Session 7: Coups de Main
Activity Log - The dangers of being too deeply involved has begun manifesting
General Summary
Two days after the incident with the fae and the slaying of Scarlet for Jammy, and twenty-three days since we officially became Dayne Reed’s new Blackhearts in the Month of Epiphany, we received two more letters requesting our services. One letter arrived in Dayne’s office written by someone named Bhunil Krogden asking us to locate his missing son, the other is sent directly to Tea Kettle by his mentor Blue Bottle asking for help to, shockingly, sabotage the laboratory of the High Fabricator Sifter lest his dangerous methods may cause catastrophe to the continent. TK is interested in pursuing this as it is important to his work and was tied to his absence a couple days earlier during the fae encounter. We meet as normal to contemplate our options, as both promised good pay. The Ghal Pelor Chronicle for the day had an article describing a warehouse in Artisan’s Row that may be linked to the Black Thorns. Also, the Color Festival is to be held tomorrow, a festival for flowers with parades and other heavily attended events. I suggested we speak to the book shop owner Isolde that Trevor recommended us to in Echo March as our first task. The bookstore is called “Arcane Bindings” and is dusty, unmaintained and uninviting. The owner is surrounded by books, most of the shelves look unused and there was no sign of any customers in some time. She is not much older than I am, and doesn’t look up when we enter the messy shop. She is rude and unfriendly when she addresses us at last, and isn’t helpful until we mention that we were sent here by Trevor. Considering us his friends, she becomes slightly more accommodating, though finding out that Cojitron is a wizard makes her treat them all the better. I ask about how Isolde keeps the store open. She says she has her ways and the store is also a hand me down from her family. We ask how we can help her, and she hands us a package with a magic grimoire and some spell scrolls courtesy of Trevor, including one that undoes magic effects. She says she’s willing to provide us with half off her scroll copying services and any wares in her store if we help her retrieve a book she claims was stolen from her. She boasts that her technique is good enough that the scroll’s magic might survive the copying process. She accuses a gnome engineer and merchant named Divernik Klume who is known for working on Clankers of stealing a book of hers called “Secrets of Fire”. She is afraid that he will use up the spells within the book before she can do her research. He has a shop two blocks away called “Klume’s Repair”. We agree to talk to him instead of punching him like Isolde suggests to bring the book back. Suggestions that the courts could deal with the issue are waved off by her, saying he’d never admit to it. Unlike Arcane Bindings, Klume’s Repair has a fair amount of customers. The shelves seem well stocked and Klume is a gregarious salesperson. He sees us and marvels at Cojitron, offering to sell to them. We tell him that we have come to ask over Secrets of Fire on behalf of Isolde, and Klume claims that he bought the book fair and square, and even says that he has a receipt from his successful bid at the counting house auction he got it from. We ask to see the receipt and he goes in back saying he’ll get it. After a few minutes we follow him back and spy a hatch in the storage room leading to a basement. I disarm the lightning trap on the hatch and unlock it, and we head down. Below, there is a lab filled with contraptions, potions and other assorted junk, and an inert clanker Klume is working on. He shouts that the book is his; we see it on a workbench nearby. We try to reason with him, but he is intent on driving us away and activates the clanker that he imbued with powers from the Secrets of Fire tome. He claims he can do similar to all clankers. Cojitron notices that the core of the clanker is missing, and that it is effectively soulless and replaced by the fire that now powers it. Stunned by this revelation, we are attacked by Klume arming himself with a gun and his fireborn clanker. Horick takes on the clanker, with Cojitron supporting with rays of frost, which are very effective on this fire elemental charged machine. Horick eventually cracks the clanker shell open, and the fire elemental steps out and burns Horick badly. TK and his bird construct came down after us after having spent some time alone in the shop, and harry Klume, who shoots me several times during the battle. Though I take serious wounds, we manage to club him unconscious eventually, but the fire elemental’s flames are heating up the combustible liquids in the basement, and TK warns it will go up very soon. Horick slays the elemental and it absorbs into Bonk, and we pick up Klume and take the book. the customers are panicking and fleeing the store, and the basement explodes a moment after we leave, setting it on fire. We make it outside where the fire brigade is on their way. I attempt to quell the crowd, telling them that we saved Klume when his experiments below went awry. They seem to buy the story. We leave before the authorities arrive. I pen a letter and drop it with the Goldheart Courier Service, informing Freeleaf that Klume was experimenting with fire elementals on clankers in his store’s basement, which is what caused the fire. We return to Arcane Bindings and checking the book, we indeed find the receipt for a lockbox he purchased from the counting house which indicates the book was rightfully procured. We confront Isolde, and she states that because she couldn’t afford the lockbox fees, Klume probably bribed someone at the counting house to bring it up for auction, then won paying 200 gp and outbidding her. In essence we stole the book back from her, and tell her we would hang on to the receipt