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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 240181" data-attributes="member: 150">Not Spire 6: A Deadly InterludeNot Spire 6: A Deadly Interlude(Note: for this session half of the players were not able to attend, something we discovered at the last minute, so we ad libbed a bit . . .)The party climbed the spire again, finding Irk’s dead body – still not even a whole day since he’d been raised from the dead the last time – and the exhausted helmet of teleportation.  They hunkered down in the same abandoned room they had hid in the last time, and waited for the dawn to recharge the helmet.  Back at the Dragoon compound, they found themselves once again the object of a great deal of attention from the far-too-young, pimply-faced recruits that were training under Pavel’s watchful eye.  Pavel himself walked over to the group, looking at Irk’s corpse, shaking his head with dismay.  Uri scowled back at Pavel.  “It was the new guy’s idea.”Ulric and Crys looked a bit shaken by the experience of the past few days traveling with the dragoons.  They explained that they needed to make their way back to the Claw barracks and recover their personal effects – the luggage and gear they had left behind when they headed off to Nightfang Spire.That left the Halfling trio to deal with raising money to bring Irk back again – and to continue to worry about bringing Eli back.  Money was getting very tight for the group – they pawned as much of their loot and gear as they could part with all over town, and managed to get close to what they needed, but it was still not quite enough.  Pah did pull out the jars of organs and embalming goo that they had recovered from the tower.  “Do you think these are worth anything.”Pavel examined the jars skeptically.  “What in the heck are they?”Uri smirked.  “You know, when they make the McNuggets . . . “  They set the jars aside and looked for anything else they might sell. Finally Pavel threw in his savings, and pawned a few items to get the cash together to raise Irk one last time.Some hours later, Irk, just like the last time, hopped up off the table, shrugged out of the shroud he had been wrapped in for the resurrection ceremony, and started to put his battered armor back on.  But Pah stopped him, pressing a probing finger through the small round holes that had been left by the Vampire Archer’s arrows.  “Um, Irk, honey?  We can’t go back right away.”She went on to explain that they didn’t want to go back without Ulric and Crys, and didn’t really want to go back again without Eli, either – they had learned to miss the withering support fire from the Elf’s bow.   They needed money.  Uri wanted spells.  And money.Pah wanted sparklies.  Minimonk wanted a new begging bowl and some peep show tokens.  It was time to change gears.  They decided that the best idea for raising some cash fast was to steal it.  Of course, you can’t steal from just anyone – especially when you’re a dragoon, one of the city watch companies.  But they figured they could get away with stealing from the Dragonpriests.  Anyway, it had been almost a month since they had seen the construction site – where they had killed the Drow assassins and stolen some letters from Anathe’s chambers.  Checking out the area, they saw that most of the construction was now finished – a remarkable feat of engineering just in having built what amounted to a small city in a few short weeks.  The new temple itself was a grand, but actually interested the party very little.  They were especially interested in Dragontown, the small mercantile district that existed behind the walls of the Dragonpriest Compound.  There they found a few shops that struck their fancy – a small jeweler’s shop, a blacksmith, and a magic shop.They decided to split into two groups, making their way into Dragontown.  Uri and minimonk would make their way to the magic shop and case the joint, while Pah would check out the blacksmith and Jeweler, with Irk hanging around as her backup.  Uri and Pah used their hats of disguise to conceal their identity, while Irk made do with a heavy cloak and thinking subtle thoughts.  Uri struck up an extended conversation with the magic shop shopkeeper, who had a handful of scrolls available in stock, could prepare some from a longer list, and had sources that could provide almost any.  After a bit of talking he also revealed a meager supply of other useful items – a couple of half-spent wands, a quarterstaff, and a few other goodies.  There was a back room to the wizard’s shop – much larger than the public area – that Uri assumed held the main of the Wizard shopkeeper’s goods.Pah, meanwhile, presented herself as the child of some new Halfling nobles.  She wanted to buy a sword and have someone show her how to use it because they were cool.  The blacksmith, a gruff dwarf named Brottor, wanted nothing more that to get back to his hammering, but the little one kept asking questions, kept needling him, until he finally showed her his store chest of masterkwork weapons.  Bored with that, Pah wandered out across the street to the jeweler, where she found nothing but cheap glass costume jewelry.  They returned to the barracks.Pleased that they had completed some recon work without picking a fight or getting caught, they planned a raid for the early hours of the morning.  This time the plan involved using the helmet of teleportation – which should allow them to hit and run without much trouble.  They actually planned three stops – first to teleport into the library in the Dragonpriest’s tower.  (This was the tower at which they had fought and killed the two drow assassins weeks before, when the tower was just four stories tall and incomplete.) After seeing what they could in the tower, they would teleport into the wizard’s shop, and  steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, make their way into the blacksmith’s shop (which was right next to the magic shop) and then teleport out to safety.It sounded like a brilliant plan.Their first stop was the library in the Dragonpriest Tower.  They teleported in.  Irk did his best to just stand in one place, touching nothing, and holding his breath, so that he would make no noise at all, while they sneaky folk tried to see what they could see.  Pah checked out the stack of books that were out on one of the reading tables.  There were a collection of different books, all histories of the Dragon Cult that had built the Spire, and some regional histories of the bandit kingdoms.  She started stuffing books into her bag of holding.Uri, meanwhile, stalked forward to the closed door that had led to Anathe’s private chamber when they were at the Tower last.  He found the door unlocked, and although the room was mostly just as they’d left it a few weeks before (Anathe had clearly not managed to return yet) he did find a few sealed letters addressed to him.  Uri slipped those letters into his tunic and returned to the main library.In the center of the tower there was a ten-by-ten opening in the floor and ceiling – the hole led down to the ground floor and up to the sixth, where they had observed a very open balcony, obviously some sort of landing platform.  Down below, on the ground floor, they could see very little, except a long, large, lizard-like tail protruding from the shadows.  They decided that they had pushed their luck enough in the tower and all joined hands and teleported to the Magic Shop.In the magic shop they again mostly tried to stand very still and be quiet.  Uri pulled out his wand of detect magic and started waving it around pretty indiscriminately, getting positive results on both the outer door of the store and the door to the back rooms.  Pah went over to investigate the door to the back rooms.Now, in Pah’s defense, magical traps are a lot more difficult to detect and disarm than mechanical ones.  It takes a very deft hand and a lot of luck to pull it off.  So no one should be surprised that the lightning trap set in the door went off.The Bolt of lightning nearly caught Pah, but her evasion ability allowed her to avoid damage entirely.  Uri, standing behind her with his wand, was not so lucking, taking the bolt full in the chest.  Irk, relieved to finally be rid of the prohibition against making noise, charged the door, now disarmed, and entered the room beyond, where the party could already hear incantations.Irk crashed through the door with the halflings on his heels to find three figures in the room – a tiny, stinger-tailed Imp chuckling and chattering at them from a corner, an angry mage in a bathrobe casting spells as fast as he could.  Oh, and there was the huge Dire Ape taking up most of the room right in front of the party (which had just been summoned by the mage). Irk went to work on the ape, while Minimonk and the Imp squared off, Pah hit the ceiling and tried to take pot shots at the mage and Uri did his best to to try to bring things to a quiet end.  Uri, still singed by the lightning bolt, was reluctant to take too many risks, so he hung back and tried his Evard’s Black Tentacles , placed to try to grab the Ape and the Mage but not Irk.  Uri’s favorite thing about the spell is that it ignores anything smaller than medium size, so the halflings in the group can run around in the forest of writing tentacles without worry.  The Ape was too strong for the tentacles, managed to shake them off, but between the deadly pistol fire from above and Irks consistent pounding, the Dire Ape did not last long.  The other mage, however, wasn’t sitting on the sidelines.  Irk more than once shook off spell effects that were threatening to turn him into a fuzzy bunny rabbit, and even a few blasts from the wand of hold person that the mage was carrying.  But with his familiar and summoned Ape dead, and his spells not making an impression on the party, the mage needed a new plan.  He cast invisibility, moved to a trap door  in one corner of the room and opened it, but did not go down – he was hoping that one or more of the pcs would think he had gone down the hole.  No one took the bait.  Then he cast blink on himself, and stepped through the wall and to the street outside his shop, where he started yelling for the Claw City Watch to come to his aid. Then he removed the spell lock on the front door of the store.  While he waited for the city watch to arrive, he kept bopping in to the shop, casting a spell or two and bopping back out.  He summoned another dire ape to keep the party busy.  Then the watch started to arrive.While Irk held off the Claws, standing the doorway and cleaving his way through the ranks as the closed in on him, Pah and Uri raided the Wizard’s stash.  Pah found a locked, trapped chest at the foot of his bed and settled down in front of it to see what it contained.  Pah, with the distraction of Irk’s massacre of the Claws going on in the background, managed to detect the magical trap on the chest and disarm it THIS TIME WITHOUT SETTING IT OFF (APPLAUSE), open the lock, and started shoving spellbooks, scrolls, potions, and a wand into her bag of holding.  Meanwhile, Uri found an Armoire in a corner and stole all the Mage’s clothes.  Then the group gathered behind Irk, touched hands, and teleported back to the Dragoon Barracks while the surviving Claws and the mage looked on helplessly.  The next day the short quartet sorted through their loot – a pile of normal scholar’s clothing, mostly clean, a couple of spellbooks, a wand, and some potions.  