The Vault on Vaaris
Uldan Holdings, Vaaris
The journey to Paetro's family lands takes a day and a half, and the party elects to travel on the main roads to make up time. Paetro begins to see people he knows, and vouches for the non-Uldans in his group. He also represents to them that he is back on Vaaris tracking down a notorious criminal. One acquaintance tells Paetro that his father came into some serious money in recent months (the Alshekal did say that their former fortune would be given to their families), and is taking a more active role in Vaaris Council business. He also learns that a man recently asked and was given permission to dig on Paetro’s family lands.
Arriving on the family lands, the party skips the main family compounds and heads to the small vale where the vault is meant to be located. There they find a work party of local Uldan laborers removing a pile of rocks from the entrance to the vault. It is evidently not open yet. There is a small camp set up on the flat across a small stream from the entrance. The party watches until the end of the day, when they witness Dar Alsan, the portly man with the limp, and an Uldan brute (whom Paetro recognizes as a local bar brawler named Biolo) leave the camp with most of the laborers on the path to the farm. A small group of laborers remain, set a fire, and sit down to an evening camp meal. The party waits a few hours, and then puts the guards to sleep, leaves Mote to watch over them, and approaches the vault.
The smooth rock wall at the entrance has ideograms indicating that it should be smashed. The party does so, and a sickening smell and fog emanates from the chamber, causing some to gag and vomit. When it dissipates, the party enters to find a square room with another aperture on the opposite side, similarly blocked by a smooth rock face with the same smash-me ideograms. They smash the door, standing well back, but no noxious fumes come forth.
The second room is the same as the first - same size, same smooth-rock covered aperture on the opposite side. Orosh walks forward, and halfway the floor tilts forward slightly from his weight, like it is on a gentle roller. With a click and then a smashing sound large iron spikes drop from the ceiling. Orosh avoids being impaled, and the room is now a forest of iron pillars. The party picks their way through, and smashes the next door.
The third room is the same, except with a low-walled basin at the far end. As the party enters, a hissing sound grows louder, and a creature pulls itself up from the basin. Ramach recognizes the type as a surface creature known as a dry beetle, for its ability to remain dormant and desiccated for years at a time. It emerges and attacks, spitting poison and flailing away with multiple limbs. Some of the party retreat to the second room, where the iron bars are too close together for the beetle to approach. The fight ends with the beetle defeated but the party much the worse for wear, and Akkisi near death. They break, and take a short rest. Koros checks on Mote and the sleeping guards, who are still snoring away. In the late hours of the night, refreshed and feeling better, they smash the next door and proceed.
The fourth room is the size of the others, but without an opposite aperture. The ceiling has a grid of nine squares, each with a smash-me ideogram and each with a different word written in Travit.
honor wealth winning
feelings people places
service authority knowledge
The party enters, and smashes wealth. A tumble of heavy rocks falls from the ceiling. The floor, similarly smooth and brittle, breaks into a network of cracks. They try knowledge next, with similar results, and the cracks begin to grow alarmingly long and wide. Retreating to the doorway, they smash a near square - honor - and the rockfall breaks the floor open, revealing a spiked pit below. With crossbow bolts and missiles they one by one smash the others, and the last - people - reveals an upward-leading shaft with a ladder carved into the rock. Using levitate spells and ropes, the party traverses the open pit and crawls up the shaft.
The fifth room again the same size, and lit with continual flames in sconces. Six alcoves, three each on opposite sides of the room, contain human skeletal remains wearing moldering Uldan funerary garb. On the far wall is a frayed tapestry. After some investigation, one of the party touches the tapestry and it falls from the wall, rotted and tattered. On the wall a strange symbol begins to glow and pulse, and words appear around it. They read:
What is hard won and no sooner shared then lost.
The pulsing grows faster, and then the room goes eerily silent - no one can even hear themselves, let alone anyone else. In the next moment, the six skeletons begin moving, pulling themselves out of their alcoves and shambling towards the nearest living person. Then the torches go out, the room is pitch dark and everyone is blind. In later discussion the party agrees that such magics are not unknown, but are rare - certainly no one in the party has seen human remains spring back to life like this. The party begin to maneuver as best they can, each in their own dark and silent terrifying fight with an unseen enemy, when the answer comes to Ramach. He mouths the words “a secret” and the noise and light return, the skeletons fall inanimate once again.