just in case so the blowback doesn’t hit us. Isolde agrees to grant us the services and discount we were promised, but does not hide her disappointment at our keeping the receipt, and gives Cojitron a repair device for clankers as a bonus. We leave and head to Hencil Spash’s estate after first cleaning ourselves off and resting for a while at Daghilla’s soon to be open ale house, catching up with Fizzle, Wilkas Cromokal, and Saskia’s family. In the same district, we make it to his manor, which is Balmoran in construct. It is grand, beautiful and richly adorned with lion statues. Cojitron mentions that based on their knowledge, the decoration and colors of the banners indicate Spash could be a Locklander. Warily we knock on the door and the butler that answers takes us to Spash when we mention that we were the ones that helped retrieve the lockbox and that we have more info concerning them. The inside is richly made up, opulence I have rarely encountered. Spash is a fairly young man, with black hair and red and black clothing, the finest one could possibly see in Ravern’s Perch. Spash is slightly condescending but otherwise cordial, and eagerly takes us to a room of trophies housing bones from creatures and some humanoids including what look like gnome and halfling and orc, (at which point I am grateful for my inability to show disgust openly) and tells us that the lockbox, of which he only thought there was one, contains a dragon’s tooth. He takes it out to show us. It is slightly bigger than the one we found loose in Fink’s bags, but it is from the same dragon. We keep this tidbit from him. Fink was an archaeologist and as he is a collector, would be interested in his other lockboxes. We keep the full amount of info we have from him, only saying we found information that points to more lockboxes belonging to Fink existing in the city and beyond. Spash offers us 600 gp EACH to break into the counting house to find and bring him Fink’s lockbox, which he surmises there must be one because the lockboxes are of that institution to begin with. We are hesitant, but Spash points out that the Color Festival tomorrow night provides ample opportunity to distract the guards from looking towards the counting house and encourages us to take his offer. We leave offering no promise other than to consider it. Because we are not far from the college, we decide to take up the job offered to us from Bhunil, even though there was oddly no way to contact them for payment (poorly assuming Dayne could handle that part for once) and head there to see if we can find a lead on the missing student. We ask around the campus about Khelan, and pretending to be students, manage to charm the ones we question into getting his dorm room number and his boyfriend’s name, Glom. We go to the room and question Glom, who is a clean shaven city dwarf. Convincing him that we are constables using our badges (that we didn’t return to Freeleaf), we ask about the last whereabouts of his partner. The missing Khelhan apparently retrieved a crown from a tomb in Baradrad, when everything else had been ransacked. He brought it back and began studying it, and managed to translate the runes on it. He suddenly began acting strange and put the crown on several days ago and went mad, saying something about it being “too noisy, need a quieter place.” He disappears, likely in the direction of Lakewatch Veil. Cojitron and TK reason that the crown has the effect of a Magic Jar spell upon it, and the soul of the zealot buried in the tomb has taken Khelhan’s body for their own; it might seek strong necromantic energy, which the MacMurdaugh Hotel has the greatest concentration of in the city. After saying that we were hired by his father, Glom becomes suspicious, saying that his family lives five or six days travel from the city and that he’s only been missing a couple days. We say that we had our ways of making travel quicker and Glom seems somewhat convinced but still on the edge about our involvement in this case. This suddenly makes us very suspicious about the origin of the letter’s true origin. I look it over and realize that there is no return address, the one given being the courier office it was sent from. This is highly suspect and we realize the job may be a trap, though Khelhan is indeed missing. We reassure Glom we will return him safely, though we are in fact quite unsure. We take some readings of his lab and research area with the mana gauge and find traces of necromancy, syncing the gauge with the student’s energy signature. We leave and pay a carriage to take us to Lakewatch Veil as it is getting closer to sundown. The driver is loathe to go too far into the area and understandably so. We go into the tailor shop once we arrive in the area, having been informed by Saskia and Teal a couple weeks earlier that another gang was searching the hotel out of that building. We find that the building is abandoned for the last several days, but the energy emanating out of the place does indicate necromancy having been used here. We visit the stable and speak to Teal, and both Good and Bad Bill. Teal promises to leave since we defeated Rudivik’s gang after we accomplish Good and Bad Bill’s requests, which is to defeat the displacer beast and to get a powerful weapon like what Babu was given (though it was nothing more than a javelin that’s been decorated). Teal says that the hotel has been quiet lately and that the gang that had been searching it hasn’t been seen the last few days. We decide to pay Bethany a visit as her room should be a safe haven as a supplicant of the night manager. We scramble up the ladder and enter her room, but find that Bethany has been brutally killed. Her body shows signs of grievous wounds and has been dead at least a couple days. There are bones scattered about the room, some in armor and armed, presumably murdered by an attack from the necromancer’s