Fallende turns to the newcomer and engages, her lips tight in a sneer.
Wesley transmutes his hand into a wicked claw, then slashes the air in front of him. The energy flies towards the wererat but goes past her instead. The wererat nimbly dodges Fallende's attacks, but Isabel lands a good hit. The wererat whirls on the thaumaturge and stabs her twice!
"Why were you holding back in the first place?" Fallende demands, following up with three vicious blows.
Charlotte sees her best friend's blood rip through the air. AN act that rips through her heart. The fire responds, billowing around the doctor, almost obscuring her completely. Through the fire and smoke, the figure inside it raises her hand, palm out, which a torrent of flame shoots from into the wererat. "Leave Her Alone!"
The wererat quickly falls to your fire and blades! No other enemies seem to be coming. You have time to rest and heal up if you desire.
After the wererat falls, smoke is still billowing around Charlotte, obscuring her to just a shape in the greasy horror of it all. "I... need a moment." the voice within says with an attempt at strained calm.
One minute is more like ten. Charlotte kneels down, whispering, rocking, hoping, then finally the smoke stops seeping from her body.
Then with obvious shame on her face, she starts to tend to her companions wounds.
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Isabel ignores the flames and the smoke, coming instead to sit beside her best friend, stroking her back soothingly and murmuring words of encouragement and support. She leaves Fallende and Wesley to keep an eye on what's going on. Charlotte needs her right now.
Once her friend has recovered somewhat and sets to work Isabel plays the part of a hopeless patient, pretending every little thing hurt, demanding sweeties for being good and generally trying her hardest to get Charlotte to laugh. The elf looks at her funny, but so what?
Once everything is finally sorted out and she's feeling much better Isabel gestures down the hallway. "Finding the boss girl is still the best plan I think."
As Charlotte tends to Isabel's injuries, Fallende occupies herself with cleaning her weapon and checking the woman's body for any valuables.
Once the healer turns to her, the elf remains silent and stoic during the woman's ministrations. A simple, "Merci," is her sole response.
After resting and healing, you press on through the next room, which smells strongly of rats—a mix of spoiled food, dander, and the pungent sting of rat feces. A blanket has been spread on the floor, and a recovered antique brass platter holds a few bits of rat-gnawed food.
Past the pack mistress's room is Ayala's quarters. Several pieces of furniture decorate this room, the modern furnishings clashing with the ancient carvings of Thassilonian wizards crafting deformed monsters from dead bodies decorating the walls. Luxurious crimson Varisian drapes have been pinned up in an archway to the southeast.
A wererat with white fur and bulging pink eyes waits here, brandishing a bladed scarf. "I don't know who you think you are, coming here and killing my girls and my rats," Ayala snarls. "But it all ends now!"
"The shard?!? Natalya stole it!" Ayala snarls. "And regardless, that treasure belongs to me!" She rushes forward, stopping ten feet away from Isabel, then lashes out with her bladed scarf!
Wesley clucks his tongue. "So unreasonable." He reaches out to enhance Fallende's sword.
"We shall show her how reasonable persons behave, then, n'est på?" Fallende says as she engages.
Charlotte hurries to her friend's aid, staunching the worst of her bleeding.
Fallende tears into the wererat, while Isabel lands a solid blow. Wesley batters Ayala with magic missiles, and she crumples to the floor!
Ayala has a +1 bladed scarf. Heaped on a table are sections of wall mural, ancient coins, pieces of jewelry, gems, bits and pieces of pottery, and more, all worth a total of 400 gp.
"Then, perhaps, we wake and question Ayala?" Fallende offers as she finishes cleaning her weapon.
The doctor kneels down to start binding the woman's wounds. "Shall we try and bind her? Or not bother again?" an eyebrow arches as she works.
Wesley shrugs. "It doesn't matter to me. Looks like she has some journals here. We could just read them and save us the trouble."
