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Me, Cheshire cat voice: "We're all mad here. Except for Robin."
Once again, our dramatis personae:
Robin, cinnamon roll paladin (who is not mad but may have been furious)
Celyn, who mostly just rogued today (mad about Robin in the ludicrous heart-eyes way)
Izgil, sorceror (mad about the moon, social etiquette, and counterspelling particulars)
Viepuck, bardlock (mad about being dismissed because he's a child)
When we left off we were slightly further along than the sort of flashback we spent doing at the beginning of the session.
So, we had rescued the Lady Debrune and her fey friend and smuggled them out of the keep, and we had the opportunity to talk to them, as the fey friend did not particularly want to be indebted to us for the indefinite future and thus let us ask a bunch of questions, only some of which were Izgil asking about the moon, because Izgil's particular flavor of obsession has its predictable moments.
We did not get any clarity on the Gloomshaper. The fey explained he had been sent to keep an eye on Celyn in specific until some event came to pass, which had not come to pass (he was told he would know when it happened, and he has had no such knowledge, more specifically), and he was too scared to stick with his post right now, so he is going to go home and face the consequences for failing his mission. He did allow as how the Enst river valley has been something of a demilitarized zone for his entire lifetime ("since the Great War") and that the sort of fey incursions we have been dealing with are basically unprecedented in his knowledge. We know the portal in the Cleenseau forest opened briefly some time ago (in the reign of Cece the Great, who died a few years ago) before being more often irregularly open now.
(We have a floating theory that something about Cece's reign was inimical to the Gloomshaper doing this nonsense; further that the premature deaths of all of her children but this last one may have been Enemy Action rather than Horrible Bad Luck. The child who survived to ascend the Sembaran throne was not accepted as the monarch of Tyrwingha, so the usually-joint crown is not currently. All of this background knowledge we were given at the beginning of the game is very "Uhhh, hmmmmm" these days.)
Anyway, we composed a message for the guy to bring back to his people about the situation and relocated to the plot, currently in progress.
This particular keep has towers at its corners. Up a flight of stairs is a landing where, to the left, is the bedroom of Marguerite, the woman who was murdered and replaced by an evil fairy; ahead of that is a secret door concealing we're not sure what but we know our friend Damien was dragged up there to be guarded by an eight-foot-tall muscular being in a ragged cloak, bare chest scarred, with massive eldritch antlers and Lorge Weapons. We have had a brief encounter with one of these guys previously, in which he one-shot knocked out Celyn; while Celyn is not actually sane in a manner that leads to being worried about his physical safety in this situation he nonetheless Has A Concern Here.
Celyn prepped a care package for our imprisoned buddy: light stone, dagger, lockpicks. In case he was in a condition to do something about them. This was handed off to Viepuck's familiar for delivery. (It turned out to be irrelevant but we at least thought of trying it in case it was useful.) Viepuck and Celyn put ball bearings on the landing in case of the shapeshifter coming out of the bedroom. Celyn asked Robin for a kiss for luck and gave him a stealth blessing, then opened the door with mage hand.
Rather than 'sneak up the stairs and find the monster', we instead found 'monster standing on the stairs waiting for us'. We were not actually entirely prepared for this!
Viepuck blasts the hell out of it and knocks it up the stairs. It comes back down, its antlers glowing an eldritch green, and a haze seeps out of them; it takes two swings at Robin, who despite protecting himself is mildly nicked by the giant blade. Then it bamfs back around the curve. Celyn lets Robin lead on going up the stairs and sneaks up behind him (primarily again because he Has A Concern about this and going up With Paladin is better than going up Solo; I think in any other circumstance he would have gone up first).
The room at the top of the tower is largely empty and contains our friend (chained to the wall, semiconscious, and gagged, and thus not able to utilize the care package prepared for him) and the Duskhound, just barely out of Robin's reach. Because I didn't have the action available to do a mage hand thing I was planning on doing, the eldritch flying purple octopus cut the gag on the chained bard. Everyone piles into the staircase after Izgil dispels the fear effect (from the haze) that Robin and Celyn had previously shrugged off. Viepuck blasts the Duskhound again. (Viepuck is growing into a damage-output monster as well as a human telegraph.)
