After a break to catch our breath and grab a drink we pressed on and came to another door.

Distress: We should check this thing for traps.
Klajdu: Klajdu check.
Splug: Wait. You’re just going to break it — we want to look for traps.
Klajdu: How look for traps without look inside?

Klajdu was deprived of smashy time, the door was declared trapless, and in we went. Into a large room that had:
— a massive minotaur brandishing an axe over on the right. No, don’t worry people it’s just a statue.
— a massive minotaur skeleton in front of us, brandishing an axe. SHIT it is not a statue.
— 3 carnage demons. Also not statues but at least not quite as large.

We’re getting positively familiar with demons here. Once we’re out of here what happens if we miss them?

Nearby stood a vast iron cauldron filled with bubbling liquid and giving off a thick mist. Neil confidently declared that it was merely a delicious pot of gumbo.

The room was divided roughly into two halves, one higher than the other by about 5 feet. Past our variously statuesque and demonic friends, there was a little staircase up to the higher half of the room. Up there we could just see 2 humans standing still inside some kind of a glowing circle. And although we couldn’t see them when we came in, around to the left there was also an altar with a well-dressed but ugly-as-hell gnoll behind it, and a Barl Gura demon.

Eager to make new friends, Klajdu’s maul and Splug’s sword introduce themselves to the minotaur skeleton. Splug does that sequestering teleporting thing as he attacks and the skeleton ends up in the Gumbo. It dies what sounds like a horribly painful gumbo-related death with a lot of sizzling and thrashing about with big evil tentacles writhing out of the smokey cauldron. Neil casually explains “That’s just the calimari”.

Meanwhile from up on high the gnoll proves to be a bit of a warlock. He hits Klajdu with a nice curse that lifts him 5 feet off the ground and holds him there. Klajdu is not amused but at least he has a good view for a while.
Neil, still clearly quite hungry, taunts the carnage demon with “huh. more like a carne asada demon! “, but only a few moments later the taunted demon took a bit of an ironic bite out of Neil, prompting this observation from the Klajdu watching from above:
“Ah. Neil has AC of a lute.”

There followed a great many crossbow attacks, curses, fiery blasts and charges, of which I will offer only a few highlights.

Splug: Klajdu like healing?
Klajdu: Friend of Klajdu poop in woods?
Splug: …. Friend of Klajdu *does* poop in woods!

And Fitz struck on a brilliant plan of wearing the demonskin cloak he had made, and trying to pass himself off as a Barl Gura. It seems nobody told him paladins are not known for their outstanding demon impressions. The actual Barl Gura who was the intended audience here burst into some pretty scary demonic laughter. Distress reported that Fitz actually pissed his armor at the time. She later summed this up quite well I thought – “This campaign is all about urine, I’ve noticed”.
(and there’s the answer I guess, if the day comes when we miss the company of demons, we ask Fitz to get out his cloak and reprise this moment.)

After a long and serious battle, pee notwithstanding, and after we actually forgot for a while that there were still 2 carnage demons behind us busy attacking Distress, we prevailed. Except one of the human prisoners. She failed to prevail, in that the gnoll spoke some words and her soul was consumed for some evil purpose and she vanished from the world. Were we supposed to rescue her? Probably. We’re not very good knights in shining armor I guess. Too busy flaying demons and dressing up in their skin.

Oh and the now-dead gnoll in the fancy cloak was Maldrick Scarmaker. We found on his person a bronze amulet, the mysterious cloak and some correspondence. Remembering for a moment that all arcane tasks are supposed to fall to me, I identified the cloak as an elvish cloak of protection +2. Albeit belatedly, I also identified the piss cape as a cloak of protection +1. Splug was confirmed by all as He-Who-Comes-Closest-To-Death, so no objection was raised when he took the +2 cloak. This left nobody exactly clamoring to wear the piss cape, but Distress has said she’d clean it up and, well I suppose then wear it? Ick. The amulet bore a certain arcane resemblance to the bronze warders so I deduced that it was a control amulet. That was more or less it for the cataloging of loot.

