"Very well. Come with me," the lead guard says. He leads you through the keep's common room and upstairs to a war room. A circular table with several chairs sits in this room. Sprawled atop the table are numerous maps of Cheliax, along with several scrolls weighed down by a bejeweled dagger.
The keep's commander, a man in ornate full plate, pores over the documents here. When he sees Farrina, though, he bows and makes a gesture of a cross over his heart. "Blessings of the Dark Prince upon you, Sister. I am Lucian Thrune. To what do we owe the honor of this visit?"
The Colorful One turns an icy gaze on the soldier that accompanied them to the meeting room and holds it there until he leaves them alone with the commander.
"My mission is confidential, Commander," she says finally in a low voice, turning to the imposing man. "And is on a need to know basis. The church must take extreme caution. If you'll allow me a moment to contain our conversation ..."
She then begins a spell.
Lucian's face scrunches up and he recoils as he throws off Farrina's attempt to charm him. "What treachery is this?!?" he demands as he reaches for his sword.
Farrina rolls her eyes. "Oh for the love of ..." she mutters before sending another spell at the man.
"Really?!" Rose says, a curse following shortly behind. "I thought you had this?" She shouts towards Farrina, still annoyed at her on Adolina's behalf, even though Farina is still not aware of this.
She quickly pulls her longbow and draws the string before letting an arrow loose at the commander.
The entertainer glares back at Rose, but doesn't say anything.
Tanjona brings up his posted trident and races to the door. He slams it shut, draws back his trident, and then as hard as he can he thrusts it into the door at an angle, trying to smash it through the door and into the nearby wall, in hopes of wedging it shut.
Lucian throws off Farrina’s magic again, but Adolina and Rose score hits. He shouts a challenge at Adolina before slashing her with his flaming sword!
You can hear the guards outside the room shouting and slamming against the door, trying to open it, but Tanjona’s makeshift barricade holds for now!
"One vs four is never going to end well." Rose starts, before getting a better position around the room and letting loose another arrow.
"Precisely," Farrina declares with a forced laugh. "Not enough holes in the body for that kind of ratio. Someone always feels left out."
Tanjona grimaces but decides that keeping the door shut is a better use of his time for now, at least as long as the wood holds out.
Once more, Lucian Thrune resists Farrina's enchantments. He takes hits from Adolina and Rose and swings back, narrowly missing Adolina!
The door begins to crack and buckle. The wood won't hold much longer!
Farrina tries once more to freeze the man in place, keeping an eye towards the door and the show she'll have to put on when the others finally breach it.
"Reinforcements coming imminently!" Rose yells out in futility as she steps back and draws another arrow.
Lucian's will finally falters as Farrina paralyzes him. Taking advantage of his helplessness, Adolina and Rose deliver deadly strikes, and he collapses to the ground!
The door bursts open, but when the guards on the other side see that their commander has fallen, they hesitate. "Commander Thrune has been defeated! Fall back! Retreat! Retreat!" They keep their halberds up as they back away towards the exit!
The scabbard of the dagger on the table is set with red garnets in pentagram patterns and is worth 2,000 gp, while the dagger itself is a +1 merciful dagger.
The documents on the table, though, may be more valuable. The bulk of the scrolls and maps strewn across its surface are reports from the Chelish heartland, showing the advances and losses Thrune has made against the Glorious Reclamation. A study of the notes makes it apparent that Thrune has its hands full handling the more widespread uprising, and that while they know rebellion is growing in Kintargo, they simply don’t have the resources at this time to bolster Barzillai’s work there. Several letters impress upon Lucian Thrune that if he can’t hold Menador Keep, the government will send more soldiers to replace him and oust any troublemakers who claim the keep—it seems obvious that the destruction of the keep and pass aren’t things that House Thrune has even considered as a possibility. In addition, the number of documents here that contain recent battle tactics and techniques can be of great use to the Silver Ravens.
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Adolina lets Farrina deal with the shinies, knowing that Rose will keep a beady eye on them too while she leafs through the documents on the table. It is clear that the Glorious Reclamation is making headway, but a note about a town called Longacre has Adolina raising an eyebrow.
