Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 3946623" data-attributes="member: 149">And here is the update at last.*******************************************************************Once we reconvened, I outlined my ingenious plan. “If we just teleport in as a group, there will be no question who it is. An Anticipate Teleportation, whether the greater variety or not, will tell her what types of creatures are coming in and there simply aren’t that many teleporting groups of five people, with an orc, shifter, human and warforged. Our chance lies in the fact that, even if she suspects I am alive, it’s unlikely she knows that I detect as an aberration to all magic. So, if just Gareth and I go in, with him looking like her lover and myself appearing as a Mind Flayer, it may confuse her long enough for us to act. Even if it doesn’t confuse her, it should be worth it for the look on her face, when she sees us.”I spoke mostly metaphorically, liches being low on facial expression. Perhaps that confused the others so that there were, surprisingly, no objections.“Yes, Edgar. I know that, but it will have to wait until tomorrow night.”Reality bent to my will once again and the omnipresent chorus of whippoorwills crescendoed and cut off suddenly as Gareth and I appeared in the room I had scryed earlier. A quick look at the prepared position Emrena and her minions had assumed out in the hall showed that luck was still failing to smile on me. I shall eventually have to teach her to remedy that error. But back to Emrena. The bafflement her posture bespoke at what appeared, while gratifying, didn't prevent her from attempting to hit us with a slashing dispel. A quick word of power to activate a ring and I crushed her spell in mid-cast. Useful as the ring was, it didn’t help with the beads of force the guardsmen threw at us, but the bursts of force were easy enough to avoid even in this prison of flesh. Then the doors were slammed in our face. “The courtesy of your home leaves something to be desired, Emrena,” I muttered, as Gareth dumped out the portable hole and the rest of our band sprang out.While he did that, my staff rang upon the stones of the room and I called in the tartly throat twisting syllables of Daelkyr. “Kha’tvan’ga! Fulfill our pact and attend me!” Obedient to my command, the creature manifested, its sleekly beautiful form contrasting with the crude shapes of my companions, and hovered silently. I instructed, “Smash the door and kill anyone out there!” Moments later the door was in splinters and the horrified guards were fleeing in terror. For all the good it would do them. Emrena was either made of sterner stuff or incapable of comprehending what Kha’tvan’ga is and so unfazed by it, but also unwilling to face all of us on her own. She dimension doored away, saying “Follow me if you dare!”“I don’t know. I rather liked the cheese we had with lunch, Edgar.”I commanded the Horror to slay the guards and bring me one, confident it would hunt them down relentlessly. Meanwhile, my comrades ransacked the room for clues and despoiled her wardrobe in ways ... unmentionable. Lime green polka-dots? No, let us not go there. The crumpled letter I had seen her writing earlier proved to be somewhat enlightening. In elven, with some parts cut out and others rewritten, it said: “My queen, I know you do not wish me to engage the Guardian Angels again, but I believe their removal is necessary for the Emerald Claw to re-establish a presence in Breland. And especially in Sharn, where their presence makes it impossible to take advantage of sympathetic worshippers of the Blood. I hope you will forgive my presumption, but I flatter myself that my success will justify the disobedience. I have begun to move some skilled members of the Claw to Sharn. More importantly, two nights ago, I made an attack on the Guardian Angels and slew their mage, Nameless. I expect that the remainder will locate and attack me here, and I am prepared for th…”Well, well. Yes, I’m certain your ‘queen’ will reward you for this success. Especially once we are finished ripping this place down around your ears Emrena. My musings were interrupted by Korm tapping me (with sufficient force to break the arm of a normal person) on the shoulder.“Yes, Korm – what is it?”“Nameless, what does a lich need a privy for?”A raised eyebrow was the only possible answer to Korm’s question. He showed me that one room led to a privy. Well made, with the kind of plumbing Sharn uses, I noticed.“So Edgar, the white or the yellow?”Kha’tvan’ga returned at that point with one of the guards, but his feeble human mind had snapped under the assault of the Horror’s presence and even Gareth’s mind-reading abilities were useless to get any coherent information out of him. Gareth quickly ended his suffering.Since there was nothing more to learn here, a quick locate creature was able to provide us with a direction, and a bit of triangulation and some trivial calculation showed Emrena hadn’t gone too far. So we followed in the direction the spell indicated she was in, Luna taking on the form of a huge wolf and not a bear, so as to avoid slowing us down as she squeezed through. We passed some distance down the hallways with no further incidents, though I noticed there were many holes in the walls, floor and ceiling. Identical to the ones that had been in our house before we sealed them, they were obviously for vampires in gaseous form to pass through.As we made another turn, we passed another door from behind which chanting came, and the voice of a child crying in terror. Memories of the Emerald Claw temple we had raided in Karrnath were still fresh, as had been the bodies of those who were unwillingly sacrificed to create the Charnel Hound we discovered. So despite the danger of deviating from our goal, nobody suggested otherwise as we turned and smashed in the door to the chamber.In retrospect, what was going on should have been simple enough to figure out. The three men at the altar, one chanting and one holding down a screaming child, while a third raised a blood-stained dagger, and the watching people seated on benches. But we are so much faster than normal people, that they had no time to react before Gareth had grabbed the child, Six had already killed the man holding the child down, and Korm punched in the head of the knife-wielder. Once the child cried out, “Daddy!” at the dead man who had been holding her and struggled to get away, it was clear.