“Help them meet their doom”
Session 8 August 2021
We walk upstairs to find the source of the noise. It is Otto! He was away for a while, but now he returned. To follow the conversation, I put on my helmet of comprehending languages. Peythur is the only one who can talk to Otto at the moment, and I don’t want to miss anything. Peythur introduces himself and asks if Otto indeed went to the Giants as the homunculus told us. “What? Who told you that?” Otto replies, “That stupid homunculus, for sure!” We tell Otto we did not accept the task the creature gave us: to kill him. Farryn asks in common if Otto is doing well after the crash they made a day earlier. Otto did not understand, so Farryn asks Peythur to translate. Peythur translates: “Forgive my little friend: he doesn’t understand our noble language.” Everyone who can understand the Sylvan language laughs. I have trouble standing up straight from laughing. “But, ” Peythur asks, “how can we solve the problem? We don’t want to kill anyone.” Otto just wants the homunculus to leave his castle. It is his, and the creature comes back every time. Farryn asks something again in the back, and Peythur disregards his comment: “Oh tiny friend, don’t be so impatient!” Peythur walks up to Valentine and me and asks how we can bring the homunculus to another plane of existence. “Why the homunculus?!” replies Valentine. Peythur agrees. At that point, Peythur tries to convince Otto to go to the Feywild. However, Otto doesn’t want to leave – he has everything he ever wanted right here in his castle! To be done with this conversation, I tell Peythur that it seems that Otto cannot be persuaded right now.
We say goodbye to Otto, and go find Farryn who wandered off AGAIN. Before we leave, Otto instructs us NOT to go to the second floor and enter the room in the south. I see Valentine with an excited look on her face and trying to sneak off in the corner of my eye. Luckily, I am on to her. I grab her arm and tell her not to go there. However, she succeeds in shaking me off and makes her way to the second floor. In front of the door, I catch up to her. “If you want to get Otto angry, you should open that door,” I tell her. “Otto claimed the castle, but what has he to way about it? Maybe this room can give us more information about the real owner or the wizard Maddgoth.” We talk in common but switch to Infernal at the point Farryn walks in. The moment Farryn touches the handle, an alarm goes off. Valentine and I run and hide around a corner.
Otto hurries to the door: “What?! Who touched my door?” He doesn’t look happy at all: as I predicted. Peythur is the only one who did not hide and tells that ‘one of the ladies’ was triggered to investigate the room. As the word ‘ladies’ falls, Valentine transforms into Aiden and walks up to Otto, dragging me along. Otto only sees me now – I’m the only lady. “That is not polite! You need to learn from your mistakes!” He attempts to cast his magic on me, but Valentine shakes her finger: ‘Nah ah.’
But, what is in the room? Otto explains there is a control panel of the castle in there. But we are not to touch it, as he installed all the settings to perfection. He also tried to reset the homunculus in there but respawns every time – just like when we sent him to the giants. We ask Otto who was there first: him, or the homunculus. Otto tells us he was there first, and the homunculus was already there, but that doesn’t count: he is not a living creature. Peythur thinks for a long time and eventually mumbles: “I don’t know if Otto is the one who belongs here…”
To get some privacy, the party moves upstairs to discuss what to do next. We enter a room to exit the hallway, Peythur and I in front. Immediately, I feel something is absolutely WRONG. I feel devil-ish energies. I see two bats that seem to consume my energy – I can feel it. Then, the bats turn into Nycaloths.
I can hear one of them say:
“Gorzog, help them meet their doom!”
The Nycaloth hits Peythur very hard, the other approaches me, but before he can attack me, Grond jumps in front of me. Nevertheless, the creature does a lot of damage to me. I use misty step to get out of the room. I’m planning on using my black tentacles area of effect spell, but first, need to get out of the room. But then, the Nycaloth (that just attacked me) comes after me – he just teleports! Shit, my plan won’t work… “Don’t go just yet, we were having fun!” He says. Valentine replies: “Why are you attacking then?!” “Because you’re trespassing!” He hits her with his claw and leaves a gash in her chest! Oh no!
From the other room, I see Peythur cast a fireball. “This is my natural habitat!” shouts the Nycaloth back at him. I cast phantasmal killer on the Nycaloth near us. “Go back to the shadows!” I yell. I caused the Nycaloth to be frightened of a mental image I just put in his brain. “No, no…. this cannot be! You’re down in Hell! My Lord, what are you doing here? No, my Lord, I’ll kill them as soon as possible! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” He hits Valentine again, and she is knocked out. Farryn kills the Nycaloth in front of me, and I have time to heal Valentine with a potion of healing. I don’t care they’re expensive, she just needs to stay alive! Valentine gets up but faints again as her fiendish wound inflicts damage.
I throw a big fireball at the Nycaloth still alive but fail killing it. It attacks Grond and splits the mechanical dog in two and bashes it into the ground. Then, it starts attacking Farryn. In the end, Farryn killed both Nycaloths.
In the meantime, I am crying next to Valentine. I give her another potion of healing and yell for Peythur to heal her. I am totally panicking. As Peythur heals Valentine, her fiendish wound disappears. Thank God! I cuddle her, but she doesn’t really want to: she is moping and crying over the fact she did not contribute to the battle as much as she would’ve liked. I am just happy she is still alive. She gives me two potions of healing. I try to refuse them, but she insists.
In the back of the room we find a piece of parchment on the wall saying: “Break in case of emergency” Without a doubt, we break it and get a spell scroll of cloud kill. We don’t want to go to the second floor yet, so we explore the third floor a bit. We find a room with a big throne made of iron and stained glass. In front of the throne, on the floor, lies a big rug. It looks like a giant mouth. We suspect the rug being a rug of smothering, so Valentine throws an eldridge blast on it. It tears up the rug but does nothing. Farryn slowly claps and fixes it. We investigate the room some more, and then discuss how we are going to enter the room on the second floor.
To be continued…
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