So there they were….
…in the cozy Ghallanda Hall, chowing down on a breakfast of tacos prepared by their warforged friend, Chef. The Hall was abuzz with talk of the upcoming Race of the Eight Winds, and in between bites, the party, consisting of Gnofulk the gnome barbarian, Shadowale the halfling rogue, Comfort the tiefling sorceress, Kyllar the human wizard, and Turnin the human monk, all discussed what they had learned about the other riders.
In his business dealings, Turnin had heard about Janus Campbell of the Rattlestone and Bazaar districts. While he doesn’t remember what the mount is, the monk does recall that it is slow. They are not usually favored to win, but function as more of a kingmaker, leveraging bribes and making deals to manipulate the outcome of the race.
Kyllar the human wizard has also heard a bit about one of the riders: Ruth, the niece of one of Winnifred’s friends. She rides the Hawk, wearing light and dark browns, and represents the Tumbledown and Underlook districts. While the hawk isn’t expected to win, the districts make bank on everything surrounding the race, as their districts make for prime viewing areas.
The tiefling sorceress Comfort, a longtime resident of Sharn, has enjoyed watching the yearly race for the violence, usually perpetrated by the Griffon, with its large beak and maiming talons. It never wins, but is a fan favorite in the city. Ridden by a (rumored) former pirate orc named “Slash” the last few years, the griffon is something probably best avoided.
The halfling rogue Shadowale also had heard of one of the riders, Bolad the Beautiful, a halfling riding a pterodactyl-like dinosaur known as a glidewing. She is rumored to be decidedly not beautiful, and financially backed by the halfling mafia, Clan Boromir.
Looking up from his plate of tacos, Gnofulk announces that he has learned a bit more about the race. It is three laps around the inner plateaus of Sharn: a big loop; a figure eight; and a final big loop.
The gnome has also learned about one of his opponents: Officer Gladstone, riding a Hippogriff, both pulled from the ranks of the Goldwings, the small aerial division of the Sharn City Watch. Year after year, the Hippogriff consistently places in the top three for the Race of the Eight Winds. Someone to watch out for, for sure.
Including Gnofulk, that’s six of the eight riders/mounts in the Race. Perhaps Rhogar the dragonborn fighter and Whudyalookadah the gnome druid have learned more?
The party finishes their tacos, and decides that today is a good day to finish up the errands for Winnifred. The kindly old wizard will cover the cost of boarding and feeding Nutasha, Gnofulk’s flying squirrel mount if they drop her bets off with the bookie. And if they help her steal the Conjurer’s Cup from Beatrice Marsh… the old wizard will owe the party a favor. Turnin pulls out a sack of coins and divides it up among the party. Their first stop will be the bookie’s – and they might as well place some of their own bets while they are there…
The party departs Ghallanda Hall, and makes their way down to Greyflood. As they make their way through the main throughfare, they hear some sailors gab about seeing a full-blown tyrannosaur down here recently… The party continues on, and reaches “Half the Time Shipping” – the front company for the halfling mafia.
They knock the appropriate knock (shave and a haircut), and the door opens, revealing a common room. A few well-armed halflings linger around the room, which has a handful of tables and chairs. Behind the bar sits a halfling with spectacles and Lincoln beard – Boris the Bookie. He is chatting with a well-dressed dwarf woman, and a ways behind her is a wizardly-looking teen, who is startled a bit as the party joins the queue behind him.
The teen clutches his pouches of coins and tries to adjust his blue pointy hat, emblazoned with a crescent moon and stars. He is Mickey, apprentice to Walter the Wizard, here to place some bets.
Mickey refuses to be goaded into betting directly with the party – they are in a bookies, after all, but does discuss one of his bets. The two “big money” pools are 1) who will win and 2) who will the griffon maim. Mickey says rumor has it, the Cogs has a new, unseasoned rider. He’s betting this rube will be the first to fall to the griffon. The party takes this claim (mostly) in stride.
The dwarf finishes her bets, claims a few receipts, and departs, leaving Mickey to place his bets.
While the wizard apprentice speaks with Boris, Kyllar hands out a few pieces of his artificer’s puzzle box, each loaded up with Mage Armor. Simple trace the rune with your finger, and the spell will be released.
Mickey soon claims his receipts and departs as well, leaving the party to place their various bets with Boris.
Shadowale bets 50 gold that there will be three fatalities in the race
Gnofulk bets 30 gold that he will finish the race, and 20 that he will win
Kyllar bets 30 gold the Gnofulk will kill someone
Turnin bets a whopping 200 gold that Gnofulk survives the race.
Lastly, Kyllar hands over Winnifred’s note with her bets. Borris hands out all the receipts, and the party departs as a few clusters of other gamblers enter the common room for the front company.
