After steeling her resolve, Setsuna scales the staircase. She finds a chaotic battle unfolding before her. Out of instinct, she looks for Zoli to ask what for details about what is happening, but Setsuna sees that that the Halfing seems... out of it. Eugeni has the same look on his face. Having been under the same effect mere seconds ago, Setsuna suspects that they too were Confused by the cultist.
Thinking back to what she knows about the Confusion spell, Protection from Evil would normally not be useful against it. In hindsight, it was rather silly that she cast it on herself. However, she knows that there are occasions when it can help, and the Oracle has very few other options.
I have to try.
Since he is the closer of her two confused allies, Setsuna carefully stalks over to Eugeni and casts her spell. By some miracle of the Dark Tapestry Dwellers, it works. The Half-Orc is able to power through the Confusion and unleashes a hail of arrows into their enemy. Only one hits, but that is better than nothing.
Besides, it's better than anyone on her side being turned into a pin cushion.
Sanity returned but sorely wounded, Morythine gulps down another ill-tasting potion, before limping up towards the sounds of battle above.
Riley directs the fire he conjured to move again into the cultist's space. Then the stirges that are not already attached continue their buzzing attack at Riley's direction.
As arrows fly, the man again releases a wave of dark, deathly energy that washes over the forces arrayed against him. Several of the stirges fall to the magical attack, leaving but a pair of heavily wounded ones remaining. The negative energy also washes over the heroes, who can feel it eating away at their souls.
Tzefira once more lets out what seems to be an inaudible scream at the man, but he seems to hardly notice the effect, if any.
Meanwhile, Zoli is unable to fend off the effects of the confusion eating away at her mind. As she stops her babbling, she looks over and sees Tsuto aiming a longbow at her father. She lunges to the attack, and slices him deeply with her scimitar!
The others, however, can only watch as they see the halfling launch herself across the room at Eugeni, nearly cutting him in two with her small blade!
__________
His face ash-grey with strain, Riley keeps his fiery spell working against the cultist leader while the few remaining stirges buzz around him. He takes a step back and begins chanting another spell, hopeful he can withstand another barrage of negative energy to keep up the attacks.
saves
attaches
Staggering onto the floor where his allies battle the final cultists, Morythine sees with horror that madness runs rampant here too – Zoli charges across the room to slice up Eugeni. He nearly moves to grapple the halfling, but seeing his companions wilt under a burst of negative energy, realises a greater threat is at hand.
Channelling death will harm me not.
he calls to his allies, and at their direction dives past Riley in the direction of the cult’s apparent leader. Before he can bound around the corner, a stirge flutters up before his eyes, and Morythine snaps a fist out towards it.
Spell prepared: 1st level:
Orisons: bleed, detect poison, guidance, virtue
Ki Pool: 3
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As Zoli slices her friend open she screams, "Tsuto! I new you'd be behind this."
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Setsuna looks at the last cultist and sighs wearily; it is only a matter of time before her allies' sheer numbers overwhelm the bastard, but there is little she could personally do to him without hurting Riley. As such, the Oracle decides to try and free Zoli from her mental haze. Her spell worked on Eugeni, so it will probably work on the Halfing as well.
It is probably the smart thing to do anyway; Zoli is far and away the most dangerous, vicious little woman Setsuna knows, and seeing what she just did to Olympus, she might accidentally kill someone else even after the danger passes.
Setsuna's determination ensures that she does not lower her guard.
"Приходите к нам, Zoli."
And then in midswing, Zoli's eyes go wide and she screams "Eugeni!! Oh no, what--? How did I--?"
Turning to the dark-haired elf she says, "Спасибо!" and then turns her attention toward the cultist who'd been messing with her mind...
The man leers at the heroes, their eyes all now clear of confusion and focused intently on him. He says flatly, through what seems to be clenched teeth, "I will not fail My Lady. I will give her your faces as gifts," before unleashing another pulse of dark energy that envelops the group. The stirges wilt and fall, and Olympus lets out a meek sound before crumpling over as well.
