Jenner is red-faced and sheepish when he returns with the others, and doesn't say much about why he left. Damned island. Damned spooks.
....and it's not bad enough they're fighting them, they got one in WITH them. He returns Elizar's glare with a sort of wild-eyed look of his own.
He's glad enough for the distraction of the discovered scrolls, and looks them over with a muttered prayer to Abadar.
The discoveries of the Arkley house, the lists, and the strange compass-thing all make Jenner tug at his beard with bemusement. "This gets weirder and weirder," he complains to the universe.
"Say now, good work with that lock, what have you found in there then?"
"Very well, if it will make you happy, Miss Fleur," Aurelian responds, taking the weapon and slinging it over his shoulder, before adjusting the quiver.
He curiously gazes around the room and at what's been discovered in the box.
Ashlyn stands in the centre of the courthouse and looks around, slowly spinning in a circle.
Noticing Evie opening a lockbox, Ashlyn wanders over and asks what she's found.
Jenner peruses the scrolls slowly and finds a scroll of protection from evil, one of burning hands, one of glitterdust and one of restoration. The scrolls are bound together by a small brass ring engraved with the word 'Hendrake'.
Just as Evie starts explaining, excitedly, what she's found Ashlyn sees movement out of the corner of her eye. On the gallery above is a small spider-like creature with a large red orb which appears to be staring at you. It hasn't reacted to you yet...
"There! In the gallery!" Ashlyn exclaims.
She looks around, focuses her mind on a nearby chair and hurls it across the room at the creature with her mind. The chair flies straight at the spider-creature...
bludgeoning
Where? Elizar mentally asks Ashlyn.
Elizar looks around, this way and that and up, looking for the creature threatening Ashlyn. Following the course of her debris to its target, Elizar narrows his eyes at the creature and howls in
Ashlyn focuses her mind again, hurling another chair up into the gallery at the strange spider-creature.
bludgeoning
"Go get him, pal!" Ashlyn tells Elizar after hurling more furniture across the room with a thought.
Elizar looks around for a way up into the gallery.
If he thinks he could jump up there, or onto a table and then up there, grab onto a ledge and then hoist himself up, he'll try. Otherwise he looks for stairs and races up them to engage the spider-creature
Fleur raises her crossbow, loads it and fires at the spider... if Ashlyn didn't already kill it.
but obviously she's a bit rattled by the sudden appearance of the ugly little beast.
Sarine will draw a javelin and throw it at the creature.
"It is a decoration," Aurelian notes. "Why are you all throwing things at it? If it it something else, you do not need to worry: Aurelian Fache is here."
He waits for the thing to do anything that seems like it would make him want to attack it.
Ashlyn sends two chairs hurtling up into the gallery and smash into the thing. It ceases moving, lying in a collapsed heap of junk.
Evie opens the box and finds a collection of ledgers which seem to detail daily life in the colony. The entries are regular and bland until about two months ago when they start becoming erratic and finally cease entirely.
Ashlyn climbs up into the gallery, hopefully by some stairs, to examine the strange spider creature she just crushed with some chairs.
Jenner barely has time to respond before Ashlynn is somehow throwing chairs with.... out... using her hands. He directs some sidelong gazing at her as well.
"...well, that was quick," he mutters. He sidles near Evie with the scrolls he'd deciphered, and looks over her shoulder around her, he's not tall enough to look over shoulders, to read them.
"Someone's snipped out these pages, that don't seem good. By the way, these scrolls are protection from evil, burnin' hands, glitterdust and..." the dwarf whistles. "...restoration, that's a big-boy one. I can manage to use the protection one and the restoration if we need 'em, but we'd need some sorta wizardy kind for the others I imagine?"
Elizar gets up near the spider creature to find it unconscious. He leaps upon it and smashes it some more for good measure.
As Ashlyn joins him he smiles proudly.
He turns and examines what he's just smushed.
Ashlyn nods. "You did good, pal."
---
After examining the spider-thing, Ashlyn turns her attention to the gallery and looks around, then looks down from the gallery at the courtroom to see if she missed anything.
---
If she finds nothing else, Ashlyn and Elizar head back down to the main floor to see what Evie and Jenner are gawking at together.
"Did you find something?" she asks curiously.
Sarine moves to collect her javelin and helps to examine the logbook.
