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"Good. Good. I see you have learned some measure of caution." Szam Tass says and smiles. "I have a final message to impart." His voice like the harsh rasp of swarming locusts draws down to a jagged glass whisper. :
"Do not bother me nor what I claim as mine again."
Serena is angry. She wants a piece of Szam Tass so badly that she can taste the vengeance.
The lich looks on from the other side of the glass portal.
Szam Tass leans back and allows the pommel to pass inches away from his nose. He takes the time to step back into the mirror that ripples like a pool as he passes through and into the strange stone chamber, and it's balcony beyond. The glass(?) dividing the two spaces is the clearest and most unblemished anyone in the group has ever seen. Szam's mouth moves as he regards the party as if commenting on something to someone out of sight, but if he had uttered any actual sound it could not be heard.
Lord Varn and most of the rest of the party rush toward and into the room as Serena comes around at the feet of Szam Tass. A few others hang back to help Matheus. "Charming." Tass says acidly. "Do you have any idea how much Seven cost!? Do you!?"
ROUND 5! (BOSS Theme ♬)
dice:
...
"Seven!?"
"And with that I believe the point has been." says the lich. Then he shouts toward the door "Come along, Seven! ...Seven!?"
Szam narrowly avoids loosing his skull, and then waggles a clawed finger at Serena as if he were scolding a naughty child. The crystal in that hand cracks with a loud **POP!**, and the waggle turns into a pointed finger and out from its tip issues a blizzard of freezing wind and snow.
The ghost flame in Szam's eye sockets flicker toward something just over Serena's right shoulder, and his stretched face curls into a knowing smirk. Szam Tass steps back in front of the mirror, producing a crystal from the folds of his voluminous sleeve, not bothering to cast defensively. dice:
"Oh, no. Stop him!" shouts a frantic Longtooth from somewhere behind Serena. "Don't let him complete that spell!"
Golden trowel charm in his claw, Szam begins to cast his spell. From around the corner, Dool interrupts with a volley of magic missiles.
The magical projectiles all strike, but the lich still manages to utter the final invocation. The gold charm flakes away to ash and the floor opens up beneath Durgan, Illthir, Alia and Matheus, revealing an impossibly deep 10' x 10' pit whose walls, and floor are festooned with barbed metal projections like some sort of giant, fiendish, inverted cheesegrater.
Matheus gives a short yell and then plummets into the pit!
Durgan again draws and throws a flask of Holy Water at the lich.
*Splash.*
dice:
Serena's connection to her goddess wains in torch-lit dimness of the chamber. The lich (well, the other lich) smiles at her with mock sympathy.
Lord Varn moves into position and Longtooth takes cover before milling through his bag. The lich seems unconcerned. It grabs at a small chain of tarnished gold charms woven into it's belt and begins to cast a spell.
His bony claw comes away from his charm belt empty. He looks at Illthir ruefully. He makes another grab and manages to gain a grip on an ancient gold shovel charm....
"Consider it bringed. No that's not right. 'Brung?' Curse your damnable Taldane syntax and it's lack of standard past tense, past participle form of your verb 'bring!'" says Szam. Then, in a tone laden with malice the corpse wizard says to Serena "Very well mortal, consider it branged."
"About time he showed up." muses the other Szam from out in the hall in response to the huge explosion.
"You realize of course, I'm going to have to hurt you now." says the Szam in the room looking up from his ruined cloak. The lich steps back and raises its bony claws in an arcane gesture. Longtooth curses as the hallway outside explodes in fire and noise.
dice:
Rather than cast a spell the entangled Szam struggles to free himself. And does so, before vanishing in a flash. dice:
A chill settles upon Illthir and the hairs on the nape of heck begin to rise. She has a really bad feeling this. Turning to her left she notes a vaguely lich-like shape in air beside her outlined in magical glitter. The shape smells of cold granite and caustic acid. "Peek-a-boo." rasps the outline.
The mirror in the room ripples like a pond disturbed by a stone and out of it steps a second Szam Tass!
Serena struggles to her feet. "Enough games, wizard!" she growls dangerously. "Face me in single combat and be destroyed!" "If you insist." says the lich before calling out the door to its twin, "I brought the chess board." It sets the game board down and cracks its knuckles.
ROUND 2! (BOSS Theme ♬)
Sandralane and Mother Vorst summon the powers of their goddesses to reinvigorate the party. dice:
Illthir bedazzles the undead creature, making the floating corpse wizard look ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS!! The lich frowns and looks strait a Illthir seemingly unaffected by blindness.
ROUND 1! (BOSS Theme ♬)
"Clever dwarf."
A voice like metal on stone calls out a word of magic from behind the party and a terrific fireball ignites in the hallway.
Longtooth comes out of the explosion seemingly untouched while the party's female clerics are blasted into the corridor's walls, and Dool's guardian is thrown backward into the room by the pressure wave. "HAHAHAHAHA!" laughs an unseen Szam Tass. "And here I was about to leave the last of you alive enough to tell your fellows not to cross me again. Some lessons it seems can only be learnt through pain."
