Session Log 2023-05-08
The Tortoise sailed safely into the refreshingly dry skies of the Torch wastelands. With one small detour to drop Vennat off near a smaller city, the journey to return to the Windwatcher's Keep was relatively peaceful and steered far clear of the western battlefront and ocean of black flame. Their remaining food store was used to keep the destructive Morgle from attempting to break, attack, or eat anything else as they flew.
Upon their arrival the party noticed the keep to be livelier than usual. The hangar was filling with the clamor of repairs, the halls were bustling with soldiers, and every workshop seemed full of activity. Klaitos volunteered to handle the debrief, but had to flag down a passing dwarven officer to find an audience. The officer promised to relay news of the successful village relocation and the encounters with the warbeasts and the Venom Drinkers. In exchange, he filled Klaitos in as to the business of the Keep.
Cayrin Corvaine's cipher had been broken, and the documents that Robin had stolen from her desk were being decoded line-by-line, prioritized for work by order of the Gale Queen. More troublingly, the city of Golarth had been attacked by the Gray Steps. The gray sky, under which the dead would rise again and again, had spread overnight to blot out the morning sun. The Torch fleet, according to the Keep's intelligence, was strained and largely absent from the eastern front. Though plans hadn't been finalized, the officer reckoned that the city was to be the arena to which the Keep's forces would next deploy, and the fortress was abuzz with preparations and planning.
Robin went to the closet of alchemical supplies which she had previously plundered to make smokebombs. She waited for an alchemist to help her identify the vials she had taken from the Venom Drinkers. A scatterbrained elven woman soon appeared, whom Robin was able to convince to identify the vials despite her stammered questioning. However, her analysis only revealed them to be a cocktail of mixed toxins and venoms with unknown intent. Before the woman could bother her with any further questions, Robin distracted her and got away.
Ekkels went looking for Millie, his druid friend. However, his diminutive stature and unassertive personality left him at the mercy of the Keep's crowded hallways. He was accidentally kicked around by some large, armored figures, and awoke in the infirmary with a headache being tended to by Millie.
Ignis was left to wrangle the Morgle. Lacking any further food stores with which to entice it to follow, he tried to lure it with his healing libations. The creature slurped the offering off the floor, its acidic saliva leaving noticeable burns. Ignis tried to bait it further, but got tackled to the ground for his troubles. He was finally able to bait the beast to follow him into the Keep. Passers-by gave Ignis and the lumpy, toadlike quadruped a wide berth as he lured it to the Keep's wasteroom.
The Morgle needed little convincing to start devouring the edible garbage in the pile. A nonplussed janitor let Ignis know that he had just been about to dump the mass into the sky and let it fall into the volcano below. As the two watched the creature gorge itself on decreasingly edible garbage, the man requested Ignis watch over it and "volcano" whatever was left when it was done, and left to do his job elsewhere.
Klaitos decided that Ignis and the Morgle he had been tasked with keeping were not to be left to their own devices. He found the ship abandoned, and realized they had gone somewhere in the Keep. He checked the infirmary and found Ekkels and Millie. Millie said that she was wrapping up for the day, and was intrigued by the "unknown species" that Ignis was leading around. Ekkels, still a little worse for wear, assumed his usual seat in Klaitos's pack, safe from the stomping crowds. The three of them left to track down the errant Fireheart and Morgle.
Robin went to the library to find a Lore Keeper able to help her translate the dwarven writing of the inscribed gem, but found a guard posted at the entrance. Inside, she saw the Keepers inside transcribing laboriously and sleeping in shifts. Undeterred, she disguised herself as a Keeper with an illusion and entered. She woke the man she had given the Corvaine documents from a light nap on a library bench. He was grouchy from the additional work they had been given out of the documents she had retrieved, and told her she had to contribute a few hours to the deciphering work if she wanted help. Disinterested in the prospect of work on someone else's behalf, she took a book on dwarven runes and language and bluffed her way back out past the guard.
Ignis watched as the Morgle continued to eat its way through the trash pile. Having apparently finished off all of the food waste, it was slowly chewing through the rest of the garbage - damaged cloth, chunks of stone, scraps of metal - with no indication that it was nearing the limit of its appetite. Klaitos, Ekkels, and Millie were able to track him down - many people had seen the weird creature, and the infamous Ignis leading it through the hall.
