Scath opens an eye and bends his neck to pin the paper inside his armor. He growls down at Juniper, showing fangs.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Juniper scowls at the cat as it stops her. "Unless you can translate right now you're just getting in the way, how about a trade?" Juniper uses Prestidigitation to create a crude looking cat toy and offers it to him. "You can have it back when I finish."
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The cat closes it's eye and goes back to resting.
"Hm. I have not heard from the Rose in some time, either," Armon remarks offhand, concerned by the growing list of missing persons.
He eyes Scath and Juniper's spat with amusement. The cat was rather large and intelligent for its kind... but it was still a cat. "Why, he's holding us hostage! Well, perhaps he has the right idea."
"It's getting close to curfew." the halfling mentions again, though this time to the room, rather than the patrons outside the room. "So... if you're not going to stay, now's a good time to head home." she says, looking from person to person that hadn't spoken up yet.
"I've been keeping on the move the last few weeks," Victor replies. "I don't have a permanent residence yet and I couldn't go back to my family and put them even more in the line of fire than they are. If you're offering a place to stay, I may need to take you up on that. As for your friend, I'll go whenever people are ready. If something goes wrong, I'd rather have more people than less around."
Scath, apparently annoyed by Juniper's spell and then the discussions about him, waits for someone to be leaving the pub, and then he crosses the room from rafter to rafter before climbing down the wall and leaping out the front door between the poor shlub's legs, nearly knocking him or her or it off their feet.
Upon returning to the urchins, Scath makes sure the urchins know to go search the stable basement from top to bottom, and to be on watch for the gremlin.
Then he gets Sanita to help him break into a library, once he's in the library, he noses a book on Strix languages, and gets her to turn the pages while he decipher's the page he has from the box. He'll nose words from books in order for her to write them down to translate the page. Then he gets her to tuck both papers into his armor, and he'll sleep the night away with the urchins, returning to the pub in the morning.
"I do not think I will be missed at home," Armon remarks, watching the cat as he runs off. "This would hardly be the first sojourn I have taken. I will stay here for the time being, if it pleases you."
Since Scath had kept his page Juniper just began translating what she had already until the others made a decision about going down tonight or not, if they decide to stay the night Juniper would take some of the pages to her home along with the items that were too much to carry around then return the next morning.
"We should go have a look downstairs," Misha says as the others seem to lose interest in going down immediately. "I am sure you all have energy! I have plahhhhhhhwwwwntty..." Her attempt at bravado is interrupted by a yawn, and she blushes after recovering. "Well, maybe a bit of rest wouldn't hurt," she says sheepishly.
As everything winds down from the long day, portions of the group go off to rejoin their own corner of the world, while some stay in the Coffee House.
A large, mostly dead dog.
15gp, a bottle of mostly-vinegar alcohol, and an Iron Key in a secret drawer in the bottom of one of the desks in the main office.
Lots of animal training gear in the storage room above the sewer entrance. (Several for dogs and horses, but also one for a bird of prey. Plus one of an exotic nature.)
Several dead dire rats.
12gp, 185 sp, 342 copper, two earrings worth 10 gp each, and nine silver buttons worth 5 gp each all in or around the slaughter-pit/gremlin nest.
Lots and lots of broken or destroyed things, otherwise.
As for the page, with a bit of work, you're able to translate much of what is on the page, as a means of turning everything into common. The lines, on their own, make some degree of sense, but beyond an individual line, things grow confusing quickly.
You work long into the night, and then awaken the next morning haven fallen asleep while you worked (Unless you stopped before you pushed yourself too hard, of course!).
Regardless, the progress you make is nothing to scoff at, having translated several pages, though the process is more arduous than you'd expected. Worse, the lines don't make much sense for you, as you read them.
As the others steadily settle in amidst the majority, Laria leads them up the ladder to show them to their new quarters. The space was actually easy to live in, but there was very little in the way of personal storage space. There were several bunk beds on the top floor (ha! I'm making them bunk beds so there's more space for bigger folks!) for those who were vertically challenged - cursed with tallness. Another room nearby was filled with single-story halfling-sized beds, and one room was left off the tour of the upper space.
The night is otherwise mostly uneventful. The following morning, the scents of coffee and baking rise up from the floor below - a not-inconsiderable amount of cinnamon scent included.
