Curses: The Snake's Revenge

A number of curses were distributed on the orders of Chavalk. Those targeted were those immediately present in the battle with Arthon over the dreamscape. Those close by in the dreamscape, such as the paladins, were unaffected. The true purpose of the curses remains unclear, though there is speculation. They may have been issued in revenge, or they also may have been an initiation ritual to join the league of snakes.

MAL Ep 1

 * Red and Aler told the group that they have been afflicted with extraplanar curses. Red's prevents rain from falling within a one-mile radius of her, while Aler's has afflicted him with a peculiar ghostly imp-like creature that sits on his shoulder, cannot be dislodged, and seems impervious to all damage. It also screeches intermittently in a language none of you understand (Abyssal, Auran, and Fey have all been ruled out.) Jon replied by saying that he too has been cursed, in his case he seems to be losing his memory (and has consequently been carrying around a journal in which he jots down quest information to the best of his ability.) Adriel said that although she has not noticed a curse upon herself, she has been receiving threatening dreams from Chavalk, which she believes may be related.
 * Red recalled that during their fight with Arthon, Chavalk yelled at Adriel for doing something to prevent him from gating into the combat.
 * The high priest of Tallian... did perform the spell, detecting no curses on the paladins but definite extraplanar curses on Red, Aler, Jon, and Adriel.
 * The paladin duty commander used her aura sense to scan Aler's poltergeist for Abyssal energy. She reported that the poltergeist had no aura at ALL, leading Aler to wonder whether it ould be illusory. However, the paladin did note a faint Abyssal reading on Aler himself, and a STRONG Abyssal aura around Adriel.
 * The party went back to Seven's bookshop to have her take a picture of the poltergeist. As previously mentioned, the picture resulted in a strange white "hot spot" in the image where the creature should have been. The picture of Adriel came out normal.

MAL Ep 2

 * Tika [the illusionist at the circus], who grudgingly agreed to analyze the poltergeist on Aler's shoulder, concluding that it was definitely not an illusion.
 * Zadkiel and Adriel went to the House of Fantarin to try to have Vyna and Astilla tell them more about Adriel's abyssal aura. They confirmed the findings the paladin gave earlier, but could not divine more. Vyna said that a different High Seeker might be able to help, and mentioned that there is both a High Seeker and the headquarters of the Third Eye in Asture, both of which could run diagnostics.
 * Aler tried to use a healing artifact on himself, and to his surprise found that it injured him instead. He later had the belt scanned for curses, and found none. Zadkiel experimented on him with Cure Minor Wounds and Cause Minor Wounds, and found that they had the opposite effects on Aler, as if he were undead. Aler used his superior knowledge of the undead to definitively rule out himself being undead.
 * The group met with the priest of Tallian at Jon's house. While Jon fetched Piper, the priest unexpectedly tried to exorcise Adriel, which did not work. He expressed regret at this, since demonic possession was a problem he knew the solution to. Adriel showed him, and the party, what is truly wrong with her: her face has been replaced by the sinister visage of Chavalk himself, giving her an Abyssal aura and distressing her greatly. The priest said this was likely an arcane curse, but that it was possible Chavalk might try to corrupt her soul, and if she noticed this occurring and was able to get to the Church of Tallian in time, they had resources that could help with that.
 * The priest also affirmed that Piper is not cursed.

MAL Ep 5

 * The party encountered a 3-foot-tall crone who gave her name as Sallykin, recognized by Jon as the legendary Lady of the Moors. She felt the group out about their mission in the moors, identified herself as a creature of fey, remarked that Red (and only Red) seemed to be afflicted by a fey curse, and requested that she leave the moors within 10 days so that rain might continue to fall. Questioned by Jon about getting in touch with the two fey lords the party had seen in the Dreamscape, Jon's memory curse caused him to forget their names. Avery the warforged came to the rescue and provided their names, admitting that he had been the one snooping in Jon's house and read his notes. Sallykin identified the female fey as the Queen's daughter, and said that the grandmother she was referring to who had power over raising spirits to mortal life must be the Morrigan. She gave the party a ritual to call her again, though she declined to offer aid to them in their quest.

