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Saritirnen waits patiently watching the odd behaviour of this child.
He wondered where this child's mother was they constantly mentioned. No doubt she would worry soon wouldn't she?
Leaning on his spear he looks up when the orc mentions heading to the Wise District.
"If that is where we must head then let us. The sun shortens it time with us and the child must be reunited with his mother."
In an effort to get more information on where you might find Fimbrik, you begin to make your way toward the Wise District to speak with Yargos Gill. On the way, however, Saritirnen reviews the original notes from Foster's chambers below the Wounded Wisp and discovers that Foster mentioned that Fimbrik lived in the Arcanimirium. Since you were already headed toward the Wise Quarter, where the school is located, you make you way to the Arcanamirium. The Wise Quarter is replete with various kinds of schools, libraries, and shops that cater to Absalom's academic and arcane residents. The largest and oldest of the magical institutions is the Arcanimirium, so the Pathfinders are easily able to find their way to the campus. Upon arrival, you find yourselves greeted by the very man you were hoping to speak to: Yargos Gill!
"Hello there, Pathfinders! Welcome to the Arcanimirium! A pleasure to see you all seeking learning and wisdom here. Is there anything in particular you were hoping to learn while you're here?"
"Fimbrik? That old gnome? Yes, I've heard he has a residence somewhere on the campus of the Arcanimirium. From what I hear, though, no one has spoken to the little fellow in quite some time, though people say they've seen him at work inside his home. Hmm...perhaps the poor chap has gone a bit mad and become something of a recluse. You know I think I've heard about that sort of thing happening to gnomes before..." Gill spends the next several minutes describing various notable gnomes throughout history whose descent into madness had some particular historical significance.
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"Uhhuh. Uh-huh. Yeah, old man Rick wasn't the same after...yes. Right, I guess so." Meredith tries to maintain a polite conversation.
"So um, maybe we'll pay him a visit then. Thanks for the information, mister." Meredith turns around and almost trips over Denair. "Wake up and stand already. We're goin'."
"Huh? Oh. Yaaaay! Did he stop talking?" Denair stands up and yawns. "Oops! Inside voice!"
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Frankie does his best to remain out of the old scary priests sight, and hides behind Denair but she keeps moving around before lying down for a nap.
Once he points out the house of the gnome, Frankie pops up and waves "Thanks! We're on a MISSION! No time for a lesson, lets Goooo!" And he takes off, weaving through the other pedestrians.
"You're certainly welcome, my dear! Come find me anytime you'd like to discuss the finer points of Golarion's long and illustrious history!" Gill turns around and begins to wander off toward whatever other pursuit he had been on when he came across the six of you. As he walks away, you hear him mutter to himself, "Such attentive young people. Wonderful!"
Armed with the knowledge of where to find Fimbrik's residence, and perhaps the gnome himself, you rouse yourselves and make your way across campus to the address written in Salmis Foster's notes. As you arrive at the address, you find yourself approaching an impressive stone dwelling reminiscent of what one might expect from an eccentric wizard’s home.
A brick step leads to Fimbrik’s front entrance, though numerous stacks of newspapers are piled around the door and crammed into a thin slot at its base. Each rounded corner of the building also has a large window, which might allow you to look into the structure without difficulty if you chose to play the peeping Pathfinder.
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"He had a lot to say, that Yargos. But he has our next lead. Let's go."
At Fimbrik's residence, Meredith notices the pile of newspapers. "Yeesh. Has he...ever picked up his papers? Back at home we'd kill for this kind of easy access to books 'n stuff." She kneels down, grabs a few papers and reads some of the headlines.
Half bat half man attacks criminal jokers in the dead of night. "Huh. Savior or Menace?"
Circus owner arrested for using captured fey as slaves. "Good! Serves him right. Nuthin good came out of slavery."
Golem crushes fourth generation of coastal dragon, prepares for battle with fifth? "Yeesh. Why can't everyone get along?"
Meredith puts the papers down, then knocks on the door. "Anybody there? We're Pathfinders, and we have some questions to ask ya. Could you open the door, please?"
Denair, meanwhile is obsessed with the windows. "Wow, all of that paper came from some tree. Hope the tree died before they used it! Frankie, help me look inside!" She gives the kid a boost, letting him ride on her shoulders.
