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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr Midnight" data-source="post: 3677940" data-attributes="member: 69">Session 5 - Chapter 2 GOING TO THE CHAPEL In the morning, the four adventurers and Jade collected their things and began discussing how they were going to move through the streets to the church.“There’s maybe a hundred and fifty feet from here to the church, but it’s going to be a hard trip,” Gerrit said. “I don’t want to risk all of us moving over the rooftops, so I suggest that I cast that spell once more that makes us invisible to undead… leastwise to unintelligent undead. The more clever kinds may see us. This time? No one attacks anything. Anything.” Everyone nodded and Arianna turned a bit red.With the spell cast, the group climbed over the barrier and out into the street. The sun was overcast through the mists and it was another pale, cheerless day. They began to walk through the streets, weaving past the zombies that lurched around them. They reached a crossroads. At the intersection, a dead horse lay rotting in the street. It was almost rotted away, but a group of zombies were kneeling around it and feeding on handfuls of sickening brownish-black horse innards. Arianna held her hand up and stopped the group. She stared at the zombies and made the motion to fall back. The group moved back up the street until the mists hid the intersection.“What is it?” Ashlyn asked.Arianna  said “I don’t think those were zombies.”“I saw it too,” Toufghar added. “Teeth like wolves. Eyes were shining. So?”Gerrit thought for a second. “Sounds like ghouls. Good eyes, ‘anna. These may have a chance of spotting us, and thus attacking.”“So how do we move to the church? These houses are tightly-packed, there aren’t alleyways to creep through. We’d have to circle way back around to find a throughway.”The group discussed the problem for a bit and in the end decided to move as planned, as quietly as possible, keeping a ready eye on the ghouls.They walked up the street. They stepped heel-to-toe, quiet on the cobblestones. They kept to the far side of the road from the horse carcass and passed it. A ghoul looked up from its meal and stared straight at them. It didn’t move and it didn’t look away. “Faster. Faster now,” Gerrit said nervously. The group upped the pace somewhat. The ghoul stood from the carcass and began to stalk slowly after them. Its disease-slicked lips drew back from its canine teeth and a line of drool stretched lazily down from its jaw. The church was dead ahead, maybe fifty feet away. Gerrit broke into a sprint. “Run! We can make it!” They dashed madly for the church’s double doors. Behind them, the ghoul didn’t pursue. It had noticed that its companions weren’t coming as well, and as hungry as it was for fresh meat, it didn’t seem to think it alone could take down four well-armed adventurers and one enormous leopard. It hissed and trundled back to the horse. Arianna, Gerrit, Toufghar, Ashlyn and Jade reached the church. A gray, sagging edifice of stone and wood stood atop a slight rise, on the very roots of the great pillarstone of the omnipresent castle. Light flickered through holes burned through the roof shingles, and the sound of hoarse chanting was audible within. The adventurers burst into the church and leaned back against the doors as they shut, breathing heavily. Only now did they look around. The church interior was a shambles, with overturned and broken benches littering the dusty floor. A claw-scarred altar brooded at the far end of the church, directly north of a gaping hole in the rotten floorboards. A croaking voice coming from that same direction chanted the phrase of a nonsense prayer.“Another lovely place,” Ashlyn muttered. Then, loudly, she called “Hello?”A wild-haired man rose from behind the altar. His face was thin and pallid and his eyes bugged madly from his skull. He wore the stained robes of a priest of Bellethanne.“Pardon our intrusion. We’ve come from-“The priest trembled as he screamed “You can’t take my son from me!!” and cast a spell from a scroll he held in a knotted hand.Ashlyn’s breath caught in her throat and her eyes rolled up into her head. She and Jade fell to the floor of the church with soft thumps. “No!” Arianna shouted. Toufghar was first to react through the shock, and he began striding towards the man, hands outstretched. “Easy now,” the half-orc said. “You can see that we come in peace. There’s no call for attacking us.”Doors behind him opened and the cramped hallway the others stood in was now filling with zombies from adjacent rooms. Gerrit began magically repelling the undead and Ashlyn plugged four arrows into a zombie’s head.  Toufghar, meanwhile, continued his steady walk toward the priest. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s talk.” The priest responded by gibbering something unintelligible and casting another spell at him. Toufghar felt his limbs lock up and his blood slow in his veins, then release. The spell hadn’t killed him… but it had been meant to.The half-orc sneered and pulled his frost-rimed greataxe from his back. “You always say I should be more diplomatic, Thendrick,” he muttered to himself. “I gave it a shot.” He jumped up to the altar’s side and swept his cleaver through the priest’s midsection.  Frozen blood cracked against the church’s wall. Toufghar swung again and the priest fell back, running to the hole in the floor, clutching his intestines to his gut.  “I’m coming, I’m coming, I won’t let them take you I won’t-“ and the man jumped down into the darkness. Arianna and Gerrit finished off the remaining zombies without too much of a problem. Arianna kept her bow trained on the hole in the floor as Gerrit knelt to study Jade and Ashlyn. “They’re dead,” he said softly. “Dead? No.” Arianna shook her head, unwilling to believe that her cat may have left her. “I’m afraid so. I can’t raise them. Can you do anything?” “I can reincarnate them, but not until tomorrow.” “Hell,” Gerrit murmured. “They might not even come back right.”“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. Only other option would be taking them to the nearest holy man, and we can already see that that’s not going to work here in Barovia.”“Good point. What do we do about the priest, do we go down after him?”Arianna stepped up to the edge of the hole and looked down. Her keen elven vision pushed the shadows aside, somewhat, and she saw the bottom halves of the priest and… something else. The priest seemed to be whispering to the half-seen thing, which had arms too long for its body. It swayed on its feet and its skin was jaundiced and tight. Other things shambled about down there. The priest leaned forward and, it seemed, hugged the creature he stood before. The thing raised its clawed hands up and hugged him back, tearing slightly at the flesh on the holy man’s back. Arianna recoiled from the hole in loathing. “No, he’s got company down there. He’s in league with the dead. I don’t think we should go down.”“We can’t not go down,” Toufghar said angrily as he returned from a cursory exploration of the church.  “Thendrick’s not up here. He might be down there, still alive.” “It might be suicide. We should wait until we have Ashlyn back.”“He might not have that long.” Toufghar cursed and kneeled by a trapdoor. He opened it and a set of wooden stairs led down into the darkness. Whispers and shuffling ceased from below. Everything was silent in the cellar of the blasphemed church. Toufghar looked to the stairs, wondering if he should go down. Below, horrible things looked to the stairs, hoping he would.Next session MIDNIGHT MASS .</blockquote>

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