Session Log 2023-08-21

Split party: Ekkels and Klaitos present.

Klaitos and Ekkels led the six militia engineers down the main road to the hangar warehouse district. They regrouped with Torrix, who was skeptical at their joining forces with the captain he had mutineed from. They discussed the resources available to them in their mission to challenge the undead dragons for the Golarth airspace.

The engineers could retrieve shipworking tools and some materials from the hangar, but Torrix said that none of the mutineers had tallied the remaining airships. Most, he recalled, were smaller vessels for minor merchants and aristocrats. The militia engineers would find it challenging to equip them with air-to-air weaponry of the scale necessary to hurt a dragon.

Ekkels asked around the plaza for witnesses of the dragons' attack. He found an anxious guard, who remembered that the dragons had descended from the encroaching umbral clouds, smashed some fleeing ships to the ground, and breathed gray and white jets that downed clouds of ships at a time.

Klaitos reasoned that the dragons were capable of breathing something that messed with the magic keeping the airships aloft. He proposed the group construct a hot air balloon - a simpler, nonmagical craft able to reach the heights necessary to try dragon-hunting. An engineer suggested that they could retrieve the necessary canvas and rope from the Sootcorner industrial district.

They journeyed east off the main roads, taking care to avoid bringing Torrix - already offending the engineers - anywhere near Captain Caergon. Instead, Ekkels diverted from the group to pass on their destination and goal. Though the remaining militia at the headquarters were alarmed to see only him, he was able to convey the necessary information. He wandered back into the city and proceeded to get lost trying to rejoin the others.

Klaitos, Torrix, and the engineers passed by a block of ruined barricades and heaped corpses. A detached head, lying on the road, began working its jaw in a feeble attempt to move closer to Klaitos. Torrix, elated to find a target he was allowed to hurt, promptly bodyslammed the head into a smear. Klaitos tried to ignore him, and hurried the group on to Sootcorner from the horrible sight.

Ekkels found he had unintentionally wandered into the same back-alleys Robin had led him through earlier. Realizing that he was lost, he chased down some voices he heard around the corner. He greeted and requested directions from a burly lizardfolk and a pair of humans, who reacted with suspicion. Ekkels realized that the three had been sneaking around with underhanded motives, and might not have wanted his company. He was able to convince them he was no threat, and they dismissively pointed him towards Sootcorner.

Klaitos, Torrix, and the engineers arrived at Sootcorner with Ekkels nowhere in sight. Klaitos climbed atop a dilapidated tenement, and conjured a narrow twister in the dark sky to signal their location to his missing friend. The engineers searched the factories nearby for supplies, with Torrix serving as a bodyguard of questionable dedication.

Ekkels passed the block of ruined barricades with a shudder. He spied Klaitos's signal and stature over the rooftops, and was grateful for both the destination and something less terrifying to look upon. As he approached the tenement, Klaitos climbed down and called everyone in to regroup.

They had been unsuccessful at finding the necessary rope or canvas. Moreover, only four of the six engineers emerged from their searching. Klaitos tried to organize a search, but struggled to wrangle Torrix's unhelpfully grim input with the nervousness of the other militia. Ekkels scanned the streets' namesake soot for footprints, and spotted a factory that had recently been entered but not exited.

The remaining group cautiously ventured inside the dirty, pitch-dark building. Klaitos attuned his senses to the stirrings of the still air, but could not detect any movements beyond the six of them. The engineers brought out gas lanterns, which revealed a messy shop floor and damaged, partially-looted machinery. Torrix ran loudly down the aisle but was unsuccesful in flushing out anything to punch.

Klaitos turned to his Lantern Eye for further investigation. He found the room suffused with ambient magic of similar magnitude to the chaos-saturated Knotted Tower. In that ambient glow, a particularly ravaged machine glowed brighter. Klaitos approached it with a borrowed gas lantern, and spied an engineer lying unmoving in the detritus at its base. In that same instant, a clawed hand reached out from the gaps in the broken machinery and slammed the lantern to the floor.

His wind senses tracked a ghoul emerging, contorted, from the apparatus. It leapt at him in the darkness, but he was able to knock it back with a solid strike. Torrix charged it an aisle away and pummeled it with a roar, but was forced to disengage when another ghoul ambushed him from the shadows.

A third raced past Ekkels and pulled an engineer from the group out of sight, his lantern falling to the floor behind his startled cry. The remaining engineers ran for the exit, leaving the factory darkened save the smoldering fuel of the two fallen lamps. Ekkels wanted to make more light, so he found a barrel of sawdust and knocked it into the small flames. The sawdust burned in a great plume of fire and searing ash.

Torrix laughed and praised Ekkels for "fighting to win" by burning down the building. He then raced away from the ghoul stalking him to the follow the engineers to safety. Klaitos pulled the missing, unmoving engineer from the ground and charged after him, knocking workstations and chairs aside to clear a path for Ekkels.

Ekkels found himself unable to keep up with the more athletic members of the group, and fell behind in their escape. He encountered a ghoul feeding on the engineer that had been stolen into shadows moments ago, both spotting the other in the same instant. The undead leapt at him, but he escaped with shallow scratches by bouncing his malleable form out of the way.

He emerged from the factory as the fire spread to drown out the shadows. The group stood and caught their breath in the dusk outside, watching the building burn to make sure none of the creatures followed them.