As Sara prepares to down the extract, suddenly Melodie's vengeful touch poisons her plans. She howls madly and rushes in.
The monster's tongue lashes Melodie as she closes, slicing a bloody wound open across her chest. Despite the pain, she touches the horror and sings a jaunty tune, and the thing finds itself uncontrollably dancing, twitching and shuddering in a grotesque display. "Damn you! You will pay for this!" it shrieks.
As Sara and Zhi move to flank it, Maria gets to her feet and scores another hit. Safina challenges the fiend and scores two hits, one a critical strike!
The monster capers and flails, opening itself up to attacks as it struggles to shake off Melodie's compulsion!
Zhi becomes a dervish of blades as she stabs again and again at the creature from another reality - bits and pieces flying as fast as her blades.
With a furious flurry, Zhi stabs her blades into the fiend again and again. Maria and Sara add their efforts to strike the dancing monstrosity, but it is largely the miniscule Tian woman who does the damage, her precise pinpricks causing torrents of blood, pus, and gore to pour from the fiend. It howls and shudders as it slumps to the ground, unmoving!
Melodie applauds her wife without a hint of irony, and then winces as the movement aggravates the slash in her torso from the creature's tongue.
"So... onwards then?" She asks, as it becomes clear their huge preparations were largely pointless...
Zhi returns to the building that the tracks in town lead to.
The windows that once ringed the upper level, as well as the front door, have been sealed with brick and mortar, and then plastered over from within. Only one side door on the first floor remains usable. This door is locked.
Zhi checks the door for traps and then opens the joke that's pretending to be a lock.
Zhi finds a devious trap on the door, one design to petrfiy and shatter anybody who tries to open it or tamper with it. Fortunately, Zhi is able to deftly disable the runes before unlocking the door.
This large room holds a half-dozen crumbling wooden desks. The desks still bear remnants of heavy ornamentation with carved spiral legs and designs of maps and explorers on their fronts. Now they are covered in dust, and their tops sag sadly. Empty shelves that once housed books and vellum line the walls, but are now home to nothing more than spiders and their webs.
As you are getting your bearings, a hidden door opens in the far wall and a bird flies out, moving through an archway across from you. A moment later, two women step out of the door, clad in black studded leather. They raise their shortbows!
Zhi invokes a spell of protection and then dashes to within melee range as she vanishes from sight, attempting to leave Sara a position to flank.
Melodie covers the archers in glitterdust with a rapidly falling scale.
Zileska waves her hand airily and blows a kiss at the archers.
"Ladies, please," she says. "Is it getting a little warm here? Lez be friends."
Both archers resist Melodie's spell! Sara moves up to try to blind one, but the other woman dodges away. Both step back and fire on the brawler, festooning her with arrows!
Zileska invokes a powerful spell. One of the archers moans lewdly and falls to her knees, groping at herself, but the other lets out a little gasp and stays on her feet, struggling to keep her wits about her.
"I know a few people who'd be very interested in that spell," Maria remarked before moving towards the nearest hostile.
Zhi steps up and begins stabbing at the figure that's fallen to her knees.
Zhi interrupts the woman's ecstatic experience with a series of fatal stab wounds. She slumps to the ground, quite dead--though at least her final moments were filled with pleasure before the pain.
Maria drives her sword into the other archer's side, drawing blood.
Melodie glares at the woman.
"Stop!" She commands fiercely.
The other woman seizes up, allowing Sara to dispatch her with ease.
All is quiet for now, but that bird you saw earlier might have alerted reinforcements....
Zileska draws a healing wand and deploys it to Maria.
Zhi appears over the body of the dead archer. After a quick look inside the secret room their foes emerged from. Once she sees that there aren't any more enemies lurking there, she moves to the other door and quickly checks it for traps.
"At least they died happy."
The door is open, but Zhi doesn't find any traps in the archway. Beyond is a room with numerous doors leading away from it. Most are closed, but one to the northeast is open.
Melodie scans the area with her magical senses, waiting for the ambush she just knows is coming.
Nodding in thanks to Zileska, Maria downed another of her extracts to help continue the healing before taking up position near the entrance to the next room.
All is quiet for now...
Zhi casts her spell of speed upon everyone. Not doubting for an instant that there's going to be other foes any moment.
She then moves to the partially open door to the northeast, glancing through it.
Scarred and battered workbenches line the walls of this room. Smashed panes of glass have been swept into a corner alongside the warped remains of parchment-stretching frames. Five bedrolls are arranged on the floor around a low table set with plates and cutlery. Sets of dice and cards, discarded clothes, cheaply printed books, and other such items are scattered among the bedrolls.