ROUND 1! (BOSS Theme ♬)
dice:
The ominous figure does nothing in response, not even turning to look at Durgan.
*yawn*
"Ah, at last. I wondered when you might summon the courage to confront your death." says the husk of what might once have been a man. "Come, face the consequence of your people's insult against me."
{Stares imperiously down from the top of the spiral stairway}
Illithir's hammer clangs off the skeletal guard's parrying blade twice. Terrion press his attack to no greater effect.
The guardsman in gold retrieves a potion from his pocket and downs it in one gulp. He looks more sanguine after he does so. The upstairs crossbow men aim at fire at Fergus.
The arrows lance into the burnt upholstery of the chair he is standing on. Further above Szam Tass seems to regard it all through a pair of pin-pricks of light that seem to be his eyes.
The lich moves up the stair and and past the second floor and up toward the third. "That's quite enough of that, deist!" echos the undead wizard's voice from high above followed by the syllables of arcane magic. A fifty-foot deep spiked pit opens beneath Durgan and Drelev's man whose name you don't know. Illthir feels the floor slope under her position at the edge of the pit, and the smoldering couch frame begins sliding down into the sudden hole in the floor.
As wounded as Drelev's man appears, he narrowly escapes the plunge diving to the nearest safe (but still canted) floor space. Durgan, Reflex Save DC 19; Failure:
Szam Tass surveys the room as if bored, not truly focusing on anyone, and says "Kill them." He turns his back and takes to the stair.
Szam Tass's face creaks into an unsettling smile. He smashes the skull upon the tile floor and a blast of eldritch energy erupts from the point of impact. The purple electrical field boils outward like a slow moving explosion engulfing everyone on the first floor. Alia, Zokon - Make an Int check DC 10 before you make the following Will save:
The energy wave looks terribly familiar. Your PC can utter something quickly (a second or two's worth of dialogue) before the energy wave strikes them.
As one the manor guards on the mezzanine draw their swords--the heavy curved Aldori dueling swords favored by Ser Richard. Szam Tass moves the hand not holding the skull with an almost nonchalant flourish that causes the dedicated skin still lashed to the bone of his hand to audibly creak. He proclaims something in his rasping voice, but the sound is drown out by the concussive blast of a huge ball of blue-white fire that engulfs the center of the room and mushrooms upward to the ceiling three floors up.
dice:
When the smoke clears men cry out, or lay wounded or worse upon the burning rugs and furniture.
"For I have been wronged, and I, Szam Tass, shall be avenged.." The servant's voice is now like steel dragged across stone. He's not wearing a seneschal's garb anymore, but instead a heavy dark robe with a high gold collar. A gold coronet sits upon a high brow and and mane of dead grey hair streams off the head behind it. His features, pallid before, are now positively monstrous. The skin of his face stretched taught over the bone has the pallor of death. The thing's eyes are like a pair of ghostly blue candle lights. Nearly everyone seems to gasp, and take a step back. "Like petty thieves they came to my home, in Erastil's former temple in the woods. They slew my servant, and destroyed my property. And like thieves they are here, hiding among you, thinking they have escaped me. It does not matter to me who you are little thieves, for you are just small tertiary cogs serving a grander machine. Brevoy is your master switch, thus my punishment will be meted out to Brevoy as a whole." the rasping voice claws at the assemblage's ears. Guards in the house livery appear along the mezzanine above. Not saying a word, Ser Richard tosses down a round object the size of a small jug. It's a human skull. "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Ser Richard," says the undead thing regarding the skull in its desiccated hand, "A fellow of infinite jest, sadly very little of it any good, but even now he still has his uses." Alia, Zokon, Intelligence check DC 10:
There's something familiar about that skull.
Knowledge (religion) DC 20:
OMG! It's a lich you're all gonna die! Liches are the undead remains of powerful spell casters (clerics, sorcerers, wizards, etc....) who seek to cheat Pharasma by prolonging their lives through undeath. Knowledge (religion) DC 25:
Aside from their powerful magic Liches are difficult to destroy. Even if smashed to pieces with bludgeoning or magical weapons (the only sort that seem to be effective against them) they will re-spawn near their magical phylactery--the artifact that anchors them to a semblance of an earthly existence within a tenday.
Knowledge (arcana) DC 20:
Szam Tass (Sham Taz) was a powerful wizard from a faraway kingdom that existed thousands of years ago. He is the bitter enemy of the powerful half-elven wizard Eldiocesan of Dweomervale. Knowledge (arcana) DC 25: 'Yemel' was an ancient arcane site in what was once the Jistka, the first human kingdom to establish itself in the Inner Sea region after the centuries of darkness and devastation caused by Earthfall. It straddled the Innersea from the northwestern corner of Garund to the southwest corner of Avistan. Yemel was reported to be a store house of some of their most powerful magical relics. The site's location has been lost to time. |
