Diary of Captain Nomed Oppenheimer - Entry Number 26
Saturday, December 7th, 907 TA
All our enemies in one place. An army of paladins hunting for us. Our “allies” either imprisoned or acting worse than our enemies. Just another day in the life for the crew of the Wanton Wench.
On the 2nd, we had just finished our conversation with Morgan, and were quite disappointed with the lack of information regarding the Impossible Bottle. He had the information regarding the events around Portsmith, but knowing our enemies were there and knowing how to defeat them were two very different issues. With that in mind, we decided to pay a visit to our favorite black-market necromancer.
We arrived in Haggelthorn on the evening of the 5th, and as soon as we docked, we made our way towards Elias’s manor. Parked outside of his hall were three carriages, each bearing the Haggelthorn crest and attributed to his son Mortimer. We were welcomed inside by the aging butler and were introduced to the younger Haggelthorn. He had come in from Teufeldorf, where he did family business and Family business. He had come home to update his father on their holdings and the two were discussing a major problem of The Family in Portsmith. The head of the Family there had gone missing, and his home had been surrounded in a perpetual darkness. Elias asked us to go there to retrieve several artifacts of power there that he did not want to end up in the hands of Jana Blackfire. We agreed, on the condition that in addition to our usual fee, we would be given information regarding the whereabouts of the Impossible Bottle.
Elias at first had no idea where the bottle was, stating that it was a myth. When told we knew it was a real object, he said that we could get that information from his family’s resident demon, the Bricklebaun. The Bricklebaun was a trickster demon that dealt in information, and that we could barter with it for the whereabouts of the bottle. This would involve a battle of wits, and a potential loss of our hard-earned gold. We agreed to the terms and summoned the creature from the altar that lay inside Haggelthorn’s hall of curiosities. The demon appeared, looking like a wet pickle, and challenged us to his game of wits. It was CJ, who is just a little bit smarter than everyone else, who solved the riddle and forced the Bricklebaun to concede. The demon disappeared for a moment, only to return and tell us that the Impossible Bottle was inside the same Family compound in Portsmith that currently was shrouded in darkness. We gave a couple of sideways glances to the Haggelthorns, who just sort of shrugged, and then departed towards Portsmith.
We headed east towards Portsmith, and stopped in a small cove along the route, far enough away to where the Siren’s Song shouldn’t be able to sense her sister and moved inland on the back of the zombie dragon. We arrived above Portsmith later in the day, and the sight was not pretty. Jana’s paladins and the soldiers of the Old Kingdom were swarming the area. They had set up an impromptu prison in their barracks with a gallows outside for followers of the Gyre and other political prisoners. The paladins seemed to be centered around Jana Blackfire’s home, where she supposedly lay gravely ill. Finally, an area of town to the southwest was completely shrouded in darkness and we figured that to be our objective.
Before we could begin our descent into the darkness, another prisoner was brought out to be hung. It was one of Chironomous’s disciples, and Chironomus desperately wanted us to get the woman, and test out his new antipaladin at the same time. CJ and the paladin teleported in front of the hangman, and our new spy started barking orders at the man to release her. Unfortunately, the hangman was not from the Old Kingdom’s group and was not inclined to listen. CJ quickly saved the young girl and teleported him and the other two back to us. There was a lot of confusion below, and our chance to go in unnoticed had been stopped. The woman was grateful, and told us that the impromptu prison was magical in design and that to help the others, it would require going in to what would be a mirror dimension.
With the woman saved, and the town alerted, we still resolved to go down into the darkness. To avoid detection, Finn transformed us all into a gaseous form, and we floated down into the area. We stopped at the edge of the darkness and Chironomous used our nature staff to talk with a giant tree that stood in the middle of the grounds. It told us slowly that men came in and tried to take everyone, and when they took the leader out, the area became shrouded in darkness and a creature came out and killed everything around it. The creature resided in one of the buildings, and whenever someone else entered the darkness by foot, it would emerge and kill them as well.
Armed with this knowledge, we had an idea. Java would use the chalk of force to keep the creature in that building while I would ferry CJ into an underground tunnel that connected the buildings, which he would then teleport the others into. It seemed like a good plan, and it started off fine, but when Java placed the chalk down, the entire side of the building came down as a gargantuan cat-like creature burst through and aimed directly at Java. It was only with the intervention of Wrane that Java survived at all, as he took the brunt of the creature’s attacks. A great battle ensued in the darkness, and although some in the party were quite bloodied in the affair, we emerged victorious. With the creature killed, Chironomous took a moment to add the creature to his now menagerie ménage-a-trois.
While he was busy with the cat, we looked inside the building it had been protecting, only to be startled by a familiar sight. There stood Juju, our former compatriot, in the flesh. Before we could demand some answers, he was gone, leaving behind no trace of why he was there. Without him there, we quickly searched the buildings in the compound and found what we were looking for in the library. It contained the artifacts the Family wanted back, as well as the Impossible Bottle.
Now that we are done playing a literal game of cat and mouse, we now must play hide and seek with an army of paladins. If we can get close enough to remove the Siren’s Song from the board, we just might stand a chance. Actually doing that though, will be a tale worthy of the name The Wanton Wench.