Second Ptolus Campaign Journal, #59
Still the 26th of Wind
Sir Feruch drops a stone down the passage beside the Pit of Insanity. It falls into magical blackness. Then we hear a crunch emanating from the passage that sounds like something just pulverized the stone. We wonder whether there’s something incredibly heavy down there that one could handle only with telekinesis and magic-impervious materials. After another test, the knight declares that there seems to be a great force at the bottom of the passage that pulls strenuously on anything that enters the passage. Barbatos tries an experiment too: He casts telekinesis from a scroll onto his pocketwatch and sends it down into the passage. As it descends, Barbatos can tell that the force acting upon the watch increases exponentially. But the spell seems to protect a small area from being affected by this force.
The wizard decides to forgo the rest of the pocketwatch experiment and simply send the telekinesis effect down the passage. He can tell through the powerful magic that whatever is down there is mighty enough to absorb the light – that’s why we can’t see past thirty feet down there. After descending a while, Barbatos finds something to grab with the telekinesis and tries to bring it back up again. (This seems to be taking hours from the wizard’s point of view, but really it’s merely seconds.) We crowd around to see what he’s brought up: It’s a tiny, barely visible speck giving off a light orange radiance. The speck doesn’t feel heavy to Barbatos once it’s out of the passage. Diethan and Feruch put it into a canister. Whatever’s at the bottom of that pit seems to contract anything it comes into contact with (including time itself). Barbatos thinks what he has dragged up from the bottom are motes of solidified time. He thinks he could use them to give someone more time – only up to thirty seconds, but still!
But despite this mystery, we got what we came here for – Tharn – and we all feel ready to go. We’re able to depart easily: The magic generating the prison walls that had trapped the litorian and his companions is gone along with the creatures who generated it (they all died in the battle).
We return uneventfully and all head to the Ghostly Minstrel for a meal. A friend comes up to Diethan. “Hey, good thing you got that Balacazar problem taken care of. I heard they were going after you and your pals, planning an assault upon your home up there in Oldtown.” We’re a bit confused by this exchange. Why did the Balacazars call off their offensive? There’s no word about it when we return to Pythoness House (which our wizard friend insists we call “Castle Barbatos”).
The 27th of Wind
We head off this morning to the Temple of Asche to get Barbatos’ chaos-withered arm fixed. We chat with Mand Scheben a bit about Spyncer Coil – the crazy creator of the Swords of Ptolus hasn’t changed much, it seems. Mand notes that, with Zavere gone, Rill seems to be keeping to herself a bit more. (Zavere is off thwarting his future death, which he learned about thanks to us, and a warning from the future Rill.)
After we bid him goodbye, Calista finds a quiet spot and, with a new spell, restores Tharn’s fur color, which was changed by the chaos below the city. (Guess Tharn wasn’t quite resigned to being green after all.)
Next stop: Iridithil’s Home, the elven haven where we hope to find Celdore Silverwood. This leader of Dark Leaf has always been able to help us in the past in our dealings with criminal organizations. Maybe he can confirm the statement we heard from the fellow in the bar last night. Celdore seems to think that the Runewarden Serai Lorenci stepped in for us and smoothed things over with the Balacazars. But that’s news to us!
During the course of the conversation we conclude that Shilukar masqueraded as Barbatos and went to see Serai to broker amnesty between us and the Balacazars. Now we just have to figure out what “Barbatos” promised this eccentric hero of the city.
Off we go to the Nobles’ Quarter, to House Lorenci, a large place with a walled courtyard. An eight-year-old boy opens the door to us. We tell him we have business with Serai and he runs off to see whether the elf’s available; we notice in passing that the boy has a rune on one cheek. Serai arrives and walks us inside, past where Tellian of the Company of the Black Lantern practices archery. Wow, it’s amazing to see all these famous people!
When we ask Serai whether anyone has been here impersonating Barbatos, he looks confusedly at our wizard friend. After a bit more discussion, it comes out that it was Barbatos all along who went to Serai and brokered the deal. So we’ve been making fools of ourselves all morning with this “disguised Shilukar” idea. We give Barbatos a piece of our minds. But he swears that the agreement between himself and Serai has no impact on the rest of us at all. “It’s simply wizardly stuff,” our friend assures us.
