Nothing is revealed by the casting of the spell.
"Care to elaborate?"
“He’s just making sure,” Aith explains. “One of those very interesting priestly tricks that drive us mages mad with jealous curiosity. How?”
Despite the obvious intrinsic interest of the question of why some spells are so much harder for various magic-users to cast, depending on whether they're clerics, or bards, or proper wizards, she is, miraculously, able to recognize that now isn’t the time to canvass for new theories.
“You’re right, though,” she tells Haleen. “Apart from getting a few spells squeezed out of me by that sand squid, and lingering poison, and – Alright, it may not sound particularly promising, but in the spirit of not being crybabies, let’s pack up and head upstairs. If we have to run away from that bug again, at least we can try to get on the right side of the stairs before trying something else. I’ll try to give everyone another boost just before we pop out from the throne, but for now…”
It’s something she’s always dreamed of since she was a little girl and the first time her mother showed her the view from the cliffs Alkenstar is built on, but never been desperate or reckless enough to try before, knowing how much determination and energy it takes. She murmurs an incantation in Elven, stirring up a light wind that tugs around her only, pushing her hair and cloak back, and then slowly, but unmistakeably lifting her off her feet.
It’s rather slow and unsteady – like a leaf in a breeze rather than a swooping hawk, but it’s flight. She quickly helps the others gather their things, now lighter than ever on her feet in her excitement, and then breezes up the stairs where she waits to listen for the sound of large and hungry vermin before she sticks a cautious nose out.
The beast already waits there.
"I was expecting a warmer welcome, it seems we haven't been out for long enough." Tariq unsheathes his scimitar and looks at the rest of the party. "What was our magnificent plan last time? Frontal charge?"
As no one else seems to be really interested, Haleen tries on the chain mail from the sarcophagus.
"Magical buffing is the plan and then beating it up." Haleen comments, while making sure not to stick the head out yet.
“And try not to get bitten,” Aith nods sagely, before starting the gestures for her spell to speed everyone up. “I’ll see if I can blind it, too, once we get out there.”
"At the count of three?"
"Agreed!"
As usual, Yasmeena casts heroism on herself and Haleen, and this time she also casts it on Tariq and Antarah. Furthermore, she also casts heightened awareness, see invisibility, and moment of greatness on everybody. When Aithaloessa casts haste, she begins her battle dance.
As Antarah emerges from the stairs, the giant bug stings him with it's tail and as he moves closer to start the killing of the beast he gets bitten at. But the defense holds and only mirror images are lost.
Then Antarah lays heavily into the bug with his blade.
Haleen follows. With the increased mobility Haleen moves up to the beast, stabs it and gets away again. But the swirling spines of the bug hurt Haleen.
Yasmeena lets loose a barrage of arrows at the bug.
Tariq jumps into combat hoping the best can't react to him closing in. Chanting and praying, he strokes with the strength of his Lady guiding his sword.
Haleen wounds the beast, but at a heavy price. Yasmeena nails it with three perfectly placed arrows, And Tariq finishes the beast off with a powerful overhead cut.
As the beast sinks into the bowl of bones, you notice Rokova standing invisibly at the columns on the other side of the bowl.
With the additional boost of her quickening spell, Aithaloessa kicks up from the throne’s platform and floats into the air above the pit.
Before she can turn to aim, the others have made short work of the giant vermin, and she casts her eyes about for anything suspicious. And, with a start – that sends her bobbing strangely, in mid-air – out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees…
Rokova reaches for his eyes as he is unexpectedly hit with glitterdust, and rubs it out.
Tariq is beholding how the big beast slides down its lair, defeated, when he notices Aithaloessa casting something. He turns around to check how a blinded Rokova rubs his eyes, which end up red as he had been smoking drugs.
The priest, still accelerated by the spell, quickly reaches to the traitor and puts a hard blow to the back of his head with the blunt side of his scimitar. "Stay down!" he roars.
Aith completes her slow arc, landing softly on the edge of the platform facing the throne. Lovelylovelylovely! she thinks, reveling in the sensation of flight, But you need to practice. It’s all a bit off-balance, isn’t it?
But that’s matter for some other time. For now, she takes a ranging shot before she sets to trying to perforate Rokova in earnest.
Haleen takes a few steps back. It might not be the smartest move, but at least glitter boy won't be getting away easily. With a running start Haleen jumps over the bowl of bones and the dead bug to land in front of Rokova, and with a lunge stabs him.
Rokova turned in no time from the invisible guy with the smug grin who waited for the huge bug to do his work into the victim of a serious beating barely clinging to his life.
