The strange skeletal lampray latched on to u-Heury’s balls and bit down hard. Blood went everywhere, and the kid yelped like a eunuch. Before I could draw my sword, the thing detached and fled. Apparently u-Heury doesn’t taste fishy. I carefully offered prayers to Clocea to clense his body of injuries and his mind of impure thoughts, while laying my hands on his shoulders. It stopped the bleeding, but I wasn’t going to look closer to see what, if anything, was left. The boy was feeling his oats and asked Kiba to check. She also declined.
We decided there wasn’t any treasure here and moved on to the tower Oscar had first explored on the initial trip here on ravenback. We flew over the flying monkeys (well, baboons) on the way. They gave chase, but we were faster.
With the ravens, we were able to exploit the opening in the top of the tower once we arrived. Inside, we found a room with a lot of bats and a door further in. The bats left us alone as we slipped through the door into a wizard’s lounge filled with moldy tapestries and decaying furniture. On the bright side (heh) there was a mystical diagram made of blue quartz. We managed to remove 40 of the gems and guessed they were worth 10gp each. It took several hours, along with an overnight stay, to do that.
The room also had a hammer trap set up against the other entrance. Kiba managed to disable it. Frankly I had planned to leave it in place until we finished with the quartz, because I had clearly heard creatures outside trhose doors overnight, but the restless night creatures didn’t bother to open the door. In the morning, we finished extracting the quartz – 40 gemstones, about 10gp each – and opened the north doors to explore the rest.
When we opened the door we were greeted by a squad of undead warriors, skeletons specifically. They didn’t last long.
The next room contained shelves of strange materials in jars, along with a detailed glyph inscrbed in the floor.
Bottled Moon Light (50gp) Tentacle of Octopus (125gp) Stems of Thorny Plants (55gp) Mistletoe Sprig (20gp) Kobold Toes (25gp) Eye of Newt (25gp)
We backtracked briefly and covered the glyph with a tapestry from the previous room, to ensure u-Heury wouldn’t accidentally vanish. Then we looted the place. As a soldier I had a great deal of experience with that, and as a paladin, well, Clocea needs funds to spread cleanliness. Sadly, aside from the weird components, there was little of obvious value. Midway through the process, we heard footsteps in the hallway. I passed some spikes to Kiba and had her spike the door until we were done, and we managed to finish without being interrupted.
When we had our loot safely stowed, we moved on. One door to the northeast was blocked by some kind of a forcefield. T only thing we could see in the room was a painting of a wizard that shifted and seemed to move, all except for one hand. Presumably there is a way in somewhere, perhaps related to that, but the zombies caught sight of our party from the south before we could explore further possibilities. We ducked away to the west room, which turned out to be fillede with bats and open to the sky, but also had a staircase leading down.
The bats harassed us as we fled down the stairs. u-Heury and I fought a reargyard action against the zombies and managed to kill one, or at least knock it down, it’s hard to tell in the confusion. There were at least three more. Between the two of us fighters, plus Kiba and her little dog too, we could probably take four zombies. But finding a door to fight them one or two at a time seemed best, as we still had several levels to descend to ground level and we were both already hurt.
If nothing else the room below may let us make a stand using the staircase as a choke point.
