Post by Markas Virnala on Oct 28, 2019 14:00:00 GMT
"Fish Stew"
18th Entry in the journal of Markas Virnala
Today was…. Today has caused me some concern. The more I think on it, the more I question if there was actually any good in what we did. Vermillion seemed happy but the whole thing just felt messy.
A notice was up requesting some help that we spoke to Coll in the Ettin about it. Myself, Rama, Faye, a friend of Faye's called Stedd, a young Fisherman who fights similar to how Baine used to (and smelt very strongly of fish), Mace, A shady looking tiefling with a certain way with words…. I'm not sure what to make of him just yet… and Bones. Bones is an interesting one. I sat with him and chatted a little just before we got back into Daring…. He's a bit intense but I like him. I think he is still trying to fit in maybe. He has some pretty strong opinions but I don't think he's a bad person at all…. I'd be interested to spend more time with him at some point. Seems to have made an impression on Hoop as well.
This particular request came from a woman called Vermillion, a Yuan-Ti from a place called Sigil. She was the first Yuan-ti I have ever met so didn’t know what to expect but she seemed nice. Coll pointed us in the right direction to where we could find a stone portal that leads directly to her garden in Sigil, giving us the password of "Pay your Tabs" to get there (Somehow I think he had a part in setting that up…)
Sigil is…. Weird. Coll gave us some warning first but it didn't make much sense, talking about doughnuts and doors, but stepping through the portal made everything come together. The city is literally inside a doughnut! When you look up into the sky, past the birds and clouds, rather than a typical sky, instead there was just the city! Roofs and streets as if you were looking from above but we were below it? In the distance you could see the ground steadily rise up and curve until it went straight over head then back down on the other side to where you were…. How does everything not fall from up there? Or maybe to them I was up there!? It gives me a headache thinking about it. That's without the last warning Coll gave us as well. He called it the city of doors and said sometimes when you opened doors there, they didn't go where you thought they might and if you wasn't careful, might end up somewhere like the plane of fire! Thankfully, none of the doors we opened went anywhere unexpected.
Vermillion came out to meet us, seems her garden is a regular spot for people to come to Sigil so she wasn't annoyed with us…. Still felt weird though. I felt like we were intruding. Not sure I'd be happy with people turning up like that out of nowhere. But then she did hire us so I guess she was expecting us? She invited us in to a pretty big house and basically explained what she wanted of us: A "friend" of hers, a wizard called Curtis Tanner, had died and she wanted us to retrieve his spell book and head…. I pointed out how it was a bit of an odd request for a recently deceased friend but turns out they were closer to acquaintances…. In fact, she didn’t even know if he was dead. Just hadn't seen him for a little bit and assumed!? She did concede if he wasn't dead, she would still pay us for looking. All in all, a pretty odd job this time round.
The head, in particular was to be claimed before another "friend" of hers could get hold of it, someone called Lothar who collected them and used magic to speak to the dead through the skulls he collected. Sounded pretty grim but Bones seemed excited by the prospect. Vermillion wanted it first to trade it for a favour by the sound of things. The spell book she just wanted for herself, but she was getting us to do it for her because "That's what she pays people for". I guess I can't argue with that…. She mentioned Curtis was very mistrusting so had likely trapped his house as well. With "friends" like Vermillion and Lothar around I can see why he would.
Before we left, I asked if there was anything worth knowing, being new territory for us all. The only thing she told us was: "You should watch out for 'The Lady of Pain'. If you see her, just RUN! Trust me, you'll know who it is when you see her. She generally has a lot of blades all around her. There is a reason why the Gods don't come to Sigil… She is the reason and if you see her, she will be there for a reason and you DON'T want to be the reason."
And then we got out onto the actual streets of Sigil... Coll and Vermillion had explained we would see a lot here (Namely, everything but the Gods, who weren't welcome here) but it didn’t actually detract from what we were seeing on the streets once we got out and about. Tieflings, Elves, Humans… all the regular races I've come to expect living in Kantas. As well as Demon, huge hulking fiends, angelic like beings with glowing wings, Genasi, elemental creatures…. Sigil is the place where everything from everywhere and when seems to come to trade and do who knows what… That ON TOP of the weird Geography of the place has made this the single most interesting place I have ever seen. A bustling metropolis of…. Everything.
