The professor's fireball clears, leaving many scorched and unconscious inmates.
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Soul-seeing eyes taking in the charred Lunatics, Ronin works to stabilise them to prevent more pointless death her. The wretches had no idea what they did and were likely twisted, he could understand that for he had seen it may times at the hands of demons in the World wound. As he does so, he indicates the two doors at the end of the chamber here.
"We may as well check to see what secrets these poor souls wer eleft her to guard. WHy not that one?" he points to the Northern door with a clawed hand.
Ronin does what he can and stabilizes the people in their loosened straight jackets. The corridor beyond the door extends ahead of you for 15 feet ending in a door and a turn to the left. On your immediate left there is another door.
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Glad the bleeding had stopped, Ronin follows Phantom through the door, his fiendish eyes easily piercing the gloom beyond. Re-activating his soul stare, the Tiefling moves to the door down the hallway and scans it over.
If he finds something he bids Phantom look at it, if it seems clear the Ronin opens the door with his free hand and shield raised.
Finding nothing particularly bad with the door Ronin pushes it open. A single large desk sits in the northern part of this room, a highbacked chair with a deep purple cushion sitting just beyond it. A door sits in the east wall.
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Ronin shrugs, his worn and tattered Kimono slipping down his right shoulder as he does so. Scanning the room, he replies in his usual accented rasp. "Nothing, but a desk. Maybe answers reside there?"Carefully, he steps into the room, sure he will be followed by his ally and begins to look around for signs of life or information of what was going on here.
Checking any drawers on the desk carefully before opening them, Ronin opens them and reads through any documents
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Cinchings his robe shut, The Professor bobs his head as Ronin proceeds into the room to check the contents of the drawers within.
"I'd have to say if I was a madman experimenting on my lunatic prisoners, I'd certainly keep a journal of all my evil plans..."
As the others glance at him he adds.
"Not that I've ever kept such a journal, but you know eventually adventurer types come along and murder you, and well, the journal's all that keeps living on to carry your legacy forward..."
The Professor waits patiently in the hall pending any interesting discoveries before urging Phantomblade to advance down the hall and open the next door.
The desk holds little except odds and ends, a ball of twine here, a pair of shears there, nothing truly interesting.
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Finding nothing, Ronin shrugs broadly and indicates the door ahead. [b]"Press on?"[/b[ he suggests with a rasp, stepping to the door and checking it whilst Phantom appears busy, maybe even melancholy after slaying the innocents.
If he finds nothing, Ronin opens the door and looks through with his soul-seeing eyes.
A large circular table in this study is cluttered with scrolls, books, and an eclectic mix of strange devices that could be surgical instruments, weapons, or writing implements. A human skull bearing horn-like growths along one side and with a malformed jaw sits on one corner of the desk.
An old man wearing a leather apron covered in surgical and torture implements is smiling at you from across the room. "Took you long enough to get here, thought my gift from the old gods would finish you. No matter, I'll use you as a sacrifice for the spawn!"
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Ronin's eyes burn in anger as he sets them upon the master of this madness. Clawed hands grasping at the hilt of his Demon-Slaying Katana, Roning darts into the room as he hisses a challenge at the crazed old man. With surety, the Tiefling draws his blade in a one handed strike, aiming to cut the foul man in twain.
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Ronin's blade is stopped just short of the old man by some force. He laughs, "That the best you have demon-spawn?"
Phantom's blade leaves a deep cut in the old man's flesh, forcing a hiss from between his teeth.
Kyra draws her scimitar and steps behind Phantom, ready to jump in if necessary.
Keeper Crove pushes backwards on the wall beside him and steps through the door that opens. He pulls colored sand from a pouch on his belt and calls out in an arcane tongue, gesturing swiftly before throwing it forward.
Phantom's blade is stopped by some force shielding Crove, who just sneers.
Crove laughs again, not caring for the tone of the Professor's voice, but backing from Phantom's assault just the same. Kyra calls to Sarenrae to send a divine weapon, causing a ghostly scimitar to appear next to Phantom and attack Crove.
The scimitar is stopped by the same force Phantom's blade was.
Crove steps backward and calls to his insane gods to burn Phantomblade.
