Maura is strangely silent as they meet Allegra, though she does attempt to read her thoughts as asked. When the others look at her to see her verdict, she merely shakes her head. "She checks out. She is concerned with Vix, racked by pain from an encounter with fish people, and wanting to bring... justice, I would say... to Lord Lowls and his army. More concerning is that face up there." She points to the form that Vix calls to moments later. Shrugging, she follows the others into the room.
Looking down at the glass, Maura observes it cautiously.
"Strange things have been happening. I would... advise you... that perhaps just setting off on the road now might be more beneficial than waiting for whatever arrangements might be made."
As she says this, she quietly works in words to the others, letting them know if the wine is safe to drink or not.
Allegra tries to stay alert for any trickery from both their hosts and this redheaded rascal. She was acting a lot more strangely than the nobles seemed to be.
She tries to recall any scant details she may know about who they claim to be.
Wanting answers though, she turns to the ranking member. "Viscount, where did the Count go? Have you seen anything strange around these grounds, and did you see when they brought me in?"
Saiya is extremely tempted by the wine. After everything they've been though in the past week, a drink (or five) sounds wonderful.
She is however not an idiot, and there are some gift horses you do look in the mouth. Particularly when those gift horses disappear and then reappear with already-opened bottles.
"No thank you." She doesn't particularly care if refusing is a social faux pas. It's not like she'd ever be welcomed at a noble's dinner party anyway. It seems everyone else is coming to the same conclusion; she sees Maura staring at the wine with a look of concentration on her face while Vix makes bad jokes about poisoned needles.
She idly leans against the wall while studying the two nobles. Baroness Daelene Spence and Viscount Asa Lalith, eh? The upper crust sure does love their titles.
Saiya remembers that there are minor nobles by those names but she doesn’t remember what they look like.
“Take that in a non-accusatory way. I mean I was shot by a dart. In the cheek to boot, so I best not drink anything for fear me face’ll spring a leak.”
Daelene comments, ”That’s truly dreadful. Not even a little bit?” Vixen feels a strong compulsion to drink but because she knows it could kill her she fights off the urge.
"Strange things have been happening. I would... advise you... that perhaps just setting off on the road now might be more beneficial than waiting for whatever arrangements might be made."
Asa responds, ”I’ve heard rumors of disappearances. All the more reason to bide our time, and wait where we’re safe.”
"Viscount, where did the Count go? Have you seen anything strange around these grounds, and did you see when they brought me in?"
Asa dodges the question about the count and strangeness, ”I don’t know what you mean. Did someone force you to come here?” Before waiting for an answer he draws a dagger and swings it at Allegra. The blade catches against Allegra's wine glass, far too short to do any damage.
Vix says, “I had enough poison for the day, thanks. But now I mean to decline—”
She sinks into dragon stance and charges past her allies to strike the woman with the wine!
“—impolitely!”
Vixen kicks the noble woman down and doesn't stop kicking. Daelene spits blood out of her mouth at the sudden attack but she's still moving and has her eyes set on retaliation.
”No knives for you, Sirr,”, Ci Ci says, pointing a finger at Asa’s weapon.
Asa feels the heat welling up in the dagger and drops it in the nick of time. Daelene centers herself and 3 perfect illusory copies of the baroness appear.
Her alertness seemingly paying off, Allegra sways back as the duplicitous man draws his dagger and swings it at her. It catches the wine glass in her hand, starting a web of cracks across the crystal bulb. With a splash of crimson, Allegra reverses her sway and her arm shoots forward, attempting to jam the shattering glass into the man's eye.
With a smooth motion, she drops the glass at the end of her swing and her other arm reaches behind her back and hefts her greataxe into place, ready in case her warning isn't clearly understood.
[dice=dagger damage seem fair?]1d4+4
The man jumps causing Allegra to miss the man's face. She swings down at the last second, tearing at his fine cloths. The glass scrapes against chain mail and shatters into useless shards.
"So you want to kill us after all. I'm shocked. Truly." Saiya's voice is deadpan even as she focuses intently on her own hands. The room is far too small for her to move forward and start swinging, and she had been trying to learn an actual offensive spell...
The air writhes as it coalesces into spiders. Hundreds of them. All clinging together into a perfect line. F~+&. Yes.
She snaps her new and extremely disturbing whip towards the man. The woman was probably more dangerous, but might as well take out the one not being shielded by mirror images.