Sanita and the Urchin's consider themselves paid for several months after the largess. The dog is worth two days of meals for the entire group alone! The rest of the findings are enough to keep the Urchins in food and decent second hand clothes for months!
The bulk of their finds they put into storage to be sold off in bits as need be when money gets low.
The next morning, when the pub opens, Sanita is one of the first to enter, looking tired with black marks under her eyes. The cat follows her in, and curls up on a rafter, taking a cat nap.
When one of the others comes in, she hands them the paper, and it's translation. With a yawn, she comments. "Boss found a paper on Scath, and translated it. Doesn't make much sense they said. Dunno, I don't read..."
Sanita's lying about not being able to read.
Tobias goes ahead and heads upstairs to sleep with the others - he has no interest in navigating the streets again after the events of the previous day and the thought of a nice, free bed does sound good.
Finding the bed Medium-size is an especial treat. So much room to roll around and adjust himself! Otherwise, Tobias sleeps quickly and well.
Juniper would enter the pub a while after it opens looking as pristine as she could manage, holding the papers she'd taken from last night those translated and those that weren't, she'd try to find Rexus to return those that she had finished.
"I was able to translate quite a few but they're encoded and I can't do much about that." She handed him the translated ones. "I can finish the others later and if you can decode we may have something helpful."
Sanita nods. "My boss said pretty much the same thing with the one they worked on. It was in Elvish, Strix, and Celestial. Each line was a full sentence that made sense, but they didn't form a story or anything. They thought they probably were code phrases of some kind, or a second level of... cypher? I think that's the word they used..."
Once people begin to gather, the noble is one of the last up from his bed - a heavy sleeper, indeed.
He mixes a bit of coffee into his milk, with a cube of sugar as he listens to the pair talk. "Yes, it was a Cypher, though I don't have much to go on, beyond that. It will likely take a bit of time for us to work anything out. I think that it would be best that we all work together on it, rather than doing so as separate individuals. It doesn't help solve a puzzle when everyone is working on the same piece, after all."
This morning begins with several different cinnamon-themed sweets, though it also ventures off into brown sugar, and of course meanders through the staples - Scones, chocolate chip cookies, and their ilk. There's even a fresh pie. Laria is apparently a very busy little halfling.
Rexus reaches into a belt pouch and produces a pair ofs potions and places them on the table. Two of the others still looked rough that morning when they awoke. "It isn't much, but they should help with your injuries. I was saving them for an emergency, if we had run into one." he says with a small grimace, before looking back to Juniper. "What of the scrolls that you took with you, did you discover anything about them?"
Scath, from his perch in the rafters is still quite aware of his distracting itchies. It seems to be getting better, though.
Victor is up just after dawn, slipping quietly out of coffee house and taking Brutus for a run around the neighborhood, getting a feel for the area around their new base of operations. He returns to the smell of baked goods and quickly finds somewhere to relax after his run. He wishes the others good morning and finds whatever pastries have fruit in them for his own breakfast, along with something to drink. Brutus satisfies himself with strips of dried meat from Victor's supplies.
"I might need one of those," Victor admits as Rexus brings out the potions. "I took a hit yesterday that's not healing as well as I thought it would."
Scath would have taken a bath and stayed under the water for several hours to drown most of them, only his nose out of the water. Sentient brains triumph over primitive instincts. If they don't go away with the next treatment, he'll fork over 20GP to pay an acolyte to channel negative energy with him in the area and then cast cure on him to counteract it.
Tobias, sitting at the breakfast table, rubs a sore spot underneath his clothes. He'd bandaged the wound overnight so he wouldn't soil his clothes, and he'd scrubbed his chain shirt for an hour to get the blood out, but it still hurt.
He drinks a small cup of plain, black coffee and eats the least-sugary bread loaf, and cheese if Laria has it.
"I also should be healed.", says Tobias. "Though I can manage without."
By the time Rexus joins them, Armon is already starting on his second pastry and third cup of coffee. He mixes so much milk and sugar into his coffee that it becomes questionable as to whether it is coffee at all.
"Ah... my sincerest apologies," Armon says, his expression falling. He dabs at the corner of his mouth with his handkerchief, wiping away a speck of powdered sugar, before retrieving his wand from his belt. "The church provided me with this at a generous discount. It would be a damned shame if I did not put it to use. I should have done this yesterday."