I think the others were having a similar kind of experience as me and Hoop at this place. The journey back to Vermillion's after finishing up was WAY quicker than the journey there. The whole place was just mind blowing. Stopping at the mask seller probably didn’t help though.
The mask seller was an elf (I think?, I'm not sure) with a shoulder height sack with lots of masks hanging off of it. Everyone was pretty interested in what they had but it didn't take long for Bones and Rama to point out most where magical (I honestly am not surprised, in a place like this). After talking a little, it became abundantly clear these were going on sale for a similar deals like the marketplace in the Feywild. There was a lot of haggling and bargaining for things including common sense, all memories up to the age of 10, All memories up until YESTERDAY, 3 inches of someone's total height, Rama's Horns and someone's perceptiveness (Not sure how that particular one would have worked out). In the end, Rama managed to convince them to take a rather large Amethyst he had for a mask that was scaly and fish like, while Stedd had traded some of his common sense for a weird looking mask that would apparently make him bigger. I wasn't very keen on anything they had but did pick up a normal (non-magical) mask for Hoop for a few Gold.
The house itself, once we finally reached it seemed like any other house. Well, any other house there at least. There was still a chance the guy was a live so we decided to knock first but as we did the door just swung open and then only thing we could see was a puddle of red liquid in the middle of the floor. We told Rama to look for traps and he said it was ok, then suddenly freezes as he spots a dozen or so traps all attached to the door. Runes on stones, Crossbow, tripwires, all wired in a complex manner, all of the already triggered or disabled! Vermillion was right about him being cautious…. The ceiling had a huge contraption covered in spikes that we could see a few dead bodies of humans hanging from… one of the already triggered traps, or so we thought, Rama's familiar checked it out while we were exploring the house, turned out to be an illusion. This guy really had an elaborate defence system in place.
So we set about searching the house. The ground floor found a kitchen that had been completely looted, save for a single silver fork Rama seemed happy to find, a cloak room with a bunch of cloaks in and a sitting room with a bunch of books and odd bits of furniture around. A few of the others found some books they were interested in but otherwise nothing else we could use or need. Menace and Faye did have a kind of weird look about them as they picked them up but I never questioned it. This was just a weird place altogether.
There were 3 floors going up to the top of the house that we then moved onto, scoping out each floor room by room, most of which only showed the scattered remnants left behind by the looters who had broken in. The majority of the rooms were empty bedrooms with not much in. The interesting rooms were the Trophy room on the 1st floor, one of the guest Bedrooms on the 1st floor, The Library and what looked like an Alchemy lab on the 2nd floor and of course the Wizards study that dominated the top floor.
First Floor - The Trophy Room
By the time we reached this floor, we could hear some shouting from one of the rooms, as well as some commotion upstairs. Menace tried to look in through a keyhole but Rama just went and opened the door to get a look in. The Trophy room, like the rest of the house, had been ransacked already. There were broken trinkets and furniture, all except for a single statue of a pixie on a plinth in the middle of the room. At either end of the room were two of the looters, both hiding from the other desperately clutching at something in their hands each. Once Rama strolls in and starts demanding who is there (classic Rama I guess…) they get all agitated. One makes for the window but Faye stopped him with one of her spells, leaving him in hysterical laughter on the floor. The other tried attacked us until bones intimidated him into surrendering, when he finally dropped the object he was holding: An ordinary crystal ball. His laughing friend was clutching a boot…. Odd choices but it seemed like the Wizard had cursed them to trick any would be looters and it looks to have worked.
There was some talk about what they were after and Rama tried to convince them he was the wizard of the house, which apparently worked as they were terrified of him afterwards…. Thinking on it, that’s probably about the time he must've started planning to take the spell book. I'm glad we caught on to what he was doing. He can be so reckless sometimes, who know what kind of trouble would he have brought after us if he got away with it.
