Session Log 2024-04-12
Oze-Oze and Klaitos rushed to attack the gold-masked woman, but she danced away from their strikes. Meanwhile, Ekkels flew the Stormjumper around the Umbral gyre, scanning for Ignis. He spotted the man being hauled aboard another Keep vessel, still on the ground, and so tilted the smuggler ship down to meet it. Robin studied the gold-masked woman as she fought, and realized that she was showing off - her mortal opponents were as playthings.
Robin tried to bait the woman with an illusory copy of the necklace bearing Arva's rings. The woman seemed unimpressed, but suddenly lunged for her. Robin evaded her grasp, and she fell back as she dodged further attacks from Angitt and Oze-Oze. The latter's over-committed maceblow sent him teetering against the ship's rail. Robin followed up on their strikes with a crossbow bolt to pin the woman's voluminous gown to the steerage wall. Ekkels, piloting the ship to rescue Ignis, heard the metal thunk of the bolt striking, and peered out to watch Klaitos's follow-up punch landing soundly. The woman's mask concealed any expression, but she radiated vengeful scorn at him.
Ekkels brought the Stormjumper to a hover by the other vessel, and tried to get someone's attention, so that they might throw his unconscious teammate to their deck. The soldiers, panicking at the zombie army scrabbling at the hull and the gold-masked woman battling on the Stormjumper, ignored his nonverbal pleas. He took matters into his own hands, instead, and swapped locations with Ignis's unconscious body. He then leapt back to the other ship, scrambling over the inconveniently-placed Ignis and Heiras to take back the steering.
The gold-masked woman tore free of the pinning bolt and leapt to the prow of the ship. She muttered a strange spell, and the Umbra above poured down past the ship. No immediate effect was noticeable, save a collective chill from the sudden exposure to deathly magic. Angitt raced across the deck and fired upon her once more, nearly striking her, but she dodged yet another bolt just as she finished her spellwork. Oze-Oze struggled to vault the rails to re-board the unsteady, pilot-less Stormjumper.
Ekkels clambered over the bodies of Ignis and Heiras and resumed his position at the steerage. Wary of the gold-masked woman standing before him on the prow, he readied for a sudden takeoff. Suddenly, Klaitos felt an uncanny force clawing life from his soul. He shook off the worst of it, but turned to find an obsidian eye hovering near the edge of the ship's deck. He called out a warning to his allies on the deck, but decided that the eye was not an opponent he was eager to face, and instead circled the steerage to stand between the gold-masked woman and Ekkels. Robin, alerted to a new shiny object, immediately consulted her Bracelet of Greed and verified that the eye's value warranted risking its threat. Eager to claim yet another treasure, she crossed the deck in a flash and stuffed the eye in a spare purse.
The gold-masked woman reached her arm skyward and clutched the air. A massive arm of stitched-together flesh rose from the ground below, following her motion. Ekkels, already on the lookout, flew the Stormjumper nearly clear of the grasping hand - its giant fingertips grazed the ship and rattled his smooth escape. All on deck stumbled except the gold-masked woman; Robin lost her grip on the eye-purse as she fell, and it flew blindly free from her grasp. Oze-Oze lost his grip on the rail and dropped to the deck of the other ship.
Angitt was the first to her feet, striking the woman's arm with a crossbow bolt as the ship steadied. She turned to the steerage and demanded Ekkels reverse course to retrieve Oze-Oze. He obliged, and Oze-Oze leapt to the other rail as they flew back down. Robin, meanwhile, pursued the floating eye-purse up and down the deck, but was unable to keep up with its flight on foot. She studied its movements, readying to pounce. Klaitos tried to corner the gold-masked woman at the front of the ship, but she danced around him, draining still more of his life force with a glare.
The woman leapt to the middle deck, but Oze-Oze, pulled to the deck by Angitt, scrambled across to smash his mace into her knee as she landed. Robin leapt for the obsidian eye, grabbing it out of the air, but fell from the upper deck in her single-minded pursuit, landing painfully at the gold-masked woman's feet. Heedless of the her looming presence, she tied the purse to her waist. Klaitos swapped roles with Ekkels, taking the steering as the latter raced out to the deck. He swapped places with the greed-distracted Robin and grabbed for the gold-masked woman again, but she easily danced away from his magic-warping grasp.
She glared death again at Oze-Oze, though he seemed to resist the draining force. She leapt free from the melee down to the wing of the ship, where she called more Umbra down to coalesce around her. Oze-Oze gave chase, lightning crackling at his jaws, but his bolt of energy missed wildly. Ekkels tried the same tactic, summoning and blasting forth with chaos in the same manner as he had struck down the floating scales earlier. His magic came out in a thrumming pulse, to his surprise, disrupting the cloud of Umbra but also the ship's engines. Klaitos struggled to maintain a level flight, and Angitt and Oze-Oze stumbled as the vessel rocked, the latter teetering against the rail again. Robin raced to the rail and fired a bolt at the woman, knocking her off the wing to plummet to the zombie-filled plaza below.
The gold-masked woman's fall led the eye to stop thrashing within the purse and caused the zombie army to fall into disarray. However, the now-disorganized army had still overrun the plaza. The remainder of the Keep fleet took to the air, surrendering the city and any remaining survivors to the undead below.
The party was ready to leave the city with their lives, but Robin suggested they fly to Lord's Town to see if anything could be stolen before they returned to the Keep. Besides the plaza and main road, the city seemed largely abandoned, as if every zombie had been called to join the mob now overrunning the warehouse district. Ekkels flew to land in the center of Lord's Town, just outside of Arva's tower. The party treated their minor injuries as Robin and Oze-Oze dismounted. She entered the tower to find any secret treasures the spiteful Lord might have kept, while he was simply eager to loot as much as he could carry off.
She climbed to the tower as he greedily, stealthlessly, and recklessly robbed the lower floors. She found a locked room at the top of the floor, and made short work of picking it. Inside, she found a room that seemed recently emptied of all furnishings. Its bare stone floor was marked with complex rune circles. At the center, a large figure sat still under an all-concealing cloak, their back to the door. Uninterested in potential hostilities or diplomacy, she quietly closed the door and headed back down.
She figured she had possibly seen something important, but didn't want to bother climbing up again, so she woke a badly-burned Ignis, filled him in on what he had missed, and told him to go check out the top room. He decided that it was important to finish looting first, so he helped Oze-Oze fill the ship. Heiras awoke to the sound of her ship being loaded with treasure. Ignis then healed Klaitos and grabbed Ekkels to join him in climbing the tower.
The two of them confronted the cloaked figure. Ignis called out, and was silently ignored. Ekkels studied the runes, and determined them to have some sort of amplifying and projecting effect - they weren't sealing or protecting the figure in any way. Ignis lit a torch and circled around the room. From the front, he observed the figure to be a giant skeleton, its fleshless face turned down as if in mourning. Neither of them had much idea of what to do with the skeleton, and both were worried about accidentally starting a fight, so they abandoned it without further investigation.
Their greed as satiated as the Stormjumper's hold allowed, the group took off for the Keep, catching up to the rest of the fleet. The Umbra-smothered city of Golarth shrank to a dark point on the horizon behind them.