"There's been a significant change of plan." 'Jeroth' says, "The False Empress has sent agents to the city and I need you to examine some objects of theirs for me so that we can track them down."
'He' holds out a small bag and waits for the hags to come closer. Just before they get within arm's reach Melodie yells "Now!" and all hell breaks loose!
Melodie lashes out at the nearest hag, filling her mind with the loathing she herself feels for Kurana and all her kind.
Unfortunately, Melodie's spell fails to overcome the youngest hag's resistance, even with her voice sapping it!
Waiting restlessly in the box, Zhi finds it difficult to keep her thoughts from spinning around in circles. After a bit, her wife begins to tire of the constant, "Are they here yet?" that Zhi directs towards her.
At Melodie's call to arms, Zhi takes the scant moment given them to cast haste using the magical rod to enhance the duration.
Sara rushes in, grabbing a wrench as she passes it. With both arms she brings it down on the youngest woman's shoulder, bending it nearly in half.
As she turns visible she winks and spits her still burning cigarillo into the hag's eye.
There is a whump as Zileska opens with some Serious Business.
Using the same disguise she'd used at the rakshasa manor, Maria drew her blade as Mel gave the signal, analysing her target's movements and striking.
Zileska dismisses her sound muffling spell. Zhi grants everybody the gift of haste, and Sara rushes out to attack the youngest sister. Her wrench bends with the force of the impact, though the woman seems to be supernaturally tough and isn't as hurt as Sara would have expected. She succeeds at blinding the woman though, spitting burning ash into her eyes! Maria stabs the blinded foe, but her blade barely seems to nick her! Safina fires a shot from Dignity's Barb, the bolt piercing the disguised hag's defenses and badly wounding her!
Before the hags can react, Zileksa calls down a column of holy fire on them. The blind one is untouched by the spell, but it engulfs the other two. However, the flames do nothing to harm them--they seem to be immune to fire. The holy energies still leave them slightly wounded, though.
While worried at her blade seemingly glancing off (and once more remembering how resilient hags could be), she nevertheless continued her assault.
Zhi downs the elixir that Maria gave her and dashes out from the crate, drawing her weapons in the process. She approaches one of the hags invisibly noting Sara's position to flank with her.
Sara reaches into her purse and pulls out her freshly magicked up cold iron crowbar, yelling triumphantly as she slams the blinded hag in the neck with it, the banner flying behind her inspirationally, calling all who see it to charge forth, lifting their spirits, and lifting them also right off the ground!
Maria scores three hits on the blinded hag, one of them a critical strike, but the creature's supernatural resistance blunts the force of her blows significantly. As Zhi maneuvers into a flanking position, Sara smashes the wounded woman with her crowbar. The enchanted cold iron sears the hag's flesh, and she shrieks in pain!
The injured hag concentrates on activating a power defensively, promptly disappearing from sight. The other two lift up off the ground, flying towards the warehouse's ceiling. "Hideous deception!" one cries, eyes bulging as she stares at Sara. "Lies and treachery!" the other shouts before casting a spell, trying to paralyze the cad!
Sara rises right along with them, pulling a wrought iron bead from her necklace and tossing it at the ground where the hag was previously. It shatters on collision, leaving shards throughout the 10 foot radius.
The caltrops litter the floor around the hag's previous location, but none of them seem to have hit her.
Melodie activates the Subtle Mask with a flicker of thought, its magic enabling her to see things as they really are.
With the hag's location revealed she casts Glitterdust covering the invisible hag (and her sisters if I can) in fine golden particles.
Melodie's mask allows her to see the hags' true forms: corpse-thin crones with sharp fangs! She also spots the invisible hag about 15 feet away from Sara, just outside the radius of caltrops.
As Melodie indicates the wounded hag's location, Safina fires Dignity's Barb. The crossbow's enchantment steers the bolt unerringly towards the hag, catching her in the chest and dropping her! Hearing the thud of her body hitting the floor, Safina shifts her aim to one of the flying hags, scoring a good hit that is amplified by Melodie's voice.
Using the banner's effect, Zhi shoots up in the air retaining her flanking position with Sara. Feeling almost fey-like, the diminutive, invisible, flying version of Zhi pushes some of the abundant magical energy about her into her blade and then stabs at the flanked hag with her needle-like rapier.
Lifting off the ground, Maria kept up the pressure.
Since the tide of battle is in the favor of the team, Zileska settles for adding a small shift in the form of a prayer.
Zileska's prayer hampers only one of the remaining hags. Maria and Zhi both move in to attack the other one, who shrieks in pain as both strike true, though their weapons are still blunted by her resistance.
Seeing Safina and her deadly crossbow as the biggest threat, the hags team up on her as they did Sara. The wounded one targets her with the evil eye, while the other tries to paralyze her.
Though Safina fights against the evil eye, her body locks up as the paralysis takes hold!
"Don't stare!" Sara shouts, slicing at the woman's forehead with her nails, causing blood to trickle down and cloud her vision, before launching into a frenzy of powerful blows with her crowbar. "It's rude."
Zhi continues to stab away at the hag between her and Sara, her blades nothing but flashing metal.
Sara and Zhi bludgeon and stab their foe until she falls back to the ground, bloody and broken. Only one unharmed and very angry hag remains!
Melodie focuses her full will on the hag, just as angry as she is!
"Safina!" Maria cried out as she saw the hags team up, though a wave of relief went through her as she saw the other hag slain.
Wanting to make sure this one didn't take advantage of the paralysis, she focused on and raced after the other.
"I've got her," says Zileska. She floats over to Safina like a seductive angel and taps her with the holy symbol of Calistria.