"Journals? Let me see."
The elf pages through the documents looking for any clue as to the location of the shard they seek.
The journals detail Ayala's history and plans for the Tower Girls. Ayala Javeski was one of a dozen wererats born to a established clan of wererat Sczarni who dwelled in Riddleport. Infighting and treachery eventually saw the destruction of that clan, with several of the siblings fleeing the city rather than be slaughtered by their kin. Today, the only scion of this clan who still lives in Riddleport is the crimelord Ziphras. Ayala ended up in Magnimar, where she worked for several years as hired muscle for the Wreckwash Blades. Through a combination of manipulation, seduction, and coercion, she managed to become apprenticed to a local cat burglar who taught her many of the finer points of breaking and entering. She repaid him with a knife to the back, leaving his bleeding corpse in a gutter one moonless night. Since then, Ayala has founded her own female-only gang of cat burglars, calling them the Tower Girls.
The Tower Girls have thrived under Ayala’s hard-nosed leadership. But after a failed attempt to seize power from the Wreckwash Blades forced Ayala to flee Dockway and go into hiding for a time in Underbridge, the Tower Girls’ fortunes seemed to be growing shaky. The discovery of the chambers within the Crow represent a great stroke of luck to Ayala—she hopes to use the treasures she finds within to restore her gang’s place in Magnimar’s underworld. The apparent betrayal of Natalya has left Ayala in a particularly bitter mood, and she’s increasingly turning her plans away from using her newfound resources to restore her gang toward financing a large-scale hunt in Magnimar to track down Natalya and destroy her.
It doesn't seem like the Tower Girls have made much more progress on discovering more chambers here in the Crow, much less the location of the next shard of the Shattered Star. You'll have to take up the exploration from here, it seems!
Disappointment and frustration are the fruits of Fallende's foray into the wererat's journals. After a few curses in elvish, she looks to the others. "It would seem that we must search for the shard ourselves. This one discovered nothing." She glares at the unconscious woman.
"Shall we continue on or do you require rest?"
She seems to be directing this question at Charlotte.
Charlotte finishes her work on the wererat to make sure she lives. After the question, the doctor pauses, not hesitating, but calculating. "I believe we should continue" she rises, brushing off the dust from the floor, shifting her bag into position, she then nods.
Fallende nods and readies her blade before leading the way further into the tower, using Ayala's notes as a guide.
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"Hang on." Isabel says, before hefting Ayala's body over her shoulder. She takes the woman back past the secret door and then deposits her, with all her belongings, on the ground before pulling the door shut behind her and improvising a wedge.
"There, now she can leave but can't follow us." She explains as she rejoins the group. "I promised."
You return to the foyer of this level. To the southwest is a common hall where three more Tower Girls play a game with a tattered harrow deck. Once you make it clear that Ayala has been defeated, though, they quickly surrender and flee the Crow if allowed to do so.
Stairs at the far end of this level lead down to a small chamber. A massive pair of double doors dominates the end of the room. These doors are made of a silvery metal decorated with images of burning eyes that look inward toward two sets of runes carved onto the face of each door. The walls bear the remains of complex mosaics that once covered much of them, but which has crumbled and collapsed in heaps of colored tiles and debris around the edges of the room.
The tiles on the doors bear Thassilonian runes in a familiar pattern--they resemble the paradox box’s tiles, and when two runes on one door are touched simultaneously, they magically exchange places (runes cannot move from one door to the other).
There are two different sets of runes on each door. The left set spells “LISTEN” while the right spells “THE EYES.”
As you ponder the puzzle, you realize your recent experiences have made you stronger...
The combination works, and the massive doors swing open. The Thassilonian murals in the hall beyond are as vibrant as if they were painted yesterday. A dusty, cobweb-choked corridor runs northward, ending at a descending staircase. The stairs curve around and around as they go down, deeper than the surface level. Ahead, you can hear the sound of something sneezing periodically...
