After clearing the gallery, the party tried the door on the east side of the room. Inside they found a beautiful study, lined with bookshelves. Over a large fireplace hung a painting of a man standing atop a rock in the blasted desert landscape the party had seen in a vision back at the guildhall. He held a whip in one hand, a pistol in the other, dark armour could be seen under his long overcoat. Ash recognized the man as Jarlas Volévont, the former lord of the manor and father of the countess. He died less than a year ago under mysterious circumstances at the manor. While exploring the room, the painting moved, with Jarlas looking down on the party and asking what they were doing in his house. Edward reacted by talking a bunch of shit, which lead to Jarlas stepping out the painting to kick some ass. After a battle where multiple people got shot in the face the party put down the painting man and stole his real stuff. The party took what they could from the study and the bedroom connected to it.
The party then returned to the gallery to check out the doors on the other side. After much debate they decided on the double doors leading to the room overlooking the ballroom. As Reith placed his hand on the doorknob to the next room, Edward was taken by another vision. He was once more adrift in space, facing Mantorok in the darkness. The great old one spoke in to his mind:
The Blackstar is in danger
These relics are our anchor to your world
Until your world fully passes in to ours, they allow us to influence your reality
She is trying to break the Blackstar, you must pre-
The space around Mantorok wavered as the connection between them was severed, snapping Edward back in to his body. As he regained his footing, the party heard a loud hum from below them, followed by a heavy thump and the discordant chimes that had become so familiar in their time in Istust. A flash of green light filled the gallery, causing the party to shield their eyes. When the light had passed, the party found themselves sinking in to the floor as if the wood had become quicksand. They struggled, tossed out lines, called out for help with no success. Only when Tumbili realized that Edward was unaffected by the event did he break free. He slapped the others out of their madness, bringing them back to reality. Nothing they had done while sinking had actually happened, Edward had watched them roll around on the floor in confusion.
Gathering themselves, the party moved on. They found more art in the balcony overlooking the ballroom, sadly none of these pictures came to life but they did contain scenes of battles between vast armies of horrifying creatures.
The party then returned to the basement entrance they found while exploring the main floor. Once past the large metal doors, the found themselves in a long hallway, made of smooth white stone and lit with small white crystal clusters. In front of them was a console showing the entire basement lab, each room was surrounded in a band of clear crystal, all of which currently glowed green. The six rooms that lined the hallway they were currently in each had a red circle of crystal embedded in the center. Three more could be found in the outline of a long room that the hallway lead to. Edward and Reith both began scouting out the hall, the rooms they could see had a single metal door and a small viewing window. Each room had a light over the door, the first was green, the rest red. Looking in the first window, Edward saw a square room with a large metal table, some metal counters and a lot of blood leading to a large drain in the floor. Some sort of dissection had taken place here, as best as he could tell. What really caught his eye was the large cluster of red crystals protruding from the ceiling in the center of the room. He sensed magic within them and felt fascinated by them. As Reith walked to the second room to look within its viewing window, Edward had a moment of inspiration. Returning to the console, he put his finger on the red crystal circle on the first room. A quiet *ding* was heard and a torrent of liquid flame dumped from the crystal in to the room, leaving it scoured clean of the blood.
Edward was in love.
Reith looked in to the second room, seeing two hybrids elbow deep inside some kind of creature, itself seemingly a hybrid combination of Deep One and another form of marine life. Getting a feeling for what would be happening here, Reith started for the third room, only to be interrupted by Edward running his fingers up and down the crystal circles on the line of rooms. A chorus of *dings* were heard, immediately followed by the sound of magic flames incinerating everything in the rooms. As Reith headed back toward the console to call Edward an asshole, the now all too familiar thump and chimes were heard. They were very close now. Those standing near the console saw as the lines around some of the rooms changed from green to red until the line around the hallway changed and a wave of green energy passed through them. They were relatively unaffected but the lab suffered severe damage. Crashes and screams could be heard both in the long room across the hall from the console and the large room at the end of the hall.
