Wizards and Wards
4 Tarsakh 1492, Waterdeep
Companions:
- Aurora Moonwhisper, an elven ranger
- Casindra “Casi” Naïlo, a half-elf warlock
- Devotion, a tiefling cleric
- Lekslufer Biswell, a half-elf rogue
- Phelan Bloodwave, a half-elf druid
- Popdaka “Pop” Veinfinder, a dwarven paladin
- Thava Norixius, a dragonborn sorcerer
As we gathered ourselves to leave the tavern for our next adventure, we found Ember surveying the second floor and let her know she should reach out to Davon Barrow—whom she already knew from their mutual guild membership—should she need to try to contact us before we’d returned. It was only then that Thokk finally spoke up about his concerns.
“So, last night was kind of a bummer, with like, all the killing and dead people and stuff?” he said in that odd way he had of making statements sound like questions by raising the pitch of his voice at the end of each phrase. “So I was wondering… if I could stay here and, like, help with the heavy lifting? Or like, I’m really good with wood working?”
I looked at Ember, knowing that some dwarves—though clearly not Pop—held some reservations about half-orcs due to millennia of conflicts between their people, but the auburn-haired woman seemed unperturbed. “Aye, ye be a strong ‘un, ain’t ye? An’ I bet ye read an’ write as well as ye speak so ye can help me wi’ me to-do lists and quote requests.”
“I have no idea what those things are,” Thokk began, “but righteous!” He pumped his fist as he exclaimed the last word.
A Fancy Flat
We made our way to the Sea Ward, the wealthiest district in all of Waterdeep, though we were sticking to the middle class housing along the outskirts of the ward, the sort of well-appointed townhouses and flats that would have been beyond my parents’ modest income when they lived in the city. The streets and sidewalks were clean, the cobbles were smooth and well-fitted, and the air was fragrant with sea salt and spice. Festivities of the Waukeentide holiday continued here as they had elsewhere in the city, and I was reminded as we passed a haberdashery with an eye-popping display of gaudy golden attire that tomorrow night would be Goldenight, and if there was anything we needed to purchase, we might find it at a bargain then.
The property manager lived in one of the ground floor flats of a building owned by the noble family who employed him. The Cassalanters owned three such buildings on Whim Street, and Saer Barrow bore responsibility for overseeing the 15 rental units therein in exchange for a guild-approved wage and what I presume to be greatly discounted rent for his own unit, if the lease agreement enjoyed by Freyot was any indication. A small, nervous man with a waxy complexion and thin moustache, Saer Barrow made it clear he didn’t want to be seen near the tiefling wizard’s flat when our party entered it, but he made a public show of checking the security of all the units on the row, during which he unlocked Freyot’s door. Once he was “satisfied” all was in order, he left for the Market, at which point we headed up the stairs to the covered porch of the second floor unit.
We peered through the windows, but the apartment beyond was dark, so no one reported anything more interesting than the barest glimpse of furniture. Since the door was already unlocked, Lek’s skill with lockpicks was not needed, so Pop insisted he take the lead.
“Isn’t this how you got knocked out by a mind flayer?” the half-elf pointed out.
Pop grinned, not at all bothered by the reminder of his close brush with death. “So? A dwarf has never seen a fight he didnae like—”
Devo spun away from the window he’d been peering through. “I’m going to follow closely behind Pop!”
“—an’ if he did nae like it, he did nae survive it!” Pop finished.
Lek held his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, if you walk in and then get knocked out, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Pop prudently pulled his shield off his back to protect himself with it, then opened the door, waited just a moment, then stepped through. Almost instantly, a warm white light flared to life, bathing the room beyond in its sudden brilliance and showing a small but well-appointed sitting area. From my vantage point still on the landing of the stairs, I could see little more than a green sofa and a painting on the wall above it, but they seemed to be of very fine quality.