Except that in a pocket in Maldrick’s cloak, Splug also found a little silver key. The moment he touched this key he had a vision. In it he saw a secret passageway to a secret tower, and he saw how to get there. The notes we found on Maldrick Scarmaker suggested that this tower is his “tower of mysteries”, Paldemar’s stronghold. Our next destination was clear. Oh, and from the notes Paldemar is into some pretty big time evil here. Collecting demonic artifacts and dedicating them to Vecna. Orantour’s gonna be happy about this I bet.

I’ll skip over the distasteful tasks of looting the dead demon bodies, and extracting a tooth from the gnoll, because after all this is a family show. We did our best to revive the one remaining slave, but we couldn’t wake him up and I think most of his mind is gone anyway. Gathering our things we returned to the Seven Pillar Hall.

————————————————————

At the Halfmoon inn, steps away from the bar no less, we run into a lot of the slaves that we had previously rescued. They rush forward and take the unconscious slave from us. Apparently his name is Luke.
Or was.
One of them says “Is there another? A woman? Her name is Ellan. Did you find her?”

As a group we are unused to consolation, so we all stand there looking grimy for a moment until Distress is the first to answer. She says:

“There was another woman being held captive with this fellow, but the batwinged gnoll creepazoid zapped her to another plane before we could terminate him. Terribly sorry.”

And I’m not sure how the rest of the conversation went because it seemed socially appropriate to start striding confidently past them toward the bar.

I do know that Carn gave a speech, because later that evening a chatty former slave saw me writing in this journal by the fire and insisted on pressing his account of Carn’s speech into my hands, for posterity.

“Fellow people, you have been taken by Slavers. They kept you prisoners against your will, and sold you to dark Deamonists. The terrible goal of those men was to invoke the deepest creatures from the outer planes, and in his quest, they were ready to sacrifice others lives. When no hope was expected, a group of champions came to the darkness of the underground following the tracks of the Slavers. They took down the Guards and Sorcerers and freed most of you. Some of you like Splug, the Doctor and Bard joined the group and fight for revenge and their beliefs. At the end we failed to save a singe life. Ellen disappeared during the ritual, while Luke survived but his mind was terribly damaged”

He took a cup, and held it out “For all the victims of the Slavers, you will not be forgotten” and poured half of it on the ground, then toasted.
“We are not yet down, a person remains in the town that is responsible for this, the mage Paldemor betrayed his duty for fulfilling his desire of power.”
“Klajdu, time to kick some ass.”

And thanks in part to this, I suppose our terrible, terrible impression of knights in shining armor is given new life yet again.
———————————-

We ate, we drank. There was much discussion and general unwinding. Distress had her focus firmly on the piss cape, and getting it cleaned or at least less dirty. Definitely some of us could use a bath at this point.

We agree to tell Orantour everything and show him our evidence, so we head straight there once we’re done at the bar.

Orantour opens the conversation with an exclamation and a “how are you”, to which Klajdu answers surprisingly honestly “Experienced many problem with well and prodding pillar of flesh. Klajdu happy by lying down on comfortable chair of length and talk about disturbing thing. Probably good for stress disorder of happen after ulterior time of problem.”

Shazia: “Aside from that, and having spent the last week drenched in blood and killing things, and well pretty much everything that’s happened since we talked, we’re good!
So Orantour, you remember last time we talked, we had all this evidence of how your buddy Paldemar had gone all evil like right?
Well here {shows the notes we took from Maldric Scarmaker}. I think we can up the ante here. We’re talking seriously off-the-deep-end evil. Like he’s assembling collections of demonic artifacts so that he can dedicate them TO VECNA. Demons aren’t evil enough for Paldemar. And he says right here he wants to overthrow the mages. Right there. He’s trying to augment his powers with some seriously nasty business and spread his influence pretty far beyond Saruun Khel it looks like….
And he’s referred to a stronghold of his called the “Tower of Mysteries”. and in a manner of which I’d rather not speak, we’ve discovered how to enter this tower.
Is this pray tell the tower within which you would not {eyebrows arched} even let us use the bathroom? Hmmm??? cause we’re totally going there and I don’t see how you’re going to stop us.

So you might as well deputize us as Mages of Saruun so we can all play for the same team. We basically are already. And then you can come with us. We don’t bite. Except for the little one. Whaddya say?
Need another drink? {offers a bottle}
————————————————————
Paldemar was stunned for a moment. Neil was not though. He picked up on a cue that probably wasn’t there and readied his bronze-warder-arm saxophone….