Session 58: Fires, Tigers, and Wine Oh My (August 28, 2024)
Last session, our heroes found themselves in an unusual predicament. A crossbow bolt had shot out of the vanity mirror in their attic room, hitting Delilas in the chest. Following the bolt, a figure stepped out of the mirror, identical to Delilas except seeming to favor her left hand. Recognizing they were in a tense situation, the party set about attempting to regain control. Elias tried to destroy the mirror, but was unsuccessful before another figured stepped out, this time someone who appeared to be Heph.
The mirror intruders seemed intent on killing their doubles on this side of the glass. Mirror Heph kept insisting he was the same person as Heph, he had just “diverged” a few days earlier when he made a realization: he needed to kill his double, since with only one of them he could absorb both their powers and be that much more prepared to take on Sentin and similar destructive forces in the future. Indeed, Mirror Heph seemed to have just as much care for his friends as our Heph did, and Mirror Delilas seemed to care just as much about her little brother.
During the fight, Heph hid behind the previously-Arcane-Locked door, Elias teamed up with his sister against his sister, Rormir worked to convince Mirror Heph that he was acting unbalanced, and Maho stood in the center of it all, waylaying and redirecting attacks to keep her people alive. Elias with the help of “New Jarles” took out his mirror sister, much to the surprise of Mirror Heph, who then sent a Message to our Delilas, explaining more of the situation to her and convincing her to take out her mirror double. After knocking out Mirror Heph and healing Mirror Delilas, however, the situation was diffused, and after a few more seconds, the mirror versions of Heph and Delilas returned to their side of the glass.
The party regrouped. Delilas passed on the spoils of her day of robbery to Heph. Elias and Delilas tried with some success to explain where they’re from, revealing it is in fact another plane…sort of. They then set about planning what to do next. Items on the docket include crafting the anti-blind device, reaching out to Bloody Mary, disrupting Sentin’s planned memory extraction of Izume, and figuring out what to do with the growing collection of unconscious bodies here in this attic space. In the meantime, Rormir found Salty playing with Karrl and cast Speak with Animals, prompting Salty to surprised yell “Gorblimey, a talking elf!”
- Rormir casts speak with animals, says “Hi” to Salty,
to which Salty responds “Gorblimey, it’s a talking elf!”
- Rormir asks Salty what he’s talking about and Salty is really confused how Rormir is speaking pigeon
- Elias asks Heph if Rormir is really talking Pigeon, and Elias decides to try himself, and Salty asks Rormir to ask Elias to stop saying “Fuck your mum”
- Salty doesn’t really have any idea what’s going on, but Ana is outside
- Elias opens the window, which reacts in pain, and then
Ana climbs in revealing she was in fact the window
- Ana explains she didn’t want to come in because the dolls freak her out
- Maho asks her for her help disrupting Sentin’s interrogation
- Elias asks her to observe, and if she spots an important artifact that would stop the memory extraction it would be good to steal it
- Maho points out stealing the hostage would also be an option, although the hostage is Maho’s size and might be difficult to conceal
- Ana starts to confirm the plans, saying Plan A is to kill Sentin, and Plan B is to get out Izume
- Elias jumps in and clarifies is Plan A is don’t die, Plan B is don’t let Sentin see you
- Ana repeats back: Plan B is kill Sentin, Plan C is rescue Izume, Plan D is also kill Sentin?
- Elias clarifies they are more priorities, and she needs to make sure Sentin can’t see her, and her lowest priority is disrupt the extraction
- The group debates who should accompany Ana, Maho and Rormir are in pretty decent shape, and Elias considers going
- Heph is in no shape to go, and Elias wants Delilas to hang back as well, and Heph convinces her that he needs help assembling the mask
- We decide to activate Maho’s sword and summons Alsa’s soul to ask
her questions
- Maho looks to Heph who just shrugs, and Maho stabs the katana into the ground so it stands upright, Heph suggests she try an incantation, and Maho comes up with a little phrase, and the floor grows ice cold for a second, and wisps of smoke come out of the hilt and form into the shape of Alsa’s face above the sword
- Elias tries to poke Alsa, but his hand gets cold and he
withdraws it
- She says ouch
- Maho asks where the extraction was going to take place, and she responds in Sentin’s room at The Hopeful Ermine in Promenade Square
- Maho asks where the subjects are coming from, and Alsa says there is only one subject for tonight, which is Izume
- Maho asks where Izume is being held, attempting to clarify the question, and Alsa kindly doesn’t count the previous question and answers that Izume is in the hotel room, sedated and in the bathtub
- Elias asks what Sentin Thornwillow’s biggest weakness is, she responds that he is incredibly intelligent, skilled, inventive, and industrious, however, he is rather squeamish with doing the dirty work himself and relies heavily on others and his inventions
- Maho asks what will happen with the experiment if she is not there, and she explains Sentin is not as well versed with memory extraction; he is good at thinking on his feet but doesn’t have the knowledge she has, and is possibly not prepared to gather the 5 ingredients needed to prepare the ritual, and poor ingredients could cause things to go very wrong; as talented as he is she doesn’t see the ritual going well