All that by a single woman. She must be quite the agent.
Still the fact that Cheliax doesn't seem to expect the fort's destruction is a positive.
"If we're clever we might be able to spin this as an act of rebellion by the garrison." She says. "It seems that Thrune half expects it already so if we spread a tactical rumor or two then we might deflect suspicion from ourselves a little."
All prepared for an elaborate ruse to explain attacking the commander, Farrina is a bit nonplussed when the soldiers turn and flee. She looks back at the man's body and then again at the last of the troops as they vanish from sight. "He was possessed by ..." she begins to offer up in a small voice before giving it up as wasted effort. She gestures dismissively at the empty space formerly occupied be armed defenders and turns to see what items of value can be found in the office and on the cooling corpse.
"They love their kinky hair-care implements," she says with a snort, holding up the scissors.
Once all the items of interest have been collected and identified, the Colorful One brushes off any imaginary dust from her ecclesiastical robes and gestures to the door. "So shall we find this dread dwarven deadfall?"
"I wonder what will happen to de soldiers. Cheliax is notoriously hard on deserters, but if an entire fort deserts at once, the commanders may decide that this wasn't an infiltration, but rather a battle that they lost," says Tanjona. "We will probably see some of dem soldiers again in de future."
Rose looks curiously at the scissors, "Who even comes up with this stuff?" She asks out of admiration.
"You're right Tanjona." She says, shaking her head, her gaze leaving the lewd gnome and returning to the papers on the desk. "I don't think they will be treated as deserters at all, that would be highly embarrassing to the regime."
Searching further in the upper levels of the keep, you find the treasury. Inside a large iron chest are several pouches of gold consisting of 980 gp in all (the keep’s payroll). Additionally, the chest contains a stash of six potions of cure moderate wounds and six potions of cure serious wounds, along with a few other unusual treasures Lucian has gathered from unfortunate troublemakers he’s captured over the past several months. These include a Small +1 human-bane bastard sword, six +3 frost arrows, a lacy white dress worth 200 gp, an ivory fan with a painted silk picture of The Six Trials of Larazod worth 200 gp, a leather-bound glass flask with attached silver fox-head stirrup cup worth 200 gp (the flask contains a potion of haste), and a solid-gold pillbox carved with a leering harpy face worth 400 gp containing three doses of dust of appearance.
Following the directions from the Silver Ravens' information, you find a secret door leading to a long-forgotten stairwell that winds up the inside of the cliff face and eventually into a room. A thick layer of dust covers the floor of this room. Stone doors stand in opposite corners, while four curving alcoves, each fitted with a squat statue of a dwarf armed with a warhammer, stand guard silently.
Farrina looks around at the dwarven statues. "They've sure got a thing for making statues of themselves," she says with a shake of her head. "One could draw inferences about carving big, hard, rigid things and latent desires, but that would be just salaciously gossip, now wouldn't it."
Rose follows Farrina closely, her hand on her quiver just in case the statue does something totally expected, such as animate and start attacking them any second. Because for Rose, that would certainly be normal.
Tanjona says, "What's our light source?"
"You mean you can't see considering you're.....oh never mind." Rose says as she pulls a torch out and chucks it over to Tanjona. "Light that if you will."
Despite your misgivings, the statues do not animate. You move on through the doors to the south. Dust covers the floor and cobwebs hang from the ceiling of this vaulted, fifty-foot-long hallway. Curved alcoves flank the hallway, four to a side. Each alcove contains a long-dry basin held aloft by a stone dwarf. Runes are carved above the door to the south, while the door itself bears the carved face of a scowling dwarven man.
The runes above the door are written in Dwarven and say, “Beyond is the Anvil of Unmaking, yet woe to those who give not prayer to the Father of Creation before undoing what his children hath wrought.”
Rose discovers a magical trap on the door.
Farrina looks at all the stonework around them and how easy it would be to crush them into paste.
"Is there a reason that we can't do both?" she asks in a stage whisper.
