With the southern half of the mob distracted by the murderous Farrukh, Tanith breaks away to smite the reformed Forwell. "That's for Varda!"
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Tanith's dedication is silenced by the presence of Astraden's silenced dagger, but the sentiment is no doubt appreciated a moment later regardless.
reformed Forwell.
Tanith brings down his huge axe right in the center of the vast swarm. The bardiche comes down in a blaze of magical and holy energy that sends everything that was once almost Forwell Hog scattering into every available crack and crevice, screaming silently from their tiny clacking mandibles. Most do not make it into safe, comforting darkness, and almost all spasm and die before reaching safety.
After a moment, Tanith raises his bardiche to see it has been embedded in the abdomen of a cat-sized scarlet spider. Its legs give one more feeble twitch, then curl inwards and go still.
"Yeah, that's right. Mess with us and you get squashed like a bug." Farrukh says, oblivious to his worthlessness in this fight.
Carina pants with exhaustion, feeling the adrenaline wearing off and being replaced with pain and nausea. She tries to say something, but just ends up coughing silently. She spits up a dead spider.
She staggers outside, still in range of Astraden's silence spell, and sees the gathered crowd. Her face collapses into a look of panic.
Perhaps it's for the best that the next several invectives that come out of her mouth are censored by the spell.
Tanith's cheer of victory is similarly silenced but it doesn't matter to him. After tearing his weapon free from Forwell's thorax, he moves in to give the arachnid charlatan a solid kick for good measure.
Rodrigo sees an enormous red spider roll around the corner, though it doesn't go further.
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Situated within a cone of silence, Eben is oblivious to the sounds of the crowd outside. So when, on a lark, he has Johannes stand up and shamble outside, a flayed mass of flesh oozing from every possible surface, it's really done just to freak out his friends and not the mass of onlookers.
He steps outside after the walking meat illusion and gets a look of horror upon his face. He quickly stops concentrating on it. Of course, it being a major image, that just means it continues repeating its last action for the next eighteen seconds, which in this case was pawing at this featureless face and moaning. (Silently, due to Astraden's spell.)
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Unfortunately, Astraden dismisses her spell in shock when she sees Johannes' ruined form, and the crowd can hear his piteous squealing loud and clear.
She looks around at the assembled townsfolk. "Hey folks. That Forwell guy? Did all this. That thing? A monster he summoned. They're called, 'lemures.'"
Carina wheels around and sees Johannes... or rather, what's left of him. When Astraden starts speaking, she promptly catches on and tries to support her.
"Er--gods above, yes! And things would have turned out worse if we hadn't intervened!"
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Finding his voice again, Eben lends it to support Astraden's lie.
"Yup. Total spawn of hell, here. It was only my coomand of the arcane that allowed me to take control of it and render it harmless. And now I will return it whence it came!" He points grandly at Johannes. "Begone, foul thing!" A pause, where nothing happens. "Begone... by the time I count to 12..." he adds.
As Johannes stumbles out, moaning and begging for death, the onlookers go pale. This time almost all of them turn and run. Of those that remain, Tarquin looks bemused, Souf is slowly backing away, Jharan seems to be readying for a fight, and the man in his thirties is looking at Astraden nervously. It's Rillikandren, she sees.
Unfortunately, Astraden dismisses her spell in shock when she sees Johannes' ruined form, and the crowd can hear his piteous squealing loud and clear.
She looks around at the assembled townsfolk. "Hey folks. That Forwell guy? Did all this. That thing? A monster he summoned. They're called, 'lemures.'"
"Lemure?" Souf frowns. "I think have I heard of such creatures. Yes, that is clearly a lemure."
As Eben moves forward and begins the complex banishment ritual, the townsfolk listen to their explanations. Meanwhile, Rodrigo goes inside and stops the mephit from heading out.
From within can be heard:
"Burn them, Master?"
"No," Rodrigo says. "Those aren't enemies."
"They seem twitchy, Master. Just a little burning?"
"No."
"Aw..."
"So," Jharan says, approaching (he seems more-or-less unfazed by the screaming man). "This 'Forwell', my neighbor...he did it? He burned the good priest?" The bugbear-blooded tattoo artist eyes the red spider with distaste.
From the north, the others see Anlathi the druidess approaching.
Tanith nods grimly. "There's a chamber below where he was sheltering another monster, a phase spider. He's been feeding the old folks to it."
"Was that what it was? Did you kill it?" Astraden asks. She distastefully picks up her dagger and returns it to its sheath, then explains to Jharan, "Rodrigo, our wizard, teleported two of us down into the chamber. He was also the one who first saw Forwell taking an old man down there."
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Slowly, a crowd starts to reform. It consists of numerous members of the Muddle's elderly (former followers of Forwell), as well as many of the townsfolk that fled earlier.
"What in Kord's name is going on here?" cries an old woman.
"Is it true? Did Forwell cause the fire?" A balding halfling leaves heavy on his cane, eyes wide.
"It can't be."
"I heard it with my own ears! He was a big spider, he was!"
"It was Kord. He must have seen the wickedness."
"Devils and bugs. Forwell lied! He's just like the rest!"
