The Murder of Magistrate Tell

Rumor

 * None of the information you have received has been first-hand, but the murder is said to have occurred last night and to have been discovered by his wife Celia the following morning, he is rumored to have been stabbed in his own house, he is rumored to have been depressed and behaving erratically since the collapse of the Dreamscape, his wife apparently sent their sons to visit their grandmother in Ruastin for the weekend "to give him some space," and he is rumored to be having an affair with his secretary. (Jon's memory worked on this one, remembering having heard this rumor during the last adventure thread: the secretary's name is Carrie.)

Facts

 * A paladin named Travis witnessed Petros leaving Tell's house last night shortly after the murder would have occurred. Travis said that the streetlamp was on and Petros' face was uncovered, and that his house is directly down the street from the Paladin's headquarters where there is always a guard marching outside even late at night ("it's a guild ritual.") He also stated that Petros had passed a Zone of Truth spell, but that he knows it is possible for people with a strong will or magical assistance to subvert that spell.
 * They [the paladins?] subsequently searched Petros' apartments and found the murder weapon.
 * Zadkiel avows that Astilla used a Commune spell to contact an angel of Altaris, who stated that Petros had NOT killed Tell.

Suspects

 * Petros Alaric, the High Seeker of Fantarin, has been arrested for the crime.

MAL 2

 * Jon and Zadkiel spoke to Captain Black, who told them Magistrate Tell had filed no papers at all regarding his hiring of the party, and had taken the money out of his own discretionary fund (legal, but highly out of character.) Jon told her the truth about the Magistrate's interest in the idol of Sholaith and his desire to invade the cult compound despite the Mayor denying his requests to do so. Captain Black retroactively declared Jon, Red, Aler, and Adriel personal security retainers of the Tell family and gave Jon four postdated letters to that effect, along with the keys to Tell's home and office.

MAL 2

 * Jon and Zadkiel shared what happened in Petros' apartments with Captain Black, and she told them more details about the murder investigation. She mentioned Magistrate Solon and the Ducal Emissary as her superiors in this matter, and stated her concerns that the Emissary, the other magistrates, and the Mayor are all under pressure to solve this case and execute somebody for it as quickly as possible, but that political reasons ensure this will not move forward until a mage has arrived to perform a more detailed magical scan on Petros and the leadership of his church has been involved.

MAL 2

 * Kit informed the group that the magistrate's wife, Mrs. Tell, left town on a coach with a man. From the man's description, Seven identified him as Mrs. Tell's brother.
 * Jon and Red visited Jen's brothel, where he was enthusiastically received. Jen and the girls chatted for a while, but did not know anything relevant beyond the widespread rumors of the Magistrate's affair with his secretary Carrie. One of the hookers was able to give you her address.
 * Astilla led the group to Petros' apartments, where the group was prevented entry by a Ducal guard. Seven sneaked invisibly up the stairs and triggered a ghost attack, at which point Jon convinced the suspicious Ducal guard to let them go up to fight the ghosts. After defeating the ghosts and rescuing Seven, she showed them the item she had found on top of the bookshelf which had triggered the ghost attack: a coaster-sized stone disk with a spiral shape on it and a rune scratched on its obverse. Red and Angara managed to sneak into the bedroom and obtain Petros' scent from the bedsheets.
 * Red, Khirg, Aler, and Adriel did some more reconnoitering around town, circling Tell's house and finding no trace of Petros' scent.
 * Captain Black also gave more details about the murder itself: Tell died last night between 10PM and midnight, he was stabbed in the back with a paralyzing dagger and died in bed, and his wife found him the next morning. She had not heard anything in the night, nor had the servants. Their two children were not at home. Tell was contacted via Speak With Dead and had not witnessed the identity of his killer, since he was stabbed in the back and paralyzed. The murder weapon was recovered from Petros' apartments, and had his fingerprints on it. The High Priest of Tallian affirms that Petros was not possessed at the time of examination (this morning.)
 * Reconvening, the group went to examine Tell's office. The Ducal guard let them in but told them not to remove anything, and they cooperated with that. Going through Tell's overstuffed filing cabinets would take days, but the guard helped them find the file on Petros, which had absolutely no mention of any personal relationship between the two men at all (just some back and forth memos about attempts to use Raise Dead during the nightmare plague.) Zadkiel and Aler found a combination safe behind a painting, and Adriel correctly guessed that Tell's combination was "1-2-3-4-5." Inside the safe was a purse of coin, 12 vials of unidentified liquid, and a stack of racy letters from Carrie the secretary, which Jon insisted the team copy down word for word. The group then sent a message to Captain Black about their findings in the safe.

MAL 3

 * Searching Tell's mansion, the party again caught no trace of Petros' scent.
 * From the scents present on the master bed and the guest bed, Red deduced that Mrs. Tell had been sleeping in the guest bed recently (which also explains why she wasn't present during the murder.)
 * There was a faint trace of necromantic energy in Tell's house, as of a necromantic spell or creature present here within the last day. Zadkiel pointed out that this could have come from the Speak With Dead spell.
 * Aler discovered Celia's diary in her lingerie drawer. In the last several entries, she fretted about her husband's mood swings (his spirits apparently lifted on the day he hired you, then crashed again the week after) and decided to send her children to Grandma's till they could sort this out.
 * Red discovered a switch in the fireplace which opened a staircase to a secret room next to the winecellar. A pentacle painted on the ceiling teleported in two bone demons. Jon determined that while the pentacle did radiate some faint Abyssal energies, the portal itself led from one point on the Prime Material Plane to another. In other words, the pentacle is not a gate to the Abyss, nor is it possible that your nemesis Chavalk could have sent them here from his plane-- there's probably a demonologist/planar mage around here on Malachi somewhere orchestrating this.
 * Also in that room was a carved idol of Sholaith, definitely not the living elemental icon Genevieve had with her-- it was non-magical but had trace elements of magic on it as if a spell had been cast on it recently.
 * There was also a stone medallion with Terran writing on it (later identified as using divine magic to cast Transmute Mud to Rock, Transmute Rock to Mud, Stone to Flesh, and Flesh to Stone, once a day apiece, when the command words are activated.) Jon declared it to the Ducal guard outside and agreed to bring it to the Grey Citadel as evidence. The cord of the medallion had Tell's scent on it.
 * Noyar said that Raise Dead had been unsuccessfully attempted on Magistrate Tell.
 * The group wanted to go to the seance medium to contact Tell's spirit, but Jon insisted on going back to the Temple of Alayan to get an actual Speak With Dead spell cast instead. The magistrate's spirit was confused and primarily kept asking after his wife and lamenting over the eternal youth he had lost his chance with by falling out of favor with Sholaith. He said he barely knew Petros, and that his only enemies were Arthon, Genevieve, and the cult of Sholaith. Questioned about the idol in the basement, he said Sholaith "barely spoke to me anymore," and that she had promised to take him back to the fold again soon, but now it was too late.
 * Jon and Zadkiel went to Celia's house and cajoled/blackmailed her into letting them in. She was short and cagey with them, claiming to know nothing about most of their lines of questioning, but did volunteer that Jarvis had been in poor spirits this month, speculating that he was stressed about the nightmare plague. She also said that he had been frustrated with the mayor and seemed upset with himself for letting one of the cult leaders escape.
 * Returning to the Temple of Altaris, the group met the newly ordained Greeley and learned that the local shiver users were no longer seeing extraplanar nightmare visions. They also learned that the community is currently suffering a lot from shiver withdrawal and that the personnel at the rehab center could tell you more about this. Greeley opined as a formal criminal that killing a magistrate was about the dumbest, highest-risk crime a person could commit. He also volunteered that Genevieve disliked Tell-- "they had a history."

MAL 4

 * Detective Noyar told the party that the vials they had found in Tell's office turned out to be hair restorer and were not poisoned.
 * The party fetched Vyna the priestess of Fantarin to try to trace the magical portal that the demons in Tell's mansion had emerged from. She explained that essentially all teleportation in the gameworld is interdimensional, making it both dangerous and difficult to trace; however, with an excellent dice roll, was able to confirm that the origin of the teleport came from Malachi, not the Abyss, and further offered that it was short-range (less than 25 miles away) and came from somewhere to the north or west (not over the ocean.)

Proving League of Snakes Exist
From this point on in the investigation the focus will switch entirely away from the specifics of the Tell murder case and instead focus on the vast organization known as the League of Snakes. The goals are to prove that they exist, that they had motive to be responsible for this, t

MAL 5

 * The Mayor sent for Jon, wanting to know more about the unusual behavior of the Magistrate which Jon inadvertently alerted the Ducal Emissary to earlier. Jon mostly leveled with him. The Mayor also told the party about the political bind he was in regarding Petros' arrest.
 * The party visited Seven and received the results of her research from earlier in the day: there were a pair of necromancers more than a century ago named Shali and Sendor Arakin, whose wizarding seal the symbol you found in Petros' house likely is (the entwined letters "SSA" probably being their initials, not the word "ASS" as Kit guessed.)
 * This is the same symbol as the rune Seven found in Petros's apartment on the coaster.
 * Did we ever actually ask Petros if he owned a coaster like that - or where/why he got it? This may lead back to Dayant Arakin.


 * Red took off on her own in bird form to commune with the land, learning of extraplanar disturbances in three sources including the vicinity of the tower.
 * After some more party debate, the group narrowly voted to approach the area of extraplanar disturbance Red's Commune With Nature spell had identified in the forest. It turned out to be a locked and shuttered cottage. In it the party found some traps, two divine magic scrolls and some other loot, a glowing crystal ball whose purpose they couldn't figure out, a rug covering a faded summoning circle with a symbol representing the plane of Air, a few books in elemental languages, and two message scrolls written in Druidic code, which the group noticed were written in the same handwriting as the note from Sahree's trashcan. The first instructed the recipient to "discharge the curse we owe to C" and "see if you can extract S," while the second said "the situation has changed" and it was now more important to "recover the Chaos Hound." The notes also mentioned a nearby necromancer referred to as "D.A." who was the ally of an ally but mistrusted by the Druids in question.
 * Red tracked a human scent from the cottage to a clearing deeper in the forest where the party found an elven druid, later identified as Liria, attempting to capture a young blond woman, later identified as Bay. The party ambushed and attacked Liria, freeing Bay.

MAL 6

 * The group talked to the young woman you rescued in Session 5, who gave her name as Bay Morrissey and told the story of her capture and escape from the Elemental Druids. She did not know the name of the demon she saw there but said he looked just like Adriel, only larger. She also said that Jendarion had claimed the demon was a fey. She offered to help the party fight the necromancer they are pursuing if they would help stop the Druids from chasing her.
 * The bat turned out to be carrying a letter for "Dayant Arakin" with an unusual gold wax seal on it. Tearing the envelope open, it turned out to be a vaguely worded letter from someone named Harasket about transport through the Veil and a "job that went smoothly," but it did namecheck Lord Chavalk and ask Dayant to keep Harasket informed of developments in Hastenport.

MAL 7
This session was the first of two involving the raid of Dayant Arakin's tower.


 * Jon found a wax seal inside a hollow book in the same skull-and-snake shape you found on the letter from Harasket.
 * Aler found an unsent letter from Dayant to someone named "Holden" concerned about the Duke's attitude towards necromancers and mages, and a creepy parchment from Chavalk congratulating her on completing a curse for him and welcoming her to the "League of Snakes."
 * The group found a pentacle ringed with skulls and determined it too small to have transported the bone demons you fought in Tell's basement.
 * Descending into the lightless basement, the group lit everburning torches and saw the head of a unicorn mounted to one wall and a large mirror mounted to the other. The face of Chavalk flickered into view and taunted Adriel, who evaded Jon's attempt to restrain her and smashed the mirror, triggering a magical explosion
 * Oh, and the unicorn head fell off the wall right after this happened. No explanation for that.

MAL 8

 * The necromancer, Dayant Arakin, appeared and spoke briefly with the party before Red attacked. She did not reveal much, but did acknowledge an alliance with Chavalk (who she said she supported because of his policy of tolerance for the undead) and identified the creature on Aler's shoulder as "nothing at all, don't you think?" She also clearly knew Jon and Adriel, and did not recognize Sahree (who Jon was disguised as at the time.) Jon cast Detect Thoughts on her and succeeded at sensing her reluctant choice not to try to turn the party into her undead minions out of a desire to please Chavalk somehow.
 * There was a big messy combat with Dayant, who proved to be a vampire, and two bone demons similar to the ones you encountered in Tell's secret basement earlier. The combat was impeded by a magical trap that caused walls of flame to spout up from the floor, separating party members. Dayant turned to mist and retreated through the barred ceiling while the party successfully killed the demons.
 * On the way back to Hastenport, the party chatted with some farm boys who mentioned that the Ducal tax collector Hector had been having strange lapses in his memory. The party went up to the windmill with one of the boys, Emmett, and discovered Hector's body in a crate in the mill (Adriel also heard Chavalk's mocking laughter echoing in the mill as she entered, although she did not tell anyone about that except Bay.) The party decided to take his body swiftly back to Hastenport, sending Adriel and Red ahead to fetch Captain Black. Examining the crime scene, Zadkiel determined that Hector's neck had been broken and that he had been dead only a few hours, and Red detected no one else's scent in the windmill recently other than Hector's. Using the Speak With Dead spell, the party learned that some of Hector's possessions were missing (including his purse, his signet ring, and his tax records) and also that his version of events doesn't match Emmett's-- Emmett says that Hector spoke to him, went up to the mill, returned from the mill, spoke to Emmett again, then rode into market with a wagoner named Fletcher. Hector, on the other hand, says he only spoke to the boy once and went up to the mill, and that he never left the mill again.
 * The party met Captain Black and Detective Noyar at the temple of Altaris, where they turned over the body, relayed what they had learned at the tower, and gave Sister Astilla the talking skulls to lay to rest. Black dispatched a guard named Brian to go with the party to the market square and see whether Fletcher or anyone else there had seen Hector.