If allowed, he taps Victor and Tobias with the wand, casting a weak cure spell on each of them.
"There! Now we still have something to fall back on for an emergency."
"Thank you," Victor says as Armon heals his wound. He can feel a cracked rib fusing back together and winces slightly, but otherwise doesn't show much expression. He's still perfectly willing to pocket the potion for later use. It's likely that he'll be on the front lines if they end up in another fight at some point.
Rexus leaves the pair of potions on the table. "They're both minor curatives. You're all a lot more likely to gain some use out of them than I will. he says as he takes another sip of his 'coffee'.
For her part, the crop of blonde hair behind the counter, keeps mobile, various confectionary ovens being unloaded, with more loaded in their place, leaving racks to cool just out of reach on the countertop. As she finishes changing the guard, as it were, Scath notices that one of the racks freshly removed smells... different. Somewhat appetizing, and definitely not sugary. Meaty, and enticing.
Laria moves onto an apparent step behind the bar, to get a clear view of the other side, then clambers up onto a stool with wheels, pushing herself along the bar to the far right. "Here you go, shorty." she says looking straight at Tobias as she does so. She lifts what appears to be a cookie with a spatula off of one of the cooling racks and slides it onto a plate on the countertop. If he takes it, he'll discover it's a scone.
If he's never had a scone, he'll discover it's something between a cookie and a cake when it comes to consistency... but that it's also a no-good liar when it comes to being called a dessert. Scones are barely sweet, if at all, and the bit of sweetness a scone would normally have is completely offset by the blend of rye flour she'd mixed into the batch, leaving that sweet taste laced with a sort of bitter-sweet. Even the confections attached to the scone weren't quite sweet - Caramel, yes... but caramel that had been laced with sea-salt, so that even the sweetness of that came with a bite.
With that, she immediately gets back to work, pulling what remains from the cooling racks, and replacing them with fresh confections that need cooling. "Samson will be here in about half an hour, he should be bringing eggs and crispy bread and bacon. You can't live off of sweets alone!"
She doesn't seem to be bringing up Nan again, just yet, leaving the subject to be brought up by someone else.
Juniper doesn't eat today instead settling to just watch the others. "I wasn't able to get to them yet, busy with paperwork but I'll try to figure them out tonight. Have you heard anything from your silk vendor?"
"Nope!" came the response from the other side of the bar as she climbs back down. "Wouldn't that be nice, though? Just show up, no more worries. Maybe he just got word before everything went to hell." she says, but doesn't sound very hopeful.
Misha wakes up fairly late, having developed a taste for sleeping in since she escaped the 'employ' of House Sarini. That is, of course, when Kenzer wasn't waking her up early to train. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and gets ready, heading down to join the others for breakfast. "So are we heading down then?" she asks as she sits.
"Unless you've a reason not to, everyone ready?"
"The sooner it's taken care of, the better. I'm rested and ready."
"Good. Great!" Laria responds, then moves around the bar to be fully visible once more. "Right this way," she adds as she slips back towards the northeastern most door - one of the only two that those that had stayed had not traveled through the night prior.
Inside was filled with an overwhelming amount of aroma (at least for Scath), all sorts of spices and ingredients along the walls - mostly those things that would spoil if overly affected by moisture. A trap door sits in the back-center of the room, which she opens, revealing a ladder that leads down into darkness below. An unlit lantern hangs on the wall beside her. "Well... there we are. There's a door on the left side that leads into the deeper chambers... it's fairly well hidden, but it shouldn't be too hard. I need to finish doing the baking and open up. Don't need anyone suspecting anything fishy is going on." she says with a smile - slightly forced - but she's still clearly relieved.
Should one attempt to find the secret door, it's actually craftily hidden this time, as opposed to the last, which had been worn by time, exposure, and use. Simply knowing where it is gives you enough aid in finding it, however - It just takes a few moments to find the mechanism. A small block can be pressed downwards into the hollow of another, which opens the latch, the well-finished wall popping inwards towards you.
Scent:
"Does any of your plan involve being above ground?" She says looking at Rexus but without waiting for an answer she sends down her dancing lights to scout ahead as she follows after.
"This isn't at all my plan. Though the rooms upstairs were quite comfortable." he says with a smile to the woman even as she disappears into the store room.
