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Aith, wondering if prestidigitation will be enough to get the blood out of her robes and stitch them up again (herself is another matter, and she's pretty sure she's still bleeding), isn't feeling very merciful right now, no matter what Sarenrae says, but she can deal with it if she doesn't have to make the call. "Right," she says, tersely. "Be careful. Do you need help dragging him out into the open?"
Aith doesn’t like the look of the fog that the nephilim conjures, but if it’s going to be a game of cat and mouse, well, she’ll work with that as best she can. If this Ezer fellow has a strong will – either inspiration or madness strikes with the thought, and the mage fumbles for her spell components and then her pistol. It more than strains her memory, but Aith fills in the gaps as best she can, and the bit of stuff in her hand fades into the next shot loaded in her pepperbox. “Ezer Hazzebaim,” she pronounces softly. Despite her wound, her smile is decidedly cat-like.
Even before factoring in his conscious will, Aith can feel something in the foe's innate self resisting her spell: she manages to push through the latter, but the former seems to be made of stern enough stuff to give her trouble, and she hastily sorts through several other options.
Aith discovers in short order that blatantly trying to use a powerful artifact in pretty much a direct opposite way to that which a murderous outsider with a large axe would prefer tends to go, in turn, the way one would expect. She manages to only half be cut in half, and twists desperately to buy a bit of breathing room, relying on her mage’s tricks to wriggle through space itself. Turning at bay, Aith, trying not to fall apart, tries to return the favour and hopefully help her friends for a moment, gathering herself to spit an impressively voluble and spiteful prayer to Calistria through her pain.
Aith backs water to make sure she’s out of the giant’s reach as she tries to understand what’s happening, something that feels rather like the sting of betrayal spiking her heart rate. “I thought you wanted to help us free everyone wrongfully imprisoned here!” she protests, hearing an unwelcome feeble note even as she does so. “If this is the artifact you meant, you can watch to make sure we destroy it, if that’s what it takes!” Except … that wasn’t what he said, was it? Or his reflection? “While the orb is still wet,” or the like? Is this a trick to get them to assume he was the only one being held by it? “We wish only to free the Princess Shazathared, ourselves, and any who mean us no harm!” If only there was more time for testing, without a lunatic eager to start swinging a really big sword around!
"Hmm, right," Aith frowns in concentration as the adventurers' reflected guide rather bursts her bubble, and tries not to look too pleased by the thought of a portable second head - or orb, at least - to bounce ideas off of. "Bottled breath of a goddess and all that. It stands to reason that some very, very exceptionally blessed water would be needed. After some more expressive facial expressions reflecting her mental contortions replacing her previous gesticulations, Aith perks up again as recalling her mental map of the palace to find their other trapped genie reminds her of something else. [b]"There was that other door! Near where we found Iavesk? We must be getting close!"
It remains to be seen whether her optimism is warranted. Probably soon, unless she's collared before she manages to zoom off.
“Worth a try,” Aith suggests distractedly, going over her mental inventory of reagents and components likely to have settled to the bottom of her pockets and pouches, and deciding she should probably keep a flask of holy water on hand in future, just in case. She wonders how many silvers she might be able to rummage up, but also starts thinking. Going over the unusual spells she’s learned from her explorations of the traditions of the schools of the far west of the continent, the mage is pretty sure that combining rain magic with a blessing – say, an aggressive, smiting one, even – and, why not, a couple of other factors… Well, it’s more god-magic type stuff anyway, so putting her own spin on it would probably need seeing it in action, but someone like Bylo, now… “I suppose it depends on how much silver we need, really, and how much patience we have with files or whetstones and such, but, if it comes to that, how does this sound?” With the rapidity of excitement, a certain amount of theological corners cut, but complex general ideas about magic across the arcane/divine divide, and lots of energetic waving of arms around, Aith picks Bylo’s brains about a spell that he might be able to pray up. Holy Ice. How hard can it be to count out and melt the javelin version of the spell, on the Plane of Fire? :) “If our royal, watery patron’s fountain won’t work, maybe? Unless we want to be more experimental first?” She heads for the door and a quick swoop down to the main pile of the palace and the princess trapped therein, but her light tone makes it clear that she is absolutely curious enough to try lunatic ideas before more sensible ones, if her friends prefer.