Millie reacted with alarm and fear to the misshapen beast and its acidic palette. She questioned the logic of bringing an unknown Venom Drinker attack monster from the Blight to the Keep. Ignis wanted her, or them, to take it off his hands, and expressed that they might need to throw it into the volcano if its appetite proved insatiable. Neither Klaitos nor Ekkels wanted to simply kill the Morgle, but neither of them were keen on keeping it as an omnivorous pet. Ekkels remembered that there was someone aboard the keep with the unenviable job of following and containing Hitchit, the bomb-obsessed kobold. He reminded Millie about their encounter with the kobold and the kobold-keeper, and suggested the man as a potential Morgle-keeper. She agreed and offered to take them to him.
Robin, unable to learn anything useful about the Corvaine documents from their grumpy decipherers, lurked around the keep looking for a lead. She was able to eavesdrop on one soldier filling another in, and surreptitiously followed the pair to learn the secrets that her recovered intelligence had revealed to the Keep.
The soldier claimed that some of the documents were unsigned messages from Corvaine spies, reporting on other ships in the Armada. Other documents, still being deciphered, contained painstaking administartive records detailing weapons, ships, crews, lootings, and exhaustive other minutia. The Gale Queen had prioritized deciphering those documents, despite their density, as they would be more useful the less out-of-date they became.
The most immediately useful message among the documents, however, was one from the Thundercaller himself, giving Cayrin her orders to capture Dawnfont as a distraction for the Torch. They were to take hostages from the villa, draw military attention, and escape to the southern mountains to frustrate pursuit. The ultimate goal, the letter said, was to provide cover for "business up north". On this last clause, the Keep had dispatched scouts to the northern Torch and the mountains beyond, in search of the pirates' movements.
Millie, Klaitos, Ekkels, and Ignis brought the Morgle through the Keep once more. Ignis, losing patience, dribbled his magic liqueur in a trail on the ground and simply ignored the damage that the creature's acidic tongue left in their wake. Robin, having nearly set about doing her own homework, noticed them pass by and joined the group, passing the inscribed crystal, dwarven translation book, and busywork to Klaitos.
They found Hitchit and his handler-soldier, Vott, in a sparring room. Much of the equipment had been shoved to the walls to make room for the kobold's workdesk, which he buzzed around with manic energy. Hitchit seemed barely aware that the group had entered, but Vott tipped his cup of coffee in greeting. He was surprised to learn that the party knew Hitchit, and let them know that the Keep was searching for a more remote place for him to use as an explosive workshop.
Ignis was able to convince him to take on the additional responsibility of the Morgle, assuring him that his tireless attention to the most dangerous of the Keep's assets was an invaluable benefit to their liberatory cause. Vott accepted with the resigned acknowledgement that, whatever the mutant was, it was hardly less scary than falling asleep around an inspired Hitchit.
Klaitos filled the rest of the assembled party in on what the officer had disclosed to him. He endeavored to translate the inscribed crystal, but found it tedious, frustrating, and difficult to follow. Having to manuever the crystal to different angles in the light while cross-referencing the book and squinting at the faint symbols was beyond him, and so he passed the task, unfulfilled, back to Robin.
Later, as the Keep began to settle for the evening, the party was summoned before the Gale Queen. She commended them on their recent success, and appreciated the preservation of the Tortoise despite the perils of their endeavor. Moving on to business, she explained that the sudden siege of Golarth necessitated their redeployment. She confirmed what Klaitos had heard from the dwarven officer about the sudden encroachment of the gray sky, and further explained that Golarth was likely to be abandoned entirely by the Torch. Most of the nobility had escaped, or tried to escape, and so the city was full of civilians and protected primarily by its titanic walls. Such people were not the enemy, however, they might feel about the Torch, and were worth trying to save.
The party, she observed, were skilled at operating in advance or in support of the Keep military. They would be ideal for a forward mission to infiltrate the besieged city. Their goal would be to assess the stakes and possibilities of rescuing the civilians from their undead doom. If possible, they were to figure out why the gray cloud had advanced so quickly, dispel it from the skies above Golarth, and help the citizen's in the Keep's name. The Keep's forces would follow them there and be ready to swoop in when called, whether that be to defend the city, repel the undead, or simply protect a convoy of evacuees.
The Gale Queen warned them that this mission was not to be taken lightly - those that fall under the gray cloud rise as servants of the undying sorcerer-kings, and that those servants would be far harder to slay beneath its gloom. She bade them rest the night and prepare for their journey - Heiras had recovered, and would be able to serve as their pilot on the Stormjumper once more.