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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9793980" data-attributes="member: 27780">Everyone was present. The winged kobold and entourage continued to sneakily make their getaway, heading over the river and east into the university area. Unfortunately, he rolled a natural 1 on hide, which meant they blundered straight into a patrol that had already been magically alerted to the theft taking place along with descriptions of the people involved. (or at least, their disguises) With several dozen heavily armed guards in hot pursuit, he decided to ditch the rest so he was no longer taking huge penalties to his subsequent checks. A few quick rolls later confirmed that he had indeed managed to escape and adopt a new disguise using his hat, but they failed their athletics rolls so they were tackled to the ground, cuffed and dragged off to the station for further questioning, although at least Rei's high diplomacy score means they won't be getting the most brutal possible questioning. Will they crack and give away any info? Will the others bother to rescue them afterwards? Another plot thread left open that could make the campaign messier in an interesting way long-term. But the main course remains the ongoing fight in the centre of the vault. The air elementals were busily grabbing the gold from the alcoves near the top of the vault when three of them winked out, indicating that beholders were approaching from the tunnel to V16. The githyanki summoned some more amnizu and set them flying slightly lower down in the vault so they couldn't use antimagic on all of them at once. The beholders did manage to get out some shots, which disintegrated one amnizu and charmed another, but with their rays split amongst a lot of targets, they didn't do any significant effect to the PC's before they met the same fate as their predecessors. Meanwhile the binder passed the priestess her blindfold and they continued attacking the slaadi in the tunnel above, which also only took three rounds before they were dead, and they could push the cornugon down onto the vault floor and drown it like they did the other one. They then had to face a third wave of beholders coming up from the tunnel to V17, which didn't bother with using their antimagic eyes and just went straight to blasting, managing to kill a couple of the giants and petrify another of the amnizu before they too were destroyed by concentrated firepower from the githyanki, sniper and remaining amnizu. After this, they'd finally managed to exhaust all the strongest defences of the place and had several minutes of peace, which with the help of four huge air elementals and a hill giant, was all they needed to roughly push 16 tons of gold from the alcoves down to the vault floor and load it into the binder's enveloping pit, then put the bodies of the creatures that saw their faces in on top so they couldn't be questioned later via raising or speak with dead. (which does mean all that gold is going to literally need a thorough laundering before they can spend it) The sniper investigated the tunnels where the beholders came from but all he found is their living quarters, with some more kobold skeleton minions that were barely even worth killing and a few doses of stone salve that they used to turn petrified things back into food with. It was time to make their escape. They tried planeshifting out, but as they expected, although the vault complex allowed things to teleport within its confines, you could only go in or out by the permitted portals. (or falling out the waste chute then shifting away before you burned up in the unprotected elemental plane of fire, but they didn't think of using that route) That left either going back up the stairs they came in by, or using the teleportation circle and seeing what enemies were on the other side of that, both of which they were absolutely sure would have alert enemies at. After a bit of discussion, they decided to go for the more familiar route. Things were clear along the vertical tunnels, but when they reached the pit with the teleportation circle in, there was now another beholder in there with it's central eyebeam trained upward, ready to blink it off and blast at a moment's notice. Fortunately, the sniper spotted it in advance, so this was an opportunity for the binder to prove that even without all her magical buffs, her full attack routine was still quite capable of ripping anything without DR to shreds as she leapt down upon it, with the githyanki dimension dooring below it to smack it from below with his maul to finish it off. The clay golem and another gray slaad were at the bottom of the stairs blocking ascent. This one proved particularly tricky for her, as not only did it's DR block most of her physical damage, the acid component of her hits was actually healing it slightly, so both she and the priestess got hit by the slaad's lightning bolts while trying to fight it. Now they just have to get up the choke point of the stairwell with more slaad raining lightning bolts down on them and into the open air and they're home free to warp out. Simple enough, right?</blockquote>

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