Captain Semiri starts to hum as she pushes away from the wreck and guides her now heavily loaded boat back to the docks. "Looks like you found a lot, mind telling me what some of this is?"
She listens to any and all explanations raptly as she rows. Getting back on the docks she offers to refill any drinks people may want.
Everyone swings by the Grand Lodge to drop off your findings. It takes a few moments of asking around, but you readily find one of the secretaries working under Calisro, and she gladly accepts the discovered items. "I'll get someone to analyze these and see what they make if them."
Then finally it's off to the mystery mansion that Gorm Greathammer wanted you to dig up some information on.
Asking around about the mansion, both Loka and Eldon are able to make in roads with the locals in the Precipice District. Loka gets told by a young woman working the pickle store about how her parents always told her scary stories about a group of crazed Pharasma followers who lived there and would kidnap and kill naughty children to keep her in line.
Eldon instead finds an old man who jabbers on about various things, including the fancy suave dwarf that came around last week and how he was too prim and charismatic for a dwarf and must've CLEARLY been selling something or a trap. The halfling also gets a story about how the crumbling mansion must be haunted, because the first floor is still standing after an earthquake took of the top two floors. Any other building that old had been reduced to rubble.
Anyone who has taken Gorm's classes on the validity of sources and information would be able to tell you that rumor and scuttlebutt isn't trul trustworthy. To make him happy, something more definitive would help, so visiting the place would help. Loka's young pickle lady mentions having snuck into the place on a dare with tons of religious relics and the floors on the first floor held up well enough, so going in there should be okay.
During the time it takes to get to the District and ask around, the sky starts to darken as the clouds gather and seem ready to threaten rain. Approaching the building there's the flash of lightening in the distance and a few long moments later the rumbling accompaniment. This mansion must have been quite the site in its prime. Three stories tall, with what might have been a beautiful garden. However now, all that remains is the first floor. You can barely even see one set of stairs that might reach above 10 feet.
The entry way and grand enterance are rotted through in places but still seems able to take your weight. The windows at the front of the building shows a little of the dimly lit interior through the dirty panes. Anyone wanting to get inside would need to one of the entrances on the side of the front entryway.
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Rogar scowls at the dilapidated structure. "We probably shouldn't even be going in this thing. Looks like it'll fall over if we sneeze." He looses a grumbling sigh and starts heading up the left-hand stairs. "Let's get this over with, then. I'll go left. And watch your footing, yeah? Probably rotten floorboards around."
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The half orc watches the building with interest, and thinks out loud. "With time, even mountains turn to sand. Yet another testament to the forces that shape the world. Slowly, but surely."
She looks at the rotten wood of the structure once again. "Perhaps a cat or a rat could scout ahead? Just a few feet, maybe...”, she looks at the rest of the group, waiting for approval.
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"Alright. Stay near me. One squeak means clear, more squeaks means problems."
Channary produces out a berry ouf of thin air, whispers something to it and swallows it. In what seems like a minute, she starts breathing faster, quietly shrinks to approximately a foot size, grows hair and a tail, and changes her form to that of a gray rat with black eyes.
The rat looks at the party and stretches a bit, then jumps into the air and turns towards the rotten door.
Lasts 10 minutes
AC = 16 (15 + your level. Ignore your armor's check penalty and Speed reduction.)
Speed 10 feet.
Weakness 5 to physical damage. (If you take physical damage in this form, you take 5 additional damage.)
Low-light vision and imprecise scent 30 feet.
Acrobatics and Stealth modifiers of +10, unless your own modifier is higher; Athletics modifier –4.
Every climbs the two curving staircases that lead to a broad veranda bereft of its railings. Two openings that might have once been doors lead into the faint remnants of a solarium, while two more doors lead further into the creaking house itself. A whiff of rot and decay seeps from the structure. Channary takes a moment outside to shrink down into the form of a rat and sneak into the building. Her rat senses shudder as something seems wrong about the place but she can't place what.
Looking through the doors barely standing upright in their rusted hinges, she sees the tiled floor, ornate columns, and sweeping staircases of a once-grant hall. It evokes a distinctly Taldan aesthetic, though the finery has suffered greatly over the past years. The marble floor tiles are cracked and filthy, and the statuary lining the walls has been smashed. None of the three staircases climbs beyond head level before ending abruptly, debris from their fallen upper reaches scattered across the floor.
A faint whiff of something burning wafts on the air. Otherwise the place seems quiet and empty.