With nothing more alarming happening than the sudden illumination, we began to trail into the small but luxurious flat, allow the door to close behind us to keep out the late afternoon chill. Though there was no fire in the fire place, the room was warm enough, perhaps due to some enchantment laid upon it, from heating radiating up from the flat below, or perhaps simply from the gathering of 8 living beings in a relatively small space. The light source was a small mage light which floated just above a brass sconce affixed to the wall next to the door.
“There’s not even any dust,” I noted aloud as I looked around in wonder. “If only Zalif Moonvale had managed that part when he warded Trollskull Manor against intruding insects and animals!”
“When was the last time someone was in this place?” Lek asked, looking around in confusion.
“Yesterday,” I reminded him, “when that scholar—Matreous, I think his name was—came in here, but aside from that… no one’s been seen here for months, as far as Saer Barrow was aware.”
The nobleman wandered into the kitchenette of the flat and begin poking through the cupboards—another mage light flared to life in that room as he entered—and the others took that as their cue to scatter throughout the flat, additional sconces creating their own little balls of light. As Lek continued to poke around in the kitchen, Pop and Devo investigated what seemed to be a bedroom to the left of the entrance, while Aurora and Casi wandered into the room behind the sofa. Phelan followed behind them, but stopped to look at the statues on the mantle above the empty fireplace, and Thava started to follow until Lek caught her attention by noting that the book on the dinette table was titled Bahamut: the Platinum Dragon.
“Not that I want to assume all dragons know something about all dragons,” he said casually as he crossed through the sitting area on his way to the final room to the left of the fireplace.
Similarly intrigued by the title—odd reading for a human or tiefling wizard—I debated whether to follow her in there or remain where I could generally keep tabs on everyone when Devo yelled out, “There’s some… ‘spider web action’ going on with some of these books!”
Color-Coordinated
I immediately began to cast detect magic, and could hear Devo and Thava doing the same. Casi, presumably, was doing whatever it was that made her eyes glow. I recalled my mother’s description of an older spell called arcane sight that had that effect, but I didn’t think what she could do was exactly the same thing as that.
As expected, the room around me lit up in an array of colors, though they were in a very neat and orderly pattern of interlocking spells that covered the exterior boundaries of the flat. Spellcasters who receive any amount of formal training in the Art are taught that one of the terms used to describe magic itself is the Weave, and in the workings of magic laid upon the flat, the Weave was a beautiful tapestry of abjuration, enchantment, illusion magic. The wall sconces were unsurprisingly emanating evocation magic, and nearly all of the soft surfaces within the room—the rugs, the sofa, the bit of the bedding I could see through the door—were steeped in illusion magic.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Thava reach for the book on the table—it was glowing faintly orange with illusion magic—only for her hand to pass straight through it. Another flicker of movement caught my eye and I saw Devo peeling back the bedding to examine the mattress in confusion, while Pop looked Devo up and down with his fists on his hips, looking surprised and confused himself, so I could only assume I had missed something.
Devo dropped the covers, shrugged, then walked through the door and abruptly stopped. “Purple?” he asked.
“Purple?” I echoed. Purple indicated conjuration magic, and my haversack was a trio of portable extradimensional pockets. “My pack—?”
“Purple,” Devo repeated, pointing at something beyond my shoulder which was not my pack.
I turned around, and sure enough, the stone archway which separated the front sitting area from the back area with the fireplace was glowing quite strongly purple, promising powerful conjuration magic. Nearby, a book resting innocently on the table next to the sofa also glowed purple and blue.
Devo walked over to the book and started to pick it up, then gave a grunt and visibly strained to lift it.
The others were drawn by our exclamations. “What are you all staring at?” Lek demanded.
“The colors!” Devo exclaimed, trying to hold the book out for everyone to see it, but struggling under what seemed to be an improbable amount of weight for its size. The cover bore an embossed illustration of an imposing bald-headed human with a well-kept mustache and goatee who looked very familiar to me, but whose name I couldn’t recall at the time.
“What colors?” Lek asked. “Everything’s green!”
“Detect magic,” Casi explained. “Magical auras on everything.”
“Is this who we’re looking for?” Devo asked, indicating the face on the cover.
