Jing-De calls upon his holy bloodline to summon a hound archon to flank with Sakura! Unfortunately, it misses with it sword and its jaws.
Sakura slashes the giant opossum attacking her twice and Pagma blasts it with bombs, while Kamo strikes the one attacking him.
The enormous beasts attack again. Sakura takes several hits, but Kamo manage to avoid the teeth and claws of his attackers, riposting succesffully.
Kamo concentrates on his attacker.
But he can't find a good opening! He tries to remember what he knows about these creatures, instead.
or
And sets his sword for a parry.
Dueling Riposte if there is a critical miss.
for
"They don't seem to like you either" Pagma quips to Sakura as she unloads her continuous stream of vials at the rat.
The damage is getting to her and it's coming on a little too quickly now, that she's having trouble focusing. Her first swing whiffs badly, closer to her brother than the rat!
◈
◈
Jing-De heals Sakura's injuries as the summoned archon bites the giant opossum. Sakura slashes it once, and Pagma only manages to splash it several times. Kamo whiffs as he remembers everything about these enormous beasts. Unfortunately, there's not much to recall--they're really big opossums. They can feign death when badly wounded and they resist cold and poison.
The creatures continue their assault. Sakura takes several more brutal hits while Kamo takes a devastating claw swipe to his midsection!
"Ouch, ouch! Go away, why are you attacking us?!" Kamo whines.
He sees an opening, is it big enough? He decides to chance it.
for and
With the creatures biting, he sets up for a parry again.
for
With a frustrated yell, the little sprite sends vial after vial at the massive rodent.
Sakura had never imagined opossums putting up this much of a fight. Hadn't they toppled far greater foes than this?!
Trying to stay focused, Sakura slashes twice before slipping into her defensive posture, hoping its enough to take one of them down.
◈
◈
◈Dueling Parry: +2 circumstance bonus to AC until the start of your next turn
Jing-De heals Kamo as his summoned archon and the samurai team up to finally finish off one of the giant opossums! Pagma zaps and burns Kamo's injured attacker as the investigator delivers a precise strike.
The remaining three opponents attack. Sakura manages to avoid injury this time, but Kamo is savaged badly!
Kamo tries to draw a bead on his enemy, but he can't find an opening, so he blasts the remaining possums with a spray of gravel.
More bombs go flying, more, More, MORE!
Sakura grunts in acknowledgement as one of their foes finally falls. She parries a blow, pivots and spins twice, trying to take down the next one.
"Hold on, brother!"
◈
◈
Jing-De heals Kamo again. The investigator batters his two attackers with scattered scree, then Pagma is able to take down the more wounded of the pair with her bombs. The summoned archon and Sakura both hit with their sword strikes, wounding another of the giant opossums.
With half of their number fallen, the two remaining beasts turn tail and run!
Sakura plops down to the ground, frustrated. "I never want to see another opossum again."
Pamga likewise collapses into a puddle and agrees "I used to think they were cute... in a punched in the face kind of way."
Searching the grove for an hour uncovers a the almost entirely overgrown remains of a long-dead adventurer. Little more than a skeleton now, he still wears his distinctive dragon turtle armor and carries a heavy steel cylinder—a dragon turtle artillery.
"I don't know what garbage pile they were rummaging in, to grow so large!"[/]b Kamo adds.
In the grove, Kamo sets some charms in the branches of each tree, explaining to a (probably inattentive) Sakura what each one will do.
[b]"This protects against leaf blight. And that one is for worms!"
Pagma goes the simplest route of caring for the grove like she would any farmland in town. Weeding, pruning, talking to the plants, creative fertilizer delivery systems. Oh, and watering.
Between Kamo's occult preparations and Pagma's and Jing-De's more practical applications of farming techniques, you make good progress in preparing the apple grove for an eventual resurgence.
Once that is done, you make your way back to Willowshore. However, upon your return, you find the townsfolk shocked and worried, abuzz with rumors of a gruesome murder that occurred while you were away! The victim is Kazuma Oono, the kitsune director at The Seven-Colored Songbird Theater. Oono's body was discovered in his private office at the theater.
The town guards show you to the crime scene so you might investigate. The door was locked, and the lock is undisturbed. A paper wall has been smashed outward from within, and the inner surface of the splintered framework bears bloodstained smears. The hole is easily large enough for a human to have passed through. There are no signs of struggle. There’s a lot of blood around the body, which lies on the floor next to a writing desk as if he’d simply fallen out of his chair without standing or otherwise responding to his attacker.
"A gruesome sight," Kamo muses as he picks his way carefully through the office. [b]"He bends over the desk to examine any books or papers on it while disturbing things as little as possible.
After investigating for several minutes, Kamo reaches a few deductions. It appears that the killer entered the crime scene calmly, without damaging anything, but they exited by simply smashing through the fragile paper doorway, leaving no tracks outside of the room in the courtyard beyond.
A trunk that rests against a wall near the smashed open section has bloody handprints on it; within lies a collection of folios that contain Oono’s annotated copies of his favorite plays. The books appear to have been pawed through by someone with blood-soaked hands.