The Duskhound tries to shoot Viepuck down the staircase; Robin deflects one arrow with his shield because shooting past the defense-and-protection specialist paladin is actually reasonably ineffective. One arrow gets by, taking out one of Viepuck's mirror images. The monster also starts emitting a cold aura, which, since it's backed up next to Damien, is sort of worrisome of it; he is not in a condition to take that sort of damage.
Celyn slips out of the stairway and flicks an illusion of a stone wall across most of the door to make it less likely the thing can get line of sight to teleport into the staircase to either escape or hit the casters. Robin engages the Duskhound and knocks it away from our imprisoned friend; the Duskhound's cold aura snaps and focuses on Robin, and the creature itself blips over next to the stairway as a reaction to being hit. Next to Celyn. Who it appears not to have noticed. This is of course profoundly funny to Celyn. Meanwhile, the octopus feeds a weirdberry to the chained bard to make him a little more conscious. (Viepuck can cast a variant goodberry spell - food for a day and a hit point of healing - but because he gets this power from a Lovecraftian knowledge-seeking eldritch entity, the flavor of the things is stuff like "last Tuesday" or "disappointment" or occasionally more prosaic choices like "rotten raisins". Curious Cthulhu does not understand flavor.)
Izgil is aware that the creature's antler effects can be dispelled, but the damn thing keeps using them before he can do so. He is ready to do something when the thing glows blue again! On his turn!
Unfortunately it is not to be, as when the creature turns away from the stairs to engage Robin again, Celyn comes up behind it and stabs it with his now-traditional, "Hi!" and the cold effect hits him instead, removing the cold aura from play. Izgil misty-steps across the room and calls up a major blasty spell, making the party briefly immune to it with his sorceror tricks; one of the creature's horns cracks and falls off to give it enough of a boost to make its save. Damien manages to make contact with Robin and drop a heal on him somewhere in here. Viepuck blasts it - again - the second antler crumbles - but it turns to knock Izgil nearly unconscious.
Izgil grumbles, "Just kill it!" so Celyn does. (Killing blow #1.)
Then Celyn handily uses his lockpicks to extract Damien from status: chained to wall. We dither vigorously about what to do from here.
Damien: So are we just ... running?
Celyn: I recommend not running. It's much harder to sneak that way.
While we are debating, Izgil's tremorsense notices someone coming up the stairs. The eldritch octopus is hiding down there to report on what's going on, and we thus are aware of the fey that guy was the bodyguard for coming up, looking around at the situation, spotting the ball bearings, and, well, an illusion of her went into the room, carefully navigating around our chaos.
We know she's on the landing below us, and thus our route of escape is closed. We climb up to the widow's walk on the tower, carrying the body of the Duskhound with us, and determine that Robin can get Damien to the safehouse with a combination of the ring of jumping (to get beyond the outer wall) and feather fall (to not plummet to their doom); the rest of us hop off the tower with just the feather fall and hide the corpse in a stable.
A minute or three after we do this, the door up to the tower opens, and the eldritch octopus gets the hell out of dodge.
Damien, in the safe space, reports to Robin that he'd used a clairaudience trick to eavesdrop on the shapeshifter and the Duskhound, a conversation that swapped from her giving directions and orders in mingled languages only some of which he understood to her telling tales of chaos she had caused and getting a different voice laughing and grading her work. Which means we know that the contestants in this little game are using the Duskhounds to report their score and we have at least deprived her of the ability to continue gaining points. He believes that the lady spotted his spell because after that point they started hurting him.
Celyn meanwhile goes to obtain our friend the captain of horse to say GUESS WHAT WE FOUND A PROBLEM and explain the situation. In the resulting conversation we tell her we believe Marguerite is both dead and replaced with a fairy shapeshifter and that this was her bodyguard. The magistrate is summoned, conversation ensues, and the magistrate agrees to officially interfere in Marguerite's attempts to hold a trial and delay it until the baroness returns. Viepuck pings the baroness with a sending spell and she will be back in two days.
