Okay, quick update here because I’ve left it like… six weeks?
You know how life be.
The party made their way back to Floodwall from the Feywild after a makeshift funeral for the Dragonborn hatchlings – there are now only two Dragonborn left in Floodwall – and some caretaking of Granny Hestia and Edsel in their affected states. Moss the Weasel stayed behind to stand guard.
Returning to Shallows’ office, they found that the place was empty. No sign of Shallows, no sign of Uzi’s vacant body, no sign of Diafani. Just an iron flask on the desk.
Cranzalar took the flask, tipped out the contents and saved it for later. The contents were one (1) Tiefling, specifically Diafani. She explained that the office had been found by these weird hulking creatures, but before she could step in to do anything she’d been sealed away in the flask.
Using Locate Creature, the Dragonborn, the Royal, and the Elf with the Tiefling in her Brain tracked Uzi’s body to the hospital run by the Royal Argat. Cranzalar used an Eldritch Invocation to disguise himself as BLANDREW GENERIKSSON and just marched in through the front doors. He was all ‘Yeah, weirdly I don’t have a pulse and I feel all scaly, send me your strongest Doctor’.
Meanwhile, Vi+Uzi and Diafani had snuck into the building’s eastern wing, having to split up to get past guards – these big, muscly nurse things. Vi Wild Shaped into a moth and made her way to a staff-only section, finding an operating table with what looked like a corpse under a sheet.
Cranzalar, after waiting for a while, was confronted by Argat, who emerged from a cupboard (???) with a secret passage behind it. Argat made some excuses about being busy with other stuff, and offered to take Blandrew to an operating room for some proper tests.
It ended up being the room with the covered body and the moth. Cranzalar waited in the observation area, behind glass, as Argat and a monstrous nurse set to work. It was Shallows beneath the sheet, locked in place with magic.
A fight broke out in an attempt to save him, with Vi and Uzi combined in one body blasting magic left and right. Cranzalar crashed through the glass to just fuckin’ obliterate the nurse thing. Using vines and a Watery Sphere, Vi and Uzi began drowning Argat. Sure, they hadn’t found his phylactery yet, but it’d give them time, and also Uzi was pretty furious. More on that later.
Then Diafani kicked a door down, all ‘look what I found!’ She carried an empty Firuzeh body and what looked to be a bejewelled first aid kit; ostensibly Argat’s phylactery. She smashed the thing on the ground. The phylactery, I mean, not Uzi’s body.
God, imagine that.
Anyway, Argat made that noise that Sonic makes when he runs out of air, and that was it.
The players were, of course, suspicious. After all, I hadn’t at any point yet said ‘You’ve solved my lich puzzle’, so they were right to be so.
‘How soon can a lich come back to life?’ Uzi asked the Archive.
‘Depending on the size of the phylactery, up to 4 days,’ it replied.
‘How big would a phylactery need to be for the lich to come back immediately?’
‘Around 13 acres.’
Cranzalar tensed up. ‘Isn’t that about the size of the hospital itself?’
Runes behind the plaster on the walls flared to life, and a figure appeared on the observation balcony.
Argat was back.
He immediately used his divine spark – not waiting till the last moment as Lilla did – to pull the party, including Diafani and Shallows, into his Phylactery. Their souls would be consumed within 24 hours.
Cranzalar, Uzi, and Vi awoke in a filthy, shadowed version of the hospital.
Roll History 