__________
Even though the wave of energy is light, and that he really should have been able to keep his concentration through it his spell falters.
He runs over to Olympus and puts his hands on the bird, channeling life back into him.
Zoli's nostrils flare with rage as she realizes what this man had done to her. She ducks and swerves around her injured allies and aims her scimitar straight for the cultist's belly. With an angry twist she spills viscera from him and sends him into a heap on the floor, barely breathing.
She reaches down to take his mask off and says, "That's right! I knew the name Ironbriar was familiar. This is the judge who settled the Glassworks case for Xamarath. Why would he--a man of means--be involved in a horrid mess like this?"
___________________
HP 37/44
Luck 3/7
Panache 2/3
Charmed Life 1/3
Buffs luck (round 1/3): +2 to hit, damage, skill rolls, saving throws;
false life 12 THP
bless +1 to hit, fear saves;
haste +1 to hit & AC, +30’ move, 1 extra attack on full attack;
The man falls, badly wounded, but still drawing labored breaths.
As the world calms around them, Setsuna finally grasps that these were the same people after her. This man (their leader?) had been a judge? That explains... so much. It explains why Setsuna had trouble getting any official help. It explains why these monsters had always caught her when she tried to leave the city. It explains so many little things that had made her life over the last several days Hell. A judge would have many connections throughout the city.
Setsuna feels something snap in her mind.
Even though the final cultist crumples to the ground, Setsuna quickly pushes past Zoli. The Half-Elf's eyes are filled with emotion. Fear. Madness. Rage. Her grip on her sickle is iron. Before anyone else can act, she raises her weapon and brings it down on the cultist's face with as much power as she can muster. Setsuna utters a loud, angry scream.
Blood covers the Half-Elf as her sickle meets the man's head. Her strike cleaves his head diagonally from the left jaw to above the right ear before becoming embedded in the skull. Even with the cultist leader decisively dead, she raises her weapon for another strike.
Setsuna's large blue eyes begin to water. Her vision starts to blur. Her sickle slips from her hand, falling lifelessly on the wooden floor. She collapses on her knees and weeps.
Looking around the room, you can see numerous places where blood stains sawdust-covered floorboards, or bits of gristle remain caught in tools.
The two smaller side rooms in this area are both unused storerooms. However, the larger chamber is another story. The walls of this room bear macabre decorations—human faces stretched flat over wooden frames by strips of leather or black twine. Each face grimaces in a slightly different expression of pain, looking down on a cramped room that contains a desk, a footlocker, a high-backed rocking chair, and a low-slung cot heaped with scratchy-looking blankets. A ladder in the southeast corner of the room leads up to a trap door in the ceiling.
The large footlocker is filled with oddments. A fair number are of a historical nature, including books, sea charts, etchings of vast rock formations and dolmens accompanied by maps, several pamphlets discussing a “forgotten” school of magic known as the Alchymyc, and a fine painting depicting a city carved from a vast frozen waterfall with towering ice cathedrals and domes.
Near the bottom are several books. The first of these is a wizard’s spellbook emblazoned with two entwined snakes: one red, one green. The second book is an old and beautifully filigreed tome containing numerous hand-drawn illustrations and titled The Syrpents Tane: Fairy Tales of the Eldest. The book presents tales of the Tane—the most feared of a group of notorious fey known as the Twisted, goliaths of war and madness dreamt and stitched into being by the Eldest. The Tane are said to be terrible to behold, and the stories speak of them stumbling into mortal lands, where they ravage kingdoms by creating firestorms, crushing keeps with their feet, and eating dragons. Specific Tane described include monstrous creatures like the Jabberwock, the Thrasfyr, and the Sard.
Finally, a slim volume at the bottom of the chest is filled with writings using a mix of Draconic, Elven, and Infernal characters.