We ask where we put the damn body. They say that burying it under straw in this vacant stall is probably going to work out fine for now? Don't we have a Terrifying Beast who might be able to guard it? Greymalkin does not like stables - they are well beneath his dignity - but guarding a thing that happens to be stashed in a stable is acceptable to him, and this is the sort of hairsplitting distinction that needs to be understood in order to deal with the fey.
Greymalkin is summoned. Greymalkin is delighted to see a dead Duskhound. Greymalkin is extremely disappointed that he was not invited along to kill it himself. Robin attempts to explain to him that we were in a narrow staircase. "I would fit!" (Dear reader: he would not fit.)
Greymalkin: "Robin. ROBIN. I want to rip the throat out of it myself."
Robin: "Next one you can come along."
Greymalkin: "Promise?"
Robin: "I promise."
Izgil has made the leap of logic that because Sembarans are way more comfortable with divine magic than anything else, the thing he needs to do to explain how scary these people are is make sure that it is clear to the others that the fairies are doing things that are Not Divinely Approved. We cannot explain how the shapeshifter can shapeshift but we are pretty sure that it ain't godly. This works much better than Izgil's usual attempts to explain magic, which mostly get people warily asking him if he's a wizard.
We decide to do shifts, let one set of us get a long rest while the others bodyguard the magistrate, then swap off. This is interrupted by a page banging on Robin and Celyn's door in the barracks to wake them to inform them that Marguerite has invited them to an early breakfast. She says she has new information about Damien's case that she needs to convey to us.
This initiates phase two of the session: the game of Playing Chicken With Fairies. Who will blink first?
Robin and Celyn, who have Not Gotten Enough Sleep For This Bullshit, take the note to the others to figure out what to do. We send a nice note back conveying, "Terribly sorry, can't make breakfast, how about we make plans for dinner after we've rested up from the terribly busy night full of divine portents we had and want to get back to processing?" Everyone knows that everyone knows we are Playing Chicken With Fairies, and we have elected not to blink first.
Robin and Celyn go back to sleep. Izgil gets a rest in. Viepuck foregoes a long rest to spend the day helping the magistrate besiege the shapeshifter with bureaucracy so that she does not get to rest up either. She has a position in this court after all and there is some urgent paperwork that needs to be handled and oh, did this slip between the cracks? We have to fix that. The magistrate does not ask why the twelve-year-old is fully fluent in both civil and criminal law, she just puts him to work being petty and annoying. Viepuck, being a were-edgelord, is in clover with this.
Next round of Playing Chicken With Fairies: turning up to dinner. We bring the magistrate, who of course has legitimate interest in how the local cases are going. We also come pre-prepared with Izgil carrying a detect magic and Celyn carrying a detect poison. The food is not poisoned, but it is enchanted. Izgil drops a danger signal, the magistrate fails to figure out what he's warning about and starts to panic. Viepuck pings her telepathically and suggests she duck out, the food is enchanted, and she makes a noise about how she's brought people up and now she's going to, uh, go, do... things!
The fairy really wants us to eat her charcuterie platter. We do not want to eat the charcuterie platter. Celyn's play is to claim that - given she was being all fake-sympathetic about how we had been Betrayed By A Friend earlier - knowing there's news she's not giving us makes it hard to have a reasonable appetite. Viepuck's play is to load up a plate while chattering away. She keeps trying to get us to actually eat. Viepuck slams the plate down on the table and starts complaining that there is no horseradish how can he have a sandwich without horseradish this is terrible.
At which point the fairy tries to get into an etiquette argument with a twelve-year-old, talking down to him all the way about how decent people have their nice meal before talking business. Which gets a lot of "BUT THERE IS NO HORSERADISH" "You are behaving like a child!" "[poutyface]" until—
—the fairy loses the game of chicken by trying to cast "friends" on him. She blinked first!
Izgil, still maintaining detect magic: "That was rude!"
She starts arguing with Izgil about childishness and rudeness. Viepuck starts to cast a spell, and we are suddenly in another combat.
