Des squeezes their eyes shut as the goblin mumbles what sounds like a prayer.
Darla affixes one of the temporary badges to her arm as Alek suggested. Letting out a deep breath, the bard nods her readiness to again face the citadel's undead guardians. She offers to lend Drake her light mace, in case he'd like to wield a real weapon against the skeletal sentinels.
"Hey, thanks! Yeah, this will definitely come in more handy than my torch."
The party affixes the worn badges to their sleeves.
Drake begins to try to strap on the dilapidated plate. It takes quite a bit of time, even with the help of the others, and when he is done, he feels awkward and off-balance due to the weight of the armor. Moving is more difficult, and every step is accompanied by clanks and scrapes and trailed by a fine powder of rust. When the group heads out of the citadel and around to the secret entrance to the lower level in the slope of the hill, he begins to wish he had waited until he was closer to the guardians he hopes to deceive to don the Hellknight plate.
Sweating profusely after fighting to get the armor on, "You have GOT to be kidding me! How does ANYBODY wear this bucket of non-moving bolts? I mean, I am a sitting duck in this thing. I sure hope we don't have to run. If so, just save yourselves," he says, somewhat kidding.
The group returns to the entrance to the corridor down which the party ignominiously retreated yesterday.
Darla switches out her rapier for a sling as the party nears the Hellknight crypt. She suggests eyeballing the guardian undead when they arrive in the crypt to try to determine which (if any) have lingering damage from the previous fight...so the party can take those ones out first, should combat prove unavoidable.
Taking a deep breath, "Okay, since I'm wearing this building, I'll go first. Hopefully, it'll be enough to fool 'em and we can move on through unbothered," he says, drawing the light mace Darla gave him. "Well... here goes nothing." He then leads the way.
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Des adjusts the ratty Hellknight patch on their sleeve nervously, swallowing audibly as the goblin turns sideways and begins to follow Drake, the insignia'd shoulder in the lead.
"I am a-a very big and scary Hellknight. P-praise Asomdeus. Woo."
Drake clanks down the hall, trying and mostly failing to keep the spikes on his armor from scraping against the walls in the narrow corridor. Reaching the closed door at the end, he glances back for confirmation and/or encouragement. At Gellius's nod, he opens the door that Darla slammed when the party retreated the previous day.
The light that spills in from Gellius's enhanced main-gauche illuminates the sarcophagus with the cracked and broken corner; beyond that, three more sarcophagi are visible in the shadows. Ahead on the left, Drake can see an open archway into another dark room.
Silently, Alek points Drake through the archway to the left.
Drake nods and heads in that direction.
As Drake rounds the corner, followed by Gellius and his light, the shattered bones of the skeleton the party dispatched yesterday come into view scattered on the floor. At the far edge of the light, near one of the open graves, a still-animate skeleton stands. Its sightless eye sockets turn toward the intruders, but it makes no move.
"Eh-heh, heh." Des laughs nervously as the goblin tries to appear friendly the skeleton, showing two rows of sharp teeth in a too-wide smile.
"We're all Hellknights here, yes? Just a bunch of us Hellknights going on Hellknight business, yep, that's right."
Darla makes sure the badge she wears is showing prominently as she approaches the skeletal guardian, but she keeps meek and silent, knowing that a mere badge likely doesn't mark her as a high-ranking member of the Hellknight order.
Drake continues on past the skeleton, really hoping the plan works.
Nervously, the party continues into the room. Five skeletons stand motionlessly near their opened graves. Their skulls turn to follow Drake's progression through the room, but they don't move from their spaces.
At the end of the hall of graves, a door is set in the eastern wall.
Looking back toward the others, "I know this is a shot in the dark prayer, but, I don't suppose there's any chance y'all got this door open the last time and these skeletons simply decided to close it, did you? Just curious if any of you have any indication about what might just be behind door number one."
"We never made it past that first dead skeleton back there the first time," Alek answers through an expression that might be meant to be a casual smile if it weren't so frozen and tense. "I say, try the door. Even if they turn on us when we open it, we'll have a wall to put between us and them in the worst case scenario ... unless there are more inside."