Once she shakes off the worst of staring directly at so powerful an artifact’s magic – which leaves her rather sympathetic to fireflies and their problems with lanterns, honestly – after a toss of her head and twitch of her hair back into place, Aith muses aloud as she tries to resist another look in. “I’m not sure – too much like looking right into a fire to see how bright it is,” she says, going over the impressions she was able to glean before being overwhelmed, again, “but it feels a bit like the same sort of magic that was bound up in the scroll that brought us here, in the end. Interesting! To bind elemental energies into a demiplane, and into a space... maybe one could use the same sort of idea to cut off a space from all other planes…” She lets her wizardy witterings peter out, knowing that the more technical aspects are probably not going to interest anyone else as much, and gets to the business end of things: "Anyway, like Kakishon and the scroll bound to it, this thing probably isn't going to weather being unbound very well. Pity, really." She would have liked to have a luxurious pocket plane to study, and while a fancy dimensional lock on a bit of the Plane of Fire is less exciting ... still. She'll have to pay careful attention when they find their sacred draughts: as past experience (and arguably regrettable enthusiasm) has taught her all too well, destructive testing can still be most instructive. "Well, moving quickly and breaking things it is, then. Hey-ho!"
Oh, dimension door is in the spellbook, and something we like to keep ready. Just trying to conserve our higher-level spell slots in case things get messy. And being tickled by the idea of what it might look like to try to be sneaky while flying. :) Hopefully I can catch a break for a bit after a brutal week IRL, capped off by getting my seasonal booster shots, which made the last couple of days especially fun. Things are looking up a bit now, at least!
“Possibly partly a side-effect of cooping themselves up here away from all the little people like us,” Aith says, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the city far below, beyond the palace walls. “That probably leaves a lot of time for silly games with words. Although, if this thing is anywhere near as powerful as it probably has to be, a certain amount of respectful caution is understandable.” Aith braces herself as best she can for what she’s sure will be an overwhelming emanation if she opens herself up to the orb’s magic directly, every new mystery pushing more divinations higher up on her mental research agenda. As she gathers herself and reaches inwardly for the wisp of her own magic that she’ll need, she adds, “Fortunately, we know where to find a princess with a pool of exceptional pure water that she didn’t want us to just dabble in. I don’t like the sound of the ‘eyes of the grand vizier,’ though.”
I'm afraid that this week is going to be hellishly busy for me, so I'll probably not be able to post again before Friday. :(
Aith watches the circling dragon for a minute, trying to gauge its rate of travel around the castle tower and overall attentiveness. As she weighs up the odds, she pulls out a spellbook from her bag and leafs through to the right page, brow furrowing as she thinks of where she might be able to stretch a point here or there, be a bit loose with a gesture there… After a bit, she snaps the book shut with a nod and puts it away again. “Right!” she says, trying to herd the others together. “Gather round, please. I think if we just don’t stray too close to it, but stay together ourselves, if we stay out of sight, we should be fine. It doesn’t seem to be looking very hard for intruders in the tower, so… let’s get back to intruding?” With a hasty explanation of what the spell she’s about to cast will do, the scatty mage does her best to return her friends, herself, and the key, to the magical lock, while preserving as much spellpower as possible.
Yasmeena begins talking, slowly refining her description of the orb as she goes, coached by some strange bardic magic. "The queen of elemental fire, Ymeri, goddess and elemental lord, she has filled this glass sphere with her breath, and the heat has imbued it with the divine warmth of pure flame. Lo, how Javhul was scorned by his elemental queen, and how he lusted after her. Yet perhaps this artifact has lain here unspoiled since before his desperate quest?" Love it! Bards nailing a tantalizing story, as they should. :) As for Jhavhul, though, gosh, what a dork. Aith’s got a sentimental streak miles long and wide, and she’s a crazy wizard, but I think even she would find that a bit much. Keeping an unrequited crush’s breath in a bottle? Just plain weird. Or maybe that’s just me, since I can’t help but think that a lunatic like Aith might imagine something like that one bit in that Dr. Who episode that had the Doctor frantically improvising for a last-minute party gift.
