Aidra Unbound
Nade City, Nade.
After stashing belongings at Hade House, the party begins a search for both Aidra Bredini and the signet ring she stole from her sister. They find the Berdini manor in the Iradeli Estates quarter, and Koros chats up and bribes a few of the hired guards who reveal that the lady has been here since the Gate to Iradel opened. She goes out often, they say, coming back late and, um, usually in a state. She has been missing for a few days, after going out to visit Little Jamerah a few times. They assumed she went back to Iradel.
Ramach searches Little Jamerah for the ring, and locates it in a few hours slightly below a one story building housing a market called Karpik's Rare Foods, a spice and fruit seller with wares from distant Islands. Akissi recognizes it as one of the places she has sensed corruption on her walks around Nade, and indeed several people coming in and out of the shop sense as corrupt. Stepping in, she notes that all the workers ping as corrupt, and tha when she enters they notice her directly. Koros buys some Zelixan spices and the party retreats to rest.
They return at night. Koros can't quite get the lock open, so Orosh bashes the door off the hinges. At an inner door, Ramach can't quite lift the bar inside with a mage hand, so Orosh bashes the door in and storms in. He is met by six dim figures in the dark, who all fire small darts at Orosh. A few hit, but Orosh shakes off whatever effect their poisons were intended to have. Orosh one-shots the man closest, Ramach puts four of them to sleep at once, and Koros throws a greenish powder in the face of the fleeing sixth, rendering him unconscious and ending the fight.
The party finds boxes of a yellow-ish powder that looks like pollen from Wisp, and does ping as corrupt for Akissi. Orosh notes there are seven beds in the room, all warm, but only six dead or tied up adversaries. A set of stairs leads down, and after securing the four sleepy men the party forms up and descends.
The basement is a long hallway with a series of rooms. The first few contain bare walls and manacles bolted to the floors. A shuffling of heavy feet on both ends of the dark hall precedes the arrival of four massive humanoid shapes, two in front and two behind. They look as if a human grew about 3 inches of yellow-green bark, their arms and hands are massive, and their eyes glow a dull yellow. They approach and attack, pinning the party in the hallway. They use one huge hand to whip out and hold enemies in place, immobile, in order to pound them with their other fist, and mundane weapons seem to bounce off their barky skin.
Koros is captured and punched several times. Orosh wails away and dents their thick vegetative armor. Each hit, however, causes the creatures to leak a green willowy gas that begins to pool up on the floor and fill the basement space. Ramach does get one to attack another with a Crown of Madness, but it is Akissi's rebuke that sends two of the creatures cowering in a corner and provides some respite for the party. They find that fire and Akissi's arcane blasts wither and hurt the creatures far more than blades, and begin gaining the upper hand one by one, but not before the pooled noxious gas leaking form their wounds starts to affect some of the party. Paetro is forced to flee upstairs, and several of the party are quite badly injured, through punches or sick green gas, before the last of the creatures is brought down and the gas dissipates.
Recouping from the fight, the party opens the last cell to find a woman inside chained to the wall and surrounded by powdery yellow pollen. She is covered in her own vomit and has bruises on most of her face. Despite the corrupted pollen all around her, Akissi senses that she herself is remarkably not corrupt. Akissi heals her, and Koros releases her, and she proclaims, "It was here! By all the angels it was here!"
Aidra Bredini then darts past the party and up the stairs, with the rest on her heels. She sees the bound men, and asks to borrow a sword. After some hesitation, someone gives her an axe, and she proceeds to chop at the skulls of the cowering men. Akissi keeps one aside for questioning. When the party then start to ask Aidra questions, she says, "Drink first, questions later!", robs the store of their coin, and beelines to the nearest tavern and downs a few quick pints.
Koros, Orosh, and Paetro follow. Ramach and Akissi stay behind to burn the pollen and questions the remaining man. Akissi intimidates him, and he reveals that they answer to a man named Trask, who in turn brings boxes of pollen from the "farm", called Placido Terra and off Gateward from Nade City. They lock people in the cells with the pollen, and they eventually become those monsters in the basement. They're eventual plan may have been to start putting the pollen in the foods they sold. Akissi kills the last man and she and Ramach rejoin the party.
When the party begins to talk to Aidra about the Gate Compass, she leaves the tavern and makes them hold the conversation in the street. She asks if her sister send the party, and questions them sharply about their reasons for tracking her. She then asks to borrow a sword again, and when given one she ruches back towards the shop, where three more men have come to investigate what has happened. Backed by the party, she makes quick work of the men, who Akissi senses were also corrupt.
Aidra then asks if the party wouldn't mind walking her back to her estate. On the way she asks questions about the character's "social club" and their interest in the object. She tries, and fails, to discretely ask if they would pay for it and how much, if she had it in her possession. Facilitated by Akissi's assurances that she is believed about her odd ability to sense "badness" in people, Aidra also sketches a mish mash of her own story. Reassembled and put in some kind of order, it goes something like this:
As an apology for her rash behavior, she admits that in her youth she was enamored of the family armsmen and their pretty weapons. Rather than have her run around hurting herself, her father had her trained in the use of simple arms. When she was of age, she got into some <hint hint wink wink> trouble with a few of them, and her father sent her away to intensify her training.
She feels that her father and she shared a kind of brash outlook, and so he often took her into his confidences. She was aware of his plans, however unwise, for the objects he purchased with most of their family fortune. He was visited by some people introduced to him by way of a letter from Rinsluk, and after a few days of haggling her father agreed to send one of the objects with them to test its authenticity. A month later, no richer and short one object, he passed away in his bed. Aidra woke in the middle of the night, compelled by some inner feeling, and witnessed a group of people leaving the manor. They just felt....wrong.
Her sister, and the household staff, did not believe her. She was known to drink, and wander at night. She herself pulled apart the second object (she seems utterly unaware of real one's potential use) and found a slapdash assembly of glued together gears, furthering her confidence that something was amiss. She looked for Rinsluk to confront him about this, but never found him. While her sister assumed the title of Baroness, and they all lamented the loss of their family coffers, Aidra's insistence on foul play was increasingly awkward. The Baroness sent her sister away- being sent away is a theme with her and her family.
On another Island Aidra began "sensing" this wrongness in people abroad. In asking around she has learned that some angel-touched people have this sense, and she says the Baronite Valley has its share of angel-touched individuals. She believes she is one of these.
Trained to arms, she began a self-appointed mission to avenge her father's murder and recover the object, so to complete some kind of sale and recover the family fortune. She has spent the last year getting into and out of quite a few scrapes, confronting people who feel "wrong", questioning them about their connection to the Bredinis, and killing them afterwards. She has been arrested by the authorities on several Islands, and used her name and empty promises of bribes and ransom and bail to weasel her way to freedom.
Here, on Nade, in that shop, she entered and was hit with poison darts, awoke in a cell. The man who questioned her not only felt wrong, but laughed and admitted that he had taken the Compass from her father, brought it right there to the shop before, "bringing it out to the farm, wherever that is," she says.
Despite days of captivity and beatings, here eyes are alight with purpose and zeal (and ale). She says she plans to head out to the Nade countryside and start visiting farms. It may take her a long while to find one that feels wrong, but she says it will not dissuade her. She invites the party to stay at her estate for the night, if they would like.