“Fistandia is a woman, and her partner is a tiefling,” I answered.
“So that’s a ‘no’,” he sighed. He struggled to try to open the book, but as heavy as it apparently was, he could scarcely do more than flip back the cover to expose the title page, which proclaimed the book to be The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces. “Could someone—?”
Pop stepped forward to take the book, but it proved heavier than he expected, and it dropped to the floor with a loud thud. Devo tried to pick up the book again, but instead only shoved it across the floor. Apparently deciding it wasn’t worth the strain, he just pushed it further across the floor, nudging it against the stone arch.
Nothing happened.
“I’m going to the little half-elves’ room,” Lek said, and walked through the inactive portal.
Nothing happened.
Leaning over the extremely heavy book, Devo flipped open the first few pages, and then looked up in confusion. “I can’t read this. Can anyone else read this?”
Thava leaned over the tome. “It looks like it’s Draconic, but it’s not quite right.” Together, she and Devo grabbed the book and slid it away from the archway back toward the center of the sitting room so that she didn’t have to lean over it quite so awkwardly to look at the text. However, after only a few moments, Thava shook her head. “I can’t read it, either: it’s mixed with some kind of shorthand.”
Recalling how my mother sometimes used a unique shorthand in her own research journals, I started to volunteer, but once again Casi surprised me by offering her own assistance in the matter. Sitting down on the rug, she leaned over the book and began to slowly work her way through the text, apparently gaining in confidence and speed as she figured out the shorthand. My spell to see magical auras soon faded, and I decided against recasting it until I thought I needed it again.
There were two authors to the book, Casi announced a few minutes later, presumably Fistandia and Freyot from the way the two flirted with one another as often as they shared their findings and their day-to-day activities and observations. The others in our party soon lost interest in the wait while Casi did her research and began to wander around the flat. Lek emerged from the bathroom to poke again at the statues above the fireplace, while Phelan let out a yawn that reminded us he’d slept very little the night before. Though he considered taking advantage of the seemingly-unused bed, he instead sat down in front of the fireplace, and seemed to drop into a light doze.
“Only one way to know if any of this is true,” Casi announced a short time later. “The magic I’m using to help me translate… it just translates it, it doesn’t tell me what the original word was. Thava, what are the Draconic words for ‘day’ and ‘night’?”
“Kear,” Thava answered, “and thurkear.” As soon as the second word was spoken, every mage light in the flat went out. “Kear!” the sorceress exclaimed, and the lights all came back on, startling Phelan out of his nap.
Casi nodded. “So, what I’m reading in here is accurate, at least! The two writers tell each other things like, ‘oh, I changed the password for the lights to night and day‘ so I guess they weren’t expecting anyone to just walk in here and be able to read their shorthand in Draconic.”
Several more long minutes passed before Casi found another password to test: ixeni, the Draconic word for ‘little flame’, or rather, any flame which is not the product of a dragon’s breath. This word caused the fireplace to magically light itself, startling Phelan out of another doze, but apparently this time there was no corresponding passphrase which quenched the fire.
Hoping there was a pattern of other obviously simple Draconic words used as commands, Thava decided to try various Draconic terms like “reveal” and “open” to see if anything would affect the portal arch, but again, nothing happened.
“Have you tried ‘pretty please’?” Lek asked sarcastically. “That tends to work! Have we tried threatening it?”
“The last time I tried to threaten someone, I said I was going to eat them,” Thava answered, baring her impressively sharp teeth. “I was informed we don’t eat people, we don’t eat pets… I am still learning. It’s been a bit since I left the temple. I was very sheltered.”
Lek didn’t seem to know how to take that. “It’s… okay. What if we try intimidation?”
I grinned inwardly, wondering exactly how Lek intended to intimidate a stone arch.
Casi didn’t wonder, she just marked her current page in the book and flipped to the last page. Or, at least, she tried. It looked like no matter how many pages she turned, there always seemed to be more. “Extradimensional book,” she sighed, and returned to the page she had marked.
Several minutes later, she stabbed her finger down on the page. “The password is ‘green’!”
