"They are pretty," Jade agrees, then sizes up her companions. "I'll take point. My lightning and water works just as well up close as it does far away, and I've got my shield to protect me." She gives it a gentle thump with her palm to emphasize her point. "Everyone ready?"
Kork picks up one colourful geode to inspect it for a short moment. He squints his eyes at the stone and turns it around a few times before putting it in his backpack. "Feathers!" he shouts at Okoteck before coming closer to the tengu. "Must mark this place on map. Shiny metals here. Silver, maybe even mithril."
"Mithral! This big geode definitely has mithral ore in it, and of high quality! Jade exclaims after examining the largest geode. "If we can dislodge it, we can drag it to wherever we're setting the rope and pulley and lower it down. There's no way we're climbing with it, unless Okoteck has a spell of some sort to make it lighter?"
"Feathers!" he shouts at Okoteck before coming closer to the tengu. "Must mark this place on map. Shiny metals here. Silver, maybe even mithril."
"But of course," Okoteck replies to Kork's suggestion, though he doesn't immediately get out his notebook.
Once the group has examined the area and found no dangers, the tengu sheathes his sword. He seems as excited by the rusted pick as anything else. "We know ibn Rashad returned with mithral and diamonds... perhaps this pick dates from his expedition? Or perhaps it is a sign that other explorers unknown to history made their way here?"
He examines the pick on the off chance he can find any clues to its origin.
"There's no way we're climbing with it, unless Okoteck has a spell of some sort to make it lighter?"
The tengu shakes his head sadly. "I am but a dabbler in the arcane. I have no spell to reduce weight. But would not a chunk of mitral ore care little for being dropped from a height? Even were it to break, the pieces would be as valuable as the hole."
As you gather around the geode and begin to break it out of the surrounding rock using your hammers and pitons as picks, you hear two soft thunks from behind you.
Turning, you behold that the two large icicles you noted upon entering are somehow alive, and their serpentine forms slither across the floor to attack the source of the noise. How solid ice could move with such sinuous grace and not crack, you are uncertain, but the evidence is right before you, and about to attack.
The snake who landed closest to the party takes two quick bites of Syper, digging into his flesh and spraying him with a clear secretion that begins hardening into ice on his body, inflicting numbing cold.
The snake that was further from the party slinks forward and bites Kork with special ferocity, dousing him in the same chilling bile.
Jade leaps into action quickly, activating her kinetic aura ◆ and sending a shower of hailstones ◇ to try and shatter the icicle snake in front of Kork.
Then Jade yells, "Move!" Syper, Kork, Jaym'row, and Okotek feel a tailwind ◆◆ ready to propel them wherever they want to go.
Jade's blast misses her foe, clattering off the wall behind it and landing with a puff in the snow. Her elemental powers grant her companions a burst of celerity, permitting them to reposition advantageously.
Jaym'row moves toward the east cave wall.
Okoteck seems almost to float on the wind Jade summons, angling to circle around behind the attacking creatures. He keeps on his course once his steps grow heavier, getting behind the one attacking Kork. As he has before he summons lightning in his left hand before channeling it through the blade in his right as he strikes.
The monster, focused on Kork, is unable to dodge the tengu's electrified shortsword. As the lightning conducts through the creature's icy form, a burst of illumination refracts outward from its faceted flesh, briefly painting the walls with a kaleidoscopic flurry of light. It hisses in pain and turns its attention to Okoteck, its erstwhile goblin prey forgotten.
Kork looks at the creatures, attempting to recall what they are. The creatures are faster, however, and he ends up receiving a nasty wound. Caught off guard, he quickly pulls out a vial, uncorks it and dips one of the blades into it. As he does, the blade starts emanating an orange glow. "Kork not like two things now. Bullies and walking icicle. Burn!" he slashes at the entity.
vs DC 15
Kork's weapon strikes the creature a heavy blow, and a spiderweb of cracks radiates outward through its icy substance as his blade strikes home. The snake-thing hisses in confusion and pain.
