2024/07/19: Avenging Anastasia Part 2 Report
General Summary
Terana, Knight, Kal'vus, Buzz The party climbed the stairway that led up the inside of the tower the wights had been guarding. At the top was a trap door leading upward. Transmutation magic was dripping out from behind the door in almost liquid form. The party decided they should really get something expendable to open that door, preferably while the party was outside the building. Once the team had evacuated, Buzz summoned a poison clone and had it open the door. There was no immediate, dramatic transmutational death, so the clone ventured upward. On the other side was a mostly empty room with archer slits overlooking the rest of the castle. In the direct center was a complicated iron stand. A large, very black rapier with an ornate handguard was set point-down in the stand. The blade was obsidian and the hilt was made of jet. It was positively dripping with transmutation magic. A few seconds later, the poison clone realized it was beginning to petrify. It was also feeling nervous, which shouldn't have been possible: It was purely a construct with no self-awareness. As it made a quick withdrawal from the tower, the clone was picking up more and more status effects: It was fatigued, blinded, deafened, depressed, and more. While the party decided what to do about the disturbing artifact, a pair of leech-faced ghouls came out of a previously unnoticed door behind them. They got mulched in short order. Divine inspiration suggested the sword was necessary to lift the curse on Anastasia. An initial attempt to send a little fuzzy phoenix-metal golem up to stick it in a bag of holding failed, with the golem being petrified with the sword in hand. Buzz headed up as the second attempt, trusting in his magic-eating sword to protect him. This succeeded, though Buzz was disturbed to notice that the magic-eating sword was supercharged and sparking by the end of it. The party regrouped at the base of the tower, artifact sword in tow. An area scrying by Buzz revealed a lot of secret passages throughout the area. The area had been settled for a long time. There were no passages leading into the castle, but the castle itself had secret passages. The scrying revealed that a large portion of the local population was currently being held, alive, inside the castle. Their precise location remained unknown. A second divination, Racoumb's Familiar, summoned a little garden gnome-like stone creature with a pointy staff. He directed the party to an unassuming wall. Terana and Humphery blew a hole in it. On the other side was a narrow downward staircase, and the party descended. Some shadows tried to sneak attack the party as they went to investigate a source of tinny music coming from one side of a crossroads. This didn't work out for them. Knight spotted them using third-person view, and his half-aimed elastic stabbing gave Kal'vus a rough target. The subsequent shotgun-blast of swordblows shattered one of the shadows in a burst of light. The rest of the group deployed light effects and undead detection to remove all ability of the enemies to hide, and then Knight took most of the opposition to pieces in a flurry of extendable black arms. Terana finished the last of them while Azhar was still trying to figure out how to cause debilitating pain to a shadow. Terana dug an amulet out of a corner of the basement room, and then breached through a walled-off doorway into a gorgeous dance hall. A tall, well-dressed vampire with a top hat was dancing alone in the center of the room. A gramophone was generating the music from the corner of the room. The vampire was dancing in the pattern of a strange ritual circle in the center of the room. The magical energy flowing around the ritual was so great that it was visible to the naked eye. The ritual was carved into the castle and impressively hard to affect. It may have been the reason the walls of the castle were so indestructible. About a minute after the group entered, the lights spontaneously changed color from yellow to red, and the vampire briefly panicked before switching to a sort of spicy salsa dance. The entire magical circle changed in the process. Building on this with some experimentation, the observing adventurers determined that the only way to avoid rapid annihilation while inside this whirlwind of summoning magic was to dance to match the music. Worse, once Terana and Humphery (the only ones present with any knowledge of dancing) took the plunge, they discovered that more dancers meant the ritual powered up faster. And interrupting the ritual would just release the gathered energy in an apocalyptic blast. Terana and Humphery almost didn't dance to the vampire in time, but they did manage it with great pain and effort. He was smeared to ribbons and then nothing at all in the seconds after Humphery shield-punched him out of step. Then Kal'vus dumped Buzz's antivenan metal dust into the gramophone's trumpet, pulled the player needle up in a feat of effort that put all his past experiences to shame, was flooded with what magic remained in the device, and passed out, glowing. Terana rushed to check that Kal'vus was okay. Knight retrieved the gramophone, which had rapidly depreciated in value as the ritual wound down.