“Green?” echoed more than one person.
“Just green?” repeated Lek, incredulously.
“Achuak!” exclaimed Thava, automatically translating the word to Draconic, and I could see Lek begin to say the same odd benediction he’d repeated when he’d had difficulty understanding Ember’s thick brogue.
His words were drowned out by a rush of magical energy as a shimmering green portal appeared in the stone doorframe, though it was translucent enough that we could still see Phelan and Lek on the other side when it finally settled into place.
“I’m goin’ through!” Pop declared, and Devo and Thava practically dove in front of him to keep the dwarf from barging through the glowing barrier without the party discussing it first.
“What did you do?!” Lek demanded.
“What do you think I’ve been studying the book for?!” Casi shot back, standing up and stretching her legs.
“I don’t know!” he yelled. “What did you—”
“Well, I’m gonna go through it!” Pop repeated, and pushed easily past the dragonborn and the tiefling.
“Then I’m going to follow him…” Devo said with a sigh, and he did just that. Shrugging her shoulders, Thava followed.
Seeing her long-time travel companion disappear through the portal, Aurora was quick on her heels. Finishing shaking out her limbs, Casi also stepped into the portal, leaving only Lek, Phelan, and I remaining in the flat.
I gestured toward the glowing barrier. “Shall we?” I suggested, then stepped through it myself.
The Bigot
The other side of the portal was a little bit of a let-down, in that it wasn’t a truly exotic locale, and yet it was also like nothing I’d ever seen before. The ceiling arched to fifteen feet overhead, giving the room an airy feel even though there were no windows to be seen. The space was illuminated with the same kind of mage lights as the flat in Waterdeep, and the walls seemed to be crafted of the same sand-colored stone as the archway that had produced the portal into this place.
Two odd sizzling noises behind me announced the arrival of Phelan and Lek, the last of our number to to pass through the portal. I turned around to see that on this side, the portal was set within the frame of a set of open double doors, but instead of seeing through the portal to whatever lay beyond the door, it instead showed the burning fireplace within the apartment we’d just departed.
Footsteps sounded on wood, and I turned back around as a middle-aged man in scholar’s robes reached the bottom of the stairs. He had gray-streaked hair cropped to just below his ears and a well-trimmed beard, and the expression on his face showed he was just as surprised to see us as we were to see him.
His surprise quickly shifted to disgust as his eyes darted over the members of our party, and the reason for his sudden hostility quickly became apparent. “Oh, wonderful, another of you devils. Out of my way!” He spoke a single word—it wasn’t Draconic, but it was one I vaguely recognized as a common-enough arcane activation term for a magical item. He faded out, and as we looked around for him, he reappeared a second later just behind us, slipping through the portal as the double doors began to swing shut behind him.
Thava jumped forward and grabbed one of the doors before it closed, but I could see that the portal was beginning to fade.
“I’ll go with ye if ye want, but I’d rather stay here an’ check this place out,” Pop admitted.
“What if we leave a magical person in here, and then we have one of the magical people go out there?” Lek suggested, by which he likely meant someone who could speak Draconic. By my count, there were three of us who could read the language, but only two who could also speak it. “We’d have things covered, ’cause the door is closing!” The door was not, in fact, closing, but the portal was visibly fading from view. “Who’s going through, who’s not?”
“I’m going through!” Aurora and Phelan chorused, gathering near the door.
“Pop and I want to stay,” Lek announced.
“Well, then I’ll stay with you,” Devo said.
“No!” Lek cried out. “You gotta fight the… the… the demon-hater!”
“He’s a demon-hater, but I don’t know if I should follow him!” Devo protested. “If you guys are staying, then I’m going to stay with you!”
Lek swore in Elvish, but his imprecations were cut off by a scream from beyond the portal. “I’m going in,” Lek decided, changing his mind, and he started for the portal.
“If somebody’s screaming, I’m going to try save ’em,” Pop agreed, and he also started forward. There was a faint flare of light from beyond the portal, but then the first of our group began to step into it.