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Zavubak stands watch at the front door with Meredith as Denair hoists Frankie up to have a peek inside. "You guys, always causing trouble. What about if he's an evil gnome? I've heard of what happens to gnomes when they stop having new experiences. Truly horrifying... Especially to children," he quips.
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Frankie bounces around, super excited "Is he a wizard? He must cast spells! I bet he has some super awesome pets! Maybe baby dragons... or monkeys that can talk!" He climbs up on top of Denair's shoulders, clinging to her head and branches while he peers into the windows.
"Get closer to the glass so I can clean it off with my hand! No not that close, ouch!" As he bounces his nose off the window, leaving a big grease smudge.
Meredith receives no response as she knocks at the door and calls for someone to answer.
Meanwhile, Denair boosts Frankie up so he can see through the window too, the mischievous duo spots what looks to be a typical bedroom. A large bed and desk occupy the tidy room, along with a wardrobe, chair, and lamp. There is no sign of the wizard in the room.
Using her prestidigitation, Denair neighs like a horse and runs around the house, looking for an alternate entrance. "Oh! We could also fiddle with the door, right? If that fails, let's smash our way in!"
Denair lopes around the building in an impressively good impersonation of a horse's gallop, while Frankie hoots and hollers in excitement. If anyone inside the house didn't know you were there yet, they do now!
The window at the northwestern corner of the building reveals the save bedroom as the pair had seen before, just from a new angle. Nothing fun there!
The northeastern window, however, reveals a new scene. This room is littered with couches, pillows, and chairs. There is ample room to seat a party even as large as yours! As Frankie and Denair peek around through the window, the door on the western wall of the room swings open and an elderly gnome enters the room and a newspaper under his arm. He strides across to one of the seats, sits down, and begins to read his newspaper, apparently oblivious to your presence.
Through the southeast window, you spy a study containing a round table surrounded by chairs. The walls are replete with tome-laden bookshelves. Across the room, you spy an elderly gnome perusing the bookshelves, occasionally pulling down and book and flipping through a few pages, then putting the tome back in its place.
Back at the front step, Meredith tries the door and finds it is indeed locked.
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At the first window where they see the gnome Frankie will knock on the window and wave at the gnome to let them in. If the gnome doesn't notice him somehow or ignores him he'll continue along to the next window, repeating the same thing.
"Hey there's a small old guy in there! I bet he's a gnome right Denair? HEY! *bang bang* Can we talk to you Mr Wizard gnome? I just want to see your pet dragons!"
In the reading room, the gnome looks up from his paper as Frankie begins to bang on the window and call out to him. He smiles at the boy and gives him a tip of the hat, then returns to his reading.
In the study, Frankie's loudest pleas to see the imagined dragon fall on deaf ears, as the gnome seems utterly absorbed in his studies.
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"Well, the little guys were... little. Not little like Frankie, but little like Alice. But not like either of them, either! He seemed polite, although he didn't want to talk. He tipped his hat and then kept reading his newspaper." Denair finishes recounting her scouting venture, using her shape changing limbs to point to Alice, Frankie and the windows without moving much.
"So he saw you but wouldn't respond to me knocking the door? And he had a newspaper? But what about these?" Meredith gestures to the pile of newspapers, her hand landing on Falcon-worshipping druids defeated by Absalom patriots. "Something don't make sense." Meredith begins pacing by the door.
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Frankie nods along emphatically with Denair's descriptions. "He waved at us from one room and read his paper, then around the corner he's in another room but didn't want to even wave. I think he just didn't want to show us his dragons."
Frankie hops down from his mount and starts looking over the door and the pile of papers. . "Maybe his mind has been taken over by the dragons, we should save him! I bet I can open this door. Mom used to lock away her tasty treats, or lock me in my room when I asked too many questions so I kinda got used to figuring out how locks worked."
Frankie doesn't spot any traps near the door, just the piles and piles of newspapers. Neither Frankie nor Denair were able to make out any of the headlines or datelines on the newspaper the gnome was reading, so they can't adequately answer Meredith's question.