Jaym'row draws her rapier as she approaches the snakicles from the opposite side as Syper, trying to stab at something that resembles a vital organ. As she faces the dangerous creatures, her fur along her tail stands on end, making her tail appear three times as thick as it switches back and forth.
if target is flat-footed off-guard.
"Gaah!"
Syper disengages with the snake, thanks to Jade's tailwind. He furiously scrapes away the rime while calling out, "We got these buggers, cold as they might be!"
The catfolk's blade works its way into a crack in the creature's icy form, breaking it open and leaving it in pieces on the floor of the cave. It writhes once, then goes still.
Syper's attempts to scrape off the bile are unsuccessful, and numbing cold continues to seep into his body as the fluid hardens into ice. His voice remains calm and clear despite his peril, belting out an anthem of supernatural vigor.
The remaining snake slides to the south and snaps repeatedly at Okoteck. One bite connects solidly, squirting cold fluid onto his leg.
Looking at Syper's wounds, Jade reaches out and gives him a spritz of healing water ◆.
Then she sends another shower of hailstones◆◆ towards the remaining snake.
Jade's healing waters flow over Syper's body, not only washing away some of his wounds but also clearing away the gelid bile.
With the notes of the bard's song granting her preternatural focus, Jade's blast of hailstones crash into the monster, causing significant fractures and spiderweb cracks in its otherworldly body.
With significant wounds and starknife in hand, Kork walks up to the creature and slashes at it twice.
The snake's attention torn between two foes, the goblin's starknife, glowing with a mysterious power, strikes twice. The first blow sends massive cracks shooting through the creature's flesh, causing it to cry out, while the second catches itself in a particularly large crack and levers it until the creature literally snaps in half. It shrieks and grows still.
The bile, however, has yet to lose its potency. Icy fingers of frost continue their slow numbing spread across Kork's flesh.
The goblin looks at his wounds as the cold spreads through his body. He lifts up his hand, fingers blue with starting stages of frostbite. "Kork know he strong, but not scared to ask for help. So... Help?" he looks around the group.
Jaym'row snarls in relief as the snakicles crack and fall apart. Then she notices Old Kork's distress and rushes to his side to try to help scrape the cold stuff off him with the dull side of her rapier.
The hardened bile, its consistency like sticky ice, cracks under the pressure of Jaym'row's administrations and falls to the cavern floor.
After scraping the bile off of the magus, it takes roughly a half-hour for Jade to heal the wounds of her party mates. It is then another hour with the picks and hammers to fully remove the geode from the wall. The party takes turns rolling the rock toward the camp.
A few dozen yards past the cavern, you come to the edge of the cliff. Spying the nearly-complete camp below, you catch sight of the cox’n, who waves in your direction and lets out a yell that echoes off the cliff face.
“Tie a rope and get down here, swabbies. Dinner’s almost ready!”
He spies your cargo.
"That's one hell of a rock. Careful not to drop it!" He cackles. "The captain will want to hear all about your trip!"
The lip provides an excellent spot to hammer in pitons and tie a knotted rope for a quick path back down to camp. You coil the rope around the geode and tie a square knot, forming a makeshift harness that allows you to slowly lower it down to the base of the cliff, then attach your carabiners and slowly clamber down the rope after it. Just as you prepare to descend, you notice a trail of black smoke from over the horizon to the northwest. You watch for several minutes but are unable to determine if it is natural or man-made.
Back at the camp, as you cluster around the cooking fire under the summer sun--still bright and yellow even well after five--Captain Ferrino looks up from his fish soup and asks you for a report.
"I take it you have discovered some mineralogical curiosities of sufficient interest to merit carrying fifty pounds of rock down an eighty foot cliff. And if you found a way up, you must have had quite the view of our surroundings. Anything I should know about?"
