Session #6 Recap
Trufargus throws Robinn over his shoulder and yells at the
party, “Go to the Hippogriffs on the Docks!
I will try to meet you there!” He
then runs down an alley with Robinn and is gone. The party quickly begin to run, as the mob of
town folks, enraged beyond reason, begin to swarm towards them. A chase ensues among the rooftops and the
narrow alleys of the Shingles, with the heroes jumping over sudden openings in
the roof, dodging around chokers and stirges, quickly jumping walls and hiding
while mobs of people run by, and, unfortunately, sometimes being caught by a
mob or monster and having to extricate themselves, either by bowling past them,
narrowly tumbling around them, or busting down doors and heading to the roof or
ground.
And sometimes, they fall off the roof through to the ground
or miss a heroic leap and end up crashing into a mob of frenzied people
fighting in wider streets.
2 minutes of running and dodging seems to take a lifetime
(or at least 4 hours). Io reaches the
Docks first and sees 5 hippogriffs tied to the ground, their riders, members of
the Sable Company, dead at the creatures’ feet.
Crazed townfolk are now attacking the hippogriffs, who are wildly trying
to escape and fly away.
Io quickly runs into combat, but is unfortunately
overwhelmed by the wrath-filled attackers and falls unconscious to the ground,
sorely wounded. Morgrym arrives next,
and he stealthily is able to get to Io and feed him a potion which heals some
of his wounds. By this point, almost
everyone in the party is injured, some worse than others, by attacks, falls,
and, for Morgrym, the events in the abandoned building earlier in the day from
which he has yet to recover. With Io now
conscious, Morgrym sneaks over to one of the hippogriffs and, trying to calm
the creature, unties its bonds. Freed,
it jumps into the air, taking Morgrym with it as the binding rope wrapped
around Morgrym’s ankle and is still attached to the hippogriff’s saddle. Morgrym is able to crawl into the saddle and
secure himself, but all attempts at calming the beast fail as he is flown
across the strait into Korvosa proper and towards what looks to be a citadel.
Io, as he is preparing to battle again after regaining
consciousness, is joined by Juliet and Aean, who have finally reached the
dock. It is noticed that Quaithe has not
arrived, nor has Trufargus or Robinn.
The 3 party members begin to battle against the raging town folk, but
not before one of the hippogriffs is killed.
Morgrym lands in what seem to be the stables for the
hippogriffs, and two men run out towards him.
After a brief conversation of how Morgrym came to be on the hippogriff
and of the battle in the Shingles, the lead officer introduces himself as
Commandant Marcus Endrin, Commandant of the Sable Company. He jumps up behind Morgrym and they take off
into the air. While the Commandant flies
the hippogriff back to the Shingles, Morgrym defends them from Sable company
soldiers on hippogriffs who have also become enraged and seem to be battling
their mounts as well as anything else in the air.
The two of them arrive and join battle with the other 3,
including Juliet, who has also climbed on the back of a hippogriff and is
having better luck handling the creature.
She is able to have the creature fly in the air close enough to the
attackers so that she can club them with a longbow she finds next to the creature’s
saddle.
When the group finally disposes of all of the attackers, the
Commandant has the party members all get on the remaining hippogriffs and
follow him back to the stables. During
flight, Juliet suddenly realizes that the priestly Urdefhan is sitting behind
her, and he asks her what she thinks she is doing and what they hope to
accomplish. It is then gone as if never
there.
Once at the stables, the Commandant quickly ushers them into
the main building where they are met by a familiar face, Field Marshall
Cressida Kroft, head of the Korvosan Guard and the person some of them talked
with earlier in the day. She asks them
how they avoided the same fate as the townsfolk, and they relate that it is
some kind of plague released on the city by the priestly Urdefhan. They have been given a gift by Sarenrae which
protects them from disease, and she relays that she too is protected from
disease due to her abilities as a paladin of Abadar, the god of contracts and
cities. Actually, the only members of the
military who remain unaffected are those with holy powers. Together, they all conclude that the
townsfolk have been infected with a plague which causes one of the seven deadly
sins to manifest in some way within each person: Wrath, pride, gluttony, sloth, avarice, envy
and lust.
The Commandant, who left briefly to check on the hippogriffs
and the remaining soldiers, returns with Quaithe trailing. She ended up traveling by shadow to shadow
through the city, and says that the entire city is impacted, no where being
safe, especially in the nighttime darkness.
Cressida says that she has two important tasks which she like to entrust
to the party, since they are unaffected by the plague and have some strength of
ability. The first is to go to a nearby
orphanage and rescue children who were not able to be evacuated to safety. The one thing the leadership was quick to
realize is that children seem unaffected by the plague. Juliet suggests that their innocence may be a
natural barrier to the plague.
The second task is to go to the Bookmaker, a renowned bookstore
in the city, and collect as many books as possible which can be used for
research by the priests and sages who have been able to resist the effects of
the plague, a very small number indeed.
Cressida gives the party 3 magical bags which can hold an enormously
large amount of items without ever growing heavy, and she also says that if the
owner of the bookstore is still there, Costa Serimus by name, that they should
endeavor to bring him back as well.
As the party is tired and in need of rest and some chance to
bandage their wounds, it is agreed that they will set out as soon as the sun
rises and the darkness dissipates. They
all then are given rooms in the barracks to rest, and lay down to sleep and
meditate. Aean, as he lies down in his
darkened room, hears a quiet tapping on glass, and he moves stealthily over to
the window. He looks out and sees
nothing, but then realizes the tapping sound is not coming from the window but instead
from the mirror on the table at the foot of the bed.