Where the glyph once pulsed is now a small square of smash-able rock, behind which is a smaller alcove containing a bag with 5,000 gp and another human shaped skull carved from Ancient Race bone, this one slightly larger than Thalina’s. Based on the colors in the decorations, the party surmises that Ramach’s coin may activate it, and indeed shortly the spectral form of Ramach's uncle Enelach manifests in the room. As with Thalina, he primarily addresses the person he remembers, Ramach. He is both crankier and calmer than his in-person progenitor.
He first congratulates the group on navigating the vault, and aloud assumes from his evocation that his progenitor is deceased. He says that his purpose, his memories, are intended to pass to the inheritors the few resources and unfinished business of the Ashekal that they wanted to leave to their chosen successors. He says that in addition to their collective work, the five of them each had their own projects. The party asks him about the Alshekal, but questions outside of the information he has to pass on get vague answers or a shrug.
Small fortune and skull in hand, the party makes their way back to the entrance, to find that Dar Alsan has set up a cordon of laborers with crossbows in a semi-circle around the entrance, screened by rocks and trees. Fires burn brightly and light up the nighttime area outside the vault entrance. On the distant flat on the other side of the stream, Dar Aslan, Biolo, and the small portly man stand in the pre-dawn light. Koros makes the party known by shouting an insult, and from the tree line to one side of the entrance an enormous terrifying creature steps forward, apparently at the direction of Dar Aslan. It is certainly not something Paetro has ever heard of growing up on Vaaris, and Ramach does not know of anything like it spoken about among the droppers. Dar Aslan shouts back that he will let them go if they give up the contents of the vault.
The party discusses for an extensive length of time - they are still beaten up from getting into the vault. Plans are no sooner made than discarded as unworkable. The spirit of Enelach is invoked, and the party questions it about how it works. Enelach tells them that once invoked with a coin, the spirit can be invoked by anyone possessing it. The manifestation has a limited range from the skull. Once the initial information is passed on, the manifestation has no obligation to be truthful or cooperate with the skull’s possessor. The party hatches a plan to decant the skull for its information and then give it to Dar Aslan, asking the Spirit of Intellect to lie to Dar Aslan when invoked. The spirit tells them he will lead the man on a merry chase to nowhere.
Ramach spends an hour listening to Enelach speak, paying close attention and committing the words to eidetic memory:
~ :: ~
The Memories of Enlach
Places to stay:
Each Core Island Traverton has a reliable inn with rooms reserved and paid through the year 503. Enelach relays the list, and that for each the passphrase consists of the name of the Island, the name of the Inn, and the words “we look out for each other, brother to brother.” He warns that these can get stale or unsafe if you are not careful in your comings and goings.
Three Core Islands - Nade, Jamerah, and Iradel - have exclusive estates or houses maintained and run by discreet Anvardi Hosteller Clan members. These are private, secure, and are meant as a safe pace for possessions and loot. Enelach relays the locations of each, and the individual passphrases, which must also be accompanied by one of the coins. These are also paid through 503, and must be renewed with the Anvardi Hosteller Clan.
Objects of interest:
Enelach relays what droppers already know - one of the most valuable objects on the Islands are the bones of the Ancient Race, the more intact the better. Something mystical about those long dead giants persists in their skeletal remains, and when worked these fossils become powerful components of imbued magics. At this point the Islands have been picked clean, and new caches come from the ground. The Alshekal have made a few trips to the ground - most notably at Empty Plaza, the Tovan Monastery, and the Barrowledge Canyons - but they also buy or, a-hem, procure the bones from others who have caches.
One such cache is rumored to be hidden on the Outer Island of Wisp, in a cave marked by flowers that should not grow there. Another is rumored to be on the Outer Island of Darromar with retired and famed surface explorers known as Tinker and Grimley. The spirit Enelach pauses here to say that this last rumor is the one he feels the Alshekal were chasing just before he was created.
Other items that Enelach and the Alshekal have heard about but, as far as his memory goes, have not obtained include the following. He sadly comments that these has been removed from his progenitor’s physical memory, wherever he is.
The Gate Compass. A possibly apocryphal item stolen from the Anvardi Magi Clan over 100 years ago. This mechanical/magical wonder is said to provide information about the position of the Islands and the Gates. It was perhaps an attempt by the Magi Clan to skirt the Arcanist monopoly on travel between Islands. The Alshekal believe that one the Guilds of Angbol may have this item, if it exists. This was a particular obsession of Nyana’s.
