Adinal: [sblock]You can maintain the Read Thoughts effect. The crowd members are quasi-susceptible to your mental broadcast; they have a higher loyalty, but you can confuse them momentarily. I'll give you an immediate action once per round to do an opposed Will save with one of them (if you feel you can ckeck often enough to do an intercept like that, otherwise just do it on your turn). If you win, they're slowed for that round. Hopefully you can buy a little time that way, especially in areas where it gets more bottled-up than an open street.
Adinal scans the crowd in front of him, probing their mental defenses gently, looking for an opening. When you turn to the boogeyman a wall of will rises up before you, black and impenetrable, the figure shrugging off your mental probe without effort. The others are much more susceptible. You get feelings of discouragement, of hunger, of fear from them, but everything is overridden by a reverence for the boogeyman, a reverence bordering on fear and rage. They are uniformly straining to see what he will command of them.[/sblock]
Narine: [sblock] You can hear whispers passing from Feiran to Adinal from where they stand in front of you. You can't make out what she's saying - and Adinal appears to have replied through the mindlink like a sensible person - but you catch your name in the words.
Also, you have gradually become aware of a wet, sticky spot on your forehead where the eye touched you.[/sblock]
Cagthail: [sblock] Your ears, alert for trouble, find something suspicious from an unexpected quarter - a whispered conversation flowing from Feiran to Adinal and from Illira to Feiran and back again. Go read the appropriate spoilers in posts 266, 269, and 271.
You aren't really familiar with this "far realm" of which Feiran speaks, but you have heard rumors of the Droman paranoia about this supposed place. It's an occasional joke among Caelder nobles when their paranoia gets out of hand and a witch hunt ensues. You've always heard it spoken of as one of the curious foibles of your neighbors, but Feiran's tone is one of deadly seriousness.[/sblock]
The moment seems frozen, briefly, as the cloaked one's gaze pans from the spot he was watching inside the Sheets and up to your party. With seemingly languid slowness, the figure raises an appendage, obscured under the flailing tatters, and points at your party.
As though this was all they had been waiting for, the crowd, cautiously edging forward before, surges ahead with purpose, producing rusty knives and crude clubs from under their rags as they advance towards you.
Illira: [sblock] When the crowd moves forward, you notice that the other-planar creatures you noticed when you cast see invisibility are moving with greater agitation. They still seem to have no specific purpose, but it is clear that they are sensitive to something happening on your plane. [/sblock]
Better go ahead and get initiative rolls now. Since everyone has emerged from the Sheets, and you've all decided to make a break for it, everybody needs to roll. The cloaked figure - henceforth "Boogeyman" - has a 16. There are so many of the dirty crowd-folk that I'm simply going to have a clod of them go at 20, 15, 10, and 5. A "clod" for this purpose will be 1d10 of the buggers close enough to do something, or more or less depending on what you do.
Due to the rain, the large number of opponents, and the general similarity between the opponents, nobody but the party and the cloaked figure will get their own square on the map. You can take a move action to assess the area; a DC 15 Perception check will get you a much better sense of what's going on in that round. A -15 makes it a free action, if you can hit DC 30 with your Perception bonus.
The ground is slick with mud, so any movement more difficult than taking one move action in a round requires a DC 10 Balance check. Fail it and you lose the move action or take a -4 on the attack(s) you're making. Fail by 5 or more and you lose the rest of your actions for the round and end up prone.
The rain imposes a 10% miss chance within five feet, and a 20% miss chance further out. Perception penalties for distance are worsened to -1 per 5 feet as well (though this doesn't apply to the general-lookaround check I noted earlier). The lighting is fine, though, so you don't need any special vision abilities to navigate.
Squeezing through the gap between the Sheets and the next building over is DC 15 for half speed, or 20 if you want to try to do it at full speed. No Balance checks, though, as Cagthail pointed out.