The man reels in horror as a number of spiders land on him and in his hair. He panics.
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Maura sighs and stands up. "So much for hospitality of the house we just kicked our way into." As she speaks she notices the Baroness multiply. Cute trick. Too bad there is only one mind in all of that mess...
Focusing on the Baroness, Maura attempts to overwhelm her with thoughts and feelings, probing her mind for ways inside.
"You might want to stay down before my friends make worrying about finding transportation the least of your worries."
The baroness dies as blood comes gushing out of every orifice on her head. Asa tries to squash the spiders still crawling over his face, up his nostrils and in his ears. He takes a potion from out of one of his belt pouches.
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"Flash, Ahh!" Ci Ci yells, extending her hand towards the struggling man.
Vix is ready to stomp out the illusions and hopefully subdue the real Baroness, but the figments fade, and apparently the woman’s brain melted.
Glaring at Asa, she says, “Her death’s on you.”
She shifts closer to the man and attacks!
Allegra lashes out at the man as he draws his potion, to no avail.
She musters her resolve and tries again, attempting to bring the axe down on him.
Saiya's not ready to stop using her cool new whip just yet, and continues lashing out at the viscount. (It's probably overkill, but it seems like a waste of a new spell to not use it as much as possible.)
To Asa's credit Vixen doesn't trip him, but the subsequent kicking, slashing, and spiders combined with Ci Ci's evil burning spell makes the viscount draw his last breath.
Potion of cure moderate wounds
potion of invisibility
mithral shirt
mwk dagger x2
matching gold necklace and bracelet, 350gp
wand of scorching ray 13 charges
pearl earrings, 200gp
a key
Vix looks at the two bodies with deep remorse. “It didn’t have to come to that.” She glares at Asa, then mutters, “AsshoIe.”
She turns to Allegra. “I’ll tell ye what yer magic can’t figure out about me: I f*#@ with people… in part for the fun, in part to get a read. At the door I kicked, people said they’d let us go but drew weapons. Granted, had the door not been trapped I’d have a bit o’ credibility on me handling o’ that. Here, I erred worse. The countess proved desperate to get me to drink, and I was slow to clue all o’ ye in. Luckily, Asa made a dumber move.
“So at this point the other read I got might be painfully obvious: Melisenn’s silence was deafening. She gave the order.” Vix doesn’t actually know that. She admits so. “Just hunches. I ain’t a mind-reader. But if it makes ye feel better, Allegra, me hunch is ye’re all right. I’ve a much higher opinion o’ ye than whatever fancy-pants prince ye name-dropped.”
Of the loot, she notices the mithril is nicer than her angel armor, but Milani apparently wants her to wear that. So she lets the others sort out the spoils of victory.
Maura shrugs. "I was about to warn you not to drink... but it seems like our... friends..." she looks at the Baroness, still bleeding from having her brains scrambled, as she says this, "decided that subtlety was something they only needed to try once before dropping it."
She stands up and begins to sift over the items recovered from the bodies, seeing if anything speaks to her. "Won't be able to get them to talk yet, but can at least add it to the pile of things to talk with later on." She smirks at Vix's remark about not being a mind reader.
"Well, luckily for you, I am, at least somewhat. Although lately it seems like I am more projecting my thoughts and memories into other minds instead of reading what was already there."
Allegra calmly wipes off her axe, not particularly bothered by the assault. At least these ones were human. "They attacked us and faced the consequences." She starts to shrug off Vix's continued monologue, then really stops to listen when Vix admits she may have made errors. At the end, she sets to searching the for any possible clues or signs of foul play. As she does so, she finally comments. "Self-awareness is good. Leads to growth." She picks up one of the masterwork daggers and slips it into her belt.
Once her search brings her back to the wine bottle, she turns to Maura. "Did you get a read on if this was actually poisoned? Shame to let it go to waste."
"You sure you don't want the armor?" Saiya is a little confused by this, given how much trouble they'd had getting Vix to start wearing the angelskin armor in the first place. But then she had said she thought Milani wanted her to wear it, so maybe that was enough for her?
Gods seemed like more trouble than they were worth. She was glad she didn't remember worshiping any.
