When Hunter suggested that we take a rest for a time, I wasn't at all opposed. I'd come very near to giving up my life and I needed a little time to recover from that. And once I'd rested I realized that some of the spells in my book that were beyond my ability to cast before are now within my reach.
We didn't rest for long. We decided to avoid the room full of spiders again and ascend to the second floor of the building to see what we could find there. Hunter demonstrated more of his unusual magical ability by opening the first door telekinetically without making any gestures or incantations. The room beyond was littered with scraps of paper and little else, but our attention was quickly drawn upward as Zinovia realized that three more large cockroaches were crawling on the ceiling.
I managed to react swiftly to this revelation and summoned a missile of force to strike the first roach. Then Zinovia slammed her blade into it. I pelted it with ice and Fox set it aflame. One roach snapped its mandibles at Zinovia but failed to find a purchase. While Fox and I kept peppering the creatures with magic, Zinovia sliced one of them in half and Hunter skewered another with his weapon.
We eliminated the roaches without suffering any real threat from them in only a few moments, which was heartening. While we had been busy with the roaches, Lonn had been trying to open the door of the next room, which was locked. Despite his efforts he'd been unable to gain access to the room. We searched the room the roaches had occupied, but the desk was empty and the papers on the floor were blank.
We moved on into another room next, leaving the room Lonn had been struggling to unlock until later. The room we entered still contained a pair of leather-covered armchairs that were in surprisingly good condition. As soon as Zinovia set foot inside the room, a creature emerged from behind one of these chairs. This creature looked roughly human but appeared not quite substantial. Lonn looked into the room and recognized that the creature was a poltergeist, perhaps the spirit of someone who had died in the building. Hunter produced a longer weapon so he could attack the poltergeist without getting too close to it. The poltergeist let our a horrifying screech and Lonn fled, clattering down the stairs. Zinovia poured a vial of oil onto her blade to allow it to touch the poltergeist's insubstantial form, and as soon as she stabbed it with her anointed sword it vanished.
Poltergeist
Once the poltergeist had been dealt with Fox suggested that we keep searching the rooms while the oil on Zinovia's sword was still effective in case we encountered any other similar creatures, so we moved on. Lonn rejoined us when the effect of the poltergeist's screech wore off. The third room we came to was locked but it was opened easily by Hunter. Inside it were more roaches, but this time they looked like the shed exoskeletons of roaches rather than the living creatures. They were just as hard to injure as their living counterparts but we dealt with them. Unfortunately as Lonn warned us, these things would explode when destroyed! Zinovia was subjected to several explosions as the exoskeletons were eliminated one by one. I even destroyed one myself when I had a moment of courage and ran in to bash it with my staff, and one of the creatures severely damaged its companion when it burst.
This left us with only the room that Lonn had been unable to open and one other room. The lock on the door that Lonn had been unsuccessful in opening seemed very well maintained, not a lock that had been rusting in a disused building for a decade, which left us wondering if someone had been using the house since Sir Roderic's death. Zinovia remembered a key she'd found earlier and tried it in the lock but it didn't work.
But it did open the second locked room. This one appeared to be a nursery as it contained an infant's crib. Disturbingly this crib was occupied by a skeletal child-sized creature with an inhuman skull, which was dressed in a tattered cloth and clutched a child's toy in one tiny flesh-less hand. When Zinovia and Fox tried to speak to it, this figure nodded its head as if it understood but didn't speak. Hunter recalled having heard of such a creature before and identified is as an attic whisperer. It held its hand out to him and Hunter abruptly began to weep, much to my surprise. Zinovia was surprised too. She knew this was wrong and attacked the whisperer. Lonn began to cry as well. The whisperer bit Zinovia and its bite left her feeling unusually weary. Fox and I tried to attack it with fire and ice but we both found it difficult to aim our spells accurately.
Attic whisperer
Zinovia rasped, "I can't keep this up..." and suddenly lost her voice. Then the whisperer began to eerily speak with her voice. Hunter backed away for a moment and his unnatural despair left him. He summoned a long whip-like weapon and used it to knock the whisperer off its bony feet. Then Zinovia hit it with her sword and it stopped moving and Zinovia regained her voice. I shuddered at the horrible little creature, but that wasn't the worst thing we encountered in the nursery. In the crib was the corpse of a baby, long dead. It had been gruesomely stabbed in the abdomen and the killer had left their dagger in the wound.
Lonn picked up the daggeer, which was of quite good quality. It bore a symbol of the pirate goddess Besmara, and a poorly written inscription on the hilt that Hunter was able to make out read "Snucktooth's favorite weapon too."
We all left the nursery feeling much anger and sorrow over the terrible death of the infant. By this time the oil on Zinovia's sword had lost its effectiveness so we returned to the poltergeist room to search it. Other than the chairs there was nothing of interest in it, and as Hunter remarked, we aren't in the business of moving furniture.
We were about to go into the remaining locked room, after Zinovia smashed the door open, when we saw the apparition of Sir Roderic enter the room and hover over a specific area of the floor for a moment before vanishing. Lonn and Hunter examined the section of floor he had apparently been indicating and found a loose board concealing a chest. Inscribed on the chest was the word "Baraket" in Thassilonian script. Lonn remembered that this was the name of the legendary Sword of Pride that had belonged to the Runelord of Pride. Had Sir Roderic found the hiding place of the Runelord of Pride? When opened the chest proved to have a space clearly shaped for a sword, but there was no sword within it. The case itself was very finely crafted and worth a good deal of gold. It also contained a cache of gold pieces. We decided we should take the case with us, but we would sell it to supply ourselves rather than hope that the blade it had held would eventually turn up.
