Ketra's caught by surprise at the cowardice of the nekomata. Looks like their allegiance to protecting Quietus is more on the tenuous side. She jabs out with a knife as the creatures dash away. She's very much hoping they won't soon come back - despite their last little jab.
Ketra's knife delivers a parting wound on the fleeing nekomata, though it isn't enough to bring it down. Garret's flare of light catches Quietus off guard again, drawing a furious hiss from the cult leader as he clutches at his eyes again. Snarling out another spell he vanishes from sight, though Garret is still able to track him as he slowly picks his way into the space between the pew rows.
+ ROUND SEVEN +
Rosalind (Fatigued)
Garret
Quietus (-22hp; Invisible, Blinded 1/1)
Sanduro (-21hp)
Ketra (-15hp)
Red Nekomata (Fleeing)
Green Nekomata (-63hp; Fleeing)
Feeling much better, Garret does his best to point out the location of the invisible Quietus to the others.
Ketra takes a deep breath and then chases after Quietus at Garret's direction. She almost barrels right into him before she takes a path around him to at least discourage his escape southward.
Seemingly content to be ignored, the nekomata flee through the front door of the Bastion of Light and out into the poisonous fog-bank. Sanduro follows Garret's directions but keeps his arrow nocked in ready should Quietus become visible again.
+ ROUND EIGHT +
Rosalind (Fatigued)
Garret
Quietus (-22hp; Invisible, Blinded 1/1)
Sanduro (-21hp; Readied Attack)
Ketra (-15hp)
Garret moves out where he can see Quietus easily, then summons a flaming sphere right at the foe’s feet, saying, ”That’s where he is!”
Fire Damage
Garret conjures an orb of fire right at Quietus' feet, badly burning the dandy and thoroughly distracting him from the split-second whistle of Rosalind's javelin which punches clean through his shoulder. With a choked gasp of pain, a mad smile spreads across Quietus face, pain forcing his voice to barely more than a whisper.
"I think it's...better, this way. False hope is all the sweeter, when it finally dies. You have won nothing here." Throwing his head back, a roiling cloud of sickly greenish fog erupts from Quietus' mouth and rolls outwarts. In seconds Rosalind and Ketra are absorbed, the stinging poison burning their eyes, skin, and lungs. Blood streaking down his cheeks from his eyes, Quietus gives a final shudder and collapses.
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Ketra rolls to her feet outside the cloud, coughing and wheezing "One final middle finger... Good riddance to someone so vile." After a pause to ensure that Quietus' body isn't about to do something unexpected and deeply unpleasant, she rushes over to check on Mirhet, Jando and Silvia. After so many surprises, she immediately thinks how bad it would be if the cat creatures returned right now to get their own last jab.
"That was great, but let's just be somewhere else for a bit in case they come back and snoop around. The cats that is."
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"One final middle finger... Good riddance to someone so vile."
"Yes, *cough* though part of me regrets him getting off so easily. I wish we'd instead been able to hand him to the inquisition at Vigil alive. Torture isn't exactly my favorite method of exactracting information but he *does* owe me quite a bit of it," She glares at the body and unceremoneously kicks it over once the cloud disperses. She stays there until then, casting a quick heal on herself and making sure the dogs didn't return not that something else appeared to steal the body. Then she kneels to search it for anything useful.
"Thank you, all of you, for saving us and avenging the townsfolk," She adresses Ketra, Sanduro, Garret and Sylvia and smiles warmly. "Each of you is strong warrior by any standard. I only wish I'd have seen that back then. Perhaps, if you'd been with the guard that day, we could have stopped him. But that is my failure for not recognizing your talent, as it was my duty to stop him myself."
Garret moves over and scans the room and bodies with detect magic as well. He watches for the cats, ready to send a spell their way if they show their faces.
Healed but still drained, the paler-than-usual halfling says, ”Do not blame yourself, Captain. The rigors of surviving the Deadlands have accelerated the growth in our power since the cataclysm. Thank you for leading us to victory in this battle—my spells are weak ever since the undead creature stole a good portion of my vitality.”
”If we have a way to bless the water in the fountain, we should destroy the evil artifact, then rest,” Garret suggests.
"Off easy? He seems very dead to me, and that doesn't seem all that easy. If we go torturing him too, we'd be sinking to his level."
Ketra shakes her head at the praise that follows from Rosa "Garret's right. The only reason we managed this is because we had weeks of been a hair away from being killed by some horrible undead or fey or who knows what. If you'd had me there the day this all happened, well, I can't imagine we'd have stopped any of it."
"As for the fountain, it should probably recover now that we've dealt with that weird thing that was inside it. How about we take a look before we go to rest?"
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""Off easy? He seems very dead to me, and that doesn't seem all that easy. If we go torturing him too, we'd be sinking to his level."
"...You're right, of course. By doing this, perhaps we would be confirming his claim of humanity having no decency. However, if this mass explosion effect can be replicated by the cult, the fate of the entire nation, perhaps even the entire world, would depend on what we could have learned from him. I'm not sure the lives of so many innocents are worth giving him a quick way out. Not when the cost is all of it turning into a wasteland ruled by The Whispering Tyrant," Rosalind sighs and looks at the body again. "Regardless, we have to make a choice. Either we hide his body so well that he can never be resurrected or animated by the cult and hope that is enough, or we take his remains with us and see if some information can be gleaned anyway by Speaking with the Dead. It is beyond my own capacities, but surely not to Vigil at large."
"...Assuming they're willing to listen to the servant of a heathen god for once," she mutters.