skeletons. The protection afforded her in this room must have waned. the skeletal shrine in the room still bubbles blood however. The gauge does not show Khelhan having been here. We search the room and find little, but do find her journal which lists her bid to buy the MacMurdaugh, as well as her address in Crokoyle not far from our office as well as several entries indicating the number of beings she has brought into the Night Manager’s service. Several days ago, she heard the voice of a new servant, which matches the description of Khelan. This lines up with his disappearance from the college. She also writes of the Blackheart’s attempts to search the hotel a couple weeks ago, and that the area that collapsed on them should have been avoided given how obvious the damage to it was. More circumstantial evidence that they were sabotaged. Right after that time, there were increased raids on the hotel by the masked necromancer. We decide to go to the bar to speak to the night manager, which seems risky and incredibly dangerous. We go down the ladder instead of making our way through the crumbling stairs. The bent neck lady appears and tries to shake us loose from the ladder, which knocks Horick off. TK saves him with a featherfall and we float to the ground, entering the hotel and heading to the bar. The curious child appears and closes the door to the bar and is upset we had been away for so long, but I remind him of the key to our room that we will need back. He changes his demeanor when we say we want to speak to the Night Manager. He tells us we’d be better off dead instead of talking to him because he can take people and their souls from them. We insist and say we are looking for a student that came in here, and he says that he came a couple days ago and signed the night manager’s book, becoming one of the concierges of the hotel. Eventually the curious boy disappears, allowing us through to the bar. The inside of the bar is desiccated like the rest of the hotel, dusty and dilapidated, with damaged furniture littered about. Horick, however, acts strangely, speaking to someone that only he can see, saying that the place is crowded and lively, though no one but us are in the area. We suddenly see a shadowy form at the bar take shape, and though it makes no more than a whisper of sound, Horick speaks to it as if he is holding a full conversation. The haunting by the spirit that has affected him the last couple weeks must allow him to see things we cannot. We don’t know what is said, but Horick seems to vent some kind of frustration at his haunting and after a few exchanges seems to agree to some kind of contract with what we can only assume to be the Night Manager. A book of some kind appears on the bar out of nothing and Horick begins signing his name in it. We attempt to stop him, shocked by the ease at which he would contract with this entity; I even attempt to burn it but to no avail. All I get for my troubles is the suddenly clear and menacing voice of the Night Manager threatening to call hotel security. Horick’s name fully forms even as the book is damaged and it closes. Horick gains a ring magically on his finger, as well as several shocking changes to his facial features and garb from this macabre bargain, and he claims that the ghost of the bent neck lady has fled his body back to her room and that he can sense all the associated “concierges” in the hotel in addition to the specters at large giving this new employee of the MacMurdaugh a wide birth. We argue that what he had done was reckless and that we could have found another way; for days Horick insisted that he was tired but could carry on like normal, but whatever the Night Manager promised in return for whatever strange and possibly sinister tasks he would ask of him in exchange for his “protection” from these hauntings cannot be worth it; I do not know much of the occult or magic, but I know enough to know it is not to be trusted without first fully understanding it. TK for his part is nonplussed and demands the magic coin from him as he no longer needed it to protect against a possession. Horick believes he can now locate Khelan in a room on the 3rd floor, as whatever possessed him made a similar bargain to work as a concierge in order to gain more spectral power. We shelve this disturbing turn of events for now. Our obvious concern for our reckless friend hardly resolved, we decided we needed to take advantage of his newfound senses and abilities and made our way upstairs. The path is cleared now that we had free reign as long as Horick was an employee, and once we find the room Khelan resided in, we quickly enter and block off the door. The possessed student faces us and, brimming with magic, warns us away from here, refusing to relinquish the body he had taken after Khelan spoke the words to activate the crown he unearthed from that Baradradi tomb. The thing was sickeningly fused to the flesh in his skull, and we knew we couldn’t remove it without grievously injuring him first. Cojitron and TK reason that if we weaken the physical host, we might be able to use the magic scroll we obtained from Isolde earlier that removes such energies to halt the possession emanating from the crown, allowing us to safely remove it. Attempts to reason with this undead priest, this Melankep, fail as he would only relinquish Khelan in exchange for one of our bodies to play host, and he immediately goes on the attack when we refuse to leave without Khelan. I wrap the immolating whip around his waist to stop his movement, only to be met with splashes of acidic magic, which I do not entirely avoid. I hold my ground to keep him tied up while Horick casts spells of protection and then proceeds to swing his weapon into the body of Khelan. It is disquieting to see a warrior like Horick chant words of power for magic, but it is something I quickly get over as TK and