Of course the second guard paladin at the bottom of the stairs stopped me. I tried to reason with him, explaining that I was on a mission from thew Goddess. He was symapthetic and “let” me knock him over and run past with Kiba close behind. We didn’t get much farther – yet another guard paladin blocked our way and this one wouldn’t let me pass. I wasn’t willing to fight him, so we got frog-marched back into the entrance room and disarmed. Godwin, the guard I talked to on the way in, helpfully left a knife for us to escape before leaving himnself to check on how the battle was going. We were hearing the sounds of distant battle almost continuously, beastial shrieks and the clang of swords.
I put my efforts into distracting the other guards so Kiba could grab Godwin’s dagger, sacrificing my dignity in the process. She succeeded, but we turned out not to need it.
A Yggian knight named Forrest demanded that I disarm, and after calling on his fellows to recognize my rights to my possessions, I did. He took a liking to Cloacina’s sword Verminbane and drew it – and was immediately subjected to her visions. While he was distracted explaining hinmself to the goddess, Godwin stumbled back into the room and fell to the floor, dead, after gasping out instructions to free Kiba and I to help weith the battle, which was apparently going badly. Forrest finally recovered from his vision and, after a tense moment when I accused him of being a false paladin for failing to heal his dying friend, freed us.
That was when the rest of our group, including mercenaries and the wizard Clubeck, followed another paladin guard down the stairs. Clubeck had somehow talked the prison guard into letting him show them around the sewers. And after some brief exchanges, the paladins left us to join their breathren. Forrest took my sword, glowing green with the Goddesses favor, and ran off to the east. Damnit, that’s the second magic sword I’ve had taken from me.
We organized ourselves into two groups to cover both approaches to the main room, in case the bitch Vee had her spell set up again. I led the southern group, and surprised a wererat trying to backstab a paladin in the now open southern room. I slew one and sent those behind me into the new room to help the paladin there. I heard Forrest and Vee fighting to the east, the sounds of wererats, some sort of insectoid, and even a kobold squeaking to the south. Another wererat stepped up to face me, and I wounded it twice without a kill. My wererat was in bad shape, but things weren’t going well.
