Guiness' shears close upon the scarf with would be finality for an ordinary garment. But the supernatural presence animating the cloth has also rendered it surprisingly strong. When the first snap doesn't slice through the fabric, Guiness tugs and tries to tear the scarf. While he doesn't succeed, the scarf loosens enough that Kargas gets to breathe freely for a bit.
Similarly, Colvyn's efforts loosen the scarf, giving Kargas some breathing room for a few moments before the errant garment seems to melt out of the ratfolk's grip. But before it can resume it's attempt to choke Kargas, Flo reaches in and delivers a powerful pulse of positive energy.
The scarf falls flat against Kargas' shoulders, and the frightful delusion it created for the bloodrager ends abruptly. Kargas' mind clears and his paralysis ends.
Now that things are calm again, you can see that the scarf is of very fine make, with silver embroidery within which is a name: Iesha Foxglove.
Encounter Over!
"Gah!" Kargas looks around, panting and bewildered. "What in all the blazing hells was that?!" He tears the scarf off and throws it into the fireplace, glaring furiously at it.
"Some kind of haunt... I don't know much about them, but based on the, um, bits of stuff on the bookend and the state of this room, someone probably experienced a very traumatic event in here," Flo speculates, leaning into the fireplace to inspect the name.
"Iesha Foxglove... Ring a bell for anyone?" she asks. Shame we can't keep this, can't justify keeping a strangling scarf around! While at the fireplace, she gingerly picks up the bookend to show the others what she is talking about. Wrapping it in some fabric, she places it in her bag. "Don't worry Colvyn, I'll ask Lord Foxglove if I can keep it and will return it immediately if not!"
Once everyone is ready, she follows Colvyn to the next door for inspection.
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Guiness looks at the scarf like it is some kind of angry snake. He appears nervous, leaving it out in the open like that.
”I don’t know much about ‘haunts’, but if that scarf is going to take flight and try to strangle people again, we should either destroy it or put it inside something it can’t get out of,” counsels Guiness.
The scarf sits still inside the fireplace, seemingly just an ordinary length of cloth once more.
Regardless of how you choose to deal with the scarf for now, the dangers of this room have been averted. Colvyn continues back north towards the door he had begun to inspect earlier. Directly north of the library is a large dining room that you spotted from the entrance hall but didn't yet explore.
A mahogany table surrounded by chairs sits in this room. Twin fireplaces loom to the west, while to the east, stained-glass windows obscure what could have been a breathtaking view of the Lost Coast. Each window depicts a monster rising out of smoke pouring from a seven-sided box. From north to south are depicted a gnarled tree with an enraged face, an immense hook-beaked bird with sky-blue and gold plumage, a winged centaurlike creature with a lion’s lower body and a snarling woman’s upper torso, and a deep blue squidlike creature with evil red eyes.
---
Colvyn reaches the south-ward door in the short adjoining hallway. An inspection of the door reveals no traps or hazards to Colvyn's sharp eyes.
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If nobody does anything else with the scarf, Guiness will empty his belt pouch into his pockets and stuff the scarf in the pouch, tying the pouch closed tightly, then stuffing it in his cooking pot and clamping the lid down securely.
He then follows Colvyn, again at a short distance to avoid spoiling the much quieter fellow's sneaking.
"Do all nobles decorate their houses so...weirdly?" Kargas asks as he stares at the unsettling stained glass windows. He's careful not to touch anything--the scarf incident has made him a bit twitchy.
Colvyn takes a side glance at the windows, then returns to the door, he was inspecting before the scarf incident. "Creepy only says the half of it. I can't imagine Aldern spending a single night in here." Colvyn put his hand on the handle and is about to open the door but stop and turn toward the rest of the group. "Please don't touch anything this time." He then slightly opens the door to get a peak inside.
Guiness takes a look around the dining room, but doesn't spot anything hidden or not obvious from a quick glance. While the room has fine furniture, it lacks any of the accouterments one might expect in a dining room - no cutlery or table settings, no cushions for the chairs, nothing of the creature comforts a nobleman might want. From the layer of dust on the table and chairs, this room hasn't been used in a long time.
Colvyn opens up the door heading south and finds a set of stairs leading up to the second floor. The stairway is lightly cobwebbed.
"It's like we've walked into a scary campfire story..." Flo comments as she keeps her wand close at hand. "Let's make sure we clear the floor before heading up, yeah?"
She gestures to another door. "Maybe this one next?"