“Is anyone staying?” Thava asked.
“Well, we know the password to activate the portal, so we might as well all go and then we can come back again,” I suggested, and she nodded in agreement.
Returning to the flat was less comfortable than the trip to the extradimensional mansion had been, as we all arrived crammed into the small area by the fireplace. The fire was now out, and the portal itself soon vanished, leaving us to try to make space for one another in the crowded chamber and spilling out into the bathroom and library on either side.
It was until the portal vanished that we found the body.
A Mysterious Death
The stranger was crumpled in the center of the center of the sitting room, blood pooling around him on the floor and soaking into his robes. It was the first time I noticed the red badge sewn onto the garment: an upraised fist with an eye on it. The gauntleted hand with an eye on it was a symbol of Helm, I thought, but I’d always seen it as an open hand and not a clenched fist.
Pop knelt next to him and examined the back of his neck. “Looks like he was stabbed by something small an’ pointy.”
“Did someone kill him,” Aurora asked, “or something?” She and Casi exchanged worried looks and began to look around the small chamber, the latter’s eyes beginning to glow as she used her magical senses.
Thava huffed and nodded her head toward Devo. “He was kind of a jerk, though.”
“He definitely hated me,” the tiefling agreed.
“He was poisoned!” Pop exclaimed. “He was stung to death by an imp.”
Devo’s florid hue paled ever-so-slightly. “Imps can make themselves invisible!”
Pop closed his eyes. “I dinnae sense it anywhere nearby… though I do get a strange sense when I’m near Devo.”
“From me?!” Devo squeaked. “Because I’m… devilish?”
Pop shrugged. “Probably?”
I backed up against the fireplace and the strange patch of sulfurous-smelling soot that blackened the hearth. “Imps can use magical flames to travel between the Material Plane and the Nine Hells, so hopefully this particular imp… went home?”
“I feel like there’s something he didn’t want us to know,” Phelan said waving a hand past my face at the dead scholar, “but I guess we’ll never know now.”
Ordinarily, I was fine with confined spaces, but this was getting a little ridiculous. “Could we… spread this out a little?”
There was a confused scrum as everyone attempted to make some space and spread out into the sitting area, including an apology from Thava of “that’s not my foot: it’s not scaly”, a delighted “I’m not crowded, yay!” from Aurora, and a startled “who touched me?” from Lek.
Now that he was beside the corpse, Lek checked over the body and found absolutely nothing of any interest aside from a holy symbol of Helm around the dead man’s neck. I recalled he’d been carrying a satchel when he passed us in the extradimensional mansion, but it was now missing, and his pockets were turned inside out, suggesting they had been hastily picked clean, likely by the now-missing imp. Further, it reasoned the magical token containing the misty step spell that had put the scholar behind our group in the mansion had also been how he had shifted to the sitting room from the fireplace when he exited the portal, and it stood to reason the imp had likewise used the magical item to shift back to the fireplace in order to exit this plane before our return.
Curse that devilish thief: that item might have been useful to us! Well, not that we’d have killed him for it, but if the imp hadn’t robbed him, or if he’d attacked us otherwise unprovoked because of whatever prejudice he held toward tieflings…
“Pop was right: we should’ve stayed back in the magical place,” Lek sighed, seemingly disappointed at the lack of loot.
Getting Back to Beyond
Pop straightened proudly. “Let’s open the door and head back that way.”
Lek bowed toward the dragonborn sorceress. “If Thava does not mind…”
“Achuak!” she pronounced once everyone was out of the way of the portal.
“One thing, one thing!” Casi protested as the party started to move toward the rippling surface. “Before we do that, can we make sure that the password works both ways?”
“Do you want me to cross through first on my own and try it?” Thava asked.
“If ‘green’ doesn’t work, maybe try ‘purple’,” Lek suggested. “Because this side everything is green, but that side, everything is purple…”
“Let me go with ye to protect ye,” Pop insisted, hefting his shield, “an’ then we’ll come back.”