Aith’s arched brows lift even pointier as Yasmeena identifies just what the orb the reckless mage has hefted contains. “Well. That’s certainly something,” she says, her tone suggesting some uncertainty on her part as to what bringing the key back to the tower is likely to do. Will the orb dissolve, or erupt in a blaze of flame? Or just start shining very brightly? It’s hard to tell, with her, which alternative she might find the most interesting, as she considers the options for weirder sorts of arcane locks. “I presume there must be a catch?” “Something as fleeting as breath, and as intimate, that Jhavhul felt he had to preserve for who knows how long? What’s it the key to really, I wonder? Some other cruel reminder from the queen of Fire, or an incidental keepsake by our favourite hated warlord?” Aith finds she rather admires the scorn implied by Ymeri’s – gift? Was it some sort of humiliating trifle intended to put an underling in his place? Or did Jhavhul somehow steal it? “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” she adds with alarmingly empirical zeal. "So we've avoided everything here, and got the fiery orb, the 'key to our quest'... Now do we teleport back to the spire and use it to open the door? I don't think flying would be good since that dragon would probably attack the instant it detects that we have the orb." “We could do that,” she nods. “Or, if we want to take some more time to roll this thing around on the way … I would need to check my notes first, but I think I could stretch an invisibility spell to cover us on the way. Maybe the dragon’s just a coincidence after all?” She gives a hopelessly optimistic peek outside to see if the beast is still circling.
Aith throws a sympathetic look Bylo’s way, as he beats her to scanning the orb and promptly has his magical senses overwhelmed with, well, whatever it is. We’ve all been there, she muses ruefully as she waits for him to recover from the perils of testing powerful artifacts. She rests a palm on the orb as she wonders if the fiery magic it’s stuffed with might have other weird properties. How heavy is it? Unless Bylo warns her against it, she’ll go with the empirical approach and try lifting it. After all, if it’s the key they need, they’ll need to bring it to the lock, no? Frustratingly, she knows there are divinations that might be helpful for prodding at such a thing that are just out of her reach right now, and she gives the orb a baleful glare as if she can simply will it into revealing its secrets.
“As long as there are no demons inside to pelt us with rocks and whatnot,” Aith suggests. “Maybe this time I won’t drop us in behind closed doors, just in case. We should have time to get inside if we have to, I think.” With that, she gathers everyone around and, once everyone joins hands and she belts out the magic words, yanks herself and her friends through space to the top of the pyramid.
"About what?" Haleen asks curiously. “Oh, you know, ‘Lovely day for flying - bright and warm - isn’t it? Don’t mind us, we’re certainly not ransacking the palace of an exiled warlord for any interesting antiques. Would you care for a cup of tea?’ That sort of thing,” Aith says glibly. Honestly, she doubts they want to get the dragon’s attention, or if they get it without calling out a greeting, that the ensuing … conversation will be all that cordial. But then, she’s not sure how dragons think. Is it safer to respectfully avoid intruding on their business, or do they want small, soft people to 'ooh' and 'ahh' and fawn a bit?
“Or, I think I could jump us to the top of the pyramid from here, which would put us out in the open, but also near where we want to be, if Yasmeena’s right about where the key to this thing is most likely to be. If we can get the pyramid’s doors open quickly, we might be able to take shelter inside if our visitor turns out to be grumpy,” the mage offers. (At least this time she’s not proposing to bypass the doors directly and jump in blindly, which turned out oh so very well with the sepid.) “Might save you a spell until we know what it’s intentions are,” she adds, though she makes sure to ward Bylo and Haleen against fire just in case, before the group decides on their next move.
"You think that flying lizard is stupid enough to come in here and be trapped with us?" Haleen inquires. “If it wants a fight, and if we hit it hard enough,” Aith guesses. “Or if it’s bound here by a geas or some other enchantment. It may not have much more of a choice about staying here than we do. Why now? Do dragons just fly over cursed old palaces in the City of Brass all the time?” She wonders if they’ve tripped some alarm or contingency by entering the tower, and, as the visitor circles outside, gets a distinct feeling of a cat watching a mouse in a hole – but not of being the cat in the situation. She tries to find a window with a view of the pyramid, trying to gauge the distance, and see if there’s a door they could jump behind to minimize the risk of jumping into tons of solid metal and stone. “Do we want to try talking?” she asks, watching the windows as if expecting any one of them to erupt with a gout of flame at a moment’s notice.