MAL 9

 * The party went to the village square with a guard to find Fletcher the wagoner. Jon questioned Fletcher while Red sniffed around his wagon, concluding the scent of the murder victim, Hector, was not on the wagon, although Fletcher was insistent that Hector had ridden into town with him. Adriel and Zadkiel did some shopping, and Aler and Angara impressed the crowd with tricks and advertised for the circus, learning as they did so that the circus was looking for a new acrobat.
 * An image of Chavalk appeared in the market square and mocked the townsfolk, inciting pandemonium. Adriel and a feisty produce seller rallied the townsfolk to attack it, while the rest of the party deduced that the image was in fact a phantasm, cast remotely from another plane. Inexplicably, Aler's bow unstrung as soon as the image appeared. During the chaos, the party heard townsfolk blaming the mayor, the high priest of Tallian, and especially the Duke for these events. Some people expressed anger that Petros had been jailed, others that the priest of Tallian was protecting Petros from execution. Kit observed the man who was shouting the loudest about the priest of Tallian and described him to Jon. The image of Chavalk eventually vanished in a cloud of malodorous sulfur, and the party calmed the crowd with the help of Captain Black and a paladin.
 * The party paid a visit to the mayor, who after reviewing all the clues the party had gathered, concluded that whoever this "League of Snakes" is has proof of Petros' innocence and will release it if he is executed, continue to stir up unrest if he remains jailed, and probably use him to commit more murders if he is released. The mayor asked the party to find "incontrovertible proof" of who really killed Tell-- and if that person really is Petros, who was behind it. Later he sent Jon a letter promising him a bardic commission from the city if he is able to deliver this, and soon.
 * DM Clue: By the way, you guys have all missed a REALLY big clue in the letters you have collected. Just in case one of you wants to look over the scans Larry sent everyone for details.
 * Was this the handwriting?


 * The party went to the Paladins guild and spoke to the Head Paladin, Sir Coranis. Coranis was unexpectedly resistant to the evidence you gathered from Arakin's tower, stating that Arakin's concerns about suppression of necromancy were valid, that the evidence suggested against Arakin or a bone devil being the one to murder Tell, that he had his suspicions that Tell might have been using that summoning circle in his basement himself, that he disagreed with the Duke's likely course of action to treat Dayant's letters complaining about him as a seditious act, and that he was concerned he and his order were being manipulated. Nonetheless, he agreed with Jon and Zadkiel that Arakin's association with Chavalk merited investigation regardless of whether she had anything to do with the murder, and promised to speak with the Ducal Emissary about it.
 * The party spoke with Seven Quinn, who told them about the dockworkers' strike. Apparently the dockworkers are striking because they believe the sea goddess, Sesharet, is angry about Petros' imprisonment and is going to smite the city. The sailors, however, don't seem to share this fear, which Seven finds suspicious and plans to investigate. She set up a plan with the party to use Clairaudience and her father's crystal ball to communicate with each other long-distance. Seven also said that according to her father, the head of the wizard's guild, Aldrayeth, is actually a dragon.
 * After an uninterrupted night's sleep, the party departed for Mendham Wood, where Bay says the Elemental Druids are located. On their way up the coast from Hastenport, they encountered a small fishing village that had closed its gate, blocking the road (something that is illegal to do during daylight hours.) Investigating this, they learned of a demon attack the previous afternoon, which decimated a small community of selkies on a nearby island and left two local fishermen missing. The party gave the villagers some of their extra arms and talked to the village priest, who stated that although the weather had been abnormal recently, Sesharet was NOT wroth.
 * The party went with Seela to the selkie island, where they discovered the bodies of 13 selkies in a shallow cave adorned with a bloody pentacle. The party determined that the selkies had died the previous day and seemed to have been drained of both blood and life force. They also found a piece of a bloody fishing net and a glowing blue eye affixed to the wall above a stone altar, which Seela identified as a symbol of magical power associated with the fey, probably a worship object of the selkies. Jon identified the pentacle as leading either to or through the Abyss and used recently, but it was of a strange style he had never seen before.
 * The party disabled the pentacle, but was shortly attacked by a strange tentacled beast that dominated Angara into nearly killing Aler, zorched everyone standing in the shallow salt water with electric shocks, and beat Red and Blue within an inch of their lives before finally discorporating. No one in the party had ever seen such a creature before, but it matched the description given by the fisherman who saw the demon that attacked the town the previous day. Jon concluded that the creature had not plane-shifted or gated away, but had rather had its corporeal form destroyed by the party's attacks. Also, the pentacle on the ceiling of the cave was nowhere near big enough to have gated in a creature of its size. The pentacle was used recently, but to transport something other than this creature.
 * The party continued on to Mendham Wood, where they met the local spirit of the land (called a wodeknight) who hailed Red and, after briefly confirming everyone's identity, told them the story of the Elemental Druids. Apparently they had made the decision to ally themselves with elementals and their earthly descendents (nymphs, etc.), which they consider a valid part of nature (different from Red's druidic order, who considers elementals to be extraplanar enemies.)  They were attacked by an ancient red dragon "inflamed with hatred for all extraplanars," who executed Jendarion's naiad wife and children and burned down a quarter of the forest, sending the druid enclave into a deep defensive posture and causing them to double down on their extraplanar alliances, eventually culminating in their current alliance with Chavalk.

MAL 10

 * The party told Seela about the vampire necromancer they fought, and her possible motivations. Seela noted that thus far three of Chavalk's allies seem to be individuals who feel wronged for one reason or another.
 * The party was rejoined by their old friend Khirg, who they caught up on goings-on in Mendham Wood. Khirg, for his part, said he was here looking for a "rogue fey lord" named Shyra, who a colleague named Tanya had come to the forest to investigate. Seela recalled that Liria said they had initially believed Chavalk to be a being of fey "like Shyra," rather than a demon.
 * While using clairaudience to talk with Seven, Zadkiel noticed she described the vampire necromancer as "winged," which does not match the appearance of the vampire necromancer you fought. She elaborated to describe the vampire as a pale, dark-haired woman with crow's wings. The vampire you encountered was a pale dark-haired woman, but did not have any wings.
 * Red used Commune With Nature to scout the landscape. She confirmed Liria's story with evidence of extensive wildfire burn scars, confirmed that there were many unnatural creatures and/or magics in the forest, and identified two "hotspots" of unnatural activity, one of which was the Water Temple Liria had told you about.
 * Approaching the Water Temple again, the party discovered the mouth of the cave blocked by a magical slab and four stone statues with different colored eyes. The party quickly identified them as elemental guardians of water, air, earth, and fire. Meanwhile Aler found a dilapidated magic circle in an overgrown rock garden. The party activated the statues by placing offerings of the proper elements in their mouths, causing the slab to roll aside.
 * At this point the party was attacked by monstrous figured Jon identified as Keres, a kind of devil associated with the domain of violent death. They were apparently damage-resistant to everyone's weapons but the force bow. With the aid of Khirg, a panther guardian from the Elemental Plane of Water, and the unexpectedly bow-proficient Seela, the devils were finally defeated.
 * On the corpse of the slain Ker Captain was found an unsigned letter informing someone named Eleni that Chavalk does not need you guys alive-- that your curses have "already served their purpose," but not to go out of their way to kill you, as "the girl may yet prove useful." There was a note at the bottom in another script authorizing the use of lethal force, signed by "Ker Eleni" and dated "14Apr844."
 * Zadkiel pointed out that 14 April was BEFORE the party rescued Bay, so the "girl" referred to in the letter could not be Bay. Red compared the handwriting to the other letters the group had collected and found that not only did it match Harasket's letter, but also PETROS' letter. The group was very confused by this, and conjectured about it for some time.
 * The water panther was affable when Jon spoke to him in Aquan, declining to provide his name but identifying himself as an elemental guardian summoned by the opening of the temple. Once assured that Adriel was not a demon, he gave permission to enter the temple, saying that it was open to all worshippers, but that no one had been here in some time. He had not himself witnessed the dragon attack or the haunt, but identified the power of the temple as coming from the river spirit Sendor and concluded that perhaps the haunt was related to Sendor's rage over his daughter Essily's murder.
 * The party descended into an abandoned sanctuary with crumbling plaster. From the plaster and the dust on the floor, Aler deduced that no one could have been in here for at least a month. The whole room radiated magic, with obvious standouts being an altar, a magically barred door, a huge bell, a fountain, a 2' diameter glass chute behind a magic grate, and a pool of mana Seela identified as a scrying pool. There were also several magical icons and inlaid gemstones. Seela stated that the more magic a place was imbued with, the more inherent power it accrued, and that the magic of this temple was therefore greater than the sum of magic items embedded in it. She cautioned against any wanton destruction of a place with so much ambient magic, as it may fight back.

MAL 11

 * The group encountered Sahree the circus acrobat, who explained that her circus accident had been a "message" from her sylph clan's elders to force her to return home. Sahree presents herself as a free-spirited teenager who just wants to see the world, but Jendarion and her people consider it too dangerous and that they all must stay and stand together against their enemies. Sahree also confirmed that her family has told her the same thing Liria did, that "the fey guy turned out to be a demon." The sylphs are apparently not happy about this, but can't think of a way to eject the demons from the forest without ejecting all outsiders, which would include themselves, or overthrowing Jendarion, which none of the other druids are willing or able to do.
 * Sahree was able to manipulate the Auran runestone to allow the party to use their Speak With Dead scroll to contact Quenzil, who said “Great danger is upon you now. The dragon was but a single monster, and in the end it could slay but a few of us. The alliance I now see rising from the shadows threatens this entire realm. Shyra must be removed as counsel to the Elemental Druids, if it is not already too late.” Asked about Jendarion's power, he confirmed that it was given to him by the River Sendor, and that since the daimon of the river currently lies dormant, the talisman could safely be destroyed if you reach it before he manifests again. However, the talisman is kept in Jendarion's house, and Quenzil warned that it was unlikely the party would be able to break in there without interference from Jendarion. He suggested Jendarion would need to be drawn away from the house and kept busy somehow while the river's talisman was found, and that he did not believe Jendarion could be reasoned with until his elemental power had subsided. The party considered splitting up next session, with one group challenging Jendarion in the grove while the other broke into his house to shut off the water.

MAL 12

 * Discontent of the Sendor River. Zadkiel is very keen on permanently pacifying the angry river genius, but the druids inform you that they have been trying to accomplish this for years and that no matter what they do, the river always returns to rage. Liria tells Red that she considers the anger of the river spirit to have been a corrupting influence on Jendarion, one that Shyra was able to take advantage of.
 * Leadership of the Grove of Mendham Wood. Jendarion ceded leadership of the Grove to Red. The members of the grove uneasily accepted this arrangement once Red pledged to A) not persecute their elemental allies, and B) find another way to go after the dragon that attacked their people. She may or may not have the intention of fulfilling those campaign promises, but it's clear that sentiment in the grove will turn against her hard if she does not. Red suggested returning leadership of the grove to Jendarion, but Liria takes Red aside and tells her she considers that a bad idea. "Jendarion is in a difficult position. He is a good leader who has protected us many times, and I am relieved you convinced him to step down without bloodshed. But I think the anger of the river spirit has taken a great toll on his mind. He is suffused in its power, and that power is now volatile. I believe Jendarion ceded to you for a reason. Perhaps the suppression of his river magics gave him a moment of greater clarity, and he realized he was not certain of the path he was leading us down. In any case, I do not believe he is well enough now to be reinstated as leader. Perhaps once the river is restored."
 * Adriel issues. First, Jon is actively withholding the letter from Harasket to Jendarion regarding a planned attack on the Order of the Dragon by some ally of his called the "Hidden Ones," presumably fearing an irrational reaction on her part. The rest of the party needs to discuss this and decide if this is indeed their intent to keep this a secret from her. Jendarion did express to the group that he believed the river would not be healed until the slaughter of his family had been avenged, and that Chavalk and Shyra had a plan to do this which will probably no longer be put into action. However, Adriel is completely unaware that this is related to the Order of the Dragon (she has been actively denying that the Order of the Dragon had anything to do with what happened in Mendham.)
 * Seven has some more news for you when you call her on the scry that night. “The dockworkers are still on strike. The Harbormaster brought in a bunch of half-orcs from Delsin as temporary replacement workers and people in the Docks district are not happy about it.  I shadowed the Harbormaster to the Citadel to see if I could learn anything else about the strike, but all he did was sign tax documents. While I was there, though, Lady Overton came in, the Ducal Ambassador?  And I overheard her quarreling with Captain Black about the vampire. Lady Overton wants her to make a public confession in the Tylden Commons. Captain Black thinks that’s stupid, because she might use her vampire powers to escape if she’s brought out of the Citadel. Lady Overton says she didn’t escape when the paladins escorted her in, so she won’t escape if they escort her out. Captain Black demanded a reason and Lady Overton refused to give her one. It got a little heated.”

