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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1455629" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #14: The Rat Man Warren, Pt II - Episode 5 of 5We awaken some time after midnight, on Hedraday, the fourth day of Madrer. Paks has a grim face, at odds with her normal likeable disposition. “Let’s do this,” she tells Miriel. Miriel nods, with a similar look on her face. The rest of us follow, in somber silence, as Paks and Miriel walk back to the slave chamber.It is a small chamber, containing fifteen slaves, who are chained with iron inside reed cages. The corpse of the carrion crawler lies on the floor here, as well, where we felled it. The slaves are all sick with the Slimy Doom, their interior organs already decayed past the point where recovery is possible.Paks draws her short sword, which she has been carrying in case her long sword breaks or is lost. She has only used it once, during the siege of Kratys Freehold. With her eyes closed and head bowed, she says, “May the people who are dispatched with this sword have Madriel's mercy on them.”Miriel performs last rites from the doorway, as Paks walks through the cages and slits their throats. The slaves watch her dully, without interest.In the last cage, one of the slaves, a woman, says, “Thank you, my lady,” before the blade ends her misery.When the deed is done, Paks lays the bodies out in respectful positions, and she leaves the short sword across the chest of the woman who spoke.She stands back a moment, in respectful silence, head bowed.When she feels there is nothing more she can do for them, Paks takes a torch, and steps past the slave chamber to investigate the other rooms. The rest of us wait behind Miriel, fearful of infection. Paks starts in the room with the pit where the carrion crawler lived. The floor is covered in bloody slime. It looks as though the ratmen scrape all the loose material off the bodies. The pit is thirty feet deep and filled with rotting flesh and bones. It smells vile, and there’s a charnel gas coming up from it. There are symbols written on the floor around the pit with glitter ink. Paks tries to erase the symbols, but they are unaffected. She walks back to the group, and says, “Telryn, how do you remove glitter ink?”“It’s impossible,” he says, “Save with a spell. That’s why it is so highly sought.”“Do you know the spell?”“Nay, I’m afraid I do not,” he says.Paks looks thoughtful for a moment. “Miriel, can I borrow your chalk?”The priestess complies, and Paks takes the chalk back to the room. She draws Madriel’s symbols on the walls around the room. The hideous stench of the gas from the pit drives her back out, but, standing in the doorway, she mimics Miriel’s words from earlier, invoking Madriel to offer last rites for the remains in the pit. She looks down the next hallway, but it extends longer than she can see by torch light. She begins walking down it, and after she goes about fifteen feet, she sees that it ends in a thatched doorway. She comes back and checks the last hallway. It looks into another very small room, which she enters. There are many nets hung from the ceiling and hundreds of stoppered bottles. In a rack on the wall there are lots of scraping tools, and there are dozens of empty bottles and stoppers. There is also a table with scrolls and ledgers. “Telryn will want these,” she says, and picks up the scrolls and the ledger to bring with her. Looking around, she decides to destroy the potion-maker’s equipment, lest the ratmen return and begin using them again. “I’m going to break some glass,” she yells back to the rest of the group. “It’s okay.” She places ten small empty vials in her backpack, and then takes the rest of the bottles, empties and stoppered potions alike, and throws them all into the pit, making sure that she throws them hard enough to break. As she’s breaking them, she sees that some of them are quite old, from before the Titan’s War, and others have labels from places she’s never heard of. It’s a strange assortment, but she does not stop. When she has finished, she comes back and describes it all to the group. When she mentions the ancient potions, Goldpetal is very interested, but as she describes destroying them all, his face grows stony. Telryn is practically weeping at the thought of the loss of all the potions.Paks concludes her tale by saying, “So, I’d like to go through the thatched door, but want the rest of you to come before I do.”Miriel shakes her head. “It’s not a good idea for us to go through the Slimy Doom room.”“I’ll go,” Stone offers, setting down the sack full of treasure.