And to further his crazy choices, he paid the looter who had the crystal orb in Silver before sending him out of the house, then picked up the guy with the boot and after some similar questioning opted to throw him out the window! I could not believe it! I asked why and the only thing he would say was "He was going out the window anyway?". Then he couldn't seem to understand why a fall from 20ft in the air might seriously harm someone! I don't know what got into him today but I think we need to have a chat about it in the future… this kinda of thing is going to get someone killed. Well, I suppose it already has thinking on it. I know they were looting the place but he didn't need to be thrown from the window like that…
As we started to filter out to check out the next room, Faye went to look at the Pixie statue and got another weird look over them… when I looked next the statue was gone and they were acting kinda shifty…. I don't even want to know where they hid it.
First Floor - Guest Bedroom
This was one of the first bedrooms we came across and the only really interesting one. Right next to the trophy room, we walked in to see a small room with a bed, a fire place and…. A rolled up carpet on the floor with what looked like a person in it. As soon as we tried to investigate, the carpet sprung up, dropping the dead body of a looter to the ground and started to attack us!
It was quite a short lived fight… we had it outnumbered and between a few of us cutting at it and a few spells being fired off, it was soon falling to the floor in ribbons and ashes. Not sure where Curtis got a violent rug from but it certainly was an interesting find. Shame it attacked us, probably could have been useful to someone. The body it dropped looked like another looter it must have caught off guard.
The Second Floor
On the second floor, after seeing what looked like the master bedroom was empty, the six of us split up to inspect one of the three remaining doors each, with Stedd and I taking the first one which appeared to be some kind of Alchemy lab. Some of the looters had obviously been here too and messed with something they shouldn't have as the room looked like something had exploded in it and there was a burnt body stuck to one of the walls. We didn't stick around for long, everything seemed to be in ruins anyway, but we could hear a lot of noise coming from next door where Bones and Menace had gone looking.
As we rushed round, we passed Faye and Rama who had apparently found nothing in their room but decided to just head straight upstairs, then walked into complete Chaos.
Menace and Bones had walked into a library, in the middle of which was a whole crowd of looters, all fighting each other over a spilled bag of gold in the middle of the room. Bones had shouted at them to stop and Frustrated, bones had apparently fired off a spell that lit a few of the books on fire.
We ran in as a stray crossbow bolt slammed into the wall next to us, the fire was spreading and the riot still in full swing. Bones was now casting some spell on himself as Menace was taking cover behind a stack of books and taking pot shots with his own crossbow so Stedd and I both charged into the Fray. Stedd seemed like he was trying to make a good show of it, and I think he is quite capable but the confusion of the melee seemed to be getting to him a bit as everyone kept moving around too much. Between us though, the riot was put to a stop pretty quick as the looters dropped to the floor as we cut a path through them. Two more fell in a burst of fire from Bones, who was now somehow on the opposite side of the room and had already put out the fires, leaving a couple of rioters left, suddenly outnumbered and having another think about fighting us. I left the others to guard them while I rushed to catch up with Rama and Faye, during the commotion we could hear some noise from upstairs so they had obviously run into something.
The Third Floor - The Wizards Study
I rushed out but before I could reach the stairs there was a rush as something flashed past me, heading upstairs. It was only as I got up there I realised it was Bones (explaining how he managed to put the fires out so fast too.
The third floor was dominated by the wizards study, with a small side room to one side. As I reached. The wizard had indeed died and was laying on the floor next to a greyish liquid. More pressing however was Bones, immediately in front of me, firing two Scorching rays at a spectral image of the wizard as it rushed at him, Rama and Fay just beyond both focusing their own attacks on the ghostly wizard before it could lay his hands on Bones. I made to move in help but as I took a step forward, the ghostly image finally seemed to have taken more than it could handle and dropped to the floor in agonising screams before vanishing, leaving nothing more than a scorch and it's already dead physical body.
Having dealt with the remaining looters and collecting up the Gold they were fighting over, Menace and Stedd finally joined us as we began investigating the room. Faye and Bones set about cutting off the head of the body (Grim work) where It turned out the Wizard, Curtis Tanner, had died choking on a fish bone (The greyish liquid soon confirmed to be a fish stew). His body had the spell book we had been sent to collect which Rama grabbed hold of before we went to check out the last remaining room.