MAL 13

 * Next the party had an uneventful trip back to Hastenport. Seven informed them by crystal ball that she had learned why Lady Overton was so desperate to get a public confession from Dayant Arakin: she and the draconic guildmaster Aldrayeth had had a big argument about the wisdom and ethics of sending the paladins to attack Arakin, and Overton wanted to prove she had been right to do so. Vanessa passed the party during the night and stopped to say hello to Aler, warning him that the Illithids had joined the League of Snakes. The party knows little about Illithids; they are barely known at all in the gameworld, but Vanessa explained to Aler that they have fearsome mental powers which are difficult to protect oneself against.
 * The party found a large crowd gathered around a pale, dark-haired woman with crows' wings who was definitely not the same vampire you fought in Arakin tower. She confessed under a truth spell to killing two Ducal guards who she claimed had abused her in jail, and then vanished without a trace--something that bewildered the magic-users in attendance since a field suppressing necromantic magic was active. It would have been possible for a necromancer to vanish like that by just passing through the Veil (you saw Barken disappear with similar immediacy earlier,) but not with an anti-necromantic shield active. A planar gate would have taken time to cast and presumably been noticed by the many high-level spellcasters in attendance. Aler immediately activated True Seeing, and did not see anything invisible in the area. The question of where the winged woman went remains a mystery for now.
 * As does the question of her identity. The paladins aver this is indeed the same woman they fought in Arakin Tower, but your party is sure it was NOT the same woman YOU fought in Arakin tower. She did not look the same and did not have the same scent (Red has the nagging feeling she has smelled the winged woman's scent somewhere once before, but only in passing, and was not able to remember where.) Theories were discussed, including one woman being the vampiric spawn of the other, one being a vampire and the other a mortal necromancer, and the two being the same woman who has been shapeshifting or using deceptive spells.
 * Adriel visited a retired knight from the Order of the Dragon who she met during the IYDIYD events. His name is Cartaso (yes, I had to look it up. Good way to remember a super minor NPC from a year ago, Scott!) He was very cooperative but didn't know too much about recent events in the Order, which he retired from ten years ago. He had not heard of the attack on Mendham Wood; the only attack by Threndix he had heard about in the past decade was an attack on a dwarven village that was collaborating with extraplanars, and didn't know many details about that, either. He has a clearly friendly attitude towards Adriel at this point, though.
 * When the party returned to Seven's house, the aspiring photojournalist shared with them a picture she had taken of the winged woman on the dais and the research she had just done showing that vampires don't show up in any scrying spell or device; thus, the woman on the dais could not be a vampire. Aler confirmed that the woman you guys fought in the tower was definitely a vampire; Red also corroborated this with having been bitten and life-drained by her, and the party additionally noted that they had seen her turn into mist and escape. Also, the paladins described the winged woman as fighting them aggressively with a fiery bow, while the woman you fought hung back, let bone demons fight the party, bit a couple of people and then left, despite being nearly uninjured. The group concluded they must be two different women, although which of them is actually Dayant Arakin remains unknown. Seven additionally pointed out in the photograph that Arakin appeared significantly physically beaten up, although Black had said she appeared well the previous day.
 * The party went to see the Mayor, who had sent a page to fetch Jon. They told him about the events in Mendham Wood and their concerns about the two Dayant Arakins, then showed him the handwriting match between Petros and Harasket and asked if they could see Petros in jail. The Mayor commissioned Bay as a "handwriting analysis expert" and sent you to accompany her to prison to get a writing sample from Petros and coincidentally ask him questions while you were there.
 * The party finally spoke to Petros for the first time since his arrest. A Ducal guard was present for the entire visit and took notes of the exchange (Jon decided against using magic to wipe his notes afterwards, as this might be traced back to him.) Petros shared a lot of information with the party, some of which (like Dayant Arakin's identity) they had already learned from other sources.
 * "Salient Points" from speaking with Petros:
 * He denied ever being in Tell's house or being involved in his murder.
 * Jon's sense motive suggests he is truthful, though it's not 100% accurate obviously.
 * He identified Aldrayeth as a silver dragon.
 * He described Threndix as "known for occasional acts of ruthlessness, but more often minds his own business"; known among dragonkind as a prophet.
 * He also mentioned the destroyed dwarven village and suggested the party could ask Ruby about it.
 * He said there was an Eyeman named Holden in the Third Eye in Asture, though it isn't necessarily the same one from Dayant's letter.
 * The party realized there was nothing in the letter to suggest the intended recipient was in Hastenport, which may be why Seven, Jen, and the Mayor had all never heard of him.
 * He denied writing the Harasket letters, and pointed out that he had sent no correspondences from prison except those vetted and delivered by the guards.
 * The ducal guard confirmed this. He found it peculiar that anyone would forge a document from him and then sign another name to it.
 * "If they were trying to frame me with a forgery, wouldn't they have signed MY name to it?"
 * He said Dayant Arakin had had dealing with the Mages' Guild.


 * The party went to the Docks district. They visited the Temple of Sesharet and spoke to a priestess named Tala; Jon made an appointment for 1:30 the following afternoon to meet with the High Priest, Ander. Then Jon and Aler went to a sailor bar to talk to Terence, who Ruby had recommended as a good source. Terence and a drinking sailor explained tensions among the sailors, the striking dockworkers, and the orc scab labor. Terence also told Jon that there was a strange green glow coming from one of the warehouses at night, and the sailors were saying it was haunted.
 * Zadkiel was summoned to the Mage's Guild to meet with Lady Aldrayeth. Adriel, who tried to accompany him, was blown off and told she was not invited. Aldrayeth was actually relatively cordial to Zadkiel, wanting to know what he knew of Dayant Arakin and especially Petros' case. She identified herself as a friend of Petros who she felt was being railroaded. Zadkiel was honest with her, but confronted her about the report that she had dealings with Arakin. She confirmed this, and affirmed that she considered necromancy a valid school of magic and the attack on Arakin's tower a political overreach, but also stated that she did not know Arakin personally and did not know which of the two women is really Dayant, nor does she have any information about whether either or both of them were supporting Chavalk. She confirmed that the negative material sphere was being held at the Mages' Guild, and suggested that if the party went to investigate the tower, she would be most interested in hearing anything pertinant they found. Zadkiel also asked her about Threndix, which she dismissed as unrelated to the Chavalk situation, finding all the connections Zadkiel tried to draw as meaninglessly circumstantial. She seemed unconcerned with the possibility of Threndix burning down a forest, saying that firedrakes are "well-known for violent rampage" and that Threndix, if anything, was far more reasoned and restrained than most of his kind, only burning something down "every few years or so." She confirmed that he was the only ancient red dragon in the immediate vicinity, and added that "everything Threndix does is done with an eye to the prophecies. He doesn't care much for individual lives. If murdering a few innocent civilians would make a disastrous prophecy less likely to come about in the future, he'd lose no sleep over it. His interventions have saved this realm more than once, but lately his prophetic strikes have been more... personal. Threndix has foreseen his death, and seeks to avert it. More than that is not my place to tell you, but I see NO possibility he is working with Chavalk. At most, he has prioritized other matters over actively opposing Chavalk, but never working with him."
 * Jon went to his meeting with Jen at the brothel. After some chit-chat about the escaped vampire and the dockworker's strike, Jen told him that 1) the discontented complaints the party heard during the demon scare in the market square are all real concerns held by some of the townfolk (losing faith in the Mayor, distrusting the Duke, feeling Petros has been set up, feeling that the authorities are blindly protecting a killer priest.) But also 2) that a shipwright from the Docks district told one of the girls that the guy who started in yelling those things in the market square was one of the acolytes of Sesharet.
 * Italics indicate this may have been info given to us by an enemy - thus making the info potentially unreliable and intended to confuse us.
 * [MAL 14] Jon went to speak with Jen, who seemed shaken up by the ordeal. She confirmed that the story the impostor told Jon about an acolyte of Sesharet was one she really had heard from a client and intended to tell Jon about, but that the attacker never spoke with her, so she does not know how he learned it.


 * Jon was incapacitated by a succubus, who wrapped her tail around his neck and began pulling information out of his mind ("Geez, this guy's brain is made of Swiss cheese!") After some poking and prodding, she got the information about the events in Mendham Wood, Jendarion, and Shyra out of him. Jen said to "dispose of him" as she had matters to attend to at the Docks, and started to leave.
 * Red, in the form of a homing pigeon, got to the brothel first and tried to attack the succubus, but was slammed back ten feet by an unexpectedly powerful punch from the madam. The succubus pulled a knife on Jon's throat and told Red to "back off or the bard gets it," then told Jen to open a planar gate.
 * Bay, hasted, arrived on the scene while Jen was spellcasting and used her chaos powers to weaken the succubus' knife, causing it to come apart when she applied pressure on it, and yelled to Red to grab Jon before the succubus could take him through the portal with her. Red succeeded at wresting the paralyzed bard away from the demoness and her broken knife. Aler, arriving next, dived through the window and attempted to grapple Jen, but she threw him off easily and the two women departed through the planar gate, leaving Jon behind.
 * With Jon revived, the party investigated the brothel and found Jen tied up in her office alongside the body of her bouncer Bruno, whose skull had been crushed. Jen had no explanation for why Bruno was killed and she was left alive. She described her assailant as a "tall, red-haired man, elven or part-elven, dressed in black leather with buckles all over it," and that he tied her up and cut off a piece of her hair but didn't otherwise harm her. Isolating scent trails didn't prove effective in the busy brothel, but Aler noticed a peculiar discrepancy in the footprints of the Jen who had fought the party upstairs and the Jen who had been walking around in the office-- the two pairs of footprints seem to be aligned backwards from each other. Jon also noticed that although Jen claimed the attacker never spoke to her, the upstairs Jen knew details about previous conversations Jen had had with Jon.
 * While Adriel went for the police, Kit arrived at the brothel, awkwardly expressing concern for Jon and explaining that she had overheard some of the orcs talking by pretending she didn't speak Orcish, and one of them asked where some guy named "Hasker or something" went, and the other one said he went to a whorehouse to ambush a bard, so she thought she'd better warn Jon just in case. Zadkiel asked if the guy could have been named "Harasket," and Kit said "Yeah, I think that was it."
 * The guards arrived and took over the investigation, while the party went back to the warehouse, having asked Captain Black to meet them there. They warned her about their concerns about shapeshifters and/or Jen's trustworthiness, and Zadkiel remembered that Black had been asking the guards to search Fletcher's wagon for human hair after Hector's murder. Black explained that a clump of hair seemed to have been ripped out of Hector's head, perhaps as in a fight, and she had been looking for evidence. The party wondered this could be related to the fact that the man cut off a piece of Jen's hair. Captain Black informed the party that Tad Hector has been resurrected and is recuperating at a sanatorium uptown.

MAL 14

 * The party discovered a hidden trap door in the warehouse. Aler found a trap on it in the nick of time before Adriel could injure herself, and Adriel opened it safely with a crowbar instead, revealing the symbol of a fish skeleton on the underside of the trap door. Zadkiel identified the fish as a symbol of Corrigar, a lesser-known god of pestilence and sorrow.
 * The party followed the staircase down into the sewers, much to Seela's disgust. They encountered a goblin maintenance man, with whom they did not tarry long to speak, and observed two more fish skeleton symbols etched into the stone walls of the sewers.
 * Approaching a crosswalk in the sewers, the party was attacked by a Banshee Ard (greater banshee.) Its destructive banshee wail came close to killing multiple party members, but was thwarted by Jon's countersong and Zadkiel's absorbing much of the damage.
 * The party discovered a sanctuary with a stone pentacle, glowing green obelisk, inactive magic mirror, and large imposing altar.with a symbol of Corrigar on it.
 * There was a priest wearing the robes and amulet of the sea goddess Sesharet in this room. The party never asked his name, but he claimed to be a priest of Sesharet and gave strangely plodding, repetitive answers to their questions. Eventually Seela recognized him for an illusion, at which point a spell detonated causing damage and a Slow spell to PCs in a radius from the obelisk.
 * Aler opened a secret compartment in the altar, finding two potions of cure disease, a vial of blood, and a wavy dagger of a strange green metal which Jon later identified as a +1 deepsteel dagger of bleeding.
 * Zadkiel was dissuaded from testing what would happen if he laid on the altar, and the group returned to the docks district. Aler cast Speak With Animals on Syla, who had remained behind spying on the street, and learned that some orcs and dockworkers drinking in two local taverns had gotten into a brawl, but it was broken up by some sailors. Apparently tensions are rather high in the docks.
 * Vanessa came to Jon's mansion for a private meeting with him.
 * The party went to the Citadel in the morning and answered questions about the brothel ambush for Detective Noyar, who confirmed that both Jen and the murdered taxman had had a piece of hair removed from their heads. His questions also narrowed down the unlikeliness that Jen could have staged the entire thing himself-- since Aler has true seeing activated at the time the "Jen" with the succubus appeared to go through the portal, she could not have slipped downstairs to pose as a victim instead. Also, the true seeing rules out the possibility that it could have been an illusion--if it was not truly Jen, then it must have been either a nonmagical disguise or an innate shapeshifter. Finally, he said that Beyond Kendra had cast Speak With Dead on the dead bouncer, whose description of the attacker matched Jen's.
 * The party returned to talk to Petros again. Petros said no chunk of his hair had been removed from his head, but noted that he had been losing hair lately and it might have been taken from his hairbrush. He also told the party that in certain black magic traditions, a person's hair, blood, or other body parts can be used to enact rituals against them.
 * The party finally (after 14 sessions!) discussed their curses with Petros. He said he felt certain he was not cursed, but agreed with the party that being framed for murder may have been curse enough for Chavalk's purposes. He had a long conversation about curses with the party. Some of the highlights were: Petros said Chavalk could not possibly have cast so many different types of curses himself, and that he hypothesized each curse had been cast by a different ally of Chavalk's. The party guessed perhaps this might have been done as a method of drawing the League of Snakes together, or perhaps proving the allies' loyalty and worth (thus why Harasket said the curses had "already served their purpose.") Petros noted that two curses had been undone by confronting the people who had cast them, and that it stood to reason finding and confronting the casters of the other curses might remove them too. He wondered who was the author of the curses against Barris and Morgana, and what might have befallen Skenebrax and Aluon.
 * Petros' imprisonment keeps him from being able to help Adriel and Jon with their curses himself, but he recommended the Third Eye as the organization best equipped to help them with such matters, and gave them the names of Eyeman Tellis in Asture or Eyewoman Terreira in Ruastin.
 * Then the party set off for Arakin tower. The first leg of the journey was uneventful. They got a message from Seven, telling them the inscription was in the Tenarri language and reads "blood to power, power to blood." She also told them that while spying in the Cathedral of Tallian, she saw Jeddas, the new Head Paladin, petitioning Father Valerian to criminalize necromancy immediately in light of what happened with Dayant Arakin. Valerian considered this too divisive, but gave Jeddas his permission to contact the High Priest in Asture about it.
 * Resuming travel the next morning, the party was confronted by Threndix, who demanded they turn over Tanya as a "dangerous extraplanar being of chaos." Khirg and Zadkiel refused; Adriel and Jon tried to negotiate. Khirg urged Tanya to escape through the Veil, but she lacks the ability to bring him with her and refused to leave him behind, instead offering to swear a magical oath not to harm Malachi. Threndix instead seized her, and a short, violent battle ensued.
 * Some talking with Threndix did occur amongst the mayhem. Jon used Suggestion to try and persuade Threndix not to hurt the non-Tanya members of the party since they were clearly allies against Chavalk; Threndix seemed willing to exempt at least Jon from his wrath. Zadkiel tried to convince Threndix that his actions were counterproductive and actually strengthening Chavalk; Threndix replied that Chavalk was not the only extraplanar menace out there and though he must be opposed, so must the others. Red condemned Threndix for his actions in Mendham Wood and accused him of being as bad as Chavalk. Adriel demanded to know whether it was true what he had done in Mendham Wood; Threndix clearly didn't care about or even remember the particular episode from seven years ago, but said if he'd done it then it obviously needed doing, at which point Adriel turned against him.
 * The party dished out a pretty substantial amount of damage, but the tide really turned when Seela revealed herself as the fey lord Lochrann and blasted him with her potent magics. Reassessing the tactical situation as less favorable to himself than he had expected and/or feeling the need to process this new information before choosing his next move, the dragon disengaged and flew away, leaving Tanya behind. (He had ripped her head off, which would have killed any of the rest of you, but Tanya isn't as attached to her head as other folks...)
 * Lochrann explained that the Faery Queen had decided against directly engaging Chavalk, Malachi not being their domain and all, but that Lochrann had hit on the idea of indirectly working against him by supporting his enemies native to the plane; however, now that her cover is blown, she can no longer do so. She asked Tanya what form Shyra had when she captured her, and Tanya answered that she looked like a beautiful elven woman with black hair and raven's wings-- who Lochrann believes must have been the faux vampire the group saw escape from Tylden Square.
 * Jon asked how he could contact Lochrann, and she summoned a Dreamweaver for him-- basically an exceptionally loyal magical familiar. This one is able to bring a message to Lochrann for him. She also stated that she would consider it a personal favor if the party is able to kill or neutralize Chavalk, who offended her clan by consuming the souls of selkies under her protection, and that her grandmother the Morrigu might look kindly upon the possibility of mobilizing the Wild Hunt on Piper's behalf "for a friend of our Folk."