Celyn: [casts faerie fire]
Shapeshifter: [resists faerie fire]
Viepuck: [casts faerie fire]
Shapeshifter: [resists faerie fire]
Izgil, playing responsible adult who says "no" to things: [casts a spell requiring the shifter to reroll that save]
Shapeshifter: [afflicted with faerie fire]
Izgil: [floods the room with magical moonlight that will help him pierce illusions if illusions happen]
Robin gets the glorious dramatic moment of being able to go fuck this shit, leap up onto the table and charge through the enchanted charcuterie platter, and hit the shifter with a warhammer. She was not expecting that. She tries to cast something; Izgil continues to be the responsible adult who says "no" to things and counterspells it. She also does an aura effect like the Duskhound had.
Celyn was also not expecting Robin to be quite that gloriously dramatic but is absolutely there for it, and thus charges up to join his boyfriend in combat, gets knocked back by the aura effect, teleports himself to the spot that he was knocked back from, and criticals on the fairy. Rogue criticals are fun and often startling to beings that are hit by them, but unlike the last thing that he critted on lo these many months ago, she is a boss rather than a generic minion and does not die of startled by rogue.
Viepuck gets hit with the aura effect but isn't knocked back, and does some damage I think. Izgil dispels the aura effect because really there needs to be more discipline around here, people shouldn't be doing this sort of thing, so Robin can pummel her some more without having to worry about it, moving to sandwich her between himself and Celyn to minimize her movements as best as can be done with a fey, which is not actually that much. (But Robin's amazing capacity to defend people standing next to him doesn't work against spellcasters, just physical attacks.)
The fairy is now in a situation where she is between a rogue and a paladin, both of whom have been Dramatic And Violent at her, with a terrifying eldritch tween intoning things like, "A MERE CHILD" at her telepathically in between blasting her with conjured damage, with a very disapproving dwarf saying "No" to her whims. She elects to teleport across the room to the furthest-away-from-the-boys window, pull the curtain aside, and leap out, turning into a bird to fly away.
She picked the window next to the flying purple eldritch octopus, which reaches out to snag her with a tentacle and wraps itself around her face. This is not compatible with birdflight, and so she plummets out of the window and crashes in the courtyard below, reverting to her fey form. "You're going to want to hear what I have to tell you," she says, in an attempt to not get dead.
Celyn swaps to his bow as he goes over to the window and shoots her, rendering her dead-unless-healed. (Killing blow #2.)
Viepuck teleports down to the ground to try to mind probe her, but she is unconscious. We debate whether we want to wake her up to figure out what the fuck she was talking about. Robin is seethingly disapproving of this plan. (Robin is, I suspect, furious at the merest existence of all three of the fey contestants in this little game, and he was the one who got Damien's rendition of her reports on her latest 'and here's who I got murdered by impersonating them!' plays.) While we are contemplating whether we want to do anything, she wakes up. (Still wrapped in octopus.)
"It's about the baroness" she says, and Viepuck promptly turns on her and mindprobes again to get more information about the baroness; she makes her save until Celyn suggests that no, no she did not, and she agrees that she did not. (Making her reroll a save: handy!)
Viepuck gleans from her mind that the fairy believes - or wants us to believe, if she's capable of lying to his mindreading abilities - that the baroness is evil, necromantically inclined, and has a master we would really like to know about. And responsible - her and her master perhaps? - for a lot of the local troubles, bad for humans and fey alike. Now, we knew that she was manically obsessive about "rooting out necromancy" but really that's a good position to seed it, and we definitely need to investigate further. (And we were confused as to why fey were appearing to truck in necromancy in causing chaos, which is not their usual style at all. Rather inimical to their usual style. If there's another player on the field....)
"Are we going to be honorable?" she asks. "Or are you going to murder me?" she goes on, as she prepares a spell.
So Celyn stabs her again. Rolling a 1 and a 4. And using his divine luck power to invert that into a successful hit because good grief. (Killing blow #3.)
So now we have two dead evil fairies, a baroness who may be evil incoming, and somewhat more information than we had yesterday.
Once again, our dramatis personae:
Robin, cinnamon roll paladin (who is not mad but may have been furious)
Celyn, who mostly just rogued today (mad about Robin in the ludicrous heart-eyes way)
Izgil, sorceror (mad about the moon, social etiquette, and counterspelling particulars)
Viepuck, bardlock (mad about being dismissed because he's a child)
When we left off we were slightly further along than the sort of flashback we spent doing at the beginning of the session.
