I'd barely closed my eyes when the mammoth starts to trumpet and Hoki's running around like a chicken with its head cut off (funny story about his cousin) hissing about there being more of them. It's basically more of the same with a bunch of ghost-magic invaders claiming we're under arrest while they charge around Nadya's house. There's one particularly wispy one that seems to go all ghost-magic on me 'cause I can't hit him with anything. Hoki runs out the back and there's some flashes of flame out the front that tell me the gnome's grilling ghosts. Not sure what Vos and the witch did this whole time. After most of the ones in the house transitioned to full-ghost, I stepped outside and did my best 'hey look at me' to distract the important looking, spiked shield wielder while Hoki sapped him on the back of his head.
Then things got weird. It involved rope and sharp things.
Lessons were learned:
1) We need more practice at asking questions
2) Never leave the crow alone with someone you want to keep alive
3) Do leave the crow alone with someone that has too many fingers.
We tucked back in and waited for the next group of idiots, however, idiots seemed to be in short supply. With the coming of morning, we waited around while some people did their previously mentioned book and animal themed morning activities, then we set off. The walk to the tower was slow. We should have found those ghost-magicians' sleds or skis or whatever they used. Eventually we got there and found out that it was a tower of ice surrounded by an ice wall. There seems to be a bit of an ice fetish with these witches... but that's cool (that was for the mammoth).
Well, no mere ice was stopping me us from finding Nadya, (and, if necessary, exacting revenge for ratting us out) and killing some witch or possibly even witches (that really does make me smile). Two swings and the ice wall shattered like so much ice. Which was appropriate. What was not appropriate was the magic ice crap that was cold to when I went through my newly created doorway. I'm not supposed to feel cold, and for making me feel cold, I will definitely lay things to waste. Starting with that big ugly troll that was trying to stop me from breaking that big ugly ice dragon statue.
A couple guards were up on the wall, but the ranger sniped them, so they weren't a worry. That troll though, wow, he could bite. Really hard. Once the troll was down, I got to bust up the statue's eyes. That felt good, but everyone was rushing up ahead. Turns out the ground floor of that ice tower was guard lodging, and they swarmed out like a nest of roaches. We squashed them like bugs. Something about ants... I'm hungry.
Our witch had us walk over to one side of the ice tower and with a flash we were somewhere else. We found more blue-skinned faeries here and swatted them, while a larger one that Vos was obviously smitten with tried to magic us so she had to go too. Still looking for Nadya, who our witch thinks is a prisoner, we started with the door-kicking.
First one we find another magical dwarf. Hoki and our witch tried to talk to it, apparently having forgotten that these things only respond to booze. It went Vos-style on Hoki and the bird ran away screaming. Ah, that was kinda funny. But then he turned into a magical giant! The dwarf, not Hoki. So, then it was my turn to talk to him in the universal language of stabbing. Stab-bite? Bitey stab, stabby bite-bite stab. Bite. Also, the others probably did things. For our efforts, we got a cookie. I am not allowed to eat the cookie.
Next room we looked in had a plant creature someone called a man-dragger or something. It screamed so loudly my food tried to escape from my stomach via my mouth and all over the plant. This was not the man-dragger's favorite thing. It transformed into a ten foot high behemoth and wailed on me. People were screaming about poison and blood drinking, so I went to work with my man-sized pruning tools and turned that thing into compost.
We continued kicking doors and immediately found a white lizardman lady. Not super lizardy, but just around the edges, you know the kind. She didn't say much and instead tried to murder us, so we tried to murder her back. She did some tricky stuff and hit me with a snowball shortly before we won the murder competition.
I was expecting all these guys to be a lot tougher. Vlad Schlad just tossed some glitter on them and his big bad bloodrager brother baloo just rolled them up like a taquitos. Those tiny fey things were kinda annoying, but this tower seems easy...a little bit TOO easy.
So you'll have no problem being in front from now on?
The art of subtlety is lost on my brother, Nevermore. I had hopes that someday he would learn the arcane ways, but alas the nuances are beyond him. He is quite good at smashing things though. It may not be a terrible idea to let him confront the threats first so you may sneak around them to a better position.
