Situation Report Twenty

General Summary

Returning to the cisterns again we head South to a passage. After a short distance, Ugnan's torch lights a side passage heading West, which ends in a recently-constructed strong iron-runged ladder, climbing 30' up. Despite a right heave-ho, I only manage to split the lock from the trap-door at the top, but there's a very heavy weight on it that's preventing me from going further. A job for the surface me thinks.
Back to the junction we head further South and Cherry picks a lock in a door heading East. Behind it, there's a spiral staircase heading up again, where another padlock secures another trapdoor. Cherry silently climbs up and overhears a couple of guards in the room above, bitching about their job. Cherry tells me that the locks are high quality, but un-trapped. "Let's surprise them Cherry." I grin.
With a bellow I push open the trap-door, and leap to attack a couple of heavily-armed guards in a warehouse room. Elona, the new recruit we picked up, leaps past me though and takes up a supporting position.
I leap forward, and the axe swings in a mighty arc straight into his neck with a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage. Arterial blood sprays in a wide arc, splashing across my face. As I blink to clear my left eye I see the poor bastard collapse into a widening pool, his hand clutched hopefully to his neck wound, and his colleague sprinting for a staircase going up, screaming, "Shit, oh shit, shit".
Elona sprints after the petrified guard and manages a weak slash across a calf as he makes a bid to escape. The rest of the crew begin spilling into the warehouse behind me, all of us sprinting after him. I nearly catch him with a wild swing. He's winded but not down. He emerges into an upper warehouse room, where another pair of soldiers are ready for us.
Elona gets the jump again, and engages one of the new targets. I muscle past the petrified guard and land a savage blow on a fresh target. The strike crushes his hip and knocks him sprawling on his arse. "Just fucking surrender, you stupid bastards, I don't want to have to kill you!'
Cherry hits the petrified guard in the back with an arrow and he winces, trying to escape across the room. Elona follows up on her foe and her scimitar slashes across his elbow, severing tendons and leaving it flopping helplessly.
But what's this? Ugnan, picking up momentum as he runs with surprising agility across the room, catches the petrified guard and slugs him with a meaty blow with his handaxe. "Look at what he can do with his new leg!", Sylke comments dryly as she comes up the stairway, casually loosing a shock-bolt that strikes the poor bastard square in the face, blinding him and leaving a blackened hole where his nose used to be.
I crouch in front of the soldier with the crushed hip and grab him round the neck, dragging him up to stick my face into his. "Drop your sword son and we'll tend to your injuries. You've no fight left." His sword clatters to the boards and I kick it away before gently lowering him back down.
The guards wisely surrender and Ugnan goes to work healing them as best he can. They're only guards, and just doing a job. They'll all survive, but will all take a long time to heal.
"Who are you working for?" yields a better description of 'The Minister' – who the guards believe is a masked merchant. However, one of our captors, overheard someone calling him 'Koren Maas'. Is this the link we're looking for?
Ugnan investigates a lower warehouse room, brimmed with high value merchandise. Cherry is pointed towards a locked and trapped door by one of the guards; the Minister's private quarters. She removes a trap, and Betty soon has the door off its hinges with a good yank. "There you go girl."
Cherry and Ugnan search the room and discover papers linking the warehouse to a man called Delvor. Ugnan discovers that Delvor received a simply massive loan of more than 1000 gold to start his business from a Sel-kai bank called Black Rock.
Cherry, lock-picks clicking like clock-work tonight, manages to unlock a chest in The Minister's study and Sylke regcognises a set of robes within that are worn by The Shipbuilders Guild, a guild that has direct responsibility for the upkeep of the machinery keeping Eidolon afloat. Oh, and there's a whole stash of gold and gems in there too. The stash contains a small calling card from Black Rock and a simple hand written message, "To our good friend with all due courtesy."
The wardrobe contains well made clothes suitable for a man somewhere between Cran and Ugnan's height. So, The slippery bastard is a bit shorter than me is he?
The crew ask a few more questions of the guards and learn that The Minister is scheduled to return within hours. Time for an ambush.
We agree to pay the guards off and let them go, with enough money to set them up for a year and hopefully buy their silence. As they stagger like drunken sailors to the exit doors, Cherry uses her Ring of Surface Thoughts to scan them; she doesn't detect any double-cross so picks the lock and allows them out into the night.
We lay plans for an ambush on the floor of the warehouse, as Sylke and Elona back-track to the boat, make it invisible and obscure the displacement with water in the bottom! They then hide themselves at the foot of the ladder we discovered earlier.
The ambush is set.

Report Date

25 Jan 2019

Primary Location

Sel-kai