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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1453434" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #14: The Rat Man Warren, Pt II - Episode 3 of 5This room is reminiscent of the previous one, with bookshelves lining the walls. There is a chest near the priest’s body, a pile of old skulls, perhaps a hundred of them, against the far wall, and a table stands in the middle of the room. We are clearly in the heart of the priest’s quarters. Three corridors lead off the far wall, one to the left, one to the right, and one in the middle.Miriel bandages Swims with Fishes while Paks picks herself up. Goldpetal invokes Denev to heal Paks, and Miriel checks Chuck, who says he’s okay. He steps over to the far wall, to stand watch looking down the middle corridor. Stone and Drinks With Orcs take up places standing watch over the other two corridors, while Novalia continues to guard our backs, watching over the entry corridor. On the way to his corridor, Stone shoves his pole into the skulls. They tumble and roll, but there is nothing underneath them. Looking at them more closely, he sees that they look like elf skulls. He glances at Goldpetal, but shakes his head and doesn’t say anything.Paks takes a rag out of her bag and cautiously uses it to pick up the scimitar, taking care not to touch either hilt or blade. Even through the rag, she can sense evil emanating from the blade. She removes the sheathe from the priest’s corpse and sheathes the weapon, placing it carefully in her pack. Then she turns her attention to the priest’s body. In its left hand it still holds the red pearl, which she also picks up. She notes some obsidian and silver woven into its fur, which she points out to Chuck.Goldpetal walks over to look at a chest against the wall, near the priest’s body. Red Scale follows to examine the chest with him. They use Goldpetal’s scimitar to pry open the chest. It opens easily, and there is no trap on it. Within, it is filled with coins. Uninterested, they close it, and move away. Miriel calls Goldpetal over, “Goldpetal, Swims with Fishes needs healing. He’s awake, but very weak.”The three individuals looking down the corridors see that they are each about five feet long, and all open into small caverns. Chuck sees some statues, while Stone sees a bunch of bookshelves and calls to Telryn, “Hey, Telryn, more books.” Drinks with Orcs sees lots of chests, and the gleam of gold catches his eye. Seeing treasure, Drinks with Orcs heads down his corridor. He walks into a small room. It is filled with baskets and rough chests, overflowing with jewelry, gold bars, and piles of coins. There’s a ton of treasure there. As he leaves his post, Paks steps over to cover the corridor to the treasure room, but Chuck and Stone, too, are walking off down their corridors! “Guys!” she calls, but they each ignore her.  Chuck finds a similar small room. In it, he finds that the statues are fifteen or more life-sized, waxy figures of humans and elves, each in what seems like torment. As he approaches one, he realizes that it appears to be a magically preserved body. Each of them are, and they are each disfigured with various diseases. Recoiling in horror, he yells, “Ewww! … Miriel!”Stone walks down the short corridor towards the room with the books. He pauses at the threshold, listening to be sure nothing lurks in ambush, but he hears nothing. He steps into the room, which is lined with bookshelves. “Telryn!” he calls out again, and grabs one off the shelf. The room is remarkably dry for being in a swamp, and the book is in excellent condition. In the central room, Drinks With Orcs returns, draped with gold chains and carrying jewels in his hands. “Wow, let’s loot that room,” Paks says. She calls back over her shoulder, “Novalia, keep watching our backs!”The others, however, answer to the calls of their names. Miriel goes to Chuck, entering the room with the waxen figures. Careful not to touch anything, she examines the figures as Chuck watches her back. “They’re all dead,” she says. “Each is infected with a different disease, all in a late stage of advancement. It’s like a museum of diseases,” she says, “Or maybe a study hall. I’m not sure if they’re infectious or not – let’s get the others and leave.” Chuck needs no further urging to leave the disturbing room, and the priestess follows right behind him.Goldpetal and Telryn walk down into the book room and begin inspecting the books, slipping past Stone as he heads back to the central room. Most of the books are in Slytherin, but some are in human languages and some are in elvish. Nothing jumps out at them instantly, but there are over two hundred volumes, and many of them could be valuable. Goldpetal tries to see if any of the elvish tomes are particularly old. He finds one that does look unusually old, and places it in his pack. Telryn searches and picks two tomes that look particularly valuable. “I wish I could take them all!” he says, but he knows that the entire library would be too heavy.In the central room, Miriel and Chuck arrive back just as Stone does. Miriel looks grim, and says, “We should gather everyone and get out of here. There’s too much disease down here. We should leave.” “But we just found the treasure,” Paks says, pointing to Drinks with Orcs, who is draped in gold.Miriel shakes her head, and turns to Chuck. “Help me gather everyone,” she orders.Chuck looks at Paks grimly, and says, “She’s right. We need to get out of here.”