“Well, Edgar, these things do happen. I have others.”“Set her down, Gareth,” I commanded. “That was her father we just killed.” Simple, really. The Blood of Vol naturally does place great emphasis on blood as a voluntary sacrifice and symbol of commitment, with worshippers willingly donating some on certain days. The Emerald Claw does place a rather darker stress on things and aren’t so keen on the ‘voluntary’ aspect of things, but they also seem to use the legitimate temples of the Blood of Vol as a cover.As clearly they were doing here.Still, they were lucky. I was going to chuck a cloudkill in there.But we had no time for recriminations. Emrena was still on the loose, and had not moved in the past few minutes. So she had probably found allies, but that changed nothing. It was going to have to be her or us, as we couldn't afford to have her plaguing us, while we tried to track down the location of the seed she had so foolishly unleashed. Perhaps this ‘queen’ would be interested in what her unauthorized vendetta had set loose?A few more twists of corridors lead to a corner around which three vampires in Emerald Claw armor sprang to the attack. As we smashed each other back and forth, Emrena popped around the next corner and hit us with another slashing dispel, which was fortunately mostly ineffective. One of the vampires quickly went down under our assault and Emrena dimension doored away again, apparently unwilling to go toe-to-toe with us. The remaining vampires exchanged blows for a few more seconds and then fled into mist form, leaving us alone in the passageway.“So, Edgar, you are enjoying the weather in Sharn this time of year.”This was only a momentary setback, however. I have your number now, Emrena. You aren’t going to get away that easily. A little more triangulation, a mental recollection of the corridors we had traversed, and I instantly knew where she was in the temple. Three-dimensional geography is so simple. “Gather round me. This time she won’t get away.” Once they had, I opened a hole in reality and shoved us through, making sure we would appear close behind Emrena. If only those whippoorwills would shut up! Her footsteps were still echoing in the hall as we appeared and glimpsed her turning around another corner, with two more priests in her train.Moments later they were both smoking corpses after a hail of empowered fireballs and flame strikes. Emrena once again proved more resilient, but also without allies, and with us nipping at her heels (her red pumps were looking a bit ratty at this point) she did not seem destined to remain among the unliving much longer. For all of about 6 seconds and that’s when things started going south ...Three more vampires materialized out of gas clouds from the holes in the floor, while Emrena put up an antimagic field and walked over to my allies, who had rushed after her.“The financial section of the newspaper? But I though you finished that yesterday, Edgar?”After all the alterations, blessings and spells we put on ourselves, we are saturated with magic. During our recent trip to Q’barra, we adopted as a method of proving our bona fides to the locals, the simple expedient of finding someone who could cast detect magic. Once the blinded adept recovered their vision, there were no questions if we were as powerful as we were claiming.The antimagic field took all that away. Luna shrank from a huge, magically-enhanced wolf to a shifter with a club. The Endless Blade vanished into Gareth’s metal hand, the fingers of which became immobile. Korm was reduced from a muscle-bound druid to a very strong orc. As is usually the case, Six came out of it the best, since he depends the least on such augmentations. He might lack the raw power of the rest of us, but he has an uncanny way of never being the target when the hellfire comes down.Not that it did him any good this time.The vampires were not so impeded, as their skills did not depend on magic anywhere near so much as ours does. Though their resistance to damage was gone, their undead flesh combined with heavy armor to make them near-impervious to the weakened blows of my comrades, and they were still able to heal their wounds. It quickly became clear  – though only amusing in retrospect – that they could call on their faith to empower their attacks in a way the Silver Flame no longer could Gareth’s. Normally the most durable of us, Luna fell first under the fury of their blades.Six held his own for a few moments, his flashing chain sweeping the feet out from two of the vampires and striking them again and again as they rose and moved in. But that only made him the obvious target, and the three of them combined their attacks to cut him down. While Gareth struck feebly at Emrena’s tough hide with his backup sword, Korm managed to drop one of the vampires that Six had wounded. But it was obvious that he wasn’t going to last very long against the remaining two and Gareth wasn’t doing much other than annoying Emrena, who ignored him and smirked at me while I stood there helpless. Her field was blocking all of my spells so I couldn’t help Korm against the vampires, and I didn’t even have the crossbow I’d carried for when my spells had run out, when I first arrived in Sharn.Gareth shouted to me, “Nameless – we need to get out of here!” He sounded even more panicky than usual when things go bad, presumably his supposed immunity to fear had been stolen by the antimagic field as well. I opened my mouth to shout at him and then it struck me. The answer was so obvious. That field was a two-edged sword. I’d actually prepared one that day, for much the same reason Emrena was using it now. It shut down nearly everything a mage could do and most of what a lich had. So while it weakened us and strengthened her allies, it did not aid her personally.