Arsith tries to hit the disgusting creature again, wanting to capitalise on the opportunity from Miss Zee Evil Eye
Arsith's mace cracks against the oily black carapace of the spider creature - it shudders under the impact...
Joanna seeing that the evil spider was still within her reach takes her sword and stabs forward, trying to wound it, and hopefully get it to focus on her.
"Aw, I'm getting a bit jealous. I thought you were only going to focus on the cheeky little girl who didn't know her place?"
Notgood.Notgood.Notgood.
Scuttling backwards, Alizna bites at Briana below her...
Chuckling, she replies to Joanna, "All in good time my dear... All in good time..."
Zee draws a card from her tattered Harrow deck, touches it to her forehead, then hurls it at the spider-thing that is Alizna.
Joanna struggles to get free and force Alizna to focus on her, but the webs hold too firm to her.
Teldon briefly looks frustrated as he surveys the room and the shortage of available places from which he can use his spear. He carefully steps around Jo and ducks behind Briana through the open doorway before turning around and stabbing back at Alizna from the doorway.
,
Ziomarra's card slices into the spider beast... it twitches angrily as one of its legs, partially severed, hangs uselessly below it... But Teldon, possibly distracted by Briana's injury, misses with his followup spear thrust...
Arsith's mace cracks against the spider's legs... Another one smashed into oblivion as the beast hisses in fury...
...and, in retaliation, bites at Arsith...
"C'mon. C'mon!"
Joanna, struggles against the webs and finally frees herself. She glares at the spider and points her sword at it.
"Now, you face judgement."
"Briana, are you alright?!?"
keep fighting, you can't help her if you turn your back on the creature and it takes you...
Teldon tries again to stab Alizna, growing more desperate to kill the creature...
,
Fueled by the need to protect those she cares for and learned to appreciate, angry at the monstruosity, Arsith barely feels the sting of the bite or the venom in her body.
Briana, stay behind, Teldon, stay with her, I'll protect you both. Love has suffered enough!
Teldon’s spear drives upwards – crunching through the abdomen of the spider creature and, with a second push, piercing all the way through to the ceiling… a stick green liquid runs down the shaft of the spear as Alizna roars in pain. The creature, sluggish in its movements, is clearly very close to death...
Eyes like blue fire, Zee throws another card at the spider-thing that is Alizna.
Arsith strikes again, puttiong all her strenght into the blow
Neither Ziomarra nor Arsith hurt the spider creature... it pulls itself tight against the ceiling as the attacks are aimed at it before, whispering in sibilants, it glares at the friends...
...and then disappears. The scuttling and scratching noises from above the group tells of the creature's attempted escape...
"La naiba! A dispărut!"
Ziomarra casts another spell, while holding a Harrow card from her spell deck over one eye. Both her eye and the card glow with a faint blue light. She then scans the ceiling as if looking through the card.
"Great," Joanna says, obviously dismayed at the tactic. She listens carefully for a moment before striking out.
The young paladin gives a sigh of annoyance as she stabs where she hears the scuttling and heavy breathing, and finds her sword only hitting wood.
"It's seems to be some kind of invisibility spell but I couldn't tell which one..." Teldon reports with some frustration. Then he listens carefully to the skittering when it comes...
Failing to pinpoint her movement he angrily makes his best possible guess and stabs up at the ceiling...
...hitting nothing.
"Dammit, cover all the exits so she can't escape!" he calls out, standing up a little straighter in the doorway he's been blocking.
Arsith places herself by the door frame, as quickly as possible, and tries her luck at their now invisible foe
Staying close to the door to prevent the escape of the spider creature, none of the friends have any luck whilst swinging their weapons at the ceiling. For a second or two, after the fury of combat, everything seems still… and then a door at the western end of the room, located just beyond a debris-covered worktop and a badly damaged partition wall, creaks open…
sh!t
Teldon yanks out one of the scrolls stored in the loops of his explorer's outfit, unfurls it from its protective casing, and does his best to read it correctly under pressure...
Dropping the spent scroll, he points and calls out, "There she is!"
Seeing with unparalleled vision, Teldon watches as Alizna - still clinging to the ceiling - becomes visible once more... Not watching the friends, 'it' appears to be doing something at the wall to the north of the opened door...
Guided by her half-perception of the aura of Alizna's invisibilty spell, and Teldon's guidance, Zee hurls a Harrow card at her best guess of the spider-thing's position.