They picked through what the might sell for cash while Uri poured over the spellbooks, trying to figure out what was there, what spells he might be able to scribe into his own spellbook.  While he was poking around in the tomes, he got the odd sense, at one point, that he was being watched, but couldn’t figure out what the source of that feeling was.The others spent the day pawning items and pestering the raw recruits in the compound.  Irk spent a lot of time fingering the holes in his armor, left by the Vampire Archer’s arrows, and sharpening his axe.  When some of the off-duty recruits shuffled into the compound after an evening in the taverns, they told the Goonies about a halfling that had been asking questions about them in the taverns.  They got a little nervous, and decided to set up their own internal watch for the evening. The party had a large communal room on the second floor of the barracks.  Pavel, as acting company commander had his own room on that floor, and the rest of the dragoons slept in a large dormitory that took up most of the first floor.  The attack came at about 3 a.m., and started very quietly. Irk heard the gate opening, and slipped downstairs to take a look.  He saw the two night guards prone near the gate, and the gate standing open, but no sign of any intruders.  He raced back up stairs to awaken the others.  That was when the action picked up a bit.  A fireball streaked into the ground floor dormitory through the door that Irk had opened.  The blast killed about 2/3 of the mostly sleeping Dragoon Recruits in their bunks.  A door opened and an invisible swordsman started hacking his way through the rest of the Dragoons.Irk had awakened the party, and he and Pah raced downstairs just after the blast, in time to see the invisible whirlwind swordsman taking the place apart.  Irk tried tossing a bit of Alchemist’s fire on him to help spot him while Pah perched on the ceiling and took pot shots from above.Meanwhile, Uri and Minimonk had their hands full on the second floor.  Once Pah and Irk left the room, the wall facing the courtyard and gate disappeared in a cloud of ions, and the conjuror and his monk follower heard light footsteps land in the room, the owner obviously invisible.  Uri reacted quickly, with glitterdust, which blinded and outlined the halfling rogue that hand entered the room.  Then Uri and Minimonk went to work on him, hacking at him with Rapier and Kama, trying to flank him and take him out while the suddenly frightened rogue tried to escape back out the way he’d come.  He called out to his attackers “just return the books and we’ll leave” but Uri and Minimonk pressed their advantage.In the abattoir that had been made of the ground floor dormitory, the invisible swordsman had finished the recruits, and was dancing around Irk, who slashed about with his axe trying to find something to hit – and connecting occasionally.  Between his axe and Pah shooting at anything that looked like it might be a target, they managed to convince the invisible fighter to retreat.  As the invisible form headed for the door, Irk, unable to pursue fast enough, threw his greataxe at him, taking a chunk out of him but forcing Irk to switch to a smaller axe for the rest of the fight.At about the same time the blinded, glitteringly visible rogue managed to drop through the hole in the wall to ground level, where Uri and Minimonk followed him, continuing to flank and abuse him.  Then Uri suddenly stood very still, the victim of a hold person spell.  The rogue continued to try to escape, and now that they were out in the open he had the help of his other party members, and Minimonk started to be peppered by Magic Missiles.  Minimonk tried to press the attack and finish the rogue, but was eventually knocked down by the enemy mage.  Pavel finally made an appearance, running down, assessing the situation, and charging out in the the middle of the compound while casting Invisibility Purge, revealing the entire attacking party – two mages, including the one that had been robbed, the battered hafling, and the swordsman.  They were obviously trying to retreat, an effort that was hastened by their sudden loss of their comfortable improved invisibility.  Irk, in an attempt to deny their escape, moved to the gate and tried to cut them off, but failed a saving through and ended up held for a few rounds.  Uri, recovering from a hold, cast a web on the entrance to try to slow things down. Pah raced around outside, taking shots where she had them, saving Minimonk’s life with a well-timed potion of healing. The rogue, freed from Minimonk by the mage and nearly dead himself, squirted out ahead of the web spell and never looked back, running away.  The mage who had been robbed, left with very few spells after the previous fighting and without his spellbooks, could do little more than shoot off his wand of hold person round after round, despite the fact that it wasn’t working very well.  He had frozen Irk, and tried to close on him, through the web, to try to finish him off, but it didn’t work – he was slowed by the web, Irk managed to recover, and finished that mage with some axe work.  The swordsman was also impeded by the web, and was finished by Irk and Pah, teaming up to pin him between Irk’s axe and Pah’s deadly sneak attacks.  The other mage, obviously the more experience and gifted of the two, cast fly on himself and took off.  Once he was out of the range of Pavel’s invisibility purge he was impossible to pursue.  The Goonies look about them at the charred and mangled bodies of the raw recruits, the handful of small fires that the fireball had set in the blankets and bunks,  the huge hole in the wall of the second floor, and the bloody ground of the courtyard.  Pah summed up their feelings.  “Solen’s gonna be piiiiiisssed.”-rg</blockquote>

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