Between the shot, the stab and the cut, some serious bloodletting takes place.
Yasmeena fires three arrows at the no-longer-invisible cleric.
Yasmeena doesn't fail and takes down the Gnoll in the fancy cloak with the first shot.
As Rokova goes down with a death rattle, five gnolls that were hiding behind the columns run for their lives.
"I guess that takes out the real threat here." Haleen comments.
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Antarah, who was getting ready to cast some mean spells at the gnoll sounds almost disappointed when he says "Good bye, lie... weaver!" He dismisses his attempt at trash talking the corpse and watches it for a few moments, thinking that it should return to its original form if it's not a gnoll after all. Afterwards, he searches the corpse for anything of value or danger.
Tariq didn't realize he could have climbed easily to the part of the platform where Rokova is, and so he's now late to deal a final blow and also to keep him alive for interrogation.
"I guess we would have to guess his plan and, if it includes the scroll, we'd have to find out what it does by ourselves."
The holy man spits on the ground and pats the quiet body to check its not moving.
"I'm sure our Sheriff will love it."
As Tariq comes along his purge invisibility makes the corpse fully visible with glitter on top. After a few moments the glitter disappears.
Starting to check for (magical) gear Antarah strips one piece ofter the other. As he removes the fine chain shirt a strange hat that wasn't seen comes off and the gnoll appearance vanishes. A humanoid with reddish skin and strangely sparkling eyes.
After a few minutes the body, stripped from all goods suddenly disappears.
As the appearance changes, Tariq finds something familiar in it...
"It's a Janni!"
He turns his head right and left to check the others' faces and, if not stopped, proceeds to stabilize the outsider.
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After agreeing with Tariq about the nature of fake Rokova, Antarah shows him his weapon and says "Tariq, this is a pretty powerful weapon and you seem to like the scimitar. I suggest you take it." He is not emotionally ready to part with his mother's weapon.
After the body disappears, Antarah's eyes widen and he screams "Where'd he go?" He's suddenly afraid this was all another ruse. The fight did seem a little too easy.
When addressed by Antarah about the sword, Tariq thanks him. "Well, I guess we should put our loot in common when we're safe. That seems a fine weapon, and many of us could benefit from its use."
Tariq didn't realize he could have climbed easily to the part of the platform where Rokova is, and so he's now late to deal a final blow and also to keep him alive for interrogation.
"I guess we would have to guess his plan and, if it includes the scroll, we'd have to find out what it does by ourselves."
The holy man spits on the ground and pats the quiet body to check its not moving.
"I'm sure our Sheriff will love it."
“She certainly will,” Aith chimes in, her laugh rippling as she uses her spell to swoop over without the newfound indignity of walking. She bobs in the air in a way that can only be described as smug.
It’s definitely a matter of town security, she decides, already starting to plan how to make her case to Almah for research time and materials. Pointing out that it will keep the lunatic mage from more reckless arcane experiments or playing around with siege weapons ought to sweeten the deal.
She’s distracted enough that she almost misses the change when Tariq strips off enough of Rokova’s gear to check whether he can be taken alive for interrogation, but the disappearing fur and change of colour is hard not to notice.
And then the body disappears. "Well, that explains it," she says, nodding sagely.
More genies: she wonders just what sort of trouble Kelmarane is being dragged into. Some sort of planar war bleeding over into their world? "He must have stepped into another plane, instead of just cloaking himself in invisibility. Genies can, after all. Though now? I thought we had him but good, as my old sergeant used to say. Unless it was a last-breath sort of spell- anyway. Things might just have got more complicated."
There's not much she can do about that, so her eyes flicker over to the doors out of the hall. Searching the rest of this place is something they can do.
After a while the body reappears.
Checking the doors you go from closest to farthest. The fist one opens into one of the three minaret towers with stairs leading upwards. Which is not really of interest.
The second one leads to the Carrion King's chamber . You recognize the stinking bed and the smear of blood all over the floor. The corpses are gone. Fed to the now dead bug, as a quick look into the carrion bowl over the shoulder confirms.
The third door leads into something new. An extended hall stretches between various chambers and arches. In the center of the hall a hollow diamond-shaped column decorated with elaborate tile mosaics frames a spiral staircase. Strewn about the dusty floor lie a dozen or so humanoid bones, cracked and gnawed with teeth marks.