So, we had rescued the Lady Debrune and her fey friend and smuggled them out of the keep, and we had the opportunity to talk to them, as the fey friend did not particularly want to be indebted to us for the indefinite future and thus let us ask a bunch of questions, only some of which were Izgil asking about the moon, because Izgil's particular flavor of obsession has its predictable moments.
We did not get any clarity on the Gloomshaper. The fey explained he had been sent to keep an eye on Celyn in specific until some event came to pass, which had not come to pass (he was told he would know when it happened, and he has had no such knowledge, more specifically), and he was too scared to stick with his post right now, so he is going to go home and face the consequences for failing his mission. He did allow as how the Enst river valley has been something of a demilitarized zone for his entire lifetime ("since the Great War") and that the sort of fey incursions we have been dealing with are basically unprecedented in his knowledge. We know the portal in the Cleenseau forest opened briefly some time ago (in the reign of Cece the Great, who died a few years ago) before being more often irregularly open now.
(We have a floating theory that something about Cece's reign was inimical to the Gloomshaper doing this nonsense; further that the premature deaths of all of her children but this last one may have been Enemy Action rather than Horrible Bad Luck. The child who survived to ascend the Sembaran throne was not accepted as the monarch of Tyrwingha, so the usually-joint crown is not currently. All of this background knowledge we were given at the beginning of the game is very "Uhhh, hmmmmm" these days.)
Anyway, we composed a message for the guy to bring back to his people about the situation and relocated to the plot, currently in progress.
This particular keep has towers at its corners. Up a flight of stairs is a landing where, to the left, is the bedroom of Marguerite, the woman who was murdered and replaced by an evil fairy; ahead of that is a secret door concealing we're not sure what but we know our friend Damien was dragged up there to be guarded by an eight-foot-tall muscular being in a ragged cloak, bare chest scarred, with massive eldritch antlers and Lorge Weapons. We have had a brief encounter with one of these guys previously, in which he one-shot knocked out Celyn; while Celyn is not actually sane in a manner that leads to being worried about his physical safety in this situation he nonetheless Has A Concern Here.
Celyn prepped a care package for our imprisoned buddy: light stone, dagger, lockpicks. In case he was in a condition to do something about them. This was handed off to Viepuck's familiar for delivery. (It turned out to be irrelevant but we at least thought of trying it in case it was useful.) Viepuck and Celyn put ball bearings on the landing in case of the shapeshifter coming out of the bedroom. Celyn asked Robin for a kiss for luck and gave him a stealth blessing, then opened the door with mage hand.
Rather than 'sneak up the stairs and find the monster', we instead found 'monster standing on the stairs waiting for us'. We were not actually entirely prepared for this!
Viepuck blasts the hell out of it and knocks it up the stairs. It comes back down, its antlers glowing an eldritch green, and a haze seeps out of them; it takes two swings at Robin, who despite protecting himself is mildly nicked by the giant blade. Then it bamfs back around the curve. Celyn lets Robin lead on going up the stairs and sneaks up behind him (primarily again because he Has A Concern about this and going up With Paladin is better than going up Solo; I think in any other circumstance he would have gone up first).
The room at the top of the tower is largely empty and contains our friend (chained to the wall, semiconscious, and gagged, and thus not able to utilize the care package prepared for him) and the Duskhound, just barely out of Robin's reach. Because I didn't have the action available to do a mage hand thing I was planning on doing, the eldritch flying purple octopus cut the gag on the chained bard. Everyone piles into the staircase after Izgil dispels the fear effect (from the haze) that Robin and Celyn had previously shrugged off. Viepuck blasts the Duskhound again. (Viepuck is growing into a damage-output monster as well as a human telegraph.)
The Duskhound tries to shoot Viepuck down the staircase; Robin deflects one arrow with his shield because shooting past the defense-and-protection specialist paladin is actually reasonably ineffective. One arrow gets by, taking out one of Viepuck's mirror images. The monster also starts emitting a cold aura, which, since it's backed up next to Damien, is sort of worrisome of it; he is not in a condition to take that sort of damage.
