Deciding that the meeting has come to an end, Kyra stands up. She needs time to process what Shalelu has told her of Bruthazmus, and there are other things that she must tend to in the meantime.
Kyra speaks first to the Sheriff. "I'd like to go over some of the planning with whatever guards can be spared. Ideally, the rest of the 'goblin slayers' and I will live up to our name, but in the event that something happens, the town must be prepared. I'd like to head over and speak with them as soon as possible."
With a curt nod to the others, Kyra turns and heads for the door. Once outside she shakes her head, trying to clear it, but still it swims with thoughts of goblins and winged naked women and ugly half-breeds. She looks up at the sky and takes a deep breath, surprised to find herself noticing the absence of her new comrades. Khalbar with his strength, A'letta with her mysticism. Even little Pick. She wondered how their expedition was going, and how many of them wouldn't come back.
She found a place to sit nearby and contemplate the universe, and to wait for the Sheriff to take her to the guards.
The trio stand. "Of course," says the Mayor with a nod. "Thank you for everything."
The Sheriff bids the other two goodbye with a gruff wave, and escorts Kyra out of the building. On the walk to the barracks, he has a couple of things to say. "Okay, I'm going to take a few of my boys with me when I trek to Magnimar. You never know what these roads are like, after all. Anyway, I'll be away for about ten days. You can, of course, do what you think you have to with my soldiers to keep the town safe while I'm gone, and I'm happy to pay you for the trouble."
Rounding a bend, the barracks comes into view. "Kyra, my boys are green. I don't know how a large-scale goblin invasion will tax them."
Pick nods at Spear-woman's order (suggestion, really, but to him they are the same thing) and moves wordlessly to the door to the south, scanning the doorjamb and the seams through squinty red eyes.
Kyra nodded to the Sherrif. "Take what you'll need to keep safe, I suspect we'll have much more to ask of you before this is over."
As they approached the barracks, Kyra considered what the Sherrif had said. "With the right preparation, I'm hoping it won't come to that." She grinned, "You've seen me around enough to know that I love a good fight, but this is about survival. They're going to hit us from behind. With your men's help, we should have a steel plate in place."
She walked inside to where the Sheriff had the guards gathered. While a few of them were looking rowdy and as they weren't going to take her seriously, that attitude disappeared fast. It was clear from the moment Kyra began talking that there was going to be no nonsense here. "Men," she began. "I am Kyra, of House Arkona. My family is one of the most powerful in all Varisia. I have been trained in several martial arts as well as in combat tactics. My grandfather wrote 'The 82 Strategies of War', which I have memorised. I have fought several mythical creatures, though you all probably know me best as being one of the 'goblin slayers'. Soon, you may be called such as well."
Letting that sink in for a moment she began to walk between them, getting a view of everyone's profiles and backs, gauging their strengths and weaknesses in fitness, in posture. She was slightly dismayed, but not surprised, by what she saw. A number of the guards were less physically fit than they should have been. Quiet town, not a lot going on, plenty of opportunity to let yourself go. She frowned, displeased by the lack of discipline. That would be one of the first things to change.
"You are in a unique position not given to many in your line of work. You will know exactly when you are needed, and what's expected of you. You will also be prepared, because you'll have someone here to train you, and help you. Someone that all the gold in your little town couldn't ordinarily hire for so much as a day. You will save hundreds, thousands of lives, and you will be revered as heroes."
"Any questions before we begin?"
Both doors are silent, and investigation of the southern door reveals a small, rhombus-shaped room. The crumbling remnants of several chairs and a long table clutter the floor of this room. To the south stand three stone doors, each bearing a strange symbol that resembles a seven-pointed star.
Investigation of the eastern door reveals a staircase that leads down, farther into the deep and the darkness.
The Sheriff quietly gathers a half-dozen of the fifty or so town guards as Kyra gives her speech. Distracting them from her to get their attention and give his orders is difficult - most of the guards are raptly fascinated with Kyra, and the six men he selects only reluctantly leave with him to the arms room, and to their homes to pack.
The rest of the men grow more and more excited with every word that Kyra speaks, and they give out a great cheer at the culmination of her speech. Sheriff Hemlock lingers for a moment, his things gathered, at the door, making sure to make one last eye-contact with Kyra. He gives an approving nod before ducking out of the door, calls of farewell following him.
They're most eager to begin their drills, and they'll follow Kyra's instructions on how to drill to the letter.
"This star important?" Khalbar asks Rhanloi. "We open and see, yes?"
Khalbar readies his ranseur fully expecting one of those strangely jawed monstrosties to come shambling out as the doors get opened.