Adjoined to the study was a small sitting room, empty aside from two chairs and a small table, on which was a plate of sandwiches. Sitting at the table was a horrible, frail looking creature, pale and grey with long tentacles sprouting from its face. As we walked in, it was taking a sandwich from the table and eating it, only for the sandwich to reappear on the table again. It didn’t seem too interested in us, instead being so intently focused on these sandwiches. We tried talking to it and learned a little…. Curtis had somehow captured a Mindflayer (The creature) and was interrogating him, to what ends we never found out. Rather than any kind of prison though, Curtis had trapped the Mindflayer in an illusion, forever eating the illusory sandwiches. With Curtis dead, however, the Mindflayer was stuck here, unable to actually eat anything until finally, before we could even decide what to do with the thing, it died of Starvation.
Bones removed the head from the Mindflayer too, hoping to trade it with Lothar but didn’t have much luck so opted to keep it for some reason? I had an interesting talk with Bones on the way back to DH while he let me sketch the head for my journal. I'm not sure I'm happy with how Curtis had been torturing this thing but equally, I'm not sure I'd rather see it free…
The book in our hands, we decided to head back to Vermillion, that is until we saw Rama acting strange, trying to collect books and ripping the pages out of some. It soon became apparent he intended to disguise the book and present Vermillion with a fake but I put a stop to his plans pretty quickly by outright telling him I would tell Vermillion what he had done. Not that I wished harm on Rama, but I have a feeling Vermillion isn't an enemy any of us need and feigning ignorance would only get us so far… Besides, with the Bone Devil that cropped up from Giorgio recently, I think we could all do with less powerful being chasing after us.
The book and Head of Curtis where delivered, but Vermillion wasn't too interested in the Mindflayer head unsurprisingly. She thanked and paid us before sending us out to the portal in her garden and we made our way back home.
I think I would like to return to Sigil at some point, though maybe not just as a tourist…. Seems like an easy place to get lost. Hoop seemed to enjoy the the place though. A lot of strange people around and it's not every day you look up to see a city instead of sky.
18th Entry in the journal of Markas Virnala
Today was…. Today has caused me some concern. The more I think on it, the more I question if there was actually any good in what we did. Vermillion seemed happy but the whole thing just felt messy.
A notice was up requesting some help that we spoke to Coll in the Ettin about it. Myself, Rama, Faye, a friend of Faye's called Stedd, a young Fisherman who fights similar to how Baine used to (and smelt very strongly of fish), Mace, A shady looking tiefling with a certain way with words…. I'm not sure what to make of him just yet… and Bones. Bones is an interesting one. I sat with him and chatted a little just before we got back into Daring…. He's a bit intense but I like him. I think he is still trying to fit in maybe. He has some pretty strong opinions but I don't think he's a bad person at all…. I'd be interested to spend more time with him at some point. Seems to have made an impression on Hoop as well.
This particular request came from a woman called Vermillion, a Yuan-Ti from a place called Sigil. She was the first Yuan-ti I have ever met so didn’t know what to expect but she seemed nice. Coll pointed us in the right direction to where we could find a stone portal that leads directly to her garden in Sigil, giving us the password of "Pay your Tabs" to get there (Somehow I think he had a part in setting that up…)
Sigil is…. Weird. Coll gave us some warning first but it didn't make much sense, talking about doughnuts and doors, but stepping through the portal made everything come together. The city is literally inside a doughnut! When you look up into the sky, past the birds and clouds, rather than a typical sky, instead there was just the city! Roofs and streets as if you were looking from above but we were below it? In the distance you could see the ground steadily rise up and curve until it went straight over head then back down on the other side to where you were…. How does everything not fall from up there? Or maybe to them I was up there!? It gives me a headache thinking about it. That's without the last warning Coll gave us as well. He called it the city of doors and said sometimes when you opened doors there, they didn't go where you thought they might and if you wasn't careful, might end up somewhere like the plane of fire! Thankfully, none of the doors we opened went anywhere unexpected.