Celyn slips out of the stairway and flicks an illusion of a stone wall across most of the door to make it less likely the thing can get line of sight to teleport into the staircase to either escape or hit the casters. Robin engages the Duskhound and knocks it away from our imprisoned friend; the Duskhound's cold aura snaps and focuses on Robin, and the creature itself blips over next to the stairway as a reaction to being hit. Next to Celyn. Who it appears not to have noticed. This is of course profoundly funny to Celyn. Meanwhile, the octopus feeds a weirdberry to the chained bard to make him a little more conscious. (Viepuck can cast a variant goodberry spell - food for a day and a hit point of healing - but because he gets this power from a Lovecraftian knowledge-seeking eldritch entity, the flavor of the things is stuff like "last Tuesday" or "disappointment" or occasionally more prosaic choices like "rotten raisins". Curious Cthulhu does not understand flavor.)
Izgil is aware that the creature's antler effects can be dispelled, but the damn thing keeps using them before he can do so. He is ready to do something when the thing glows blue again! On his turn!
Unfortunately it is not to be, as when the creature turns away from the stairs to engage Robin again, Celyn comes up behind it and stabs it with his now-traditional, "Hi!" and the cold effect hits him instead, removing the cold aura from play. Izgil misty-steps across the room and calls up a major blasty spell, making the party briefly immune to it with his sorceror tricks; one of the creature's horns cracks and falls off to give it enough of a boost to make its save. Damien manages to make contact with Robin and drop a heal on him somewhere in here. Viepuck blasts it - again - the second antler crumbles - but it turns to knock Izgil nearly unconscious.
Izgil grumbles, "Just kill it!" so Celyn does. (Killing blow #1.)
Then Celyn handily uses his lockpicks to extract Damien from status: chained to wall. We dither vigorously about what to do from here.
Damien: So are we just ... running?
Celyn: I recommend not running. It's much harder to sneak that way.
While we are debating, Izgil's tremorsense notices someone coming up the stairs. The eldritch octopus is hiding down there to report on what's going on, and we thus are aware of the fey that guy was the bodyguard for coming up, looking around at the situation, spotting the ball bearings, and, well, an illusion of her went into the room, carefully navigating around our chaos.
We know she's on the landing below us, and thus our route of escape is closed. We climb up to the widow's walk on the tower, carrying the body of the Duskhound with us, and determine that Robin can get Damien to the safehouse with a combination of the ring of jumping (to get beyond the outer wall) and feather fall (to not plummet to their doom); the rest of us hop off the tower with just the feather fall and hide the corpse in a stable.
A minute or three after we do this, the door up to the tower opens, and the eldritch octopus gets the hell out of dodge.
Damien, in the safe space, reports to Robin that he'd used a clairaudience trick to eavesdrop on the shapeshifter and the Duskhound, a conversation that swapped from her giving directions and orders in mingled languages only some of which he understood to her telling tales of chaos she had caused and getting a different voice laughing and grading her work. Which means we know that the contestants in this little game are using the Duskhounds to report their score and we have at least deprived her of the ability to continue gaining points. He believes that the lady spotted his spell because after that point they started hurting him.
Celyn meanwhile goes to obtain our friend the captain of horse to say GUESS WHAT WE FOUND A PROBLEM and explain the situation. In the resulting conversation we tell her we believe Marguerite is both dead and replaced with a fairy shapeshifter and that this was her bodyguard. The magistrate is summoned, conversation ensues, and the magistrate agrees to officially interfere in Marguerite's attempts to hold a trial and delay it until the baroness returns. Viepuck pings the baroness with a sending spell and she will be back in two days.
We ask where we put the damn body. They say that burying it under straw in this vacant stall is probably going to work out fine for now? Don't we have a Terrifying Beast who might be able to guard it? Greymalkin does not like stables - they are well beneath his dignity - but guarding a thing that happens to be stashed in a stable is acceptable to him, and this is the sort of hairsplitting distinction that needs to be understood in order to deal with the fey.
