As our heroes started to go around and stabilize and treat their wounded opponents, more of the Mintarn guards rushed onto the scene and began helping out with the carnage. As soon as they started asking for the guards to get Telliann to hear what they had discovered, a runner came onto the scene and told our heroes that Telliann was in the farmers market in the Protector's Enclave near the House of Knowledge. The party quickly departed for the rendezvous with Telliann once they knew that the civilians were being taken care of.
They met Telliann and two of her Mintarns at the market and began explaining the recent events that have shed some light onto these mysteries. While they were telling her that there was most likely some kind of mind control going on in the city, they all heard an extremely loud whining-screeching sound. The sound was painful and Telliann and the two guards tried to cover their ears to block out the sound to no avail. The three dropped to the ground, unconscious or worse. At the same time, several strange creatures popped out of the two sewer entrances in the market and more than half a dozen street thugs made their lumbering way into the market. The thugs appeared to be mind controlled just like the previous group of citizens, although these guys were well armed and looking to serious bodily harm to our intrepid adventurers. Zerak determined that three of the creatures looked like flumphs covered in a translucent blue aura, meaning that they were probably highly infected by the Spellplague. Normally good creatures looking to protect the material plane from evil outsider intrusions, these flumps were anything but normal. There were another two creatures that no one could identify - they had one large eye in the center of their faces, muscular human male-looking bodies, and also covered in Spellplague blue.
The flumphs opened the battle by spitting out some weird goop that would engulf their targets, harden quickly, and cement the target to the ground where they stood. Zola and Kel were the first targets of this and were stuck fast. The strange one-eyed creatures had an eye power that struck party members with cold energy which also had the capability to push back the targets five to ten feet and knock one prone as well. Plus both type of creatures had an electrical-based energy ray that they could use against the party seemingly at will.
The party had their hands full between the thugs, flumphs, and the other two creatures. Blackwell stuck to the edges and attempted to stay hidden and strike out from the shadows. Kel, Asphodel, and Zola were taking the enemy head on with varying degrees of success for the energy ray abilities the creatures had were ignoring our heroes superior armor and was beating them around the market square. Zerak was battling one of the thugs when he got slimed by one of the mutant flumphs and became quite firmly stuck to the ground and to himself, and so for a number of rounds he was just a human sized pinata for the thug. Jobi was using her magic missiles and magic quarter staff to damage the enemy until one of the cyclopsian creatures made its way around her, used its cold force ray and flung her over ten feet straight into an alchemist's market stand. This in turn, broke many glass vials and jars holding who knows what kind of ingredients and reagents. And unfortunately, the combining of the mixtures resulted in the entire alchemist's market stand to explode and erupt into a flaming, fiery mass of noxious materials, completely destroying the stand and engulfing everything within ten feet in a raging inferno. And Jobi was right in the middle of this, burning within an inch of her life. Plus one of the guards was also caught in the blaze and received the full force of the blast since he was already unconscious.
Kel, meanwhile, was able to withstand the effects of the flumphs sticky goo for several rounds due to his, I mean her new abilities as a cleric of Desna. But once the liberation ability wore off, she was able to break free of the goop by using her brute strength. Then she ran through the area on fire and dragged the guard out of it to save his life, then she made her way over to Jobi, who had made it out of the flames by crawling. If it weren't for her natural resistance to fire she would have been burned to a crisp, perishing in the hot flames, instead of just receiving major burn damage and her clothes being completely burned off her body (even her horn was blackened by the fire). Kel gave her some minor healing to help stave off the burn wounds, but Jobi decided that staying on the ground was a much better option than trying to get up. She did manage to crawl a little further and shoot some more magic missiles at one of the strange one-eyed creatures.
Blackwell helped out Zerak with taking out the flumph that gooped him and back-stabbed the thug beating on Zerak as well. Zerak finally got free from the goop just about at the same time, for it seemed that the goop only stayed solid for maybe half a minute before turning brittle and falling off. Zola took out a couple of thugs and a flumph, but began having issues once old one-eye concentrated on her. The first melee attack she scored on the creature actually ended up doing damage to herself. The creature somehow manipulated reality to the point that when the attack was supposed to hit it, it turned the attack around to hit Zola. She finally had to retreat behind some of the other market stalls to heal herself and avoid further injury until she could continue without the threat of dying from a single blow.
Asphodel used her wings and flew about the field of battle to take out a total of three thugs and a flumph. She came up with an idea that ultimately worked to neutralize the two strange creatures. She flew at them, grabbed them and flew up forty to fifty feet in the air and then dropped them. Each one made a sizable thud when it hit the ground and both sustained damage enough to kill them.
With all the creatures dead, healing everyone in need became the focus of Zola, Kel, and Zerak, using potions, spells, and wands to great effect. Zola used her water creating abilities to put out the fire still raging at the alchemist's market stand. Telliann woke and was impressed with the parties battle prowess and told them to get some healing supplies from the temple(s) and to have some of it charged to the city. The party decided to rest for the night before delving into the sewers to track the creatures back to their lair.
Once they woke, everyone was feeling a bit under the weather and Zola and Kel had some pretty bad nightmares to boot, making their sleep even less restful. They went back to Telliann and requested some additional help in the form of personnel to make the sewer trek with them for the party felt that they may be facing a very strong psionically endowed adversary, like mind flayers or aboleths or possibly something as of yet unknown. The evidence was hard to refute that this may be the case since they already had one creature that no one seemed to know anything about. Plus Telliann was also afflicted with nightmares and feeling under the weather as well. She had no one to spare to go with them into the sewers and suggested they seek help at the temples. So they went to the temples to recruit some help and see if anyone could figure out the disease they may have and how to cure it. Once there, removed disease did not work to remove the party's affliction, and more powerful magics were not available (like miracle or wish). Furthermore, the affliction appeared to be one that was being generated from kind of source and may not be cured until that source is destroyed, but this is only conjecture since the temples were not able to identify the disease or its cause. The temples did however lend some extra muscle to the heroes. One paladin from Desna and two clerics from Saranrae accompanied the party down into the sewers.
The group followed the sewer tunnels, which were 15 ft in diameter, based on Blackwell's tracking ability and after a while they came upon a large junction where they spotted 4 sentries, all half-orc and all appeared to be mind controlled as well. Two were archers and two were melee combatants. The archers were taken out by the party exchanging arrow and magic missile fire with them. Zola even scored a critical hit against one of them, severing an artery in his leg that caused him to drop and bleed out. The party made short work of the other three sentries while not sustaining any real injuries themselves. After the battle, a search concluded that heavy traffic only leads out of this sewer junction down one way. So the heroes get themselves ready to delve deeper into the sewer system looking for the root of the seemingly random acts of violence that are plaguing Neverwinter.
Until next week's adventures...
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.