“Lovely tea set,” Aith announces as she finishes her magpie tour of the chambers. “I think it would be wonderful to have for when we’re entertaining. I’d have to take a moment to consult my notes for shrinking spells to make it more manageable – most everything is genie-sized – but if there’s anything else that speaks to someone’s heart-” Her ramblings are cut off by a glimpse of a large, scaly, winged something that swoops past her field of vision. She looks to the others to gauge if she’s seeing things, and the mood of the group. “Ah! Looks like we should expect a visitor soon, speaking of! How much time do you think we have to prepare, or should we decide we’re not at home?”
Poking about, it becomes clear that Aith is all too fascinated by the luxurious apartments, and would reproduce their decadence at a more suitable scale (and temperature) in her own life if she could. She makes a beeline for the tea service and starts calculating the best way to stack it for, er, liberation from a brute like Jhavhul or his minions. Although it must be said that the idea of letting the weird mage drink coffee from cups that size, with as much sugar as she likes, is the sort of thing her friends will probably veto in short order, in the interests of the general structural, chemical, and magical stability of her surroundings. Aith also takes a look at the hookah in passing. Not her poison, and who knows if they’ll ever meet the former inmate of these chambers, but the guardswoman in her checks anyway, just in case, especially if it turns out to be something that would be worth factoring in: would whatever was in there boost aggression, or reduce inhibitions, or just leave the smoker kind of dopey? Forewarned is forearmed! As she fiddles absently with the furnishings, the mage looks up at the tapestries, trying to decipher the details of their subjects. Jhavhul himself, or an ancestor? Is that a desert back home, or some even more viciously blazing one on the Plane of Fire? And what are those … things? Necromancy was never her favourite type of magic, and her postings never took her closer to Geb (mercifully), so Aith is a bit shaky on matters related to the not-quite-dead.
Like Bylo, Aith takes a moment to check the heat pulsing in the middle of the room, trying to figure out where it’s coming from, and what it might be doing, when their elusive, cryptic guide pops in for another moment.
“Oh, good,” she says, halfway between rueful and sardonic, nodding as Yasmeena unpicks the riddle in a much more poetical way than a technically-minded (however whimsical) mage could hope to. “I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if that weird ghost in the palace proper would just love to muck about with actual flaming hearts, but if this hidden orb is a key and a heart, then whatever is in it, or it’s made of, should be something like blood, and this –” “– should be a … lock?” She does wonder what opening it would look like. Given the lingering heat here, and fieriness of the mentioned orb, would it result in the ignition of a pillar of beacon-fire? That might be something to see! She takes another look around the room, looking for interior stairs, before the adventurers butterfly off towards the pyramid without fully exploring the tower. Maybe behind those doors?
“That looks uncomfortable, if it is a hot spot,” Aith says, pointing out the all but invisible waves stirring the air in the very middle of the room. “Better safe than not? Does anyone else want a ward against fire? And if all Hell breaks loose – especially with swords or maces or what have you – I can try to protect whoever's in front with a counter-charm to toughen the skin, but that spell calls for diamond dust, and I only have enough to cast it two or three times. Oh, to get to the city’s bazaar!” She casts a wistful look over the view of the rest of the City of Brass, before casting her spell to resist energy on herself, and anyone else who wants one, before stepping through the curtains to see what’s what. A council chamber? If it’s a throne room, she wonders about the symbolism of the corners focused on the center. A shared goal? As she enters, Aith keeps one eye on Haleen and Bylo to know where to run to if it looks like they’ll need a stoneskin in short order: to hold back another infernal giant, say.
Upon arriving at the balcony, Aith takes a moment to take in the view – rather wistfully, given that she seems to have exchanged one planar trap for another. The view’s more extensive here (and she keeps an eye out for any landmarks she might recognize ), but in hindsight, she liked (RIP) the weirdness of Kakishon rather more, especially with the proteans. Still, maybe they’ll be able to do some exploring if they can figure out how to get out of the cursed castle? After a minute, she turns to the nearest archway, and takes another second to admire the curtains – maybe silk would allow some of the colour effect, without the weight? – before trying to peek through to see what’s beyond. ...Only to promptly underestimate just how heavy the curtains are, get yanked off-balance, and roll herself into a flap of the metal fabric before she gets a good look. Hopefully there's no bored monster lurking within whose curiosity might be piqued by a sudden motion in the windows.
