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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 167920" data-attributes="member: 41">36—Voices Under the StairsSatisfied that she has put a stop to Indy’s ridiculous imagination, Kyreel looks about her and ponders her situation.  Killing wretched humanoids in an abandoned warehouse is one thing, but these wererats all lead lives as Marner citizens.  Convinced that she can turn to Marner’s religious community, she and Indy bundle one of the dead wererats, and trundle off to the Temple of Pelor, and beg an audience with the High Priest Forgrimm.Pleasantries are exchanged, divinations are cast (on the corpses as well as those who brought them), and the High Priest agrees to speak with Shella on Kyreel and Indy’s behalf.  The Sun’s Blessed are intrigued by Kyreel’s description of the Goddess Ishlok, and suggest that she speak with Heironeous’ Champion Alein, a woman who, like Kyreel, has dedicated her entire life to the service of Order and Goodness.  Alein, the high priest assures them, would love to become involved with the sorts of investigations Kyreel and Indy are undertaking.   Indy sneaks away and steals food from Pelor’s kitchens, as Kyreel and the high priest talk long into the evening.As the duo are traveling to the Southspur district, looking for Heironeous’ shrine, they hear a startled yelp, and a half-grunt half-scream coming from up ahead.  Charging forward, they stumble into a bank of rapidly spreading mist that covers first their boot-tops, then their legs, and then obscures their vision altogether.Indy grabs Kyreel’s arm, slowing her charge, and cocks his head for a listen.  He whispers, “Someone is fighting behind the building.  I’ll go up to the roof!”Kyreel feels her way to the back of the building and tries to home in on the sounds, now quite muffled, of two men grunting under some strain.“Kyreel!  Cream ‘em!” Indy yells from his vantage point above the mist.  “They’ve got a body in a bag!”Kyreel helpfully complies, silently thanking Ishlok that Indy didn’t say, “now, bitch!”The fight is more of a mugging than a combat, and after some frenzied hand-to-hand fighting, Kyreel and Indy are standing over the bundle the three suddenly-deceased individuals were trying to make off with.  The bundle looks suspiciously like a body, either dead or alive.Fortunately, the body in the bag proves to be quite alive, and is none other than the acolyte to Valor’s Champion Alein.  The frightened acolyte tells the adventurers that Alein went missing last night, and just as he was getting ready to go looking for her, these two ruffians jumped him outside the shrine.The acolyte recognizes one of the dead men as being an attendant at the Reality Wrinkle Bookstore, a queer little shop specializing in Arcana and magical obscurities.  In fact, he and Valor’s Champion Alein had just been there a few weeks ago looking into a murder.“I’ll give ‘em a murder to look into!” Indy mutters to himself, as he rubs the bite-wound one of the crazed kidnappers gave him.  “Let’s go Ky . . . er, Leeryk!”The Reality Wrinkle Bookstore is more than a queer little bookstore specializing in Arcana.  It is, in fact a Queer Little Bookstore specializing in Arcana.  Indy and Kyreel saunter in and swiftly find themselves in possession of Queer Little headaches, starting just behind the eyes, and stabbing backwards into the skull.  Everything seems Out of Place, and while the dusty shelves and discordant stacks of books are entirely appropriate for a bookstore specializing in Arcana, this dust seems both more and less than just dust, and the piles of books look exactly like the sorts of piles of books Foul Creatures might want to hide behind.“I don’t like it here one bit,” Indy mutters as the duo approach an old man sitting at the service-desk.“You there.  We need to ask you a few questions, in the name of the Law,” Kyreel begins with all her characteristic subtlety.  “I am going to cast a spell to divine truth from lies in what you say, so do not . . .”The paladin is cut off as the man dashes past her and behind a curtain, without a word.“Sonofa . . .” Indy shouts as he rips his spear from its peace-pouch.  “Get him!”As the two charge behind the curtain, they are struck with a wave of dizziness, as the angles joining things seem just a touch impossible in the Reality Wrinkle’s back room.  A foul gibbering emanates from behind a door underneath a set of stairs leading to the building’s second floor.  Kyreel throws the door open, and is accosted by an amorphous blob of mouths and eyes that oozes over itself subsuming its horrific features, only to reveal new ones as it rolls onto the shocked paladin.Indy covers his ears against the nonsensical howling and gibbering emanating from the thing, as its un-worldly muttering worms its way into the panic centers of his brain.Fortunately, the monster is just as vulnerable to a Holy Smite as the next hideous aberration from an utterly alien dimension, and Kyreel is able to fight it off, suffering only a disgusting series of red welts where the thing was biting her.“You know, they pay extra for . . .” Indy begins, but trails off in the face of Kyreel’s withering glance.“While you were cowering,” she begins, “I heard foot-falls above us.  Whatever this thing is, its wailing set this entire building into motion.  Let us be on our guard.”Unfortunately for the heroes, the old man at the front isn’t the only utterly mad neo-cultist in the Reality Wrinkle, and dashing up the stairs, our heroes quickly become trapped in a sticky quagmire of a battle, as a half-dozen madmen (and madwomen) attack them with weapons and spells, while a willowy figure dressed entirely in red and wearing a festival-mask phases in and out of an invisible state and summons several hideous giant lamprey-like monstrosities.Indy shouts “That’s it, we’re done for!” on no less than two occasions, and if Luck hadn’t been on the side of the heroes, they surely would have been.But in the end, the blood staining their clothes isn’t their last, and Indy and Kyreel survey the carnage in the bookstore.  With their foes defeated, Kyreel attempts to wrest from the dying masked woman what the group’s purpose was.“The Gate to the End of All Things will open and swallow us into its embrace as its chosen . . .” is her croaking reply.“Oh, great, another cult to entropy,” Indy says.  “Like we need this right now.”“Nonsense, Indianichus.  This is no religion.  This is, rather was, a sort of home for the criminally insane, but I think we’ve put a stop to their nefarious plans.”And so, for a time, do all the citizens of Marner.</blockquote>

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