So Vix didn't want it, Allegra wore heavy armor, and neither Maura nor Ci Ci wore any at all. "Guess the armor's mine then. Everything else can go in the bag for later use and/or selling." She looks a little forlornly at the now confirmed to be poisoned wine. "Any chance there's more wine around here that's not poisoned?"
"Could be more where it came from. Everybody ready to continue?" She motions up the stairs next to Saiya that Asa had come down.
Ci Ci picks up the wand, and the remaining dagger. "These will come in handy for me, if no one else wants them," she replies.
"I can enchant the jewelry, if anyone is interested," she says offhand, as if offering to sew-up a rip in a dress. "I can make jewelry, too, given the materials and tools."
Vix says, “I want ye to have the mithril, Saiya. Ye’ve been racing me to the fray since we busted out of our cells. I go and do a fool thing and get meself KO’d again, at least ye’ve the shiniest armor.”
Vix asks Maura, “Is that bottle poisoned to the touch? How about we cork it—someone with gloves, then one o’ ye can cast that Prestidigitation spell to be sure ain’t a drop on the outside. Then, I’ve a poison wine bottle I can whip it at an enemy from afar.”
To Saiya again, “As for proper drinks, yer buddy with the snazzy cap invited us. I suggest we settle for whatever’s served at the dive bar. Fine wine’s worth f+~+-all if the atmosphere lacks finesse. Everyone who knows wine knows that,” she says as if she knows people who know wine.
Enchant jewelry???
“Interested—yes! Love to hear more on that, perhaps o’er drinks.”
Allegra keys in on a phrase and tenses up more than normal. "Cells? Is Wrentz hiring criminals to assist her investigations? I don't take you for nuns."
Maura shakes her head. "I honestly can't tell... I know it is poisoned, but I was unable to divine exactly how. That said, given it was in an ingestible substance like wine, I would suppose that would be the most effective way of using it. If it was poisonous from touch alone one of them might have tried throwing a glass in our faces, after all... but I am just speculating. I personally would not use it, but to each their own."
Turning to Allegra, she shakes her head. "From what I was told, we were in an asylum prior to this. I only came too recently, so you would have to ask them about the details."
Saiya pauses in the middle of changing into the mithral armor. She wants to laugh at the nun comment, but knows enough about the Godclaw to take Allegra's question seriously. "Like Maura said, Count Lowls dumped us in an asylum after we somehow mysteriously all came down with group amnesia. Said insane asylum went more insane than normal thanks to people f+%#ing with things that should not be f#*!ed with. My first post-amnesia memory is me and a few other people, Vix included, waking up in cells under the loving care of a doppelganger interested in seeing what people's insides looked on the outside." She shrugs. "Not seeing the appeal in being tortured to death, we broke out."
Okay, mostly seriously.
"I know that probably doesn't make much sense, but it's a very long, complicated story. Telling it will have to wait until later. Preferably over those drinks Vix mentioned." New armor donned, she nods at the stairs. "Ready when you are."
“Yeah… and seeing how ye literally told us, like two minutes ago, that ye were being held prisoner here until, like, three minutes ago… I’m hoping ye might notice the glaring lack o’ connection between being behind bars and deserving it.”
Allegra hears the women out and relaxes back to her standard operating level of tightly wound. "How reassuring. I will take you up on that offer, Saiya, once we're done all this and I can report back." She hefts her holy symbol and taps it against her breastplate with a clank, saying "Not criminals, just a bunch of loonies." It's accompanied by what probably definitely isn't the barest hint of a quirk of a smile.
Vix returns the smile she’s pretty sure she saw, but her face turns serious.
“Ye joke, but if we’re looney, what were they?” Looking at the bodies, she goes on, “It made no sense to go two-on-five once their ruse failed. People who dress this well and have high stations to match don’t just throw their lives away when a plan goes awry.
“We’d have spared ’em had they surrendered… right?” She leaves no time for an answer. “Instead, the Viscount forced yer hand, bringing a knife to a sword fight. Even crazies don’t do that. Ye know who does?”
A frown creases Allegra's brow. "Sacrificial pawns. Fanatics, the desperate or ensorceled, those otherwise being controlled. No...that's not enough. Secret-keepers."
”Whatever they were, they were overmatched,” Ci Ci replies. ”The cannibals and the madman in the yellow robe were more dangerous than these two.”
Allegra and Ci-Ci both voice what Vix was thinking as she posed the question.