“My favourite spell for flying about is not one that can be bestowed with a touch,” Aith frowns, “but I do have another, which is better in some ways, but doesn’t last anywhere near as long.”
Going over what is now becoming almost second nature in realms far from those she’s used to Aith, quickly casts a warding over herself for protection from evil intent, not least in case anything tries to get into her head, and then softly intones the incantation that will lift her off her feet. “Tower first, at least just to take a peek?” she asks, her magic already pulling her up on her toes. “What do we think the chances are that the pyramid isn’t just a folly, but also a tomb stuffed with ghosts and other ghouls, like for the northern pharaohs back home?” As she looks up to the tower balcony with its convenient space to land, she draws her pistol, just in case she'll need it when she and her friends arrive.
“Hmm. Well, we’ve found one princess already, but shall we check that tower next? Take that flying carpet for another spin, for those of us not flying by other means? And then, depending on how that goes, we can work our way down from there, and see about getting into that pyramid we saw from the walls,” Aith muses. Her brow furrows as she considers some of the other bits and bobs she’s accumulated recently, not least in Kakishon. Unfortunately, the weird metal walls of the palace laugh in the face of the handiest tools available for getting past earth and stone. There’s always more dimensional shenanigans to try if her friends are happy to try short-range blind teleports, but that might be a hard sell after how running into the sepid worked out.
“Thank you, Bylo,” Aith nods, as the conjured breakfast gets dished out. “Goodberry Surprise, while a life-saver, does eventually outlive its welcome, I have to admit.” She does her best with a bit of prestidigitation to enliven everyone’s meal, casting her cantrip over again to try to suit everyone’s tastes. There’s only so much so tiny a spell can do, though, and for all her elven airs, Aith’s Smokeside childhood shows in the unsubtle indulgence of her flavours.
With an optimistic hum as she sets to her bowl that’s now in the vague neighbourhood of cinnamon and sugar, Aith casts her eye over the room once more, and her mind over what they’ve seen of the palace so far, in an attempt to recall any doors they might have overlooked. Whatever it is that serves as a focus for the force that's keeping them here, she seems to have missed it, and she makes a mental note to add more planar magic to her research agenda. Is there something like the opposite of a dimensional anchor?
Hello, everyone. Just popping in to say that you should probably bot me for a bit - my luck finally ran out, and I tested positive for COVID on the weekend. I have been in a haze since, and I think it's best for everyone if I don't make any choices for Aith involving spell areas or whatever - even if it might be true to her character. :) Hopefully it won't be too long before I can check in again with as much lucidity as I've ever been able to muster.
“No harm in stretching our legs a bit more,” Aith shrugs, “and the garden is lovely. Maybe it could even tempt out the immured vizier to look in on us?” She directs a quizzical brow at the haunted walls of the palace for a moment, not that she really expects a response. Although, as Yasmeena says, Aith is pretty sure their partially insulated magical tent will be comfortable enough – not like roughing it in the desert on an outrider rotation with the town guard, or just generally, under the grim fumes of the dark, satanic mills of Smokeside – she doesn’t mind humouring their resident swinger of swords and squisher of frogs. “Ice wall,” the mage murmurs to herself as she saunters off to find a place to set up camp that will make everyone as comfortable as possible. “Conjuring a wall of ice might help keep things comfortable while trapped on a fiery plane, and with containing escaping villains, polymorphed or otherwise. To keep an eye out, once a suitable library presents itself.”
"Mm-hm," Aith nods, biting her lip in thought, her mind still full of ideas about how to try to conjure up more robust walls more quickly, should the need arise, or to throw up force fields, or hone her magic so that it holds to its targets. "If nothing else, there's always a corner of the great hall. We can keep an eye on comings and goings, if any, the columns and such will provide an interesting perspective, otherwise, and if his giant nibs asks, he can take a look at the wreckage to see that we're not merely taking our sweet time."