The party decides that now is as good a time as any to go steal the Conjurer’s Cup for Winnifred, and makes their way up to her aerie and small castle in one of Sharn’s numerous towers. They make their way there without incident, and catch the old wizard just as she is finishing preparations for the ritual in her common room. The massive fireplace is empty, and two tall candles sit alongside it. Intricate, circular runes are scribbled around the fireplace and candles, and as she finishes the final words, she summons warm cookies for the party, and talks through the plan with them.
She’ll open a portal to Beatrice Marsh’s personal sanctum, and the party will enter, retrieve the cup, and get out. They have about an hour before Winnifred’s portal spell collapses, so they’ll need to move quickly.
Munching on the cookies, the party has some questions, but unfortunately, Winnifred isn’t too enlightening. Beatrice is a warlock, but the nature of her patron is a mystery. All the old wizard knows is that it’s not a Fiend, leaving either a Fey or an Old One as the most likely patron. Winnifred doesn’t know much about this alternate dimension aside from its magical location, deduced over years of study. She doesn’t know what is there or how things will work. She also doesn’t have anything else to really give the party – she’s working with them because they are competent and have their own gear.
With no further questions, Winnifred takes her place in front of the huge fireplace, arms outstretched. Ready?
The elderly wizard flicks a double thumbs-up to the fireplace, and pale blue fire spews from the candles, setting the inscriptions ablaze and opening an opaque, shimmering portal as the fiery pathways connect.
The party jump through as a group.
All land safely on the other side, with the exception of Gnofulk, who biffs it and tumbles through the portal, landing on his back. He is helped up by Turnin, and the party takes in their surroundings.
The smells of a salty sea fill their nostrils, and they find themselves in a small sitting room; a moldy looking couch before them. The walls are wood paneled, and warped slightly with the dampness, and the rugs on the floor squish slightly underfoot. The room is tall, and the portal sits a good 5 feet off of the ground. Not perfect, but still, not bad.
The sitting room has two exits, and the party opts to go right, and find themselves in the middle of a long library room. They fan out, and Kyllar casts detect magic, but none is found among the moldy tomes. Shadowale lifts one from a shelf, but its dilapidated pages crumble in his hands. It was probably a dumb book anyways.
In between the book shelves are stone-framed windows, all displaying the same odd vista. There is a churning sea, dark save for the white caps and almost oil-like coloration of the shallows. Opposite the sea is a dead cosmic sky; only a handful of dim stars fighting against the black. The oddity is the horizon; a vertical line with the sea on the right. The party is unsure how physics works here.
They decide to continue going right, and enter a room with a large staircase, with steps going to a level above, and a level below. The party decides to go up, and starts climbing. They emerge into a stone-floored solarium. On the other side of the glass is dark, green-tinted water, occasional motes floating by. A few heavily distorted light sources glow through the deeps, illuminating the solarium with a pallid light, exposing a few small bookshelves, a telescope and a table with notes and globe that appears to match up with a few of the distorted light sources.
Turnin can’t resist looking through the telescope and peers in. It is pointed near one of the light sources, but the monk can’t determine what the source is. As he ponders, he swears he saw a hand move, and stands transfixed, beholding a heavily obscured form twist in the unperceivable distance. Hands, arms, and tentacles squirm just out of view of the telescope, and the monk takes a step back, shaken.
Kyllar notices the small book near the telescope, and picks it up, reading the page it is open to. The paged has a heading of “Leviathan” – and the name triggers the wizard’s memory. He pockets the book. It could prove useful later.
The party can’t make heads or tails of the rest of the room, and depart the sickly solarium, descending the steps down, Kyllar in the lead. They pass their original level, and continue downward, the steps quickly transitioning to damp stone.
It proves too much for the wizard, and rounding a corner, Kyllar biffs it, thumpa-thumpa-thumping down the stairs to the landing. The wizard adjusts his robes, as the party catches up, and they find themselves in what appears to be a cavernous cistern, tall stone columns supporting arched ceilings… well over a floor above them. The architecture is weird. The party can’t determine the depth of the water.
The landing transitions into a stone pier of sorts, in the shape of a cross. The party warily makes their way down the pier to the cross-end. They peer down, seeing steps from each of the cross stubs deep into the water, ending with what looks like a pale blue oval.
As the party discusses their next move, the portal light on their right flickers thrice, and long shadows are cast upward towards them. Three bulbous, thick bodied forms start bobbing, thin limbs climbing the steps on all fours. The party quickly decides to hide.
They back up to the cross stub on the left, and after some consideration, Kyllar conjures an illusionary wall to conceal them.
A few tense moments pass, and then the forms breach, one-by-one, flopping up onto the stone pier. Their hands and feet appear fin-like, and their bodies and faces are bulbous. Huge yellow eyes sit on either side of their hairless heads, and their fat lips flop in the groans and rumbles some unknown language.
The party exchanges looks, nudging the magic users. Comfort quietly casts Comprehend Languages, and hears the awkward small talk between the three, noting how terrible the transportation system is here, and chit chat about helping Beatrice and furthering the Old One’s plans. All hail!
