The creature screeches horribly, freezing your blood in your veins, although Karmid, Ro, and Jili are able to shake off the sensation.
"Its an infected giant-ghoul-bat thing! Somebody shoot it before it comes down here! I will cover you!"
Karmid then proceeds to slam the head of his hammer into his klar to get the things' attention...
"Tasty morsel right here! Come get me!"
As soon as Ro has finished her spell, she sends a bit of her surplus magic into the starknife to enchant it. Without pause she sends it spinning toward the dark form. There's nothing good to be found in or under the house, so it's best to get on with killing whatever it is.
As she lets the weapons fly, Ro asks around for a favor. "Can anyone put a light on the thing?"
The creature swoops down out of the darkness, a gigantic, decaying, bat-like creature. It lands on its hind legs in front of Karmid, snapping at him with its massive jaws and inflicting a nasty wound in his shoulder.
,
Ro responds by throwing her starknife, which hits it dead-on in the forehead before returning to her hand.
Jili screeches and casts Light on the flying bat.
Jili screeches and casts Light on the flying bat.
Last Hero Point!
Karmid stiffens up, then suddenly moves faster!
Thunder and Fang!
+
Drasven remains as he is.
Lia just stands there, surprised and shocked.
How did that thing get IN here?
Jili casts light on the end of an arrow.
Mere moments passed, but to Lia, standing frozen in surprise and fear, it seemed like weeks.
The undead bad does not seem to feel the pain of the blows raining down on it and continues to bite at the Shoanti.
Ro moves around from behind Jili and sends her starknife spinning into the giant undead bat again.
With his paralysis gone, Drasven reaches out for the long handle of his axe as he moves forward and strikes at the skaveling from behind Karmid.
Using his Thunder and Fang skills, Karmid begins to lash out at the creature!
Thunder and Fang!
+
Crit?
"Feel my fury bat-thing! You cannot escape!"
Jili draws her bow and fires an arrow at the bat.
The group continues pounding the grounded undead bat until it stops moving and lets out a hollow death rattle.
With things under control, you look around the cavern, paying particular attention to the three human corpses. Judging from their dress, two of them appear to have been Varisian nomads, while the third looks Chelaxian. Going through their pockets you also notice that the Chelaxian only has one arm, and not because the skaveling tore it off; he seems to have been missing one for quite some time.
The skaveling clearly wasn't interested in treasure, as the Chelaxian is wearing a pearl-encrusted ring , has a money purse with 56 gp in assorted coins, carries a longsword made of adamantine, and has some kind of magical hat in his pocket.
Picking up the adamantine sword, Karmid mutters to himself as he recognizes the material and shakes his head.
"So unimaginative! I wonder if I can melt it down into a head for my hammer...or better yet a whole new klar!"
He then looks over at Edgar hesitantly, then the others.
"Can you...or any of you use it? Its worth a fortune in metal and as a normal weapon it is unparalleled. If its enchanted you could cut through stone or solid metal from what I understand...sometimes...with a decent swing. In other parts of the world its called 'Starmetal.'"
Ro pays less attention to the sword than the Chelaxian body.
"Hey! You know what? This is Redshiv Bilger! He's wanted for highway robbery. Kind of a big deal, he was very good at it. There's a reward for him down in Magnimar dead or alive, and here he is dead."
"We look at be headed to Magnimr soon enough. How much of him do you think it would take to prove we're bringing them the real Redshiv?"
"We just bring his whole body if there's no other way to identify him." Drasven jokes as he cleans his axe....
"That sword is what I have heard among my kin joked about as a lockpick." the dwarf motions towards the sword Karmid holds.
"Slices Monsters, doors and locks just about as easily as each other."
Lia remains stunned a while longer, then continues staring up at the ceiling for any more of the creatures.
Finally stopping to stare, she approaches Karmid and takes a look at the sword, cheerfully suggesting:"Or melt it and make a few Chisels. A sculptor would love it - they would probably make a statue in your honor - in an afternoon."
She then joins Rojava in looking at the corpse:"Funny how HE is actually dead, while everybody else dead was not really dead. Maybe we should make him stand up and simply walk to Magnimar with us? Oh, what's that?"
Lia retrieves the hat and takes a closer look.
Lia examines the strange looking hat and examines it with her magical sight. It seems to be a hat of disguise, useful for appearing as someone else.
"Does this dead man have any other token or such we can use to identify him? Else I'll just bring his entire body...." Drasven is done with making sure his equipment is in good shape.
"If there's nothing else in here, we should go. Unless one wants to speak with this one's spirit or something."
"What about the ring? Do you think that could identify him?" She shudders at the thought of bringing the body back to Sandpoint with the group. "Does StarMetal do well as a hammer head or does it need to be sharp to work?" \
Ro eyes the corpse. "We sure could use the money...
Karmid will use the super-sharp sword to quickly remove the head from the corpse's body.
"There you go...anybody got a sack? He's already dead. We might as well earn some coin for his rotten flesh. We're going to burn the rest down anyway. Right?"