__________
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As the desperate battle is finally won, Morythine gives a sigh of relief, only to regret it immediately as the action tugs at his deep wounds. Slurping back a touch of his blood rouging his lips, he watches with delight as Setsuna delivers the coup de grace to Ironbriar.
Her first blow comes close to her foe’s head in two, but not quite, becoming embedded in the skull. Setsuna drops her weapon then collapses into tears, so Morythine steps past her, picks up the gory sickle and finishes the job with a clumsy chop. After pausing a moment to admire Ironbriar’s brain matter pooling on the floor, he pads back to Setsuna.
Placing her sickle near her hand, he pats her awkwardly on the shoulder with his red right hand.
“There, there, dark maiden,” in a voice that tries to be chivalrous but borders on the leering “the man is quite dead now.”
When done comforting Setsuna, Morythine joins the search of the room. “These boys certainly have some style,” he mutters, flashing his fangs in a rare smile of appreciation at the macabre trappings as he peels skin masks of the faces of fallen cultists and runs his fingers over the human faces splayed across the walls. “I might even like it better than Foxglove Manor. No haunts.”
Letting his wanderings take him out of his companions’ immediate line of sight, he mutters some reversed prayers to Zon-Kuthon. The dark god seems to hear, and some of Morythine’s wounds nit together.
Returning presently to his friends, he beckons Zoli over to the footlocker as he starts to search through its contents.
“I wonder who his Lady is?” Morythine remarks to Zoli, remembering the failed promise of doom Ironbriar had made before his fall. “Can you read any of this?” he continues, passing her the slim volume from the bottom of the footlocker.
Spell prepared: 1st level:
Orisons: bleed, detect poison, guidance, virtue
Ki Pool: 3
Riley stands up from comforting Olympus and sees Setsuna send the cultist leader to his final reward. He stands quietly for a moment. He steps closer to the traumatized woman and says softly, "He channeled unlife and was clearly a source of great pain in this existence. He would have killed us all. But take heart in your turmoil, since that is what ensures that you are nothing like him."
He then moves next to Mory to explore what the cultists have left for them.
Eugeni grips his many wounds. "Well, that sucked. But looks like we all lived this time. Lets grab everything useful and clear the rest of the building, then get out of here."
Tzefira looks down at the fallen man with an thoughtful eye. "No wonder it was taking me so long to investigate... He was the one sending me on potential leads... A deliberately futile chase no doubt. Luckily I hadn't had a chance to report to him on recent developments..."
She glances at the proffered volume the group had found at the bottom of the locker. "I have knowledge of several languages... and may be able to decipher others... I'll have a look," she said, taking the book and flipping through it. "Interesting... he's used a mixture of elvish, dragon-tongue, and devil's-tongue letters... At least these are languages that I have facility with," she finishes, looking through the volume at a slower pace to pick up the details of the contents.
Later , Tzefira channels some of her magic into her vision to peruse the items they had found.
Tzefira frowns down at the book, flipping pages faster and faster before snapping it shut in a huff. "Going through this thing is going to take a while... Have to save it for later," she says, sliding it into her pack.
Turning to the items that had been collected she passes her hands over her eyes, muttering a mystical phrase and begins to stare at them. "The wand is a curative one, of moderate wounds that seems to have twelve more uses," she begins describing her findings as she determines them, mentioning the shortsword and buckler next. Her face shifts into a look of distaste as her eyes fall upon the sickening masks and the look deepens as she determines more about them.
"Dangerous items, these... Although they allows one to perceive... fear, and see the blood flowing within others, wearing them causes to loose a bit of one's sense of self... Apparently thoughts of murder and violence become rather... involved in one's thought processes. Ironbriar had something a bit more," she continues pointing at his mask. "Not only does it have the same... cringe-worthy benefits, but it allows, as some have already experienced on the other side, one to confuse their opponent on a limited basis..."
She pauses and gives Morythine and his mask a long stare. "At least yours seems not to have the same... deficiencies...," she says before turning to the other masks. "Do we keep them to present as evidence? Perform some deeper level of analysis on them? Or perhaps it would be best to destroy them, lest another become subsumed by murderous intent."