MAL 15

 * The party investigated the Arakin tower again. No undead things attacked as they skirted the graveyard; the PCs did not stop to check the names on the gravestones. When they got to the site, the tower was gone. Only a sinkhole in the ground remained. The party determined that the tower was physically not present, not merely invisible or otherwise hidden.
 * The party conversed with Sallykin, who addressed them again as "the Hunters." (She said previously this was because you had introduced yourself by saying you were hunting a demon lord. "That's big game!") The party chose not to reveal their association with Lochrann to her, so she offered only that "Shyra" and "Seela" were not fey names and were probably aliases. They also did not ask her whether the tower was on the fey lands now. They did tell her about Threndix and his crusade against extraplanars, to which Sallykin commented that she'd been on the moor a long time even by draconic standards, and that he'd never bothered her.
 * Exploring the sinkhole and using Stone Tell, the party determined that the tower had been teleported away somehow and that the earth then collapsed into the hole left by the departed basement. Some fragments of stone tile were apparently wrenched off and left behind during this event, causing a large brazier and a number of small personal effects to scatter into the dirty. Khirg found a fork, and Aler found a few gold pieces and a letter from Dayant Arakin to a cleric of Alayan named Beyond Jessery, addressing her as a fellow supporter of the League of Snakes and associate of Chavalk's, bemoaning what she perceives as unfair treatment of necromancers, and voicing her opinion that action needed to be taken against the Duke of Peraine.
 * The group deduced that the tower must have been transported to another plane. Red tried to use Scry on Dayant Arakin, using the fork Khirg had found as a personal focus. The spell did not succeed. Red knows there are significant minuses for not knowing Dayant personally and for her possibly being on another plane. Also, in retrospect, though the fork was a great idea, Red's not actually all that sure vampires even eat with forks.
 * Vyna, Petros' second-in-command at the House of Fantarin, identified Corrigar as a god of pestilence and sorrow, and said that he doesn't have an organized church, though many people pray to him to spare their families.
 * The party told Seven about the missing tower, but not about Threndix or Lochrann. She informed them that a friend in the tax office had told her Holden had not paid any taxes in Hastenport for the last five years, suggesting that he neither lives nor works here. If he is the same Holden who Petros identified as being a member of the Third Eye in Asture, that fits. Seven thought the description of the red-haired elven man in black leather sounded like someone from the Order of the Dragon, but wasn't sure. She did not recognize the description of the guy in the sewers, but pointed out that if he was an illusion, he wasn't necessarily a real person in the first place.
 * Italics indicate that it is an enemy speaking while looking like Seven. This should call into question the validity of this information.


 * While this was happening, Red noticed something was wrong--Seven had no scent. She took Aler aside to inform him of this and he cast true seeing, revealing Seven had reversed hands--the sign of a rakshasa. They told Adriel and Zadkiel about this and then the four of them attacked her, Red catching her in her serpent staff, Aler casting dancing lights, and Zadkiel casting dimensional anchor and an antimagic spell. Much DM fumbling in this section (the rakshasa's magic immunity should have repelled the dimensional anchor, and the antimagic spell should have dispelled the dancing lights.) "Seven" used grappling to break the snake's grasp, knocked Jon back 10' across the room, and exited the premises, suffering attacks of opportunity from most of the PCs and not appearing to care (it was clear she wasn't taking full damage from those blows.) Aler pursued her and observed her turn into an alley and shapeshift into an urchin boy. Khirg, running about as fast as a galloping racehorse (!), managed to catch up with the rakshasa but was confused by a magic blast. Aler caught a glimpse of the child dashing into a neighboring house, but he was gone by the time Aler entered, and a few unlucky track checks and the trail went cold.
 * Searching Seven's study, the party found her camera under the sofa. Bay was able to use Use Magic Device to turn it on, revealing that the last picture she took was a blurry shot of a red-haired person in black. Jon identified that there had been a magical portal cast here, and fetched Vyna from down the street, who identified it as an Abyssal portal. The party also found some letters scratched into the paint of the baseboard in one of the corners of the study: 666 -7Q.  The party hypothesized that this was a note from Seven referencing demons or the Abyss, that the person in the photo could have been the same one described by Jenn, and that "Seven's" unusual strength and knockback ability seem similar to those exhibited by "Jenn."
 * Jon cast Scry on Seven, who waived her saving throw. He saw a darkened room with two figures in it, one of whom he believed was Seven sitting on a chair. He cast Message through the scry and asked her where she was; she responded with a string of numbers, "42 25 N 16 8 W."
 * Deducing that these must be map coordinates, the party began running chaotically back and forth between the police station and the cartographer's guild. Eventually Captain Black was fully apprised of Seven's disappearance, and the cartographer's apprentice Jarth--after an emotional argument with Jon-- identified the numbers as the coordinates for the city of Ruastin. He said that Seven would have known this from her association with him, and said that the last time he had seen her had been the night before last, when she seemed to be in normal command of Seven's full complement of memories. This is in contradiction to the rakshasa's claim that she had been on a date last night.
 * Jon and Red visited Jenn the madam, learning that the High Priest of Sesharet, Ander, has not been seen since the night before you left for the Tower.

MAL 16

 * First, Lady Aldrayeth came over at five in the morning to speak with Jarth. Apparently his guildmaster, Estobb, had told Aldrayeth Jarth was going to Ruastin to look for Seven (which the party had told him last session.) She loaned Jarth a cube of force to help him recover Seven. She made a couple of references to using her weight to threaten or intimidate Seven's abductor, but said it would not be possible if she doesn't know who that is.The party decided to inform her about Threndix' attack, which surprised her-- when they said he was after an extraplanar friend who was a Dullahan, she wanted to know if she was perhaps "part fey," and when Khirg said she was not, she said "Then it must be a different prophecy than the one I'm-- well, I don't have an answer for you. travelers, as you can see. I will have to look into this." Exit Lady Aldrayeth.
 * Reuniting inside the city, the group encountered an oracular troll who ripped out his intestines in the middle of the street and read a prophecy from his own entrails. Apparently this isn't a particularly unknown phenomenon. The party is beginning to understand why the presence of a deinonychus dinosaur isn't causing that much commotion in Ruastin. The prophecy warned “When thy defense holds, let not thy guard down,” he cries in a ringing voice. “For the invasion can only succeed in its third wave. Once has it been turned back already, once more will it be turned back, and the third time it will not be. This kingdom will not survive unless the fight is taken to its enemies. So… it is written!”
 * Behind a secret door, the party found a staircase leading down to Skenebrax's slightly distrurbing living quarters. There was a fancy coffin lying next to the bed, a magical vat of slightly congealed blood, a bathtub with blood stains around the drain, and a magical refrigerator containing a human brain and a wine bottle. Most of the personal effects seem to have been removed from this room, but the party did find a few pertinant letters, including one from a friend of Skenebrax's girlfriend urging them to leave Ruastin before "things get worse" and another from a friend of Skenebrax's suggesting that his curse, which Skenebrax had already ruled out as Abyssal, might possibly be Chaotic in nature. "There is a prophecy that Xhriakw will return to the land led by a Lord of the Abyss who has mastered the three Hounds of Chaos. I have reason to believe Chavalk controls one of the Hounds of Chaos. If he is in league with Xhriakw, then perhaps Chaos could be the source of your curse. Although to be honest with you, I think it would be kind of strange for an elder force of chaos to concern himself with harassing a morgue operator with some minor plague."Jon remembered an adventure he had gone on several years ago in a Temple of Chaos and a book his party had recovered there about the Lords of Chaos, and thought a contact of his in the Temple of Lyra might know more about it.
 * The party met Jon's ex-girlfriend Kalima, who passed the sniff test and was glad to see Jon again. Jon did not tell her about Piper, nor about his curse, but he did tell her about Seven's abduction and asked about the book of Chaos. Kalima was confused and said that Jon had been the one to take this book from the temple, to read through for his planar studies. Jon has no memory of this. Their adventure in the temple of Chaos was seven years ago.
 * The party decided to go to the Center of the Third Eye to try and get more information. On the way, they were ambushed by a spiky nightmarish monster, a burning smilodon skeleton, and a handful of invisible demon assassins. Zadkiel turned into an angel again, inspiring a bunch of nearby dwarves to rally against the skeletal cat. Red was dominated by the nightmarish monster into trying to kill Jon and Bay, but luckily got some really terrible rolls, meanwhile the rest of the party got some great ones and Adriel eventually dispatched the nightmare being with the casualties including only one dwarf.

MAL 17

 * First, the party talked to the dwarves they had just fought the monsters with. The dwarves provided some ale, and Jon composed a song in honor of the dwarf, Doron, who was killed fighting one of the demonic skeleton cats. The warrior who had rallied the dwarves against the monsters, named Arsanus, wanted to question Zadkiel about his angelic transformation, but Zadkiel didn't have any answers for him. A dwarven clan leader named Hondor came out to assess the situation and asked the party what they were doing in town; they decided not to tell him about Seven or the League of Snakes, instead asking about Skenebrax. They received the rumor that Skenebrax was a cannibal and the suggestion to talk to Beyond Jessery to learn more about the plague he caused, and also learned that someone had set off a bomb at city hall last week, though no one was killed. The dwarves were not willing to speculate about who might have done it.
 * Then the party was attacked by invisible archers, who turned out to be gorgon-like devils. Jon was taken down by an unlucky critical hit, while other party members were damaged. A four-armed Ker devil decloaked and stabbed Zadkiel with a deepsteel weapon, preventing him from spellcasting for a round. She proved immune to most of the party's weapons, to Khirg's frustration. A demon portaled in and shoved Bay out of the way of getting potentially killed by the devil; the two kept up a running back-and-forth bitchfest in Abyssal for the rest of the combat, which only Jarth understood (he narrated it to the rest of you later.) They did not mention Seven at all, instead disagreeing about whether or not Chavalk was okay with killing Bay or not. Aler took the opportunity to shoot the Ker while she was distracted, and paid the price as five of the six devil archers unloaded three shots apiece into him at point blank range. Ten minutes of furious retconned math later, Aler was determined to be merely mostly dead, not all the way dead (in the future, you only get healed if you write the healing down on your character sheet, not just if the cleric says he offered to heal you earlier--but with Nick on the other side of a computer screen, there was an understandable communication barrier to accomodate.) Bay lost control of the chaos force, which started breaking things in the vicinity including the masonry of the ruined colonnade. The Ker clearly gave a command to move out, which the archers all obeyed; Adriel managed to kill one of them with attacks of opportunity on the way out, causing it to be banished back to the Nine Hells. The demon weathered an attack of opportunity by Khirg and also gated out.