Eiji, stubbornly ignoring the conversation between Hokkaido and Vostok, grabs Hokkaido and shoves him first through the next door into an unexplored room.
"See? It's that simple!" Eiji explains, as though talking to a simpleton. "You just go in... first. No need for the rest of... whatever you were talking about."
The scent of perfume fills the air of this small bedroom where several dresses styled for a Taldan noblewoman lie neatly arranged on the bed. A mirrored vanity and chair sit by the door next to a wooden chest, and a larger mirror hangs on the wall between two windows.
Seated in the chair in front of the vanity is someone you recognize...
The Lady Argentea Malassene!
By Erastil's good eye! Don't tell me you're a black rider too?
After rescuing Nadya, she tells you what she has pieced together of Queen Elvanna's plans, based on rumors and what she overheard before Nazhena left to report in at Whitethrone.
After decades of careful research, Queen Elvanna finally made the fateful decision to overthrow Baba Yaga, but she realized that success would require meticulous planning. Several events needed to take place almost simultaneously, and the first and foremost was the imprisonment of her mother.
This act signaled the start of Elvanna's rebellion, but it wasn't the only thing that required immediate attention-the Dancing Hut had to be separated from her mother as well. Not only is it Baba Yaga's mobile fortress and a repository of her many secrets, it is also her personal symbol across countless worlds and dimensions. Once Baba Yaga had been imprisoned, Elvanna transported the hut back to Golarion and shackled it in gigantic leg irons in Whitethrone's Market Square. There it was to serve as a testament to Elvanna's victory over her mother. At the same time, the queen deactivated the mystic keys required to transport the hut across the dimensions to prevent its theft by those still loyal to Baba Yaga.
With the hut secured, Elvanna turned her attention to Whitethrone's Iron Guard, an organization that had notoriously maintained its loyalty to Baba Yaga above any of her daughters throughout Irrisen's history. In a well-coordinated strike, the queen purged the Iron Guard, installing in its place her own Winter Guard, drawn heavily from the city's ice troll and winter wolf populations.
Finally, Elvanna went after Baba Yaga's Three Riders, the heralds who announce the Witch Queen's return every 100 years. The Winter Guard eventually captured the Red and White Riders, impaling their dead bodies on a bone fence around the hut, but the Black Rider managed to escape. As the Winter Guard searches for the missing Black Rider, Elvanna has sequestered herself in a secret location to undertake the massive rituals needed to usher in a global ice age across all of Golarion.
Nadya plans to relocate what is left of her family with her sister in the village of Ellsprin, about week's journey from Waldsby, along the road towards Whitebridge.
Prior to departure, Nadya offers to go into town and purchase any supplies you might still need. She also gifts the party with a set of "snowshoes of northern pursuit" in thanks for rescuing her and agreeing to travel with her and her children to Ellsprin.
Nadya gathers her twin boys (4 years old) and the supplies needed for their journey, meeting you on the border of Waldsby before leading the way north.
Additionally, prior to leaving the Waldsby area, Nadya notices that the fiend, Eiji, seems to still be quite weak. After ascertaining that Eiji has fallen to Nazhena's trap curse, she notes, "Katrina Goltieva keeps a stock of scrolls at the White Weasel . Perhaps she may have something that could be of use?
MARKETPLACE:
Base Value 500 gp; Purchase Limit 2,500 gp; Spellcasting lst
(75% chance that any magic item costing less than 500gp is available; you can roll that here.)
Minor Items: +2 studded leather, +1 darkwood quarterstaff, masterwork shortbow, oil of protection from evil, potion of feather step, scroll of goodberry;
Medium Items: +1 arrow catching light wooden shield, belt of mighty constitution +2;
Major Items: none
Any mundane gear you'd like should be available.
Price: 450gp
Price: 105gp
Price: 195gp
Price: Not Available
Price: 450gp
Price: 450gp
Price: 50gp/ea.
Price: 300gp/ea.
Price: 300gp/ea.
