RECAP: 5th Avengers, 3-14-21
We head up the stairs to the Moathouse courtyard without incident. We begin to scout out for a defensible place for the long rest. It is dusk, and Balyx finds one of the rooms we started out in. There is plenty of ruined furniture to fortify the room, and to start a fire. A fire would identify our presence but produce smoke and keep night creatures away. We agree to set a cold camp and set a watch. Balyx takes the first watch and it proceeds without incident. Looking back at his experiences in the dungeon, Balyx concludes that some things about it simply do not add up. The elementals didn’t act right. He passes this information to Geth, who takes this under advisement. Other than the sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing flies, Geth’s watch also passes without incident.
Geth, considering Balyx’s insight, is certain that these elementals were enhanced in some way. We never saw the clerics do any kind of magical motion, aside from casting spells. They never conjured any of the elementals, which he is unsure how that is done, which is unusual because elementals do not occur naturally on the material plane. He’s not certain, but it just didn’t seem right that elementals were found alongside clerics. He passes this information along to Caela, who says she will journal about it. During Caela’s break, a giant frog appears at the window and eyes her. She shoots it with an arrow and attempts to wake Geth, whose dreams shift to stampedes and thuds. The frog misses with its tongue. Caela finishes the frog with the heavy mace. She finishes the frog off, leaving it to partially obstruct the opening and returns to her watch. Geth wakes up and sees a dead giant frog next to him, rolls over and goes back to sleep. There is some kind of imbalance between the kids of natural magic, arcane magic and faith magic. Everything seems to be coordinating.
On Jarry’s watch, sitting atop the dead frog and puffing a pipe, he finds himself wondering about the day’s events, most of all that clerics do not summon elementals. Conjuring elementals is arcane magic, and a summoner of conjured creatures can only have one summoned creature at a time, which does not jive with the details of our encounters with the clerics. He also knows that a conjured elemental will take the commands of the conjurer, and will be friendly to the allies of that conjurer, but they just seemed to be taking commands in a protective fashion of this cleric. Though the elementals seem to be immune to certain things, they just seemed to be creatures walking around, unlike conjured beings.
Lauris thinks he does a marvelous job of field dressing the frog for breakfast. Thinking about the tactics of our fights, the elementals seemed more like puppets than anything else. Shortly before waking up the party, he realized that some of the air elementals were illusions, but the fire elementals were real, and the summoning vortex was always an illusion. He thinks that there is some sort of cloak and dagger thing going on, at the very least some misdirection.
Everyone can tell that Lauris has completely botched field dressing the frog except Lauris. Every cut is wrong and there is a mess of organs all over. We decide to cook it where it is. Balyx asks Geth to let Lauris borrow his belt but Geth replies that he would not be ready for the wisdom boost. We locate the stairwell but in there we see a housecat in the courtyard. We recognize it as looking a lot like a housecat that was in Spugnoir’s shop. Jarry says we should kill it but it runs away before we can do anything. We notice that we can hear the sounds of morning time in the swamp everywhere but here in a small room in the southwest. It is filled with spiderwebs. The interior appears to have supported a wooden staircase, an upper floor and a roof, hollow and blackened from a fire long ago. It is filled with debris and all manner of webbing. He can tell there are spiders everywhere. He walks away and tells the group that there are a lot of spiders in there. Jarry wants to burn them and Geth is not enthusiastic about it. Jarry begins to cry softly. Geth suggests we try to find something to burn in the basement. We look around the torture chamber. Balyx finds something odd nearby and investigates. Balyx strikes the column and deals no damage. One of the manacles in the torture chamber appears to be secured to the mortar with a bolt, but it is actually connected a little bit further away. Jarry tries to fiddle around with it but can’t figure it out, and Lauris figures out how the thing works, revealing a very narrow spiral staircase that only one of us could fit down at a time. Geth shares with the party that this has been used recently, seeing regular use. Balyx suggests we head on down and we file in. The passage drops down about thirty feet and has iron rungs set into the stonework. Except for the close quarters and dampness of the air, it is a fairly easy descent. At the bottom of the passage, a narrow tunnel leads to a door. We investigate the door. It opens out, is regularly used and is neither trapped or locked. Lauris pops it open. As soon as he opens the door, he sees two creatures glaring at him.