MAL 18 & 19

 * As the party passed the church of Tallian, the saw a group of elves walking down te steps expressing frustration that the authorities in Ruastin were all too distracted by local concerns like the tax fraud, the bomb scare at city hall, and Petros arrest to take their concerns about something seriously. The party approached them and told them about Seven's abduction, which they appeared not to know anything about. They declined to tell their own business to random human strangers and a drow, but did give Jon a letter to send the Ducal Emissary in Hastenport and gave their inn room address.
 * During the attack, an arm shot out from the eye sigil on Khirg's back as he maneuvered past Aler, phasing through his ribcage, causing him to fall unconscious, and teleporting him somewhere. He regained consciousness in a black-tiled room with a fiend who demanded to know who had demonmarked Aler and tortured him with hellfire and a deepsteel blade when he refused to answer. An illithid rescued him by shooting the fiend in the back with a holy blaster, revealing herself as a tiefling planeblazer named Tisha Lake with a shapeshifting amulet. She also told Aler some information about his family, in particular that he could have inherited the demonmark from his mother because demonmarks follow bloodlines and that Aler's father had killed Tisha's mother.
 * Meanwhile, Aler and Tisha were escaping from the ethereal plane, where Aler had apparently been imprisoned. With Tisha disguised as an illithid and Aler acting like her mind-controlled slave, the pair bluffed their way past a crystalline fey giant and a little fairy dragon to escape out the window of the tower to a location from which Tisha would be able to plane shift them back to Ruastin. Aler then failed a fortitude save and succumbed to the pain of his injuries, passing out.
 * Tisha revived Aler with a healing potion, revealing them to now be in the Land of the Dead--the only location she had been able to safely shift to quickly enough. She apologized for teasing him about being unable to carry her and revealed her demonic heritage, then asked his advice about getting past a valley filled with ghosts to a spot she could safely bring them through to Ruastin. Using their stealth skills and Aler's ranger abilities versus the undead, the two of them managed to first sneak and then run past the ghosts, at which point Tisha shifted them both to Ruastin where they were reunited with the rest of the party.
 * Tisha explained to the group that she had been on the ethereal plane looking for a family friend who had been kidnapped, revealing herself to be Barris Wainwright's daughter and the family friend to be Seven, who the party told her they were also seeking. Tisha told the party she had infiltrated the ethereal tower because there seemed to be infernals there and she had identified the devils that attacked the party at the ruins, so she guessed they might be related. However, she did not find any trace of Seven in the tower--only Aler, who she knew of through her father and decided to rescue instead. Then party decided to invite her to join forces with them.
 * The question asked of the vision was "Where was Seven Quinn five minutes ago?" They received a vision of a magically darkened room, in which Aler, Khirg and Zadkiel were able to identify what looked like an illithid standing behind an altar, but no sign of Seven. Before the duration ended, Jarth alertly redirected the vision with the question "How did she get there," which showed Seven riding through the Abyssal gate on a horse with a man in purple robes, alond with two other horses carrying the succubus that had attacked Jon earlier and a large man with blue woad lines on his face and torso, to whom the eye sigil on the wall spoke and said "It is watched" in the Fey language. Neither the robed man nor the man with woad lines pinged Jon as extraplanar, and Zadkiel identified his robes as those of a priest of Sesharet.

MAL 20

 * They fought the skeletons in the Tenarri tomb, which was going pretty well until a bunch of damn fairies portaled in and started cursing everyone and supercharging the skeletons. The party rallied, killed the skeletons and a barghest and drove the fairies off after a long fight, with some assistance from Father Saxon, Captain Ames, and some sharpshooting guards.
 * Ames told the party he was at the tomb because his investigations of the three kidnappers the party saw in the vision turned up the tip that the purple-robed priest of Sesharet had been spotted at the tomb. Jon alertly said that was why the party was there too, which Ames believed. Ames and Jon both identified the most recent sighting of the priest they knew of to be a day and a half ago, and Ames posted guards on the city gates and the docks to detain the priest if they saw him trying to leave town. Saxon, who doesn't seem to like drow, expressed concern about Aler, but Zadkiel vouched for his character and Aler revealed himself as a member of Iscariot.
 * Their magics nearly depleted (including all their higher-level healing,) the party decided to return to the inn to sleep, but first stopped to talk to several NPCs. First, they returned to Terreira to see what she had learned about today's extraplanar portals (the party had specifically asked about whoever had captured Aler in the Clown Gang raid.) Terreira identified two portals in that place and time, one from the fey lands and another to the ethereal plane. Tisha reported that if someone had portaled in from the fey lands and out again to the ethereal plane on the same combat round, that person must be a high-level planeblazer. There was also a portal from the fey lands by the Tenarri tomb at an undetermined time (that may or may not have been one of the ones you witnessed there,) and two additional portals to the Ethereal plane and back from the Land of the Dead that Tisha identified as her own.
 * I believe these were Aler getting kidnapped by more than one assailant. Next it was probably the fairies. Lastly Tisha identified her own travels.


 * The party went to visit Messana, who baked cookies for everyone. She was unable to cast any more Vision spells on their behalf (the spell does drain the witches' XP), but suggested to Red that the kidnappers seen in the previous vision might be easier to find than their captive. Red became excited by this and tried to use scry on the purple-robed priest, unfortunately to find he was in a blocked location.
 * Red, Adriel and Khirg went on to visit the oracular trolls, making an appointment with them for another augury the following night, and then to speak with the elven delegation they had seen at the Church of Tallian that morning. This time Red introduced herself as an archdruid and an elf-friend, and the elves decided to tell her everything after all, revealing that they were in Peraine trying to offer their assistance with the upcoming Invasion and had found trouble getting the authorities here to pay attention to them (being busy with the bombing of their City Hall, the tax scandal, the looming execution of Petros, and other issues.) They did not know Chavalk's name, saying that the one they had encountered leading these demons was rather ancient and named "Lasanta," but mentioned that extraplanars often went by more than one name over the course of a history as long as elven history, so these could be two different names for the same demon (or the name of two different allies.) They asked whether the Duke, the King, or the High Priest of Tallian knew about the League of Snakes, to which the PCs said they did not know. Red told the elves about the Green Guard, the Elemental Druids, and Iscariot as possible allies to fight against the League of Snakes. The elves exchanged animal messenger contact info with her and departed for Asture immediately in an attempt to pull strings and meet with the Duke directly.
 * The party went to sleep and had disturbing dreams related to their own deaths, Chavalk's invasion, or both, all ending with the word UNLESS. Jarth, Cartino, and Bay also had such dreams, although Bay commented she usually has dreams about dying so it didn't really seem out of the ordinary for her. The party compared notes and realized that all the rest of them heard the word "UNLESS" in Zadkiel's voice, while Zadkiel heard it in Not-Star's voice. They speculated that the dreams might have been prophecies of doom or warnings of specific dangers that must be averted to survive. Several PCs seemed rather shaken up by their visions.
 * Red used another scry spell on the man in woad, being rebuffed by his will save and recognizing that he was located on another plane at this time. She does not know whether he was aware of this attempt.
 * In the end, the group decided to investigate the Clockworkers' warehouse, which might be related to Seven's kidnapping (being north of the river and also apparently made of metal, both of which would have interfered with scrying) and also related to the quest to thwart the Invasion (since a Clockwork Man had been linked with one of Chavalk's curses by Terreira and Khirg reported fighting with strange mechanicals in his dream.) That is where they are headed at 5:30 AM on Sunday May 1st when the next session begins.

MAL 21

 * The party went to the metal warehouse of the King of Clocks. They knocked on the door, planning to parlay with the clockworkers, but when no one answered, they went inside to have a peek around. Aler found a note from the King of Clocks mentioning Harasket offering him help with some unknown situation in the kingdom of Averdale which has apparently been going on for 19 years. No beds, food, or any other indications of anyone with a human life cycle living here were found.
 * Before the party could investigate more, Adriel pulled up the stakes on a leather tarp on the floor, triggering a mechanical dragon of very large size to spring up out of the floor and start attacking. The party decided to flee, grabbing a peculiar enchanted metal box on the way out.
 * After a long discussion about who was going to go where when, the party finally decided to go talk to Kalima the bard. On their way to the Hall of Lyra, they passed the Church of Tallian where Father Saxon was reading a proclamation against necromancy by the Church and the Duke.
 * Kalima introduced Jon to a dapper halfling called Fingers Clayton, who she later identified as the owner of the Ruastin casino. Clayton had pieced together the party's search for Seven and told Jon the cult of Corrigar, an affiliate of the gang called Malice, were allied with illithids and he could find the girl he's looking for if he confronted them.
 * Unknown validity.
 * Adriel got an anonymous note from a Malice member telling her that the Red Hand is lying and Malice is NOT allied with the illithids--except for Skenebrax, who is now gone--and that the King of Clocks, a Red Hand ally, is the real associate of the League of Snakes.
 * Unknown validity.
 * Red then tried scrying the priest of Sesharet again. This time she got through, and witnessed the priest conversing with a drow who called him "Mr. Ander" and wanted to know "what is in this for me." The priest then noticed the scry and told the drow, who started casting something. Red broke off the scry.
 * Finally, the party talked to Beyond Jessery, first establishing some friendly relations by discussing the necromantic ban and Piper's situation with her, then revealing Seven's kidnapping and confronting her with Dayant Arakin's letter. Jessery seemed confused and claimed not to know Dayant Arakin or Chavalk, saying that the letter must have been meant for a different Beyonder. Detect Thoughts failed but Sense Motive suggested she was flustered but telling the truth when she claimed never to have met Dayant Arakin. Overall, the party concluded that this letter was most likely another example of Chavalk's deceit, though they couldn't rule out Jessery being involved with the League in some way.

MAL 22

 * Philsin turned out to be an information dealer. The party bought several pieces of information from him, the most relevant being where the cult of Corrigar was located (in a building in a park in the west of town,) where the King of Clocks is (an address in Hastenport), and who Enarras Misterian was (a Tenarri sorcerer-king from ~600 years ago, known as the Dragonslayer and buried in a tomb in Ruastin by his fellows after he fell nearby in combat. Local rumors describe his spirit wandering the streets as an apparition reliving old battles.) Philsin also offered to buy information, but he said that he would not and could not promise to keep any information the party sold him a secret from anyone else.
 * Descending the staircase, the group found some underground catacombs, where Adriel triggered a trap where the stone floor swallowed her face and began suffocating her. After attempts to yank her out of the stone and smash the stone out from around her didn't succeed, Zadkiel held his breath and transposed with her, then Tisha grabbed his foot and went ethereal with him to get him out of the encasing stone.
 * Tanya found an invisible button on the wall. After using a mage hand to remotely push it, she found it caused a secret door to swivel open. Tanya, Khirg and Aler went through to check it out, and found a hidden room with a safe. Aler was unable to open the safe, and sent Tisha and Bay through instead, who were able to crack the safe but triggered a gas trap that rendered Bay unconscious. The small group escaped from the room with some unidentified loot and a letter from Chavalk addressed to the "Priests of Contagion" telling them that the timing of the Invasion would depend upon the "disposition of Xhriakw." Jon took more mental damage when he thought about the name "Xhriakw" again. He is sure he must have known more about this at some point, but seems unable to access those memories. Zadkiel hypothesized that the priests of contagion mayb have been behind Skenebrax' curse of spreading plague.
 * The party filed past a magic mirror without taking any precautions to cover or disable it, then entered a twisty passage that led them to a false staircase which dumped them into a pit of green slime and scarab beetles. Using ropes and magic, they managed to climb back out, then Tanya found another invisible button which rotated the wall to reveal the real staircase down.
 * On the lowest level, the party bypassed a door to a room that later turned out to be a laboratory, and followed another twisty passage to a large altar room where they were attacked by a mummy, a priest of Sesharet, several green-robed cultists, and an invisible illithid. The mummy shot at the party with arrows of dragon slaying, then announced that "none of my enemies are here," as if surprised. The priest of Sesharet stated you were "mercenaries, just kill them." Zadkiel tried to talk the mummy into turning on the cultists, but it wasn't interested. The illithid dominated Khirg, who did a lot of damage to his teammates before being restrained by the magic python, and then three of the fairies you encountered in the tomb returned and began lighting the party up with eldritch blasts. After a long, messy fight, the mummy was killed by Aler. The still-invisible illithid tried to get to a side door and was thwarted by Tanya and Jarth, then he and the purple-robed priest somehow teleported out of the complex together, while the cultists were wiped out by Red's summoned creatures.
 * The party revived their downed teammates and found Seven in a glass box where she had apparently been in stasis for four days. They opened it and released her, learning her version of events and also that her investigations in Hastenport had revealed Ander, the villainous priest of Sesharet, is actually a priest of Corrigar who had infiltrated the Temple of Sesharet.
 * Finally, they found a note from someone named Kolchis discussing a "biological agent," telling Ander that the Keres would be "otherwise occupied," and that Harasket had provided them with a location for an attack, but no time. Jarth was able to identify the coordinates as someplace in the middle of the Utah forest. "That's a... strange place for an attack," he says. "Why would they choose a remote wilderness location like that? What could be there that they would want so much?"