Darla grimaces at Alek's words. As rearguard, she'll be the last of the group to get to the next door...and the likeliest target for all the undead that might pursue. Still, she can see no other play, so she sucks up her fear and follows the leaders.
"Okay... here we go." Taking a deep breath, the ranger reaches for the door and proceeds to open it as if he belongs there.
Rows of large metal-and-stone lockboxes line the walls of this storeroom, as do occasional shelves and cabinets. Most of the lockboxes hang ajar, having been opened and emptied long before, most likely when the Order of the Nail departed for Varisia. A set of obvious tracks on the dusty floor suggest someone moved around in here quite recently. They lead from a door in the northern wall, around a low table in the center of the room, to the door Drake just opened and another just to the south. A pile of ashes and a few melted candles stubs lie atop the central table.
The skeletons continue to make to no move to attack the party.
Once she's safely out of the skeletal guardians' hall, Darla closes the door behind her and goes back to her normal duty of detecting for magical emanations.
Des breathes out in relief as they put the skeletons behind them, and the new room does not seem to be inhabited by other undead. Immediately, the goblin's eyes are drawn to the lockboxes and shelves as they start poking around.
Once the door is closed, the party lets out a collective breath of relief.
"This is the Vault of the Nail," Alek realizes with enthusiasm. "Every Hellknight in the citadel would have had an assigned lockbox for safekeeping of valuables and documents. My grandfather's box would have been emptied when they returned his personal belongings to the family ... but maybe something was missed. Look around for a box marked 'Stagram!'"
"There's something magical nearby--within 30 feet of where I'm now standing," Darla reports quietly. The bard switches to Search mode.
"This is the Vault of the Nail," Alek realizes with enthusiasm. "Every Hellknight in the citadel would have had an assigned lockbox for safekeeping of valuables and documents. My grandfather's box would have been emptied when they returned his personal belongings to the family ... but maybe something was missed. Look around for a box marked 'Stagram!'"
"You got it." Drake proceeds to look for said marking.
"There's something magical nearby--within 30 feet of where I'm now standing," Darla reports quietly. The bard switches to Search mode.
Looking over at Alek, "Maybe that'll be what you're looking for, friend. Let's check it out." The ranger then heads in the direction of the magical aura as directed by Darla.
Darla locates the lockbox marked 'Stagram.' It appears to be empty, but when she tips it, she hears a clink. Upon closer examination, there is a crack between the metal bottom of the box and the stone coffer in which it is set; something small could have slipped in and been trapped between the inner and outer boxes.
On a shelf in a dark corner, Gellius finds some decaying sheets of parchment stacked beneath a silver implement depicting the head of a woman in profile; each side of the head has a face. The parchments on top fall to pieces at a touch, but some of the paper toward the bottom appears to be in better condition.
Des goes up on tiptoes to get a better look at the silver medallion. "Pretty." The goblin turns to Alek. "Is this what you were looking for?"
"No," Alek answers shortly, frowning at the lockbox. "This could be, though. Damnation! This box is too well-made to have had such shoddy workmanship. There's no way to smash it. I suppose we'll just have to carry the whole heavy thing back to town; the stonemasonry will have tools to get into it."
Now that Darla knows where Alek's ring might be, she tries to position herself more than 30 feet from it while detecting magic, to perhaps figure out by the process of elimination if the item inside the broken lockbox is what triggered a ping in the first place. The idea of carrying the whole thing back to town does not appeal to her.
It takes some persuading, but Darla convinces Alek to squeeze into a far corner with the box while she re-pings the room. She still senses the same source of magic and sets everyone but Alek to going over the room with a fine-toothed comb.
Gellius checks through the papers that were under the silver implement and finds four well-preserved scrolls with indecipherable runes on them -- indeciperable to him, anyway. Darla recognizes three as scrolls of magic missile, darkness, and darkvision. Des recognizes the fourth as a scroll of heal, as well as the darkness and darkvision ones.