The Bredini Collection. The House of Baron Bredini on Iradel reportedly collected small items of practical magics over centuries. Just a few decades ago, they fell on hard times and were forced to sell it off. The buyer insisted on taking the whole lot, rather than letting them divest it piecemeal. Something went wrong and the collection never made it to the buyer. Chaywa - for this held the most interest for her - believed the problem occurred while the collection was waiting for a gate opening on Kasan, and that the collection was sent into the Kasan canyons and hidden there.
Zelixan Flower Box. Morran was a fan of Zelixan flowers of all kinds, and his family on Empyrean dabbled in the trade of the rarer species. He was convinced from his own networks and contacts that the Arcanists had found and developed a material that when placed near the Zelixan Rainbow Gate soaks up its energies and slowly releases them over time. He strived to learn more about this material, and the Arcanist’s desire for it. He also had a pipe dream to build a small planter box from the material in order to cultivate certain Zelixan flowers on Islands other than Zelix.
Levitation bars. Enelach admits that this item was his project. He has spent years chasing rumors that he came across in his youth. Developed by an unknown magi, by themselves or in some cabal with others, these staff-length objects are supposedly permanently enchanted with an enhanced levitation ability that allows sideways motion and does not have the same weight restrictions as a typical drop-mage’s spell. This SOI contains all that Enelach knew about these items, but he does not have time to tell all....
Habri Leader’s Helm. The mercenary Habri are usually hired in groups, but their units and composition is opaque to outsiders. Above a certain unit size, their unit leaders wear distinctive helms that are rumored to be imbued with interesting powers. No one seems to know what they are, or how they are made. Finding one to pass along would be a lucrative endeavor. This was a Thalina project.
Buyers:
Enelach begins his list of buyers with an admonition - as Alshekal, one must NEVER sell or give to Arcanists. It may seem tempting, and Arcanists do covert the bones of the Ancient Race, but Enelach says that as a rule they are not to be trusted, and in fact warns that they may interfere rather violently in Alshekal acquisitions. With that stated, he goes on to outline their most reliable buyers.
Morayel. A fellow named Chull is the dean of the craftworks at the Collegium, and quietly buys arcane items either to research or resell, or possible claim as his own. Chull meets his sellers surreptitiously in the back of an inn in the Hanging Village. He can be stingy and cranky, but his discretion is outstanding and has proven to be true to his word in all ways.
Empyrean. Court of the Mage-King on Empyrean. In particular a woman named Ullaren. Enelach is not sure of her position - some kind of servant to a court officer - but after getting her attention she will let you know where to meet. Negotiations tend to be fair and swift. Enelach thinks she may be related to Morran somehow, but is not sure.
Nade. The mixed authority on Nade, and the Traverton and sprawling Baraki and Rathi settlements near the Gate, allow for quite a few unsavory groups to flourish. Miksaji Palnach is a Mehujaelite exile who acts as a fence between many of these groups. He is contacted by wearing two red items at a certain market and waiting for instructions, although this method changes periodically. Items sold to Miksaji are often at a discount, but pay usually includes rumors of other high end items.
Barakeel. A tribal leader known as Hakimin roams the ‘north’ of the wastes on Barakeel, and will take small items permanently imbued with magic. The items have some spiritual significance to the tribe he leads. He does not pay much at all, and when he does it is in rare gems unearthed in the Baraki wastes. However, through Baraki tribal family connections Hakimin can be a trusted source of information about the Arcanists and their doings.
Iradel. Family of the Baron Bredini. Long time collectors of items of practical magics, and will pay nicely for them. They are in fact trying to build up a collection they lost a few decades ago.
Anvard. Varodi Clan account. Less a buyer than a place to safely deposit items and wealth. Enelach states that the Clan should have your names, and the coins and a password (which he gives you) is also required.
~ :: ~
Soon after, Koros steps out under parlay to hand over the skull. Biolo approaches to take the hand off, and shortly thereafter Dar and his two associates - and the large unknown creature - hastily leave and the laborers begin to break up and leave as well. A few of them deliver a badly beaten Mote to the party. Akissi shares as much healing as she can, and the full light of day dawns over the ridgeline.
This time opting for stealth instead of speed, the party finds a hiding spot in the pines overlooking the main farm compound. They take a long rest and watch Paetro’s erstwhile homestead. The laborers are paid and move on. Paetro’s father is seen arriving and talking with several locals. Biolo and the small portly man leave along the road towards the Traverton. And towards mid-afternoon, a troop of Orn riders lands, enters the main house, and then launch aloft and begin circling the farm in ever wider spiraling circles. The party hunkers down further, making sure to stay under cover.
At night, they parallel the roads and head back to the Traverton, taking care to avoid any contact and to stay under cover during the daylight.