January 20, 2024

Hook

TSB;EoA: Veins of Primordial Blight [Session 2] (Wilderness; Elemental Plane of Earth)

Plot Synopsis

**For time consistency with the other groups, 3 days might have passed in the Elemental Plane, but on Cayali dates- only a day has passed.**

The party converses with the shopkeeper a little more, who doesn’t seem all that phased by the events that just transpired. They are able to point the group towards the mayor’s house, and answer a few questions about the going ons in the town. They learn that a strange mage shows up every now and then- and they were the ones that had put Samson in charge (the previous mayor going missing). The guards were probably paid off by the same mage, and no one really talked about it. The party thanks the shopkeep, shoves Samson’s body in a bag, and heads out to the mayor's house.

It is easy enough to get into the mayor’s abode, the guard showing them inside the to the waiting room where they were supposed to wait for Samson to get back from “greeting an old friend”. Though when the party gets inside to realize… there aren’t any guards inside the building, they leave the waiting room and begin to snoop around the place. The entire inside of the building would normally be non-descript, with the walls and stairs being carved mostly out of the same stone that fills the cavern. Though Samson apparently made some “improvements” to the place by draping and roughly painting everything in the same gaudy shade of red he dressed in. The party makes their way upstairs, poking around a few bedrooms before finding their way into the office that Samson had taken over.

Moryena is the first one to notice the smaller-shadowed figure in the corner clutching a scroll of paper. The party convinces the person, who’s name they learn to be Cir, that they won’t harm them- but do want the paper that they currently possess. Cir hands it over without issue, and it turns out to be a map to the camp of the mage that had put Samson in charge. The small eufalconi/earth elemental hybrid reveals that they want to follow the mage because a friend that brought them to the town had recently gone missing- and they believe that the mage was the culprit. The more that Cir tells them about the mage, the more the party gets on board with killing him. They investigate a little more- Wisteria learning that the mage’s name is none other than Sunflight Tsorren, and Ignis and Moryena grabbing a few books from the room.

The party spends a few hours gathering supplies for the three day trip, before they set off down one of the abandoned mine-tunnels that the map pointed towards. A long, uneventful walk fills the first day, and the party is able to find one of the first camps that is marked on the map. The camp resides in a lush cave, and the party is able to find a series of Froztea Mushrooms, to add to their stew along with some fresh cave-rat that they hunted earlier and some potatoes that Wisteria had of their person. The group talks long into the night about a wide degree of subjects, learning a bit more about each other and Cir. The morning comes before long, and the next few days are similarly uneventful.

They reach the camp at the end of the third day. It resides in a large cavern with most of the tends placed towards the entrance of the cave. A larger, more important looking tent is placed in in back of the cavern along with a series of cages. Three of the cages contain a series of creatures (A smaller Earth-eater, a Lurrkarzoa, and three Lurkarzoa young) and the last one contains a few humanoids. Most of these creatures, and a few of the people have strange collars around their necks, and weird rocky-ice mutations growing out of their flesh. In the center of the cavern is a larger cage, in which Moryena is able to see a series of cuffs and chains within it, along with blood splatters along the ground. Closer inspection reveals these cages to be lined with terrisium, keeping any of the creatures from using magic while within the cavern. The party is rightfully disgusted by the sight.

After a while the party comes up with a plan to sneak into the main tent in order to talk with Sunflight Tsorren alone. Ignis stays back as overwatch while the others sneak around the side. They make it to the tent relatively unnoticed, and look inside the tent. They come to find it is filled with all sorts of notes, cages, and strange substances in vials. A shadowed figure resembling a person in a chair is backlit against a semi-transparent covering in the back of the tent. Ji is able to sneak around and look underneath the tent to observe the room inside- to which they find a half-dead elemental man strapped to a metal chair. The room is filled with a series of surgical instruments and strange metal parts- which seem to be used to attach to the flesh of the living ‘experiments’. Ji relays the information to the stealth-group and Wisteria decides to go in and talk to Sunflight alone.

The meeting goes… as well as you can expect from a mad scientist and the previous pupil. Wisteria tries to get Sunflight to tell her about his experiments, but he only lets on that he's been having success in the realm of controlling beings. He demonstrates this through the half-dead man that Ji had seen in the sectioned off room. He motions for the man to follow him- and goes to lead them both outside towards the cages. Though when he opens the flaps to the tent- Ignis blasts a hole through his chest and vaporizes the Simulacrum. The man that was being controlled by the mage however makes a few hand-gestures and the doors to the cages unlock. The creatures, now also under control of the mage, turn to fight the group.

Noteworthy Postgame Events