Vermillion came out to meet us, seems her garden is a regular spot for people to come to Sigil so she wasn't annoyed with us…. Still felt weird though. I felt like we were intruding. Not sure I'd be happy with people turning up like that out of nowhere. But then she did hire us so I guess she was expecting us? She invited us in to a pretty big house and basically explained what she wanted of us: A "friend" of hers, a wizard called Curtis Tanner, had died and she wanted us to retrieve his spell book and head…. I pointed out how it was a bit of an odd request for a recently deceased friend but turns out they were closer to acquaintances…. In fact, she didn’t even know if he was dead. Just hadn't seen him for a little bit and assumed!? She did concede if he wasn't dead, she would still pay us for looking. All in all, a pretty odd job this time round.
The head, in particular was to be claimed before another "friend" of hers could get hold of it, someone called Lothar who collected them and used magic to speak to the dead through the skulls he collected. Sounded pretty grim but Bones seemed excited by the prospect. Vermillion wanted it first to trade it for a favour by the sound of things. The spell book she just wanted for herself, but she was getting us to do it for her because "That's what she pays people for". I guess I can't argue with that…. She mentioned Curtis was very mistrusting so had likely trapped his house as well. With "friends" like Vermillion and Lothar around I can see why he would.
Before we left, I asked if there was anything worth knowing, being new territory for us all. The only thing she told us was: "You should watch out for 'The Lady of Pain'. If you see her, just RUN! Trust me, you'll know who it is when you see her. She generally has a lot of blades all around her. There is a reason why the Gods don't come to Sigil… She is the reason and if you see her, she will be there for a reason and you DON'T want to be the reason."
And then we got out onto the actual streets of Sigil... Coll and Vermillion had explained we would see a lot here (Namely, everything but the Gods, who weren't welcome here) but it didn’t actually detract from what we were seeing on the streets once we got out and about. Tieflings, Elves, Humans… all the regular races I've come to expect living in Kantas. As well as Demon, huge hulking fiends, angelic like beings with glowing wings, Genasi, elemental creatures…. Sigil is the place where everything from everywhere and when seems to come to trade and do who knows what… That ON TOP of the weird Geography of the place has made this the single most interesting place I have ever seen. A bustling metropolis of…. Everything.
I think the others were having a similar kind of experience as me and Hoop at this place. The journey back to Vermillion's after finishing up was WAY quicker than the journey there. The whole place was just mind blowing. Stopping at the mask seller probably didn’t help though.
The mask seller was an elf (I think?, I'm not sure) with a shoulder height sack with lots of masks hanging off of it. Everyone was pretty interested in what they had but it didn't take long for Bones and Rama to point out most where magical (I honestly am not surprised, in a place like this). After talking a little, it became abundantly clear these were going on sale for a similar deals like the marketplace in the Feywild. There was a lot of haggling and bargaining for things including common sense, all memories up to the age of 10, All memories up until YESTERDAY, 3 inches of someone's total height, Rama's Horns and someone's perceptiveness (Not sure how that particular one would have worked out). In the end, Rama managed to convince them to take a rather large Amethyst he had for a mask that was scaly and fish like, while Stedd had traded some of his common sense for a weird looking mask that would apparently make him bigger. I wasn't very keen on anything they had but did pick up a normal (non-magical) mask for Hoop for a few Gold.
The house itself, once we finally reached it seemed like any other house. Well, any other house there at least. There was still a chance the guy was a live so we decided to knock first but as we did the door just swung open and then only thing we could see was a puddle of red liquid in the middle of the floor. We told Rama to look for traps and he said it was ok, then suddenly freezes as he spots a dozen or so traps all attached to the door. Runes on stones, Crossbow, tripwires, all wired in a complex manner, all of the already triggered or disabled! Vermillion was right about him being cautious…. The ceiling had a huge contraption covered in spikes that we could see a few dead bodies of humans hanging from… one of the already triggered traps, or so we thought, Rama's familiar checked it out while we were exploring the house, turned out to be an illusion. This guy really had an elaborate defence system in place.