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"We can try." Adolina replies. She waits for Rose to work her own kind of magic and then steps forward.
"Torag, Father of Creation. We do not come to destroy the work of your children, but to secure freedom for everyone in Kintargo. Please turn aside your wrath and let us do what we came here to do."
Rose locates her picks and sets to work, doing her best to disable the trap before trusting in Adolina's understanding of dwarven gods!
Adolina's prayer doesn't seem to have much effect. However, Rose is able to disable the magical trap on the second attempt. You can then safely force the door open.
Thick layers of dust cover the floor of this room and the looming contraption of stone and iron it contains. Looking something akin to a massive, squat bell of stone bound in iron bands, the device is connected to pillars of iron to the west, east, and south via taut metal chains. Four iron beams radiate from the top of the central bell, almost like the wheel of an ancient winch.
Two hulking archons stand watch here. They appear as stocky dwarves armed with flaming warhammers, though they have wide, metallic wings, and their eyes glow with heavenly light.
"Halt!" one shouts. "None may approach the Anvil of Unmaking without the blessings of the Father of Creation! Only the most righteous may make use of it!"
"Oh, we wouldn't dream of doing anything without the Father of Creation's blessings," Farrina says with a dismissive wave. "That's why we won't come any closer. You boys look like you can handle any unrighteous folk that come along."
She taps her finger against her chin.
"Would you be just a dear, though, and activate the Anvil for us? I'm sure you'd love to see it work as well as we would. It's one of the Father's machines and it really isn't fulfilled unless it gets used."
"Hmm... We do not detect any wickedness among you," the archon says. Both guardians relax slightly. "Tell us why you wish to activate the Anvil. If your cause is a noble one, we may allow you to do so."
"We wish to free the great opera house of Kintargo from Cheliax oppression," she announces with a fervor. "However to do that we need to free Kintargo, itself. Along those lines, we need to cut off the obvious source of the devil land's support." She nods towards the device. "That leads us here to close this pass."
Clearly, oration is not the Colorful One's strong suit.
”We do not know of these places. Kintargo. Cheliax. But if it is truly a land of devils you wish to stymie, then we will allow you to use the Anvil.”
"Wonderful, wonderful," Farrina says with a nod and then having not a single clue how to utilize something like this, she turns to look at the others with a questioning eyebrow.
"It looks like a bell Farrina, it tends to be straight forward and you just....ring it." Rose points out, a little confused about Farrina's lack of understanding.
She takes a few steps forwards and tries to sound it.
"Well, yes, Miss Obvious," Farrina says with a roll of her eyes, "It's a bell. Even I can see that. But it's a big effing bell and I'm sure it has to be rung a certain ..."
Before she can finish, Rose steps forward and applies action to words.
Tanjona stays near Adolina but leans over slightly and mutters to her under his breath.
The Anvil of Unmaking is a mechanical device in remarkable working condition, complex in engineering but simple to comprehend. Examining the device, Rose realizes that rotating the wheel atop its character bell one full rotation causes complex internal mechanisms to release.
The chains connected to the three support pillars then snap taut, shattering all three pillars. This in turn sets up a cascading failure throughout the structure. As internal supports snap and shatter in the slow-moving chain reaction, the entire keep shakes, shudders, and rumbles.
You quickly flee the scene, making it to a safe distance away. Finally, after nearly 10 minutes, the entire keep collapses! The Menador Gap is sealed. There will be no land reinforcements coming from Cheliax!
"Lets." Rose agrees.
----
Back in Kintargo, Eliona surprises herself when she makes Adolina's shelter her first port of call. She finds herself busying her mind with checking any correspondence that has arrived as well as trying to think of upcoming charity events that she can start to plan, knowing full well they are truly making a difference with the support they have started to provide. It wasn't the difference she had set out to make on the Night of Ashes, but it was an important difference nonetheless.
Once they return to the city, Farrina throws herself into her research in her lab in the Lucky Bones, only coming out for food and her nightly performances at various taverns and beer halls.
Her performances continue to follow her pattern of ribald humor, but include more subtle commentary on the current government.