MAL Ep. 5

After tying up a few loose ends in Hastenport, the party acquired a map to the Arakin tower northwest of the city, and decamped for there.

1) The group questioned Sahree the acrobat about the crumpled note found in her wastebasket. She identified Jendarion as an ex of hers, a druid living in Norwall.

2) Red received a letter from Petros, answering her question about Chavalk being blocked from gating into the Dreamscape in scholarly detail. After some follow-up on his information, the party concluded that all the individuals in Hastenport powerful enough to accomplish this either could not or had not done so, leaving it a mystery what really happened there. The party did not use their purloined Ducal writ to enter the prison and question Petros about other topics.

3) 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.

4) 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.)

5) 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.

6) Beyond Kendra showed up with Detective Noyar to collect the artifacts Jon informed her Avery had taken from the tomb. She was civil but at this point clearly had zero interest in spending any time doing a favor for the party or listening to them recount their escapades at the circus.

7) Noyar spoke candidly with Jon about tensions in the city, expressing his desire to work together with him and offering to cover for the party as much as possible but also that stealing items from temples was beyond his ability to protect them from. Noyar opined that it would have been better to stealthily return the items to the tomb or turn them over to Noyar and let him handle it than to send Kendra a signed letter acknowledging looting them. ("She still has that letter, by the way. I'd stay on her good side if I were you.")

8) In the morning, Kit claimed there had been a ghost in the house. Her evidence for this was that she heard movement and rustling papers in the living room late at night, but could not find anyone there, and that the windows and doors were all still locked. Karna thinks she made this story up for attention, but Jon definitely did think the papers in his desk had been disturbed, and Kit claimed she did not touch them (which Red's scent-tracking ability backed up.)

9) The party disagreed about whether to travel to the tower via the route Jarth had suggested, which led through the local forest, or go north and cut through the marsh. After much discussion, the forest was agreed upon.

10) The party found a gazebo. It did not eat them. :-) It turned out to be a shrine to the Earth goddess Raija. Avery refrained from looting it. The party did not find anything else in the shrine.

11) 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.

12) 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.

13) Liria stopped fighting when she recognized Red as a druid of the Green Guard and began negotiating, claiming that she and Bay had both come from Norwall and that Bay had been meddling in dangerous chaos magics and needed to be taken back to undo the "damage she had caused." Bay claimed she had done nothing of the sort and that Liria's druids were in league with a demon, which Liria staunchly denied. Sense Motive suggested both women were being sincere (though probably not telling the whole story.) Adriel revealed her face, which Bay recognized and claimed to be the same demon she had seen in Norwall, whilst Liria showed no sign of recognition and simply accused the Green Guard of being the ones to deal with demons. Liria did acknowledge Jendarion as the leader of her organization, Sahree as a fellow member, and Bay as the Chaos Hound. The party did not ask her about curses. After they told her the story of Chavalk, she seemed suddenly worried, left Bay with the party, and gated away with her air elemental companion.

14) Adriel suddenly turned and attacked Liria as she left, causing her to exclaim "I *knew* that was a demon!" before gating away. Luckily for Adriel, who is down to about 10 HP, I forgot to make the air myrmidons who were standing right next to her retaliate. Air spirits are flighty and unpredictable beings; seems like these two were luckily bored with the scenario and ready to go home. :-)

And there we broke for the day. Game on! Laura