Pick is a little bemused at how few of the doors he's found so far-- none of them!-- are trapped. Clearly, you people are unused to dealing with drow.
Still, he serves the ... tribe... as best he can. He looks longingly towards the eastern passageway, which leads deeper, deeper into the comforting earth and away from the sky-eye. Then he looks over the three stone doors, sniffing and prodding at the edges.
If nothing appears inherently dangerous, he'll nod to Khalbar and the others with a bemused shrug, and take up a position opposite the first door, working with the big man, before opening it.
"I think this is the same symbol we saw in the book from that statue. We could be closer to discovering what that symbol means!" Rhanloi says with delight, and a little trepidation, in his voice. He puts the light crossbow away and pulls out his quarterstaff - they are in tighter quarters now and his aim has been a bit off...he makes a mental note to visit the bowyer to have the device checked and recalibrated.
"We best check if any magicks haunt these doors before we proceed to open them. "
Shoanti gibberish was followed by a pale blue sheen flashing over A'letta's eyes. She studied the doors with her new-found vision.
The doors are, like so many others, untrapped and unlocked, and investigating them reveals them to have once been cells. They are lockable, but currently unlocked, and each contains the skeleton of what was once a humanoid. The might have been human if not for the disgusting deformities. One possesses an enormous and misshapen skull, a second has a rib cage that must have a half-dozen extra ribs, and the third has three arms instead of two, but all three are thin and brittle-looking.
A magical aura emanates from below some of the wrecked furniture. Digging it up reveals a scroll.
"Ehhnnn," is Pick's neutral response to all these odd bodies. Aberrations and abominations are more common in the deep dark. Which isn't to say he wants to get any closer to any of them. He helps Spear-woman dig out whatever it is she sees, hands it over to her unquestioningly.
Rhanloi takes the scroll and looks it over. "These deformities, and the strange nature of the statue, added with the disturbing images in Tsuto's journal, provide a grim vision of the deeper secrets here..." he says to no one in particular.
A'letta studies the remains and wonders if it has anything to do with Lamashtu..
"It is in my nature to take a step back and consider all options, but with what we've seen so far ..", she sighs and shakes her head,".. we truly need to handle as quickly as possible. Let us move on."
Rhanloi is not able to identify the scroll.
It seems to A'letta that if any diety were responsible for the malformations of these poor souls, it would certainly be Lamashtu. Nothing about them specifically rings a bell in A'letta's mind, however.
The staircase descends into a large, open, square room. The ceiling of this strangely cold chamber arches to a vaulted height of twenty feet. The floor contains eleven wooden lids strewn haphazardly over eleven five-foot-wide pits in the ground. From the darkness within these pits echo up strange shuffling sounds and, every so often, a low moan.
In the center of the southern wall is another doorway, though bereft of a door, that continues into a hallway heading southward.
"Hnh," Pick grunts at the moaning and noises emanating from the nearest of the eleven pits. He hauls his pack off his shoulder and pulls out a coiled silk rope from its depths.
With quick, brusque moments, he knots the rope around his own torso, and passes the other end to Khalbar.
"Hold."
Only when he is satisfied that the big man is keeping a firm grip on the rope does he creep closer to the edge of the nearer pit, trying to get a glimpse of what lurks down in the dark, in the gap the skewed lid offers.
As she walks around through the formations, Kyra is very pleased with the progress that the guards are making. They had listened very attentively to the instructions, and were all trying their absolute best. In some occasions she had to make adjustments or suggestions, but it was more than she had hoped for. 'Green or not.' She smiled. 'They'll be ready.
Leaving one of the more adept guards in charge with instructions for drills, she starts thinking about the next phase of preparations. The guards would need more training, but in the meantime, there were other things to get started on. She went to the Sheriff's office and began studying a map of Sandpoint. It crossed her mind that the last time she'd looked at such a map, she was also looking for weaknesses, though for an entirely different purpose, the humour of which was not lost on her.
"Wall at the north might be secure." She muttered. "But still bears investigation." Over the next while, she made several markings on the map, frowning with the realisation that the town was indeed quite vulnerable. She realised, too, that much as she hated to admit it, she could not do all the preparations herself. The other goblin slayer's still not having arrived back, she was resigned to use whoever was in the town. Loath as she was to do it, she was going to have to call a meeting.
At the bottom of the pit, shuffling in little circles and moaning, is a single human zombie. Investigation of the rest of the pits reveals exactly the same.
"Deads," Pick says eloquently, scrambling back from the pit's edge with a shrug. They pose no threat and he has no particular moral or philosophical burden to slay them. Pick takes the rope back from Khalbar and trots over to the open hallway to the south, peering down into the dark.
