Eorin wakes up from his nap to see his friends gone. He asks the Kobolds where they went, and one offers to take him to the entrance. Eorin climbs down the ladder and finds the door locked. He investigates and realizes it requires a magnet to open. He sighs and climbs back out to go and buy a magnet. 5 silver later, Eorin opens the door to find sewers! Eorin realizes that the sewer is bizarrely clean due to the oozes that are about. He sees two corpses in one, but quickly determines that they're not anyone he knows. He comes to a "Y" intersection, looks directly down, and sees nothing but lots of murky water. He goes to the left and finds a hobo den with a bugbear corpse. There's an odd tunnel that leads to the city graveyard.
Eorin then goes to the right and finds another area with a filter, but it doesn't lead anywhere other than a pipe system. Eorin returns to the intersection. Eorin goes into the water, and is surprised how well he can see. Must be a side effect from the dragon's blood. He can see that there are three more sections underwater similar to above, and a strange pillar sticking out of the middle. He sees a teleportation room and goes through. He finds himself in an unremarkable room with a staircase. The staircase leads to the parlor of a very wealthy person's home. He goes through the only door and find himself looking upon a large orgy scene being enacted by statues, with Orias attempting to participate. Illythan and Kyle whip towards him, thinking he might be a threat, before lowering their guard. Orias notices something with the statues and freaks out, quickly extracting himself. He tells Eorin that he fears they might have once been real people.
Eorin takes a closer look and determines that yes, they were once people. He informs the rest of the party and says that he can't reverse the petrification effect. He also says that there is no mass petrification spell, so whomever cast this was very, very careful and skilled. Or a basilisk slithered through the room. Zelara says that she feels as though they're still underground. She doesn't hear anything suspicious at the first door. At the second she hears bubbling water. And at the third she hears nothing. Orias checks the second door for traps. He doesn't find any, and we open it.
It's a very nice kitchen! It is stocked with the finest of supplies, and there's an open trap door to a storage room. Kyle sneaks over to the trap door and looks down. The room looks like it has been flooded and repaired. It's mostly storage and there's a table with somethings that have been cut up. There's a root vegetable that's only been half cut up. Orias looks into the pot and sees vegetables and sausage cooking in broth. It looks like the stew was started today, but that the veggies were sautéed first. In the cellar, we find a sausage making machine with bones from normally eaten animals nearby. There is a masterwork set of kitchen knives and many, many crates as well. Kyle sees that some of the crate lids look disturbed and not put back properly. They all contain vegetables that were in the soup. We can't find anyone down here. Orias finds a case that's about the size of a bread box that looks like ancient Tien art. It doesn't have any traps, but has a pressure plate under it which connects to a series of wires which would drop the thing holding all the masterwork knives. Orias goes and gets the thing that you use to retrieve bread from the oven to get the box. The trap sets off and comes clattering to the floor. The box says "The Only Blade That Shall Bring You Happiness" on it. There's a big cleaver inside. It doesn't look pretty, and the whole thing is one piece of black metal that's been hammered by hand. The cleaver isn't magic, but the box is a box of mending.
Orias goes to turn off the stove, and finds it already off. Illythan sees that the oven itself is a magical device. It's a mixture of continual flame and unseen servant. We decide to go back into the orgy room and close the kitchen door behind us. Kyle opens another door and lots of vials of oil, marital aides, and bdsm gear. Orias checks each and every one for magic. Eorin sits calmly and meditates. Orias checks the big double doors for traps. It's not trapped, but it is locked. Eorin puts the supply closet back in order while Orias picks the lock. The door opens into a main entry hall. But there's dirt outside the windows, as though the mansion has been sunk or buried. The interior is very impressive and well maintained, however. There's a double staircase and a portrait of a gentleman with a nicely trimmed beard. He's tall and gaunt and looks very much like a nobleman, with a tattoo of three eyes on his ankle. It's the River King. Below the painting is the man himself with six men with bows. The River King is standing in the same pose as the painting. Orias shoots at him, and the River King catches the bolt in his fingers.
COMBAT! The bad guys' arrows put people to sleep. D: Illythan blasts them with a fireball which kills four of them, but the building starts to creak and shake. Stuff starts to fall from the ceiling, killing the remaining two archers. Orias and Kyle wake up, and we discovered the River King is gone. There are now cries of pain from the room we just left. There is a mass pile of mostly corpses. There a few people crushed under large pieces of debris. Despite Eorin, Kyle, and Zelara's best efforts, those who survived the initial falling debris do not survive their wounds. Orias throws a dagger to the ground in rage and searches the main room for where the River King might have gone. Illythan stays to help him. Illythan figures out that the painting is an illusion creating device, so the River King was never there. Orias fiddles with the door handle and there's a trap. There's a painting under the painting, with a painting on the back, and another painting, and another, and another…..