Scath grumbles as he sniffs about, then snaps at the magical lights as they ghost past him, as if annoyed by them, or maybe it's just the lights flashing past awaken an instinct in the feline to chase them. He skulks ahead in the shadows...
The room beneath seems just as deserted as the spoiler would suggest. As the lights flicker outwards, the room becomes illuminated enough to have a general idea of everything therein, but doesn't completely remove Scath's ability to get into shadows behind objects.
The ceiling is roughly ten feet up, and at least for now, of the sort you would expect a basement to have.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Armon is not exactly enthusiastic about being below ground again either, but he says nothing of it. That smile of his persists however, as he tries to keep an optimistic outlook on things. Namely, that they were not searching for a dead man.
Feeling a little adventurous, he searches the far wall for the hidden entrance, Juniper's spell providing much needed illumination. It takes him a few moments to find it, even with Laria's description. Even when he does spot it, it does not strike him as being obvious. Which was the idea, of course.
"Ah, here we go," he says as he pressed down on the block. He takes a step back as the wall swings open, looking to his companions. "Well then, who would like to go first?"
"I'll go," Victor says, shouldering his bardiche. "I'm probably the most durable one here, so it's best I stay in front." He steps forward, tapping his thigh to signal Brutus to stay close. "Lady Juniper, if you would kindly direct your lights down the hall so we can see where we're going, we'll can keep moving."
Huffing unhappily, Scath scoots through the door before anyone can cast any more light spells or move any down the corridor, trusting his sight and smell and stealth. He moves as far as he can, to avoid being in the light or backlit if possible.
As Scath slips quickly forward and out of the light, nothing reacts to his presence. The hallway looks dug-out, not necessarily from hewn stone, but there is stone within the walls. The entire thing is roughly hewn and smells earthy, though it takes very little time to reach a solid line of stone, followed by what looks like sewer once more. The 'hallway' continues to be a mixture of dirt and stone, but off to the left opens into water. A recently built pier stretches out into the water with a small rowboat tied in. Thirty feet away (fifteen for folks without scent) from the pier, a dead smell, like rotting fish becomes more evident over the previous scents. Off ahead is another dug out exit and off to the right are a pair of the same. One nearer, one further.
What do you do?
Scath sniffs around, looking for where the scent of two-legs seems strongest, which should indicate the normal path they take down here.
[
Scath noses forward, but the majority of two-leg scent isn't really there. As he snuffles along, the scent of rot grows stronger off to the left, and the bird scent grows stronger straight ahead and to his right. He also smells animal scents in the immediate area, with hints of blood, though it's older blood, seeped into earth.
He can just nearly recognize the bird scent. It's something he's smelled near the city's central bridge.
Out in the water, he can make out an immobile woman, but the details are obscured by the distance... the fact she isn't moving means she's probably a statue.
Off to his right, the there's a wall before the edge of his vision, but otherwise the room appears expansive, with a few stony supports.
Victor sighs. "That cat is going to get himself killed if he keeps doing that. One of these days, he's going to run into a trap or a monster that he can't handle alone." He gives a short whistle and starts to move down the hall toward Scath, keeping his eyes peeled.
Juniper keeps moving forward using her lights to scout ahead as she watches for any clues about the disappearance while moving toward the boat.
Armon moves forward with the rest, staying towards the back of the group.
Tobias concentrates for a second, focusing on his sword. Then, he shakes it a bit and it begins to radiate light. "There." he says. "Now it's really bright."
He jogs up beside Victor, sword and shield at the ready.
As everyone moves forward, from the depths of the water too quick for anyone to shout a warning - though not too fast for Victor's reflexes - there's a soft splash. Hustling on all fours and followed by a low growl, a large, white-scaled reptile erupts from the water, launching itself towards the hound.
Victor manages to carve a broad swath through the creature, grazing it and leaving a gash from its foreleg to its bag leg. Unfortunately, that doesn't dissuade it from its goal of collecting a meal, as it snaps its jaws shut around the man's faithful hound.
Teeth pierce deep into the hound, leaving him grazed, though the teeth don't open back up, instead staying locked firmly around the dog, who struggles to get free, but ultimately does so in vain.
Before anyone can even react, the lizard, tucks in its legs and begins to flop end over end, winding as a snake would, but not around the prey. Several crunches can be heard as Brutus connects with the ground... the result is Brutus being twisted and mangled by its teeth and the ground around it, leaving Brutus critically injured and prone.