"I'll watch over these two," Fírinne says, returning to the room with the captured cultists and drawing her rapier. "Call if you need help."
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Might as well ask...
Emi doesn't expect cooperation out of fear or remorse so much as she thinks the hubris she's detected in so many of the spider cultists may cause them to speak freely, thinking whatever their goals are to be unstoppable and inevitable.
Emi grabs ahold of whichever of the two scumbags seems more coherent and pulls his head up off the floor.
"What's upstairs? What's downstairs? Your life depends on accurate and detailed answers."
The man Emi interrogates is processing his ruined motivations in real time. He coughs up answers readily. At first.
"Master Nyhbur is upstairs. Bedrooms. The ritual chamber. The summoning room..."
His eyes flick from Emi's face, back to the corpse of the demon spider.
"Y-you cannot kill the Dreamer! He's died already and is risen again!" He turns wild eyes to his companion, who purposefully looks away from him.
"S-She cannot kill the Dreamer!" he babbles. He starts looking for confirmation in the faces of the other party members. His manic gaze settles on Nebbin, and he repeats it. He struggles against his bonds, half-slips them with appalling ease and tries to twist away from Emi's grip.
Emi spring back from the man as he rises and swipes at him with her falchion.
Emi's hack puts the crazed man down. His life's blood splatters the second prisoner and it's plain from the look on his face that he's frightened. He has no more threatening taunts for Tassira now.
"There's labs in the cellar. Shiver labs. And spiders and nests, of course. It's how we make shiver, right? And sleeping cells and prisoner cells. It don't matter now."
"You killed the Dreamer. His voice is quiet."
Kayleigh breaks her brief silence, addressing the last captive. "Why would you listen to such a voice in the first place?" she wonders aloud. "Lord Nyhbur--does he command magic? A mage or some sort of priest?"
After hearing the man's reply (if, indeed, one is forthcoming), the cleric turns to the others. "I guess we need to head upstairs next," she says quietly. "The big question is whether or not be do so in one group or split up to come at whatever's up there from two directions. If Nyhbur's got magic, attacking en masse might give him the advantage--think of that life-draining cloud we just survived. Splitting the party, of course, comes with its own risks. Whatever we decide, I think Tassira and I ought to have detect magic spells running when we head upstairs, just in case our foes are again invisible and lying in wait."
Emi moves over to the other cultist, taking a knee beside him and grabbing his robe by the neck to pull his head up.
"That's what I like to hear. Keep cooperating like that and you'll make it out of this house alive."
Emi punches the man in the face hard enough to bounce his head off the floor. If he's still conscious, she does it again.
"I've got precious few spells remaining," Fírinne replies, turning away from the soon-to-be-unconscious survivor, "but I think this lot was the bulk of their strength. I can handle one drug-addled mage."
"Wait, are there any prisoners downstairs?!" Nebbin asks before Emi can possibly murder the second man.
"If we split up, I'll go with you, Kayleigh!" Nebbin says fiercely.
Before Emi dribbles the second prisoner's head off the floor a few times, Nebbin gets his question in.
The man winces as he answers, "No, Lord Nybhur commanded they be given... to the Dreamer". His gaze drifts back to the oozing heap of black gore and bugs on the steps. Seeing the building rage and the head drubbing that's coming, he manages, "But they were just gangsters, criminals and shiver-addicts anyway. Nobody's gonna miss.." Whatever else he was going to say is lost to the beat down.
With the last prisoner beaten into unconsciousness, the party turns to the stairs and puts Kayleigh and Nebbin's plan into action. The pair are immediately confronted with the obstacle of the spider-monster's corpse, exploded to cover half of the room but concentrated on the back corner where the steps are.
Picking steps carefully through the gore, they cannot help but recognize half-digested parts of the monster's unfortunate victims, the leavings of its exploded abdomen.
The story above is dark and quiet. Heavy drapes are drawn before the graceful windows of the second floor, admitting only soft diffuse light. Their slowly adjusting eyes reveal a short landing to the steps, with a door to the immediate right and an open arch to the left going into a similarly darkened chamber. As Nebbin gains the higher steps, he notices a flickering white or blue light that's very dim, occasionally casting odd shadows beyond the arch.
The spider-thing came down this wall and left the black streaks of its passing everywhere. From the marks its evident the thing came through the arch.