- Alsa says they have one more question before she goes to heaven
- Rormir has a question, and Heph and Elias tell Rormir he needs to share it with the group, not as a question, and Rormir carefully words his thought of asking the best way to approach disrupting Sentin
- Ultimately the group decides to ask her the best way to disrupt the memory
extraction
- She explains he will attempt it if he has the supplies, so the best way to stop him is to prevent him from getting the supplies
- She continues, the 5 supplies needed are items representing the senses:
- For smell a wine native to and only made in the Hojo village where Izume is from
- For sight a beautiful mountain vista they were hoping to acquire from an art dealer in Promenade Square
- For touch the coldness of fresh fallen snow
- For taste a plumcake
- For hearing the language of the giants ancient and spoken
- She is happy to have answered the questions and go to heaven, and then is suddenly pulled down towards Christian Hell
- Alsa briefly returns from Hell to clarify that none of the ingredients were acquired yet
- Heph assigns items to everyone, Maho should find the wine, Elias should take care of the paintings, Rormir should eat all the plumcakes
- Ana volunteers to help, and we send her after all the giant phrase books in the city
- Before setting about our tasks, we ensure Harris is bound and gagged, and the masked guard is also tied up
- With Karrl’s help, Rormir finds 5 bake shops
throughout the city that sell something cake-like, then heads off to go visit
all of them
- Rormir approaches a shop labeled “Cakes! Cakes! Get your … etc”
- There is a dude hawking his wares, and he is towards the end of his day (which starts at 3am), and he only has 15 plumcakes left
- The guy ultimately sells him all the cakes for 6 gold, and then points him towards a workwear shop on Vogue Alley called Craig’s Workwear where he can buy real clothes
- Rormir recruits Karrl to help him shit on all the cakes, and between the two of them Rormir is pretty confident that they got all the cakes in the city
- One of the shit checks crit, and for that one Karrl basically blew up a dude’s cart who was walking around selling cakes to spa-goers
- Rormir finds an alley and tries to devour the cakes, sharing some with Karrl
- After eating 5 he throws up, but continues eating
- Maho knows a bit about the underground wine trade from her village,
but she doesn’t know exactly where she could find it
- She searches out the goliaths who have been bar-crawling all day because might have some idea
- Following the trail from Digk’s, she ends up at Digk’s 2: Again!, and finds someone who looks exactly like Digk Büt standing behind the bar, and the goliaths are there
- Suzuki is fully unconscious on Tomatsu’s back and they are singing an old goliath drinking song
- They are passing around a bottle of wine that smells distinctly like the wine from her village
- The goliaths very drunkenly greet Maho and offer her wine, and they explain there’s one guy in town who has the wine
- Maho asks Ando who the guy is, and he tries to remember, Maho headbutts him to jog his memory, and he suddenly remembers there is a guy who operates out of the Bad District in the mud baths, and you say a secret passphrase which is “Give me that good mud juice” and then he will sell you the wine
- They ask Maho to go get more, and Maho agrees, and they start chanting “Maho! Maho!” excitedly
- Arriving at Dirty Dan’s Mudpit, which is a wood building over a mudpit with a shirtless dude sitting in there alone
- He asks her to get into the pit, but she says she isn’t looking to get in and she just wants him to “Give me the good mud juice”, and asks him for all of it for a taste of home
- He offers her all the juice for 40gp, which she hands over, and he lets it sink into the mud, puts the goggles on his head on, and dives down into the mud
- After a frightening length of time he suddenly re-emerges with his arms full of 8 very dirty bottles of wine
- He dives down again and comes back up with a towel and wipes some of the mud off
- Before heading off, she learns that the guy in the pit is Frank, Dan’s brother, and then she throws the bottles into a sack and starts heading back to Tertel’s
- She manages to get the bottles back to Tertel’s without running into Sentin
- Elias searches around the city for art galleries or other places,
and manages to find a caricature artist
- Elias sits for the painting, and it is very good, but he really highlighted some of the things Elias is really insecure about, like the size of his ears
- Elias tells the guy he is deeply offended, hands him a gold piece, then asks where he can find a painting of a mountain vista
- He asks for another gold, and after Elias hands it over the guy points to a shop like 30 feet down the street with a ton of mountain vistas
- Elias asks the proprietor how many paintings he has, and he explains he gets up at 1:30am every morning to paint them and they sell out every day, and he only has 2 left
- Elias asks if a hoity-toity elf came by, asking about Sentin, and he says they did, but they didn’t end up buying any of the paintings
- He tells Elias the paintings are 40gp each, and Elias draws a card from his deck of illusions, throwing down an Ace of Clubs, and an Iron Golem appears and starts thumping around, looking genuinely terrifying
- The old man selling the paintings goes “OH NO!”, pisses himself, and then tries to grab his paintings, but Elias convinces him to run