________
Colvyn looks at the stairs going up. "If those go to the second floor of this house. This could mean that the door across from here could be stairs going down." He points a the door right behind him. Pondering about their next move, Colvyn studies the last two remaining doors before opening either one.
Colvyn checks over both doors and finds them to be untrapped. He opens the door in the short connecting hallway first, finding a staircase that leads down into the manor's subterranean level. A musty and moldy smell wafts out of the open staircase, and it appears that the lower level is entirely dark (though not to people with darkvision of course).
Having been proven right, Colvyn moves on to the next door. The door proves slightly stuck, and it takes a solid tug to get it open. Beyond lies a dusty room with a long couch caked with white sheets of wispy fungus. A solid stone fireplace sits at the eastern end of the room, its alcove filled with a deep pile of ash. Eddies of dust and ash skitter along the warped floorboards as if caught up by a slight breeze, yet no wind is noticeable in the air.
A single wooden door from this room leads to the west. When you open it up, you realize it connects to an east-west hallway that returns to the entrance room and has a couple of branches along the way.
"It's possible, I suppose."
Flo raises her hand to about chest high. "Wouldn't surprise me, we'd hear the footsteps if it was just someone invisible, no?"
Her nose crumples with disgust as she processes the state of the room. "This place is scary and gross, I never knew abandoned buildings could be so off-putting!"
Lagging a little behind the others, Kargas wanders over to the stained-glass windows, studying the monsters emerging from the strange box depicted there.
"Yeah this place is f#+!ed up, I dont think anyone lives here," he calls back to Flo, his voice too loud in the still room.
Kellek reckons that this is likely to be another haunt of some kind, but the nature of it or how it might manifest is not clear to him.
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Receiving her confirmation from Kellek, Flo nods her head. "Be ready, no telling what will happen after this!" Raising her hand overhead, she releases a burst of holy energy into the room.
________
Guiness can tell the whispering is coming from somewhere close to the room's fireplace, so he starts wandering in that direction. Luckily for him, Flo takes that moment to send out a wave of positive energy over the whole room. When she does, a woman's voice lets out a single strangled cry of despair before going silent.
The dust in front of the fireplace settles immediately.
---
With the dust settling, Flo cautiously steps into the room and looks around. Haunts usually come from trauma... There was the bookend in the fireplace in the other room, maybe something- Ah ha!
Striding over to the fireplace, she gingerly picks up a toy horse. "This also has dried blood on it," she points out to her friends. "What happened here? So much pain..."
________
Again, Colvyn inspects the two doors before opening either one. "Hopefully, those are the last two rooms on this floor. I suggest we head upstairs before trying the basement."
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Colvyn checks both doors and finds them to look safe enough. He turns the knob on the first of the two and reveals a simple washroom. An ancient metal washtub sits to the north end of the room, a ring of mildew growing on its inner rim. Soon after you open the door, a strange, furtive scratching starts to echo from inside the tub.
Whoever steps up closer to look inside the tub sees an exceptionally grotesque rat scrabbling at the bottom of the tub. The rat is a horrific and pitiful sight, blind and laden heavy with bulbous tumors. It begins shrieking and trying to clamber up the sheer and mildew-slick walls of the tub.
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Kellek looks at the rat with obvious disgust. He pulls his wand of magical missiles and aims it into the tub.
**ZZZOT!**
**ZZZOT!**
"Why waste magic on it? It wasn't going anywhere." Kargas turns and heads back out of the room, to the final door Colvyn had indicated.
The first magic missile indeed doesn't manage to finish it off. Instead, the force bolt bursts a large boil on its back, sending a gout of vile pus against the walls of the bathtub. The injury seems to invigorate the rat even more, and it attempts to scramble out towards you all!
But it immediately slips back to the bottom and ends up on its back and unable to get up! The second magic missile strikes it soundly and finishes it off.
---
Kargas can't hear any sobbing from the bathroom or the hallway, but he can't tell if thats because it stopped or if it simply isn't audible from the group's current location. He opens the door to the remaining room on the ground floor.
The stately room beyond has oak paneling covering its walls. Once, it must have been breathtaking, but its a sad sight now. The floorboards are warped with moisture and the paint on the ceiling is peeling - in fact, this room looks worse than all the others you've come across so far. A grand piano, its surface splotchy with mildew and its keys warped, leans tiredly in the southeast corner.