“Why?” Paks asks. “What did you see?”Chuck explains, “There are a bunch of dead bodies, preserved in various states of infection down there. It looks like a hideous wax museum.” Paks immediately looks concerned. “Are they carrying the diseases, breeding them?” she asks, as Telryn returns from the library.Miriel shakes her head. “It just looks like training, but no less dangerous for all that.”Stone and Drinks with Orcs head back to the treasure room, and Telryn goes with them. Paks looks after them, and tells Miriel, “We’ll go shortly.”In the treasure chamber, Stone starts grabbing jewelry and gold, stuffing it into his sack. Drinks with Orcs starts to help, but Telryn says, “Stop! Wait a minute, while I check for magic.”They stand, shifting impatiently, as Telryn casts detect magic on the room. He finds two rings, a small silver ring and a wooden ring wrapped with silver wires. “Both of these are clearly magic, enchantments of some kind,” he says, picking them up. He scans around the room briefly, then adds, “Nothing else.” He turns and walks back towards the main room.Stone and Drinks fill Stone’s sack, and still there is more. They fill his canvas, then finally Stone takes off his shirt and fills that with gold, too. When Telryn reaches the main room, Paks asks him, “Can you look at the red stone and the scimitar?”He nods, and has her place them on the table in the main room. As she sets them down, she notices that there are ten vials on the table. “Hey, check these out,” she says.The mage has maintained his concentration, and is still able to detect magic from his earlier casting of the spell. As he steps up, he points to two of the potions. “Those two are magical,” he says. After studying the two artifacts Paks has picked up, he says, “The scimitar has some sort of necromancy on it, while the pearl is a conjuration. I can’t learn more than that without spending the better part of a day studying.”While he examined the magic, Miriel had been examining the other eight vials on the table. Now she looks up. “These five are poisons,” she says, “But these three are glitter ink.”“Really?” Telryn exclaims. He gets very excited and grabs them. “My master will be so pleased!” “Can I have the poisons?” Chuck asks. Nobody else seems to care, so he picks them up.“Where’s Goldpetal?” Miriel asks. “We should go.”Telryn glances over into the library room, and says, “He’s still studying the books.”“Come on,” Miriel says. “We have to go.” Stone comes walking out, heavily loaded with treasure. He seems to stagger under a great weight.Paks picks up the scimitar and the red pearl, and places them back in her pack. “I think we should burn the study room,” she says, “To kill off the diseases.”Telryn and Miriel in unison exclaim, “That’s a horrible idea!” When Paks looks confused, Telryn explains, “If any of them are transmitted by air, we could all catch it.” “We could lay a trail of books,” Stone suggests, “Out to the entrance, and light them on fire.” Telryn looks at him as though even suggesting that is sacrilegious.“Do we want to go back above ground,” Paks asks. “Or finish clearing the warren out? We haven’t found the slaves we came down to rescue yet.”Miriel opens her mouth as though to disagree, then shakes her head. “You’re right, of course,” she says. “We have to continue looking for them.”Telryn looks in the drawers of the table, and finds two vials of acid, which he takes. Paks asks, “What did Goldpetal find in the chest?” Everybody in the room shrugs, so she walks over to the chest.She opens the chest, and finds it full of gold coins. She pokes around to see if there’s anything under the gold coins, but she doesn’t find anything. “Hey, these coins are unusual,” she says. “I don’t recognize them.”Telryn comes over to look over her shoulder. “Yeah, look,” he says, “They’re not just Veshian. These are from all over the land.”  There are some that none of us recognize, and at a quick estimate, we guess that there are over ten thousand of them. Paks tries to pick up the chest, but she can’t even budge it by herself.“If we’re fighting,” Miriel says, “We should go before our spells wear off.” The blessing has worn off, but the mage armor is still active. “Goldpetal!” Chuck yells, “Let’s go!”Reluctantly, the elf leaves the library, and follows us as we go to clear the rest of the warren.</blockquote>

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