Busting through the door to the long room, the party found themselves in the construct lab. Construct parts, work tables, long shelves filled the room, pulleys and chains hung from the ceiling. At the end of the lab stood a Clockwork Golem surrounded by dead halflings and dwarves. One remaining halfling was caught in it’s hand, struggling to break free. The construct opened it’s large body reveling thousands of spinning gears and slowly moved the halfling in them. The halfling clawed frantically at the constructs giant hand before being shredded. The party moved in to fight, eyeing the arcane cores on the worktable behind the construct. It was a fierce battle, with heavy blows traded between R4D and the construct. It had Ash held in it’s hand when the party shut it down, which was a problem for Ash as the construct exploded in a shower of arcane energy and molten metal when it was defeated. The party collected everything they could and headed back to the hallway.
Reith cracked one of the large metal strapped doors at the end of the hallway, giving him a stealthy view of the carnage within. The room had been used to house the less successful hybrids from the labs experiments, contained within metal cages. The wave of otherworldly energy pushed the cages in to a twisted ball against the back wall furthest from where Reith was watching. A few of the creatures were free in the room, most were caught in the tangled mass, struggling to get free. A few hybrid keepers were desperately trying to contain the situation, using magical means to take care of the more aggressive creations. One used a metal and crystal device to create a gravity well on the backside of the room, pulling both monsters and cages in to it’s crushing center. Unfortunately for the keepers, this also freed more of the failed hybrid. The leader of the keepers was overwhelmed, while attempting to disintegrate what was once an orc, his hand was forced up. This resulted in his disintegrate striking the large red crystal cluster in the center of the room. The room held three of them, running in a line down the middle. Turns out, they were linked as the beam caused the middle to activate, dumping massive columns of liquid flame in to the room, filling it. Edward had come to the door with Reith once he learned there were more crystals inside, he refused to look away when the flames came, causing him to get burnt the fuck up.
The party entered the now empty room, Reith fished the Wand of Disintegrate out of the ashes, unfortunately it only had one charge left within it, and crossed to the next set of doors. This lead to a lab filled with glass and steel. Long tables were covered in the different experiments, boiling away in dozens of beakers and tubes. Multiple large tubes contained hybrids in progress and in the center of the room was a large glass tube filled with a viscous yellow liquid. Various pipes and wires came to and from the tube to machines that appeared to be used in the creation of the arcane cores used in the constructs. The party spread out across the room, looking at all the experiments. Edward was fascinated by the yellow liquid and couldn’t keep his damn hands off the tube. When he stepped on the tiles next to the container he step off a trap that cast shatter on all the glass in the room. The party took some serious cuts, including Edward nearly dying where he stood. The hybrids sloshed out on the floor, dead, but the liquid in the tube formed in to a new best friend for Edward. The party slapped the ooze around for a while before Tumbili used the stone base for the tube to seal it away.
After not healing up, the party pushed through the remaining doors. In the final lab room they found the Countess in the process of using a large crystal gun to try and break apart the Blackstar. The energy she gathered from the relic was then attempted to be forced in to another artifact she held. The Division Bell was a relic of Xel’lotath, and the way it rejected the energy the Countess attempted to force in to it was the source of the otherworldly energy that had been such a pain in the ass all this time.
The lab was large, the floor divided in to a grid of braided wires and crystal clusters, the center contained a raised container surrounded by a wall of force containing the Blackstar. The Countess was at the end of the room on a raised platform, protected behind another wall of force with a large control panel before her. The crystal gun hung down from the ceiling to the left of her, pointed at the Blackstar.
The Countess opened by first retreaving the Division Bell from the podium in front of her, then pointing the gun at the door to the room and firing, hitting Ash hard. The party moved in, fanning out to avoid the gun. She used the grid on the floor to shock R4D in to overload, removing him from the fight. Edward chain lightinged the wall of force protecting her almost in to oblivion. Shots were fired, the Countess shouted an agonizing prayer to Xel’lotath, wounding the party with her profane words. She then flamed Tumbili with the grid after he used stoneshape to disconnect the crystal gun from the ceiling, sending it crashing to the floor. The fighting became close and intense, until the Countess could be delayed no more. Using the Bell, she drove back the party and opened a rift above her. Through that rift, the party could see down in to a room filled with the horrifying body of a creature chained with spectral shackles underneath a great platform. On the center of the platform stood a pillar made of bone and flesh, with some of the creatures tentacles woven into it’s structure. In front of this pillar stood a solitary black candle, as tall as a human.
With the power of the Bell, the Countess brought forth a tentacle through the rift and pulled herself through. As she fled, the party heard her exclaim that the Blackstar was now worthless and she could acquire more relics after the coming of the Lady.
Early Frost Warning 