Mandraiv uses his ability to speak to Oso's mind, saying: "Granted he's just a kobold, but he's apparently talking about something he considers to be a god. He might get touchy if he thinks we're disrespecting his god, and I don't want to waste time killing all these stupid kobolds if we don't have to. And we need to get more information out of him. He could be referring to a dragon."
Imsh waits for someone to translate what is going on.
"She is big fat kobold mama? like mum." calls up Oso as he listens from the bottom of the stairs.
The kobold shakes his head in a universal sign of negation. " No, no. She is a honored ancestor, what you humans call a dragon."
Mandraiv asks the kobold, "How big is she? Is she a black dragon like your tribe has black scales or is she a different color?"
The kobold gives the warlock a confused look. "She is black like we are, of course, otherwise she would not be our All-mother."
Mandraiv replies, "Ok, that will be all for now, unless you have more to tell me."
The kobold looks at Mandraiv suspiciously. "So you not kill us if we leave you alone?"
Mandraiv replies, "That's what I said. We are here for Bargle, not kobolds. While I am pleased that you have offered yourselves as slaves, we do not actually need your services. So just leave us alone and we will leave you alone. Now, before we leave for good, we are going to want to talk to your Chief face to face. But that will likely not be for at least a couple of days yet. We will let you know when we want to talk. Other than that, you leave us alone, and we will leave you alone."
The kobold shakes his head. "No can do. Chief is gone to the hills with rest of tribe. We last kobolds here in our home, and we leave to join them when we finish talk-talk. We come back when we see you leave."
Mandraiv replies, "In that case I will give you our last two demands now. The first is that given you will be leaving here I want you go through your area and make sure that none of your traps are set. While I can usually detect and disarm them there's always some luck involved and I'm not going to want to deal with that. The second is that I want your tribe to leave the people in the village on the coast alone. If they come here to attack you, you can defend yourselves. But do not go to their village and fields to cause problems."
"For our part we will leave you alone and not follow your tribe into the hills. We will also try to make sure that you know when we have left. We would likely leave a small fire burning in front of the gate or some such thing."
Aredhel mostly stopped listening at the mention of the word 'dragon'. At that point, her almond shaped eyes went wide, and she exchanged quick glances with her companions. Mandraiv's sangfroid is impressive, but for her part she's clearly waiting for the kobold's to leave before engaging her companions in conversation.
The kobold makes a hand gesture that is difficult to interpret. "The traps? Oh, you mean our protection. We can tell you what areas to avoid, but we cannot take protection away, as we have spent a long time building them and will need them again once you have left. This one will make you a map. That should be enough."
"The village on the coast? We will avoid, but we are our Mother's children. If she commands us to attack, we will attack. Bargle commanded us to attack, so we attacked, but he is gone now."
He then shrugs as if to say that this is all he can promise.
Mandraiv replies, "Fair enough. We will deal with Bargle and discuss the matter of the village with your Mother. Go ahead and make me the map, then you can go."
The kobold, who is growing increasingly nervous around you, agrees to the demand and draws a crude map of the major trapped areas on the wall of the dungeon using a piece of charcoal. He and the other kobolds then quickly and quietly disappear.
After the kobolds depart Mandraiv invites the rest of the party up so they can look at the map. Mandraiv says:
"That was disconcerting. Not only does Bargle know we are here, he has retreated deeper into the cave system to get support from a black dragon. So as opposed to a quick in and out raid we are now looking at something more like a major campaign."
"We should establish some sort of base area here in the castle where we can safely rest and heal up. I wasn't too worried about the kobolds, but the other creatures we are starting to run into are too dangerous to leave behind us while we still have a dragon to face down. So we're looking at having to totally clean the place out as we proceed. While that will give Bargle and the dragon time to prepare against us, I think that's going to have to be a necessary evil to put up with. What do the rest of you think?"
"I agree we need to be a little more cautious," nods Artius. "We've lost any surprise we may have had anyway, so giving our enemy an hour to prepare or a day won't make much difference. I think we should press on for now - my guess would be this lower level is probably not prone to incursions from above - not if there's a dragon living down here somewhere. Perhaps these Ogrekin have a defensible lair nearby we can use."