It’s a strange and extremely welcome feeling of revitalization as Aithaloessa’s body surges with the healing energy that Bylo channels through it, almost shorting her out as it spills beyond her capacity and stirs her from the pit of oblivion the defunct sepid’s bombardment forced her into. Which is not to say that the elf mage doesn’t make an incongruous sight, wide-eyed and spread-eagled, coughing up a puff of dust from the conjured debris that flattened her, and a vehement stream of Elven curses, <“Bastard elemental devil! Resisting elven magic! Unfair, is what that is…"> Sitting up with enthusiasm buoyed by holy healing, Aith combs out what looks like an unpleasant mass of cobweb from her hair and blinks more dust from her brows and lashes as she continues to half-mumble, half-rant to herself about things to look into to avoid such a turn of events in future. She certainly looks like she’s been thrown through the better of the contents of an elaborately furnished room twice over. How does she keep getting caught in collapsing architecture? “If anyone, I should be the one bringing houses down. I should learn that trick with the rubble, at least. Or find a way to carry my own cannon around…” There’s a brief, excited squeak considering the metals that might respond best to magical manipulation of mass and dimension as she jumps to her feet, before she remembers herself and bows deeply to Bylo. “Oh, I’m ever so much obliged! That was much closer than I would have liked, and if it hadn’t been for you… Clearly, I’ll have to be more careful, although, too, it’s a terrible thing that can resist the, hmm, flow of my people’s magic. Stranger and more dangerous things, once one starts walking the worlds, I suppose…” Haleen shakes her hands to get the toad goo off and checks where else it splashed. "One magical cleaning please." Aith nods, casting a jaundiced eye around the wreckage of the room and, with a quick incantation and a few passes of her hand, she does her best to oblige Haleen.
Oh, gosh. I guess it depends on how you want to play it. As to BAB, narrowly, that’s the easy bit: baleful polymorph explicitly calls out that the victim retains its BAB, base saves, and hp. Since our angry new toad made its Will save, it also retains its extraordinary, supernatural, and spell-like abilities – except when they “depend on [the target’s] original form,” per the rules for the (scrolling down a bit) polymorph subschool. I imagine it’s GM’s choice about what that means for a given creature. I mean, some forms of DR and resistances are probably tied to the body of critters, but for things like alignment-based DR, well, are evil outsiders literally, material evil (but not if they're transmuted into the shape of a (mostly) normal animal), or is it a carry-over from the polluted strength of their corrupt souls? (And maybe it makes a difference whether we’re talking mooks like lemures or whatever and your balors and other demon lords.) Maybe we should ask Bylo. :) As an old crone, I grew up thinking that polymorph spells just gave you the new form’s ability scores, which is rather more convenient for us than even baleful polymorph being based on beast shape, which normally gives net bonuses, for Medium sized critters. The former would give our new toad Str 1, Dex 12, Con 6, whereas the latter, with the adjustment for being Large to start with, would modify whatever the sepid’s physical stats are by: Str -8, Dex +8, Con -2. I think I would go with the former, in general, and use the beast shape template as a guideline to avoid exploits like willingly failing a save against a deliberately less baleful casting of the spell on an ally, but that’s definitely to our advantage here, so, again, GM’s choice. Either way, it loses its old size modifiers to attack and AC and CMB, replacing them with whatever Diminutive critters get. It would also lose its original natural armour bonus, I presume, but, if we’re going the beast shape route, get that spell’s +1 natural armour bonus instead. I think that’s my take, unless I’m forgetting something.
With a muffled, choking curse, Aith goes down under the barrage of rubble like, well, a certain amount of bricks - her body unmoving.
Aith’s fingers twitch for either more magic or her pistol – maybe not the latter, seeing how nimbly the transformed sepid is hopping around. “Iavesk, Neelah! Any ideas about pinning that thing in place?” she calls. Haleen - skewering it?” It might betray a certain lack of imagination on her part, as a mage, but Aith did not wake up this morning expecting that she would have to ask her friends, “Get that frog!”
A fleeting thought to investigate larger ordnance crosses Aith’s mind as she’s forced to jump back from another blast from the sepid.
With the nudge of Neelah's performance, the mage's back-pedaling spares her the worst of the fireball. "I don't think I can hit hard enough to hurt that thing!" He again casts healing magic to help the party. “I’m trying to think of what I can do!” she calls back worriedly to Bylo, before pointing a finger trembling with outrage at the unearthly giant. "Why, you - you stubborn, obnoxious ... goat!" she protests, furious, magic building behind her words.
"Ha!" Aith calls as her spell sweeps the door clear. She hopes that she stands a better chance than not of hitting a barn door with, well, something closer to the size of one than her usual missiles (shame - that looked like a lovely cabinet), but then again, it's a pretty big giant too, and her mind races for what magic she could try next. What is this thing, anyway?