Each of the undead cultists had a well-made dagger and some half-repaired armor--seemingly whatever was on hand to re-equip themselves with upon awakening as undead.
Quietus' fine cloths are ripped and stained with blood, thoroughly ruining them, but several other items on his person are of interest:
+1 spell-storing dagger
Amulet of Natural Armor +1
Bracers of Armor +2
Headband of Vast Intelligence +2 [Knowledge: Nobility]
Ring of Protection +1
Black iron key, whose aura seems...strange
When you check in on the injured members, they all agree that they're no more injured than before. Falling back, you see that the fountain is--not clean, exactly, but certainly cleaner than before. It's obvious that without the constant pollution of the polong's bottle the fountain's magic will restore the water to physical and spiritual purity.
Garret checks out the items before they go…
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Ketra scoops up the daggers where she sees them. The spell-storing one in particular makes her ponder the potential uses. Otherwise once the group's had a chance to look at the fountain she asks "Then we more or less have to rest. Probably for the best. Let's pick somewhere less awful, if we can find a place like that in here..."
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"I'm not sure what the strange key is... if no one knows, we should probably handle it with care and not touch it directly. Knowing Quietus I wouldn't put it past him to curse his possessions just to spite whoever got the best of him," Rosalind says.
Once back inside and barricaded in what they thought was a safe area of the mansion with the survivors, she does her best to treat and stitch the wounds of the remaining survivors. Afterwards, she begins the slow process of wrapping up Quietus' body in a number of blankets from inside the mansion and then tieing it up with rope. "Personally, I think we have no choice but to take his body with us to Vigil. Assuming you're all willing to go there with me? The danger to the nation is too great to not glean from him what we could, I feel."
When the guard schedule for the night is set, she finally allows sleep to take her.
"I think the plan was to head to Vigil from the start. We need to bring news of what happened here to good people with a lot of soldiers and a lot of magic, and Vigil's the only place that comes to mind. Quietus surely has some evil friends who won't be sitting quietly either." Ketra nods. Though Ketra's relatively well traveled for someone who group up in a little town, she's always made her journeys in much safer seeming conditions. For a trip in these circumstances to Vigil, she's glad to have Rosa with the group.
”Vigil seems like a reasonable place to go,” says Garret as he prepares to sleep. Perhaps with their victory some of his vitality may return overnight.
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Barricading yourselves in the offices Quietus had commandeered--it has sufficient space for all of you, while also being less tainted by bloodstains and the faint smell of rot that so much of the Bastion now holds. As you bed down and parcel out food and watch orders, Garret and Sanduro set to unraveling the mystery of Quietus' gear, Mirhet watching with interest.
Most of the items are valuable but straightforward, the only real mystery is the key--its abjuration and evocation auras seem ephemeral somehow, until it clicks: the key itself is not magical, but it is tied to a magical trap wrapped around the Fetoring Maw! Had you tried to submerge the relic in a liquid of any kind, it would have unleashed a lethal pulse of electricity into everything around it! The key is bound to this trap and can dismiss it as well; simply rap the key thrice against the Maw and with a small effort of will the arcane menace will be undone, allowing the destruction ritual to proceed safely.
When the subject of traveling to Vigil comes up, Jando and Silvia come over to join. "I fully support warning the Knights of Ozem at Vigil, but I don't like leaving the border towns in the dark. In my current state I'd only slow you down, so I'll break off at the first village we reach and turn northwest to warn the forts along the Hordeline. Once I reach Everstand I can make my to Vigil and maybe link back up with you."
"I will go with the ranger," Mirhet announces. "We are injured, alone either us would be vulnerable but watching each others backs makes our warning more likely to reach those who need to need to hear it."
"That's not a bad idea," Silvia muses. "Vellumis is Lastwall's second greatest city--if I can catch a ride down the river to Lake Encarthan and then charter a boat, I could be there before any of you are in Vigil."
Ketra looks over at Mirhet "I know you're worried about your family too. We should get a message to the tribes as well somehow. They may be farther away, but a rising of undead like this is exactly what they were always preparing for. Are you sure you and Jando shouldn't go west?" After Mirhet's terrible ordeal at the hands of Quietus and his minions, the last thing Ketra wants is for her weakened mentor to be snapped up together with Jando by some of Quietus' friends. "We can always spread the word as we travel and get word to the border towns that way..."
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“Vigil sounds right. If my family’s caravan ran into trouble around Roslar’s Coffer after the explosion, they might decide to fall back in that direction rather than risk the Northern Fangwood.”
Sanduro winces as he shoves a stiffening arm back into place as they wrap up their adversary’s corpse.
“I can’t do anything about the rot or the stench, but if you want to try to question Quietus tomorrow, I can ask Pharasma for the power to make his corpse answer.”
He peers back through the doorway to the center of the nave, where they have dragged the corpses of the cultists and arranged them as neatly as they could given the party’s exhaustion. “Zsofia is going to be so pissed she missed all this.”
Despite what the bards' stories say, Quietus' death doesn't bring with it a sense of elation or victory--instead a heavy disquiet follows you around as you take your rest, the poison fog just outside serving as a reminder that the the dandy was just one part of a larger plot. Though the rest is badly needed you can't help but feel that you're losing valuable time.
If the nekomata have remained in the area, they don't show themselves, and after some sleep you really do feel better. Jando in particular is able to move unassisted, the strength-sapping magic of the sigil trap slowly fading with time. Taking a peak downstairs, you can immediately tell that the fountain's magic has been hard at work; the water bubbling up into the basin is clean and clear, and even the fountain's stonework seems less grimy.