But what piques your interest is some cackling to the left. Quickly moving over you find the source you face something rather unusual. Six granite columns, badly chipped and damaged, encircle a large room swept clean of debris and dust. Metal rungs riveted into the columns suspend a humanoid-shaped, cage-like structure from fitted iron chains with a gnoll in it. Before the cage, a complex device set in a weighted metal base extends a swiveling, jointed appendage of unfinished iron inscribed with jagged runes. Mounted to the end of the appendage is a burnished steel facemask with clamps and bands strapped over the gnoll's head. Centered in the forehead of the mask, a half-inch-wide drill bit faces inward toward the wearer’s face. The bladed bit connects to gears and spindles that lead to a crank halfway down the metal arm. To the east, a large stone door sealed with chains and iron bars stands in the wall. A smaller door with no obvious lock stands to the southwest.
A human, who does the mad cackling, operates the machinery to drill a whole into the highly sedated gnoll's skull.
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Antarah expertly explains to the others "Janni can go ethereal. What puzzles the mind is... how did Rokova go ethereal while being unconscious? Was he faking being unconscious and we fell for it?" He theorizes for a few minutes. Then Rokova's body reappears. Antarah shuts up and let's out an awkward "Oh..." He puts his weapon to the outsider's neck and asks "Shall I do the honors?"
Antarah takes pity on the gnoll and says loudly "Stop!" so that the cackling man hears him.
Haleen got some question marks in her eyes as she turns to Antarah. "It's a different style, but isn't he doing our job?"
"Why?" the madman inquires, while not stopping.
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Antarah tells Haleen "Our job is to make the gnolls get along with the troglodytes again, not slaughter them. If anything, the two groups keep each other in check so they don't give us trouble."
After taking a look at the apparatus, he adds "And those runes indicate that they put the gnolls through some enlargement process, not unlike the one I use on myself. I gather this is how they get big."
Then, addressing the man he says "Because if you don't, I will make you!" The implication is in the air.
"Why?" the madman inquires, while not stopping.
** spoiler omitted **
Aith’s weapon hand flies up at the sight, though she doesn’t intervene violently yet while Antarah’s still trying to get a straight answer out of the madman.
She didn't go out of her way to examine the fleshforges in Nex on her way to Katapesh (she shudders at the thought), but this sort of apparatus would fit right in, she imagines.
“And probably how they get so … stupid,” Aith adds, for lack of a better word at the moment, looking at the size of the drill-bit and how deep it pretty much has to go.
“I don’t know much about trepanation, but that looks likelier to cause a headache than to cure one. Though I will concede that with how mad everyone around here seems to be, some sort of endemic brain fever seems likely,” she quips, obviously trying not to imagine the details of the operation they’ve sort of interrupted.
She could do without any of these Rovagug-worshipping lunatics, but there are some limits as to how she’s willing to do it. There are faster, more permanent, and more merciful ways of getting rid of an enemy by introducing a piece of metal into their head. And anyway, quite what they were planning is still unclear to her. She talks fast, trying to cajole a pause and an answer from the ‘surgeon.’
“‘Why,’ indeed. What were you trying to accomplish here?” she asks. “It’s over, we’ve torn through here like a storm. If these gnolls being ‘unchosen’ is so important to you, maybe you could ‘unchoose’ this one from your operation, and talk to us?”
Madfang pauses his work and turns to the visitors. What do you care about that gnoll?" As the elf chimes in with obvious knowledge about anatomy and surgical procedures he falls into villain monologue. "I need perfection! They are still getting stupid. I want to reproduce what created the Carrion King! Can't you see the potential!"
"It is a pity that you killed my sponsor, but I can finish my work without him! Strike that - I can recreate him! And that one will forever be in my debt! Mwuhahahaha!" He returns his attention to the machine at hand again.
<&%^$ it,> Aith thinks, the part of her wizardly brain that fixates on strange things wondering why it is that Common tends to words of four letters to convey concepts in the general domain she’s considering.
Anyway, given the way the state she and the others left Rokova , and this fellow’s derangement, the poor gnoll might be their best option for finding out what’s been going on, once the sedation wears off, at least. Possibly with the additional inducement of the threat of being handed over to the troglodytes.
Since the depraved surgeon isn’t taking the hint, and her patience with nihilistic cultists making monsters has worn beyond thin, she pulls the trigger.
The bullet ricochets from the metal of the apparatus. The overall crazy of Madfang turns into mad rage. He shows a bit of his abilities to the impolite elf, throwing a vial at her.
"Eat s$~#."
When words no longer cut it, but you're still not done talking, short words, no longer than four letters, seem most fit to the situation.
On impact the vial explodes into a ball of fire.
Yasmeena is also struck by the similarity of these four-letter words in both Common and in Gnoll. Though the latter is more a growl and a grunt than an identifiable word, she thinks.
Lightning-quick, she draws an arrow and fires it as she begins the steps to her Sarenrae battle dance.