Two men dressed similarly to the women you fought are here, starting to move towards the door with bows drawn. They shout in alarm when they see Zhi peeking in. The far end of the room is cloaked in magical darkness...
Zileska takes the free moment to heal Sara so that the fighter can get back into the thick of things against the latest enemies.
Melodie covers the men in glitterdust!
Moving in right after Zhi, Maria went after one of the new hostiles.
The man Melodie is hampering with her voice resists the glitterdust, but the other one is blinded! Maria moves to attack the one that can still see, driving her sword into his belly. Sara and Safina move in as well. Sara attempts to blind the other with more mundane methods but fails to do so. Safina shoots the man with a crossbow bolt.
The archers step back and fire a barrage of arrows at Maria. Thanks to her magical defenses and the one man's blindness, only one finds its mark. The blinded warrior wipes the dust from his eyes.
A shadowy sphere of force appears, attempting to close around Sara, but the brawler just barely leaps out of the way and avoids being trapped within.
Zhi takes advantage of the magical speed that she still possesses to move around to give Sara a chance to flank one of the archers.
Once she knows that the brawler is aware of her position, she vanishes from sight.
She then strikes with her tiny invisible blade.
Stepping up to the archers, Maria let loose with her blade.
Melodie, confident that her friends can deal with the archers now that they've closed the range, waits - trying to work out what attempted to catch Sara.
Zileska snaps out her whip and snares one of the archers, though she keeps an eye peeled for the spellcaster who tried to isolate Sara in a bubble of force.
Zhi and Maria team up to take down the first of the archers. Zileska fails to grapple the second, but between Safina's crossbow bolts and Sara's deadly heels, the second man falls.
Melodie stands ready to dispel any magic coming your way, but the darkness at the far end of the room suddenly vanishes, along with whatever may have been hiding within. Things are quiet for now.
A tiny Zhi reappears and pokes the defeated foes casually with her equally small rapier as if verifying that they are, in fact, dead.
"Ok, lots of shifty folk here to defend ... what?" she says in annoyance. She notes the symbols of Norgorber. "I wonder if they're members of the Brotherhood of Silence. If so, I'd really like to have a sit-down with one of them while they're still alive."
She turns and strides towards the next door, checking for traps before opening it.
Zhi does not discover the trap on this door until it is too late. When the trap is triggered, it generates a forcecage in a 20-foot cube around the door. The forcecage is barred with half-inch bars of force, spaced a half an inch apart. Each bar is also studded with razor-sharp force spikes extending 10 feet into the cage, fillimg the interior with slowly moving blades!
Zhi rolls out of the way as the cage appears. "Sorry about that," she says to Melodie with a shrug. "I'll blame pregnancy brain."
With the trap triggered, she waits for the effects to fade away and then opens the door.
Melodie gives her wife a glare that combines concern and annoyance in one. "You pay more attention sweetie." She says firmly. "No pregnancy brain allowed when it comes to traps and you, especially while you're carrying our daughter."
The forcecage disappears after a minute. The stairs within the small room lead up to the abandoned and empty second floor, and the stairs down have been collapsed and filled with rubble and plaster after 10 feet. It appears this is a dead end.
Properly chastised, Zhi takes a little more care at the next door.
This enormous room houses a dozen empty, glass-fronted bookcases, each one bearing a metal identification plate on its side. Much of the glass has been smashed, leaving the floor littered with glittering shards.
Zileska quietly shifts through the debris with the sole of one boot. "Someone was looking for something in particular?" she guesses.
Zhi looks around the room carefully. "Or they were looking for everything," she says, looking for any cases that haven't been broken into. She looks over the labels trying to determine what was taken.
Melodie meanwhile examines the room for magic. This is clearly a room for storing something of significance.
The labels provide little insight, but Zhi does find an old bundle of 15 +1 fey-bane cold iron crossbow bolts amid the rubble. She also notices one of the bookcase doors (one of the few still intact) is painted on the inside to look like empty shelves. Opening the door reveals a set of stairs hidden within the case which lead down.
Her eyebrows raises at the discovery of the stairs. "We need to clear the rest of the rooms on this level first," she says. "I don't think we want someone coming in behind us."
Heading back to the central hall she examines the remaining door for traps before carefully opening it.
Chips of marble on the ground suggest this room was once tiled in variegated marble. The tiles have been pried up and taken, leaving the rubble-strewn masonry subfloor exposed. Wooden railings, with a few chips of gold paint still clinging to them, mark the boundaries of a queue. A long stone counter stands against one wall, and the sagging remains of cushioned chairs lie broken in a corner. The ceiling here goes up to the second level, and countless empty shelves line the walls above. Metal tracks run from floor to ceiling between the shelves, made of metal plates, gears, and springs, with arms jabbing at the shelves as if replacing invisible books.