“Exactly. Two pawns sacrificed to five queens. Self-preservation wasn’t a factor, which means they don’t follow a commander. They follow a puppeteer, be it magic compulsion or somehow, failing to kill us with the wine meant punishment so harsh Asa felt it best to ensure only one party leaves this room alive.
“Not what I’d expect from a viscount and a baroness.” To Allegra, Vix adds, “Ye think the prince who sent ye’s part o’ this royal circle-jerk?”
"Not insane... just without memories beyond recent ones... and ones that I have from talking to objects." While that might sound like a joke, she says it completely deadpan serious.
"As for them... perhaps they were members of the yellow robe society. Folks willing to ritualistically sacrifice others to some odd city... well, 'fanatic' sums it up nicely. Are we pressing further in or withdrawing for now?"
Vix is good to explore the current building thoroughly, but lets Saiya lead the way to check for traps.
Allegra mulls over Vix's question. "I have not seen any evidence that Prince Ordranti is involved. I doubt he would have sent us to investigate the Count if he was."
She is willing to clomp up the stairs first but will defer to Saiya for trapfinding.
Vix shrugs, “I still can’t shake that the viscount responded to you specifically with the blade. Ye said ye were held here, so he must’ve known ye were with Omari… may her god rest her soul.
“It could just as easily mean yer prince is their foe, and admittedly I’ve a bias when it comes to titles. In any case, I’d limit yer reporting to Werntz unless ye know the prince personally. No disrespect meant to ye.”
Vix almost ends that with to Ordranti, but she honestly doesn’t have reason to respect a man who gained power through inheritance. And she does respect Allegra, which means she won’t lie to her about how she feels about a self-important man-child barking orders with his puffed chest and his puffy pantaloons. Oh, f$@! him.
…she also respects her enough to spare her the unsolicited truth.
"Let's go through this place as thoroughly as we can, so that we know nothing and no one's been left behind to plot behind our backs," Ci Ci suggests.
Saiya is occasionally capable of taking a hint, and so she walks up the stairs first. "Glad to hear the 'look for traps before going in' plan stuck." She pauses. "Until of course I'm the one to get blown up by something I miss. Then I will be less glad about the situation."
It's difficult to tell given how sardonic her tone normally is, but she seems to be joking.
The guesthouse stairwell leads to two other rooms. The first is a solarium with large windows spanning two of the wall, with the other two whitewashed.
The second is a lavish bedroom. Featuring prominently is a plush, four-poster bed draped with lacy netting. Coals smolder in a ceramic stove in the western corner. A large padlocked trunk sits in the southern corner near a long writing desk.
Saiya finds no traps as she searches the rooms.
Vix seems pissed about something as she looks around at the lovely room where the would-be assassin couple sat in comfort.
She’s about to kick the trunk’s door off its hinges, but recalls finding the key. She calms herself… and seeing it’s been checked for traps, she tries the key on the padlock.
Saiya gives the trunk a quick once-over before leaving it for the Vixen. Her own attention is caught by the writing desk. "Maybe here's where they keep the '10 Steps to World Domination' pamphlets?"
Probably not, but it's worth a look.
Saiya is occasionally capable of taking a hint, and so she walks up the stairs first. "Glad to hear the 'look for traps before going in' plan stuck." She pauses. "Until of course I'm the one to get blown up by something I miss. Then I will be less glad about the situation."
Allegra looks at Saiya with mild alarm. "If trap-checking isn't in your standard protocols, we will have to amend them. Remind me to read them over once we're safe and rested."
Once upstairs, she'll search under the bed.
Vixen opens the heavy padlock...
...and a blast of concussive force shatters the chest spraying splinters of fine wood, scraps of quality clothing, glass from bottles of wine mixed with their contents, and shards of jewelry and gold out in a ten foot radius. Allegra and Vixen at the last second hug the ground, minimizing the impact but everyone else takes blast directly.
The clothing and wine is ruined but the precious metals are still worth something. 900gp worth
“F$#+ a duck,” Vix mutters.
She pulls her head out of her arms, and eyes the woman lying beside her. Not that Vix thinks conversation’s possible, given her ears can’t be the only ones ringing, but she gives it the old college try.
“So… Allegra… is there a standard protocol o’ trap-checking that accounts for the undetected? Like… do I just start throwing a stick at everything? Or’s there a spell that unlocks doors from fifty yards? These protocols’re written down, right?”