was in very bad shape. Pah had been bitten, and was feeling feverish. Dentheira confirmed that she had been tainted by the bite, had contracted Lycanthrope. Dentheira was able to provide a dose of Belladona, which flushed the disease from her system, although it sapped Pah’s strength considerably. Uri said, “Meow.”Another ugly discovery. In the closing moments of the fight, Pah had made an excellent spot check, and had noticed a residence near the river – a house that overlooked the halfling encampment. She saw movement, one of the curtains in the upstairs window being let go, falling closed again. The party waited for dawn, and the meager healing that Dentheira and Alein could provide. Dentheira held back a couple of spells she needed for her son Modeir’s funeral. Bolstered slightly, the party made a quick investigation of the house across the street. The door was open. They stalked into the house, and in the upstairs bedroom the found the entire family dead on the floor, killed in a gruesome way – their skulls had been crushed and their brains had been sucked out. None of them had seen anything like that before, but a crystal Pah wore around her neck, loot from a battle fought long, long before, grew warm in the room. [the crystal is a bit of loot from a fight with the local leaders of a cult of psions who were trying to drum up a religious furor against magic users. A fight that occurred long before the events detailed in this story hour. The crystal is a psionic item of some sort – no one around is able to tell much more than that. Pah has decided that it’s pretty, turned it into a crude necklace, and has been wearing it ever since.]The investigators returned to the halfling village, and they compared notes. Mavaros and Dentheira were able to offer some additional information. To begin with, Maravos, an Elf who has been around for long time, was the only one who had seen this sort of thing before. The crushed skulls and missing brains meant one thing to her. Mind Flayers. And the warmth of Pah’s crystal seemed to support that. Maravos was not cheerful. “This is very bad. The mental powers of mind flayers are formidable. A mind flayer behind things here in Brindinford would explain a lot – the variety of allies the villain has drawn to his service, all charmed powerfully to do his foul bidding. It would also explain the Baron’s behavior. And, obviously, some sort of infernal pact is involved as well.”“But what makes it all that much worse is that the Ogre Mage managed to abduct Minimonk. The mage and his master will take his mind apart, charm him powerfully into their service. You must assume that they know all of your abilities, and your plans, as intimately as Minimonk did.”“That’s all right,” said Uri. “We’re not exactly a plans kind of operation.”What the party needed most, at that point, was to regroup. They took the following day to hide out and wait for Uri to finish his work on the axe. And heal. And feel sorry for themselves. Eli and Maravos spent the day talking about archery, the order, and the philosophy behind it all. Uri took breaks now and then to Meow at Pah. Irk fidgeted. And they all were on hand for Modeir’s funeral. At the end of the day Maravos explained that she needed to leave. She gave Eli a small handful of enchanted arrows and wished him luck, but someone needed to go and report to more powerful figures, so that if the party was not successful someone could come and do something about the growing evil in Brindinford. She wished the party luck, and slipped off into the night. And, with a nervous watch set, the party slept through another night.Next time: Minimonk, Minimonk, wherefore art thou, Minimonk.</blockquote>

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