"It can't be."
"Kord has deserted us."
"Am I the only one who cares that it looks like that Kettite just shanked a man in the throat?"
"Where the hell is the Watch? What the hell is keeping them? There's a gods-damned murder what's happened here!"
"Look at all those beautiful men."
"Never would've happened under the old governor."
"Where's Forwell? Is it true what folk's saying?"
"What in the Weeping Lass's name..."
"Your goddess is fake and its priests are dead! Make of that what you will." Farrukh says, helpfully.
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"He's lying! He's lying, he must be lying!"
"How did I get...where has Forwell gone?"
"I mean, there's a dead body right there. You can still see the blood on the klar! Anyone?"
"Forwell's...dead?"
"He was a giant spider man! I'm telling you, he was swinging from the rooftops like some sort of giant froghee-moth!"
"Kordians. We've wasted our time. Our lives! Damn them all!"
"There's so much less drama over this kind of this when you worship Iuz. Um, did I say that out loud?"
"Everything...everything a lie."
"Forwell has gone over there. And there. And a little bit there too. And some in Carina's clothes I think. He turned into a LOT of spiders, and they're all dead now."
"And if you were wasting your time with Kord instead of weird cults, this wouldn't have happened! At least you know that Kordians will waste your time from now until the end of Oerth. They're a persistent bunch."
"Farrukh." Carina pinches the bridge of her nose. "Not. Helping."
Tanith finds himself mirroring Carina's expression.
"Forwell was behind the fire that killed Varda and scarred the Muddle. He did it to silence Varda because he caught on to what Forwell was doing - making a mockery of mighty Kord and feeding the poor souls he suckered to a phase spider underground. Varda died trying to protect the Muddle and nobody even knew it until now", the big man explains.
"And now it's time to make things right. We need to dig up the remains of what's left of Forwell's victims and finish what Varda started by tearing this place down!"
Carina straightens herself up. "He's put it much better than I could. What can I say--Kord looks after his own, and does not take his faith being derided lightly."
If everything goes well, Carina pitches in as best she can, be it with handling the remains or demolishing the building.
"Yes, we definitely need to dig up the undershrine. That will prove everything we've said." I hope..., Eben thinks, finding himself in the odd position of hoping it's as horrible a site of slaughter as the people who were down there seem to think it is. "In fact, that would be a great way for the community to pull together! Anyone with shovels, run home and get them! We can unveil the truth in a matter of minutes!"
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Farrukh tries to look as nonthreatening as a man with covered in blood, wielding blood stained weaponry, and with the corpse of an elderly man at his feet can.
Farrukh tries to do a little dance to lighten the mood.
He does surprisingly well, by his usual standards.
Astraden walks over to Farrukh and closes Edane's dead, hollow eyes. "May a true god give you rest, aged rogue."
Astraden goes over and performs some final rites, ignoring Farrukh's giddy dance right next to her.
Tanith words seem to affect the crowd. Some leave, but most stay. Tarquin sends someone to get shovels, and the crowd begins to grow in size.
After ten minutes, there are at least forty people—almost the entire population of the Muddle—digging away inside the shrine. Ruck and Tudge, the half-orc brothers from the Two-Necked Swan, seem to take particular glee in lugging the big statue out and smashing it against the cobble. Tudge can be seen stuffing the head in his backpack.
As they work, people start to get more and more impassioned. Only Tanith's, Eben's and Carina's careful efforts prevent the crowd from becoming an all-out mob. Nonetheless, mutterings of anger and betrayal—of Forwell, of the church, of Kord himself—can be heard from almost everyone by the time the shovels strike stone.
It has been an hour since work started, just as the workers are beginning to break through the stone to the chamber below, that the Watch shows up. The five guards are armed with saps as they cautiously advance, led by a burly armored man with a bushy mustache, prominent sideburns, and an ugly deerstalker. It's the same captain who harassed the party after the chimera attack.
"What? What's all this nonsense?" The captain's prominent eyebrows furrow. "What in the name of the Blinding Light of Pholtus's all this, then? Is this some sort of maddened riot? Absolutely unacceptable!"
"No riot, we just killed an evil bug-priest who was feeding the old people of the Muddle to a giant Phase Spider, and now we're digging up a secret elevator shaft into a room full of half-eaten corpses."
"Basically, Tuesday."
Carina looks up in time to see Farrukh chatting with a contingent of guardsmen. "Oh, great."
She gets up and approaches them. "There's no riot going on here, sir--my friend here has the right of it." She gestures to her spider-gore stained gear. "The 'bug-priest', as he puts it, was operating in secret for a while before we stumbled upon him. His targets were mainly elderly people--we're currently working on exhuming the remains of his victims to give them proper funeral rites."
Astraden smiles blandly at the eyebrow man, who she's certainly never met before. "Sir! Just an orderly citizen's investigation, sir! According to eyewitnesses, Father Forwell Hog of Kord was not actually a priest of Kord, and was actually a swarm of hideous vermin. These good folks are just digging down to see if the rumors about a huge vault of bones are true, from what I can tell. I'm just here to make sure they don't get out of control."