---
Emi, Firinne and Tassira filter through the door to the kitchen and up the second set of stairs. These are evidently meant for servant access, as they land in a butler's chamber that's lit by open windows on the right as they ascend. A shelf covered in household sundries stands on one wall. There's a chair and a small table in the corner, and two doors leaving the room. Both of the doors are closed and unremarkable.
Nebbin looks nervously at the arch, but wants to make sure there's nothing lurking in this other room -- if everyone had run out of it, shouldn't the door be open? Ever so carefully, he glances back at Kayleigh, gesturing for her to pull out her wand, then puts a single finger to his lips to make sure she knows he's trying to be quiet.
He ever-so-slowly eases the door open enough that he can peek inside.
As Kayleigh and Nebbin climb the spider-slimed stairs, the cleric whispers, "What if the second floor is partitioned off and the others can't get to us or us to them?" As if in answer to her own question, she silently draws her wand of spiritual weapon.
With detect magic running (mainly to scan for invisible foes), Kayleigh creeps after Nebbin. Outside the door when he makes his gestures at her, Kayleigh smiles and waggles her already-drawn wand...somehow managing to bang it off her buckler! Grin turns to grimace at the noise.
Fírinne closes her eyes for a moment, reaching out with her mind to sweep the room for any magical auras.
Before the part ways Emi hands the potion Tassira gave her over to Nebbin.
She takes the lead up the stairs and into the butler's chamber. While Firinne scans for auras, Emi quickly checks through the room. Her assumption is one door is an exit and the other is storage.
Emi chooses the door that seems lees likely to be an exit based on its location and opens it.
Tassira flexes her fingers and tries to be quiet as the party searches.
Unfortunately, Kayleigh's clumsy wand-handling startles her and Ravnos, resulting in a sharp "ROWR!" coming from her backpack.
The door swings easily by Nebbin's hand onto a huge, dimly lit noble's suite. There's a table and chairs for private dining, a massive hearth, a fine canopied bed and a dozen shelves, bureaus and chests arranged logically in the room. The only light in the room comes through more windows along the south side of the house, curtains half-drawn.
From the doorway, none of the shadows move or raise suspicion, and after a pause, Nebbin believes the room is unoccupied.
Waiting on the landing as Nebbin pauses in the doorway, Kayleigh can make out the dim, inconstant white light reflected off some construction in the room beyond the arch. Reflected from above. Looking up from where she stands on the landing, she cannot see what the source could be, but she recalls from the outside of the house that the third floor room sits over the center of the structure. The room beyond the arch sits above the entry hall where you just had your fight. It seems to her that the light must be coming down from that third floor room somehow.
---
The door Emileva chooses is unlocked, and when she opens it, she too finds a darkened bedroom. While not as grand as the room Nebbin found elsewhere in the house, the bed, bureau, chest and mantlepiece all speak to the wealth of the occupant, who is not here. When Firinne enters the room behind Emi, her magical sweep picks up soft auras in the chest at the foot of the bed.
Nebbin creeps toward the light, hoping that they'll see Emi, Firinne and Tassira on the other side. He moves slowly, to give them time, but also doesn't want them to be waiting for him. Still, he concentrates on being quiet and careful.
Kayleigh follows Nebbin very slowly .
Tassira follows after making some soothing whispers into her backpack to calm Ravnos down.
"Hold a moment," Fírinne cautions Emi, gesturing to the chest. "It may be warded."
"Not touching yet, just looking."
Emi gives the chest a good looking over to see if anything about it suggests 'security devices' of any sort have been installed.
Emi finds no hint of a trap, but the chest is locked. Firinne sees auras in conjuration and transmutation overlapping one another.
---
After stepping just a little beyond the arch a couple shapes begin to resolve in the darkness. There are shoulder-tall, unlit candelabras around the perimeter of the room standing like sentinels in the shadows. The shape in the middle is a winding metal staircase, freestanding in the center of the room and leading up to the cupola chamber on top of the mansion. Only a square of the room above is even remotely visible through the open trap door, but the white light is definitely coming from there. It flickers and emits a soft crackle that is just audible as Nebbin reaches the steps themselves. The darkness of the rest of the chamber looms threateningly, and the stench here is approaching overwhelming.
Nothing moves in the room but Nebbin and Kayleigh.
"We should wait here for the others," Nebbin whispers to Kayleigh. He backs up a bit so he hopefully can't be seen through the trap door, but keeps his sword ready as he looks around the room .