Fallende shakes her head and mimes back with fingers walking and then drawing a line across her neck.
The elf rolls her eyes and proceeds forward with her weapon in her hands. She moves stealthily. Well ... stealthily as long as anyone listening is half-deaf.
Charlotte is about to proclaim her friend to be a genius, but that genius silences her with a finger to her lips. Then somehow manages to make more noise than one thought could be possible. Maybe she means to make Fallende feel better one would wince at the silence-shattering steps the armor-clad elf was making, but there would be no way the wince would be heard past the racket.
Sighing, the doctor joins in and drops her doctor's bag loudly on the floor.
Ahead, you come upon a lone miserable mitflit with watery eyes and a runny nose. He sits on one of the steps, looking longingly down the stairs, but your loud approach gets his attention. He turns and looks at you with wide eyes, then shrieks and leaps to his feet, preparing to flee down the stairs!
Before it can leave, Wesley quickly casts a spell and hurls a rock at its head! It bonks the gremlin hard, sending him sprawling on the stair.
"Don't worry, I just knocked him out. For now," Wesley says. "I didn't want him to raise an alarm."
Lady Plumth raises an eyebrow at the 'For Now' portion of Wesley's statement, but compliments him on his quick reactions and thinking.
The doctor's kneels and checks the mitfit's condition as well as binding him in case he wakes.
"Does anyone know if waking this pitiful creature would be beneficial?" while it looks intelligent enough for speech, she is unsure it would speak a language they knew.
Fallende turns her disapproving gaze on Isabel. "Is that what passes for knowledge among humans? The creature is a misflit. If you took a gremlin's magic away this is what you'd have left." She gestures at the pathetic creature. "They're cowards and can be cowed by an angry child."
She turns back to look at the prisoner, muttering under her breath in elvish, "Je jure que les humains ne sont vivants que parce qu'ils baisent comme des lapins."
To Charlotte, she nods. "Please wake it. It will know what others lie ahead." Her tone softens as she speaks to the doctor.
The mitflit whimpers and babbles in Undercommon after Charlotte wakes him. Wesley glares down at the gremlin and responds in the same language. After a bit of back and forth, the wizard turns towards the others.
"The mitflit says he is part of a larger tribe that dwells on the next level down. He is sick and they were annoyed by his excessive sneezing, so they banished him to guard duty. The gremlins have been here for about a year. Their leader is named King Zuuga. There are many monstrous vermin that they keep as guards and pets."
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"Wouldn't you like to know?" Isabel says softly with her back turned to the elf, before shaking her head at the quizzical look she gets from Lottie.
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"What does King Zuuga want?" Isabel asks Wesley, and through him the mitflit. "Do you think we could negotiate passage through his level and into the area below if necessary?"
Fallende rolls her eyes.
"If they are all mitflits like this one then we will have no trouble with them," she says with a shrug.
Charlotte looks back and forth between the other two women, dark eyes considering, and for some reason curving into a slight smile, which she hides quickly by concentrating on the pitiful creature she brought back to consciousness.
She doesn't understand it, at all, so all she really is doing is making sure its spraying sneezing does not rip open its head wound.
The mitflit chatters to Wesley, who translates. "Negotiating with King Zuuga might be hard. He's apparently rather insane. The other gremlins generally leave him alone and occasionally bring him food."
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"An insane king they placate and ignore. Why do they leave him in power then?" Charlotte and Bel are used to the general uselessness of some of their fellow nobles, the human ones at least. She wonders if Fallende has the same issues in elven society. Asking though might spark another racial superiority discussion which Charlotte wanted no part of.
"We will pass through. If we need to negotiate then we will attempt to appeal to their common sense. If that fails, then we will appeal to their sense of mortality," Fallende declares with a decisive nod.
"If that fails, then perhaps they will discover their mortality."
"You can certainly try," Fallende replies with a smirk before heading out.