MAL Ep 8

 * During the fracas, the globe broke open, revealing an inky blackness inside which light bent into in an unnerving way. It started seeping into the room, emitting a pull that was difficult for the PCs to resist. The creature on Aler's shoulder detached and disappeared into the void, ending his curse. Characters attempted unsuccessfully to knock the globe closed with a mage hand, a greatsword, a giant snake, etc, but none of those things were both strong enough and able to manipulate the latch. Red, who was capable of both, tried to shut it herself but failed a saving throw and found her arm sucked into the void and damaged, luckily the snake managed to pull her back out again.
 * The party fled from the tower, over Zadkiel's loud objections, and called Sallykin the moor fairy. Sallykin identified the blackness as negative material plane energy, and the creature on Aler's shoulder as probably having been a being from that plane (and hence indeed, to a certain approximation, "nothing at all." It explains why it had no aura whatsoever, at any rate.) She also said that fey magic was notoriously difficult to unwork, and that unless the original caster or a more powerful fey caster was convinced to remove it, it might be easier to edit the curse than to break it. Finally, after a brief internal struggle, Adriel asked Sallykin for fairy advice, and she answered "Don't look back in anger" before disappearing.

MAL Ep 9

 * Jon and Red went to talk to the half-fey seance medium. He did not know anything about Red's curse, but was able to use his powers to help Jon recover his memory about interplanar spellcasting (his attempt to remember this earlier not only failed but also caused him a d6 of damage. His curse is apparently getting worse.) With the recovered memories, Jon was able to deduce that the phantasm of Chavalk could not have been cast from the Abyss, as casting spells between two such remote planes cannot normally be done without a pentacle or other magic circle. The spell was most likely cast through the Veil from either the Land of the Dead or the Fey lands.

MAL Ep 12

 * Red's curse. Liria said she did not know how to remove it and that only Shyra or a fey caster of higher level than Shyra could remove it, but it appears to be gone now. Liria has no opinion on how that could have happened. Zadkiel suggested perhaps she had unwittingly fuliffled the built-in conditions that would discharge the curse.

MAL Ep 14

 * 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.

MAL Ep 16

 * 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.

MAL Ep 17

 * Then the party continued on to the Center of the Third Eye. They passed the Silver Scorpion Inn, where they rented rooms. They also found a restaurant serving overpriced gyros, a shop called the "Adventurers' Friend," the police station, and the Wizard's Guild. The Third Eye is a secret society and wouldn't let non-initiates inside, but name-dropping Petros was enough to fetch Eyewoman Terreira, who met the party in a private office in the Wizard's Guild. She confirmed Adriel's curse as a high-level Abyssal curse and said that it could be countered by a high enough level abjurer (suggesting the Eye of the Night at the Center of the Third Eye in Asture) or by killing the caster. Jon told her about his curse, and Terreira told him more about the illithids and their little-known psionic arts, concluding that magic was unlikely to be able to reverse this malady, and that killing the illithid who did it would probably not help either. She believes only another psionic can undo this damage, and that the only human she knew to have mastered this discipline was a mad mentalist named Anselm near Delsin. The other option would be letting another illithid into Jon's brain to repair the damage, which she wouldn't advise. Asked if she knew anything else that might connect these curses, she became thoughtful and recalled one of the King of Clock's men ("or whatever they are") coming in to the Wizard's Guild several weeks ago to have a cursed potion identified, being very focused on knowing what it did and whether it was fatal. Terreira eventually determined that the potion had the effect of sabotaging one of the target's skills; she did not know which one. She identified the Clockworkers as "strange people" from Averdale (a theocratic eastern kingdom where magic is outlawed; Dayant Arakin referred to it in her letter to Holden,) but she thinks there are more of them in Hastenport than Ruastin. The group decided to trust Terreira with information about Seven's kidnapping. Terreira checked Third Eye records about extraplanar gates during the two days Seven most likely disappeared and gave the party the location of an Abyssal gate on the 28th (not entirely matching the data you have which is that Seven disappeared on the 26th or 27th, though Terreira acknowledged the timestamp on Abyssal gates is sometimes inaccurate) and an Elemental gate the evening of the 26th (probably exactly when Seven disappeared, but Seven identified her abductors as demonic, not elemental.) Terreira didn't know anything about Zadkiel's angel form, suggesting that he talk to a master of religious history, like Father Valerian in Hastenport, to learn more about whether this kind of transformation has happened in the past. Finally, she mentioned that a drow necromancer named Thrane Do'Ezzen (a name both Jon and Aler had heard before) had arrived from Asture on the 26th, though she does not know what he is doing here or whether it's related to Seven.

MAL Ep 33

 * 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.

MAL Ep 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.

MAL Ep 39

 * Meanwhile, Adriel and the other party members created an alibi by walking around the shops, ending up at the New Face Shop where Adriel paid to have her human face restored.