The hag resists Melodie's spell, though she is staggered by the sudden rush of emotions. Maria stabs her in the shoulder with her sword cane!
As Zileska frees Safina from her paralysis, the last hag flies back a few feet from Maria. The fallen hag's raven alights on her shoulder as she shouts curses at you. "The Circle will hear of your treachery!" she shouts before she and the two birds fade out of existence!
Melodie can still see them, but they have slipped into the Ethereal Plane.
Invisibility purge.
Zhi flits to help surround the incorporeal hag , but holds her attacks until the creature is pulled into the material plane.
Sara follows her earlier progression of attacks, hoping to blind the woman and render her defenseless. As Zhi strikes a sensitive spot, Sara in turn sends her cold iron crowbar careening into the hag's head, allowing Zhi to continue their violent back and forth dance.
Melodie grins, a rather dangerous expression on Jeroth's face, and holds up one hand before making a crushing gesture. The hag's spell vanishes and she is returned to the material plane with a jarring thud!
The final night hag has only a few moments to register shock at being shunted back to the Material Plane before Sara and Zhi utterly eviscerate her. The two ravens caw and fly around the warehouse, but with their mistresses slain, the familiars will soon lose their abilities and revert to simple animals.
Melodie gives a grim smile of satisfaction as the last hag falls. "Good riddance." She pronounces, before stepping forward to take part in the appraisal of valuables.
"We should definitely hang onto these." She says, holding up the teleportation glyphs. "I assume they're linked to Abadar's Pillar, and being able to teleport in or out could be extremely useful in future. Before we rest though I think we should check out the shop, just in case they have anything else there. Once that's done we should have dealt with this branch of the network for good."
Melodie makes a sketch of one of the hags before she goes, just in case it ever comes in handy.
Sara tries and tries to coax the ravens into coming with her, her fondness for animals keeping her distracted. "You poor things," she says, petting one, "All alone now. Don't fret, I'm here."
The ravens flock to Sara, accepting her as their new caretaker and allowing her to take them under her wing.
You head to the Sweet Dreams tea shop and search the place. Most the of the tea sold at Sweet Dreams is of average quality. The stock behind the counter includes a small chest of medicinal Red King tea from Vudra, each cup of which acts as an antitoxin and antiplague. The chest contains enough loose tea to prepare 15 cups, worth a total of 2,250 gp. The store lockbox contains 35 gp, 816 sp, 12 cp, and a hexing doll.
Shelves line the walls of a large, dusty warehouse adjoining the shop. Searching it takes several hours. Many of the items here are average items fashioned to appear precious. A bit of appraisal identifies the valuables: six champagne flutes carved from smoky quartz (100 gp each), three golden bowls etched with falcon iconography (300 gp each), a rose gold censer lined with a tarry residue of lavender oil (400 gp), an oil painting of the late Grand Prince Stavian II (1,500 gp), a music box carved from darkwood and wound with a permanent prestidigitation spell (3,000 gp), and waters of transfiguration.
A cozy, two-room apartment is above the warehouse. The outer room serves as a living room, office, and small kitchen. Four mangy cats hiss and yowl at you but keep their distance. There is a dose of flying ointment, and an orb of heaven wrapped in three layers of black sackcloth on a shelf, alongside various half‐burned candles, cracked animal bones, and feathers.
Also on the bookshelf here are meticulous ledgers maintained by the Sisters of Indulgent Dreams on behalf of Milon Jeroth. The rakshasa still uses the night hags and their magic to deliver instructions and payments to Maxillar Pythareus’s various false‐flag operations attacking Taldan targets and framing Qadira. The ledgers on their own aren’t enough to damn Pythareus—given their dubious origin—but provide another strong piece of evidence of his wrongdoings.
The bedroom reeks of decay and incense. In the far corner from the door lies a humanoid figure wrapped in sheets—the desiccated body of a middle-aged woman, dried by the desert heat. A desk near the door includes writing implements and stationary, as well as a massive tome bound in leather. The tome is written in a curious combination of Abyssal and Infernal, and illustrated with terrifyingly vivid drawings of both great heroics and atrocities.
Zhi looks down at the dead hags for a moment before cancelling the spell affecting her size. She cleans her weapons and then approaches Melodie. Hey, you," she says, before taking the woman in her arms. "It's nice to know I'm good at something at least." She smiles and then kisses the mesmerist.
Given the first opportunity, she recommends dumping the bodies in the sewers.
The young rogue seems to take note of very little in the shop itself with the exception of one of the jars of tea. Her eyes widen and she picks up the jar, opening it and taking a hesitant sniff. She smiles.
"More Night Orchid," she whispers to her wife with excitement. "Did you have plans for tonight?"
"So anyone taking bets that that was the former owner?" she comments, pointing at the stored body.
After looking through the strange tome, she shakes her head. "We probably should hang on to this. It seems like something related to a ritual that has something to do with Taldor's past kings."
Melodie drops the disguise, slightly before Zhi kisses her, which prevents the whole situation being extremely awkward.
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At the Sweet Dreams tea shop Melodie is cataloguing valuables when her wife comes bounding over with a new packet of tea and a question. She raises an eyebrow and continues working.
{"For you. Anytime darling."} Her mental voice is warm however, extremely warm.
The book puzzles her for a few moments until she breathes deeply and lets the words rearrange themselves in front of her eyes. "This is... disturbing." She says as her eyes flicker across the pages. "We either take it or burn it, but I should probably study it more first..." Although she doesn't sound entirely thrilled by the prospect. "These ledgers are useful though - this is really going to build a case against Pythareus."