1 Norstan 1120

You Can't Go Home Again

The events in Corbanos (Follow the Money) left the heroes with a puzzle to solve.

Six months before, someone had left a package containing magical gloves at the Central Bank of Nessen and advised the Bank that Aria Seastar would claim it. Two days before the party arrived in Corbanos, someone -- the same someone? another someone? -- had told the Bank that Aria was coming. Yet the party had only decided to visit the bank as a result of their adventure in Survale, and Aria herself had known nothing of the package until it was given to her.

The package had been marked with the personal seal of Aria's father, a nobleman missing since her early childhood. The gloves bore the symbol of the monastery where she had been raised and trained. When the party came to cash out the Servants of the Beast Below's account, they got only a statuette of an aventi monk. These facts did little to explain how someone had so much knowledge of the party's present, but they did strongly suggest a deep knowledge of Aria's past. It was time for Aria to visit her old home.

The party laid in provisions in Nessen and headed straight for Seastar Colony, which lay in the waters northeast of Nessen. Aria guided the ship to the spot in a short and uneventful cruise. The party activated their water-breathing aids and headed down.

Their first sign of trouble came as they approached the colony. Instead of the expected aventi patrol watching for outsiders, the party was greeted by a trio of dire sharks. The huge, deadly fish were in an aggressive mood and attacked immediately.

The party responded with a full barrage of weapons and spells. Strontium let fly with a volley of steam-based magic missiles and a lesser missile storm while Audas used his eldritch chain ability to attack multiple targets. Mrs. Wilkins cast friend to foe and fooled two of the sharks into attacking each other momentarily. With every hero landing blows regularly the sharks got no chance to swallow anyone whole and were eventually overcome.

Some rope and a few minutes' time saw the shark carcasses secured to the Chimera for transport to Marhaven, where the meat and skin would fetch a reasonable price and help to add a little variety to the group's regular menu for a while. Despite the disturbance of the battle, the party noted that nobody came up from the colony to investigate. This was not a good sign.

Sure enough, the colony was devastated. When the party reached the coral structures that defined Seastar Colony they found signs of an obvious and brutal battle. Buildings were toppled or scarred from weaponry and there was no sign of any life. In the village center a monument to Aventernus had been torn down and broken to bits in a clear act of savage vandalism. This led the party to investigate the main temple, which had also been ravaged and defiled.

As the party gathered at the entrance to the colony meeting hall they encountered the likely cause of all this destruction: a party of three scaled, tentacled humanoids mounted on ramfish. The creatures were unlike anything the heroes had seen before. Their bodies looked most like sahuagin, humanoid size and shape with sharp claws and scales ranging from light green to pale yellow. But the heads on these creatures reminded the party of the mind flayers they'd encountered at Eldmoor: round, bulbous, with lidless eyes and sporting four writhing tentacles in place of the expected mouth.

There wasn't time for discussion. Audas acted first with an eldritch chain but the energy died in his hand -- these creatures, whatever they were, had a degree of magic resistance. Audas swore and ducked as the enemy charged in. The ramfish swam free of their riders and attacked independently, charging and goring Strontium and Aria and Quinn, while the humanoid types chose their own targets.

One of the humanoids paused and focused in the direction of Caenus. The barbarian dropped his weapon and stood motionless, stunned by some kind of mental attack. Quinn reacted by casting moon bolt at one of the creatures but still it charged her.

The deadly horns of the ramfish earned them the party's respect. Mrs. Wilkins focused her efforts on the fish, using mass whelm spells to wear the creatures down. Audas used his eldritch chain on them, since they had no resistance to it, and Strontium spent magic missiles to discourage the one that kept attacking him.

The humanoids, however, quickly proved themselves the deadlier foe. Another mental attack further stunned Caenus and disabled Aria temporarily. Quinn's opponent threw a barbed net over her and then, as she cut herself free, moved in to grapple her head with its tentacles. The creature grabbed on with the tenacity and technique of a mind flayer. At the same time another of the creatures locked its tentacles on the skull of Melian while the spellthief struggled in vain to escape.

Clearly these creatures were kin of some sort to illithid kind. The group had to conclude that they had only seconds to act in order to prevent Quinn and Melian from having their brains painfully extracted and consumed. Quinn managed to break free on her own thanks to her opponent's reduced strength from the moon bolt, but Melian was securely held. Strontium focused an empowered magic missile on the creature and did enough damage to rattle it, which caused it to lose its grip on Melian's head.

Audas realized they were facing aberrations and brought out his newest weapon, the baneful blast, which does extra damage to aberrations. Mrs. Wilkins cast hold monster and immobilized Quinn's opponent, allowing her to perform an easy coup de grace and then move forward to finish off its mount as well. Caenus and Aria recovered and rejoined the fight.

