The sling bullet looks like its going to hit its mark but then when it crosses the stream of blood it shoots down the hallway.
Theophilus looks on with a concerned look on his face.
Julius ducks the blow, his rapier flicking out to attack his assailant.
He calls back behind him. "Everything okay out there?"
Rowan yells back.
”I think they’re gouls, but I don’t know much about them beyond them being undead.”
"Don't let them touch you! Unless you're an elf, their touch is paralyzing."
One of the ghouls cocks her head at an odd angle. "Poor Mrs. Freeling didn't get her medicine and her heart exploded," she looses a slow chuckle which turns into a raspy cough. The other continues, "I wonder if we rip your heart out will the same thing happen do you?"
They both scramble closer but Dervak was ready for them and downs the first one as it closes.
The other attempts to bite Dervak but slips slightly on the blood oozing on the floor.
Undeterred by Julius' deft strike the Apostle tries to smash Julius again.
Julius dodges to the left, then snaps his rapier out once again at the crazed cultist. He smiles, clearly starting to enjoy the thrill of the battle. He strikes a slightly defensive position, as if daring the Apostle to come after him again. "Heh. This is all coming back to me now...en garde!"
That's malpractice!", Mara shouted. She moved around Dervak, drawing out her rusty greataxe, and swung wildly at the undead medical practitioner.
Continuing his Cackling, the Witch stares again at the Apostle playing with Julius.
Dervak drops the longspear, draws his falchion, and attacks. Then he takes a 5' step back to make room for Rowan.
”Don’t let them touch me... huh.”
Looks down at his hands for a moment.
Rowan drops his sling and draws a hand axe while he moves up next to Dervak.
The other undead creature falls to Dervak’s assault.
Julius baits the cultist into attacking and she falls for it. As Julius tries to turn the stirke to the side she powers through it with surprising strength.
Rowan moves as close as he can to Julius and readies an attack , if possible, for if one of the cultists gets up.
The last standing Apostle falls to an axe to the head.
After the last ghoul fell, Mara moved back to the body gushing blood, and tried to stuff her blanket into the chest cavity to stop the bleeding, cutting the fabric into strips with her knife as necessary.
Dervak will help tie up or knock out the cultists as requested.
"Maybe they can be cured, if there are any real doctors left in this place. Or if we find Zandalous or the Shred-man."
Just for shit and giggles, Theophilus casts Stablize on the blood-spewing woman.
Julius helps to tie up the remaining cultists. "I agree, maybe we can find a way to help them in the future."
The rags stuffed into the chest of the dead woman begin to soak in blood. Quickly they begin to move of their own accord straining towards the western side of the room. When they become thoroughly soaked the mess explodes flinging the bloody cloth down the hallway into the slowly growing pool of blood on the far side. Theo's spell appears to have no effect on the corpse or blood.
The three live cultists are tied up.
"I'm at a loss as to how to stop the blood!", Mara declared in frustration. "We're going to end up with no way to get back to the chapel soon!"
She got up and looked around the furniture on the southern side of the room, looking for any sort of clue as to what was going on.
Perhaps, if her positioning were to change?
"Yeah, I could throw her outside into the fog. If we could find a door.
The ghouls said she didn't get her medicine. Maybe too late for her body but her spirit wants it? Like ghosts in stories want something made right?"
"We haven't found anything that could possibly be construed as medicine, right? Or like...a really big cork or something? I just don't want to think about the possibility of swimming through this back to the chapel."
Dervak will search the ghouls - they were dressed as doctors or nurses.
Mara finds nothing that she thinks is useful to the problem at hand. Dervak finds nothing really useful on the ghouls, two doctor's outfits. The cultists have several empty bottles that have a distinct medicinal smell however.
[ooc]How quickly is the western end of the hallway filling up with blood?[/b]
Maybe we can put the body in a room somewhere, to buy us some time," Mara said. She went over to the door at the southwest corner of the dayroom, and listened.
After a few minutes the lock yields to Julius' attempts. Julius finds a magnifying glass, two vials of alchemist's kindness, a vial of smelling salt, two vials of soothe syrup, 4 doses of antitoxin, 2 doses of opium...
"The nurses station is where we keep the medications. If you head out the door," she points east, "go past reception and admitting, to the left there is a long hallway, at the end of the hallway is the dayroom. Attached is a window to the nurses station. If you can retrieve some of the tonic we give Loic we'd be in your debt."
So that's where the cultists were hanging out, and they drank some of the medicine, but there could be more in there. Can we dismiss the Web?
Staring at the Fountain of Blood, the gentleman absently snaps his fingers, allowing his Web to be dismissed.
Wall break inside a wall break...
Dervak goes into the nurses' station and looks around for more medication.
After spending several minutes searching the nurses station Dervak finds enough material to make a healing kit. Including some liquid tonics. He also discovers two potions that the more magically knowledgeable people in the party identify as cure light wounds potions.
Dervak pours the liquid tonic down the bleeding woman's mouth.
For a moment nothing happens and you think you'll have to try something new, but slowly the body and all the pooling viscera and blood sublimate into a sickening yellow mist which eventually dissipates completely.
Mara looked over to see what Dervak was doing, and saw to her amazement that he seemed to have stopped the hemorrhagic river. "Well done, Dervak! How did you do that?" she asked.