“Me too,” says Novalia, and Paks hands her the torch.The three of them go back to the thatched door while the rest of the group waits and listens. Stone steps up to the door, and peeks through the thatch. It is entirely dark, but he can hear insects, as though it leads outside. They open the door, and find that it opens out onto the swamp, from the side of the hill. It looks like it was concealed on the outside. It’s on the east side of the hill, where the garbage dump is. The garbage smells so bad that Novalia almost passes out from the smell, and even Stone seems affected by it.“Chuck!” Stone calls. “C’mere!”Chuck rushes through the slimy doom room, and finds the group by the light of Novalia’s torch.“Look for tracks,” Stone tells him. “I think the ratmen went after the slaves we let go.”Chuck can’t stand the stench for long enough to do a thorough search, but after a brief moment, he shakes his head. “I don’t see any tracks at all,” he says. They close the door on the foul smell, and come back to rejoin the rest of the team.We go down the long branching corridor, with Chuck in the lead. Stone and Drinks with Orcs follow him, with the rest of us out behind. The corridor is about eighty feet long. The room at the next end appears to be someone’s sleeping quarters, full of personal effects and equipment. A large sleeping area is in one corner, and there's a box against one wall. In a small hutch there are weapons and other effects. It's decorated with rugs and tapestries. The room is rectangular, with an exit at each of the four corners. There’s nobody in it.“All clear,” Chuck calls quietly, and the rest of us come in. Stone and Drinks with Orcs watch two of the three exit corridors, and Goldpetal moves over to guard the far one, while the rest of us search the room.Chuck looks around, but doesn’t see anything that interests him. Paks looks in the box and finds some parchments in it. She takes these. Miriel looks around for anything that might be magical, but nothing stands out. Telryn looks through the weapons cabinet, and takes a sturdy, sharp knife.“Telryn,” Paks says softly, “Scrolls.” She hands them out to him.Miriel examines the other items in the hutch carefully, but just sees random ratman effects, including a human skull ashtray. Chuck kicks the throw pillow, but there's just mud under it. He cuts the pillow open; it's filled with human hair. “Telryn,” Goldpetal asks, “Were there any arrows in the weapons?” Telryn is too preoccupied with the scrolls, and waves him away, so Goldpetal goes to check it out. There are some, which he takes. Paks searches the bedding to see if anything is under it. Chuck pulls the tapestries off the walls, but there's nothing there. Finally, Paks checks out the weapons rack, but none of the weapons look well made. “Nothing here,” she says, and everyone nods. Stone leads us down the first passageway to the left. Ten feet down, there's another huge room, about forty by twenty feet. There are two exits, one at the end and one to the right. There are a lot of sleeping mats on the floor, and four ratmen are digging through the stuff in the room.Stone steps into the room, and when they still don’t notice him, he attacks one from behind. He makes two firm open-handed chops to the side of its head, and kills it before it knows what hit it. The sack of treasure hits the ground loudly, and the three ratmen whirl around. Novalia steps in with her bow, and shoots the ratman furthest away, across the room. Her arrow bites deeply, wounding it, and Telryn yells “Take one alive, so we can question him!” Drinks with Orcs charges to the right, smashing one of the ratmen with his club. It too, collapses, and Paks sees that the others have the situation fully in hand. She steps over to watch the two remaining corridors. The injured one turns to run, but Goldpetal is quicker, and he cuts it down from behind with his scimitar. It dies at the mouth of the corridor. Red Scale and Swims with Fishes watch the other two corridors, the second exit, and the corridor we entered through. Stone, Goldpetal, and Chuck surround the last ratman, and try to subdue it. Stone misses. Chuck tries to hit the ratman with the pommel of his sword, but he isn’t used to that blow, and strikes a glancing blow which causes him to drop the sword!The ratman bolts for the door. Stone punches it in the head, knocking it out. “Here ya go,” he says to Telryn, as the young mage walks across to it.Telryn says, “This might work, this might work.” He looks like he’s preparing a spell, but then he shakes his head. “Nope,” he says, and takes out his dagger and kills it. Stone looks disgusted. Stone and Goldpetal join the lizard men at the exit corridors, and look down towards them, while Paks searches the room and Chuck searches the bodies. Neither of them find anything.Down his corridor, Stone sees another exit to a thatched door, about twenty feet down, while Goldpetal sees a smaller room about five feet down. It is a nice clean dry room, about fifteen by twenty feet, with wooden racks on every wall. They hold lots of crossbows, bolts, and scimitars. Stone steps to the thatched door, and peeks through. Like the first thatched door we found, this also leads outside. “Chuck,” he calls, and the tracker comes to look for tracks. Chuck steps through the door into a marshy area, with lots of ferns and broken reeds. He studies the ground, and says, “It looks like a lot of creatures might have gone through here in a hurry.”