- While chaos is ensuing, Elias dumps oil over all the paintings and lights them on fire, and then walks by the caricature guy, who is doing a caricature drawing of the golem, and says “you’re welcome”
- As he leaves the area, he instructs the golem to start breakdancing expertly
- He rolls a nat 1 stealth
- Back in the room, Heph spends some time constructing the mask
removal tool, which is a structure that sits on the head, clips on to the
mask, then has levers near the ears which remove it like a wine bottle opener
- About as Heph gets to the part of the process where he needs Maho’s help with the runes, Maho approaches Tertel’s
- Tertel is outside watering his plants, which appear to be sprouting to life as he is watering them
- He welcomes Maho back, and she notes he was missing earlier, and he says he was on a trip
- He notes the bag, and Maho asks if he is interested in some wine from her hometown, and she pulls out the least dirty bottle from the bag with a nat 20 persuasion
- He looks at it and notes it’s from Hojo, and Maho is a bit surprised he knows it, and he says he’s not been to Hojo for a long time, but he is a traveler by trade
- The bottle brings back memories for him, and he suggests that on the roof of his home near the chimney she can enjoy the wine with her friends with a nice pastoral view
- He says “I’m going to go enjoy this now” and heads inside, Maho walking in after him and seeing a side door swing shut behind him
- Maho heads into the room, offers Heph some wine, which he declines because he needs to stay sharp, and Maho helps Heph draw on all the runes that are needed to remove the masks
- Delilas has been periodically bonking the captives on the head to make sure they stay unconscious, so they are still unconscious as Heph uses the device
- It clicks and ratchets and releases a puff of steam from the hydrogen fuel cell that Heph canonically uses in all of his gizmos
- As the mask lifts off we see a scarred face with a gash through the right eye
- Heph splashes water on his face, and he jolts awake, and starts
talking in a language that sounds like Holden
- Heph tries to ask him if he speaks Common, Gnomish, or Goblin, and the guy seems to know a bit of Goblin
- Heph explains who he is, where they are, and tells the guy he was enslaved by an evil man
- Heph gets a nat 20 persuasion
- Heph explains that Sentin is nearby and we took out most of his party, and the guy asks if we have anything that smells of Sentin, we say we have the wagon, he jumps out the window and sniffs the wagon and runs off
- Maho jumps after him, and Heph tells Delilas to keep and eye on everyone and then walks down the stairs to find him gone and Maho laughing at the absurdity of the situation
- Maho and Heph give chase to the guy, trying to track him through the city
- Meanwhile, back at Promenade Square where Elias has made quite the
ruckus, Elias puts his hands in the pockets and starts whistling
and walking casually to Tertel’s
- As Elias leaves the Square, Sentin wanders out of an Alley and notices the chaos and Elias
- Elias runs back towards the golem, and Sentin gives chase, noticing that the breakdancing iron golem isn’t real, and fires a crossbow bolt at Elias, hitting him
- Elias runs towards the cover of nearby buildings, throwing up a wind wall behind him to try to block any future projectiles
- Sentin pulls out a sling and fires a bolt at Elias, and although the Wind Wall doesn’t block it he misses anyway, and he runs a bit closer to Elias
- Elias runs further, trying to duck around a corner out of sight and misty steps away, rolling a nat 20 on a stealth check and vanishing to the other side of the street and ducks into an alley, tripping over a pile of plumcakes and Rormir
- Sentin can’t see Elias anywhere, and then suddenly Elias hears the sound of running feet and a roar as an orange flame-striped tiger with scars across its face leaps at Sentin, knocking him over and snarling at him
- Sentin looks a bit panicked, spins a ring on his finger and goes invisible, and then a slash from the tiger causes Sentin’s blood to spill on the ground, the tiger stares at the sky for a bit and then runs off again
- Maho and Heph arrive not too long after, and finding
Elias they briefly discuss the guy they were chasing, and the
group manages to connect the tiger to the guy
- Elias explains that Sentin was there and the tiger man tackled him
- The group decides to head back to the inn and get away from where Sentin was spotted, and Maho grabs the passed out Rormir and the group heads back to Tertel’s
- Elias gives the mannequin at Tertel’s the plumcake, explaining that it is the last plumcake in the city, and it doesn’t seem super enthused about it, but it doesn’t collapse
- Heading back up the room, Heph asks loudly if Ana had any success, and one of the dolls lifts its head up and says “I thought I’d give it a try but I do not like how they look at me”, and explains that she gathered up all the phrase books and burned them, making some people pretty mad
- Heph pays Ana for her help, and pays back Rormir for the cakes
- Maho suggests some drinks on the roof, and Maho,
Elias and Heph head out to the rooftop, Maho
leaning against the chimney, and reflect on our day
- Rormir is in a food coma from the cakes, and stays back in the room
- Staring out over the city, drinking Maho’s warm wine, we smell a distinct sweet smell, which Elias remembers smelling from the chimney the first time he climbed up onto the roof
- Heph thinks it smells familiar and unfamiliar, kind of like a fruit juice, but sweeter, but also different, there are notes to it that he can’t place
- To Elias it feels a bit familiar, having smelled it before, and the smell reminds him of home