Episode II: The Hidden Laboratory
Participants
Story
In the aftermath of the battle, things look dire in the camp as panic and fear continues to linger. They start to hear people screaming in the distance, and the caravan master, Barkley, orders its two remaining guards to secure the area and try to maintain order. Vall'ia and Linette get acquainted with Sol and the golem from the forest, while Karim starts looking for Thea, a bit worried about her wellbeing. The golem opens its chest and from it, a child comes out. He introduces himself as Ed and then asks them if they have seen his father. He also says that the golem is Mother. Linette checks the fountain for Thea not finding her there but finds tracks of people being dragged away from the camp.
Albert, the caravan guard, returns together with Karim with dire news. The guard reports that two of the other guards are already dead, while the others are missing. There are also several travelers missing including Thea and Helen. Afraid of another possible attack, Barkley orders the camp to be packed and moved to Ebendorf in less than 15 minutes or be left behind. Karim is desperate to rescue Thea and pleads with Barkley to help but he is denied. Mister Horton sadly tells Karim that they cannot help because they are just entertainers and actors, and they wouldn't be able to fight. Karim then goes and pleads with the adventurers to help, and they agree to go with him. Horton goes to Vall'ia and gives her a wand of healing and makes her promise to try to bring Karim and Thea back alive.
In the camp tents are being packed, barrels are being loaded in the carts and people start gathering their belongings for moving out. The adventurers and Karim remain to recover their wounds and rest for a while around the fire. After the caravan leaves the camp, the adventurers have a brief conversation while Vall'ia sings a song. They see a figure approaching in the night and they are wary of who that is. The figure reveals itself to be Elinor, a half-elf traveling the road. She was sleeping in the woods when she heard people screaming nearby and she wanted to investigate what happened. She found the camp, and after she observed them for 20 minutes, she decided to join them.
The five adventurers then start to follow the tracks left by the attackers which takes them into the woods. Elinor leads the adventurers on a path through the forest and almost falls into a spiked trap. They soon find a small shack in the woods where they see a flicker of light. Elinor goes alone ahead to investigate. The hut has two windows with a door between them. The left window has boards nailed to it, while through the other open window she sees a light. There is another window upstairs, but it is covered by shutters. From the front door there is also a stony path that leads to a well. Approaching the open window, Elinor sees a half-consumed candle lit on a table which is covered with some kind of liquid that she can't recognize, but no one else is inside. She tries to reach the upstairs window, but she can't open its shutters.
Elinor then goes and investigates a visible mound of earth to the right of the house and discovers a secret entrance with some stairs going down hidden by an illusion spell. With this information, Elinor goes back to the party and reports her findings. The party agrees to go directly to the secret entrance, suspecting that the missing people were taken through there. They go down into a cave passage and come up to a T intersection. Ed notices that there is fresher air to the left and the passage goes deeper to the right. Following the path to the right they come up to a large cave where they see ruins. Elinor and Sol deduce this is an ancient place of the dark elves and the depictions on the wall represent the goddess Lolth, the Spider Queen. They find a knotted rope hidden in the undergrowth which they use to go down.
While Mother, Ed's golem, lifts Karim on a ledge to the left to investigate, Vall'ia and Linette investigate the right path that leads to some stairs down. Karim tries to go down but slips, hurting himself. Together they all go down the stairs, where Vall'ia notices that one of the stairs looks different. She points them to the other members as well, but Elinor doesn't trust them enough and when she steps on it, she is paralyzed by a shock spell which reverberates across the cavern. After Elinor recovers, they find at the bottom of the stairs that the normal path to the left has collapsed, but there is an entrance to a deeper cavern just ahead. Following it, they stumble on a hidden laboratory where a masked individual was awaiting them (probably because of the noise they made) telling them that he could always use more material for his experiments.
A fight ensues where the masked individual casts a spell to animate their shadows once again, like in the camp. He is joined by what seems to be two mutated people with various extra features. Throughout the fight, the masked individual casts darkness and tries to evade the attacks made by Mother, while the adventurers dispatch the shadows and the mutated people, but they are severely injured themselves. The masked individual then causes an explosion at the table that hurts several characters as well as destroying any evidence. The explosion damages some acid containers on a shelf that causes a brief gas cloud that further hurts everybody, leaving Karim barely standing. The figure then runs away through the darkness with nobody being able to follow him.
The party then investigates the mostly damaged lab, and they find a weird jar that survived which Elinor recognizes to be an Alchemy Jar. They also collect two vials of acid from it. In the lab there are also two water tanks containing other mutated people suspended in liquid. In one of the side rooms they also find the missing people after Mother smashes the door. They free them while Karim and Thea rejoice in a long embrace.
Links
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|---|---|
| Night Terrors | Loot and Webs |
| Campaign: Revenge of the Steinbergs | |