The card slices through empty space, then suddenly banks to the left and flutters back to Zee's hand.
Joanna, guided by Teldon's pointing, stabs up at the spot the spider-thing should be in.
Realising that she has been discovered and is seemingly backed into a corner, Alizna hisses and bites at Joanna… as she does so, she phases back into view…
Arsith acts quickly, hits the creature but she doesn't manage to kill it.
"There you are!"
Zee flings another card at the creature.
With Ziomarra's flung card embedding in its skull, Alizna finally lets out a death croak and, limbs quivering, drops from the ceiling... crashing against Joanna as it falls. Listening and holding still for a moment, it appears that no-one is coming to Alizna's aid and there is time to examine the 'horticultural laboratory' in this room...
An examination of the plants growing in the room reveals a large collection of poisonous mushrooms and other strange fungi, including several containers of pale blue mold that have been labelled with a skull and crossed bones.
Also present here are four strange puffball-like spore cases, gray and the size of a man’s fist - among these four sits a fifth, recently emptied spore case.
Despite its disgusting use and rustic appearance, this room contains a masterwork alchemy laboratory kit and many vials of useful fluids and unguents, including:
Looking into the room to the west, the room that Alizna seemed to be scuttling towards - This windowless room is lit by a single brass lantern hanging from a rusty nail on the northern wall. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of moths crawl throughout the ceiling’s rotting rafters and on the moldering curtains of boarded windows, the disturbance of their movements causing eerie shadows to wiggle on every surface. Old floorboards have been ripped up in the room’s corner, allowing a flight of earthen steps to lead down into the ground... to a cellar or some other subterranean space.
"Here, drink this." Teldon says with some relief, handing one of the neutralize poison potions to Briana. "These spore cases hold the seeds to grow qlippoths... We should probably destroy them. The empty one is likely from the pig; I don't believe they're powerful enough to reanimate Alizna. I suppose we should destroy her remains just to be safe. The rest of this we should take with us. And it wouldn't hurt to check the strongbox before going down in case it contains anything useful..."
He makes his way back to the earlier room and, being careful not to step on the broken pieces of floor, moves to the strongbox and inspects it for traps...
Edging across the floor, stepping to the stronger boards whenever it seems that the floor is about to give away, Teldon makes his way across the room and, after confirming it isn't trapped, opens the strongbox. Even in the dim light of the farmhouse, the gold in the box gleams with a warm glow - various items of jewellery; brooches, rings and necklaces, have been carelessly heaped into the box...
Joanna pulls herself out from under the corpse, her teeth clenched in a grimace as one of her hands holds the wound on her shoulder. Her entire body trembles as she stands up and leans against the wall.
"Well," she says with a weak smile, "That didn't go too badly."
Joanna is rather shaken at the moment. Though she's trying to hide it.
The wound on her shoulder isn't life threatening, but if it had been just a few inches over, she'd have been hurt rather badly. As it is, she's looking pretty ragged.
Silently, Arsith comes close to Joanna, gives her a lenghty hug while stroking her hair gently, and calls fervently on Pharasma's favor to heal her friend's wounds
Do you want me to check your wounds, dear? I got my healing kit, and could at least clean them..
"Hopefully," Joanna agrees, "I--I'm sorry you are having to look after me like this," she adds, "I've exhausted what I can do to heal my own wounds, but I can help get myself patched up."
Teldon dumps the treasures unceremoniously into his sack and then rushed back to the others as quickly as he can move safely. When he gets back he tries, weakly, not to scowl when he discovers that nobody has packed up the alchemy equipment. Grabbing the vials he says, "I hope very much that you're right but the magic that lets me see invisible things will only last about two more minutes, so we should try to move quickly in case anything is lying in wait... we can grab the rest of this equipment on the way out..."
Pushing past the thick webbing that coats the staircase down to the cellar, the friends descend...
The walls of the low-ceilinged basement that they discover beneath the farmhouse are decorated by curtains; curtains made out of a mix of thick sheets of webs adorned with countless dead insects. Most of these are flies and mosquitoes, some of which are quite large. At the far end of the room sits a low wooden table on which a hideous shape crouches—a human-sized statue of an insectile monster made from corn husks, dry branches, rags, and bones. The floor of the room is an uneven layer of moist soil and earth, and three shovels, their blades caked with earth, lean against the side of the stairs.