"Shall we see what these strange cultists have to say?"
Theophilus claps in appreciation of Dervak.
Well done, my good man, well done! I would have just been beside myself if any of that viscera were to soil my garments!
"It seems so obvious in hindsight, nice thinking Dervak."
Dervak clearly appreciates the praise for having had a good idea. "The ghouls were mocking us. Teasing us with the solution. Or maybe a part of the doctors they used to be was trying to help. I'm just glad it worked. In the Kellid stories, ghosts are usually angry about something that killed them or else some unfinished things."
He looks at the cultists. "All yours. I killed ghouls and fixed a ghost so I will sit back and watch. Let me know if you need me."
Dervak looks for a comfy chair in the dayroom. He takes one of the potions of CLW and leaves one for somebody else to take.
Mara regarded the half-orc with a new measure of respect. He had come up with the solution that she had missed. If only I'd thought of that before I ruined my blanket!
She moved over to the bound cultists and addressed them as they came to. "Hello, my name is Mara. I think we met a few others from your group earlier. They attacked us, hence our rather aggressive response when we met you. I'm sorry that our meeting had to start on such an unpleasant note. Can you tell me who you are, and what has brought you to this asylum. I'm thinking you weren't patients like us."
"Um... I'm Baisily. I uh... sleepwalk a lot." one of the other patient interrupts, "Baiz don't tell them anything, you know what Zandelus will do!" The third just stares off at nothing.
"What will Zandalus do to you? Just out of curiosity. Because telling someone you sleepwalk doesn't seem like something that you would get punished for..." Julius inquires.
Mara replied to the sleepwaker, "I would like to help you, if you'll let me. We were patients here, I think; we're trying to figure out what is going on in this place."
The second one answers Julius' question without realizing what he's doing "Turn her into one of those vomiting mist-heads." With that Baisily goes, "Eep." The second one continues responding to Mara,""You can give us some more of that reddish brown powder we found for starters." You realize he's talking about opium.
Dervak barely stirs in his chair. He cranes his neck a bit and shouts, "I'm here if you need me for anything."
Then he goes back to cleaning gore off his falchion.
Mara recalled finding some opium earlier. "I think we have some of that," she told the second captive. She consulted with her teammates, finally producing a package of opium.
"You can have this, but first I'd like to know who Zandalus is. We've heard the name, but I don't know much about him." She presumed that Zandalus was a him.
Theophilus stares at the proceedings with blue eyes wide.
Why who doesn't want to be turned into a vomiting mist head! Where does one sign up?
Thoughtfully, "The bodies in yellow robes that sounds like the Apostles in Orpiment, Zandalus' cult. If I had to guess they were former patients, a part of the revolt."
When the topic shifts to Zandalus Sara's eyes fixate on a set of six small but powerful images sketched with coal upon torn parchment and set in fine frames. Anyone who takes the time to examine them sees they depict eerie vistas of an endless, empty city under a sky of whirling mist. In the corner of each, a delicate copperplate records a year from 4708 to 4715 and the name Ulver Zandalus. They feel familiar, you find them quite similar to the city from the shared nightmare that you experienced.
"Zandelus was a patient, some kind of artist. Then the monsters started appearing he let us out, saved us. The monsters don't bother us, I think they're afraid of him."
Baisily says to Theo, "Um... through the double doors that's... a guard post. Don't go in though... the darkness has teeth. But if you do get past the darkness that's the... uh cafeteria... the rest of us are there. I'm sure... Zandalus would take volunteers."
Sara walks up to Dervak with her two dolls, "Was that really a ghost? It looked like a nightmare to me. Can you tell me a Kellid story? I'm bored."
"Do you know where the monsters came from?" Mara asked. She wondered how much these people knew about what Zandalus was up to. "If we join Zandalus, what will he want us to do? Do you know what he wants to achieve here? Is he trying to get rid of the yellow fog, so you can all leave?"
"Really don't know. Why don't you ask him. Can I have my opium now?"
"Uh, okay," Dervak says to Sara.
She looks young, but she wants to know.
Dervak begins telling Sara a story he heard among the Kellids about about an ancient hero named Ivvora, a demon named Eshimka, and restless spirits in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords. (The Solstice Scar back-story.) Then he starts rambling with his theories of ghosts.
"The dead are often angry about whatever killed them, or maybe about a job they failed to do, and you can't always fight them with strength. Sometimes you have to figure out what they want. Now this hero Ivvora is not one of the angry dead, in fact we don't know if she even is dead, but some of the tribesmen who deserted her in her quest are cursed to wander as restless spirits until they can atone for their cowardice. And sometimes if you treat bodies poorly, if you didn't kill them yourself, their spirits can come after you. That is why I did not want to walk on the pile of corpses from the basement and why I moved them out of the way carefully. Now if there was an enemy I killed in battle, I could spit on or step on their face but because I had defeated them their spirits would not come after me."
"I have heard rumors that some spirits are not angry, just curious or even helpful, but those are not the usual kind."
"Alright, here's your opium," Mara, replied, handing over the packet. She didn't think giving the man the drug was really helping him, but he and his friend had given them some information, so she kept her end of the bargain.