3.8 Details, Details!

Having just helped to rescue Great Trench from the terrors of a massive Void Spawn attack, our heroes spend some time planning their next moves and recovering. First, they seek a rapid exit from Great Trench, less out of any emergency and more to avoid awkward questions and demands, such as those lobbed at Timmeron and Sajaina from scared civilians demanding to know why the ‘heroes’ were not stopping the attacks more readily, among other things. Before departure however, Sajaina wanted to visit the Archbishop of the church of Bartos whom she had rescued from imprisonment in the course of liberating the Dragon’s Breath from the Black Anvil Company’s vault.

Curiously, when the party visited him, the man immediately asked them to remove him from Great Trench. He also refused to say why he needed this favor due to the chance that others might overhear. It was easy enough for the party to disguise Travize as the Archbishop  (given that Wrynn can freely manipulate the image created by a certain ring) and place him in the Archbishop’s bed. The rest of the party, meanwhile, lead the man out of the church under the cover of invisibility. Unfortunately, Travize was discovered by a paladin who sensed that something was amiss and dispelled the illusion. Through the man’s outrage, Travize insisted the man cast a spell to discern truth from lies and tried to convince him that the Archbishop had departed the church of his own free will and by his own request. The paladin proved eminently unconvincable without a full interrogation, a thing which might reveal dangerous information the party wanted to keep secret in addition to detaining Travize for some time. To avoid this, Travize was forced to use the powers of the Ascendant to negate the magics holding him in place and flee the temple. There is now the worry that the Church of Bartos will convince itself that the Chosen of Astor have kidnapped the Archbishop.

The party reconvened on the ship where they performed their own rather more polite interrogation of the Archbishop. The old man revealed to them that he had discovered a secret of the church of the powers of Bartos. While he was reluctant to discuss it, he did say that a higher ranking person in the church had apparently persuaded the paladins that he needed to be monitored and kept within the church for his own safety- predominantly as a way of keeping track of him until whoever it was could get him to divulge his secret.  Amidst assurances that they would do their best to keep him safe and prevent the misuse of his secret, the party prodded at the Archbishop until he let slip enough information that they were able to guess his secret. He had discovered the rites and symbols of Bartos that would enable him to perform resurrection.This was also the reason that the Black Anvil company had kept him a prison, for their leader had someone he needed resurrected. Unsure exactly how to handle this information, the party simply elected not to press for now.

As a result of their \*other\* exploits in Great Trench, they finally have, thanks mostly to Sajaina, acquired the Dragon’s Breath stones they needed to fully power the Archivist for its (his?) final banishment of the dark creatures invading their reality. But things are rarely so simple and the Archivist noted several things that still need to be taken care of. To begin with, the spell it will cast to seal the borders of reality will have to be done from the realm of the Voidspawn. In order to get there (and back) safely, as well as to properly fix its spell, the Archivist will require whatever material it was that first called the Void Spawn to our own reality.  Secondly, the spell will have to be finished from the other side , which is to say that someone must agree to stay behind in the land of the Void Spawn to finish the spell, stranding them in that world forever. Well, not forever. A second spell would be activated to annihilate their body and possessions because any substance from our world that remained behind might be used to wear down the barrier the Archivist was going to cast.

Being a clever and resourceful man, Baygrith did not bother participating in the debate that followed over who should or should not be sacrificed. Instead, he thought to himself for a few moments before interrupting everyone to declare that he would build an artificial mind that could finish casting the spell so that no one had to die. In fact, he had recently made a contact who had already made some developments in artificial intelligence! The party was quick to latch on to this idea, leading to an immediate conversation with the gnomish Architect via the Etheric Emitter Torch. The two rapidly and excitedly began devising a plan, but it seemed to call for working together more closely than the Etheric Emitter Torch would allow. To that end, The Archivist sent Baygrith some experimental plans for a portal generator.

Baygrith set to work like a child with a new toy, which may not actually be the proper simile. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that a child with a new toy would behave like Baygrith with a new project. In any event, he needed some help and so enlisted  Sajaina to be his extra pair of hands. Perlapae joined him as well- not because she planned to help with the machinery, but because things tended to explode while Baygrith was experimenting. Baygrith also had to reluctantly admit that there was a small chance of a radiation leak- whatever that is. Thus it was that by, the end of the day, Baygrith had successfully added to Gadgette another miracle of artificiary: arbitrary portal generation. The device did explode once or twice before it was finished, naturally, and there is a chance Perlapae was “dosed with radiation” when she tried to protect Sajaina from the blast. We don’t know what being dosed with radiation actually means, but her healing magic seemed to repair the damage. Now Baygrith could get to work in earnest on his artificial mind.

The rest of the party, meanwhile, was focused on Sal’s brother, Elasmos. He had been, as you may recall, a member of a cult under Albert that was trying to summon Void Spawn into the world. While Sal had talked him out of the cult, the party was convinced that he might know something about the source of the material that summoned the Void Spawn. He didn’t, as it turned out, but he knew where and when the leaders of the cult might be having a meeting that the party could sneak into. The catch was that he wanted to join the party on the mission in order to get revenge on the cult for lying to him. He refused to say where the meeting would be if the party did not agree to take him with them. After some intense debate on the subject the party agreed, but only if he also agreed to stay out of the way and let the party get revenge for him. The deal was struck and Elasmos informed them that the meeting would be held later the same week and that he could find out where once he talked to certain people. Bagel, for his part, speculated that the people responsible for the Void Spawn would probably turn out to be the mages of the Tower of Apotheosis, causing a good deal of apprehension at the thought of breaking into the highly guarded tower.

With that plan sorted out, the party turned to one more order of business. It was high time that they brought a servant of Bartos before the Night Maiden to see if Bartos was at all related to the coming calamity she had described. Sajaina spoke to the Archbishop and he agreed to meet with whoever we wished, as long as it was safe. With this the party set a course for the nearest stretch of dark woods in which they could summon the image of the Night Maiden using the lock of hair she had given the party.

As long as they were in the area, however, Baygrith had a favor to ask. He had used his artificiary to determine that Mercury, the mysterious figure who had been contacting him via the Etheric Emitter Torch was no longer in Great Trench. Instead he was hiding out in a village to the north, close to where the party had met the goblins. The party yelled at him a little for not mentioning that he had been in recent contact with such a person, let alone that he snuck off and discovered the man’s secret lair in Great Trench all by himself, but agreed that finding him could be useful. so it was that they agreed to use the woods near the goblin villages to summon the Night Maiden while Timmeron and Baygrith worked together to pinpoint his location. Apprehensive of the future, they literally flew into the sunset.