Session 31: Bad Blood

The gang waltz right into the grand foyer of the Cromwell mansion, into a magnificent party full of shady characters. Tohd follows along behind them, with a semi-concealed axe for protection from what looked like a swathe of vampiric guests. Around them, glassy-eyed waiters are bussing drinks while barely paying attention to their surroundings and not reacting to stimuli.

The group decides to split up to cover more ground for the sake of time and the size of the mansion. Hazel, Billy, Aggie, and Tohd headed towards the ballroom and the main party areas. Elisen, Abe, and Maurice headed into cordoned-off areas in the back. They agreed to meet back in the foyer in exactly one hour.

The first group head into the crowded areas. They witness many waiters walking around with trays of glasses full of a red liquid that was most certainly not wine. In the ballroom, bossing around guards and waiters was a slimy-looking man who appeared to be a some form of high-ranking servant of Cromwell's, and he seemed to be running the party. The group followed one of the zombified waiters into a back corridor and into the kitchens.

Meanwhile, the second group made their way to a bathroom and found a small vent, through which Elisen was able to transform into a spider and go exploring. She wandered through the vent system and through a series of back hallfways, scouting for anything interesting. Eventually she found an opening into a room that appeared as though it was magically conjured into the mansion - dark, mysterious, and definitely out of place. However, as she tried to leave, one of the two guards standing at the door noticed her spider-form on the roof. As luck would have it, that guard turned out to be intensely arachnophobic and started screaming, causing a fuss. This prompted his partner guard to capture Elisen in a cup, trapping her in spider form.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchens, the other group found large barrels of blood that the waiters were using to refill the glasses. They considered trying to poison or otherwise drug the blood, but unfortunately lacked any suitable drugs. They found a door at the back of the kitchens that led to an underground larder filled with rotting food and rotting corpses - many, many corpses. Billy spied some bottles that looked alcoholic, and so he made an attempt to drink them. This only proved to be yet more blood, and so Billy threw up all over the front of his suit shirt. He tried to turn the shirt inside out, but that didn't work to conceal the vomit. He ended up borrowing Tohd's jacket to compensate.

They made their way back into the main room, where they found the slimy man talking to a guard who was holding a cup with a spider in it - Elisen. The slimy man was insisting that the guard simply kill the spider instead of taking it outside. Billy rushed over to them and made a show of his drunkenness and vomit-covered shirt, acting the part of the intoxicated party-goer. He drew the eye of every other guest in the room in doing so, but he was able to successfully knock the cup holding Elisen out of the guard's hands without outing himself as intentionally helping her. Neither the guard nor the slimy man suspected anything, and Elisen was able to scarper off back towards the bathroom where she had left Abe and Maurice.

Meanwhile, Aggie and Hazel followed the slimy man out onto the back terrace, where they saw him speaking briefly with a man who was clearly Cromwell.

The group convened back in the foyer as planned, with Elisen now back in human form. She shared the story of the staircase room, and now that she was back in the foyer she could see that the tile pattern off one of the side doors matched the hallway that led to the staircase. The party hatched a plan to get all of them into the back rooms without being seen, given that they knew Cromwell was on the back terrace. Aggie and Maurice used a synchronised mage hand to pull both ankles of a party goer and causing her to fall into a waiter with a full tray of glasses. With some magical stealth help from Elisen, the whole group were able to use the ruckus as a sufficient distraction to slip away into the back hallway.

We find the same door guarded by the same two guards. Aggie was able to conjure spiders inside the mouth of one of the guards, causing him to freak out and run away from the door and the other guard to go into an arachnophobic panic. The arachnophobe ran towards the group, and as he approached the corner where the party was hiding they instructed Tohd to take care of him. Tohd did just so, with one clean hit. The party followed the second guard into the back room where he had run, and promptly locked Tohd inside for a moment before Tohd emerged covered in blood and very pleased with himself.

It was time to enter the room with the staircase. It was indeed creepy, and the whole room seemed like some form of magically-induced door from one plane to another. The stairs down were also lined with the same crying statues that the group had seen just before they fought the Laughing Hand.

The stairs themselves formed a long, thin spiral staircase around the edge of a stone cylinder with no centre guardrail, meaning it was a bad step away from a long long long fall down the darkness. Only when peering carefully could a faint light be seen at the bottom, but too far down to see properly. The group headed down in single file, Hazel with a glowy shield at the front and Billy at the back. Unfortunately Hazel accidentally triggered a trap on one of the steps, and suddenly undead creatures started to crawl out of the stone walls. There was still a lot of stairs left to go.

The group sprang into part-action part-panic. Tohd and Hazel started fighting before quickly realising that there were too many to fight. Billy took quick action and leapt over the center hole to get in front of the pack. Maurice pushed his way past Hazel and Tohd to do the same. Aggie and Abe, stuck together at the back of the group, tried to fight off the undead with limited success.

Billy ended up stone-shifting his way through the outside wall and straight down to the bottom of the stairs, thus reaching it first. There he found a glowing pylon with electricity arcing off it. He immediately started to punch it, and while he was able to crack the plinth it came at the expense of burning off parts of his own fur and doing damage to his hands.

Tohd ended up picking up both Elisen and Hazel and carrying them under his arms while they flung spells. Aggie tried to jump on his back, but she couldn't hold on. Tohd ended up running foward, using his living gatling guns to clear his path. As he ran, he easily caught up with Maurice, who had to sprint against the tide of undead just to stop from being barrelled over. Maurice ended up opening a dimension door as far down as he could down the centre hole, and so he fell only a small distance to meet Billy at the bottom.

Billy was able to punch and break the plinth, pulling out a glowing blue crystal of dubious power. Removing the crystal stopped the flow of undead from the walls, but the existing undead still posed a problem for anyone still stuck on the stairs.

Aggie and Abe were the last ones stuck near the top of the stairs. Aggie ended up grabbing Abe and thunderstepping them both across the stairs and down as far as she could, but she couldn't take them far enough. Abe made a strike at one of the attacking undead, but a splash of bloody ichor hit him in the face and blinded him. Aggie tried to pick him up, but wasn't strong enough to carry him. She ended up grabbing him in a piggy-back, but she was too slow down the stairs and separated from the rest of the group. With Abe on her back, Aggie made the only move she could think of - to call on her magical wings and attempt to fly down the centre aisle. However, Abe was not able to maintain his grip on Aggie with magical wings bursting from her shoulders. He slipped from her back and lost his grip on the stairs. From more than a hundred feet up, Abe fell.

Aggie flew towards him and tried to grab him, but she missed. Falling through the air, Abe's vision came back just enough to see Maurice on the ground tossing him the ring that he had stolen from the group all those weeks ago - the ring of featherfall. Abe managed to grab it and put it on, and thus floated down to safety.

Tohd carrying Hazel and Elisen reached the bottom of the stairs, having cleared out the remaining undead. Aggie flew down, apologising to Abe.

Despite a few close calls, they had reached the bottom of the stairs and were faced with a large, wooden door.

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