Greymalkin is summoned. Greymalkin is delighted to see a dead Duskhound. Greymalkin is extremely disappointed that he was not invited along to kill it himself. Robin attempts to explain to him that we were in a narrow staircase. "I would fit!" (Dear reader: he would not fit.)
Greymalkin: "Robin. ROBIN. I want to rip the throat out of it myself."
Robin: "Next one you can come along."
Greymalkin: "Promise?"
Robin: "I promise."
Izgil has made the leap of logic that because Sembarans are way more comfortable with divine magic than anything else, the thing he needs to do to explain how scary these people are is make sure that it is clear to the others that the fairies are doing things that are Not Divinely Approved. We cannot explain how the shapeshifter can shapeshift but we are pretty sure that it ain't godly. This works much better than Izgil's usual attempts to explain magic, which mostly get people warily asking him if he's a wizard.
We decide to do shifts, let one set of us get a long rest while the others bodyguard the magistrate, then swap off. This is interrupted by a page banging on Robin and Celyn's door in the barracks to wake them to inform them that Marguerite has invited them to an early breakfast. She says she has new information about Damien's case that she needs to convey to us.
This initiates phase two of the session: the game of Playing Chicken With Fairies. Who will blink first?
Robin and Celyn, who have Not Gotten Enough Sleep For This Bullshit, take the note to the others to figure out what to do. We send a nice note back conveying, "Terribly sorry, can't make breakfast, how about we make plans for dinner after we've rested up from the terribly busy night full of divine portents we had and want to get back to processing?" Everyone knows that everyone knows we are Playing Chicken With Fairies, and we have elected not to blink first.
Robin and Celyn go back to sleep. Izgil gets a rest in. Viepuck foregoes a long rest to spend the day helping the magistrate besiege the shapeshifter with bureaucracy so that she does not get to rest up either. She has a position in this court after all and there is some urgent paperwork that needs to be handled and oh, did this slip between the cracks? We have to fix that. The magistrate does not ask why the twelve-year-old is fully fluent in both civil and criminal law, she just puts him to work being petty and annoying. Viepuck, being a were-edgelord, is in clover with this.
Next round of Playing Chicken With Fairies: turning up to dinner. We bring the magistrate, who of course has legitimate interest in how the local cases are going. We also come pre-prepared with Izgil carrying a detect magic and Celyn carrying a detect poison. The food is not poisoned, but it is enchanted. Izgil drops a danger signal, the magistrate fails to figure out what he's warning about and starts to panic. Viepuck pings her telepathically and suggests she duck out, the food is enchanted, and she makes a noise about how she's brought people up and now she's going to, uh, go, do... things!
The fairy really wants us to eat her charcuterie platter. We do not want to eat the charcuterie platter. Celyn's play is to claim that - given she was being all fake-sympathetic about how we had been Betrayed By A Friend earlier - knowing there's news she's not giving us makes it hard to have a reasonable appetite. Viepuck's play is to load up a plate while chattering away. She keeps trying to get us to actually eat. Viepuck slams the plate down on the table and starts complaining that there is no horseradish how can he have a sandwich without horseradish this is terrible.
At which point the fairy tries to get into an etiquette argument with a twelve-year-old, talking down to him all the way about how decent people have their nice meal before talking business. Which gets a lot of "BUT THERE IS NO HORSERADISH" "You are behaving like a child!" "[poutyface]" until—
—the fairy loses the game of chicken by trying to cast "friends" on him. She blinked first!
Izgil, still maintaining detect magic: "That was rude!"
She starts arguing with Izgil about childishness and rudeness. Viepuck starts to cast a spell, and we are suddenly in another combat.
Celyn: [casts faerie fire]
Shapeshifter: [resists faerie fire]
Viepuck: [casts faerie fire]
Shapeshifter: [resists faerie fire]
Izgil, playing responsible adult who says "no" to things: [casts a spell requiring the shifter to reroll that save]
Shapeshifter: [afflicted with faerie fire]
Izgil: [floods the room with magical moonlight that will help him pierce illusions if illusions happen]
Robin gets the glorious dramatic moment of being able to go fuck this shit, leap up onto the table and charge through the enchanted charcuterie platter, and hit the shifter with a warhammer. She was not expecting that. She tries to cast something; Izgil continues to be the responsible adult who says "no" to things and counterspells it. She also does an aura effect like the Duskhound had.
