Session 10 - Descent Into Depravity

General Summary

11 Sar

Feragni attempts to place Ralso under arrest, clawing at her viciously.
She bypasses him, narrowly slipping down the stairs. Feragni returns down to the other heroes to fill them in on the secret passage.
The agents patch themselves up quickly and leave the mimic behind to pursue Ralso before she can escape the building, moving quickly up to the second floor and down the stairs into the unknown.
The heroes enter the unlit basement of the Dreaming Palace.
The first room is a large collection of preserved biological "wet" specimens, ranging from preserved humanoid body parts and whole fetuses to more bizarre curios. The agents are attacked by undead animated in the jars.
The specimens are quickly dispatched, but not after nauseating several of the agents and teaching them a valuable lesson in combustible vapors.
The second room is a macabre trophy room, where the flayed skins of several humanoids hang like cloaks and long coats on hooks around the room. The agents are again attacked by animated undead, several of the skins flying and engulfing them.
Feragni and Artorius are both controlled by the shredskins, with Abigail suffering a critical cut to the throat, but they are able to fend them off before they can be puppeteered in harming each other.
The next room is a perfectly clean rendering chamber with a large cylindrical hole in the ground and ceiling. While checking out several other doors in the room, the ochre jelly resting in the bottom of the pit pulls itself up to the floor and attacks, nearly incapacitating Cara in the process.
The agents learn that ochre jellies are incredibly resilient to physical damage and split into cellular duplicates of each other under certain circumstances. Fire appears to be very effective, however, and the ochre jellies, a plural of itself at this point, are eventually melted away.
Exploring the adjacent room, a converted smelter, the watch agents discover more evidence in the discarded personal effects of several of Pratchett's victims from their missing persons list, including Archibald Knight.
The next room, unlocked through Feragni's lockpicking skills, contains a fully stocked and organized necromantic laboratory, cementing that Pratchett is in fact a skilled and deeply mad necromancer.
While Exley is busy thumbing through Pratchett's notes and spellbooks, Feragni moves to the hall in the room to close the cage doors on several corpses, fearful that they could animate like the other undead. Unfortunately, they were already aware and leaped to attack him with their boney, smoking claws.
The next room is, somehow, even more shocking, containing a shrine dedicated to an aspect of Norgorber, with his unholy symbol sculpture suspended near the ceiling with is starburst eye. The agents find a book written in what appears to be blood.
They hear the sounds of torture in the next room.
Hendrid Pratchett stands before them, wiping a set of surgical knives down and raising his unsheathed sword cane at the agents with the threat that they weren't the first guards to snoop around his activities and they won't be leaving the Dreaming Palace alive.

Report Date

03 Dec 2020