Session 14: The Profaned Sailor Arc 2

With the basement floor swept clean, the party moved to the upper levels of the warehouse. They were met with a labyrinthian challenge, piles of furniture and crates created walls and tight corridors, patrolled by more passing rooks. This would have been a problem in it of itself, but this situation became much more perilous when our heroes looked at the ceiling and discovered that the third and last floor was no floor at all, but mainly, suspended corridors with open spaces between them, giving the guards above them the perfect perching nests to surveil all that was underneath them.

Rhyia, still in her spider form, climbed literally through knock and cranny, in order to scoot ahead any dangers lurking in the shadows, and as an ironic twist of fate, the spider’s curiosity made her bite more than she could shew. Behind a closed and guarded door, the druid crawled through a keyhole, convinced to have found her mark, the office of the owner of the warehouse. And although she wasn’t wrong, nothing could have prepared her for what she had found on the other side.

As she entered through the hole, a pungent smell greeted her, seemingly a mixture between the nauseating aroma of rotten flesh and the scent of salty sea spray. Inside the room was the silhouette of a colossal man seated before an old desk, with a small music box on top of it, playing a weak and distorted lullaby, which echoed through the remains of the room.

This room seemed completely detached from reality outside of it. What was once a warm and welcoming room, now laid in ruins—walls crumbling, rotting wood covered in dust and ash, all of it bathed in a ghostly green light that seeped through the cracks of the collapsed ceiling. It all felt to Rhyia as if this was all…detached…from everything. She could even look through the crumbled walls, but instead of seeing the outside docks and the bumming sounds coming from the festivals close by, all she could see was…nothing, black and dreaded emptiness.

When her gaze shifted back to the man at the desk, her shock could not be contained any longer. What was supposed to be once a man was now a twisted behemoth dressed in a torn and soaked sailor’s shirt. Its pale skin was stretched and stitched over bloated, misshapen muscles, while its face, baring an expression of intense suffering, was covered by a mask of flesh nailed onto its skull.

Their left arm was wrapped in a skeleton frame, with its thin ribs clinging to the creature’s forearm, while what was once a spine now hanged loose and sharpened, resembling a scorpion’s stinger. The rest of the skeleton seemed to be…hugging the abomination, deeply embedding it´s fingers into the mountain of rotten flesh, while the skull rested delicately on top of the titan’s shoulder. Strands of long gray hair reached out from the skull, seemingly flowing through the air, giving this ghostly appearance the illusion of being submerged deep under water.

This grotesque site was strong enough to rock Rhyia out of her wild shape. Now, alone and locked in this room, she quickly closed her eyes and focused, turning back into a spider and leaving through the door hole. But it was too late, for whatever that thing was, it knew it had unwanted company.

Turning back one last time, still inside the keyhole, the last thing Rhyia noticed was the beast getting up from its chair, reviling a grotesquely swollen belly, pulsating and shifting beneath its flesh, scarred and covered in cysts and forgotten runes. And beside the monster, beside its desk, was a crib—long abandoned, but never forgotten…

Rhyia clawed as fast as her spidery legs could, informing the rest of the party in a frantic panic. And from the top floor they heard the door being opened, but instead of the monster, what came out of the room was a bulky, brown long haired and bearded Asimar, wearing the same sailor´s shit, only in much better condition. Drodak ordered his guards to be on high alert, as he suspected of the presence of intruders.

The group used this to their advantage, since it became much more difficult to take out the guards in the open without being spotted from above, Botas used his mimicking skills to impersonate one of the guards, while the rest of the party convinced Yasu to cause a ruckus in the room. This led to a group of guards capturing the mimic and dragging it down to basement, where our party waited in ambush.

With a coordinated attack, an entire squad of rooks was taken out, without raising suspicions. The rest of their plan began to form, those who could fit inside the guard´s armor would do so in order to help them navigate through the warehouse inconspicuously, eliminating as many guards as possible, in order to overwhelm Drodak with sheer force and numbers. Those who choose to conseil themselves where Cat´s, still in her beastly form, who stuck out like a sore thumb, Valsali e Cicie, in a combined effort to pretend to be a single individual inside a large trench coat, and Botas, who fitted impeccably well inside the rook´s armor, with the beak shaped visor accommodating to the natural shape of his face, decided that this would be a worthy replacement for his previous vestments.

As the concealed group returned from the basement, the remainder of the guards fell into a lighter mood, thinking that their alarm was dumbfounded, but Drodak continued tense, closely watching from above. Our heroes went in separate directions, scattering through the mase of furniture. Cats stalked their unsuspecting prayers from shadowy corners, knocking out two guards and dragging their limp bodies to a more secluded area. Cicie and Valsali took a more dynamic approach, for they had previously known that there was a group of guards drinking and resting inside one of the divisions of the building, only to return to their posts by the alarming calls of their boss. They had been drinking, and one of the guards who was tricking into going down to the basement reeked of alcohol. Pretending to be intoxicated, Valsali convinced two more guards to escort him back to the rest room. When this group entered the room, the door closed, and the lower body of the seemingly drunk guard separated from the rest of its body, and from its pelvis jumped a pink haired halfling, kicking one of the unsuspecting guards in the jaw. The remaining rook, now caring for a legless corpse by himself, has no time to react before being punched in the balls by the small assassin. Valsali, still in the remaining of the armor, looks at this man through the beaked visor and mocks him, saying “no will believe you”. Such a traumatic experience was enough for guard to regurgitate all the booze he consumed on that faithful night, only to pass out cold on top of it moments after. The nominated Operation “Two Goblins in a Trench Coat” as a stounding success.

Meanwhile, the last concealed member of the party, Botas, proceeded to go to the second floor, in an attempt to deescalate their enemies suspicion. While this tactic seemed to be effective on the remaining guards, Drodaks paranoia proved unwavering. He slowly walked towards Botas, and as he got closer, reality seemed to become more and more fragile. With each step it took, the walls began to crack, floorboards and pieces of the ceiling crumbled around the creature, which shifted franticly and uncontrollably between its two alter egos. This thing was now in front of the Kenku, and the weight of death that dragged the entire world around it was felt. “You are trembling soldier, yet you say everything is fine?” it spoke in a gurgled wet voice. “Are you lying to me?” it asked. This two faced titan bent down to reach the levels of this soldier´s eyes, and for a moment, the shifting stopped, but the monster remained, and so did the skeleton, the woman, who freed one of her arms and gently caressed Botas face, slowly opening the metal visor, which now felt like it was slowly being filled with salt water. “I was lied too once…NEVER AGAIN!” One of its misformed arms slams against the little crow’s frame, sending him flying down back to the first floor. Where it not for Minerva and her quick wits, catching her compatriot mind her, Botas would have flown for the last time.

Now there was no more avoiding it, now was the time to crash against the beast, now the flood gates had been open.