Eorin consecrates the ground as Kyle and Zelara help move the debris and bodies into neat rows so they can be identified later. Orias and Illythan loot the bodies of the bad guys. Eorin determines that the ceiling would not have collapsed if Illythan hadn't maximized his fireball, though it would have eventually due to the pressure from the sinking building. Eorin also determines that each of the people who had been turned to stone had some sort of incurable fatal illness (Lycanthropy, mummy rot, etc.). He deduces that they may have been turned to stone to preserve them until a cure could be found.
We go through one door at the top of the stairs and find what was once a woman's room. We hear someone calling from help within a side room, the door of which had been blocked by a heavy piece of furniture that had fallen over. Her name is Udarrin. She appears to be of Azlanti descent and is young, but older than the party. She looks terrified. She is wearing fancy cloths and jewelry. Eorin treats the cut on her head and speaks to her in a soothing tone of voice to calm her done. She's the moll of the River King. She had been in the bathroom when the house shook and she found herself trapped. She tells us that the River King is gone to a meeting, and that he's sometimes gone for weeks. She doesn't know where he usually goes for meetings because he never takes her with. Orias figures out that she's hiding something and threatens her. Udarrin hides behind Kyle and Eorin. Kyle attempts to mollify her, and she asks us to promise not to kill her if she tells us.
We all promise, and the glamour disappears. She's a medusa. She isn't evil. She tells Orias that the River King has four different routes in and out of the building, and she only knows how to activate one of them. She then tells Eorin that the petrified people were those who had gone out to find rare antiquities for the River King's right hand man and had gotten sick along the way. The statues were his way of keeping them immortal, though thoughts toward a cure were not considered. Those petrified were there willingly. She offers Illythan a vial that will remove the aboleth mucus from his system so he can breathe air again.
Udarrin shows us the various exists form the mansion. She doesn't know anything about the cleaver. There's a halfling fellow who stays with her though, and he's probably around somewhere. He's usually cooking in the kitchen, though we didn't see him there. Zelara and Kyle move debris out of the way of the other upstairs doorway. We learn that the River King is an aboleth, and he gets there are teleportation circles in the library and the parlor, with aboleth mucus and water as the activation ingredients.
The rest of the party goes and investigates the rest of the house while Eorin reads books about the experiments the aboleths did on the Azlanti to make humans better. Also on the process of making gillmen.
The rest of the party almost sets off an explosion mucking about and finds a bag made to contain evil shit like aberrations inside a drawer. The bag whispers to Orias to open it. He vehemently refuses. Kyle reaches towards the bag and feels it super radiating heat. Orias notices that it doesn't get warm for him. It keeps trying to tempt Orias to open it by saying it can help him get revenge or save his mother. The party leaves the room and goes back to the library, running into Eorin who is heading for the parlor. The voices then try to get Eorin to come to the parlor to open the bag by telling him there's a way to save all the petrified people. Kyle has to bodily restrain Eorin. They then all go through the teleportation circle.
They end up in a room with vats full of Azlanti, sleeping. Eorin recognizes them as preservation chambers. There's a small human sleeping there, who, upon waking, tells us that they are the aboleth's souvenirs. The then explains that aboleths have racial memory (they remember the memories of their parents and grand parents, etc). He helps us use the teleportation circle to send us back to the house.
The voices start up again for both Orias and Eorin. Eorin begs to be allowed to go into the parlor to retrieve the books. The party begins to think that's a good idea, since the teleportation circle int he parlor will lead them to the River King. Then the human accountant tells them that might be a bad idea since the River King has those circles ready so he can have men ready to shoot anyone that comes through the circle uninvited. They go back to the parlor and Eorin retrieves books on curing disease, reversing petrification, and scrolls of raise dead. The goes to put them in his haversack and sees a bag there. He pulls out the bag in confusion and the rope holding it closed attaches around Eorin's wrist. The voices are now audible to everyone. They say "The deal has been made." Everyone tries to figure out how to get the bag off Eorin's wrist and come up with nothing.
So we decide to deal with it later and step on the teleportation circle. On the other side is a cistern. There are about ten thugs with bows of varying degrees of fanciness and awesome pointing at the circle. There's a man in a chair that's slightly into the water. He does look like the most dapper merchant we have ever seen. We are slightly in the water, and there are jars on shelves that could be easily pushed into the water. Some of the archers are about to kick over the shelves when the River King tells them to stop, because he sees the bag on Eorin's wrist.
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