Baraket, the Sword of Pride
As we went out into the hallway I spied Sir Roderic's ghost again, this time entering a room on the opposite side. I pointed this out to the others and we followed him. Hunter opened the door. There were no roaches, haunts, or other undead things in the room. The walls were lined with maps, but one wall was bare though the discoloration indicated there had been a map there at some point too. Lonn took the scrap of paper that Fox had picked up previously to see if it looked like it might fit in the empty space, but it did not.
Zinovia then noticed that one of the remaining maps had a seven-pointed star in its corner, and a notation with a series of lines near an inscription that said 'the wall', which seemed to indicate an area to the east of Roderic's Cove. As we discussed the possible significance of this note and the Thassilonian star symbol, Lonn and i reminded our companions that the Runelords had separated their personal territories with barriers. Could this note indicate one of these walls?
Hunter then speculated that perhaps there had been some conflict between the Runelords of Rage and Pride, which now led to the conflict between the Road Keepers and the Horned Fangs since the Horned Fangs seemed to be wearing the symbol of Rage or Wrath. The Road Keepers appeared to have a symbol too but we didn't know what it was.
The last room's door was jammed shut. Zinovia and Hunter pried it open with a crowbar. It proved to be a storeroom - and was also occupied by a haunt. The temperature in the small chamber abruptly dropped dramatically and spirits emerged from the walls. I backed away, hoping that would let me avoid the worst effect of the haunt. Zinovia tried to shut the door but prying it open had made that impossible. The haunt screamed before it faded from sight, its piercing cry wounding everyone but Zinovia and I as if it had thrown daggers at us. The haunt must have frightened off other looters, as we discovered that the storeroom still held nine small bars of gold.
Haunt
There was only one more part of the house left to explore at this point, down the remaining stairs. When we descended we found two more corpses, much more recent than the others but still decayed. We could hear water lapping and birds screeching. Suddenly the door slammed shut and the whole area began to fill with water. I found myself struggling desperately to avoid sinking beneath it.
Back stairs
As quickly as the water had appeared it was gone, though I was still wet. Lonn kindly dried me. I had been the victim of yet another haunt. It left us wondering if the two bodies had been its victims as well. Hunter noticed that one body wore magical slippers, which he removed. There was nothing else to see here, as the stairs led out onto a dock next to the house. Both Hunter and Fox tried to determine what magic the slippers held but in the end I had to look at them. They are what is known as feather step slippers. We will probably sell them as none of us find them particularly useful.
Examining the bodies also led us to determine that the two dead people were probably members of the Road Keepers. They had suffered claw marks from reefclaws, but we didn't think the reefclaws had slain them. They may have been fleeing the haunt and then were poisoned by the reefclaw.
We had yet to open the room where the spiders were, which was now the only room in the house we hadn't investigated. None of us had any magic or weapons that would be effective against such a swarm, so we decided to leave the house for a little while and visit the market to see if we could acquire some flasks of alchemical fire to throw on the spiders. When we returned to the Wreck, Hunter suggested an unusual plan: he had acquired some fireward gel, which he would apply to himself and also use his wand to protect him from harm. Then he would enter the room and distract the spiders while the rest of us threw our flasks in through the doorway from the hall.
Spider swarm
This plan worked reasonable well, though we weren't entirely able to prevent the spiders from rushing out into the hallway before we could burn them all. When the spiders were gone we found that the last room was the kitchen, which held only broken dishes and moss. There were cracks in the floor that showed the house overhung the water.
We went back through the house once more with Hunter and myself checking for any traces of magic while Fox looked for hidden compartments or doorways. We found nothing. After we left the house we spent considerable thought on why the murdered infant had been in the nursery. Had the child come with Sir Roderic's family, or been brought there by someone else? Had the family chose to stay at the Wreck rather than his manor when they first arrived in the town, where they had been murdered?
Our intention had been to visit Mayor Thort again and tell her what we'd found, but this plan was sidetracked by stumbling upon Kynae Fromperton's father Kolton begging for coin in the street. He tried to run when addressed by name, thinking he owed us money. Lonn offered to buy him food and drink if he would talk with us, and we took him to a nearby tavern. At first he denied having any relation with the Road Keepers, but Lonn persuaded him to tell us that he sometimes gives them information in exchange for a few coppers. We learned that the 'screaming woman' his son told us about comes from the wealthier district of town and has something to do with the "Peacocks," which we know nothing about. Further questioning let us learn that the leader of the Horned Fangs is a dark-haired young woman who sometimes carries a quarterstaff and wears a tricorn hat, which leads us to wonder if it could be the same young woman Zinovia saw at the inn carrying the broken sword.
Kolton Fromperton
Hunter asked the poor drunkard about the Road Keepers and learned that their leader is indeed a goblin, as well as at least one other member Kolton refers to as "Crazy Eyes" because the goblin has one blue eye and one red. When asked about Kynae, Kolton seemed unconcerned for his son's well-being, even cheerfully admitting that while the lad is his son he's no father. None of us can disagree with that assessment. After spending so much time with him we grew disgusted with him and left. By then it was too late to see the mayor.
The next morning we rose early and on our way to the mayor's office discussed how much we should tell her about what we'd found in the Wreck. We decided not to mention the sword case, as we really don't know enough about it yet. We did tell her about all the bodies we found, and showed her the dagger that was used to kill the baby. She told us that Snucktooth was a pirate. We also asked if we will need a writ to visit the warehouse that Kynae told us about. The Road Keepers aren't permitted to use it, and while it's open to anyone she gave us another writ so the guards won't bother us. She also confirmed for us that the poor baby slain in the Wreck was probably a relation of Sir Roderic's. We'll need to let Audrahni know about all the corpses to be buried.
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