"Oh, these are useful!" exclaims Des as the scrolls are identified. "You just read the words off them and magic happens!"
The goblin tugs at Alek's sleeve, showing the silver holy symbol. "Which deity is this? Doesn't look like Asmodeus..."
"Certainly not!" Alek snorts, sparing a glance for the holy symbol. "A woman with a mask? Some sort of minor god of theatrics, I'd guess. I've no idea what a thing like that would be doing in the Vault of the Nail, though. Odd sort of paperweight for a Hellknight."
"Hey, let's check out what's behind that door there," he motions toward the northernmost door. "I've got a pretty good feeling about that one." He then moves to the door and tests to see if it's locked. If not, he'll cautiously open it.
Gellius moves up next to Drake with a nod towards the tracks on the floor.
“Someone was moving about in here,” he observes, before pointing towards the pile of ash on the table. “And whoever it was didn’t seem to care about looting the place. They didn’t go near the lockboxes and did…something on the table there. Maybe they were part of this group of strangers who have been causing all this trouble to begin with.”
Gellius examines the ash and candles on the table. He is hardly an expert in the arcane, but he has read many books on various subjects and feels certain that a ritual was performed in this room -- and from the lack of dust on the candle stubs, not long ago. Given what Alek has told the party about the skeletal guardians, he is pretty sure that some sort of necromancy was done in here which caused the long-dead Hellknights to rise and defend their comrades' resting place. Judging from the footprints, whoever performed the ritual came and went by the door Drake is now opening.
Behind the door is a long narrow space cluttered with storage racks and cabinets; some are empty, though others still contain dusty banners with the Order of the Nail's sunburst insignia, stylized Asmodean paraphernalia, and hooded robes clearly designed for formal funerals. Curiously, a dirt-walled tunnel opens in the eastern wall of the closet and stretches into darkness; a set of tracks leads to and from this tunnel to the door in which Drake is standing.
Des pockets the silver medallion, then starts poking around the storage space, wrapping some of the banners around their shoulders like a cape.
"We got us a tunnel here, folks. A tunnel with tracks no less. Odds are pretty good the same folks Gellius just mentioned. Should we check it out? Gonna need some light if we do because it is really dark in there."
Darla moves forward a bit and casts a light spell on someone's weapon.
Des notices that one of the banners is really heavy; a closer look reveals that it is decorated with shiny golden rings shaped like Order of the Nail insignias that are made from actual gold! That ought to be worth something to someone.
Des attempts to drag the heavy banner off the shelf it's resting on, and promptly drops it, raising a cloud of dust that sends the goblin into fits of coughing.
"*khoff*khoff* Real gold! Shiny *khoff* cloth!"
Alek squints skeptically into the gloom. "Look, it seems like I may have found what I came for, even if I can't exactly get at it yet. I don't see the benefits of exploring a dark tunnel used by necromancers. Hadn't we better leave well enough alone and get back to town?"
Darla's face indicates that she's a bit put off by Alek's single-minded self-interest...but she's also interested in seeing this ring that means so much to the man. Alleged ring, she reminds herself as she looks to Gellius and the others for their opinions on the matter.
Shrugging, "Fair enough. You can go on back if you want. I, personally, want to see what's down the dark tunnel. No way I came here to just get a ring and leave. What about the rest of you? Are you all going to stay and check this place out with me or are you going to be heading back as well?"
"We just started, why go back now?" wonders Des.
"Well, good luck to you," Alek nods, taking the bulky lockbox in his arms and turning back toward the door by which the party entered. His enthusiasm visibly dampens a bit when he realizes he's going to have to walk back through the skeletons himself. "Er, listen," he says, whipping one of the moth-eaten robes off a rack and draping it around him for an extra Hellknighty accessory, "you wouldn't mind just waiting until I've got out of the room, would you? Just in case?"
Steeling himself, he takes a deep breath before opening the door back onto the Vault of the Nail and its skeletal guardians.
Drake shrugs. "Sure. No problem."