“Gareth, stop screwing around with the sword! Just grab her, gag her and drag her towards me. NOW!” Emrena’s muffled cry of outrage was most satisfying, as Gareth crammed his gauntlet down her throat and wrapped his other arm around her neck. Even weakened by the lack of magic, Gareth was still much stronger than Emrena and she was able to put up little resistance as he dragged her down the corridor, while I dashed forward through the field. As I moved, I instantly calculated distances and positions on the battlefield. There was one more little thing to do. “Korm! Step over Luna!” Unarmored and facing two vampires, Korm instantly obeyed, though his expression showed his uncertainty of what I meant.And then, as Gareth dragged Emrena just far enough, Luna’s unconscious body snapped back to its lupine shape – and size. As I had calculated, the sudden expansion blocked most of the hallway and prevented the vampires from rushing after Emrena, slaying Gareth and ruining my plan. Before they could think of scrambling over Luna, I unleashed my last fireball, empowering the magical energies in mid-cast and placing it precisely so as to vaporize one of them and leave the other weakened. Assisted by a pair of pseudonatural rhino beetles I’d summoned, Korm quickly finished off the remaining vampire, despite the bulk of Luna restricting his movements.We walked back into the antimagic field, where Emrena’s outraged eyes were flashing daggers at us. With Gareth’s metal hand rammed down her throat and his arm around her neck, she couldn’t speak the words to dismiss the antimagic field which held her helpless. And she knew I knew it.“I enjoyed this part the most, Edgar. So did you.”It was grim, but very enjoyable, watching Korm’s sword falling repetitively on Emrena’s helpless body. Slowly chipping away at the burning vitality of a lich’s withered body, while she was helpless to do anything to avoid the relentless march of her doom. I thought, as I watched, that it was much like what time does to those incapable of transcending their mortality. Emrena, of course, had attempted to do precisely that, but by the limited process of changing her physical form, whereas I plan to…My cogitations – and Korm’s methodical chopping – were interrupted as a richly-dressed man strode up. Without preamble, he indignantly demanded, “What are you doing in the House of Hazal, in my home? You murderers and desecrators!” Emrena looked suddenly hopeful and her eyes were clearly pleading with the man, but that hope withered as Korm’s blows didn’t slacken at all and I cut the man off in mid-sentence.“We will compensate the family for the man’s death. It was an accident and we put ourselves at some significant risk, while pursuing an Emerald Claw terrorist, responsible for numerous crimes and murders, in an attempt to help the child.” “Where was that book again. Edgar? Second on the left? Thank you.Even as I spoke, I was trying to recall where I had heard the name he mentioned. And then I recalled it – the House of Hazal was a large mansion I had passed on the way to Trillia’s home. And suddenly a number of things became clear. Emrena’s letter about Sharn. And even the plumbing. I had used a greater teleport capable of flinging us from one end of Eberron to the other and back again. In order to move us less than a mile from where we had started. In fact we were still in Sharn, and even in Tavick’s Landing, where our house was. The irony was great, though I might have found it less amusing if I hadn’t solved the mystery of the battle so successfully moments ago.“I’m calling the watch to arrest you, you, you ..,” Hazal stuttered with rage. While the steady rhythm of Korm’s sword hacking at Emrena continued in the background.“Yeeesss! That’s an exxxcceeellleeent idea! In fact, I’ll send someone to go get Warden Balan Cord of the Blackened Book. I’m certain he's going to be fascinated to learn about the Emerald Claw terrorist cell you’ve been harboring here. While the Blood of Vol is a legitimate – perhaps even unfairly frowned upon – religion, the Emerald Claw holds no such position. I look forward to hearing your explanation to him of this. And while you’re doing this, I have a message for your boss or Emrena’s. Whom ever this ‘queen’ she mentions in her letter is and it’s quite simple. Emrena is a f*ckup. She’s cost you the use of several powerful undead, has failed in her missions, pursued a personal vendetta against orders for the sake of a lover so stupid he got himself killed saving her from being inconvenienced, led us to this hidden temple and has brought nothing but grief to her masters. I’d advise your ‘queen’ to think carefully if she wants to retain the services of a loose cannon that’s as incompetent as she is. Make sure she thinks long and hard about this. Because we are going to have to go after Emrena’s phylactery and even if we die trying, I guarantee, there’s going to be enough collateral damage, that your 'Queen' will NOT be pleased.”It was about that time that Korm’s sword finally cut her in half and the light went out of Emrena’s eyes as she crumbled into dust. “I do believe we can go get the watch now.”Hazal stared for a moment, and then turned on his heel and strode away.“Ah, I can’t argue with that, Edgar. Can’t argue with that.”</blockquote>

Verification