Before she even has a chance to enjoy her successful magical manoeuvre, Aith flinches under a hail of rubbish, which she thinks is quite unfair, since she managed not to try to jump into solid stone. After Bylo's spell, she's less likely to keel over quite yet, and the mage quickly tries to assess the barricades keeping the doors shut. How easy would it be to get them clear, so their friends who didn't ride her teleportation can come in? Eyeballing the piles of stuff, she gives it her best guess and rather than using her magic to yank on space, tries her luck with force.
With a glance, a growl, and a sweep of her hand, the badly battered mage does her best to sweep the doors clear and, if possible give the giant a taste of his own rough music, hurling the piled furniture back at him.
“See you in a moment,” Aith nods to Haleen, hoping the fighter hasn’t got a gut feeling about a complication that Aith’s gut is missing. “Right!” She extends her hands to Iavesk and Yasmeena, and lifts an arched brow to Bylo in question. Once everyone’s arranged themselves for going or staying, Aith feels out with her magic for the space beyond the door, and with a sudden cry of something that sounds a bit like very old Elven – <“Horsandhaettoc!”> - gleeps with her friends into the sealed chamber.
"Could you set fire to the inside of the chamber without us opening the door?" Haleen inquires from Aithaloessa. “It would be tricky,” Aith suggests. “The evoked flame starts in something like a seed, or a bead – bigger than a spark, that is – that has to get to where one wants to start a fire. As Neelah says, at best, it would mean peering through the keyhole, and then stringing the bead through it, if we don’t want to just blast through.” There’s just a slight hint of wistfulness in her tone that suggests she might want to try it.
“That said, there are other ways of looking for trouble,” she reassures (?) Bylo, “that won’t risk singeing anyone on the other side of that door. I can only take three along, until I get more practice, but so long as we’re not trying to leave the palace, some dimensional conjuration ought to do the trick, and we’ll unbarricade, or what have you, the door to let the last one in as soon as, assuming we’re not jumping down a dragon’s gullet. Hands, please?”
"That sounds like a lovely idea," Aith says. "Especially if we can find a place to get our bearings again, and see where we can poke our heads into to find what's holding us here. Perhaps our reflective vizier might put in another appearance someplace we might be undisturbed?"
“Yes, Shabendeh was the one who took poorly to our explorations, so I suppose Bagoas would be his spectral rival? He – the latter, I mean – didn’t seem particularly concerned about anyone wandering around, so long as they don’t bother him.” “We put down Shabendeh and his ghouls, and, I’m afraid, the mad efreet: they came at us too ferociously for us to subdue them, once they noticed us. It’s been that sort of thing, so far,” Aith explains, counting up the kills quickly in her head. “We open a door, get greeted by either hapless servants like kobolds, who we try to treat fairly, or a mob of swords and whatnot, or even summoned creatures, and those we deal with as you might expect. I think it’s been about, hmm, a couple of dozen or so lunatics so far, your lizardfolk, efreet, and salamanders.” "Will Bagoas turn on us, do you think? Or try to slip some horrible deeds under our noses? Like we said, we can try putting everyone who deserves it to the sword, but depending on how many that is, we might not be able to do it in one single push."
“We’re working on it, sir,” Aith says quickly and humbly, channeling what she’s learned about mollifying people in charge from her time in Alkenstar, trying to do her job with the chiefs always breathing down everyone’s neck for more progress. “We just thought we should escort rescued civilians someplace safer, and thought we should report in the interim to make sure we’re not missing something important.” “Do we know how bright is – er, how many there are in the Flickering Candle? We defeated one of their number – an elf who, unlike yours truly, didn’t see the way the wind was changing – and then freed Iavesk here, who was captured by them, but put under a terrible enchantment right after, so he hasn’t had any luck remembering much more about them. On the way, we also dealt with a creature disgracing the name of priesthood, who also offended someone calling himself the “Master of the Haunted Palace.” If he’s one of the guards you mentioned, he didn’t seem to be very concerned about everyone poking about the place – ” Aith takes a breath before getting to the nub of it, “ – but before we get in so deep that we need to start worrying about who’s hiding what and might turn on us as we track down the Candle and the last of the guards with misplaced loyalties, do you know of who we should be watching for especially? Apart from a barbed devil and a very slippery elf fellow, neither of whom will be a problem anymore?”
