After a quick survey of the scene by remote eyeball, the party hustles up the stairs and starts investigating a book nook when one of the elves notices a cleverly concealed doorway. The opening mechanism is sussed out and the party enters an unadorned hallway that ends in a concealed door that opens into a small storage closet. A wine rack (the door), some dining implements, a few candelabras and a pile of robes. A plain door is on the other side of the small chamber.
Goldpiece and Thelonious advance cautiously, and the gas-huffing elf opens the door ever so slightly, then a little bit more and finally most of the way open. The light that spills into the darkend room reveals a few lush tapestries, a nice rug on the floor and a massive six legged beast from hell that tries to eat the elf’s face. The party rallies mightily and The Bean, The Piece and The Boniest combine to attack the creature while Iko works his way forward and Malchor lets fly with a volley of useless missiles. He and Elulyn linger in the wine closet and admire the robes – until the beast belches fire at them and sets the place a-smouldering.
During the melee a small bat-winged creature keeps appearing and trying to shank the monk with it’s needle sharp tail. It fails mostly, but is a bit distracting. The Bean swings the bone of slaying and manages to shatter the beast’s spine just below the neck, leaving it paralyzed. As the party spirits rise, they are quickly dashed when a middle aged woman enters the fray, appearing through a sort of shadow door. Malchor’s missiles are turned back upon him – ow. and while Goldpiece and the suddenly heroic Iko swing and connect a few times, she seems unperturbed as she drains some of Goldpiece’s life energy to heal herself before battling on. She eventually retreats behind a wall of whirling blades which the party swiftly dispels, revealing a closed – and apparently quite solid – door. Goldpiece and Thraw burst through and find themselves in an inky black space. Goldpiece dimension doors back to the party while the lady alternately curses at Thraw and beats her with a staff.
Again the party rallies and the mages and the fighter follow a dispel magic into the darkness. With darkness dispelled, Thraw retreats as the group enters a very small room with no exits? Whut? It takes a few seconds but Malchor realizes that a wall of stone spell has been used to seal off the end of the chamber and Elulyn uses a passwall spell to create an opening into a mysterious whirling mist which fills a dimly lit room. Their entry prompts an ice storm to fall upon them. Elulyn promptly retaliates with a fireball and sets the lady’s richly appointed boudoir ablaze. The lady vanishes, but Malchor suspects trickery and looks for traces of her presence. Meanwhile, a wall of fire springs up in the chamber they have just vacated, splitting the party. With Goldpiece and the two mages in the burning bedchamber which they are examining for magic and/or loot, the wounded Thraw, the monk and Iko stand guard in the entryway near the dead hellbeast.
The lady of the house appears and slays Thraw and Thelonious with a volley of spells, then uses her staff to smash Iko’s skull. But – but the power of the mace of faith – Iko is restored to full health and launches a surprise attack on the woman. She turns him into a fish. So it is that when the trio bursts into the room, having been alerted by the noise of the brief exchange, they see the remnants of their party. Soon thereafter they hear the baying of the hellhouds and know they need to act fast. A quick ice wall to block the onrushing hounds and some hurried preparation ( The fish is stuffed into a waterskin for the moment ) and they teleport back to the gentler climes of Immersea and the Temple of Torm.
There, party members are returned to normalcy and the ‘Tit turns his scrying eye towards that distant temple and the ill-tempered shrew that dwells therin. He finds her talking with other robed figures in some sort of dungeon. As she climbs towards the ground floor she becomes aware of the spying scrying and beckons to the watcher to follow her as she leads them outside. There she grins and gestures towards the four new obsidian minotaur golems that now guard the entrance.
The party is surly. They plot revenge and so it is that a few days later Malchor and company are back in front of the imposing structure, but this time Malchor has brought his sphere of annihilation out to play. Grey faced with concentration – lest the sphere turn upon him – he guides it into and through the ranks of the golem guards, reducing them to so much rubble in a manner of seconds. He moves the sphere back and forth across the massive doors to the temple and erases a significant portion before returning the party to the safety of the vault and parking the sphere. A quick teleport back to the overwatch and within a minute, the party has settled in to see what might come of this escalation…
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