Meredith hesitates when Frankie mentions unlocking the door, but Denair pipes up. "Ooo! Open it! Open it! I wanna see how you do it. Maybe I can learn it some day." She kneels down close to the door.
Frankie and Denair don't notice anything unusual, but as Frankie sets about picking the lock...
*Click*
The rusted lock springs open and the door swings slightly open on its hinges.
"Wow! You're so cool, Frankie!" Denair claps when she hears the door latch loosen. "Okay, let's be quiet now."
The fox-tree hybrid's movements become stiff, controlled and calculated. She takes a peek through the door before heading in.
Frankie loudly declares himself, so Denair decides to duck to the side before continuing. Hopefully no one noticed her.
Meredith also keeps an eye open for danger.
Frankie peers into the house and gets a sense of the central chamber. A large sofa sits awkwardly near the entrance, facing toward the center of the room. Sets of chairs and tables are arranged throughout, and statues of grandiose gnomes occupy the corners of the room. A set of stairs at the northern edge of the chamber leads downstairs. A second set of stairs leads up to the second floor.
There is no response to Frankie's inquiry after the wizard.
As she leans her strange, tree-like body through the doorway, she notices several that despite the lack of dust on many surfaces, no one has been here for years. The carpet and sofa show virtually no wear, and she somehow deduces that the clean tables are the product of a permanent unseen servant. This invisible housekeeper also tries to move any newspapers that are left on the doorstep and dispose of them elsewhere in the house, but ever since the local printers changed the thickness of their publication, the servant has had difficulty pulling the papers through the door slot, and eventually settled for leaving the newer papers neatly piled beside the door.
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Meredith smiles, glad the door is unlocked and open. "Good job, Frankie. Let's teach that old man some respect." Then she catches herself. "I mean, sometimes you need to take extraordinary measures, and we tried to be polite."
Meredith walks up to the study in the Southeast corner. She knocks on the door again. "Uh, howdy. Don't mean to scare you. But you have a lot of trash outside and we need some questions answered. Can you come out of there for a second?"
Meanwhile, Denair slips into the bedroom on the West side, looking for clues. Notes. Anything that Meredith may find useful. "Gotta help out the boss! Even if she doesn't want to call herself that..."
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Getting no wizardly responses from the house, Frankie heads inside and hops up on the couch to check the springs "Wow not bad! I bet I could almost reach the ceiling if I tried!" Before hopping down and checking out the neat statues of gnomes as Denair disappears into the nearby room and Meredith heads in the other direction. "Wow these gnomes are pretty big, is that other guy just a short one or something?"
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Zavubak moves in with Meredith and Frankie, looking around the small house with a tinge of curiosity. "Yeah, someone was definitely here not too long ago. Perhaps he is just out. And we sort of just broke in. Hmph, whatever, we have our mission, right?" He follows Denair into what looks like the master bedroom. "Alright tree weapon woman... thing... See anything interesting in here?"
Several of the new friends begin to spread out through the house. Denair and Zavubak don't find anything of interest in the bedroom, and Meredith's knocking and pleading at the door to the study is met with silence.
Frankie, meanwhile, has found a delightful way to entertain himself in this potentially powerful gnome wizard's home by jumping repeatedly on the stranger's couch. As the boy bounces, however, the groans of the couch become mingled with a strange buzzing noise, and those among you who are magically inclined (so, everyone but Frankie) feel a slight tingling on the back of your necks as the hairs there begin to stand on end.
Suddenly, there's a flash of red light from beneath the couch, and three beetles the size of large house cats erupt into being! Their dull brown carapaces bear large, luminous patches that glow with a sickly yellow-green light. The beetles appear and advance on those nearest them!
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"This guy is really driving me-" Meredith hears a buzzing noise. "What is that- Frankie! Look out!"
Meredith pulls out her mace, shuffles up and swings at the beetle under the table.
Instead her mace clobbers the table. "Damn it!"
Denair hums to herself. "Oooh, nice bed! I bet Frankie could jump on it!"
Meredith's strike puts a hole in the antique coffee table that Fimbrik had so carefully chosen to complement his seating area. More distressing, however, is the angry buzzing of the beetle as it emerges from under the ruined furniture to strike back at Meredith. The summoner scrambles to defend herself from the scuttling menace, but the beetle manages to get its mandibles around her forearm and chomp down with surprising force.