She keeps it quick and fairly serious, but there's a bit of a hint of pulling a fast one and making excuses as she tries to verbally shuffle around all the pieces of what's going on for her own benefit too.
Yep! It's been a while since I've logged in to Roll20, but unless shenanigans have been afoot, I don't think my account will have gone anywhere.
“Do you know what they wanted with you?” Aith asks. “The entire palace seems to have gone mad. At least, as far as I understand it, the master of the place is long gone, but everyone here is … trapped, and jostling to get the balance of power and control? As you can tell, we’re not local ourselves, but people seem to be at once rather uninterested in our presence, and happy to steer us into making trouble for their rivals.” “We mostly want to make sure that we, and anyone else who’s been unjustly imprisoned, can get out of here. You’re welcome to follow after us for a bit, but we haven’t found our exit yet, and we’re likely to get in a bit more trouble first.” She sighs, shaking her head apologetically. “I can only imagine how overwhelming it must be. We can chat as we go, if that would help? We seem to be working towards a colloquy of the elements, but we’ve yet to meet an efreeti who has much time for us.”
Haleen gets the impression like the elf could know that from practical experimental experience rather than using a figure of speech. She looks at Aithaloessa with suspicion. “I mean, I guess. If one spends any time doing duty on one of the south gates in Alkenstar, one learns not to look too closely at some of the carriers the Gebbites use in their caravans,” Aith offers in (somewhat feeble) explanation. She watches Bylo’s operations curiously, inwardly conflicted by how some crucial aspect of life seems to come so much more easily to the magic of faith than of more experimental science. More research is needed, clearly.
Aith nods at Yasmeena’s suggestion. “That’s just it, Bylo. It’s not a trick to get us to lower our guard – the sort of ill will that your paladins, or clerics such as yourself, would easily discern with your magic and lore – but as far as I could tell, there really is nothing else there. Nothing we would recognize as thoughts or feelings as we know them, compared to, I don’t know, a lizard's. Or a zombie's? It’s like his brain has been scooped out.”
"It's very strange - I think he's gone mad. There's no malice that I can detect, but not anything else, either. And it's not an ongoing spell, as far as I can tell, like a curse or enchantment. It's like he's just ... gone."
Aith speaks softly in an attempt to be tactful, before realizing that the poor djinni is in no state to be offended. "I dabble in healing magic, but more for bumps and bruises than anything as delicate as the mind. Do you have any ideas, Bylo?"
Aith's brow furrows in concern. She knows she can be a bit much, but even she can tell her friends offer a gentler, much less manic approach without much luck calming the inmate. She moves to position herself at the bars to the cell where the others won’t get in the way of her aura readings, and calls up her cantrip to detect magic, trying to sort out if the poor genie is under some cruel enchantment, or if the wall he’s staring at is – maybe manifesting the sort of mysterious reflection that she and her friends have seen, but not visible to ordinary senses? Now that she thinks about it, she wonders if they all saw the same thing, really, in the fleeting moments that the image of Jhavhul’s vizier appeared. “Poor fellow! I’m not much of a diviner, so I doubt I’d have much luck reading his mind. Do you think it will be safe if we open that door?” she half-whispers to the others. As she considers her options , her free hand reaches for the curious walking stick the group acquired before confronting the grotesque priest a short while ago.
Not for the first time, Aith laments the fact that she keeps getting dragged out of her lab, and isn’t left alone to see what mysteries of magic and alchemy she can pull from her experiments, or, failing that, to play around with ways to lob lead and stone ever further and faster. She takes a step back and tries to calm the prisoner. “Don’t worry, our quarrel is only with Jhavhul, strictly speaking. As far as we’re concerned, if we can escape, it’s only so much the better if we can also make sure anyone under his thumb can leave too, if they want to. We gather that he had a nasty habit of collecting genie prisoners, and an artifact has gone missing too that’s left a curse on this place and prevents free passage beyond the palace?”
Despite her good intentions, her wizardly mind can't resist the siren song of picking a new local's brain on any of the several problems she's mulling over, so what starts off as an attempt to be reassuring rapidly turns into a rapid-fire series of questions linked mostly by mad mage logic.
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