Spurred on by their success so far, Briana and Ziomarra call one energies both arcane and primal...subduing their enemies further...
Teldon moves to the sleeping wererat and slits her throat with his mithril shortsword.
,
"We know Ayala has become obsessed. Any humans who surrender will be spared." he calls out to the remaining Tower Girls.
Nalathi darts out from behind the corner, drawing her trident, and stabs forward at the Girl next to Joanna.
Seeing his opportunity, Teldon slips forward and runs his blade across the neck of the sleeping wererat…it’s lifeblood pools around it’s head as it noiselessly dies.
Also dashing from the shadows, Nalathi digs her trident into the Tower Girl who, without even seeing her second attacker, falls backwards… and doesn’t return to her feet. Seeing their numerical advantage evaporate in seconds, the remaining Tower Girls fire panicked shots towards Teldon and run in to the western side of the corridor.
"They're never going to listen to me... does someone else want to try talking them into surrender or should we just kill them?" Teldon asks, "and what of the rats? Zee or Briana, do you want to try to give them some command or should we try to put them down while they're distracted?
"I cannot really command a rat with that spell-- I would need to be able to speak to it! I think we should just slay them!"
Nalathi blinks as the Tower Girl drops in front of her. Wow. That was fast. "We shouldn't let those others get away, they could bring more." She dashes toward the hallway where the other two disappeared, and stops short when she realizes one of them is still in the hall, leveling a hand crossbow at her.
Seeing that the rats have been neutralized via magic, and that both the wererat and the Tower Girl fighting Joanna is down, Zee decides to close with the enemy. She strides back through the room, drawing a Harrow card from the battered deck.
Teldon takes a cue from everyone else's movement and moves toward the northwest chamber too, sheathing the shortsword and regrasping his longspear as he moves.
Chasing around the corner, Nalathi and her companions find that the Tower Girls have decided to flee…Nalathi catches a glimpse of the slower of the girls clipping her harness to a rope and, utterly without fear, swinging out of the window and climbing onto the northern wall of the Crow…some one hundred and fifty feet above the waves below.
As Briana races with Nalathi and Ziomarra, she hears a plaintive squeaking behind her…the charmed Donkey Rat cautiously following behind her…
Teldon nods to Joanna, signaling her to end the creature and move on. Then he quickly moves to the window to see where the fleeing women are headed.
There are two fixed ropes that are secured via pitons into the wall of the room with the window – they run horizontally (at waist height) out of the window and off to the right. Both of the escaping Tower Girls have used their harnesses to attach on to one of the ropes…
"They're following a rope to the east. I can't see where it leads..." Teldon calls back to everyone, "we could cut this end and try to use the loose ropes to knock them off the wall, or leave them connected to chase them... either way, we'll need to put that ring and maybe the harness to work."
"Surprise is our biggest asset, when we can manage it. If we let them get away they'll warn everyone and then it will be nearly impossible to finish our exploration..."
"Who has Natalya's harness? One of us could hook on and follow them!" She pauses, looking grim. "Or we could cut their ropes..." She then shakes her head, "No, we're Pathfinders, not murderers!"
Although you didn't row around the entire circumference on the piling, you are fairly sure that the piling (at least the lower parts of the western, southern and eastern walls) doesn't have any ropes on the outside...
As Teldon clips himself on to the rope, the second of the Tower Girls leans back from the wall as she traverses the corner onto the external wall of the piling...any longer, and she will be out of sight from the room...
"If nobody knows where the ring is it has almost certainly 'fallen' into Nalathi's pouch. Someone go check the wererat's room and see if the ropes end there." Teldon calls out as he makes his way out the window.
why didn't I take this blasted harness off sooner...
Zee draws a Harrow card and presses it to her temple. It glows slightly, and she hurls it at the visible Tower Girl.
"Surrender now and we'll spare your lives!"
As the Harrow Card flashes towards the Tower Girl, she repositions herself...but she can't move quickly enough and curses Ziomarra as the card slices a crimson arc across her exposed back...