Cojitron followup with devastating spells of their own. They are determined to knock him down even at the risk of harming the host, and it turns into a largely magical affair as I struggle to keep him from fleeing with my whip. Although Horick also takes some painful spell attacks, our numbers prove to be the tipping point and Cojitron’s bolt of electricity sends him reeling and smoking to the ground, the crown’s influence having waned with his apparent defeat. Cojitron removes the scroll from the case and casts it to dispel the crown’s effect, and, to our great relief, the magic is cut off and it detaches from the poor student’s skull on its own. TK moves in to resuscitate the clinically deceased Khelan and, thankfully, succeeds to getting his heart started again. Quickly feeding him a potion of healing, I feel my anxiety being pushed back down. The thought of an innocent paying the price would have been a difficult blow in a day of difficult blows. The crown rests on the ground of the room, slowly pulsing with dark energy; it has been deactivated for now, but I decided not to chance it and sliced into it with my enchanted weapon. It was too dangerous to be left for someone else to find. A wail rose and the crown disintegrated from the damage I had wrought. Horick looked around, announcing that once the crown had been removed from Cojitron’s casting, the name Khelan disappeared from the “ledger” and was replaced by Melankep. Now, that too, with the crown’s destruction, disappeared as well. Khelan eventually comes to and we tell him that we were hired to help find and return him safely to Glom. We calm him down enough to explain the events that led him here, and I ask as forcefully as I could muster not to deal in powers that he couldn’t understand, a topic I feel strongly in after Horick’s ill fated contract. Despite the loss of his major academic find, Khelan takes the point and we hastily leave the MacMurdaugh to return him back to the university. Reunited with his partner Glom, Khelan expresses his gratitude and asks what he can do to repay us as he had no money (and clearly the job was a trap to begin with for us). We settle on access to the college’s labs and facilities in case TK and Cojitron desired equipment for their own projects, something he is happy to provide. A thought occurred to me, and I took the letter we received about the job to begin with and I show it to Khelan, asking if the handwriting on it was indeed his father’s. Looking it over, he shakes his head and very confidently says the writing was not at all from his father; it was too neat and well written to be his father’s “chicken scratch”. He asked where it came from and we deflect, not wanting to worry him further. After we leave campus, I study the letter further, and the answer came to me, frustrating me to no end that I didn’t notice earlier. The handwriting is of one I have seen around Uncle Dayne’s office many times on ledgers, receipts, journals, letters and the like; it belonged to Ian Becker, the missing manager of the Blackhearts. I immediately inform the other three of my suspicion, as they hardly would have noticed given my dispassionate expression while studying the letter. Was Ian himself the Masked Necromancer? Or was he working with them? It would explain the sabotage that got the others killed, and why he would want us out of the way now that we had taken their places and were getting in his way of finding Fink’s lockboxes with the dragon teeth. If I ever knew to frown, I would have at that moment. Already Horick was, in my sincerest belief, in danger for getting involved with the Night Manager because we couldn’t begin to understand this power the spirit had over the MacMurdaugh. Bethany’s decaying corpse was proof enough to me that contracting with him would not end well. Now we were doubly in danger with one of Dayne’s former associates discovering our involvement and wanting us dead, and knowing intimately how the operation worked which was to his advantage. I began to regret accepting the increased contract work from Uncle Dayne; I only ever considered his mercenaries to be ruffians that rarely did anything of import who were beyond their peak as ruin sweepers, and so considered it only more pay for slightly more involved work, but not anything like this at all. Now we were in the middle of a story that had possibly gotten away from us. What can we do now? The End for now, ~Bayour S.
Rewards Granted
- Half off scroll copying and other such arcane services and wares from Isolde's Arcane Bindings
- Access to the college's laboratories and other facilities courtesy of Khelan
- No monetary compensation for Khelan's rescue, as the posting was a sham
Missions/Quests Completed
- Retrieval of "Secrets of Fire" for Isolde, despite the questionable legality of her ownership of it
- Successful destruction of Melankep's crown and rescue of Khelan from its clutches
Character(s) interacted with
- Isolde, Proprietress of Arcane Bindings introduced by Trevor DeWitt
- Divernik Klume, Gnome clanker engineer and owner of the now burned Klume's Repair
- The Night Manager of the MacMurdaugh
- The Curious Boy, the Bent Neck Lady and other hauntings
- Khelan and Glom, partners and students of the Archaeology School of Ghal Pelor College
Related Reports
Notes
- Ian Becker either is the Masked Necromancer or working with them. Doubtful Dayne Reed is involved, he seemd genuinely distraught over the deaths of his Blackheart mercenaries and he's not a good enough actor to pretend otherwise
- Horick's contract with the Night Manager and new abilities are concerning; no telling what tasks the hotel will set him on and what the consequences of declining them would be
- Getting involved in Isolde and Divernik's dispute was risky; we don't want to get on the constabulary's radar more than we already have
- These ghosts are starting to become burdensome
