Reviving the giant is a bit of a mixed bag, but the application of a charm spell makes everything easy-peasy. Turns out that the fleeing refugees were supposed to regroup at a landmark known as the shrine. His party split off from the main group to deliver a message and they were headed back towards the river when they ran into the beholder.
Now, the group knows that everyone else is dead, but they decide to string the giant along for a bit to see if they can discover anything else. They do determine that the giants are communicating and organizing on behalf of a greater plan, but ole Barney Fire Giant doesn’t have many details. So, the group abandons him and proceeds with great haste via WindWalk and Fly spells. They cover a lot of ground in a really short time. They see some interesting sights, including a drow merchant caravan, a group of bugbears being led by trolls and a couple of sphincter-puckering mindflayers. They rest and regroup up a rope, then redeploy for another day’s fast travel.
This leg gets them out of the caverns and headed towards a structure carved out of the rock. Malchor deploys a globe of invisibility and then sends out an arcane eye for some exploration. There are large plazas, guideposts staffed by goggle-eyed fish folk and a huge statue of a crustacean woman atop some vast pyramidal structure. The place is dimly lit and gives off serious undersea vibes. Well, they are under the sea, but still. This place is too much.
The place reeks of evil. The fact that evil giants were ready to regroup here – combined with the stories around the lobster-woman’s cult is enough to switch the party needle from ‘looking’ to ‘killing’. But not today.
The following day they start off with a vengeance. Creeping silently and invisibly to a spot in the street, they perform simultaneous assaults of the temple/throne room and the guardpost in the main thoroughfare. The mage’s fireballs roast the guards and the druid’s insects swarm into the temple area. A few minutes later, the group has confronted and slain some obviously important fishman, plundered his bolthole, slain the temple guards and vanished into a network of tunnels and chambers that lie beneath the ‘main street’. There they charge about with reckless abandon, slaying the groups of fighters they encounter and generally being murder hobos of the highest order.
Eventually they reach a dead end and must backtrack. For the moment, it seems that though the alarm has been sounded, their blitzkrieg tactics and rapid disappearance have stymied serious pursuit. It could all change in a few minutes, but for the moment…they have the upper hand.