Following Teldon's suggestion, Briana runs towards the room that the Wererat is presumed to have come from...crashing through the door, the room smells strongly of rats—a mix of spoiled food, dander, and the pungent sting of rat faeces, all under an incongruous scent of lavender. A blanket has been spread on the floor, and a recovered antique brass platter holds a few pieces of rat-gnawed food...
More importantly, there is a small window in this room...but it is too small for someone to squeeze through. As far as Briana can see, there are no ropes in evidence on the areas of external wall she can see.
...and ambling behind her, a tame yet slightly confused dog-sized rat...
Nalathi moves into the room that the Tower Girls have escaped from and, at Teldon's suggestion, starts rummaging around in her bag for the Ring...
Meanwhile, high above the crashing waves, the Tower Girls are slowly but surely traversing the walls of the Crow...
Failing to even make it through the easy hand and foot holds of the interior section, Teldon unleashes a brief tirade combining a melange of colorful language with expressions of frustration that a man of his intelligence and learning would be thwarted by a stone wall.
"Nalathi, I need that ring right away!" he calls out, cutting the two ropes and tying one very carefully to his harness while holding the other.
Whilst Teldon struggles with stepping out of the window and into the open blue, the Tower Girls continue to make their steady escape… completely unaware that, behind them, the safety ropes have been cut.
Teldon takes the ring from Nalathi and, clutching it tighter than he's ever held anything before, leaps out the window...
Teldon grasps the ring and, trust in the strength of the Tower Girls’ pitons jumps from the window…the rope goes slack as he starts to plummet… before, just as a look of panic was starting to colour Teldon’s visage, the magic of the ring slows his descent…at about twenty feet below the window the rope suddenly goes taut as it catches on the piton at the corner of the wall and Teldon swings out, pendulum like, onto the external wall of the Crow.
…From outside the piling, you hear shouting…
Nalathi runs back toward where she and the others had hidden earlier, hoping to find some kind of staircase or other way of moving upward besides the one they'd just used.
,
Running southwards to look for alternative routes upwards, Nalathi (with Joanna following behind) finds an apparent dead end...a network of three rooms...
Several crates, barrels, and sacks lie in the middle room, stacked in an orderly fashion in the middle of the room. A pair of donkey rats are currently rooting among a spilled sack of rye. They shriek in anger if disturbed but, after sniffing the air around you, ignore you and go back to eating rye.
The chamber leading from the food stores seems at to be merely another empty room, until you notice the cool breeze wafting in from the south - apparently through a solid wall...looking hard enough, you realise that there is an illusory wall shielding the view into the shaft high above the dock.
The eastern wall of this room depicts a fresco of a tall red-headed woman with a ranseur, standing over a short hunch-backed man - the ranseur is impaled in the man’s belly, and his twisted demonic hands clutch at the shaft as black smoke wafts up from his face and wounds.
To Brianna, "I can't tell!"
Zee shouts out the open window, "Teldon! What's happening?!"
- the shouting is not distinct but you do see Teldon jump and jerk to a halt some twenty feet below you...then, all of a sudden, he shoots upward - the rope pulling him up by about ten feet or so...when he next swings into view, you can see he is wrestling with his crossbow....trying to line up a shot.
"Climbing is harder than it seems! It may take a while for me to catch up with you girls."
- Teldon, hanging from the rope, looks back at you...and then, pushing away from the piling with his legs, cuts the rope that he is attached to. He plummets for a moment before the wind catches him and blows him away from the walls - his descent slowing as Natalya's ring fights against gravity...
...as he drops, you hear a scream from out of sight off to your right...and mere seconds later the smack of something heavy hitting the water below...
...watching Teldon fall, you see him splash into the water...some twenty feet clear of the piling...
As he slowly drifts down toward the water, Teldon loads his crossbow and fires it at some unseen target on the pillar. Then, even more surprisingly, he does it a second time before splashing in the water.
,
,
After hitting the water Teldon begins thrashing trying to make his way swimming like a boss to the pillar.
After swimming safely to the pillar, he shouts up to the girls, "I only managed to stop one of them! The other one is climbing down!"
She moves back out into the main room. Are we really going to have to climb out on the ledge to get up where they are? She looks down at the shard bouncing innocently against her chest. Can't you tell me anything?