Session 18 - The Tower of Alchemy - Deborah's Notes

General Summary

Ilalai's familiar is called Crumbles and is a pet rock with one eye.
Cornelius d'Cannith, a human artificer with dragonmarks on his fingers, runs down the stairs and catches up with the rest of the party. He is super keen to explore this tower with us.
Cornelius asks what he's missed, and the party points at the lava on the floor, the small elemental Hettie is holding, and Musclesdine's freakishly huge muscles in quick succession.

The tiny elemental is a small version of the large lava elemental we fought earlier. The machine that was building it up is long since disassembled for scrap (i.e. Deborah disassembled it for scrap).
Rakki shakes Cornelius' hand. Cornelius is confused by Rakki's politeness.
The door opens up into a long corridor.
Half the party casts 'detect magic,' and Cornelius is a little suspicious of Deborah's hummingbird. Deborah lies about receiving the bird from home, and tells the truth that both of her parents kept hummingbirds but she was never allowed to touch or be near the birds because they were a valuable magical resource and a certain amount of magical prowess was needed to keep them calm and ensure they didn't fly off or misbehave. Cornelius shrugs and doesn't pry any deeper. Deborah sweats profusely and starts to grow more anxious.
We trigger a trap in the hallway. There is a whirring, arrows fire forth, and a skeletal animal falls from the ceiling. Rakki, Hettie, Ilalai, and Cornelius all dodge the arrows. The pressure pad that triggers the trap is weighted to trigger when approximately one giant (or four medium sized creatures) steps on it. Cornelius extracts the arrow trap from the wall, along with a long glass vial with poison in it (that supposedly coated the arrows with poison). Rakki looks at the animal skeleton. It's a large quadruped wearing a metal collar that says 'Knock First' in Giant. Deborah determines that it is some kind of cat.
There is a large ceramic bowl on a pentagonal pedestal at the end of the hallway. Part of the ceiling has fallen on it and shattered it. The front of the bowl has half of a glyph on it. Deborah hides the bowl in her sleeves and 'casts mending' (aka 'deborah glues the bowl back together with alchemical salve while holding the shards so nobody can see them'). The bowl is old and traditional, and has interlocking elemental symbols inside it. Cornelius figures out that it needs four pure alchemical components put inside it, and that the pedestal not the bowl is magical.
Cornelius puts pure water into the bowl and it glows. We don't have any of the other three elements so we look around.
Musclesdine pushes open the door at the end, and with a puff of smoke turns back into Mafaldine. He then coughs up a lot of blood. Everyone is worried. Mafaldine is not worried.
The room ahead contains alchemical equipment but is also covered in rubble and the floor has shifted considerably. Mafaldine runs towards some large vats and investigates them. There are two vats and a central mixer. One vat has an oily filmy flammable substance and the other has an inky black-green rotting sludge in it. The central mixer has an orange oil inside it that is essence of flame. Hettie wants some essence of flame for her fireworks. We keep the essence of flame away from the little lava elemental.
SOMETHING OMINOUS APPEARS ON ROLL20. IT'S IRIDESCENT GREEN AND THE SIZE OF THE MAP. Peter and Lucy are horrified by this foreboding premonition of what may come. Steve reassures us that it was a mistake.
Rakki
Hettie and Deborah head over to a table with lots of glassware on top of them. Deborah finds oversized jars and a huge mortar and pestle. She also finds a large fantasy bunsen burner. Deborah ignites it
The scavenged goods are worth 125gp towards the laboratory that Deborah and Hettie are trying to assemble, and 125gp towards Cornelius' hospital.
The runes on the door say "Elemental Generators."
Rakki leads the way down another staircase. Another trap is triggered. It fires a blade into the wall that says 'PRIVACY PLEASE.'
We proceed down the staircase. There's a skittering noise. Rakki peers forwards and sees a huge pool of water falling from above, another elemental generator (presumably for air), and a construct plodding around. It has four legs, vats strapped to its back, and is falling apart.
Mafaldine, Rakki, and Cornelius sneak up towards the creature. We roll initiative. Cornelius rolls a crit and hits it with his rapier. Mafaldine turns invisible.
Hettie casts a flame spell and her hand begins to spark and sputter. Deborah is glad that she is the one holding the elemental. Hettie spontaneously grows 25 centimetres taller. She is now 183 centimetres tall. Deborah screams, panics, and fires her crossbow into a wall because she's terrified.
Ilalai attempts to shatter the construct. It goes pretty well. Crumbles wedges itself into the floor.
A being begins to emerge from the floor of the room. It is covered in elemental mud. It also tries to fight us. Ilalai splashes acid on it and it grows in size. Like the previous fire elemental, we all resolve not to use acid on that thing anymore.
Another being emerges from the floor. It is covered in fire and crackling lightning.
Cornelius' flying cauldron and Mafaldine's rat familiar explode after being hit with an attack. Deborah is shellshocked at this point.
Ilalai splatters the construct with another shatter. The mud monster is not as badly affected.
We continue to fight. The construct is exploded, but now there's also an air elemental creature to deal with. Ilalai fires a catapulted piece of debris through the chest of the mud creature and it explodes. She is proving herself to be incredibly competent during this fight.
Rakki breaks open the elemental air generator.
(session notes end here because it was 10:30pm and I had to get ready for work the next day, but some more things happened.)
DM's Notes:
The party broke open the generators, recovered samples of alchemical substances, and mixed them together to open the door above.
Inside, a room which seemed to be an office belonging to "Lyndara", an ancient giant alchemist, was inside.
They searched through, found several potions and magical items, a diary which may answer some questions, a reference to a legendary weapon, and a key to the "Fires of Rebirth", apparently at the bottom of the tower.
Outside the tower, the staircase continued down, giving another entrance to the town, and even further down, into an area flooded with seawater.

Report Date

08 Nov 2019