Which is why we won't be trying to sell my awesome, 90,000gp ring of "regeneration"
Suddenly Hoki got his feathers in a fluff and decides he's best suited to face blocking all the things and storms off through a door to confront the next dire threat... which turns out to be a lady on a bed. She looks like that lady we rescued from the basement of those bandits who were maybe the forest sentinels gone bad. Anyway, she says she doesn't remember anything, and she can't be a black rider 'cause that old man died and then disappeared, so her whole story isn't holding up. The gnome was singing a song about how the lady isn't the lady, and she was right! The lady turned into some grey, wrinkly skinned monster lady. This was apparently the go signal, 'cause all the weapons started going. She was a bloody mess on the bed in seconds. First Nadya, then the blue dancing lady, then the lizard lady, now the grey not-lady... I'm starting to think we shouldn't trust ladies .
Vos says the teleporter thing is locked and we can't just go up to the next floor. Why can't they build ice stairs in this frozen waste of space? Cat, that's our witch, says we can go up to the roof and work our way down from there. So we go to a different teleporter and it warps us up there. If we could have done this right off, maybe our gnome could have just melted this whole place from the top down. Anyway, back out in the open air, there's another blue lady, only this one looks normal, except for being blue, but I won't judge. She's got a thing for birds though, and that's just gross. There's a thousand of Hoki's bastards sitting on some wire walls up here. The new blue lady squawks at them, and they come charging at us in a big mass of talons and beaks. Hoki must have figured that they wouldn't attack their kin since he just waltzes into the cloud of feathery doom. While he's screaming about "oh gods, they're going for my eyes" and such, I figure the blue lady must be controlling them the same way that little fella was controlling that stag back on the other side of the world. I hit her really good, and while she's reeling from the shock of pointy spear death, the gnome does her best to fry anything and everything bird-like in a series of truly impressive gouts of flames. She's like a tiny, crazy dragon. On top of a tiny, hairy elephant. On top of an impossible ice tower that's full of evil ladies. And has no stairs.
There were a couple rooms up there. All those tiny blue folk must have been living on the roof too, 'cause we found their tiny house full of tiny loot. And in the other room, we found a weird love note from Radi-something who's apparently some sort of creep that was trying to get in the beds of all the evil ladies (to include our witch, which explains her sudden urge to leave). But since he thought anyone getting too lonely might want his teleporter unlocking key, he left it up here (for the blue lady, the tiny folk, or just the flock of birds, I don't know. Not sure he cared by Cat's description). This was a good development. I wasn't sure I had enough oil and alchemist fire to actually melt through the floor up here anyway.
We took the teleporter down to the top indoor floor and found the Radi-guy... with a goat. A goat. Seriously. A goat. I can't stand to see an animal be abused in such a foul way, and everyone else unknowingly agreed with me. At least, I assume they did, cause Radi started mumbling Vos-style and we had at him. Hoki went first, that's his thing now, and charged in. I stepped up to put the goat out of his misery, and Vos tried to banish Radi to hell, but only managed to drop him about twenty feet into a non-hellish pit. Keep trying, brother, someday you'll get there. Unfortunately, the goat fell down too. Out of the frying pan and into the fire my hairy friend. Not sure what to do now, I fished a random bottle out of my backpack with the old third arm. I fumbled to bottle and sorta dropped it directly on Radi. Luckily it was a flask of alchemist’s fire. Unluckily it splashed Hoki and goaty. Well, live and burn. A flurry of arrows, crossbow bolts, and magic finished off the sad, singed couple.
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The tower got really quiet then. Except the muffled cries of "help, help" coming from an adjacent room. Turned out to be Nadya, and while, previously, all the women that yelled "help" at us have wound up tied to a chair and used as a zombie speed bump, we have now lowered that average by half! Nadya blamed the tavern owner and his wife (another evil lady!) for ratting us out, and then there was an awkward exchange about how she found out the witches (not our witch) had killed her daughter and how we sorta knew and hadn't told her. Only, I didn't know. Keeping that kind of information from her would just be cold. Inhumane even. Possibly evil. Well, she's mostly just pissed at the witches now. When we got back to town, she kinda bullied everyone into being nice to us and dealing fairly with us. She told us all about what she had pieced together of the evil witches plans while she was under room-arrest in the stair-less ice tower. Now it seems everyone's ready to go kill more witches.