Zoli stands a bit in shock as the afterimages of the Confusion slowly fade. My father, killed again...Tsuto...
She gasps as Setsuna kills the unconscious cult leader--and then Morythine takes a swing too, further mutilating the man's skill. Zoli turns her head away (her jaw open but not yet able to speak). She hears Riley's words and nods. "That man did terrible things to our minds...but I hope we don't continue where he left off..." Shudder.
Despite her distaste for the gore, Zoli's curiosity demands another look at the corpse. On a thin silver chain is a one-eyed black enameled mask. She unclasps it and takes it over to the chest where Morythine and Tzefira are looking at the book. "Look at this. This is Norgorber's symbol. I was wondering, since Ironbriar was talking about his 'Lady' if he worshipped Lamashtu like Nualia did, or some other female deity...but Norgorber doesn't have a female aspect as far as I know. I don't recall ever hearing him referred to before as 'Father Skinsaw' either...but that must be one of his more secret aspects, since we heard him pray to him by that title earlier. I do know he's evil and secretive and is rumored to have aspects that noone speaks of.
"I wonder if this book will tell us what on Golarion his cult hopes to accomplish by doing all of this...and if there are more of them." She shudders again. "Guugh."
She looks over Tzerfira's shoulder at the book, but realizes quickly that none of the languages in it are familiar to her. "Do you think you'll be able to decipher it?"
Looking over and noticing the ladder up, Zoli's curiosity once again takes charge. She climbs up the ladder to see what she can find.
A timber cabinet sits against the northern wall here, its doors made of iron mesh. Inside perch three strangely silent ravens. A table nearby holds a tall narrow bucket of bird feed, a quill, and a vial of ink, as well as several thin parchments weighted down by a polished rock.
Zoli pokes around in the parchments, looking for anything with writing on it. She then says, "Hello there, raven. How're you today?" and cocks her head to the side.
Zoli ducks her head back into the lower room. "Hey Riley, you seem good with birds. Want to come up here? They've got some messenger ravens, it seems."
Riley puts his hands on his hips. "Well, I don't know if I'm good with birds so much as birds are good with me. Most of the time, anyway. But not always. I'll have to see what sort of disposition these ravens are in."
He whistles once to Olympus, who stays alert and on guard, then climbs up into the rookery.
After looking over the ravens' cage briefly, he then studies the birds themselves with a practiced eye to ascertain if they are mundane or enchanted in some way.
If they are normal ravens, he attempts to gain a rapport with them.
Setsuna takes a long time to collect herself, though Riley and Morythine's comforting/"comforting" actions seem to help. Still teary eyed, she trails after Zoli and Riley, out of a sense of gratitude for their help and a desire for protection from any lingering cultists who might be lurking in the shadows.
"...They were the men who were hunting me..." Setsuna finally murmurs with a sniffle. "Sorry for... losing it. Combat is always stressful enough for me as is. That just... pushed me over the edge."
After studying them for a bit, his form shifts and flows into that of a large carrion bird . In that form, he squawks and flaps his large, dusky wings.
::Friend eye-eaters! Where is your other roost? You have another place where food is given to you, yes? Enough for one more? Can you show me? Describe it to me?::
"Yes. Other roost at Snake Lady Tower. Snake lady have snacks. We go, we come back."
::Yes! You know how to get there? Direction, big things near that say you there? Good food, if you tell!::
Riley works to get as much detail from the ravens as he can, from their limited understanding, before finally shifting back to human form.
He stretches and cants his head back and forth a bit before shaking his head clear. "Well now! There's a tower where a snake lady lives, apparently. They ferry messages from here to there and back. In another day, we could possibly release one of them and I could follow. Not as a raven, unfortunately. Haven't quite got the hang of getting really small. But I have no doubt I could keep up, and then let you know where this 'Snake Lady Tower' is." He gives Zoli a hawkish grin.