The little boy returns to us and, eyeing my great height, asks me who I am. I briefly explain my Charad titan heritage and he nods. He speaks a few words to me in Hu Charad! When I react with incredulity, he calmly replies, “We learn many things here.” Apparently Serai takes in runebearer children and trains them to be leaders of the future. Quite a noble cause.
On the way back, Barbatos admits that Serai came to him and offered to get the Balacazars off our backs in exchange for magical research that he’d been doing. Wow. Is Barbatos really that powerful? I never would have believed it (and maybe I still don’t).
The 28th of Wind
We decide that the time has come to confront the Ennin and strike a blow against this city’s odious slave trade. Today Calista magically stakes out a warehouse in the Docks built into the side of a cliff – this is the font for the Ennin’s operations, we learned long ago from their cretin-middleman Teris Brunchart. Using clairvoyance, she learns the locations of three secret doors in a dark room of the warehouse. The back wall of the main room is solid rock.
We know that when we go in we’re likely to encounter Annagais (a naga), Poselle (a lamia), or perhaps even Vanum Vaal (an ogre-mage sorcerer). We know that these guys are Pactlords of the Quaan, humanoid-hating monsters who nevertheless go about town masquerading as humans.
Calista teleports half of us invisibly into the office of the warehouse, while Barbatos knocks open the door of the place and enters with the rest to confront the guards. There are crates stacked all around the perimeter and elsewhere. A female guard whistles, and a number of crate panels inside open up and out rush horrid-looking creatures bristling with teeth. My group engages a trio of grey-skinned goblinoid brutes in cloaks with falchions.
Though surprised at our sudden increase in foes, we make quick work of them. The only one left alive at the end of the melee is a clerk, whom we knock out and tie to a chair. But this is just the “front” for the slaver group. Now we advance.
Session CXIV – Still the 28th of Wind
The clerk’s office has a desk with some shipping manifests (customers include businesses all over town, some of which I’ve never heard of) and a secret compartment. In it we find a recent letter and a leather bag full of platinum pieces. The letter is to someone named Mabris from the Ennin high-up Poselle and reveals that the bodyguard slaves recently sold to Menon Balacazar have compulsion circumvention wards. This means that when old Menon is exposed, they will not help him and Killraven will be free to strike. But the Ennin think there’s a Balacazar operative within their ranks due to certain information leaks.
Barbatos finds a secret compartment elsewhere in the room with more ledgers and clothbound files. These are records of transactions of the sale and storage of “goods,” which we can tell are slaves (some are noted as “1 E” or “2 L” – elves, litorians, etc.). We also find letters of request from various parties seeking certain kinds of slaves. Customers include the Balacazars, Killraven, and Houses Sadar and Vladaam. And apparently the Ennin also do a fair bit of business with the dark elf houses. Most such letters are addressed to Poselle or Vanum Vaal. We hang onto this evidence to help us create a list of slave-buyers to target later.
Diethan pushes open a secret door in the back wall of the office. The room beyond is quite cold and damp. One hallway continues on, and another is blocked by a door of bluish glass. (Ghul used a sturdy material called bluesteel in his underground constructions – it’s hard to open these doors, even with magic. Also I’ve heard of transparent glass doors down in the Labyrinth, but each has a nasty associated curse, so breaking them is a bad idea. This door seems to be a little of both.) Beyond the glass door are quite a lot of people, sprawled on the stone floor asleep or huddled in corners. Ah, these poor slaves! We must get to them! We rush back to the fallen Ennin to search for the key; meanwhile, Tharn hears some quiet noises that sound like the setup of an ambush around the corner.
We find no key but manage to set off the ambush – the resulting shot misses Barbatos and we all leap in to attack. There’s lots of fungus in here, as well as two wild-looking armored dwarves with big mechanical spear-throwers. (They are not Shuul, despite their interesting powered armor.) As Diethan tosses a chaositech bomb at them, he hears one of the dwarves ask for Vaal, while another urges their invisible friend to help them out.