The red beetle similarly emerges from the couch and goes for the biggest thing around: Zavubak! Despite the beetle's best efforts, the half-orc is able to side-step the its assault.
Finally, the blue beetle explodes into being from the long-dormant spell the party tripped and finds itself pinned against the couch by an especially creepy elf with a big, pointy stick. It does what any unintelligent creature would do when it's backed into a corner and lashes out at Saritirnen, but the elf easily fends off the insect with the butt of his spear.
Meredith grunts as the beetle bites her arm. The usually aloof Denair bolts from the bedroom door, not really paying attention to the fire beetle threatening Zavubak.
Instead she stares at the beetle digging into Meredith's arm. "Boss!"
"Fire beetles! From the not-nice place!" Denair's left leg stretches out and tries to crush the beetle beneath its massive weight.
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Frankie watches in fascination as some overgrown carpet beetles scurry out from under his fun bouncy couch. "Wow check these out!" He exclaims. "Zav its time to slay some monsters! AAAAiiiiiAAHHH!" Hollers the little man as he jumps down onto the coffee table, wooden axe in hand and hacks down at the beetle from above.
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Just as the beetles had seemed to act almost in concert when they appeared from beneath the couch, so the Pathfinders worked together like a well-oiled machine in dispatching the summoned vermin.
Saritirnen nimbly steps back and shows the beetle exactly how pointy his stick is, skewering the beetle and pinning it to the floor.
The green beetle begins to lash out at Denair as the strange fey creature rushes to her master's aid, but Zavubak and Frankie take advantage of its momentary distraction to chop and smash it into a buggy paste. Denair, meanwhile, is sprayed with the viscera of the beetle as she moves with all haste to save Meredith from the bug that dared to attack her. She raises a leg and her odd shapeshifting abilities kick in as her leg suddenly broadens to the size of the trunk of an old oak tree and smashes down on the final beetle.
Moments later, the beetle's disappear in a puff of acrid smoke, and all is quiet again in Fimbrik's home. As soon as the dust settles, the remains of the table begin to drift into the air and toward the stairs heading down into the basement. It would seem that the unseen servant Denair had speculated about previously was indeed responsible for the tidy living room, and it is now busy at work clearing up the mess of your encounter with the summoned beetles.
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Frankie cheers and high fives Zav after the 'axe brothers' chop up the beetle, they then watches in awe as the bodies go poof and coughs at the smoke left behind. "MAGIC BEETLES HOLY CRAP!" He exclaims in youthful jubilance. He hops back up onto the couch to see if he can birth more vermin to fight. Boing Boing Boing As he jumps up and down until the table starts fixing itself. "Umm.. guys.. what's that?" As he points to the floating debris.
He hops down off the couch and races after it, following it down to the basement, axe in hand with a growl across his face."AaaiiiEEE!"
Frankie the brave rushes down the stairs after the magically floating debris and finds himself standing among stacks and stacks of years-old newspapers. The debris drifts over to a clear corner where a work table and tools stand neatly in a corner, then settle on the table quietly. Frankie feels a presence brush past him as the unseen servant moves back up stairs to collect more of the table's remains for its repair work.
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"You alright, Frankie?" Meredith isn't immediately concerned about her injury, but more worried about the child's safety. Seeing that he's unharmed, she smiles. "Good."
Denair, meanwhile watches over Meredith's arm. "Bah, that beetle! Boss, I take the hits, not you!" She watches the wound. "Somebody help her!"
Meredith's arm hurts. She tries to ignore the pain, but she grunts again. "Can uh, anyone help me out? Denair has a point."
Watching the unseen force carry table's splinters, Meredith loses her temper. "Summons a bunch of beetles to bite us, and he can't even say hello." She walks right up to the door to the study and opens it- by any means necessary.
Denair stands by. "Now she's mad..."
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Frankie looks back with come concern as Meredith hollers at him "I'm GGrrreat!" He cheers, fist in the air. "Your arm doesn't look so good though, you should put a bandage on it else you'll get blood all over this wizard's house!"
He looks down the stairs to see a hoarder's hoard of newspapers "Wow this guy likes newspapers!" He heads down to look around