Okoteck is just as glad that the 'snakes' shatter without too much difficulty. Having felt their icy fangs himself, he has a healthy respect now for their danger.
"Well the first thing to be aware of is that some icicles around here want to kill us," the tengu jokes. More seriously he continues, "We were able to get a good view of our surroundings, which I've done my best to record. We did not see anything of particular interest or concern at first, but on our way back we happened upon a shallow cave. Within we found a number of stones with traces of various metals... including mitril. As well as aforementioned icicles that tried to kill us. Actually, they appeared to be a form of... ice elemental, perhaps? They took a form more like serpents to attack us, and spread a heat-sapping gel with their bites."
"As for the metals... well, there is at least some mithril. But perhaps more interestingly, someone else found the cave before us. Nearly a century before us, based on the remains. A Cornyrian mining pick, to be exact. I could see no signs of those who carried it."
He pauses, then adds, "Did you see the smoke from the northwest a few minutes ago? It was distant, but might mean trouble."
"Smoke?" The captain glances northward, but with the camp located in a depression, the horizon is blocked by trees. "We'll want to investigate that, most certainly, when we get the time. Perhaps even tomorrow."
He turns back to you. "But for now, we should take a look at this rock you found. If others have tried to mine the area in the past, that tells us there might be something there. And if there were extraplanar creatures in its vicinity, that something might be very valuable indeed."
The Captain motions to the blacksmith, who sidles over to you as you uncoil the rope harness. At the sight of it, he blinks in stupefaction for several moments before regaining his wits and eagerly inspecting it.
“This is mithril, and of incredible purity. There’s something odd about it, however…” He furrows his brow in concentration. “Let me take this to my workbench back in the tent. I’ve finished my soup anyway.”
Minutes later, you stand gathered around him as, with a little work from his pick, he pries open the geode and separates the mithril from the rock, revealing an ingot of prodigious size.
“Ilara’s light,” Mirian breathes, awed by the sight of the majestic metal as it reflects the light of the afternoon sun.
“This is mithril, all right, but not just any mithril. It’s absorbed energy from Saramir, the Realm of Metal itself. It will be incredibly hard for a normal smith to work, and is far beyond my ability, but someone skilled in magic could make something truly fantastic from it.”
Ferrino grins and slaps each of you on the back. “This is what we came here for, folks!”
He points at the ingot. "That's worth twenty thousand gold to the right people, easily. Were it not for the ever-present danger of frozen death pressing down upon us, I would break out the grog!"
Kork pulls out the smaller geode and gently tosses it to Ferrino's feet. "More rocks there. Also nasties. Come prepared."
“This is mithril, all right, but not just any mithril. It’s absorbed energy from Saramir, the Realm of Metal itself. It will be incredibly hard for a normal smith to work, and is far beyond my ability, but someone skilled in magic could make something truly fantastic from it.”
"I wonder how that happened..." Okoteck murmurs to himself, mind filled with visions of arcane catastrophes or other great works of magic causing such a thing. He seems entirely uninterested in the mithril's monetary value.
The dwarf pores over the other stones you retrieved, squinting and nodding.
"This one," he says, holding up the reddish geode with silvery streaks, "is a very fine piece of silver ore. Silver and mithril tend to be found together, which is why we call it by the Elven word for dawnsilver."
He holds up the yellowish geode. "This contains brimstone and antimony, and will be useful to an alchemist."
Finally, he holds up the dull brown geode. "And this is just a rock."
"I could tell you many folktales about some hero who finds something that is tremendously valuable, but then they can't find anyone willing to deal honestly with the hero. They either claim it is not really all that valuable but offer to take it off their hands for a few shiny coins or they try to take it by force. So having this is nice, but I'm not going to plan any major real estate purchases with my share just yet."
Jaym'row nevertheless seems a bit more cheerful for a while. She is, however, eager to set out to do more exploring.