As horrifying as undead are to the superstitious Khalbar, they are corralled for the time being and he sees no reason to slay them unnecessarily.
He skirts around the pits and explores the rest of the layout of the room.
"Fascinating...walking dead." Rhanloi mutters as he peers in the pits after Pick. But, finding no reason to study the creatures further, he will follow the group to the southern hallway.
Runners are sent while the remainder of the guards continue to train and Kyra gets settled into Sheriff Hemlock's office. Settling into his large leather chair, she sits back and sighs a satisfactory sigh.
This was but the first step.
Soon enough, those Kyra's asked for begin to assemble, but Kyra makes them wait. Better that they all go into the office at the same time, no?
As she bids the six she's summoned to enter, she turns around in her chair to face them in true dramatic style.
Ameiko Kyra already knows, but the rest are strangers to her. Ilsoari Ganthedus is a tall and thin old man, wearing flowing blue robes and carrying a darkwood cane. Titus Scarnetti is a large man, with white-blonde hair and a handlebar moustache. Aliver Podiker is a small, round and pale man, with chapped lips and thinning hair. Aesrick is, as could probably be expected, a dwarf wearing a simple artisan's outfit, with a long and classical brown beard and calloused hands. In place of his father, Ethram, Belven Valdemar is here to represent his family. His father's been having persistent lung issues, you see.
As the group enters, Scarnetti takes the lead of the group, bellowing and flailing his arms. "I demand to know the meaning of this! I am not...SUMMONED by some upstart!"
Nothing else of particular note is in the room with the zombies, but the southern hallway leads down to two interesting places.
On the left, about halfway down the hallway, is a destroyed stairwell. The stairwell once must have led down, but now is completely blocked.
At the end of the hallway, behind an open door, is a strange spherical chamber. This strange room is a fifteen-foot-diameter sphere. Several objects float in the room, spinning lazily in space - a ragged book, a scroll, a bottle of wine, a dead raven surrounded by a halo of floating and twisting maggots, and a twisted iron wand with a forked tip. Yet perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the room is the walls, for the are plated in sheets of strange red metal that ripple every once in a while with silent black electricity that seems to coalesce into strange runes or even words far too often for the effect to be chance.
".......nnhh." (This is Pick-ese for 'I'm not too happy about this'.)
He stares through the doorway at the floating items, especially the morbid sight of the maggot-surrounded raven. Then he turns his red eyes to the floor, trying to judge if it's safe to step inside.
Pick can't really tell if it's safe to step inside. On the one hand, there's black electricity rippling all around the room. On the other, he can't see any obvious traps.
Pick stares around at the zapping bursts of black lightning for a bit, then he takes several steps backwards to be behind Ran-loy.
One gloved hand on the elf's skinny back. Shove shove shove forward until Ran-loy stands in front of the doorway.
"Magic. You look."
The sight confounds A'letta. "Do we have anything that we can use to drag the items out of the room with? The book, scroll and wand come to mind."
Pick squints at A'letta wordlessly. His tongue works inside his cheek for a bit, as if he were probing at a toothache.
If he did not owe Spear-woman a debt several times over, now, he would tell her to drag things from the lightning room herself.
As it stands, he does owe her a debt. So he silently starts un-looping the rope from around his torso, and gets out the grappling hook from his pack. The squat duergar sits down on the stone floor and ties rope to hook, in preparation for trying to lasso the floating objects.
He still wants the drow-cousin to look first, though.
Rhanloi says, "Now THIS is intriguing! Give me a few minutes to study this room..." He will cast detect magic to determine the auras of the room, and attempt to discern any of the magical properties or spells used, or the purpose of the spherical room. Then, clearing his mind and focusing on his bonded ring, Rhanloi will cast mage hand and pull the scroll, then the book, and finally the wand out from the sphere and to himself, examining each again in turn.
Kyra's face grows darker as Scarnetti begins to shout at her, and barely manages to resist the urge to tell him to shut up. Still, she has already decided to make his life hell if he refuses to help her. Of course, if he refuses to help her, they might all be dead anyway.
"I am sorry," she remarks, quickly adding "if you think your title is the most important thing in the room and I did you a disservice by not honouring that. I am afraid that we have something larger to worry about than me overstepping my bounds."
"What I am about to tell you all cannot leave this room," she continued. "I have called you all here because you have prominence in various parts of the city, and you will be helping me to defend it against an attack."
Kyra went on to explain what many of them had already heard about, the attacks by the goblins, the massacre in the glassworks, the capture of Ameiko's brother. There were things she left out, such as Nualia's involvement, and simply said that Tsuto was involved with a large goblin / bugbear group that was intending to attack the city. She didn't know these people enough to gauge how they would take Nualia's lie, and she didn't have time to get sidetracked.