"Well, that fits in with every other dismal fact we've found so far. Something strange happened here..."
After all of the excitement, Evie is only skim reading the book and doesn't notice the missing pages until Jenner points them out.
"If anything every happens to my own log book, I would be horrified. What must have happened in these last few days for this to happen? If someone cut this out, there must have been someone around after the chaos to cut this out?"
The next two buildings around the edge of the palisade prove to be communal housing. Long and rectangular, both buildings are constructed entirely from planks on a wooden frame, with a pitched thatched roof. Each building has two door frames on the building side away from the palisade - but there are no doors, only heavy curtains of badly tanned leather. There are four window frames, likewise empty, with sacks to cover them. Inside the floors are hard packed earth with wooden bunk beds around the outside. Most of the beds have bundles of clothes and personal possessions sat neatly at the end - the whole place has the same deserted air as the rest of the village.
As you leave you glance north and can make out, beyond the boundaries of the colony but well within sight there is a small field and even from this distance you can see the mounds which dot its otherwise flat surface...
Ashlyn wanders into the communal housing and looks around for survivors or threats. Finding nothing, she begins to sift through bags and beds, looking for further clues as to what happened here.
After a while she sighs. "No more paperwork or clues," she announces, "But I did find this money and a necklace. Can anyone tell if it's magical?"
"Let's finish looking through the palisade. It's unlikely that anyone is still here, but there's no reason to finish looking. Also, we might still be able to find tools to unlock that box in the smithy."
Ashlyn nods. "Agreed."
Aurelian looks around.
"Aurelian can see why they would have left some of these clothes -- they are not pretty -- but this is still very strange. Did they not know Aurelian was coming? Why would they have left without waiting for him to fix whatever problem they were having?"
He shrugs, unable to understand the minds of such people, and continues to lead the others around the palisade.
"Hey, what's this?" Ashlyn asks, pulling a wand out of a mattress. "Any idea, Evie? Fleur? It's got initials on it... U.H."
Ashlyn passes the wand off to someone who could identify it, and let's Evie glance over the charter to identify UH.
Ashlyn smiles at Aurelians confidence. "Maybe they couldn't wait any longer."
Elizar rolls his tear-filled eyes at Aurelian, then glares at Ashlyn as she replies to him. He drifts right in front of her and glares at her for while.
Ashlyn stares back at Elizar, eyebrow raised in curiosity, then surprised. They stand silent for half a minute, Elizar looking angry or annoyed, and Ashlyn looking embarrassed, then amused. They look to be sharing some kind of mental communication.
Eventually Ashlyn smiles and pats Elizar on his goopy shoulder.
"You're overreacting. Come on, pal. It's time to move on."
Elizar lets out a mournful sigh and shakes his head as he follows Ashlyn out of the building.
Evie's eyes go vague for a moment. "U.H... U.H... Hendrake! That was the name, there's a Hendrake on the charter!" She starts rummaging in her bag to find the charter that she stowed there a few minutes ago. "That's it! Una Hendrake - she must have been some kind of wizard."
Evie takes the wand, murmurs her cantrip and looks it up and down carefully before handing it on to Fleur.
"I think it will cast colour spray. What do you think Fleur? Do we know how much power it still has?"
She keeps up a discussion of the merits of colour spray, and wands more generally all the way around to A3.
Fleur look over at the field sieht the mounds, shakes her head. "That doesn't bode well... mounds in a field could be graves... or more giant ant things... either way not good news."
The rectangular building you come to is constructed out of mud bircks. There is a simple door which faces inwards towards the colonies well, the strange thing is that it has no windows. A heady smell of dried herbs, plants and dried meat lingers in the air.
As you push open the door you find a short set of steps leading down into the building, which is set about three feet lower than the ground outside. There is no light inside and only the ambient light from the entrance-way lights the floor below.
Four stout pillars support the roof and are laden with strings of garlic, salted meat and bones. Crate, barrels and boxes form haphazard stacks and debris of rotten food and husks of grains litter the floor.
As the sunlight glances in, the floor begins to swarm as hundreds of cockroaches scuttle out of their hiding places and begin to swarm about on the floor.
"Ewww... yucky... let's leave them be... "
"Some of those boxes and barrels are still sealed." Ashlyn points out, seemingly undisturbed by the vast carpet of writhing bugs.
