Previous: An Adventuring Party
Games and Deceit
With no real leads to follow and a deep need to burn off stress, we decided to head to the local post-harvest festival. Dracarys and Cail absolutely crushed a carnival game called Titan’s Grasp, and in doing so apparently impressed some local muscle. A shady fellow appeared and offered to stake us in an underground (literally, as it turned out) competition. The Brawlers League. We haggled the guy down from the ridiculous “finders fee” he wanted from any of our winnings, but ultimately we struck a deal.
Moments later, the festival was under attack. The creepiest things I’ve ever seen - Skin Flappers is the only way I can describe them - burst out of some crates and began causing chaos. As we dispatched them, a stranger in black armor with a flaming glaive joined us. His name was Rylok, and he’d been digging into some character named Sabrina. Apparently she was the head honcho of the Orion Transport Company, and he was sure she was up to no good. When we checked the crates the Skin Flappers had burst out of, they were stamped with the Orion logo, so that seemed to check out. And she was connected to the Brawlers League, where we now had an in.
The party went to find lodging and plan, and we ended up at The Pirate’s Chair. It’s not far from The Broken Shield. Gili’s place. I took the opportunity to sneak away and go check in with him. I reported I’d made the delivery, which prompted questions because apparently the intended recipients were the late owners of the Brackus Estate. Hard to deliver something to the dead, and now I’d been spotted in town with the very people thought to have killed them. It took some double speak, but I smoothed things over, I think. Got a new job anyway. A parcel needed to deliver to someone in Kymal, and I could pick it up the next morning. I rejoined the party.
The Hidden Past
The first night of the Brawlers League went fully to plan. Everyone won their fights, and I caught sight of some sort of messenger talking to Sabrina. After the competition was done we began heading back to the tavern, but were interrupted by a loud disturbance in the town square. We diverted to check it out and found guards dealing with the aftermath of an attack. A giant, tusked gorilla had appeared out of nowhere, destroyed a statue, beat the snot out of several guards, and then vanished.
While we were puzzling over that, Cail somehow spotted a half-orc woman peeking in on the area. We gave chase, caught her, and much to her chagrin forced her to talk with some magical assistance. Her name was Olaz. We retreated to The Pirate’s Chair, and had a nice long talk. Turned out Cail is far more than he appears.
Years ago, the being that is now Cail was deeply evil. This woman was part of an order that had worked to save the world from him. In those days, he’d built some sort of literal dead man’s trigger that was expected to destroy the world if he was killed, so they had to seek alternative means of stopping him. Memory was the key. They managed to hide his so far and so thoroughly from him that it requires the intervention of a god to overcome it. The order had been spying on us and knew of our deal with the Wildmother. They believed it would bring back the person Cail was, and they feared that more than anything.
It was a lot of information to learn all at once. Cail was goofy. Excitable. Competent in a fight, but caring. Nothing like what this order claimed. Sure they ascribed this evil to a hidden past self… but the end of the world? It seemed a bit much. The party took it more seriously though.
The next morning, I returned to Gili to collect the parcel and get the final details. Dracarys noticed me leave and followed me, which set Gili on edge. I learned enough to put Dracarys onto a different scent. Or rather the same scent we’d been on. The cryptex delivery had been commissioned by the Orion Trading Company. We were already digging into the Brawlers League without that info, so I could tell Dracarys we were on the right track without divulging anything specific.
The Spocks of Spock’s
That night we returned to the Brawlers League for the semifinal. This night went wild. Cail and Dracarys were sent into the arena for 2v2 combat, but right before combat started, the League introduced a wrinkle. Every couple minutes a gong would sound, and combatants were required to switch teams. Friendly fire would result in instant disqualification. A fascinating concept… if it hadn’t been rigged. The reigning champion was granted every advantage.
I tried to spend the time getting close to Sabrina’s spectator box to see what I could overhear. Doros had made me invisible, so I was able to get close easily enough… but it seemed that Sabrina had planned for that. Some other invisible entity caught me. How, I don’t know. It was clearly able to see me, but I couldn’t detect more than the direction its voice came from. Ultimately, I talked my way out of a scrape, but left with the threat of violence if I were to find myself in the wrong place again.
Cail and Dracarys were knocked out in the semifinal, but the champion was impressed with how much of a fight they put up. He spent some time teaching Cail how to properly wield his kusurigama. The whole party appreciated that. Cail was kind of a wild card in combat already. We didn’t need his weapon to be too. After that we went back to The Pirate’s Chair and slept.