Calista tries to use a spell to open the blue-glass door, to no avail; in fact, it tries to suck her in! Meanwhile, Tharn scents a demon-human approaching him. His foe shows himself: a nimble, androgynous-looking human(?) in a chain shirt with a greataxe. Tharn and I make quick work of this tiefling while Diethan comes under attack by a spellcasting, obese ogre-mage. It’s Vanum Vaal! Tharn and I move on to the next dwarven foe, and the ogre-mage disappears, to be replaced by two Large blue creatures with big sharklike mouths. They are covered in shards of ice and breathe gouts of cold at us. Calista and Barbatos send fire spells against these creatures while Tharn and I use more conventional tactics. When destroyed, they explode with icy cold death throes, which wound us sorely.
And then the ogre-mage returns and opens fire on us with more foul magic; we’re all looking pretty shaky by this point. Diethan and Tharn throw caution to the wind and fly up to attack the floating ogre-mage. After Calista manages to dispel much of Vaal’s protective magic, Diethan makes a deadly series of attacks with his fire weapons and the horrid ogre-mage falls.
Searching Vanum Vaal for the key to the blue-glass door, we are horrified to see he’s already regenerating – only Diethan’s flaming attacks seem to damage him permanently. But the sickening experience is all worthwhile, because on Vaal’s corpse we find a blue-glass key!
One door we pass on the way back to the slaves’ quarters is now glowing greenly, so Tharn uses his stoneblade to place a wall of stone in front of it – we’ll worry later about where it leads. Back at the slave pen, I open the blue-glass door with the key and Calista puts the slaves’ fears at ease. Nineteen of the two dozen are humans; there’s also one dwarf, three elves, and a halfling. One third of the humans are younger than thirteen. They’re all terribly frightened but unhurt. (One is diseased, but Feruch heals her.) None has been here for more than a week. Feruch learns that most of them were grabbed outside of Ptolus, from up and down the Whitewind seacoast, where they were nabbed at night and taken here by ship. (Embarrassingly, Barbatos questions the ex-slaves to see whether any of them has any cooking skills – apparently he seeks to add staff at Pythoness House.)
We hand out some of Vaal’s platinum and six of the ex-slaves leave to make their own ways home. The other eighteen of them we escort to a nearby safe place: the Mane. (I wanted to take them to Pythoness House, but I was outvoted.) We get them settled and offer them each a platinum piece, plus we give some cash to the leaders in the Mane to help pay for their upkeep. We ask our litorian friend Dessa to watch out for them. I promise to take them down to the Dockmaster the next day to help them all book passage home.
29th of Wind (early in the morning)
Three hours later, we’re back at the Ennin warehouse, but now the door is locked. The piled crates with secret doors that released the thorny hounds are smashed and the hound corpses are gone. The corpses of the grey-skinned creatures have vanished too. In the office, our former prisoner is gone, and the office has been ransacked. Ah, the Ennin are trying to make this look like a simple robbery of their warehouse!
Barbatos detects a magical trap at the secret door leading out of this office. Calista dispels it, but only after it renders Feruch unable to see or remember the secret door. (I grab him and drag him through.)
We approach the wall of stone that Tharn created with his stoneblade. It’s blocking a doorway, but we can clearly see that it’s not the same wall that Tharn created… it’s an illusion. We go through and come to a sealed door. Barbatos opens it with a knock spell and we emerge into a long chamber free of fungus. The floor and walls are made of a reflective metal. We note a high ceiling and a ledge with a stone railing all the way around the room. Two or three human men in helmets peer over the top of the railing. As it turns out, they are only illusions, too. Tharn flies into the room but before we can react, the walls open to reveal strange creatures with large mouths. Destrachans! They look hungrily at Tharn.
I was about to toss a trapfinder ball into the room as a trap-test, so instead I just manage to peg one of the destrachans with it. The hard rubber ball careens off the head of one of the beasts and becomes stuck to one of the metallic walls. The same thing would probably happen to one of us if we tried to walk in there. Tharn flies back out and we decide to close up the door again and search other rooms first.