"While Sheriff Hemlock has gone to request additional aid, I have been helping to train the guards, and now I seek to prep the city. It is my intention to stop the attack before it ever reaches the city, but if that does not happen, we must be prepared."
"Whatever your feelings are for the mayor, for me, these goblins seek to destroy your homes, and if we fail to act, they might well succeed. Please ask questions if you have any, otherwise I would like to begin preparations."
The items are easily retrieved by magic from the strange spherical room, and Rhanloi's further magic detection reveals a few things of interest.
The book is nonmagical, and is written in Abyssal, although the character for "Lamashtu" can be recognized in many places within its pages.
If he looks carefully, Rhanloi can see Thassilonian characters for anger, revenge, and destruction amongst the flashes of lightning in the spherical room.
The wand and scroll are magical, and the wand is a wand of shocking grasp (28 charges), whereas the scroll is a scroll of burning hands.
Detecting magic on the room itself, Rhanloi can determine that there are multiple magical auras, the most obvious-sounding of which is a levitate spell.
The group of prominent citizens that Kyra's summoned listens to her carefully, and even the raging Scarnetti calms down to listen to what she has to say. There are group-wide "oohs" and "aahs" at her storytelling (it is, after all, quite an excellent and exciting tale) and when she winds down, the group to a man (and to a woman, says irritated-faced Ameiko) has a thoughtful, far-off look in our face.
Scarnetti is again the first to answer, but this time he is not the only one to speak. He begins, "You say that we WILL help you. Is this not your own job? What gives you the right to demand our help?"
Podiver and Valdemar both express their disbelief that they could do anything to help (after all, what are we, just a simple herbalist and dockworker, yes?) but Ameiko, Ilsoari, and Aesrick pledge their aid quite immediately.
Ameiko steps forward, saying, "As rusty as my sword-arm is, you have its aid. I'm not sure that's what you want from me, however...what did you want?"
Ilsoari expresses a similar sentiment, articulating that, "Okay, yes, I was once an adventurer, but now I'm just a caretaker. I'll do what I can, but I'm not sure how much that is."
Pick looks sourly up at Ran-loy (who may not even notice it, as busy as he is deciphering the magical items he's found).
You are robbing him of his chance to do a service for Spear-woman, drow-cousin.
With a deliberate grunt, he slowly and pointedly coils the rope again and puts it back in his pack, glaring at Ran-loy who is excitedly discovering the secrets of scrolls and books and wands and things.
After examining the room and items, Rhanloi will explain all to his comrades. "I would like to examine this room further, but not right now. It is a powerful construct that is intended for dark uses, I fear. It is no wonder the way in was sealed...we shall have to ensure noone stumbles into this room by accident. But for now, we must continue."
"The only place we haven't checked is the tunnel opposite to the entrance of this complex, right?"
.. so if I'm not mistaken, we can go back there and go east or west? I'm fine with either choice.
"Hall," Pick grunts, shouldering his pack again. He is indifferent to the magical items, knowing almost nothing of magic himself.
He trundles on his stubby legs back to the unexplored hallway, starts making his way down it with eyes peeled.
Rhanloi puts the book in his backpack for later study, tucks the wand into his belt, and the scroll into a scroll case, then follows the group back out.
Continuing their explorations in the southernmost hallway going eastward, the spelunking group moves forward. Here, the tunnel widens into what appears to have once been a small shrine, for to the northeast, steps lead up to a platform of gray stone. Sitting atop the platform is an ancient altar, little more than a jagged block of blak marble with a shallow concavity on top of it. This basin is filled with what appears to be filthy water.
A'letta calls upon her spirit sight to see if there are lingering magicks on or around the altar.
Pick gazes around the room with mild disinterest-- there is no visible danger he can see. When A'letta informs them there is no magic upon the altar he shrugs and moves up to it, first circling the black stairs warily, scanning for anything dangerous.
If he spots no traps, he moves up to the altar, dips a finger in the water, and tastes the dirty water with no apparent hesitation whatsoever. This from the guy who wouldn't let you touch the magic weapon without him looking it over first.
Pick approaches the altar, and, seeing nothing terribly suspicious about it, dips in a finger and touches it to his tongue. Putting his finger in the water feels quite strange, but its too late, and as Pick puts it in his mouth, he feels reality warp.
His dwarven fortitude, however, does not fail him and he merely doubles over in discomfort, vomiting for several seconds. His stomach aches and so do his throat and mouth.