“Where’d they go?” asks Stone.“There’s no telling from here,” Chuck says, “They’d be real tough to track through the swamp at night. Let’s finish here, first.”We go down the other corridor, through the armory room, and down the next corridor. Telryn and Stone take the opportunity to reload, grabbing a bunch of crossbow bolts.The next room is about fifteen by fifteen, with an exit straight ahead, one heading back and to the right, and one heading off the right. This is another nest, abandoned, with lots of mats and rags. There are weapons lying around, as well as some knickknacks and trophies, ears and the like. Goldpetal discovers a necklace of elf finger bones and elf ears, and the thought causes him to vomit. Miriel compassionately offers him some water to rinse out his mouth.  The group is steadily scattering further and further apart, but the warren seems to be almost deserted. Paks heads down the corridor that leads back on the right. She comes into a low-ceilinged room, full of reed baskets and wooden weapons; it looks like practice equipment. Stone goes up another corridor, about ten feet long, ending in a thatched door to the outside. He calls this info back to Chuck, who comes out and looks at the ground. “I see lots of ratman tracks,” he says, “Heading off in all directions, a few hours old. They appear to have deserted the sinking ship.” Paks continues down the exit from the practice weapons room into a large room, twenty by fifteen, that connects back to the nest room that the rest of us are in. There are two other exits to the right. It has lots of reed mats on the floor. There are nicks and gouges in the wall. “Training room,” she says.Goldpetal follows Paks and looks down one of the exits to the right. He sees a corridor leading off into darkness. Miriel, Swims with Fishes, Red Scale, and Telryn follow them in. Telryn asks Swims with Fishes to check out the other exit. Swims with Fishes sees a curving corridor, which he says he can’t see down. Goldpetal lights a candle and explores down his corridor; it leads back to the room with the four brass bowls. We keep searching the warren, splitting up more and more to cover more ground. Everywhere is full of filth.Goldpetal sees a few giant rats, which scatter when he shoots an arrow at them.Novalia finds a larder filled with hams. When she examines them more closely, she realizes that the hams are made from humans. The gruesome sight makes her throw up. When the young woman has recovered, Paks helps her cut them down. They offer last rites, invoking both Tanil and Madriel. In one of the slave areas Chuck finds five listless slaves in manacles. “Miriel!” he calls, and Miriel and Stone come to see what he’s found.Miriel checks them out, but they don’t pay any attention to her. “They’re not diseased,” she concludes, “But they’re unnaturally apathetic. I don’t know what’s wrong. Let’s try to break them free.”Stone and Chuck try, but the manacles are very strong. They’re unable to get them open. Finally, they grab weapons and are able to break them. As they free the first slave, he suddenly becomes lively. “Thank Tanil!” he shouts. “How long have I been down here? Get me out of the swamp!”Quickly, the two warriors break the rest free. Every time they break one free, the slave seems to wake up from a stupor and thanks us for saving them. “The manacles must be enchanted,” Stone concludes.“I want to test them,” Chuck says.Stone takes a broken pair and puts them on Chuck. Immediately, he becomes as moribund as the slaves had been before we found them. Even though they aren’t actually locked, he seems to have no interest in getting them back off.When Stone takes them off of Chuck, the Vigilant breaks into a big grin, and exclaims, “Excellent!”He takes four pairs, and gives the fifth pair to Telryn for further study.It takes about two hours to search through the entire warren, but we find no more ratmen. When we have completely emptied the warren, we gather to leave, and escort the five slaves we’ve rescued to join the others. As we climb out of the warren, we see some large cloud banks to the southeast which are lit with beautiful pink and orange as the Madriel’s light shines upon them. It is the dawn breaking over the swamp with a majestic beauty.</blockquote>

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