MAL 23

 * First, Tisha identified three questions she thought were important: one, who is Xhriakw--it sounds like the timing of the Invasion depends upon his nature, so we'd better learn that. Two, why was Seven brought to Ruastin? She didn't find the hypothesis that the League of Snakes was trying to lure you there viable, because they didn't seem to have a good intelligence briefing on you (shooting rare and expensive dragon slaying arrows at a human and a drow), and there's also no obvious reason they wanted you in Ruastin. And third, why are they planning to attack a location in the middle of a forest--what is there that they want? Looking at a map, Red identified the location in the Utah Forest as being at or near a fort of the Green Guard, but still had no idea why an extraplanar army would want to take this fort as it is, indeed, in the middle of the wilderness.
 * The party paid a visit to Thrane Do'Ezzen, playing it safe by leaving Red and Aler behind. They tried to sell him the drow armor they took from the agent who attacked Bay, but he was not interested. They asked about his religious affiliation, and he said he was a worshipper of Lolth. They asked him about the necromancy ban, and got the response that he didn't expect anything to change as he hadn't been in the habit of casting necromantic spells in front of police detectives anyway. The party decided not to ask him about his meeting with Ander and left.
 * Red cast Scry on the illithid they had fought in the cult of Corrigar, and was able to observe him in an unknown room speaking with the demon who interrupted the Ker attack on you earlier. The conversation was elliptical-- "She didn't take the bait." "Too bad. What about the rest of it?" "The canary has flown." Then the demon frowned and mentally attacked Red. As the spell faded out, the party heard him yelling “God DAMN it will you tentacly bastards start securing locations, this is what magic was invented for—” :-D
 * Red hypothesized that perhaps the "bait" of Seven being held prisoner was intended for Lady Aldrayeth, since the enemies had prepared a substantial anti-dragon ambush and since Aldrayeth clearly cared enough about Seven's abduction to lend a major artifact to the cause.
 * The party remembered that Zadkiel and Red had found dead canaries in the birdcage in the disease lab, and speculated that the cult of Corrigar might be spreading disease by releasing infected birds. Aler said it could be a metaphor for any agent of disease, noting that Skenebrax had carried a plague back to Iscariot. The party decided to pay at the temple to have Zadkiel and Red, who had entered the disease lab, checked for signs of disease. Zadkiel, but not Red, seemed to be in the earliest stages of infection with a disease, which he was able to cure with the Healing proficiency. The party then guessed this might have been because Zadkiel fell into the scarab pit unlike Red, so they paid to check Angara, Khirg, and Aler. Aler was similarly affected, but not the others. The party then paid to have Tanya, Adriel, Jon, Bay, Syla, Sephy, and Blue all checked, revealing Jon was affected. Aler and Jon were cured. Zadkiel suggested checking Seven and Jarth, and Jarth was affected like Zadkiel, Aler and Jon were, but Seven was fully infected and contagious, and Cure Disease needed to be cast on her. The group realized that the characters who had caught the disease today were the ones who had touched Seven (Aler helped her out of the box, Jarth hugged her, Zadkiel checked to see if she needed healing, and Jon comforted her and tried to calm her down.) Everyone was now successfully healed, and the outbreak of an annoying plague next session that would have caused PCs and important NPCs to become comatose at inconvenient times for the party was now thwarted. XP awarded.
 * The group returned to Philsin the Fixer to see whether he had found more information about the kidnappers like they had requested. After paying him, they learned that the man in blue woad is a feysworn sorcerer named Manathor. The party then haggled about Ander, trading the information they had learned for the information that Ander had apparently been consulting with Thrane about the possibility of raising some deepsea monster from the dead.
 * The group went to see the oracular trolls as planned. Red asked them the question "How can we defeat the enemies of Malachi who threaten to invade us?" After reading his own entrails, the troll declared "To win at war thou must understand thy enemies, and thou art disadvantaged in this, for thy enemies already well understand humankind. Know that arcana is always most effectively countered by arcana, prayer by prayer, extraplanar magics by extraplanar magics, alien powers by alien powers… charge not a unit of longbowmen with dagger in hand. So… it is written!”
 * After sleeping the night, the party set off for Hastenport. The journey was uneventful, but they found guards posted at the gates to Hastenport, which has not been typical. Tegan and another guard dropped the bombshell that there was "a little bit of civil disorder in Hastenport," as Petros Alaric had been executed yesterday. Zadkiel started freaking out, but the guards didn't know any more details. One of them did offer that a local farmer had also been executed-- "I guess it's some conspiracy."
 * The party entered the city and went to the Mages' Guild. The members who usually tell you to go away whenever you try to enter ran to fetch Aldrayeth immediately once Jarth told them he had a 62,000 gp artifact to return to her. :-D  The group shared their theory about the cult of Corrigar setting an ambush for Aldrayeth. She was surprised by that, but wondered if it might be possible that they had gotten garbled intelligence suggesting Aldrayeth was physically with the party, instead of just giving them aid. Aldrayeth did leave town earlier this week, though not for Ruastin. Perhaps there is a spy in the Mage's Guild. The party data dumped to Aldrayeth about Chavalk and the League of Snakes. Aler asked about his demonmark, and Aldrayeth took a lock of his hair to examine, saying she'd get back to him later. Zadkiel asked Aldrayeth about the possibility of making a truce with Threndix. She said that Threndix is actually quite a rational individual, but he IS prideful, and she isn't at all surprised if he wants to kill people who beat him up, drove him off, and humiliated him. She offered to try putting out feelers to him about it, though "he doesn't necessarily like me that much either, you know." Zadkiel asked again about Threndix' prophecy, and Aldrayeth told him that Threndix had foreseen his own death at the hands of someone half of Malachian blood and half extraplanar.
 * The party went to see the Mayor. After he set up several protective spells and swore the party to secrecy, he revealed that Petros is not really dead. "I am setting a trap for the trap-setter, and I am taking the gamble that the social crisis it is currently causing will end up being shallower and briefer than the one which otherwise would have happened. If they try to nail the Duke with proof he executed an innocent man before the city burns down, I reveal my hand and I win. If the city burns down first, I lose. With any luck, High Seeker Lorinell’s public insistence on Petros’ guilt will tamp sentiment down enough to tempt Harasket into fanning the fire." He asked for everything the party had learned about the League of Snakes, and they told him everything including the King of Clocks information. The Mayor said of the King of Clocks "The reports I have suggest that they might be golems or mechanical people displaced when whatever artificer made them was killed or fled in the Averdale coup. That’s speculative, though. They keep to themselves." The party did show him the letter about Averdale and the Keres, and the Mayor said he had no idea whether the King would want the Averdale regime to be overthrown or not, but that presumably the party had a chance to get either the King of Clocks or the Queen of Averdale to join their alliance, but certainly not both. The party concluded they would try the King of Clocks, since the Queen of Averdale seemed unlikely to ever work with their party of mostly magic users to help a duchy whose Church of Tallian they had a major schism with. Finally, the party discussed High Priest Ander and the different scenarios for how compromised the Temple of Sesharet was (running all the way from "This one guy was dominated by an illithid into betraying them" through "the whole temple is secretly allied with Corrigar and the League of Snakes.") Everyone concluded they don't have enough information and need to investigate the Temple of Sesharet, the complication being that any perception of the city cracking down on Sesharet worshippers at this point is likely to be disastrous at this point. Red suggested taking a diplomatic tack and asked the Mayor to authorize it. The Mayor, commenting that his career was unlikely to survive the Petros gambit anyway, agreed to come with the party to the police station. He also told them that Captain Black, Detective Noyar, High Seeker Lorinell, and themselves were the only ones to know Petros was still alive, and swore them to secrecy from telling anyone else.
 * The party went back to the police station, and found Lady Overton (the Ducal Emissary) meeting with Captain Black in her office. The Mayor explained that he'd heard enough to authorize a third-party operation to investigate the Temple of Sesharet, but the Emissary objected and demanded to know what kind of operation. Red did her best to make the investigation seem nonthreatening, but Overton wasn't having it and said Sesharet worshippers were rioting already and considering what had happened with Petros, ANY allegation against their own high priest would be taken badly, especially as he was still missing. The party explained that he wasn't really missing and the circumstances under which they had encountered him, but the "proof" they provided her-- the letter from Chavalk to the "Priests of Contagion"-- didn't mention Ander or Sesharet at all, and she overruled the Mayor's authorization and forbid the party from investigating the Temple of Sesharet. Then Tisha leaned around the mayor and put her badge on the table, saying "His Majesty's Secret Service. Mission reauthorized." Multiple WTF faces exchanged all round, but Overton backed down. Tisha agreed with Red that the extent of the problem within the Temple of Sesharet needed to be determined and that doing this carefully could reduce, not increase, civil unrest.
 * As they left the Grey Citadel, Zadkiel was surprised to see his father waiting outside for him. They went to the Temple of Altaris to talk, and Zadkiel's father revealed that he is not actually Zadkiel's birth father, in fact Zadkiel's mother was already pregnant when he met her. They had used magical precautions to hide his parentage, but apparently something had happened to shake it loose, and a draconian had apparently observed it in Ruastin and told his dragon master, who now wanted to kill Zadkiel. "Why the dragon holds a vendetta against your birth father I do not know. His name is Hastaros, and he is an angel of Moradin." Moradin is a dwarven god.
 * The party discussed Threndix' possible desire to kill Zadkiel because he is a half-extraplanar and a half-extraplanar is destined to kill Threndix. Zadkiel pointed out that Threndix had been trying to kill Tanya, not him. Khirg said Tanya is not half-extraplanar, but a fullblood fey being. Red realized that Threndix has been killing not only half-extraplanars but also extraplanars who were married to Malachians, since he is a prophet and can see events in the future, he may have been trying to kill Tanya to prevent her from having Khirg's children in the future, and killing Jendarion's wife and children for the same reason. Tisha confirms that Threndix killed her half-fiend grandmother ("though to be perfectly fair, she was kind of evil, from everything I hear,") but has never bothered her father or herself (who are less than half extraplanar.)

MAL 24

 * After a certain amount of animated discussion on how best to avoid being turned into flambe, Zadkiel went to talk with Threndix, giving him information about the League of Snakes and the party's efforts to thwart them. With Zadkiel swearing a Draconic oath not to cause harm to Threndix as suggested by Jon, the firedrake seemed satisfied and allowed him to leave alive to go bother the League of Snakes further. Zadkiel also told him about the vendetta of the Aquan river god and Chavalk's plan to send the Hidden Ones after the Order of the Dragon, which gave Threndix pause.
 * The group went to investigate the Temple of Sesharet. After discussing the tense social situation with some sailors and dockworkers in some local bars, the group talked the rather guarded acting priestess Mayalei into letting them in to investigate Ander's disappearance, withholding from her the information that they had fought against a priest they believe to be Ander in the cult of Corrigar. She let them into Ander's office, where Zadkiel found a secret compartment behind a plaque with a tree design on it that looked suspiciously like a fish skeleton design when rotated 90 degrees. The compartment contained a magic mirror, a nonmagical potion, and a key. Red didn't succeed at analyzing the potion. Mayalei said the mirror was a religious artifact of the temple and refused to elaborate, but she didn't know what the potion or key were and allowed the party to take them for further analysis. As they were leaving, one of the priests who had seemed more disturbed by the conversation than the others, named Renner, caught Red's eye before turning away. Not clear whether this was plot related or an awkward pass...
 * Aler brought the party with him to the meeting. Naruah asked him point-blank what was going on with Petros' execution, and Aler kept his word to the Mayor and didn't tell him about the ruse. Naruah discussed a few other topics, of which the most important was the fact that the Eye of the Night had examined the gate sigil Khirg had been carrying around, determined that it was fey in origin (as Jon had already surmised,) and traced the magical signature to one by the name of "Lann Lasanta." Jon recognized this as a name meaning "flashing blade" in Fey. The players recalled having heard the name "Lasanta" before, ultimately remembering that the elves identified it as the name of a leader of the Invasion (either another name for Chavalk, or one of his allies.) The party wondered whether this might be the same person as Shyra. Red sent a letter to the elven diplomat she had spoken to earlier, informing him of this connection.
 * With Jon and Tisha returned, the group paid a visit to Lady Aldrayeth, telling her what had transpired with Threndix and asking for help identifying the amber lantern Jon had received. She agreed with Tisha that it is a planar gate device leading through the ethereal plane--possibly to a demiplane/pocket dimension embedded there--and also agreed with Jon that it was activated by the catches beneath the amber panels. Aldrayeth activated each of these catches herself, and the lantern grew to gazebo-like proportions. Khirg remembered a letter that Tanya had sent him, which he had already shared with Red, telling him a Dullahan prophecy that his people would be routed and destroyed if things continue as they are now, and that he must "find what's beyond the amber door." Tisha hypothesized that the item Tanya wants to find may be the same one the ethergaunts are trying to unload, and wondered whether this might be related to Petros' house and Harasket's intrusion there after all, since the ethergaunt found them at that particular place.

MAL 25

 * When Khirg picked the bow up, the party was attacked by slaads, who made a concerted but ultimately fruitless attempt to kill Khirg and/or wrestle the bow away from him. With the help of the water panther and a water elemental summoned by Red, two of the slaads were slain and the others retreated onto the ethereal plane.
 * Red and Jon went to find the priest of Sesharet, Renner, who had been looking concerned and shooting glances at Red when she was there investigating High Priest Ander earlier. After discreetly managing to get Renner alone, he told them the location of a house in the marshlands outside of town where they could learn more about Ander, and that he could say no more.
 * Aler met with Naruah and updated him on everything the party has learned about the League of Snakes. Naruah mused about why Chavalk would wish to invade Peraine in the first place, and provided Aler with some information about the illithids, offering to serve as a go-between if Aler wishes to send letters to the quarantined Skenebrax. He also mentioned that the strange monsters the party encountered in Mendham Wood and Ruastin sounded like creatures Skenebrax has described from illithid mythology, and asked the party to inform him if they are able to learn anything more about the illithids or their agenda.
 * Red had been invited to meet with the King of Clocks, so she brought the rest of the party with her to do that. Besides some roleplaying interactions with Red and Adriel, the King of Clocks revealed that his arms deal with Harasket was supposed to occur in two weeks. If Khirg's vision is accurate, that means the Invasion could not happen for at least two weeks. If Jon's vision is accurate, it would have to happen before the summer solstice. So that gives you a window somewhere between May 18th and Jun 20th. You already have coordinates that you intercepted from the illithids.
 * It was now about 8PM, and the party decided to travel to the address given to them by Renner and scout it out before deciding whether to enter or sleep for the night first. They successfully located the swamp house, glowing red in the darkness, and there we left off for the day.