Loka maybe due to her super sensitive ears or years as a rat catcher hears the sounds of thousands of things lightly scrabbling against the floorboards under the tiles of the main hallway. These aren't rats, or even mice, they almost, faintly, sound like fingernails, thousands of fingernails lightly scratching on wood, waiting, lurking, slowly wavering between opened and closed. This is likely some haunting (assuming there's not actually thousands of creatures down there) and could probably be exorcised with someone with religious training.
Dengar takes a moment to expand his senses and can immediately tell there's more than a few unhappy spirits lurking in the main entry way. they seem to be willing to let one person pass but anyone further would be mauled and shredded to bits by hundreds of clawing hands.
He moves cautiously out into the middle of the room and performs a cleansing ritual, spreading a handful of pristine white gravel in a circle and chanting a prayer to Torag. After a moment, thousands of white hands start to extend from the floor, but instead of grasping and grabbing they reach for the skies and disappear, through the broken sky light. The scent of incense becomes extremely strong as it wafts through the room, but the place is actually completely quiet. The faint almost imperceptible background noise of scratching completely faded.
Everyone else starts to move into the main rooms of the house itself, as Dengar notes the handiwork of Pharasmin priests, even speculating that those might have been their hands in the floors.
Rogar moves to a door and opens it to a room, in the middle of it is a smashed chandelier and a good section of the roof still attached. Outside of the waterlogged and eerily intact red couch that almost seems to have been dragged into the room, all of the furniture has been smashed by the falling debris or horrible sodden to the point of not being solid anymore. Across the room, which can be reached by readily skirting the mess in the middle of it, are two different doors, barely standing under their own power.
Loka pokes her head through the rotted off doors of the rooms leading to the east wing. The first space seems to be a coat closet with various hooks and hangers half rotted away, but the room is faintly illuminated from a glowing in the next room over.
Everything this new room once held now lies jumbled over the floor in a soggy mess: torn pages, scraps of fabric, and splintered remnants of furniture. Doors hang askew in the north and east walls, but the door to the south has been smashed from its hinges. The faint glow comes from something precariously balanced on a half rotten shelf still clinging to the wall. It proves to be a small bottle of what looks like a healing potion.
Loka has to jump to grab it but she's more than able to get it down and keep it safe. As she lands she spots something unusual in the wood work of the desk remains. Opening what proves to be a hidden, waterproof compartment, the goblin finds a book of Pharasmin prayers with notes in there about the efficacy of quieting the dead. A page of loose-leaf paper also falls out, that has some hastily scribbled notes about undead sightings in the area, half of them are crossed off, with the next one on the list circled.
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Seeing that Eldon has that room covered and hoping for expediency -- not that he's eager to leave the haunted house with murdery ghost hands or anything why would he be how dare you suggest he's afraid he's not shaking it's just cold in here shut up -- he moves over to the double doors next to him and throws them open.
Loka moves to the door off the main hallway and finds a small room full of mostly ruined settings and smashed plates and china. Seems that this is where the servants of the place would plate meals and prep them for serving later. There's little of import here other than risking exposed skin to cuts.
Eldon sees Loka pop out from one of the rooms on the room he's in and instead moves to the other door, opening it a malodius odor rises from a hole in the floor and assials the man's senses. Seems there was a toilet/purging room that no one cleaned out before abandoning the place.
Rogar opens the double doors to the final room on this side of the wing. A large, long-cold fireplace stands in the east wall of this expansive parlor, but the furnishings are all rotted. A dank stench of mold lingers in the air. The ceiling overhead has collapsed, leaving the room open to the sky. The floor in the room’s southern end has followed suit, leaving a gaping hole into darkness.
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Rogar scratches his nose and shrugs. "Found a big hole. Might as well check it." He pulls out a coiled length of rope and finds somewhere to tie it off that doesn't look quite as rotted as the rest of the place.
He then slowly and carefully approaches the hole, keeping hold of the rope, and tries to see down into the darkness with his innate darkvision.
Getting even within a 10 feet of the floor, Rogar's ancient dwarven crafting genes tell him this place wouldn't support his weight, nor the weight of anyone really. He gets as close as he can to the hole without falling in, and looks down into it. There's a mostly dead body in there that has decomposed nearly down to the bones, but otherwise it is perfectly empty. The body seems to be at rest and not undead.
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Rogar sighs. "Body down there. Can't get to it though, not without the floor giving way. I don't like leaving a corpse to rot instead of getting a proper burial, but I don't think there's anything we can do. We should report it, though; maybe somebody at the Society can retrieve them by magic."
He follows Eldon and Loka to the other side of the building, still keeping his eyes peeled, but stops at a doorway as the other two press on. He listens at the door before opening it up.