Celyn was also not expecting Robin to be quite that gloriously dramatic but is absolutely there for it, and thus charges up to join his boyfriend in combat, gets knocked back by the aura effect, teleports himself to the spot that he was knocked back from, and criticals on the fairy. Rogue criticals are fun and often startling to beings that are hit by them, but unlike the last thing that he critted on lo these many months ago, she is a boss rather than a generic minion and does not die of startled by rogue.
Viepuck gets hit with the aura effect but isn't knocked back, and does some damage I think. Izgil dispels the aura effect because really there needs to be more discipline around here, people shouldn't be doing this sort of thing, so Robin can pummel her some more without having to worry about it, moving to sandwich her between himself and Celyn to minimize her movements as best as can be done with a fey, which is not actually that much. (But Robin's amazing capacity to defend people standing next to him doesn't work against spellcasters, just physical attacks.)
The fairy is now in a situation where she is between a rogue and a paladin, both of whom have been Dramatic And Violent at her, with a terrifying eldritch tween intoning things like, "A MERE CHILD" at her telepathically in between blasting her with conjured damage, with a very disapproving dwarf saying "No" to her whims. She elects to teleport across the room to the furthest-away-from-the-boys window, pull the curtain aside, and leap out, turning into a bird to fly away.
She picked the window next to the flying purple eldritch octopus, which reaches out to snag her with a tentacle and wraps itself around her face. This is not compatible with birdflight, and so she plummets out of the window and crashes in the courtyard below, reverting to her fey form. "You're going to want to hear what I have to tell you," she says, in an attempt to not get dead.
Celyn swaps to his bow as he goes over to the window and shoots her, rendering her dead-unless-healed. (Killing blow #2.)
Viepuck teleports down to the ground to try to mind probe her, but she is unconscious. We debate whether we want to wake her up to figure out what the fuck she was talking about. Robin is seethingly disapproving of this plan. (Robin is, I suspect, furious at the merest existence of all three of the fey contestants in this little game, and he was the one who got Damien's rendition of her reports on her latest 'and here's who I got murdered by impersonating them!' plays.) While we are contemplating whether we want to do anything, she wakes up. (Still wrapped in octopus.)
"It's about the baroness" she says, and Viepuck promptly turns on her and mindprobes again to get more information about the baroness; she makes her save until Celyn suggests that no, no she did not, and she agrees that she did not. (Making her reroll a save: handy!)
Viepuck gleans from her mind that the fairy believes - or wants us to believe, if she's capable of lying to his mindreading abilities - that the baroness is evil, necromantically inclined, and has a master we would really like to know about. And responsible - her and her master perhaps? - for a lot of the local troubles, bad for humans and fey alike. Now, we knew that she was manically obsessive about "rooting out necromancy" but really that's a good position to seed it, and we definitely need to investigate further. (And we were confused as to why fey were appearing to truck in necromancy in causing chaos, which is not their usual style at all. Rather inimical to their usual style. If there's another player on the field....)
"Are we going to be honorable?" she asks. "Or are you going to murder me?" she goes on, as she prepares a spell.
So Celyn stabs her again. Rolling a 1 and a 4. And using his divine luck power to invert that into a successful hit because good grief. (Killing blow #3.)
So now we have two dead evil fairies, a baroness who may be evil incoming, and somewhat more information than we had yesterday.
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(The "THERE IS NO HORSERADISH" keeps cracking me up.)
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This seems resplendently complicated!
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It does seem like it has the potential to be a substantial and complex layer of plot, too!
Whoever has the bag of holding ought to sneak some horseradish into it, just in case.
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As I might be said to understand it, generally one does not want to stash a body in a Bag of Holding, or at least not a Bag of Holding you have anything else in, except I suppose other bodies but maybe even not then. It's an anaerobic environment; it's very, very dark. Give it even a day and untying the bag's opening comes with a faint outgassing hiss. Give it a week and it's Highly Specialised Tongs time as one tries to fetch the remnant solids out of the ghastly slurry.