Deevolly, Cipke, Elissa, Baeril - Frickard's House: South Market
Deevolly stops in her tracks and tries to be silent.
This time, Deevoly hears something. A series of creaks and muffled movement from the room above.
Deevolly nods and points upstairs.
Cipke looks up from the parchment he was examining, ready.
At Deevolly's nod, Elissa silently moves through the door and heads for the curtain. Elissa winces at the creaks her feet make on the old floorboards. The curtain is the same as the one they had seen in the first room and leads back to that room. Behind the wall across from the curtain, however, is the stairs Elissa is seeking.
Ascending the stairs, Elissa enters a wide, spacious room with a fireplace set in the western wall to her right. Two armchairs flank the fireplace and a couch sits between the two. A small cupboard stands beside a window that looks out into the alley behind the house. Two doors are located in the far corner, one in the western wall and another in the northern wall just next to it.
Chalk marks crisscross the floor in a variety of lines and arrows. If they hadn't noticed them before, they would have had to be blind to miss them now.
Elissa sees no one in this room, nor hears where the noises she had heard from before could be coming from.
To cover for the sneaking about, Baeril paces noisily back and forth on the main floor and begins having a conversation with himself.
"Do you want some toffee, pretty elf girl?"
"Oh, Mister Gnome! I would be ever so delighted to have a toffee!" he repeats in a high, squeaky voice with an elfish accent.
"It's quite a tasty toffee, although it's nothing like my Oma's. She once use a piece of her toffee to repair a mine cart when she was a girl, and saved a dozen workers from certain death. CERTAIN! DEATH!"
Elissa's eyes widen as she hears the gnome below having what sounds to be a tea party with himself at top voume. A sudden commotion comes from the far door by the fireplace.
Elissa smiles to herself; Baeril's storytelling is so comical she feels half the tension of the situation leaving her... if all goes well, she'll definitely have to buy him a beer and share a toffee later. She takes out her sap and sneaks over to the far door, although she barely needs to sneak as whoever is behind the door isn't paying attention to her activity.
"Oh, Mister Gnome, I like your stories ever so much, tell me some more!"
"Storytelling is very important in Greenfields and there's contests with stories and songs and clockwork toys and playing alpenhorns. Those are these big, big, big horns about 20 feet long, and you stand at one end and go BA-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOM with the horn and you can hear it all over the valley. Of course, the kobolds and goblins and stone giants outside the valley can hear it too, but all they can see of the valley is a glacier and rugged peaks, because of the illusions. That's why I learned magic; it's an important part of keeping Greenfields safe. It's very funny that humans would rely on locks and such when magic works so much better."
"They are not as wise as you, Mister Gnome!"
"Oh, ho ho, be fair. They do try!"
As she nears the door, Elissa hears the footsteps quickly gathering at the far end of the room beyond. It takes a moment, but Elissa realizes that the noises are starting to lessen. Her eyes widen as she hears a whispered voice begin to fade as if descending and the creak of a ladder.
The three investigators downstairs hear nothing under the gnome's story, until Baeril hears a thump followed by a curse from outside the shop itself.
Elissa yells "Outside, ladder!" towards the stairs, and bolts through the door.