A few hiccups were found in that plan, but were quickly hashed out: Pop and Thava would go through, wait for the portal to close on its own, then would try to open it from their end using the password, and if they hadn’t returned after a few minutes after the closing of the portal, I would speak the Draconic word “green” to re-open the portal and allow them back through.
It occurred to me after they stepped through the portal where the first fault in our plan lay: there was no Draconic word for “purple”. However, since the word for “green” was derived from the Draconic word for a green dragon, I hoped that Thava’s instinct would be to go for the closest equivalent, and instead name “amethyst”; though gem dragons are exceedingly rare on Toril, they are reputedly more numerous on other worlds.
Five terribly long minutes passed with no sign of our companions, so I spoke achuak aloud. The portal opened and Thava and Pop returned from the extradimensional mansion unharmed. Casi breathed a sigh of relief, but immediately dove back to the Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, hoping to find something she might have missed before.
“I can’t open it from that side,” Thava admitted, “so I’m going to need a doorman to assist. So can… Casi poke her head back through every little bit, or…?”
“I dinnae like the idea of splitting the group,” Pop grumbled.
Devo walked over to the front door and stepped out onto the balcony, then came back inside. “Everything’s quiet outside, so I don’t think the imp went out there. I really do think it used the fireplace to escape to the Lower Planes and is gone.”
After several more minutes studying the book, Casi rolled her eyes and muttered, “Wizards. If there’s a clue to the password for the portal on that side, it’s on that side.”
We discussed our options further, then agreed to go and inform Saer Barrow of what we’d found so far. Casi and Phelan accompanied me to the landlord’s office, where he was surprised to learn about the extradimensional portal located within Freyot’s flat, but he noted that it certainly explained the odd flashes of green light that were occasionally seen through the windows. Upon learning of the imp-slain scholar, however, he seemed oddly unfazed, and promised to handle the matter discretely through the City Watch. He made a note of the password for the portal—he was not fluent in Draconic, so I did my best to give him a phonetic spelling—and then promised us an additional five days before he’d inform his employers and ask them to send for the Watchful Order of Magists and Protectors.
With that matter settled, we returned to the flat, and caught up the party on our new timeline. Knowing that someone would come looking for us in five days if we didn’t return on our own, we all headed back through the portal into the extradimensional mansion, though we hoped it would take far less time than that to find the answers we sought.
With the hostile scholar gone, we took a moment to look around, and it didn’t take a dwarf’s keen eye for masonry to realize the stonework wasn’t natural. Several paintings adorned the walls, and doors were set in the walls at the ends of each hall and on the left-hand wall of the right-hand corridor and on the right-hand wall of the left-hand corridor, some of which stood open a few inches. As we gathered our bearings, a fluffy black cat descended the stair case, regarded our party with imperious disinterest, then disappeared into the door nearest the staircase, from which wafted the faint smells of cooking food and the sounds of clattering cookware.
The scholar was gone, but we were clearly not alone in this place.
Art Appreciation
My companions’ eyes were drawn to the paintings on either side of the foyer, which were large abstract images of shaded gradients in dizzying swirls of color. Both paintings were lighter at the top and darker at the bottom, with the left painting transitioning from red to purple to blue from the left to the right, and the right painting transitioning from blue to green to yellow from left to right. Each was a riotous swirl of color, though the strokes were larger and more dramatic in the yellow part of the right-hand painting and small and regular in the red part of the left-hand painting.
“What about yellow?” said Lek suddenly.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“What if the password’s ‘yellow’?”
“There is no word for ‘yellow’ in Draconic,” I answered. “Though I suppose we could try ‘gold’ or ‘topaz’…”
“‘Citrine’!” he added.
Casi shook her head. “I don’t think it’s another color word; I think that would be too obvious, and that doesn’t seem like their style.”
“Wizards,” Pop huffed.
“Wizards,” came the echo from several others.
And that suddenly seemed to make what the painting represented click in Devo’s mind. “They’re a representation of the Outer Planes! The left-hand painting represents the lawful-aligned planes—good at the top and evil at the bottom, transitioning toward the neutral planes—while the right-hand painting begins with the neutral planes and transitions toward the chaotic-aligned planes.”