So we set about searching the house. The ground floor found a kitchen that had been completely looted, save for a single silver fork Rama seemed happy to find, a cloak room with a bunch of cloaks in and a sitting room with a bunch of books and odd bits of furniture around. A few of the others found some books they were interested in but otherwise nothing else we could use or need. Menace and Faye did have a kind of weird look about them as they picked them up but I never questioned it. This was just a weird place altogether.
There were 3 floors going up to the top of the house that we then moved onto, scoping out each floor room by room, most of which only showed the scattered remnants left behind by the looters who had broken in. The majority of the rooms were empty bedrooms with not much in. The interesting rooms were the Trophy room on the 1st floor, one of the guest Bedrooms on the 1st floor, The Library and what looked like an Alchemy lab on the 2nd floor and of course the Wizards study that dominated the top floor.
First Floor - The Trophy Room
By the time we reached this floor, we could hear some shouting from one of the rooms, as well as some commotion upstairs. Menace tried to look in through a keyhole but Rama just went and opened the door to get a look in. The Trophy room, like the rest of the house, had been ransacked already. There were broken trinkets and furniture, all except for a single statue of a pixie on a plinth in the middle of the room. At either end of the room were two of the looters, both hiding from the other desperately clutching at something in their hands each. Once Rama strolls in and starts demanding who is there (classic Rama I guess…) they get all agitated. One makes for the window but Faye stopped him with one of her spells, leaving him in hysterical laughter on the floor. The other tried attacked us until bones intimidated him into surrendering, when he finally dropped the object he was holding: An ordinary crystal ball. His laughing friend was clutching a boot…. Odd choices but it seemed like the Wizard had cursed them to trick any would be looters and it looks to have worked.
There was some talk about what they were after and Rama tried to convince them he was the wizard of the house, which apparently worked as they were terrified of him afterwards…. Thinking on it, that’s probably about the time he must've started planning to take the spell book. I'm glad we caught on to what he was doing. He can be so reckless sometimes, who know what kind of trouble would he have brought after us if he got away with it.
And to further his crazy choices, he paid the looter who had the crystal orb in Silver before sending him out of the house, then picked up the guy with the boot and after some similar questioning opted to throw him out the window! I could not believe it! I asked why and the only thing he would say was "He was going out the window anyway?". Then he couldn't seem to understand why a fall from 20ft in the air might seriously harm someone! I don't know what got into him today but I think we need to have a chat about it in the future… this kinda of thing is going to get someone killed. Well, I suppose it already has thinking on it. I know they were looting the place but he didn't need to be thrown from the window like that…
As we started to filter out to check out the next room, Faye went to look at the Pixie statue and got another weird look over them… when I looked next the statue was gone and they were acting kinda shifty…. I don't even want to know where they hid it.
First Floor - Guest Bedroom
This was one of the first bedrooms we came across and the only really interesting one. Right next to the trophy room, we walked in to see a small room with a bed, a fire place and…. A rolled up carpet on the floor with what looked like a person in it. As soon as we tried to investigate, the carpet sprung up, dropping the dead body of a looter to the ground and started to attack us!
It was quite a short lived fight… we had it outnumbered and between a few of us cutting at it and a few spells being fired off, it was soon falling to the floor in ribbons and ashes. Not sure where Curtis got a violent rug from but it certainly was an interesting find. Shame it attacked us, probably could have been useful to someone. The body it dropped looked like another looter it must have caught off guard.
The Second Floor
On the second floor, after seeing what looked like the master bedroom was empty, the six of us split up to inspect one of the three remaining doors each, with Stedd and I taking the first one which appeared to be some kind of Alchemy lab. Some of the looters had obviously been here too and messed with something they shouldn't have as the room looked like something had exploded in it and there was a burnt body stuck to one of the walls. We didn't stick around for long, everything seemed to be in ruins anyway, but we could hear a lot of noise coming from next door where Bones and Menace had gone looking.
As we rushed round, we passed Faye and Rama who had apparently found nothing in their room but decided to just head straight upstairs, then walked into complete Chaos.
Menace and Bones had walked into a library, in the middle of which was a whole crowd of looters, all fighting each other over a spilled bag of gold in the middle of the room. Bones had shouted at them to stop and Frustrated, bones had apparently fired off a spell that lit a few of the books on fire.