The first humanoid showed more signs of mind power by inducing Audas to use an eldritch blast on Strontium. It then set about trying to grapple Mrs. Wilkins but found her hairnet made it difficult to get a hold with its tentacles despite Mrs. Wilkins' lack of size or strength. Strontium killed Melian's opponent just as it once again had him in a death grip and Aria felled the last enemy to end the fight.

Now that they had time to examine the enemy, Strontium applied some of the knowledge he had gained from the notebooks they recovered from the aberrant cult hideout in the desert (Badlands). These creatures, he concluded, were half-illithid sahuagin -- aberrant hybrids created by implanting illithid tadpoles into adult sahuagin. They retained most of the abilities of sahuagin, such as the ability to speak with sharks and related fish, and clearly also gained the powers of a mind flayer in limited form. If these things had overrun the colony there was little hope of finding survivors.

With the village itself an obvious ruin, the party headed for the monastery to see what, if anything, was left of it. The monastery was outside town, nestled in a tiny coral grove. On approach it looked to be in far better shape than the colony proper but there were still no signs of life.

They went to the meditation hall first. It was empty and seemed as if it had been undisturbed for some time -- weeks, possibly. Aria led them to one of the two dormitory buildings where they found signs that some of the beds had been used recently but no bodies or personal effects were in evidence.

With mounting discomfort they approached the door to the private quarters of Relvin, the master of the monastery. Melian checked the door for traps found none. Before he could get to work on the lock, though, Audas reached over and knocked on the door. At his touch a blast of psychic energy issued from the door that stunned both men for a half minute or more.

No enemy came out, so the group waited for the two to recover and Melian set about picking the door lock. The moment he touched it, however, another psychic blast knocked him out of his wits momentarily. Mrs. Wilkins came forward with her want of knock to open the door. As she tapped the lock with the want another psychic blast stunned her, but the wand did its job. A disgusted Strontium grabbed the knob and tried to open the door but also got stunned by the powerful defense. Finally Aria steeled herself and worked the latch despite the blast, at last clearing the way into the master's quarters.

Inside the group found a half-dozen chests containing, at quick estimate, the accumulated valuables of the entire monastery's residents. Aventi coin, minor gemstones, and valuables from the meditation hall and monks' rooms, were all gathered in this one place. The party concluded that Relvin was no longer in residence here and secured the valuables inside Quinn's Heward's Handy Haversack, on the theory that they could give the treasure to any survivors they might find.

Next the group ventured into the dining hall, where the monks prepared and ate their food. This building was air-filled, with magical barriers keeping the water at bay, so that the monks could cook and eat both surface and sea foods. Under the building, Aria knew, was a root cellar where more items or even survivors might be hidden.

As she and Caenus reached the bottom of the stairs, however, they spotted another group of half-illithid sahuagin. The group leader turned to them as they reached the bottom stair and unleashed a mind blast that stunned Caenus and Melian.

This time the heroes were prepared for their enemy's tricks. Quinn immediately sent a moon bolt at the leader and Audas let fly a baneful blast. Mrs. Wilkins cloaked herself in greater invisibility and crept along the wall out of harm's way.

One of the sahuagin mutants got its tentacles on Caenus and was ready to extract the brain but Quinn and Audas moved in for the kill before it could finish the job. Two more fell to Aria's determined blows and the leader dropped unconscious after a mass whelm from Mrs. Wilkins.

The party dispatched one unconscious creature and held the leader for questioning. It proved impervious even to Caenus and Strontium's tandem technique. Speaking telepathically, the creature was almost cocky even in defeat; it promised that its leader would find them soon enough.

While Strontium and Caenus continued the interrogation Aria and the others checked out the storage rooms. In one they found two young initiates, whom Aria recognized but didn't know well, starving and weak but alive. In the other was Relvin, similarly ill but mostly unharmed.

The story the captives told was horrifying. In mid Eidos, some three months before, the colony had been attacked by an army of the half-illithid sahuagin and their ramfish mounts. Men, women, and children of all classes were slaughtered or captured, many rendered stunned and defenseless by the mind blasts of the aberrations. When word of the attack reached the monastery Relvin had led nearly all of his monks to the colony's defense but they were too late to save the day. Several dozen had been taken captive and secured in the monastery cellar, and every few days one would be taken away and never seen again. All feared they had become food for the soldiers.

Relvin related two especially disturbing details. The soldiers were in service to another creature, he told them -- a being of immense mental power. It had been probing Relvin's mind for hours each day, testing the master monk's defenses, seeking to learn whatever it could. The effort of resisting was exhausting. And when resistance failed, the creature taunted Relvin with images of the battle. In particular, it showed him images of the two aventi who, mounted on horrific aberrant seahorses, had led the attack on the colony. They were older and worn, but Relvin recognized easily the faces and fighting styles of Kallaebri Seastar and Lord Tagren, Aria's parents.

