The following is an extract from a collection of notes left at the door to the great with no indication of provenance. The text was badly encrypted and contains numerous references to some kind of archive of information that the library has no access to.
Keel [A029] showed up one day looking for a team, she had an inside scoop on the House Ueraven [H031] business at their copper mine [G005][E1203]. I'd followed the coverage of the events on News from the Underground [PJN003] jumped at the change to strike back at the aristocratic pig dogs. Most of the folks from the previous run [R00] also showed up ([A018], [A019], [A20]), even if Garak looked greener than normal when we met in the Klava Mine [THTH246]. After going over the info Keel had gotten from mz Lance-d’Chaseur [N0952] we set out towards the meeting place with our contact, Freddi [N1350].
We moved long before the meeting time and stopped at an inn called the Ghost Pepper Hurgl [THTH293]. Keel made a good show of her drinking, Garak seemed to enjoy himself, and the orc bartender looked at me like he wanted to squish me. Pretty good all told. The clientele was mostly miners and we got some stories about incidents at the mine and how House Ueraven had managed to "absorb" the miner's union.
About an hour before the meeting time we left to scout the area and spotted several people failing to sneak up to a door guarded by an angry human woman with a pitchfork. Turns out she's the Freddi we're looking for and she's been sheltering relatives of the miners that died. They were sewing together quilts to remember their dead and wanted us to take them to the mine and burn them as offerings.
Not enough sugar in the world to quell my rage.
We took their mules loaded with the burial goods (is it burial goods if you burn them?) and took off in the vague direction of the mine, after Keel worked some contacts and found out a Purifier [A031] had gone up that way a while ago. The mules must have smelt tasty cause we had to deal with several wolf attacks, but thankfully no boars.
As we got closer we found more and more signs of extreme pollution (physical and astral), streams running green, dead plants, and crazed elementals ambushing us [Z0004]. The fight was rough with Keel getting hamstrung almost immediately, but we eventually prevailed. As the spirits dissipated they ranted about a "grandfather". We decided to pull back to a safe camp and wait for the next day before continuing.
The next day we reached the mine which looked like it had been set on fire by someone or something very angry and we found what Garak recognized as slave collars [I241], possibly used on the elementals. I did a quick recon of the main shaft, but could not find anything of interest so we proceeded with the ritual burning the goods and each of us offering our own eulogy for the dead. This seemed to clear at least some of the astral pollution.
And then Grandfather [Z0005] showed up, the very spirit of the mountain, royally pissed off. It pretty much demanded we go rescue his "grandson", the Purifier, who was trapped in the bowels of the mine and his soul being used for... something, something very bad. We were told to "look for the pipe" and that "a passage would be opened".
So we went and found the pipe discharging all the wonderful gunk from the mine, which was still spewing? Despite the fact that everyone inside should be dead? Better and better.
After some observation we figure out we had several minutes between each wave of toxic gunk, so trusting in Grandfather in we went. A few hundred yards in we found a shaft leading up from the pipe into a large cave.
Inside the cave were more crazy elementals, a whole bunch of namegivers in chains, a dude looking like the villain in a bad theater production, and, at the far end, the obsidifolk Purifier, strung up like in a butcher shop leaking blood onto a smelter. By the way Ueraven claimed to have done no smelting at this location, which is weird but rich people like wasting money, and smelting inside the mine itself seems super extra dumb.
Anyway, we didn't have too much time to ponder how big Ueraven's lies were cause the theatrical reject ordered the elementals to kill all the slaves since there was nothing more to "drain" here. We rushed into the room grabbing the attention of the elementals before they could murder anyone and started putting them out of their misery. Meanwhile Garak took a great shot (or so I'm told) at the creep of the year who was distressingly unfazed before jumping into the crucible.
Yep, full of molten copper and obsidifolk blood. It was one of those days.
On the plus side all the elementals crumbled away.
On the other hand mr "I like really warm baths" got back out, covered in flames.
And then it flew away, at which point the purifier's corpse also crumbled to pieces and Keel got some kind of vision of an airship loaded with copper (well copper and obsidifolk blood alloy) ingots flying away earlier in the day.
And then Grandfather decided to inform us we were no longer welcome and ejected us (albeit surprisingly gently).
We collected the mules, got back home with a whole bunch of not actually dead miners, and got to watch House Ueraven scramble to cover their arse and explain what happened. Not that they faced any real consequences of course.Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Sat Nov 27, 2021 10:04 am
]]>