Zoli watches wide-eyed as Riley turns himself into a bird, talks to the ravens, and then turns back. After his summary she grins back, saying "Pretty cool! That's a handy thing to be able to do. Think you could teach me how to do it?"
"My, quite the eager one you are!" he smiles. "First you want to ride them, now you want to be one!"
He puts his hand to his chin and thinks. "I could teach you, but it would be quite the departure from your current path. But if you have patience, and are willing to open yourself up to the powers of Nature herself, you could learn to do so."
"Don't suppose any of you could heal me?"
"Yes," Tzefira responds to Zoli's question. "It will just take some time. I can look at it once we're at a more secure location."
The sylph listens to the conversation regarding the raven and this tower where a snake lady lives. "It seems their 'Lady' could very well be this 'snake lady' you speak of. Perhaps a high priestess of Norgorber or this potential Father Skinsaw aspect you speak of. Regardless, would it not be unusual for a raven to arrive without a message should we send one off to follow? Or do they routinely fly back and forth without messages or without having their message immediately looked after?"
Looking at the injured half-orc, she shakes her head. "Healing magics are beyond my ken," she said. "If no one else can assist, perhaps we ought to take some time to rest prior to a foray into this lady's tower."
"I don't have any healing spells left, so that's why I carry around this." Riley fishes out an ash wand. "It's good to start the healing process, but it'll probably run out before everyone's fully healed."
With that, he says the command word and uses it several times on everybody.
"If we could take some time to rest, then I could spend the next day or two healing you all. It's the least I could do."
"My, quite the eager one you are!" he smiles. "First you want to ride them, now you want to be one!"
He puts his hand to his chin and thinks. "I could teach you, but it would be quite the departure from your current path. But if you have patience, and are willing to open yourself up to the powers of Nature herself, you could learn to do so."
Zoli frowns a bit at Riley's answer. She furrows her brow in concentration and tentatively flaps her arms as though they were wings. When nothing happens she says, "Hmmmmm, I figured it wouldn't be easy...but it doesn't hurt to try!"
When talk turns to healing, Zoli pulls out the groups's wand of Infernal Healing. "This is a great option too, when you're not in a hurry. It comes with a tingly evil-all-over sensation, but it only lasts a minute.
"Tzefira, I'm not able to make it work, but you might be able to. Xamarath never had any trouble with it. If you can make it work, maybe you should carry it?"
At the suggestion to wait a few days, the halfling looks clearly impatient. "What would this snake-lady do if she learns that Ironbriar and the other cultists here are dead? Will she bring in more cultists to defend her? Or worse, run to some new hole in the ground?
"I want us to be able to rest of course, but if we use wands to heal we should be able to get going first thing in the morning, and so possibly catch her unawares. If we wait longer she'll certainly discover that we're on her trail.
"I suggest that we send a raven there tomorrow and have Olympus (or Riley-in-bird-form, or both) track it. We can tie a blank note around it's leg but then rip it off so it looks like a real message that got lost.
"If we follow close behind, we might be able to get the jump on them. What do you all think?"
She pauses to look at the newcomers. "That is...if you still want to do this. I think we could really use your help, but it's your choice to make. These cultists are clearly dangerous!"
Tzefira shrugs, looking at the wand. "I have heard of this spell... Dark connections, but functional. Had I the desire, I probably could put together how to cast the spell myself. In any case, I should have no difficulty with it."
The sylph raises her hands in a calming manner at Zoli's impatience. "If the Lady learns that her minions are lost, she may hire new cultists to continue whatever plans she have, but I would be doubful of her fleeing. Aside from information from our bird-friends here, we have found no information that could lead to her. She may feel safe," she begins.
"On the other hand, I would think it prudent to examine what information we do have, such as this book, and try to discover more information on this tower and the Lady before making ourselves known. Such information could help us to prepare for the inevitable confrontation. And much of this could be done while we rested."