In the midst of setting up a campsite on the evening of the second day out from Waldsby, Nadya quickly approaches Catriona, clearly distressed. "I can't find Orm," she weeps. "He was here just a moment ago; I don't know where he is. Do you know where he is??"
"Orm! You come out right this minute!! Has anyone seen Orm?!"
Eiji has a journal? Who knew he was literate?
Eiji quickly searches for the boy's tracks.
Ranger, take the east side. I'll search the west
@Nadya No, I haven't seen him. We will begin searching immediately
We must find the boy. Nadya has suffered enough, without having another one of her children come to harm
Catriona immediately begins searching to the South of the camp while Eiji and Alemar search to the East and West.
Hokkaido, search North, please!
I don't see any sign of Orm over here. What about the rest of you?
They boy has been missing for nearly half an hour. As dark falls and it begins to snow (again), Ailmar finally finds him. As Ailmar approaches, he notices a large wolf stalking nearby, watching.
Having given up the search to the North/South of the camp, Catriona and Hokkaido follow Ailmar, who upon seeing the boy and wolf, silently points them out to the rest of the party. Catriona readies her wand in case the wolf attacks.
Ailmar readies his bow, and eases up to position himself between Orm and the wolf. Quietly, firmly, Ailmar says to Orm: Orm, I need you to get behind me, and stay behind me. We're going back to you mother now.
Hopefully this wolf leaves well enough alone. Now...I wonder if it has a pack with it
The wolf whines as it backs away. After taking a few steps back, you see the wolf more clearly in a bit of moonlight between the trees. It is a smallish, skinny thing, probably a bit too young to be on its own. It looks around as though searching for a pack that has presumably gone beyond caring for such mundane things as hunger and fear.
Feeling bad for the abandoned baby wolf, Catriona says to Ailmar: You seem to be lacking an animal friend. Perhaps you should go be all Ranger-ey and make him your pet?
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Hokkaido speaks with the boy. O, praise Hei Feng! There you are, Orm! We've been looking all over for you. Why did you wander off like that? We have to be more careful because there's a lot of other things out in these woods. Now, let us return to your mother who will be overjoyed to see you safe and sound.
Hokkadio kneels down to the level of the child and offers his bird man hand out to the young boy in reassurance.
Sighing in relief, Ailmar sets about coaxing the wolf along.
Hokkaido quietly urges Orm away, carrying the frightened boy most of the way while attempting reassurances. Upon returning to the camp and returning to the boy to his mother, he cries out to her. After a moment, he clams and haltingly say, "I'm...sorry, really sorry." *sniffle* "I thought I could be a helper... I was looking for some wood for the fire, and I got lost! I was really scared!!"
Meanwhile, Ailmar presumably lowers his weapon, motioning to Catriona to also stand down. Breathing a sigh of relief that the child has been recovered safely, he presumably says, "Catriona, you can head back to camp. I will see what I can do for this poor, wretched creature."
@Ailmar: We're heading back then. Let me know later if you want help naming your new friend.
Catriona returns to the camp with Hokkaido and Orm.
Seeing Orm's distress, Catriona tell Orm: It's dangerous to go anywhere alone out here, and you're wearing a red shirt which is just asking for trouble. By Nethys's right buttock! It's like he wants the writers to kill him.
If you want to help, just ask us for something to do. I'm sure there are a lot of things a good helper like you could do in the camp.
Taking her leave of the emotional child and mother, Catriona sits by the fire and feeds Archimedes an apple while he hoots enthusiastically.
Catriona then turns to Vostok: Hey Vostok! What's a witches favorite subject in school? ..... Spelling!
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The usual stoic Hokkaido chuckles at the obvious pun and nods his beak in approval. Relieved at seeing the boy back with his mother, Hokkaido offers Orm to play a game of Hide and Go Seek later so long as Hokkadio can stealth..he means hide first. However, in the meantime he attempts to entertain Orm with magic tricks.
To produce a copper from Hokkadio's pocket and simulate pulling it out of Orm's ear.
E voila!
As everyone calms down, Nadya scans the group and asks, "Where is Ailmar? Did we find one to lose another?"
@ Nadya Ailmar stayed behind to wrangle the wolf pup we found. He should be following shortly.