After the colony was destroyed the former heroes had taken the bulk of the force east, leaving the powerful psion and a small force of aberrant soldiers behind to hold the location. None of the captives had any idea where they had gone or what their mission was.

Quinn kept an ear on the interrogation of the aberrant leader and grew impatient at the creature's intransigence. While Aria was distracted with her old master she took the half-illithid into one of the small rooms for a more aggressive interrogation. It withstood threats and mutilation -- Quinn lopped off the creature's tentacles one by one as it refused to answer questions -- and maintained quietly that nothing Quinn could do would be worse than the consequences it would face for capitulating. Finally Quinn gave up and beheaded the thing.

With the aberrations' leader nowhere in evidence, the party led the former captives out of the cellar. As they filed out of the dining hall and into the outside courtyard four new figures materialized as if out of the water itself: more half-illithid sahuagin soldiers. These soldiers were clearly a higher class of creature, though. They wore sharkskin armor and carried double-ended spears.

The party was slower than normal in reacting, giving one of the creatures a chance to use its mind blast before anyone could prepare for it. Caenus, Audas, and Aria were stunned immediately. With half of his companions incapacitated, Melian turned to Audas and used his spellthief abilities to borrow an eldritch blast or two but was unable to overcome the creatures' resistance. Quinn, who had used much of her spell quotient helping to heal the group after the last encounter, dove into the melee with her trident in hand and Baelavin at her side.

Mrs. Wilkins sought to create opportunities by casting friend to foe and succeeded in getting two of the enemy to attack friends, buying the fighters another round to recover and then protected herself with a mirror image. Strontium fired up an empowered magic missile followed by a silent magic missile to completely destroy one of the enemy.

The wizard's success came at a price. In front of the party a tall, monstrous creature appeared. It resembled a mind flayer but was taller, more menacing, and had two additional long tentacles extruding from its head -- it was a ulitharid, an elite form of mind flayer. The creature focused on Strontium for a long second and something in the dwarf's mind came loose. He charged the new enemy at full speed and took an ineffectual stab with his dagger.

Aria recovered in time to see Strontium's bizarre behavior. She dealt a killing blow to an enemy and rushed to Strontium's side only to discover that it was protected by a pair of nearly invisible body guards: shabboaths. She swam up and over the tentacled construct and tried a Stunning Fist attack but failed to land a blow against the ulitharid's resilient hide. Meanwhile Strontium recovered his wits long enough to back away and expend a lesser missile storm. He penetrated the creature's resistance and focused the entire spell on it.

The enemy showed no reaction; instead it focused on Quinn and attempted to stop her lungs working. Quinn felt the mental attack, resisted it, and charged at the ulitharid while Baelavin killed another foe with his bite. Again a shabboath stopped her charge, forcing Quinn to swim up and over the thing to position herself for an attack.

The newcomer's magical resistance was formidable. Mrs. Wilkins failed to affect it with a blinding color surge and a slow. Audas, recovered from the mind blast, was unable to get an eldritch blast through and Strontium descended into mindless babbling, acting randomly because of the earlier attack on his sanity. Fortunately the fighters were recovering and able to join the attack. Aria focused on the tall creature and landed some telling blows despite an even stronger mind blast. Quinn joined her while Caenus helped to fend off the constructs.

Melian stole Strontium's last lesser missile storm with intentions of using it but never got the chance. Strontium recovered again temporarily and lashed out with an empowered magic missile that came close to slaying the creature. It regarded the heroes with an alien-seeming menace, shimmered, and disappeared in an obvious psionic plane shift.

With their master gone the shabboaths lapsed into inactivity and were easily destroyed. The party returned the valuables captured from the dormitory to Relvin and addressed the issue of what to do about Strontium, who was still in the grip of psionic insanity. Relvin advised them that the only cure was a wish-equivalent psionic power; only the Society of the Mindful was likely to be able to restore Strontium's sanity.

The Nessen headquarters of the Society remembered the party from their earlier visit (Badlands). They were able to cure Strontium, but declined payment. The party's finances, while healthy, were not enough to pay market rates for that kind of cure. Instead, the party shook hands on an agreement that the Society could call upon them for a service in the future. Such open promises often lead to danger, but such is the party's normal lot in life anyway.

On the way back to Marhaven the heroes reflected wryly that they had found no answers to the questions that brought them to Seastar Colony. They still had no idea how their movements were being tracked and no clue who had left the gloves for Aria and why. Instead they now had the issue of a possible war on of the undersea settlements to contend with, and it seemed as if the leaders of that army were the ulitharid psion and Aria's long-lost parents.

They settled down to discuss options.