"Well, it seems clean. I'll try to get it open."
Emi takes out a set of lockpicks and tries to spring the chest open.
Kayleigh stops moving and gives Nebbin a nod. Then she takes her time scanning with detect magic, starting with the spiral staircase in case it's magically trapped.
"No hints of abjuration magic, so that rules out any glyphs of warding. Should be safe enough."
Emi is struggling with the lock and feeling less certain what she's doing is going to work. Sometimes a slight distraction can help by taking just enough focus away to steady the hands and find the flow. She asks Firinne and/or Tassira a question to make some conversation.
"What are those exactly? Glyphs?"
Tassira takes a look at the chest and tries to identify the specific magics on it.
The box defeats the ladies in detail. The lock won't give and the material is providing just enough shielding to keep them from learning anything more about the magic contained. The box needs to come open to get at the goods and figure out what they are.
---
Nebbin's senses don't get any keener as he waits in the darkness for signs of his friends. But the longer he crouches there in the quiet stench, the more confident he becomes that no second ambush awaits him here.
Kayleigh's magically enhanced sweep doesn't note any auras standing out in the darkness. Glancing up, however, she notes a strong aura of illusion emitting through the hole in the ceiling.
Kayleigh whispers a quick report to Nebbin. "There's some strong illusion magic in the chamber above...probably too strong the be any sort of invisibility spell."
"They are, as the name suggests, a magical ward that can be used to protect an area, a doorway, or an object like a chest or a book. Anyone trying to access the area or object without the password would set it off. Wizards will sometimes use it to protect their spellbooks from prying eyes, setting it to explode if someone attempts to plagiarize their spells." She gives Emi a wry smile.
"I, of course, would never do such a thing. It would be very rude to read my spellbook without permission, as I've worked very hard on it, but I tend to protect my secrets through more direct interventions."
Emi responds to Firinne's explanation with nothing more than a distracted "Mmmm..." and shortly thereafter gives up on the chest in frustration.
"I can't get it. It'll have to wait. We shouldn't spend too much time separated from Nebbin and Kayleigh. Let's finish the rooms on this side and get back together. with them."
"Fair enough, it'll still be here when we get back."
The second door off the butler's station is also not locked, and when it's opened it reveals a big dark chamber beyond that seems like it must be the center of the stink in this place. The light spilling around Emi reveals a patch of soiled marble, a line of unlit candelabras to either hand and the vague outlines of a free-standing spiral staircase in the center of the room. In the opposite left corner of the room is an arch, just visible in the dim light that escapes around drawn curtains along the left hand wall. The right hand side of the chamber is entirely obscured in darkness.
Obviously, Nebbin's vigil is interrupted as a door, unseen in the dark, opens up to permit some light on that side of the chamber. The familiar forms of his friends are silhouetted in the doorway.
Peeking around Emi, Firinne's eyes take in the whole scene. Nebbin and Kayleigh stand by the stairs. The entire back of the chamber is a webbed abattoir. Dark masses, oozing black with a thickness like tar hang in the unnaturally thick webbing. They take the shape of humans, of course, or parts of them. There are so many victims, scores at least.
Nothing moves in the room but the soft, random lights coming from the trapdoor above. The stairway up to that room is a tight, single-file affair.
When the others draw near, Kayleigh lets out a soft sigh of relief before whispering a report about the strong illusion magic she detected coming from the room at the top of the spiral staircase.
"Can you make one or more of us invisible?" the priestess asks Tassira, knowing that the group will be particularly vulnerable climbing the staircase and then facing whatever awaits one-by-one.
Tassira sighs and shakes her head. "I had to use up all of my second-tier magics just to survive the fight. I've barely got anything left in the tank already..."
Nebbin looks at the others, a surge of adrenaline fading as he realizes it's them when the door -- which he hadn't even noticed -- opens. "Kayleigh says there's a powerful illusion up there," he says, "so everyone should get ready."
Once they are, he leads the way up the stairs, sword at the ready.
Fírinne comes to a halt mid-stride as the scale of the cult's atrocity is made all too clear to her. She stands there for several seconds, her mouth slightly agape, as her thoughts race. Finally, Kayleigh's question seems to snap her out of it, and she is able to speak again.
"Ah...briefly," she says, blinking hard as she tries to refocus on the cleric's face. "Half a minute, at most."