With her knowledge of Willowshore, Pagma notes that one play from Oono’s regular cycle of offerings is missing: The Chronicle of the Water-Weaver. This play is about a monk who learned how to weave cloth from water, then became embroiled in a complex plot involving bickering silk traders vying for the attentions of a fickle governor. Oono traditionally directed a new version of this play at every summer solstice, but he didn’t this year—likely due to the events surrounding the Willowshore curse.
In fact, Sakura remembers that Oono was ready to go with this production, but when rumors spread that he was altering the play to make it a blatant critique of Governor Heh Shan-Bao, the governor paid Oono a visit a few weeks before the end of spring, and all discussion of that summer’s production of the play went silent thereafter...
"I always liked that one. The part with the colorful silks dancing like a storm... ah..." Pagma says this mostly to distract herself from the murder of one of the most unique people in their town. "Could it have been the governor... still?"
"But how? He can't be a ghost--ghosts don't burst through walls," Kamo comments. "Maybe some other sort of undead, but I thought we were...pretty thorough with him."
Kamo looks outside for tracks leaving the area.
Kamo is unable to find any tracks in the area.
Pagma backtracks through the same things Kamo found, looking to see if there is anything else he might have missed, but her friend is too perceptive for that to be possible. "Maybe we should ask around to see if anyone else knows what was in the play?"
By interviewing those who were nearby at the time of the murder and those who knew Oono, you learn that Oono was last seen shortly before dusk on the night he was killed. He stopped by the Happy Kappa bathhouse for a post-dinner soak. He spoke briefly to Hua De-ge while he was there and seemed to be in good spirits at the time.
Oono was excited about writing a new play based on your performance earlier regarding the time spent in the mindscape, and he felt that he’d just had a breakthrough in his inspiration. As soon as he left the bathhouse, he said he was going straight back to the theater to write down his sudden flash of ideas before they evaporated.
While Oono didn’t have any obvious enemies, there was that time a few weeks before the last day of spring that Governor Heh paid him a visit, and folks reported hearing a heated argument... after which Oono seemed particularly depressed and frustrated.
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"Well..." Kamo states, reluctantly, "back to the governor's manor, I suppose. We should have burned that place to the ground."
He gives Pagma a significant look, though he doesn't really blame her.
You return to the ruins of the governor's manor and spend quite some time scouring it for any clues. Unfortunately, your investigation doesn't turn up anything of use. Nothing seems disturbed or changed here from the last time you were here. It looks like there's not much more you can do to try to solve Oono's murder for now, but perhaps opportunities will arise to do so in the future.
In the meantime, you wait for Ren Mei Li to return. She does so after a few more days, thanking you for your work restoring the grove of apple trees. While her demeanor is as courteous as ever, there’s an intensity to her manner that she never showed before. The silvery sheen over her eyes is more pronounced, and the tips of her fangs are visible when she speaks.
“You come to the fourth season, and to the most revealing task. The ritual of winter requires providing a spiced tea for the people, signifying the steward’s ability to provide warmth, sustenance, and safety throughout the season’s cold and hungry nights. It’s best to use fine tea for such an occasion, yet even the finest tea can be improved by filtering it through the most delicate of webbing.
“The caretakers of Whisperweb Shrine to the northwest provide such fine silk, the texture and weave are perfect for the straining of delicate teas. They may not be what you are accustomed to, yet provide them with a taste of the teas you seek to present, and you should be able to secure their favor. I advise against simply taking from them what you need, but your choices, as always, remain your own."
This time, she offers the cloisonne ball depicting the fruit platter, while holding back one final ornament, which shows a steaming cauldron glowing against a backdrop of white snowflakes, or perhaps spiderwebs. Then, she once again promises to return in one week to sample the teas strained through spidersilk gathered from Whisperweb Shrine.
"Sakura, maybe you can pretend they are just big crabs," Kamo suggests to his sister, unhelpfully. "Pagma, we still have plenty of your tea? Do you have something spicy?"
"Oh Yes!" Pagma coos with a bounce "Sakura has been taste testing for me, and the last one made her mouth go numb!"
None in Willowshore know the name “Whisperweb Shrine,” for in their time a century ago, the site was without a name at all. Instead, it was known only as a strange, forgotten shrine that predated the modern township. If you ask around Karahai, you can confirm that the old shrine located a few days travel north of Willowshore has been known as Whisperweb for as long as they can remember.
The journey to the shrine is uneventful, though an ominous hush descends upon the land as you draw close. The winding path opens here into an idyllic-looking clearing, at the heart of which shines an achingly beautiful pond. Ornaments hang from tree branches overhead: paper lanterns, gilt masks, braids of woven silk, and, hung among the rest with equal prominence, the mummified corpses of animals and more than a few people. Their silent screams are preserved in tight, suffocating layers of silk, as though the keepers of this place found that expression particularly pleasing or amusing.
The ornamental pool that glimmers in the middle of the clearing is surrounded by old stone shrines built out of stacked stones, while a beautiful cascade of water runs softly over the edge of a low ridge to the northwest to fill the pool, flowing back out to the south in a narrow creek.
Soon after your arrival, six spiderlike spirits emerge from the surrounding woods and clamber up onto the six rock shrines to the east and west of the pool. The one closest to you addresses you in a soft, eloquent voice. “You intrude upon sacred ground. Your kind abandoned this shrine to us. By what right do you claim such a return?”