We ran in as a stray crossbow bolt slammed into the wall next to us, the fire was spreading and the riot still in full swing. Bones was now casting some spell on himself as Menace was taking cover behind a stack of books and taking pot shots with his own crossbow so Stedd and I both charged into the Fray. Stedd seemed like he was trying to make a good show of it, and I think he is quite capable but the confusion of the melee seemed to be getting to him a bit as everyone kept moving around too much. Between us though, the riot was put to a stop pretty quick as the looters dropped to the floor as we cut a path through them. Two more fell in a burst of fire from Bones, who was now somehow on the opposite side of the room and had already put out the fires, leaving a couple of rioters left, suddenly outnumbered and having another think about fighting us. I left the others to guard them while I rushed to catch up with Rama and Faye, during the commotion we could hear some noise from upstairs so they had obviously run into something.
The Third Floor - The Wizards Study
I rushed out but before I could reach the stairs there was a rush as something flashed past me, heading upstairs. It was only as I got up there I realised it was Bones (explaining how he managed to put the fires out so fast too.
The third floor was dominated by the wizards study, with a small side room to one side. As I reached. The wizard had indeed died and was laying on the floor next to a greyish liquid. More pressing however was Bones, immediately in front of me, firing two Scorching rays at a spectral image of the wizard as it rushed at him, Rama and Fay just beyond both focusing their own attacks on the ghostly wizard before it could lay his hands on Bones. I made to move in help but as I took a step forward, the ghostly image finally seemed to have taken more than it could handle and dropped to the floor in agonising screams before vanishing, leaving nothing more than a scorch and it's already dead physical body.
Having dealt with the remaining looters and collecting up the Gold they were fighting over, Menace and Stedd finally joined us as we began investigating the room. Faye and Bones set about cutting off the head of the body (Grim work) where It turned out the Wizard, Curtis Tanner, had died choking on a fish bone (The greyish liquid soon confirmed to be a fish stew). His body had the spell book we had been sent to collect which Rama grabbed hold of before we went to check out the last remaining room.
Adjoined to the study was a small sitting room, empty aside from two chairs and a small table, on which was a plate of sandwiches. Sitting at the table was a horrible, frail looking creature, pale and grey with long tentacles sprouting from its face. As we walked in, it was taking a sandwich from the table and eating it, only for the sandwich to reappear on the table again. It didn’t seem too interested in us, instead being so intently focused on these sandwiches. We tried talking to it and learned a little…. Curtis had somehow captured a Mindflayer (The creature) and was interrogating him, to what ends we never found out. Rather than any kind of prison though, Curtis had trapped the Mindflayer in an illusion, forever eating the illusory sandwiches. With Curtis dead, however, the Mindflayer was stuck here, unable to actually eat anything until finally, before we could even decide what to do with the thing, it died of Starvation.
Bones removed the head from the Mindflayer too, hoping to trade it with Lothar but didn’t have much luck so opted to keep it for some reason? I had an interesting talk with Bones on the way back to DH while he let me sketch the head for my journal. I'm not sure I'm happy with how Curtis had been torturing this thing but equally, I'm not sure I'd rather see it free…
The book in our hands, we decided to head back to Vermillion, that is until we saw Rama acting strange, trying to collect books and ripping the pages out of some. It soon became apparent he intended to disguise the book and present Vermillion with a fake but I put a stop to his plans pretty quickly by outright telling him I would tell Vermillion what he had done. Not that I wished harm on Rama, but I have a feeling Vermillion isn't an enemy any of us need and feigning ignorance would only get us so far… Besides, with the Bone Devil that cropped up from Giorgio recently, I think we could all do with less powerful being chasing after us.
The book and Head of Curtis where delivered, but Vermillion wasn't too interested in the Mindflayer head unsurprisingly. She thanked and paid us before sending us out to the portal in her garden and we made our way back home.
I think I would like to return to Sigil at some point, though maybe not just as a tourist…. Seems like an easy place to get lost. Hoop seemed to enjoy the the place though. A lot of strange people around and it's not every day you look up to see a city instead of sky.
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