Well, I decided to keep the tiger look, for a while at least. Turns out that the sweet little old priestess in town wanted a small fortune to de-tigerify me. So much for the kindness and charity spiel she preaches. And it also turns out that the serving wench—remember the cute one we were going to use as a ghost-holder?—well, it turns out that she has a thing for big cats. So, my main objection to the mask was that people would run in fear from me. If they do the opposite, well, I’m flexible (but not as flexible as SHE is!)
So the next day we make a third assault on my new home. Looking at the map, we saw that there should have been a second floor above the west wing. We realized that we found no stairs up, so there must have been a secret passage that we missed, or else the Tegels teleported up there, which wouldn’t surprise me.
We had decent enough luck going room to room, and we didn’t see any reason to go charging around like we did on the first day. So we enter through the back door once again, but this time we turn right rather than left. Then we start checking out rooms. I suppose I should point out that we passed though a lot of empty rooms before we get to the encounters I described. Exploring is hard work, and it can be tedious. I don’t want to give the impression that it’s all fun and games.
SO the first room we check out looks like it was the bedchamber for a knight, with a suit of armor and a locked chest which I check out. We found a nice sword, probably magical, but since none of us use a longsword, we put it in the “to sell” pile. Then Qual went to check out some drapery leading to an alcove, and wouldn’t you know it, the drapery comes to life and tries to suffocate him. I swear that that dwarf’s curiosity is going to get us all killed big time. Well, of course we cut him out. It’s a good thing that dwarves can hold their breaths, or he would have suffocated in there.
Well the next room had clothing that tried to do the same thing. I began to suspect a pattern, and resolved to carry a pair of shears in my pack from then on.
The next room was a little different—everything was tinted red, and a bunch of ghostly dancers with swords whirled around, scaring the bejeezus out of two cavemen. So what do the cavemen do when they see us ride to their rescue? They attack us. Natch. So we have to put a beat-down on them while the dancers (who turn out to be harmless) continue to do their thing. They were guarding a room that had vats of blood. Just to be sure they weren’t for feeding vampires, we smashed them all. I try not to think about cleaning bills when we do this sort of thing.
Next we come across a simple bedroom that was home to a snake-headed man, who did not take our intrusion kindly. My efforts to talk with him were met by him trying swallow my beautiful furry tiger-head. I swear, I spend more time inside of monsters. On the plus side, once he was trying to swallow me, snakey-boy was pretty vulnerable to the axes and arrows of my buddies, who chopped him up good. Maybe I’ll take to wearing a spiked helmet.
The door to the next room was locked and rigged with a lightning trap that would have been better dealt with by a mage rather than me. Try telling Sorel this, though. He just laughed and laughed when I got zapped. Prick. Anyhow, there was a big magic cauldron in the next room. I know it was magic because it kept shooting lightning bolts at us. Qual got fried twice before we smashed it. I’m sure it did something really cool, but I have a thing against owning items that try to cook me.
We moved into a part of the manor that felt like a maze. No straight corridors with lots of doors to work with, just room to room to room. We came across a bunch of ghouls in one chamber. We put them down easily, but it was kind of funny when Ev forgot that she was no longer immune to ghoul touch. I suggested we do something rude to her while she was paralyzed, but Aleandra made to kick me in the nuts again so I decided to retract my suggestion.
We wandered in this area for some time, trying to make sense of the floorplan. We came across a nest of slugs that spit their venom at us. Only it was dye, not venom, and we were stained purple for the better part of two days. I added salt to the list of things I needed to bring back to the manor on our next resupply.
The next room appeared to be filled with flames, but they did not give off heat (cool—I want to keep the effect when I move in) and it was also home to what I can only describe as a Jell-o golem. It proved really tough to kill. Qual was in bad shape already, so we decided to call it a day and return to our camp.
We finally broke our campsite in!
I miss my wench. I wish I could remember her name.