Aredhel sighs. "Agreed. Let's move forward and wipe this place clean of all evil, and make sure we're rested and ready for whatever eventuality we find at the end. If Bargle's aligned himself with a powerful dragon, we may simply have to retreat at that point. I trust in our skills, but an elder wyrm would laugh at our attacks."
Oso nods. He grips his sword tight and readies to leave. The garundi doesn't say much but those eyes light up at the mere mention of a dragon.
Mandraiv spends a few minutes disabling the various counter-intrusion measures he had placed on the door. Opening the door, the hallway to the east continues 50' before opening into a larger room. Two corridors interrupt the corridor's northern wall, while two closed doors can be seen on the southern wall.
Nothing stands out in the corridor, and nothing unusual can be heard, although you notice that the walls and floors on this level are a good bit more moist than the upper levels.
Mandraiv reconfigures his pact blade as a glaive. Carefully probing ahead of himself as he goes, Mandraiv starts down the westernmost of the northern corridors.
Imsh fallows up in the rear of the group, keeping his eyes out for anything sneaking up on them as they progress down the corridor.
Oso hangs back of his more stealthy friends. He stays with Imsh, and keeps an eye om the rear. Listening behind every now and then for signs of pursuit.
The party advances to the first door, a large, rough hewn affair that seems to have been repaired recently. From here Mandraiv also has a viewing angle on the first of the northern corridors, which appears to lead to a larger room that includes a large table. Everyone continues listening for noises, but none can currently be heard in this, the deepest level of the dungeon the group has explored.
Mandraiv will check the door for traps and check to see if it is unlocked. The pact blade gets reconfigured to a longsword.
The door seems to not be trapped but is locked.
Mandraiv sheaths his longsword and pulls out his thieves' tools to try to open the lock.
The lock on the door is not particularly tricky, and Mandraiv opens it with little effort. Carefully opening the door reveals a small room (10'x15') with two oversized beds (). The smell in here reveals that whoever its occupants are or were, they were not very interested in hygiene.
The room has no obvious exits or occupants.
Aredhel wrinkles her nose and hangs back.
Mandraiv does a quick search of the room.
Assuming nothing of any great interest happens Mandraiv will then go to check around the table in the open area.
Mandraiv discovers a bearskin bag under the bed. It seems to contain something large and angular.
Mandraiv draws his longsword, reconfigures it to a glaive, and tries to use it to move the bag out from under the bed.
Something metal inside the bag goes "clunk!" as it falls over gainst the hard stone floor as Mandraiv moves the bag.
When Mandraiv gets the bag out from under the bed he looks inside it.
Inside the bag is a gold-plated chandelier (which is what made the noise), along with about 100 gold coins minted with the face of King Infrexus (the Chelish king before the current Queen Abrogail II).
Mandraiv turns to the rest of the group and says, "We have loot! The chandelier might be a little too bulky to drag around though. Does somebody want to take the coins, or should I just lock everything back up in this room? We could make it our treasury as we clean the place out."
Aredhel eyes the golden chandelier."There must be an interesting story behind that thing's appearance under the ogre's bed. I wonder where it came from?"
The chandelier does not seem to be elvish in design, but Aredhel can't pin down its origin any better than that.
Stowing the coins and the chandelier, the party decides that there is nothing else of interest in the barracks room, and moves back out into the corridor. Both of the northern hallways lead to the same room: a disgusting dining room of some kind. A gigantic table sits in the middle of this room, with huge tree stumps around it for chairs. The carcass of a large, half-cooked boar rests in the center of the table, flies buzzing around it.
Mandraiv will go to the second door and do his usual checks.
Oso prepares for the boar zombie to attack. He keeps his sword and shield at the ready and protects the backs of his comrades.
The second door that Mandraiv checks is also locked, but he is able to open it with little difficulty after first checking it for traps. Carefully opening the door, he looks in and finds a storage closet, approximately 15' x 10'. Large crates, sacks, and barrels are stacked in this small room. A small door stands ajar in the southeastern corner of the room.
Mandraiv will look into a couple of the sacks to see what sorts of things are stored there and then check out the room to the southeast.
The sacks contain basic provisions: salt, flour, some hard tack, root vegetables, and a few hearty other vegetables and fruit. The room to the southeast is very small (5'x5') and seems to be empty.
Mandraiv tries searching it more carefully.