The cloaked tengu ducks and avoids the beam of light, blade spinning and ready again.
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Ronin snarls and bears his fangs as the professor flees down the tunnel, feeling Valyssa's potent song flowing through him. Leaving one blade on the floor, though it pained him to do so, The tiefling darts down the tunnel and tries to roll through the man to keep him blocked, before slashing with a quick strike in both hands.
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Ronin isn't stopped by Crove's weak defenses and slips behind the man, blade flicking up and out, cutting deep into the old man's back. He stumbles and coughs blood, looking almost ready to pass out.
Phantom keeps up his assault on Crove, swinging mercilessly.
Crove goes down with a final gasp, his life spilling onto the floor.
Crove has a host of arcane and divine implements on his person .
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Valyssa looks over the area after the combat ends and once she feels it is safe, she uses her detect magic and spellcraft skills to determine what everything is.
"You might need these Prof..." she says regarding the bracers."I could have need of this fancy necklace though..." she says eyeing the natural armor amulet.
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Ronin nods to the Tengu as their blade cuts down the strange cult leader. As the adrenaline wears off, the Tiefling immediately goes to collect his dropped sword, wiping it clean with an oiled cloth and apologising the the Sword's sould for such treatment. Sheathing both blades, the ex-samurai collects his shieldand straps it to his arm.
"Such trickery employed, he is depsicable." he mutters darkly at Crowe's corpse, before helping the others take what gear they could find.
"Then take it Lady Warsong." The Tiefling says, bending down to collect the amulet and hold it out. "My cursed Skin turns aside blades well enough."
When they have finished in the secret corridor, Ronin takes time to explore Crowe's office for clues.
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The Professor immediately begins sorting through Crove's assorted baubles.
"Ahh, yes. Fascinating this one. Oh, and what do we have here? A scroll of planar binding? Perhaps our good friend here was the one summoning outer planar beings to this town?"
The Professor turns the bracers offered by Valyssa over.
"I will say my bathrobe here serves as quite the protective barrier. I've had more than my fair share of arrows directed at be impeded by its soft, quilted deflective properties! You know, I often wonder if some of our enemies have something against gnomekind what with their seemingly single-mindedness to shoot at an academic such as myself!"
The Professor rubs his hands together anxiously as Ronin begins a thorough search of the man's office.
"Yes, be particularly alert for diaries filled with evil plans!"
The papers on Crove’s desk consist primarily of translations from memory of his copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Some pages are half-written, as though Crove lost his train of thought mid-way through the page and started writing another portion he remembered.
Ronin finds a door leading to what appears to be a library. This musty-smelling room has two large bookshelves in opposing corners. A third corner features a cluttered reading desk heaped with papers, scrolls, and books. The room is well lit by a floating globe of churning fire near the center of the ceiling. Amid the stacks of research notes, blasphemous poetry, and other materials heaped on the desk are a scroll of contact other plane, a scroll of planar binding, a scroll of restoration, and a scroll of scrying. The books on the shelves are all old and quite rare. All concern the Great Old Ones and other matters blasphemous and forbidden. In addition it looks like Crove's spellbooks reside here.
The other room nearby appears to be Crove's room. A large, canopied bed takes up the majority of this room. A quaint writing desk sits next to the bed, and what appear to be three footlockers sit under the bed. The three footlockers are unlocked. The first contains a rusty iron ring with keys to every door in the asylum, a leather bag containing 300 pp, and a crude map of the tangled tunnels below Carrion Hill. The second and third footlockers contain hundreds of fragments of pottery, small pieces of sculpture, tiles, and twisted and burnt bits of metal; a common theme is figures of stylized, twisted creatures and glimpses of things that writhe, formless horrors that are hinted from the fragments.
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Ronin hands all his found materials to the Professor and then makes sure to examine the rooms within the secret chamber opened by the fleeing Crowe. Once they were happy everything had been found, Ronin packs up their gear and recasts the Longstrider spell from his wand, causing his feet to move much swifter.
"Two more keepers, The Church seems as good a place as any?" the Tiefling enquires as they head towards their next target.
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The Professor casually flips open the party's copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts.
"Ah, another one crossed off the list. How convenient they made us a list, no?"
The Professor draws a thick line through one of the entries before nodding.