Comfort also notices that the trio is on a bit of a sliding scale. One of them has distinctly more human traits than a fish or a merfolk, which leads the tiefling to suspect that some kind of process or metamorphosis is responsible for their appearance.
The trio begins to depart, the more human one hunched but standing more upright, and turning towards the center pier, while the other two, more fish-like, continue on, shambling towards the party on all fours.
The party again exchange looks, and decide to act while they have the element of surprise. Comfort summons up the energy within her, and twin-casts a witch bolt at the two fishy forms before her, blue energy arcing out from her palms and into their scaled bodies.
The bolts burst through Kyllar’s illusionary wall, ripples forming in their wake, and the fish-men warble in disbelief as Shadowale bursts through the wall too, blades flashing with his sneaky cuts. One fish-man is gutten stem to stern, fish guts spilling out as the blade in the halfling’s off-hand sinks into the fatty flesh of the second foe.
As Shadowale slices, Turnin uses his cool staff to vault past the fish men, landing near the more human of the trio. The monk’s sudden arrive startles the man-fish, his bulbous eyes wide in disbelief. Turnin wastes no time though, and with a wide swing of the cool staff, the man-fish is ended.
Gnofulk follows his fellows through the rippling wall, and merely thwacks the sole surviving fish-man in the face with the butt of the gnome’s ax, knocking him out. The blow echoes through the cistern, but there are no other sounds.
The party try to rouse the fish-man by tossing some water on him. It doesn’t work, but a chuckle is shared. More than half the allotted time has expired, and the party decides to backtrack to the library. Gnofulk hoists the bulbous fish-man over his shoulder, should he wake up and the party need someone to interrogate about the whereabouts of the Conjurer’s Cup.
The party cautiously make their way back up the stairs and to the library, and continue on through it to the far end of the room, entering a private study. Walking from the library to the study, the vistas displayed by the windows of the new room shift; same sea and cosmos, but a different perspective with regards the horizon. Bizarre.
While still damp and humid, the study is in a little better condition, dominated by a large desk in the center of the room. The party spreads out in the small room, with Kyllar burning another spell slot to detect any lingering magical items.
The wizard is rewarded, and a magical peacock quill, small knife, and shark jaws are tossed into the Bag of Holding while Turnin nabs the Conjurer’s Cup from a shelf. Gnofulk unceremoniously dumps the fish-man on the floor.
It is nothing, if not ostentatious. It has a metal skeleton inlaid with colored glass like a stained glass window. The cup itself is large and hexagonal, each face showing off some facet of magic, from an all-seeing eye to ensorcelled weapons to a succubus mud-flap girl silhouette.
Loot in hand, the party is running short on time… but not that short. They decide to venture on and explore more of this salty abode.
Skirting around the desk, the approach a locked door at the end of the study. Turnin tries the door, but it is locked. Shadowale tries to pick the lock, but it appears to be beyond his abilities. Finally, Comfort steps in and with two twists, the door is opened, revealing another little room, with a stairwell and another shut door.
The party scamper up, Turnin in the lead, and they find themselves in another solarium. Like the other solarium, this room has similar small bookshelves and a telescope. It also has an astrolabe, filled with stars. This stands in stark contrast to the exterior of the room, a mostly empty void of black; the dark opposed by only a few dull suns.
Again Turnin looks through the telescope, but sees nothing spooky this time. Just empty space. Which could be argued as being existentially spooky.
The party backtracks down the steps and opens the other door in the stairway room, leading to a bedchamber, with a large bed and vanity. Against Comfort’s protests to leave the lady’s things along, the rest of the party piles in, though no magic items are found. Turnin looks under the large four-post bed and is surprised as a frog leaps out. The monk’s reflexes are too good however, and he manages to snatch the frog by his back leg mid-leap.
Kyllar checks the time, and stresses that they need to get going.
The party hurries back to the small sitting room with Turnin clutching his new pet. A quick peek down the other exit from the sitting room shows a large, long hallway, but the party has no time to explore more.
Winnifred’s voice is heard from the other side of the portal, imploring the party, if they are there, to hope on through – the spell is just about out of energy.
Turnin bends down allowing Shadowale and Gnofulk to climb up and jump through the portal, followed quickly by the rest of the party, who haul themselves through Winnifred’s onto the floor. When they are all through, the elderly wizard lowers her thumbs and the pale blue flames are extinguished, sealing the portal.
Kyllar triumphantly hands over the Conjurer’s Cup, and the party is quickly debriefed with more cookies.
While their extra loot is kept hidden from the elderly wizard, the party does tell Winnifred that Beatrice is a warlock favored by the Old Ones, and that group is linked to the Leviathan threat spoken of by the Death’s Noggin hobgoblins just recently. The last bit goes over the elderly wizards head, but she is pleased to learn more about her rival. And now, she owes the party a favor…
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