MAL 26

 * Inside, the group found the source of the red glow: a magical brazier which gave Red and Zadkiel a vision about being lowered into the sea to the eerie sound of a heartbeat. Tisha used a dispel magic to disable a magic mirror, warning the party they could be used for scrying. Red found a bed upstairs with a scent she recognized from the Cult of Corrigar in Ruastin, though she could not positively identify it as Ander's (there was a crowd of cultists moving around at the time she smelled them.) Zadkiel found a blacklight flashlight. Aler and Bay found buttons inside four fish plaques on the walls, turning them into fish skeletons and causing a staircase leading down to open.
 * Passing through an underground corridor, the party discovered trapped octopus plaques, but Tisha fluffed her disable device roll and was blinded by some strange ink for the remainder of the adventure.
 * The party arrived in a study with a shiny floor, with a crooked painting on the wall bearing the words "The cure for anything is saltwater... tears, sweat or the sea." The door on the other side would not open, giving a minor electrical shock to anyone who touched it. Searching the desk, Aler found a purse, a scroll of Speak With Dead, a parchment in the illithid language, and a letter from Petros warning Ander to exercise caution with some apparently "forbidden" knowledge he had come across. Using Tongues on Zadkiel, the party learned that the parchment is ritual language (analagous to a magical text one would have to use "read magic" on), and that the inscription over the door reads "Abandon Hope," though reading the latter was deeply unsettling to Zadkiel. Using the blacklight revealed three magical runes on the floor: symbols of water, earth, and Corrigar. Rotating the crooked painting caused the whole room to tilt, not just the painting, causing most the PCs to slide down the smooth floor into a darkened room below.
 * The room below seemed to have had people in it relatively recently (a toilet chute in the corner was used a week or two ago by Red's estimation.) The word "Mariska" was written on the wall in dried blood, but there was no smell of death in the room. Aler and Bay, who had avoided falling into the lower room, manipulated the painting to open the room again and release the other PCs, commenting that this room didn't make sense as a trap with which to attack intruders. The party guessed that perhaps it might be a prison.They activated the three magical runes, then Red used the strange crystal on the desk to turn the doorknob and open the door.
 * The party passed into a shrine with a mosaic floor. They recognized the stone altar here as similar to the one they had seen in the shrine of Corrigar in the sewers. On top of the altar was a chalice of wine and within it was a pitcher of unholy water and a basket of rags. Upon further examination, the rags appeared to be a linen tunic and pants that had been cut with a knife, but there was no blood on them. The scent matched one of the scents Red had smelled in the prison room. Meanwhile Zadkiel and Khirg found a wand on top of a bookshelf, then Zadkiel became entranced by an ominous looking illithid book titled "Mysteries of the Snake" and sat down on the floor to begin reading it. In the desk, Aler found a thin black journal, a green potion, and a letter in the illithid language. The letter seemed to be discussing Harasket's curses, including an explanation of a memory curse that may match Jon's. The journal was a magical research notebook, which started innocently enough describing an Aquan artifact, but the last four pages were nothing but the single illithid word "power" repeated over and over again. The book Zadkiel was reading was starting to cause disturbing Illithid murmurs to play in his head, but he couldn't stop reading it. The other PCs disrupted his reading, allowing him to quickly shut it. Khirg took that book and another one titled "As The Worm Turns" and put them in his backpack. At this point the party was starting to suffer the effects of acid that had burned through their boots and Zadkiel's pants. They retreated from the room, and Aler, using true seeing, found the mosaic floor to be illusory and the real floor to have pools of acid in several places. The party proceeded more cautiously through the room and through the door on the other side, which Bay noticed a disarmed magical lock on it.
 * The party went down a staircase into a dark cave with an octopus carving engraved in the floor and a bar with two manacle-like clasps hanging from the ceiling over an underground grotto of sea water. Red turned into a plesiosaur and slipped into the water to investigate, triggering a flash image of a man with his arms extended hovering above the water. Khirg found some perfectly cleaned human skulls in a cauldron, Adriel found a lever which she wanted to pull but the other PCs dissuaded her from pulling it, Zadkiel examined a large balance with a crystal feather on one side and placed his own angel feather on the other side, causing the sound of a man's scream to reverberate in the room, and Aler opened a heavy metal chest and found a fist-sized crystal skull with large eyes, a vaguely alien shape, and no mouth.
 * Shortly after Aler picked up the crystal skull, the heartbeat sound was heard again and a gigantic water abomination burst out of the water, seizing Aler and mauling Red. After a brief, strobe-lit battle, the monster turned and left, carrying Zadkiel away with it in angel form, but he used Free Action to wriggle free and swim to safety.

MAL 27

 * Kit informed the party that the leviathan they drove off had come swimming past the harbor, terrifying the sailors and the residents but apparently not attacking anyone. You didn't get much more information about this--Kit is not so good at Jon's "5 W's" thing yet. ("Who-- a big ass sea monster! What-- swimming past the coast! Where--I think it came from the north. When-- 20 minutes ago. Why-- um, maybe it was awakened by... nuclear radiation? Yeah, and now it wants revenge on humanity! I bet that's it!" XD )
 * After sleeping, the party went to the police station and reported to Captain Black. She agreed with Zadkiel's plan to take the information the party had amassed to the Temple of Sesharet. She conjectured that the name "Mariska" which was found written on the wall in dried blood might have referred to Mariska Hill, a farmwife who went missing during the shiver epidemic a month and a half ago, who might have become a victim or collaborator of Ander's. Pressed by Tisha, Black mentioned another local who disappeared more recently, a village ne'er-do-well named Garret Tanner. He matches the general description of the sacrifice victim Red and Zadkiel saw in their vision, and disappeared a week ago, which would fit with the tracking information Aler and Red got.
 * The party then went to the Temple of Sesharet and met with the acting priestess Mayalei again, presenting her with the sum of their evidence against High Priest Ander. Increasingly alarmed by this information, Mayalei called in the temple elders and assumed leadership of the temple, then led the priests down to the pavilion where they summoned an Aspect of Sesharet to chase down the leviathan. Mayalei asked the party for more information about the cult in the sewers, which they did not have. Some of the party members remembered the goblin maintenance man they had encountered in the sewers and paid no mind last time, and determined to speak with him again.
 * Zadkiel secured Mayalei's agreement to meet with the other head clerics Thursday night to discuss the danger posed by the League of Snakes.
 * The party went to visit Seven, and found her selling a book to Head Seeker Lorinell, who wished to talk to Adriel about Chavalk's attack on her childhood village, Berranan. Lorinell wondered why Chavalk would have led a demonic host against this village, and the party brainstormed about that for a while before Lorinell concluded that perhaps Adriel should return to the site of the massacre and search for answers there. She also spoke with Jon about Piper; the group did not share Petros' letter to Ander with her.
 * The party went to talk to Naruah, showing him the crystal skull and feather they found in Ander's house. Naruah didn't recognize the feather, but thought the skull looked like an illithid artifact, and suggested asking the mentalist Anselm about it, though he is a "considerably strange person" who Skenebrax and Aki once tried and failed to communicate with. You also shared the letter you found from the illithid to Ander, and Naruah opined that from context, the "Hrin Fhtamgali" sounds like they must be some clan or organization of illithids to which Skenebrax does not belong.
 * The party located the goblin maintenance man Tinka and questioned him about the cult in the sewers, learning that there was a human in purple robes, several in green robes, and a man in "thief armor" (which he later elaborated as black leather armor.) The robed people came from the tunnel beneath the warehouse which the party already discovered, and the guy in thief armor came through a secret door in "sector 8," in the northwest of the docks district.
 * The party located the secret door and used a Knock spell to open it, revealing a winding passage with a spongy floor in a snakeskin pattern that made them feel cold and uneasy and drained their hit points. Bay was unable to ever find a mechanism to turn this trap off, which she found perplexing. The party absorbed the damage and used Wood Shape to punch through a barred wooden door into a room with a large ornate disk with a snake's eye in the center, a reflective floor, metal skulls that jetted fire at you when disturbed, and black and gold tapestries that seemed to ripple in an unsettling way whenever touched. After some trial and error and a grievous burn to Khirg's hand, the group determined how to activate the snake eye disk to open both a fey portal (clockwise) and an abyssal portal (counter-clockwise.) Vanima Kaimelar was able to describe what she saw on the other side of the portal, but after some discussion the group decided neither to send her through to explore it alone nor to send Tisha through to the Abyss. The party now knows how to safely operate the portal for the future, however.
 * The party went up the shaft into an ordinary and deserted-seeming rowhouse, where they found only a few books written in an unknown language, some women's jewelry (which I think nobody took,) a magical picture which showed each viewer a portrait of their own family, and no scent trail. The party guessed this might be a hideout of Harasket's, since he has no scent and would be able to freely traverse the trapped hallway without taking damage. They went to Captain Black and learned that the home belongs to a Tenarri woman named Tesleen, who has not been reported missing but Black will look into it.
 * After several vague inquiries about whether anyone knew any giants or what the significance of giant guards could be, Red informed the party that her Druid grove had informed her that Barken the dwarf necromancer had been arrested for practicing necromancy and taken to a secret holding facility near Oak Ridge--a tower guarded by giants. Tisha reacted strongly to this, saying that secret Ducal prisons of which the feds were unaware was highly illegal, and retreated to communicate with her people in an attempt to determine whether that was in fact the case. Apparently it is. Meanwhile, the group sent a pigeon back to the grove to ask about the tower, wondering if it might be Dayant Arakin's displaced tower; however, it did not match that description.
 * The party decided to travel to Delsin and Berranan, both to the south of Hastenport. Tisha, however, said she would be dealing with the secret prison tower in Oak Ridge, to the north. The party discussed the possibility of going with her and then returning, which they decided would take too much time. Tanya offered to go to the tower with Tisha, and Tisha said she would contact her people to try to scare up some reinforcements. Red brought Tisha to meet Kevin, the King of Clocks, who she had apparently already spoken to late last night about the Barken situation. Kevin was willing to take his mechanical walkers to the tower and break in, but wanted confirmation as to whether or not this was an official government site or not. Receiving the confirmation that it was not, Kevin, Tisha and Tanya began planning their raid, while the rest of the party planned their trip to Delsin.

MAL 28

 * Zadkiel, Aler and Red decoded Lochrann's message, learning from it that Shyra is indeed the fey Lann Lasanta, and surmising from the text that she has shapeshifting ability.
 * On their way to Delsin, the party was ambushed in the middle of the night by an explosion of wildfire, causing much damage and chaos. They were then attacked by two creatures of Limbo Jon identified as "starbeasts," which did only modest amounts of damage but were incredibly difficult to injure.
 * During the fight, Bay noticed something inside her and Aler's burning tent. Zadkiel flew in and perceived somebody invisible going through Aler's backpack, but then was hit by a Power Word Stun. Aler used True Seeing to catch sight of the culprit stuffing the crystal skull into his bag: it was the feysworn sorcerer with woad tattoos who had been involved in Seven's kidnapping. The party surmised that he had summoned the starbeasts to distract them while he purloined the skull.
 * Angara managed to wrestle the sorcerer's bag with the crystal skull away from him. Having taken a lot of damage despite his hefty magical protections, he invoked the power of his tattoos to flee to the Fey lands without the skull. However, Aler used Seela's blacksilver arrows to shoot him through the Veil, and then Jon planeblazed through and totally killed his ass with a Shout spell.
 * The party finally got some sleep and carried on to the mining town of Delsin, where they found themselves being rather pointedly ignored by the townsfolk. Zadkiel brought the group to the stately dwarven temple of Moradin and asked the high priest, Dareth, to help put him in contact with his deadbeat angel father. Dareth was surprised but not shocked, and told Zadkiel the angels of Moradin speak only to those who have done a great service for the dwarves. Zadkiel manifested his angelic form and attempted to lift the hammer of Moradin from the pool it was resting in--unsuccessfully, but it did cause the pool to star glowing and the statue of Moradin to speak to him. “Go thou to the volcano of Abresor, and bring back to this temple the Forge of our Master. Only with this forge can the Children of the Mountain craft arms to defend our land. Do this service, and the Angels of Justice will come to answer thy questions.” Adriel recognized Abresor as the name of a volcano near her childhood village of Berranan. Jon also asked the dwarven priest about the mad mentalist Anselm they were searching for, but the priest had no idea about that.
 * The group decided not to speak to anyone else in Delsin at this time and instead decamped immediately for Berranan, hoping to learn why, other than sheer orneriness, Chavalk would have attacked such an ordinary bucolic village. Adriel told them the story of the attack from her then-8-year-old perspective, and also said that Chavalk and her father had long been enemies, so it isn't impossible that Chavalk would have attacked merely to take revenge on her father.
 * No one seemed to have set foot in Berranan in years. The group encountered a spectral Haunt with many ghostly voices lamenting their untimely deaths. Some complained of their bones lying "scattered like the dust" or "abandoned," though there was clearly a consecrated mass grave here where victims had been laid to rest, and others complained that the knight Martin Valenal had ridden away in their hour of need, left them to be slaughtered, etc. Adriel, who had been with her father at the time of his death, maintained that he had fought bravely against Chavalk himself and been slain in battle.
 * Exhorted by the haunt to go to the schoolhouse, the group found only a crater overgrown with weeds. While the party cleared the weeds to get a better look at it, Red used the druidic torc to get past images of this land, getting images of normal happy village life interspersed with images from battle and destruction. She got one clear conversation between Adriel's father and a younger knight. Apparently the haunt and Adriel were both sort of right--Chavalk had caught Martin Valenal in a fork position, attacking a group of villagers including Adriel down by the river to draw the knight away from his position defending the rest of the townsfolk, especially a boy named Marek. Valenal did charge into battle against Chavalk at the second location, saving Adriel's life but dying in the process.
 * Clearing away the weeds, the party noticed an unusual blast pattern, with individual bricks and beams from the schoolhouse scattered across the ground in no close proximity to each other, rather than clumps of rubble or chunks of walls as you would ordinarily expect. The party quickly associated this with Bay's entropy force, and she confirmed that when she was first stricken with this force that "no two things were left touching one other in my vicinity." Putting together what Adriel remembered of Marek and the letters about Chavalk and the Chaos Hounds, the party hypothesized that Marek may have been the first Chaos Hound which Naruah said Chavalk already controls.
 * In coda, as the party set off for the volcano of Abresor, a pigeon arrived from Red telling her of the druid unit's successful rendezvous with Tisha, Tanya and the King of Clocks. Barken has been rescued, but was considerably disoriented, reporting being "drugged and interrogated by “a woman in her underwear,” who asked him questions about ghosts but seemed to be ignoring his answers." A guard was also taken prisoner, who claimed to be a mercenary from Norwall (not actually a Ducal soldier at all) and not to know who hired him.