Baskerwhel - hermit, swamp druid, potions (hunched corpse)
Crove - warden at asylum
Hyve - sage at abandoned church of Aroden, poison and drugs
Marshan - owned/lived in destroyed house
Myre - middenstone baron, necromancer at vathouse on riverbank
"The Church? Very well! Lead the way, good Ronin. I wonder if we should ward ourselves against whatever poisons this sage may have prepared for those who'd seek to thwart him..."
The rain is unceasing and only looks to be getting worse as you travel to your next destination: Elm Way Church. You manage to catch a Crow Sergeant's attention as you travel, letting her know of Crove and the horrible experiments in his asylum. She promises to look into it as soon as she can before assisting some of her men in keeping the citizens orderly in front of a carriage house.
With the closeness of the alleyways and the buildings looming overhead it is nearly impossible to stay dry. The streets are getting harder and harder to walk through, especially going uphill as the water tries to pull your legs out from under you. The church, when you reach it, is not very impressive. Standing only 40 feet long at its largest side it is a single story structure made from middenstone in architectural stylings made famous after the fall of Tar-Baphon.
The interior of the church is cold and damp. Two man-sized statues stand to each side of the room, both draped with gray sheets. Dozens of sagging bookshelves stand along the walls, and a stone altar has been converted into a table. The shelves contain hundreds of tomes about history, focusing on the last 2,000 years of Ustalav.
Proceeding carefully you start checking rooms in the church. The first opens into a bedroom, only containing a cot and a lamp. Just off of that is a storage room, filled with food, water, lamp oil, ink, paper, and other sundries and supplies. Across the main aisle of the church you open a door to a waterlogged room, rain coming in from a hole in the ceiling. The western portion of the room has about four inches of water, though it looks like it is draining through a crack to the alley outside. The final door you check is locked, and the keys you've collected from Crove do not fit.
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Stepping into the heavy downpour, Ronin takes it as stoicly as anything else, thiugh he is concerned for the health of the strange old man in a bathrobe. Uncaring at the ruination of his grey tattered attire, the ex-samurai does hold his scabbards aloft to keep his blades from suffering more humiliation.
Glad they find the church before they sink into the mud, the Tiefling sets off in a search, sighing at each dead end until they find the locked door. "Are we sure it is safe first Professor?" he asks as the man gets to work.
He also re-activates his soul-seeing eyes.
In the room is a trapdoor which opens smoothly, revealing a ladder 20 feet long. It leads to a large chamber. This large, low-ceilinged chamber may once have been part of an extensive basement or subcellar, but the worked stone walls have long since crumbled to reveal uneven stone beyond. A sunken area in the center of the room contains a small pond of stagnant water that reaches around a single pillar of rock supporting the ceiling. A slick-looking circular tunnel extends south. To the southwest and northeast, several tables cluttered with what appears to be alchemical equipment stand around two more stone pillars.
Hunched over the table to the southwest a robed man is frantically mixing beakers and working with various liquids, sword belted at his side. Every now and then you catch brief glimpses of his face, which is gagged with some form of leather thong.
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Chugging the bitter tasting Anti-Toxin before they manage to pop the door open, Ronin creeps down the stairs along with the others, allowing his natural vision to poerce the gloom. Fixing the Keeper with his soul-searching eyes he focuses to see if the man lives or is an abomination.
Looking to Phantom, he lets the Tengu slip off if he wishes before sneaking the opposite way.
Ronin and Phantom slip through the shade, avoiding inopportune puddles and gravel, getting right next to the keeper, still very much a man, and observing what he is doing.
He appears to be playing with reagents and some vile purple liquid and mixing up a potion or poison of some sort. You can now see that he has gagged himself with a black thong covered in red writing, arcane looking in nature.
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Creeping through the church, the Ronin winces every time his clawed feet scuffs a stone, though he ensures not to step on rotting wood or in deep puddles. Hand clasped upon his sheathed blade, he gets within view of the Man's work before spying Phantom getting into position. With a brutal slash of his Katana, he looks to cut down the poisoner before he can strike.
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A muffled scream comes from the man as Ronin's blade strikes true, but he remains standing, knuckles whitening around the vial of purple gunk in his hand.