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The captain eyes Carina with suspicion. "Oh, it's you lot again. Of course it is. Do you realize you happen to be vandalizing city property? This is all most unorthodox, I'll have you know, and I won't allow it!"
He turns and glares at Astraden. "You look rather familiar. Do you realize how much trouble you're all in? Just off-the-bat, I can see evidence of breaking and entering, incitement of mischief, hooliganism, zoning violations (unless you mean to tell me Mister Hog applied to install a basement beforehand, which I severely doubt), slander, rudeness to a public official, contempt of implied curfew, and he—" He points at Farrukh, eyes narrowed to slits, "—is, I've been informed, guilty of street performing without a license. This is not the Slum Quarter. We don't tolerate this sort of anarchy! No, it must stop at once."
He doesn't seem to have noticed the dead body yet, though only thanks to the large crowd blocking his view.
Eben will otherwise lend a hand in whatever needs doing, but on the offhand chance that some city watchmen show up, he'll make a special point of talking to them ahead of anyone else. (And using fascinate and suggestion as needed to have them do nothing to us till the undershrine is opened.)
Eben steps up to the task of interacting with the local constabulary. His years in petty swindling have taught him that there is one, single, sure fire way to get the law on your side every time.
But since he doesn't feel like trying to figure out this guy's comfortable bribe range, he goes for method # 2 instead.
"Officers, it's a good thing you're here! This situation has been in need of a firm hand. I can't even begin to tell you the horrible things we've seen so far tonight, and it's not even midnight yet! Creatures dripping poison, men made of bugs, walking men flayed alive, monsters breathing fire, and that's only above the ground! There are horrors beneath the earth I can't even begin to describe!"
The captain shivers, as do his men. He recovers enough to advance on Eben, gesturing wildly. "That's—utterly preposterous. Absolute balderdash! What proof have you of these outrageous claims?"
Eben raises his hands, plactatingly. "Well you see..." his voice drops an octave, and he speaks with a slow, precise cadence. "We were looking into the fire that Varda died in. We investigated the old shrine, and we found evidence that it might be foul play. We retraced Varda's footsteps, tracked down anyone who last spoke with him. That led us here. We planted a spy to keep a watch on the shrine, and within a few hours after we left, Forwell met with one of his flock. He took him into a secret chamber underneath the shrine. Only Forwell returned. We came to find the chamber, see what was down there. Three of our friends made it in, using magic. They found a giant spider. Forwell attacked us up here. Told us everything. The whole thing was a con, to feed his spider-god. And as soon as the secret room is opened, we'll be able to show you..."
The captain blinks. He stares at Eben, listening intently for a moment...
...and then another, and another. He listens without any regard for time or duty. He begins nodding vacantly as he accedes to Eben's will.
The other guards seem perplexed, as if not used to their captain being so reasonable about things, but don't interrupt.
"And now, Captain, you're here and the truth can be revealed, under your scrutiny. You've just arrived at a mass grave, " Eben blinks, in surprise and admiration. "Why, you'll probably get a commendation and promotion, once the secret room is exposed!"
"Uh...yes. Yes, well, of course..." Even the captain's trademark bluster is muted as he nods amiably. "Just doing my job, keeping the ruffians in check..."
"And you do it so well. I'm sure your superiors will see that when you make a full report tomorrow. For now, though..." he looks over his shoulder at the excavation underway. "Well, it's not my place to take charge. Those diggers do look like they could use some organization, though..."
Astraden drifts away from Eben's story, scanning the crowd for Rillikandren. When she manages to catch his eye, she frowns at him.
[dice=Secret message: "You're putting yourself in danger"]1d20+12[/dice]
Rillikandren purses his lips and nods, giving Astraden a salute as he backs out.
The captain turns to his men. "Yes, well...organization. That's my job. You'd better step aside, lad, there's work to be done." He raises his hands. "Everybody, listen up! We're going to do this in an orderly fashion." He begins delivering mostly redundant orders to the diggers at the front.
When the chamber is at last broken into, a foul smell immediately spills out. Several of those nearby have to be escorted outside while they recover.
Cries of horror pervade the shrine as the braver types are lowered into the shrine to investigate. They eventually exit to report their findings, all pale and shaken (especially the captain, who insisted on going in first). The crowdmembers tremble and shake as they hear the news: A huge pale spider's hollowed husk, dead wasps littering the ground, and the dozen-or-so bodies that been torn to shreds and left to rot. Identification is out of the question—even if Forwell hadn't preyed upon the old and forgotten, there's just not enough left to go by.
Anlathi exits last. She leans into the scorched doorway, shuddering. She's carrying something large in her cloak. "I...haven't seen anything like that in decades," she says quietly to the heroes. "It was...it's hard to believe any druid, even one so twisted and altered as Forwell, could permit something so loathsome to survive. I can only thank the Shalm that we acted when we did. At least some light has shone through these dark few hours."
Rodrigo takes 1 Constitution damage.
Rodrigo finally breaks free of the poison. Just barely.
Finally noticing that Rodrigo's looking much worse for the wear, Carina approaches him and offers him a lesser restoration extract.
"You don't look so good--here. Drink up." She holds out the bottle of orange liquid.