Summary 156: Circling around (2016-10-28)
You eyed up the magical archway and finally the Captain and Boamund rushed through, suffering some serious magical energy burns in the process in the former case, which others in your troupe also suffered to varying degrees as they followed in. Meanwhile, the early-arrivers explored the chamber, finding it to be full of old but dry and largely worthless sorceror's goods (bottles, scrolls that collapse into dust when touched, odd bits of metal tubing that survived the ages; all on withered, warped wooden shelves around the edges of the room).
Soon enough your attention turned to the room's central circle. The runes around it responded to touch with a faint glow, and Maugis could see lingering sorcery there but it didn't seem quite right. No combination of rune-touching seemed to do much but when Boamund stepped into the circle, he felt a strong draw on his mana. Watching this, and others' experiments entering the circle, Maugis inferred that the sorcerer's circle must have once been a conjuring and/or transport enchantment, but that its powers had faded and/or been mangled, so that it no longer did what it was supposed to do. You decided that it was time to abandon attempts to make this circle do something useful for you, and you rested while you worked blessings to heal each other.
While the room seemed safe as long as you didn't prod the latent magics, you knew you had to leave through that deadly archway again. Some trials with a moistened blanket helped reduce the incidence of people catching fire but there was still plenty of injury as you filed out one by one (Orsattus, though, passed through valiantly unharmed at least once, and doted on his New Froalar as much as he could to help).
You'd since opted to confront the gorp down the twisty tunnel again rather than give up on this mysterious complex for now. Boamund conjured a water elemental to wrestle with it and others waited up above in the bloody chamber between the gorp and the sorceror's room. The elemental succeeded in dragging the gorp up into the hallway before the magical arch, then the gorp broke free but the elemental caught it again. You managed to avoid their tussle, feeling unable to do anything to aid. It was up to the undine, and it had done its main job, to clear a way for you to go down that corkscrew tunnel to the water. The Baronet and ?Orsattus slid down first, followed by the rest of you and last Maugis and Boamund, as they watched the undine and gorp slosh through the burning archway into the ritual chamber and then a final flash of light as they hit the central enchanted ring. What happened to them then, who knows.
But you soon were all together at the bottom of the tunnel, and by then your first wave of explorers had found that the water led to a sea cave where there was a rocky, muddy shoreline with signs of recent bootprints and the ruts of a boat being hauled ashore and then back into the ocean. Beyond the cave's widening mouth, you saw the great Arvonesse reefs, and dawn breaking with fishermens' craft beginning to ply the sea for their day's catch. There was no more sign of the “Strangers”, and surely there had been enough time now for them to be some distance away. What to do now?
The Strangers were still a puzzle but you'd learned some things about them. You now had found another entrance to the sewers/New Arvonesse, too. Did Captain Gulos know/care about either of these things? Should you go meet him now, as he expects? Or should you find your way home through the mudflats and reefs toward the southwest? Syrr Kogag surely would want to know what you'd found about the Strangers: they were not Dripping Beards pirates (but they worked with such unsavory sorts), they at least consorted with or used chaos, they had amongst them or were “Purple Prophets”/“Poets Against Twilight” (a group which, despite its association with dusk, surely had nothing to do with the demigod Luathans from the distant west), and they were vicious but elusive and clever (unlike the Dripping Beards). They also had left a curious letter from some “Nanni Pola”. But then there was still the problem of what was inside this sewer complex, too- you had found little about the supposed Froalar/serpent cult/connections, and several places were further progress was difficult or impossible.
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