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Fung blasts the hidden priest, who is starting to look worse for wear.
Naomi continues agilely towards the combat.
Status: bold may post
Tirrem 1 damage - Flee for 1d4 ⇒ 2 rounds
Theadus
Cultists
Green 14 damage. partial cover
Red ready
Aarion ; guidance
Xuan Fung - shaken
Naomi - may act twice.
Grimaldus
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Theadus reaches out and touches the heart of the priest with an icy finger.
He stops, gasps and drops to the floor.
The last zombie drops at the same time...
combat over
"I say, it's gone awfully quiet up there."
"Did the peasants die already? Best go find some more"
"No, I can still see some of them standing.."
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Fung sighs deeply in relief that the battle is finally over. The unnatural fear in him still has a tight hold but he grits his teeth to ignore it. Irritated by the nobles' comments, he almost releases a bolt of electricity into the wet floor they are standing on before he stops himself. Turning around, he attempts to grab Tirrem and hold him from his flight.
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"No time to wast. We need to secure the dead before they animate." Says Aarion as he begins taking out rope from his pack.
After collecting the rope from his pack, Aarion begins binding the dead in case they animate. Once finished with the task, he carefully moves over to where he dropped his bow and retrieves it.
"Anyone know anything about that unusual rock?"
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Theadus suspects the big glowy stone is probably related somehow to what is going on. Destroying it might help release what magic has the placed locked down at the moment.
"It is a fowl thing, likely the cause of tonight's strange phenomenon. It should be destroyed," says the teifling with a hiss in his tone. "And if that is not a suitable solution to all, then it should at least be taken with and delivered to the society, though I'll not be the one to touch it."
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The zombie has nothing on him. The man, well, he did have a short bow, maybe he forgot to use it in the excitement. The man by the stone is dressed as a war priest. Bot have heavy picks on them, a nasty weapon if they ever got a chance to use them.
As for what they were trying to do...
Well, if you wanted to check them before destroying the stone, they would both be alive but slipping towards death, and with a heal check you could stabilise them.
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With due intimidation you can learn of the plot, and what befell Wuthers. On his body (a zombie upstairs) you find his journal and an unfinished letter that also fills in some of the gaps. A bit more intimidation and eventually you learn the whole sordid history...
[ooc]Copy and paste from background intro follows
Known as the Grim Harvestman, the Harbinger of Unexpected Tragedy, and Most Hated Rival of Pharasma, the godling Zyphus holds dominion over unexpected death. His cults, though small in number, have spread throughout Golarion and seek to extend his glory from their graveyards and barrows. True believers of Zyphus teach their followers that souls who perish by accident do not travel on to Pharasma’s Boneyard in the Great Beyond, but are instead captured by the Grim Harvestman and malignantly absorbed, making their deity ever more powerful. Most of the Zyphus cults remove themselves from civilization, orchestrating small accidents and disasters to feed their master’s will. A few overtly assault the establishment, planning and executing large events such as ferry sinkings, mass fires, and building collapses. Never before has a Zyphus cult planned an event that could unexpectedly wipe out a city, a region, or even a whole country. Until now.
Unfortunately for Wuthers, his fame drew unwanted attention. A cleric of Zyphus, a Taldan named Fel Bustrani, saw in the young Pathfinder an opportunity for his own glory and for the glory of the Grim Harvestman. He contacted Wuthers a year ago and regaled him with an amazing story of a lost artifact of Zyphus, known as the Zyphus Stone, that was ritually sealed in an underground tomb by descendants of Lost Azlant when Oppara was nothing more than an indigenous fishing village on the River Porthmos. Bustrani told Wuthers that the stone was a “living artifact” designed to bring Zyphus’s faithful back to life if they died in service to their Grim god. In truth, the descendants of Lost Azlant who buried the stone knew the terrible powers it held, knew it could populate the world with zombies, but hid it hoping to later study its terrible power. They buried one of their own with the stone to see what would happen after prolonged exposure to its magic. The Azlanti never returned for the artifact, but the young man left behind was twisted into a horrible caricature of humanity—a rotting, disease-filled Zyphus zombie with the power to raise regular zombies by feeding on corpses.
Bustrani invited Wuthers to return to Taldor’s capital and help the cleric access the stone’s resting place, known as the Chamber of the Stone, which Bustrani recently located beneath Oppara’s famed House of the Immortal Son, an opera house that was once a temple to Aroden. Misleading Wuthers by posing as a cleric of Irori, the cult leader and the Pathfinder quietly gained access to the opera house’s cobweb-filled storage area and began digging, convincing the management of the Immortal Son that a find of this caliber beneath their theater would put nobles into seats for years to come. It took quite some time to dig through the bedrock beneath Oppara, but three months ago they finally punched through the last few inches and became the first living beings to gaze into the Chamber of the Stone in more than 6,000 years.
The chamber’s only resident was the Azlanti that had been left behind, sprawled across a raised dais beside a huge block of stone in which had been carved the symbol of Zyphus: a heavy pick made of a femur, skull, and rib. Assuming the Azlanti was a preserved corpse, Wuthers approached the stone and immediately began sketching and documenting the find. Bustrani allowed the Pathfinder a few moments of glory, more to keep his attention averted than anything else, and then uttered the phrase the Grim Harvestman had revealed to him in a dream. The phrase, a garbled mishmash of various ancient tongues, brought the stone and the Azlanti zombie to life. When the chamber filled with green light and the zombie climbed to its feet, Wuthers knew he’d been betrayed. Before he could reach for a weapon, the cleric of Zyphus struck him down with the heavy pick he’d used to clear the chamber’s tunnels. He ordered the Zyphus zombie to feed, and in minutes Wuthers rose again as something terrible.
With the first phase of his mission complete, Fel Bustrani contacted his cult confederates hidden throughout Taldor and summoned them to him. Their time had come. Using the Zyphus zombie, the unwitting employees and actors of the House of the Immortal Son, and their Zyphus-granted zeal, they would spread unexpected death throughout Oppara, Taldor, and beyond. They would turn the world into zombies and dance in the glory of their all-powerful god.