2023/07/26: Infiltrating Necrosa's Bases Part 4 Report
General Summary
Knight, Lillith, Kal'vus, Union, Zaran, Buzz, Abarai, Ik-chuk When we last left off, the parties had entered the enormous library inside Necrosa's last known base in Leithien, labelled Facility 6 by her enemies. Kal'vus flitted through the library quickly and quietly in an attempt at recon. He wasn't fully silent, but he was fast enough that it didn't matter. He saw a number of beings throughout the library, and they didn't seem to notice him. 4 classes of wizards. Red, green, blue, and purple. Long pointy hoods that shroud their faces in darkness, part of the robe. Something inhuman about the way they move. They're scattered throughout the library, but they mostly interact with members of their own color. No weapons visible, aside from the books some are carrying. Roughly 50 of them in all. 20 foot tall guy sitting at a table. He's chained to the table with a bunch of books open before him. Tiros pulled a couple of books off the shelf nearby. He was surprised to find it was all very basic arcana instruction. Lillith, looking at the stairs up to the floors above this one, came up with a theory: Each floor represented one level of spell power, and the party was currently on level 3. Lillith snuck up to the next floor to see if that floor had something more advanced. Lillith noticed that the robes of the wizards looked kind of leathery. That's probably their skin. And they probably don't have faces. Lillith came back to the party with the book Astromancy for Beginners. It was still very basic, but in an unfamiliar type of magic. The group considered their options. They decided to try to assassinate as many of these creatures as possible before stealth was broken and they had to go loud. They split into three groups: The highly stealthy group that would do the actual assassinations, the close backup group that had some degree of stealth skills, and the cavalry that had no stealth but plenty of brute force. Lillith, Ik-chuk, Union, Chaos, and Tiros were the first group. Kal'vus, Knight, and the elven archers were in group 2. Everyone else was in group 3. There were some fumbled stealth efforts, but Lillith managed to chivvy the less lucky members of the stealth team through some initial sneak attacks. While stabbing some of the wizards that briefly noticed them, she discovered that their hoods served sort of like bags of holding; a stab through the face never found a back of the hood, and the space inside was cold. The pointed hood was apparently full of brain if you didn't go through the face, though. At one point Chaos decided to try to cut the robe off one of the wizards. The results were predictably horrific, to the point that everyone watching needed to make trauma checks. Tiros, who utterly ignored the trauma, analyzed that these were some sort of incarnate demonic entities. At another point, when it seemed stealth was about to be compromised as three groups of wizards arrived at an ambush spot simultaneously, Lillith managed to kill all thirteen wizard monsters in three seconds. (Way in the back, Buzz was offering the cavalry team cherry juice. Zaran cheerfully accepted.) Finally, after over half of the mages were dead, a mishap finally broke stealth. Ik-chuk, invisible, stumbled, and while he caught himself, the noise he made was enough that one of the wizards noticed. The wizard instantly whirled around and fired off a cone of force while the stealth group was still pausing in horrified shock. The damage was minimal. The noise was not. The battle that ensued saw a lot of weird magic thrown around. The strangest was a box of distorted space and/or time that immobilized and trapped the stealth team and resisted antimagic effects and physical force. In fact, once it had gone off, it wasn't a spell effect at all; it was just a physical distortion that had been imposed on the world. Ik-chuk managed to eviscerate one of the purple wizards on his own (or at most with allies as distractions)! Everyone was very proud. Note: Ao-powered light grenade plus Buzz's phoenix gate equals library-melting kaboom. The parties dug themselves out of the rubble. All of them were alive except for the dryad, and even she wasn't fully dead because her tree hadn't been destroyed. One of the rangers had a broken leg and the sorceress had been crushed into unconsciousness. Big villain hovered out of the rubble of the farther part of the dungeon. He claimed it would take him "minutes" to fix this. He was defended by a spell called "Monologue", which let him monologue for a very long time without either side being able to attack, retreat, or take significant action. He launched into a tirade of complaints, insults, boasts, and threats that lasted for what felt like forever to his audience, but really lasted for 10-15 minutes. Over the course of the monologue, he revealed that he is "The Faceless Watcher", an evolved ultroloth. This is but one of the many ways he's expanding his knowledge of magic. He is, in summary, extremely powerful, extremely knowledgeable, and very annoyed. And he had ways of making his all-encompassing spread of personalized insults surprisingly cutting.
Rewards Granted
2 xp for those above lvl 30, 3 xp for 20-29, 5 xp for 1-19
Character(s) interacted with
Fist of Ranthael (party), Sapphire Tenet (party), Abarai, Ik-chuk, the Faceless Watcher
