here Kitty

We waited a few hours for Kat to return but there was no sign of her. Glyn suggested I look for tracks but it was a lost cause with her special abilities.

Instead we moved within spying distance of the building. It all looked quiet—the only movement was the irregular passing of guards on the walkway that surrounded the upper floor. We kept our distance but moved around to view the building from each side but there was nothing else to see from this distance.

We moved in closer. Close enough to see better, but far enough to not be seen. Still nothing to see so we waited until both guards passed in close succession and then ran in under the overhanging walkway. Glyn looked in the nearest window and couldn’t see anything and asked me to look as well. I saw something—a devil looking straight at me. I’d seen this type before—I think Valkor said it was called a bearded devil.

It teleported out to attack us and Valkor put a grease patch under it. To avoid it teleporting away I prepared to attack it should it try to teleport while the others attacked. We knew their glaives leave nasty bleeding wounds so Glyn cast a spell to shatter it.

I could see that it was going to teleport so I attacked it but failed to hit and it blinked out.

We smashed the window but didn’t enter, hoping to throw them off by making them think we were in the mansion. Instead we circled around to the back of the building and were most of the way along the wall to the door we were planning to use to get inside when it sprang open and the bearded devil came out with two friends.

Glyn cast his spell a couple more times and successfully deprived the devils of their weapons. Of course then they had their claws which were almost as nasty and they attacked with those. Valkor cast a sticky web that caught two of them and we were doing a good job of smacking them around when one of them blinked out again.

We continued to pound on the two that were still there and then the other returned with a swarm of imps. It could have been nasty but Valkor cast a spell which created a noxious cloud that incapacitated most of the imps before they could descend on us, and then Mervyl cast some spell that caused most of them to be enthralled. Three of them were coughing and spluttering from Valkor’s spell but apparently not affected by Mervyl’s spell and they made a run for it. We were too busy with the bearded devils to worry about them.

I can’t say it was easy as the bearded devils managed to claw their way free of the web but both Valkor and Stimpy summoned creatures to join the fight and we slowly gained the upper hand.

Mervyl kept the imps in thrall and we were trying to work out how to get rid of them when the three that had fled returned, having recovered from Valkor’s spell. They took us by surprise but we had cleared the other “distractions” and they didn’t last long.

A couple of spells cleared up the other imps and we were ready to begin exploring the mansion. The room we entered was a grand kitchen occupied by a bunch of strange humanoid creatures. Valkor settled down to master a new spell when we found we couldn’t communicate with them while we explored the side rooms, which turned out to be storerooms. Most of them were uninteresting but one of them contained racks of bottles and when Glyn entered he narrowly avoided a trap. As he looked around he saw there was some sort of humanoid or something hiding in the back corner that became quite agitated when he began fiddling with the bottles in the racks.

We waited for Valkor to finish preparing his spell and I don’t mind saying I wasn’t very happy just sitting around in enemy territory like that. It seemed like a very long time but eventually he said he was ready and cast a spell he said would allow him to communicate in any language.

First he questioned the creatures in the kitchen but they seemed focused on preparing food to the exclusion of anything else. He then tried to talk to the thing in the storeroom but it seemed uninterested in talking and ran out the back door and fled. It seems the bottles were infernal wine and I suspect this thing was from one of his rivals and was poisoning the wine. I told Valkor my theory and he said devils are immune to poison, but I was sure I was right—just because they aren’t affected by the same toxins as us doesn’t mean there isn’t something that could be insinuated into the wine to discomfort them.

We moved from room to room, and as we made our way down a statue-lined corridor a couple of traps triggered giving Glyn a couple of nasty surprises. There was a door at the end that he tried to open and he felt some sort of spell try to trigger on him but fail, so then he tried to force it open and the spell affected him this time, jolting him with a massive electrical charge. Perhapps there was something valuable behind here, but we weren’t going to get in without some help.

We backed up to a side door and found a couple more bearded devils in a gaming room. We were fighting them in the corridor and it wasn’t working to our advantage but Valkor cast another web, and both he and Stimpy summoned creatures to help. Glyn tried to shatter their glaives but failed this time. We were really struggling in the cramped space but we knew what we were doing and we took one of them out and the other blinked away.

We found a cashbox in the gaming room and pushed on. We moved across the main entry foyer and started down the rooms on the other side of the building. Dormitories and sleeping quarters, but they were empty now. In one of the rooms was a corpse and as I searched it I pricked myself on a small needle as I pulled a note from a hidden pocket. I cast a spell to block the effects of poison and handed the note across to Valkor. He read it and it seemed to be a warning about other agents in the mansion, and it sounded like there were many schemes at work here.

The next set of rooms were crafting areas. Some we could identify, some we couldn’t. One of these rooms was the one we’d broken the window in, one had a staircase going down, and one had a staircase going up. I was a bit surprised at the latter as I’d assumed the stairs up would be in one of the main rooms (which we’d avoided).

Valkor cast a spell to check for magic and found some magic in the alchemy lab and one of the other rooms was filled with apparently magical items of all descriptions—capes, boots, gloves, cut stones, ... Glyn grabbed a bag and shoved a cape in it because we figured we should loot as much of this as we could, but when he tried to put something else in there he jumped from surprise and said something had tried to grab his hand in the bag. Valkor told us to be very careful and suggested all these things might be cursed. Who would want to collect so many cursed items???

We made our way down the stairs expecting that would be the most likely place to look for Kat. The only thing down there was a forge and it was manned by some other strange creature we couldn’t identify. It grabbed red hot brand from the forge to defend itself and backed into a corner. We left Valkor alone to see if he could calm it enough to touch it and activate his communication spell but it wouldn’t let him get close. We decided it was harmless and left it there, instead taking the stairs to the upper level.

The room we entered here was some sort of unpleasant ritualistic site, with chains, altars, blood, and a generally unpleasant feel about it. There was nothing of immediate interest so I headed for the next door. I threw it open and saw a familiar sight—two of those chain devils we’d faced near the portal. Only this time they were in a room full of hanging chains.

The last thing I recall is being whipped repeatedly by the chains in the room as they sprang to life while I tried to close the door.