MAL 29

 * Long, furious 3D combat resulting in Adriel's death by critical hit with an 8-foot-long blazing scorpion stinger, but the beast was eventually slain and sank back into the lava. The party dragged the 2-ton anvil back to the waiting hut and brought it back to the dwarven temple.
 * The angel, Hastaros, didn't actually turn out to be that much of an asshole at all. First he told the assembled dwarves of the threat to Peraine and used the forge to rally them against it. Second, he told the high priest to contact the dwarven King and ask him to ally against the League of Snakes. Third, he finally explained himself to Zadkiel--he had been unable to tell him anything of his heritage earlier because he had given his word to Zadkiel's mother and angels cannot go back on their word under any circumstance. Now that Zadkiel already knew the truth, he agreed to remove the spell he had cast to suppress Zadkiel's ability to access his angelic form. Fourth, Zadkiel brought up Piper's problem. Hastaros said it would be possible for the angels of Moradin to restore her to life as a mortal by undoing her sacrifice, and that they might be willing to do this out of their abhorrence for child sacrifice, but that such a powerful magic would be sure to have cascading effects, since everything that she has used her powers to accomplish would also be undone. Jon and Piper were too concerned about the negative ramifications that could have for Malachi to take him up on the offer, but he said Zadkiel could contact him again at the temple if Piper changed her mind.

MAL 33

 * Learning the importance of all the crystal skull's uses: Anselm identified the skull as a "conduit," which could theoretically be used to channel power for any purpose, running through an exhaustive list of which would not be an efficient use of your time. However, regarding the importance of the artifact's uses, Anselm explained that few men are capable of commanding the mental powers of the illithids, and since you found the skull in the possession of their human ally/servant Ander, they undoubtedly gave it to him so he could activate their own power to do what he could not. The party guessed that he might have been using the artifact to control the Leviathan you encountered at Ander's house, which Anselm agreed was possible.
 * Anselm also mentioned that there was one other "use" of particular importance to the party: the illithids could use it to track the party, "and there is nothing you're capable of doing that could conceal it from them. I would assume their first attempt to repossess it will not be their last." Zadkiel asked whether Anselm would be willing to keep the skull here in his realm, and if so, whether he could keep the illithids from finding it here. Anselm said yes, but if the party chose to do this, they could not count on finding him again to get it back from him later.
 * How to fight against the illithids both offensively and defensively: Anselm gave the party some information about the nature of the illithids' mental powers, which they call Fhtagn, the Tenarri call Psionics, and he himself refers to as "mastering the Core." He warned that the illithids' psionics are nearly impossible to block, counter, or dispel. Without mastering the Core yourself, your only defenses against them are "mitigation, Will saves, and blind luck. There is a good reason the rest of the Darklands fear them. But I know the secret of the illithids: the Core is equally useless against magic. Even their oldest enemies on Malachi do not know this. When you can control men's perceptions without recourse, how are they to know how much damage their enemies have taken, how much effect their spells have had, by what means a victory has been achieved?"
 * The party discussed this with Anselm further, asking questions about mitigation and how to use magic against the illithids' weakness. Anselm defined mitigation as not countering a power, but preventing its effects from harming anything. As an example, he said you can't magically stop an illithid from telekinetically dropping a rock on your head, but you can disintegrate the rock before it hits you, use a ring of jumping to jump out of the way, or take the damage and heal yourself. Conversely, an illithid cannot stop you from casting a lightning bolt at him, but he could transpose polarity and divert the strike away like any other electricity, or use the Core to heal any damage you cause. Anselm also warned you that the illithids are masters of mitigation, having had much experience with the magics of the Darklands.
 * Aler brought up force attacks, having noticed that his force arrows seem to have no effect on the Cthulhoid monsters you all fought. Anselm said he would not recommend using mind-affecting magics or force attacks on illithids at all, as their mitigation game would be especially strong on those fronts.
 * Red brought up several spells as examples to feel out what would be a useful attack against illithids or not. Anselm clarified that if an illithid had erected a psionic forcefield, an arrow could not pass through it regardless of whether it was magically enhanced or not, but nothing would stop you from casting a non-physical spell through the forcefield as if it were not there. So, for example, you could summon an animal right next to an illithid even if there were a forcefield between you. They have no resistance to pure magic spells like Finger of Death (though they still get a saving throw like anything else.) And if you cast any spells to enhance yourselves or disadvantage them, they have no way to dispel that... except for dominating the spellcaster and forcing him to terminate the spells, which they could do.
 * The party then asked whether Anselm could use the crystal skull to confer his own powers to the party to shield themselves from illithid attacks. Anselm said no, the skull was nowhere near powerful enough for such a thing. The party then asked whether Anselm could empower the skull to hide JUST their knowledge of the illithid weakness from psionic probing. Anselm said he could do that, and the party gave him the crystal feather from the magic balance in exchange for this.


 * Finally, how to reverse Jon's memory loss. Anselm explained that this had no simpler a fix psionically than magically, since Jon was not suffering from brain damage (which could simply be healed) but rather his neural pathways had been rewired. "Nothing is going to have any chance at reversing that but another intervention through the Core." He suggested two options for restoring Jon's memories: 1) getting another illithid to do it. "They aren't a hive mind or anything--just because one illithid attacks you doesn't necessarily mean another one might not help you. But making deals with the illithids is not for the faint of heart. Bear in mind there is nothing you can do to completely protect your mind from them while you interact." 2) Anselm could try to repair it, but without knowing exactly what the illithid did, he might end up causing more damage. He suggested that if you brought him the brain of an illithid, it would improve his chances a lot.
 * The PCs decided the best course of action was to go to the Underdark and contact the illithids--if they could find one willing to cure Jon they could do that, but if they could not, they could kill one and bring back its brain. However, Jon asked Anselm to attempt psychic surgery immediately, despite the higher risk of failure. Adriel stridently dissented, saying that the risk of brain-damaging Jon further was too high and that it was irrational to assume that healing his brain a few days sooner would make any difference to their anti-Invasion plan. Bay asked whether this would help Piper somehow, and Adriel stated that it did not matter, because the fate of Malachi was more important than the lives of any individual. After a short quarrel, Jon stated that it was his brain and this was his final decision, which Red backed him up on.


 * Bay then asked Anselm about the apparition of Chavalk they had faced (which Ralph had referred to as a "free Answer,") and whether those were a preview of Chavalk's real powers or just, you know, a generic pit fiend stat block from the Dungeon Master's Guide. Anselm mused aloud about his philosophical unwillingness to start bending his own rules, one of which is not to discuss the thoughts of his visitors with anyone else--but that in this case, the illusion of the demon lord you fought in the Tomb of Horrors came not from Adriel's own mind but from an impression left by a previous guest, and that while he still does not intend to divulge personal information about his visitors "even to their next of kin," he knows without a doubt that the stored data about Chavalk would have been willingly given to Adriel.
 * Note, the recap didn't make this clear, but as of now the party's consensus was NOT to leave the crystal skull with Anselm, but rather to give him the crystal feather in exchange for psionically imbuing the skull to occlude their knowledge of the secret of the Fhtagn from illithid telepathy.

MAL 34

 * As Anselm had warned, performing psychic surgery on Jon without the illithid brain he said he needed did cause permanent brain damage (though luckily a comparatively inintrusive kind.) However, thanks in part to an 11th-hour memory check on Jay's part, Anselm was able to puzzle out that the disconnected neural pathways were related to the Plane of Chaos, and has now reconnected them. Jon explained his hypothesis that it may not be a specific fact Chavalk was trying to suppress, but rather his ability to synthesize interplanar information--and that he did not feel he would be able to play his part against the impending Invasion with that ability impaired, thus it was worth the risk.
 * The party decided that hiding their knowledge of the illithid secret from telepathy was worth the danger of the illithids tracking the crystal skull. Red decided to carry the skull, on the theory that while she is in dinosaur form the skull should not be able to be pickpocketed. (NB, though: She has been in human form throughout this adventure so far.)
 * Returning to the walking hut, the party encountered the gnollish leader, Ataman Finera. Khirg unhesitatingly offered her his golden bow, at which point she formally bestowed it upon him and declared him her champion, warning him to keep it out of enemy hands or the Xhorhasi (the gnollfolk) would be destroyed. Finera also agreed to join the allies at Red's meeting in Hastenport on May 17th (one week from today.)

MAL 35

 * Finally, after about 10 hours of travel, an illithid skyship suddenly appeared in an apparent attack, and there we broke off for the day!

MAL 36

 * The illithids succeeded very well at using their psionics to create chaos and turn the party and the drow crew against each other. Their attempt to kidnap Red went... less well for them. Eventually the illithid skyship disengaged and vanished, taking with it Red's snake staff. The final casualty rate, due to Zadkiel's furious healing, was only two lizard-illithids (identified by Aishek as cannon fodder troops) and one drow sailor Adriel demolished with a critical hit.
 * On the ground, the party was attacked by a chthulhoid tongue monster like the one they had to flee from in Mendham Wood. That was like 6 levels ago, though. This time, the party stood their ground and killed the beast. Bay was killed by a horrific mental attack, but Red managed to use druidic magic to save her.
 * The party was met by three curious couatls, who proved difficult to parlay with because they seemed to communicate only in mental images and emotional sensations. Jon managed to effect some rudimentary conversation, though the couatls' mental imagery was so abstract and Jon's so concrete that it was hard to tell how much they actually understood each other. They seemed friendly though, in their way, and flew off without causing any trouble for the PCs.

MAL 41

 * The sibyl then stepped down into the mana flame and disappeared. The blue magic walls dissipated, revealing that a glowing golden web matching the one from Khirg's dream had appeared in the archway and a giant tentacled brain had appeared in the purple pool. A large illithid figure was standing beside the archway with a drow, a Marilith and three smaller demons were standing in front of the archway, and a large spiky alien creature was standing by the pool with two illithids.
 * In a dramatic cutscene, Khirg thrust his golden bow at Aler, yelling "Just take it, all right!" and charged the archway, cutting through the golden web with his greataxe and disappearing in an explosion of golden light.
 * A pitched battle began, made worse by the revelation of two hiding wrath demons that attacked the PCs from the flanks when they charged the marilith and the approach of an army unit from the west (who were stymied for the first round by the shambling mounds, whose stats I'm really gonna need for the future!)
 * Due to the late hour I averted the second round of combat by having Jon move first so he could pull the escape trigger, to the slight disappointment of Adriel and Aler (who had a nonzero chance of taking down the badly injured Marilith before Jon's initiative came up), but to the overall benefit of the party (who had an even better chance of suffering one or more fatalities before that happened.) Jon successfully phased the party through the Veil to the Fey lands, where they found themselves buffeted by eerie green mana winds.

MAL 42

 * Then Jon noticed the three wrath demons from the ambush party arriving in the mana field, trailing silver Astral cords behind them. He suggested cutting these cords, which he believed would send the demons back to the Abyss.
 * A combat engaged, during which the demons engaged in progressively more and more unexpected behavior. They tried to possess Angara despite a divine spell blocking possession, one of them targeted Aler with an attack despite his demonmark, Tanya's dispels did not take down their forcefields, Zadkiel's antimagic shield did not stop them from spellcasting, Cartino's holy smite did not work properly, and cutting the Astral cord of one of the demons caused it to be stranded in the Fey plane, not returned to the Abyss as Jon expected.
 * At first the confused party wrote these things up to the well-established variability in demonic powers on Malachi, to the fact that Malachian magic is known to sometimes behave oddly in the Fey lands, or possibly to this group of demons being affiliated with Orcus in some way. However, eventually the truth came to light: they were actually illithids using psionic manipulation to masquerade as demons, and all the "magic" they were using was actually psionics.
 * Looking back on the ambush fight from last session, the party concluded that those enemies HAD been real demons, since holy smite had worked on them and the marilith dispelled Red's magic, which illithids are incapable of doing. These illithids had presumably mimicked the demons from their fight with the thought that the PCs would find that too believable to react to quickly, in which they were correct.

MAL 43

 * The party spoke with Feachan about a few other topics. Tanya said her husband was missing and Puck had said Feachan might be able to help. This too, Feachan seemed to become concerned about despite himself, and said that if Tanya learned where he was, Feachan could open a portal for them leading to that region with much more precision than Plane Shift (which dumps you hundreds of miles away.) Tanya asked if a fey mirror could give him enough information for him to create such a portal and Feachan said yes. Aler asked about the giant aberration skull you found in the Underdark. Feachan didn't know anything about that, saying he is not a paranormalist or xenobiologist, but he did identify the fluid as chaos mana. Aler asked whether chaos mana could mutate aberrations in some way and Feachan said he believes that would be possible. The party noticed Feachan was wearing the sigil of the Loon clan. (Lochrann's was Raven.) The party talked to Feachan for a while longer but that's all I remember of it, feel free to add on.