The crew spends the rest of the evening celebrating the find and trading tales of what on which they intend to spend their share of the treasure.
A considerable quantity of supplies have been relocated to the camp. Seeing as the ship is not only unheated but cannot sustain a fire to drive away the chill, the majority of the crew have relocated to base camp as the fortifications near completion, with only the gunner's mate onboard to man the Dragonsbite.
The next morning, after eating a breakfast of bread and salted pork, you set off in the direction of the smoke (long since dissipated), following the frozen river.
The primeval hush of the forest is broken only by the rapid-fire chirping of robins, snowfinches, and pine warblers staking their claims upon the canopy, and the sound of your boots crunching in the snow. The pleasant smell of pine is dampened somewhat as the cold air sets your nostrils running.
You make excellent time, avoiding thin ice the few times you are forced to cross the river to bypass obstacles and threading through the trees without getting disoriented.
You break for lunch at around 1pm, wolfing down the hardtack and jerky as quickly as you can just to get it over with before resuming your journey. At 6pm, exhausted by 10 hours of trudging through snow, you pull out your tents and sleeping bags, eat another meal possessed of tooth-cracking sturdiness, and fall asleep. This far north at this time of year, the sun at 6pm has only the faintest tinge of red, so the sleepers place strips of fabric over their eyes in order to block out the light.
Jade takes first watch, as her vision will fail when the sunlight does. She then turns over duties to Kork, who watches over the camp until the small hours of the morning, at which time Okoteck rises and performs his morning stretches and studies his spellbook by moonlight until he has prepared for the new day.
On the second day, as you are forced to cut through the woods and lose sight of the river for a time to bypass rough terrain, Jaym'row nearly gets turned around. Fortunately, Syper corrects her, and you continue on your way, having only lost a half-hour of time.
Shortly after you finish lunch and resume your travel, you hear cracking branches and lupine barking from a distance.
Rounding a slight hillock, you spot (at a distance of about 200 feet) a young woman and her dog running full tilt away from four humanoid creatures with heads and legs like wolves. They lope swiftly forward on two legs, coming up roughly fifty feet behind her.
Seeing you, the woman yells something that sounds oddly similar to the Common word for “Help!”
Jade activates her kinetic aura ◆ and sends the four winds ◆◆ to propel her crewmates forward.
Pushed forward by a force of wind, the goblin charges forward, if a but surprised. He uses the momentum to move further along the path and draws Spikes from his belt.
"Get behind Kork!" he gestures to the dog.
The woman dashes toward the fallen tree, her dog loping along beside her.
Moments before hearing the sounds of pursuit, Jaym'row's nose picked up the tell-tale scent of dog. This puts her on alert and so she is ready when the chase comes into view. She dashes as quickly as she can toward the fallen tree to use it for cover in anticipation of being able to snipe at the bad dogs. Jade's tailwind povides a welcome assist.
The bard rushes forward, taking cover behind the fallen tree.
Okoteck rides the wind forward, though he doesn't seem particularly hurried. He jogs forward and takes up a position somewhat behind the fallen tree.
"Can you understand this language?" he calls out, loudly enough that he hopes both the woman and and the wolf-like beings can hear him. While he's inclined to defend the person running away, if there's any possibility of diplomacy he'd rather take it.
He cycles through as many languages as he can as he moves.
The lupine beings notice your arrival, but it does not phase them in the slightest. They ignore Okoteck's entreaties (whether from contempt or incomprehension you cannot tell) and continue their headlong rush, battleaxes raised and teeth bared in a feral snarl.
"The bloodlust is on them! They will not stop!" yells the fleeing woman in thickly accented Common.
Jade hustles to catch up to everyone else.
Jaym'row ducks down behind the fallen log as she prepares a bow and arrow. She peeks over the log and waits for the nearest wolfman to get closer and then pops up and sends the arrow flying.
(Range 60 ft)
if target is flat-footed off-guard.