In light of their recent successes, the party received some tickets to a spa/resort/hotel thing from Bailiff. It was a nice gesture; Bailiff had signed up to Nico’s special membership scheme and pulled some strings to get them. They declined to go with the party, though.
The hotel was pretty fancy. There was a hot spring and everything, though since they were split by gender in the Japanese style, it’s probably a good thing Bailiff didn’t come.
Anyway, there was an encounter with the Fire Genasi Inquisitor – a brief conversation with him, leading to a confrontation as the party tried to leave. There was also a conversation with his apprentice – a blue dragonborn who’d lost her name when apprenticing, so gave her name as ‘Carnevalle’. Well, she said ‘Carnival’, but that first one is how she thought it should be spelled.
The altercation ended up with the Inquisitor in the Regicider’s dungeons, and with Carnevalle eating a load of big ham sandwiches in the common room. Cranzalar wanted to kill the Inquisitor, as his deity could convert that act into sustenance, and stop his body decaying further for a time. Firuzeh absolutely did not want that to happen, since the Inquisitor was their prisoner.
Cranzalar relented, eventually, and stormed out to clear his head. As he reached the edge, looking out over the ocean, something ruptured in his chest, and he blacked out.
When he awoke, he was deep, deep underwater. Something had been rammed through his chest, pinning him to the seabed. He tried to contact Eadro, but found himself facing Aurifar instead – who explained that he’d found it necessary to pin Cranzalar down in a similar way to his pinning of the Leviathan. The thing in his chest was a spire, like the one the city had grown around.
Cranzalar was able to summon up his pact blade, even in this weird place, and struck at Aurifar, waking himself up. He freed himself and floated to the surface.
Meanwhile, Uzi had gone to look for her friend. She followed his trail to the edge of the city, and then into the ocean – leaping down and diving to look for him. After a time, Vi followed, and the two saw in the distance this huge, magical flare go off.
The flare was sort of Cranzalar’s fault. He’d ended up on this strange island that had been transmuted into different precious materials – trees made of emerald, diamond sand, even animals made of rare woods. After making his way to the centre, he found himself face to face with Oltin, the phoenix Royal, who let off a burst of transmutational power so strong it began to turn Cranzalar’s bones to obsidian.
Cranzalar ran away, very quickly, and jumped onto a carpet he’d brought.
Back in the city, as Uzi treaded water, Vi went back to the base to tell Bailiff about where they were going. Then she nipped back down to the cell with the Inquisitor in it.
As it turns out, she agreed with Cranzalar.
She didn’t find anything important on the Inquisitor’s corpse.
As Cranzalar flew back, the Phoenix hot on his heels despite the multiple rounds of lightning bolts he blasted down onto it, he saw a massive tidal wave racing towards them, with Firuzeh commanding it from within.
He rolled the carpet around himself and shot through the wave like a message in a pneumatic tube, and the full force of the tidal wave hammered down onto Oltin.
The Phoenix died for a moment.
Then, reigniting, it flew back to its island.
Roll History 