Noticing Fleur's disgust Ashlyn looks confused. "But we can take care of it later, I guess, if you want...?"
"I think we're too far away from civilization to put that food at risk. We can't be sure that the seals will hold."
Sarine removes two bottles of alchemist's fire from her pack.
"If anyone feels like they have a good throwing arm? We should probably try to get them to come out of the granary first."
"Feel like getting those bugs to come out, Elizar?" Ashlyn asks.
Elizar looks at Ashlyn and nods slowly.
"Or I could throw some stuff at it," Ashlyn adds. "Maybe they'll come out for that..."
"You'd better stand back, Fleur," Ashlyn adds helpfully.
"I agree we should try and get that food out. Who knows what state other supplies may be in. I could try and hook the crates with my grappling hook and haul 'em out?" Jenner suggests a little dubiously, eyeing the cockroaches with the distaste of a merchant.
He unshoulders his pack, digging out rope and a grapnel.
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Aurelian looks quizzically at Elizar.
"You make no sense," he tells the spirit. "When things are dead, they should stay dead. If you would like, Aurelian will stab you so you can stay dead for real. Furthermore, if Aurelian were in a woman (or a man, for that matter), he would think it is very rude to pull out. You should stay there for everyone's satisfaction!"
Aurelian looks at the bugs and then at his sword.
"Aurelian could stab each of them, but there are quite a lot. His sword arm will not grow tired -- he trains for just these circumstances, as you saw! -- but it may take him some time..."
Listening to the others, he nods at all the plans.
"Yes. Let the dead man brings the bugs out and then we can use fire!"
EARLIER:
Ashlyn gasps when Aurelian offers to re-kill her dear friend, Elizar. But as Aurelian finishes speaking she blushes furiously and looks thoroughly scandalized.
"That's -- That's--"
She turns to Aurelian "You don't understand!"
Then she turns to Elizar and smacks him on the shoulder, making a squelch sound.
"And you! Quit thinking that!" She looks mortified.
Elizar shrugs his shoulders as he looks at Ashlyn, clearly thinking that is not such a bad idea...
Ashlyn turns and flounces away in embarrassment.
---
BACK TO PRESENT:
Ashlyn removes three vials of acid from her bag, keeping two for herself and passing the last one to whoever wants one. (If it's Aurelian she passes it to him while looking at the ground, clearly still embarrassed over Aurelian's earlier comments).
Ashlyn backs up from the entrance to make sure she's not going to be in the way. She makes sure everyone else is also out of the way and prepared before allowing Elizar to go inside the building.
---
Before Elizar goes in Ashlyn places his hands on his shoulders and pulls the ectoplasm that makes up his body back into her own, leaving Elizar an incorporeal spirit.
"We'll try it this way first, okay?" she tells him. "It's safer."
Ashlyn stands ready to hurl a vial of acid at the cockroaches when they come fully outside.
Elizar swoops into the room, diving through the swarms form with his own body, and trying to drive them outside.
Elizar drifts back outside and waits while Ashlyn turns him ectoplasmic. The he stops forward slowly, one step at a time, into the darkness. The moment he thinks he has the swarms attention he runs back outside, trying to lure them into the open. If they don't react he takes a swipe at them in the hopes of riling them up.
Evie, often rushing into combat looks confused yet disgusted at the swarm of insects looking rather lost standing holding her bow, which clearly is no help in this situation.
"I'm really not the biggest fan of insects" she says with a green tinge to her face.
Elizar has no impact what-so-ever on the bugs scuttling around the floor, he even passes through them - all to no avail. What does become apparent though is that they are not fans of light and the entire swarm stays away from the few sunbeams that fall over the steps into the bottom of the granary. Even when Elizar attempts to smash them - swatting a few bugs in the process, they do little more than swarm around his feet - although that causes some damage by itself.
Clearly these bugs are not going to be drawn out...
"What does Aurelian not understand?" Aurelian asks, looking confused.
"They are afraid of the light (which is a silly thing to be afraid of, because it cannot hurt you!). Perhaps we have some light we can use to scare them off while we get the food out?" Aurelian suggests.
Aurelian is left confused, as Ashlyn does not return to explain it to him.
---
"Of course!" Ashlyn exclaims. She picks up a few rocks, and stares at them for a while. Suddenly, they begin to glow brightly.
She passes them to Elizar. "Use these to try herding them out."