The next morning we stumbled across another store called Spock’s Enchantments. Apparently there’s one in each of 5 major towns across the continent, each run by a different brother of the Spock family. This one was run by Onyx, and he was deeply dismayed to learn of our run-in with Quartz (their parents liked rock, apparently) in Onstall. He claimed that the beans we’d gotten there were deeply dangerous, and offered to buy them back for far more than the price we’d paid. We relented and sold them back, but not before Cail pocketed one. I also took the opportunity to commission a belt that could summon its paired dagger back to its holster at a thought. It would be ready in 18 days.
Information
Around this point, we split the party to follow some leads in town. Unfortunately, I neglected to write notes that session so I only have vague memories. Some of us visited a very irritable Aaracokra in a library and learned some stuff (we might have all been present for this?)… and at some point a small group went into the sewers for some reason, got absolutely wrecked pretty much right away, and beat a hasty retreat (this might have coincided with the upcoming infiltration?).
Dealing with Sabrina
At The Pirate’s Chair, we plotted out what to do next. We were out of the Brawlers League, so the next likely place to find information about Orion was at their central shipping hub here in Westruun. This was a landmark to behold - a tower rising hundreds of feet above the city, where airships from all corners of the continent could dock. Sabrina’s flagship was currently docked there, and we suspected she’d be away doing business in the city.
The plan we came up with was for myself (with some magical assistance from Doros) to teleport up to the crow’s nest of the flagship, then invisibly climb down and search the place. This… kind of worked. Doros was caught almost immediately, but I don’t need invisibility to avoid notice. While the bard worked to talk his way out of things, I snuck through the cabins and found some maps that highlighted the shipping routes between Westruun and Emon on the coast.
Somehow, Doros was able to convince Sabrina that we were there to offer our services as mercenaries. I mean, the guy’s good at talking, but I kinda figured she had us in her sights as a threat already. She had a task already prepared for us though. Apparently the larger ship across the dock, The Mayfly, was supposed to be mid-loading and the work had stopped. What’s more, strange noises had been heard within and the crew that was supposed to be aboard hadn’t been seen in a while. We accepted the task and rejoined the party.
Information
Depending on the sequence of events, this is either where we learned how it went in the sewers, or Doros just shared what we learned and agreed to with the rest of the party.
The sewer crew was beat up, so we took some time to recover. And it was a good thing too… while the journey back up the docking tower to The Mayfly was much nicer with permission and elevator access and all that, our greeting on the ship wasn’t very nice at all. No sooner had we stepped below decks than that bastard Arthund Waney appeared. We had no idea how he got there, but that wasn’t particularly relevant. He wasn’t any less nasty the second time around. Sabrina’s bodyguard joined us, which would prove useful later.
Flight from Westruun
In the heat of battle, we ended up launching the airship to get it away from the tower and prevent Arthund escaping again. That didn’t make dispatching him easier though. A storm grew around us as we sailed up into the sky, clouds obstructing our view and rain pouring down on the deck. We took some close calls, and at one point Cail planted that bean he’d held back from Spock. Before it could sprout, we did ultimately manage to take Arthund down, and then we had a new problem. Un-planting the bean didn’t seem to stop its growth. At the last moment, I chucked it overboard and as it fell through the storm, we saw lightning strike several times consecutively.
We didn’t have time to go check what had happened though. Below decks were the ragged remnants of Dracarys’ crew. Arthund had been their captor for some time, and they were in rough shape. Several had perished but their captain, Lamora, and a few others were hanging on. While some of us set about freeing them, the others asked Sabrina’s bodyguard to contact her. We’d been conscripted to investigate what was happening with this ship, and here we’d flown off with it. If we didn’t want her considerable resources chasing after us, we needed to convince her we weren’t stealing it. Fortunately(?) she was able to teleport directly to us, where we hashed things out.
Orion was cooking up something new with this ship. All its airships have brumestone engines, but this one was the result of special modifications from Lolen, a gnome engineer. Its maiden voyage was meant to test how well this experimental engine performed, but finding a crew to run a ship with a possibly dangerous engine had proven difficult. She agreed to a trade. We’d put the ship through its paces and report back to her with what we learned, and she’d give us the ship in return. Well, sort of. She’d report it stolen and collect on its insurance policy, and we’d be in trouble if we were ever discovered with it… but Orion wouldn’t come after us. She gave us instructions to go to her drydock in Kymal for repairs to damage sustained during the fight, and to collect a payment for operating expenses during testing.
Next: The Journey South