Galvar looks at Blan as he slurps stew and then back to Pinball. He sets the bowl down and nods, still looking distracted. He rushes into the cantina where two men are facedown on the table while three others stand and stare at them.
"Sir! Thrick were making the stew, do ye think he put somethin' rotten in it? He passed out and Inetra drops a second later sir! I ken tell ye, they ain't been drinkin', sir. " Galvar moves over and examines the nearest man (Thrick).
Galvar sighs. "Passed out cold. And you men felt nothing, saw nothing?" He stares at the other three, who shake their heads. Galvar sighs. "Leave them here, but spread word that the others are to be on alert. Something's not right here."
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Pinball "inspects" the unconscious guards, making a show of checking their pupils and mouths, and then the soup itself with a wary sniff.
"Sir..." she says carefully, looking back to Galvar. She drops her voice to speak in Serious Confidence to the chief. "You said there were Bellflower operatives being held here. Do you think it's possible this is part of some Bellflower...scheme? To free their fellow traitors? These dedicated guardsmen falling unconscious might be just a distraction, and meanwhile hidden operators could be going to the cells as we speak. Should we maybe go check on those prisoners?"
Galvar looks a little disturbed by the idea that this is some sort of coordinated attack by Bellflower agents. He nods tersely. "Here, this is the key to the office. The key to the interrogation chamber should be in there. Fetch it and investigate. I'm going to check on Thrick and Inetra."
A smoldering fireplace illuminates this room, casting red light over a massive corner desk littered with disorganized papers. A seven-foot-tall statue of a four-horned fiend with a burning crown overlooks the desk from the corner.
The desk hosts a jumbled mess of interrogation schedules, prisoner transfers, and Loyalty Day agendas. There's simply too much here to be sure what's important and what's not. You find the key hanging on a rack by the door.
Blan's archival eye catches several documents in the pile that Garret missed.
One is a copy of The Asmodean Disciplines, bookmarked to a chapter on crime and punishment with a handwritten note included. It reads:
"Asmodeus even stated
Of our wretched fate
That he hath reevaluated
Every spirit’s weight.
For what would be the fairest price
Of souls ixpressly grown
If I’ve an essence full of vice
And sin in evil Abrogail’s Thrice–
Damnéd Hall of Sacrifice to cast before his throne?"
The second document is a twine-bound set of instructions for activating the prison’s soundproofing mechanism. The manual notes that the prisms emit light when active, and they create a wall of magical silence between any two prisms with an uninterrupted line of effect to one another. No sound passes through this border, but if an object, creature, or wall disrupts the border, the entire effect ends until the obstruction is removed.
The third is a letter addressed to the interrogator from the Nail’s ranking officer addressing the declining efficacy of reports exposing political enemies provided by Zarta Dralneen. It reads:
"Vasenti,
I appreciate your desire for more information to guide your interrogation of prisoners. Know that your request has not gone unnoticed. Unfortunately, your superiors are limited by the reports we receive from our informants.
I will tell you this: the last three prisoners about whom you requested information were apprehended using intelligence provided by Paracountess Zarta Dralneen in Absalom. Following a recent political misunderstanding, the paracountess’s reports have grown increasingly vague, lacking their past detail and proving to be nearly useless. Those above my station assure me that this change is being investigated, but I have seen this pattern before. To me, Zarta’s contributions are purposefully misleading, as though she were attempting to shield her own informants—or worse, actively sabotage House Thrune’s rule. There is also the possibility that as she works more closely with the Pathfinder Society, her loyalties there grow stronger than those to her homeland. Until I can convince my superiors of her true motivations, work with what we have. I have moved our latest shipment of documents to the vault for further processing.
Good fortune with your continued service to the glory of Cheliax and the noble House of Thrune,
Inspector Lusarious Deckland"
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Pinball hurriedly scans the office for magic as per Blanmieux's suggestion, to be sure they're not leaving anything relevant, and takes the key to pass to Blanmieux for safekeeping in his pouch.
"Silencing the prison seems like it could be potentially useful," she observes, "but if the effect ends once a creature passes through the wall of silence, that doesn't help us much when we need to spring Zefiro. Our priority right now is finding him, but we need to manage to hit the archives too and retrieve the damning evidence. I'd say Zefiro first, from here. I can make him invisible for three minutes' time-- not much, but maybe enough for us to hit the archives next."
Heading out of the office you can see Galvar in the staff break room, talking to a couple of the other guards. He glances up for a moment, spots you, before casually closing the door.
You open the door to the vaults. Hundreds of manuscripts and prison records fill this room’s shelves, many bearing labels such as “Accounting,” “Calendars, and “Discharge Logs.” A human woman in her early 20s sits at a desk, pouring through stacks of files. She looks up as you enter. "Hello. You're not the usual staff. What's going on here?" She stands up, crossing her arms in front of her.
The woman smiles and steps over to the door, closing it. "My name is Krima, and yes, I am a tiller for the Network. They assigned me here six months ago to await further orders. I've kept the Network apprised through the dead drops, but I've heard nothing back. Why are you here?"
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Oblivious to Galvar's look, Pinball's shoulders slump with relief as she's no longer required to tell lies and can return to truth with the Bellflower operative.