As Nebbin leads the way, the crackling, energetic sound from above becomes more pronounced. As the trapdoor comes into view, he can see white-blue light of flickering intensity lighting up the room beyond. Peeking his head above the threshold of the floor, Nebbin sees a room with six walls - the whole cupola as seen from outside. The open trap door blocks out half the room, but where he can see perplexes him. There's a podium in the center of the room, with a book that stands open. The walls are a mixture of narrow bookshelves and narrow windows, but the drapes are fixed so that no sunlight gets in - and probably also so no electric light gets out.
The light is radiating from the book in lines that pulse asynchronously, filling the room with a mild strobe effect. The lines are connected by runners, so the entire structure looks like a web of light, reaching out from the podium and book to walls of the room. At their nadir, the lines dim to the point where they almost disappear. Nebbin can't tell if they do. It occurs to him the light may have burned its image into his night vision.
As he tries to shake it off, he notices another detail. A shoe on the floor. As he leans around the trapdoor to open his field of vision, he realizes that a body in robes lies on the floor on the other side of the podium.
Emi goes second after locating her flask with the oil for keening her blade in case she needs it. It's the only boost she has to give herself if one is needed.
She grows impatient as Nebbin stalls at the top of the ladder. Nudging him, she asks "What's the wait?" in a 'get a move on' kind of voice.
Kayleigh waits, barely breathing, knowing that she's the least stealthy/most clanky member of the party. She expects to be the party's rearguard as a result.
"There's a body, and an electric web" Nebbin whispers back. "Hold on while I make sure it's safe!"
He quickly describes everything he sees and then looks around to see if it looks like the body may have been killed by the web or if there's some other possible cause.
If it looks like the web isn't to blame, he heads up, still being careful not to touch any of the beams of light.
"Uh, maybe Tassira should take a look then? She knows electricity."
Tassira looks around the room, scanning to identify magical auras.
Like Kayleigh, Tassira detects strong illusion magic coming from the electric web, not the evocation magic one might expect from an effect that appears to be pure lightning given shape. The electric web is like no spell she’s ever seen or heard of, however, leading the mage to believe it’s the result of a ritual initiated by the dead leader of the spider cult. The way the light dims out of each strand the farther it gets from its point of origin—the open book—makes Tassira think that maybe each strand might instead be slowly becoming invisible, perhaps reaching out unseen into the city outside the mansion walls. While that’s somewhat consistent with the effect having a strong illusion aura…it’s still just a guess.
Ducking so as not to touch the dangling electric web/net that spreads out from the book, Nebbin gets a closer look at the fallen man, presumably Lord Caleb Nhybur. There’s no burn or scorch marks on the man (as there reasonably would be had the electric web killed him); his lips are upturned into a smirk, but his eyes are wide, his last moments apparently filled with triumph, revelation…or terror.
Emi shifts a bit to get a better view of the dead man. She’s the only remaining party member to have witnessed the cultist death inside Careless Curiosities that brought the dreamlands spider-monstrosity into the waking world. The lights in that instance were blue, purple, and white—not the fairly steady brilliant blue of the electric web. And the cultist in the bookshop was wholly consumed, body and spirit, to bring the nightmare beast into existence, while the corpse assumed to be Lord Nhybur is still intact. Still, it seems a life was exchange here for something from beyond the mortal realm.
From below comes a hushed call from Kayleigh: ”Is it safe to come up?”
I have a PM in with DM Luke asking if Lord Nhybur had any magic items; assume those detect as usual when you scan the chamber and I'll give you details once I hear back from Luke.
"...it's weird--this electro-web is radiating illusion magics, not evocation." Tassira replies.
"That's good, right?" Nebbin asks. He still does his very best to avoid it -- fortunately, he's gotten good over the years at trying to minimize his size and not bump into things. Though he wasn't carrying a huge sword for most of that time.
Emi doesn't have the knowledge needed to answer Kayleigh's question so she doesn't.
"It depends," Fírinne replies as she makes her way up to where she can get a better look. She examines the web with her magical senses, trying to learn more about its nature and purpose.
After a moment, she relents with a sigh. "I've never seen anything quite like this. It could be an alarm, or a trap, or just a red herring to distract us from the real clue."
"It's also of an illusion spell I've never seen before. Don't interact with it if you can help it, just in case."