Flo has to suppress a brief rebellion from her stomach as the geyser of pus sprays across the bathroom walls and looks away as Kellek performs his execution emotionlessly. "What, uh, was that?" she asks from the hallway, staring at the wall.
As the door to the next room opens, she gently but firmly grabs the lead person's arm. "Wait! When I looked through the window here, I felt... something. It may be another haunt," she explains. Wanton destruction has never been my thing, but after what we've seen it might be worth speaking with the Mayor about burning this place to the ground. We're pretty prepared for this sort of thing, but a farmer or wayward traveler?
Raising her hand in the air, she releases another wave of holy energy.
________
"Well, this complete the exploration of the ground level. Let's head upstairs. So far, aside from haunts, we haven't seen anything that could be the source of the ghouls." And I don't want to spend anymore time that we need here. Colvyn heads back toward the manticor room and inspect the stairs for sign of trouble before heading up.
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The wave of holy energy washes over the decrepit parlor room, but there is no obvious effect as it fades. The room appears to be in as ugly of a shape as it ever was. Guiness' careful inspection of the room finds that the warped floorboards are scuffed heavily in the center of the space, as though there was a lot of foot traffic in the center of the room, but not elsewhere.
With nothing else in the parlor, you head for the grand staircase leading up to the 2nd floor from the entrance hall. Colvyn leads the way there while looking out for traps, only to catch another odd whiff of burning hair and flesh. The smell is... stronger this time. This time around, Kargas also catches a whiff.
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Colvyn's fur bursts into flame , but he quickly bats out the fire and it doesn't linger.
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|||| INIT (surprise) ||||
Colvyn (16 dmg, surprise round only)
Kargas (surprise round only)
|||| INIT (regular round) ||||
Guiness
Kellek
Flo
Manticore
Colvyn
Kargas
Bold are up
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Guiness bellows a war cry as this flaming beast suddenly appears and impales Colvyn, "Сражаться!"
He shifts to the south to give the other warriors room to maneuver, then swings his magical hammer, Dragonfist, at the attacking creature of flame, hoping that the magic in the weapon can enable it to affect the enemy.
Kargas frowns, sniffing the air. "Does anyone else sme--oh hells, Colvyn look out!" As the flaming tail plunges into the ratfolk archer, Kargas' scar-sigils flare and he invokes several arcane phrases as a shimmering field of energy coalesces around him.
Of course everyone is standing in the way. Honestly, I'm not sure why I bother.
Flo calls power from her wand and then steps out of the way of her friends. "What is that?!"
________
"Ow! What the hell! Why is this thing moving now all of the sudden." Colvyn takes out his bow and get ready to fight back.
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Guiness swings in with his hammer, but despite his careful aim at the creature's flank, the weapon passes through the flames without any effect on the flaming manticore. The rest of the group starts preparing for a fight as the fiery beast rears back and readies to stab Colvyn once more. But just as it lunges towards him again, the burning apparition dissolves into a rain of ash and embers that harmlessly float to the ground before vanishing entirely.
Out of Combat!
You look once more at the stuffed manticore, and it seems to look exactly as it did before - no sign of any fire damage at all. In fact, as you look around, the flames from the manticore's burning copy didn't touch anything in the environment, and the only evidence that it had existed for a few seconds is Colvyn's charred fur.
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Colvyn checks over the staircase to the southern end of the room and finds it creaky but otherwise safe to ascend. When the group is ready, you head on up the stairs and arrive in a long hall on the second floor.
The second floor proves significantly less damp and definitely less covered in mildew. As you look around, you see more than a half-dozen doors branching off the central hallway to various rooms. You check the first one on the left and find that it opens up to a landing and then a set of stairs back down to the ground floor.
Flo prods the manticore with disbelief before hustling away to the stairs. "So... anyone willing to support a petition for Sandpoint to appropriate this building and burn it to the ground?" she asks, only half joking.
"Ok Colvyn, take point and I'll follow your lead."
________
Flo prods the manticore with disbelief before hustling away to the stairs. "So... anyone willing to support a petition for Sandpoint to appropriate this building and burn it to the ground?" she asks, only half joking.
"I have a spell for that." Kellek says with sincerity.
Flo takes a moment to consider Kellek's words, his body language, tone, everything she can. For the life of her, she can't help but believe the sincerity of his statement. When did he pick up that sort of spell? How long has he had it for? Has he been underselling himself this whole time?
She chuckles nervously in response before making her way up the stairs. He can't be serious, right?
________