"Pleasure to meet you, Krima, my name's Pinzell," she says, speaking quiet and fast. "We're trying to retrieve a gentleman from this terrible facility who doesn't deserve to be here-- though I doubt any of the people here do. The Network helped get us inside. We're here in the Archive specifically because we're hoping to get our friend's papers out as well-- documents pertaining to Zefiro, a librarian. Could you help us find them? Or, really, help us at all? And what of the other prisoners here? If they've been as wrongly imprisoned as our friend, maybe we can help each other?"
Krima nods. "I can't outright help you, not in front of Galvar and the others; my orders are to remain undercover until told otherwise. But I think your friend was in the middle of interrogation when the others were called away. He's probably still in there, in that machine the interrogator uses. Also, I think there's a couple others who I suspect are also Bellflower agents. If you can get them out, please do. When your man was imprisoned, all his papers were secured in the vault. I don't know how, but I know it's trapped, but I think the interrogator keeps some sort of written memo for accessing the vault in his office. I have a key I've made of the door key for there. It's not a perfect copy, but it ought to get you in there. Listen, I can go with you, maybe if Galvar thinks I'm watching you he won't follow you around too closely?"
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"We've actually been in the office," Pinball admits. "We found a note of what seemed like, well, the typical sort of Asmodean-propaganda, really-- but maybe it's tied into this vault you've mentioned. Maybe it's the password."
Pinball waits for Blanmieux to retrieve the note from his useful pouch, then murmurs, "...ixpressly... mere poetic license, or a password, given that it's not the usual spelling? Hmm. Is the vault accessible from this room, Krima? --and thank you for all your help. We'll do our best not to blow your cover-- if we get discovered, we'll threaten you and pretend we're holding you hostage, okay?"
"Um, no, the vault's across the facility. "
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Manius follows after the others as they seem to know what they are doing with this undercover stuff.
Manius winks
"We can do threathing if needed. No doubt about that"
"Seems we need to pass guards everywhere we want to go..anyone have a decent idea on how to distract them while we move around the place? Or have a way of putting them to sleep or something clever like that?"
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"Oops," says Pinball. "Very well. Let's try and get to the vault unobserved, then. We stalled Galvar with some lies earlier but that won't last forever.
"Unfortunately, I have nothing to make guards sleep. I have a few simple distracting magics, like making illusory sounds and the sort, but our clever sleep attempt was mostly the oil of taggit, which several of the guards threw off. If we have everything we need from the archive here, let's get to the vault and get the damning materials on Zefiro."
You head across to the Vault, not seeing Galvar at all now. The guards in the area walk their circuits as usual and nod at Krima.
Steel beams reinforce the walls of this chamber, which is accessible only through a round iron door with an inset wheel. The numerals one through nine embellish the wheel’s edge, with the number one set in the uppermost position beneath a stone arrow.
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Pinball isn't a hundred percent convinced. "Hang on," she murmurs. "What about the fact that the 'ix' in 'ixpressly' is 9 in some numbering sytems? The Taldanes use those numerals, at least, and Cheliax was originally a Taldane colony.
"Or, there's a set number of words in each line, and there's nine lines-- look:"
3- Asmodeus even stated
4- Of our wretched fate
4- That he hath reevaluated
3- Every spirit’s weight.
6- For what would be the fairest price
4- Of souls ixpressly grown
7- If I’ve an essence full of vice
6- And sin in evil Abrogail’s Thrice–
9- Damnéd Hall of Sacrifice to cast before his throne?"
She muses over Blanmieux's suggestion some more. "...I think you're right though. Good eye."
Blan steps forward and spins the dial to the numbers he indicated.
...
...
And it opens!
Dozens of carefully organized codices and scrolls fill the stone shelves carved into the walls, each labeled with names and sigils hammered into small brass placards over each niche. Two statues of humanoid fiends holding red-flamed torches monitor the room from the corners. Two open chests on either side of the door hold jumbles of unsorted documents, but a third chest in the far corner remains closed.
Nothing seems to be magical in this room...
The documents contain information on Cheliax’s numerous political targets extracted from the Nail’s interrogation sessions. Some of these documents provide blackmail material (useful to Sovereign Court PCs using Faction Journal Cards), but any Pathfinder would take interest in three documents in particular.
The first two are interrogation reports filed in the section marked with the Aspis Consortium’s sigil (Player Handouts #3 and #4). The other is in a chest that stores a mound of Zefiro’s unaltered Chelish histories, including one annotated lineage amendment torn from its binding and left atop the pile (Player Handout #5). The former two reveal that Ianareth Alazario collaborates with the Aspis Consortium, that an Aspis agent named Kitio Aspenthi is active in Thuvia, and that the Bell of Obedience stolen from the Society years back was recently sold to the Hellknight Order of the Rack; this is exactly the kind of information Zarta Dralneen wants Dark Archive faction PCs to recover. The third document reveals that, although she was raised a Dralneen, Zarta is in fact the last known blood descendant of House Davian, former rulers of the greater Hellcoast region and the most powerful noble house to oppose the rise of House Thrune (and thus be obliterated after Thrune signed its infernal pact).
The corner chest stores the Nail’s monetary assets for covering basic expenditures, holding an assortment of Chelish-minted gold and silver coins.