letting the Kat out of the bag

It had been a successful day of hunting and now I had a boar roasting on a spit with some mushrooms and root vegetables stewing in the pot. The sky was clear and the stars were bright, and the firewood was dry so there was little smoke from the fire.

In the back of my mind was the peaceful knowledge that this was my island—nobody had been here before me and with any luck I would be long dead of old age before anyone else ruined my paradise.

In the distance I heard some shouting and my immediate thought was whether I could kill the interlopers since I was unlikely to find myself another paradise such as this, or whether there was some other way to discourage them from staying that wouldn’t just result in others coming to look for them.

I doused the fire immediately, and prayed that they hadn’t seen it. The shouting was growing louder faster than should have been possible but I still couldn’t make out the words. Whoever it was seemed to be in trouble because there was a sense of frantic urgency to whatever they were saying.

And then I recognised one of the voices. It was Stimpy and he was calling my name. As I puzzled over how he had found me other thoughts began to stir in my mind—travelling to the first plane of Hell, losing Kat, searching the mansion for her, and being struck by several chains.

I opened my eyes as Stimpy was telling the others that I was okay. It was a relative term, evidently, because I hurt all over and was covered in blood which had to be mine. I was pulled to my feet and we hustled down the stairs and back outside, sheltering under the walkway so that if the chain devils wanted to come for us they would at least have to fight on their own without all the chains around.

Stimpy said he was going to fly around the building to look in the windows on the second floor so he wouldn’t have to blindly stumble from room to room and we waited, listening for any indication that he’d run afoul of the chain devils.

We heard movement on the walkway above us which had to be the chain devils and we kept as quiet as we could. The sounds died away which probably meant they’d moved further away to look for us. After a minute or so Stimpy suddenly swooped down past the walkway and landed in front of us. Immediately after a female devil with wings appeared in front of us. By the pallor of Valkor’s face I guessed that this wasn’t someone we wanted to try fighting.

It was surprisingly easy to strike a deal with this devil. All we had to do was explain to her that we intended to embarrass her boss which would create an opportunity for her to move up the ladder, and she agreed that she hadn’t seen us but warned that she’d better not “not see” us again.

With Stimpy’s scouting information we moved back indoors and up the main staircase. The landing at the top of the stairs led off on either side to corridors and in the two back corners were weird statues with open mouths full of teeth. I don’t know—maybe these things are considered pretty in Hell.

We checked the doors directly off the landing but didn't find anything interesting. The two doors led into a training room with a couple of weapon racks. Only about half the glaives were missing so we figured the rest of them belonged to devils that were currently away from the mansion. I happily broke the hafts in case their owners returned before we were ready to leave.

We then made to move down the corridor but as soon as left the confines of the landing both the ugly little statues started emitting a loud alarm sound. Moving back into the landing didn’t shut them up so instead of standing around in the open we ducked into another room.

From this room there was a door into the master bedroom where Stimpy had said he’d seen a small pouch on the night stand. We waited for the alarm to die down and nobody had come looking for us so we opened the door to the bedroom and looked in. There was some sort of netting surrounding the bed and draping over the night stands. It was difficult to see through to the bed and would be impossible to search anything without moving them. Glyn poked at them with his rpaier and nothing bad happened so we cautiously moved around the outside of the room to the night stand where the pouch was and I moved into the room behind him.

Suddenly the room was filled with flame and I ran out of the room slapping the flames out and Glyn followed soon after saying that the netting had burst into flame as soon as he touched it. As we watched the flames continued to burn but appeared to leave the netting unaffected.

A couple of the others slashed away at the netting from the door and cut a door-shaped patch out of it. Glyn stepped carefully over the pile of fabric on the floor and into the space where the bed was but as he moved over towards the night stand it became clear he would still be unable to get to the pouch so he backed out again.

We suspected that the trap might be triggered by alignment, so I tried reaching in from the doorway and sure enough nothing happened when I touched the fabric so I quickly moved in and collected the pouch. I searched the rest of the room and there was nothing else of interest so I returned with the pouch and we confirmed that this pouch was strongly magical.

We still had no idea where Kat was, and after checking a couple more rooms (setting off the alarm again as well) we were left with either the locked and trapped room at the end of the corridor of statues, or the tower. Not surprisingly we decided that we’d prefer to try to get into the trapped room.

Valkor managed to use some spell to move himself into the room and then appeared again a minute later with a small bundle containing three golden daggers. They weren’t magical but we figured there must be something special about them but we now had only one place left to look so it was back upstairs again, set off the alarm again (which we no longer cared about since nobody had responded to the other alarms), and then up the stairs to the tower.

There was a trapdoor at the top that had a latch on this side so we released that and then there was a ladder leading to another trap door. That one appeared to have a latch mechanism from the other side but it wasn’t latched and we pushed it open carefully only to be greeted by Kat’s strident voice asking what had taken us so long.

We moved in and found Kat chained to the wall and also Miranda who was chained to the floor. We tried to keep somewhat quiet as we didn’t want to annoy the devil upstairs. We worked out a plan to get out of there as quickly as possible and were soon well away.

We looked more closely at the daggers and saw that there was a tiny inscription along the blades. Valkor looked at it and was able to read some sort of celestial psalm. That was definitely odd—if these had been trophies taken from some defeated celestial foe then surely these daggers would have out on display instead of hidden away in a carefully trapped room.

After we got back through the portal we camped for a day to to make contact with our “friendly” devil. He sent an agent and we gave him one of the daggers to take back to his master, and then waited another day for them to honour their end of the bargain. Sure enough they returned with the inscribed cube and told us they were satisfied.

We made a small trip to Mota to sell our spoils, stock up on some additional equipment, and try to get some additional information on the pouch and cube, and the remaining two golden daggers.

We didn’t get much information on the pouch and cube, and as far as anyone could tell us the daggers had no particular value so we sold the daggers and prepared to return to Red, who I’m sure will be so happy to have his device back that he’ll once more tell us something we already know. Or perhaps the device truly is something of great power and he’ll just destroy us.