"Hum. Why did you do that?", Lia wonders, looking at the head and trying to mimic it's facial expression: "Now he can't walk by himself and you have to carry it. We could have disguised him and he could have turned himself in. Right, ..." Lia turns and looks around for the Undead girl she charmed earlier: "Hey, where'd my friend go?"
Ro takes an old sack from her pack and carefully feeds it down over the head. She pushes one side of the sack under so the head will roll back into the opening, then lifts the mouth of bag so she can scoop up the head without having to touch it.
"Alright, there we go. Let's get out of here."
You leave behind the dark cave with the body of the undead bat-thing, and climb up the narrow stairs to the ground floor of the haunted house. So many things have happened in the last day that seems hard to wrap your head around all of them.
You enter the main floor lobby and pause for a moment behind the stuffed manticore, nervous that it might come to life once again. Karmid leads the way and steps forward boldly and to everyone's relief, the statue remains silent.
You regroup once you are out of sight of the cursed manor and find a secluded place to sit down, treat wounds, get a bite to eat, or take a drink of water. Memories of everything that has transpired here race through your head, and you keep on looking back in the direction of Misgivings, thinking that something dark and depraved must be still following you.
Scratching absentmindedly at a wound on his arm again, Karmid comments dryly.
"Who wants to do the honors and set this place on fire? I have my hands full carrying this dead guy's head and stuff like that. Lia? Want to take care of it? It was your idea in the first place."
"Is it now? I knew it would burn in the end, so I tried doing that first...", Lia answers absent-mindedly, then drinks the rest of the holy water vial she opened earlier for refreshment.
Retrieving the bundle of sticks with oiled rags tied to them, she places them in the middle of the group.
"I think we should do it together."
Waiting for Karmid to get a fire started, she then throws the first makeshift torch through a window in the upper floor.
As they throw the first makeshift torches at the House, the oily rags remaining and smoke emerging, but the fire not catching, Lia seems to grow agitated.
"You are supposed to burn. You killed so many. You made Aldern kill. You are evil!"
Again, some more torches, some rags landing on parts of the roof or decor elements on the outside, burning, but not spreading.
"I saw you burn. You will burn."
All of a sudden, major parts of the house seem to be engulfed in flames, with hisses and croaking, and cracking of wood. Alas, one of the rooms on fire is the entrance hall, only some feet away, and the clear lack of Heat suggests that is is a mere illusion.
"Your line ended. You end.", Lia shouts at the house, as even more illusional flames cover areas spared by the first burst.
Just as one of her comrades tries to calm her down, a hand placed on her shoulder, Lia screams: in a shrill voice and at a volume one would not expect from the petite girl.
And suddenly, there IS heat. Lots of heat. In a Flashover, the previously illusionary flames catch hold of anything there is to burn in their areas. Windows burst, with a Backdraft spreading the fires further as fresh air is drawn into the stale rooms.
As the entrance hall all but explodes in a fiery combustion, Lia is thrown away and falls down backwards, a few feet further back from the house.
With a defiant expression, she sits up and glares at the fire :"Told you so!"
Above her league from a pure power perspective, but mechanically ok since it only saves us from backtracking to get it done, AND she is very emotionally invested into this...so she just draws from a future reality where the house already IS on fire, and makes it HER reality.
Karmid pick himself up casually, dusting off his hands afterward.
"Remind me to make sure that Lia...'understands' I DON'T like being on fire. Actively not. Like ever."
As for Drasven, he claps thrice and puts his palms together in prayer as he recited a litany for the dead (and probably for the unwilling undead.)
He is impressed that Lia could burn the house down with her conviction alone. She would make a fine priest for a deity who graces Lia with her favor.
Despite is moldering appearance, the entire house goes up in the whirlwind of flame instigated by a chosen of Desna. As you watch it burn, hundreds of moths, butterflies, and other flying insects come streaming out of the forest and alight upon nearby branches and bushes. At first it seems they are drawn to the flame, but with time you see that they simply seem to be witnessing the event far from the heat.
As the upper stories begin to collapse you hear a bass groaning coming from somewhere far beneath the manor. I climbs to a wail that matches the pitch of the steam escaping from the burning timbers until it too fades away.
Ro glumly helps with the burning of the house as she can. She carries fuel for it and so forth.
It's not that Ro has anything against the idea of burning the place, she can't think of anything better to do about it. The house might well still be the cause of future problems if left standing.
Really though, the house itself is not the thing. It was just a building until it was stained by the things the family living there did to each other over the generations. Ro has now witnessed what the house had, and felt similarly stained by knowing what people were capable of doing to those who they were supposedly closest to.
After they have all watched the house's final collapse into a pile of flames Ro suggests they start back to Sandpoint, but only for as long as absolutely necessary.
"Will a day in Sandpoint be enough for everyone? We should keep it to no more than that long. We need to get on our way down to Magnimar as fast as we can so we can finish cleaning this mess up and be done with it."
Lia stares at the flames wordlessly, and almost unblinkingly. Only after the final collapse does she manage to tear her attention away from the ruins:"We are going to Magnimar? For vacation?", she seems puzzled at the prospect.
"Yeah Lia, I suppose it's a vacation in a way."