Lek scoffed. “Terrible work. Not very appealing at all.”
“I think that’s subjective!” Devo protested.
“I thought it might be a clue fer openin’ the door,” Pop sighed. “Wizards! Let’s search this place.” He marched across the hall and poked his head through the partly-open door next to the stairs, though on the opposite side of the stairs from the one the cat had entered moments earlier.
There was a soft “mrrrp!” sound, then another fluffy black cat appeared in that door frame, winding its way around Pop’s feet and doing its best to deposit fur on his legs, though I doubt it was very successful given the polished metal greaves fastened to his boots.
Lek nimbly avoided the cat’s swishy black plume of a tail and squeezed past Pop to check out the room, which from my position in the foyer appeared to be a small library of some kind. Devo, on the other hand, knelt down on the ground to give the cat a thorough scratch behind its whiskers, and from the satisfied purr which soon emanated from the cat’s throat, he’d made a friend.
“Casi! Thava! Can you come in here please!” Lek called out from within the room, having apparently found something of interest, but apparently in a language he couldn’t read, and possibly in more of the arcane shorthand. I stepped closer to the door so I could see in better, and noted as the dashing rogue handed what appeared to be a journal to the arcane pair before he picked up a letter that had been beneath a crystal paperweight and began to read it aloud:
“My dearest Freyot,
“The telescope puzzle was simply delightful! Of course, it makes accessing the restricted archive much more lengthy and difficult, but it does keep the cats out!‘
“I’ve been thinking about changing the passphrases used for the portals again: remember how much fun you had piecing together the books and statues? And then there was that time you sneezed and accidentally set off the quick escape password, which led to the creation of your brilliant dust-be-gone spell!
“As a first step, I’ve changed the password for returning to your flat in Waterdeep, and I’ve hidden the clues throughout the mansion. And no, asking the cats or the homunculi won’t help you this time: they can’t read!“
The trio all chortled at that, apparently finding it amusing that the writer—Fistandia, it seemed—would find it necessary to caution her partner that the cats were unable to read.
“I’ll give you only one clue: look first at the daughters of mystery.
“All my love, Fia“
Lek put down the letter, then began to look examine the bookshelves, letting out an exasperated noise when he realized fully two-thirds of the books in the room were clearly more journals. “Have fun, Casi,” he said drily, waving his hand at the shelf after determining that the books contained more of the same shorthand. “Casi, Thava, best of luck to you… I’m going to go find a cat…”
Devo, hearing that, decided to pick up the cat he’d been petting and ventured down the hallway to the right, but as he passed the open door where the first feline had vanished, the one he carried wiggled loose of his hold and likewise slipped into that room. Devo and Pop pushed the door open, and firelight spilled out into the hallway.
I blessed my father for the excellent ears his heritage bestowed upon me as I caught a tiny, high-pitched voice asking, “How can we be of help to our honored guests? Cooking? Cleaning? Mending your clothes, perhaps?”
“Can you give us information?” Devo asked.
“Oh, yes, yes, we can give you information! You are honored guests of our masters!”
“Yes, we are,” Devo lied unconvincingly, though whatever small creature he was speaking to apparently didn’t need to be convinced.
And that was probably true: we were in its masters’ house, and since its masters were powerful wizards, anyone who had gained access to this place had to be a guest… right?
“What are you?” Devo asked.
“We are homonculi!” a slightly different but no-less-pitchy voice answered. “Made by our masters!”
The tiefling nodded, apparently understanding now that the small creatures before him were created by the wizards who inhabited the mansion and had been spoken of in Fistandia’s letter to Freyot. “Do you know the password to get back out of here?” he asked hopefully.
“No, no! We’re not allowed out of here!” came the expected reply. “We live here, and we serve our masters!”
Devo’s face fell, but then he brightened. “What are the cats’ names?”
“The cats? The cats are Soot and Coal and… ah, shoot, what was the other one… Wait, that was the other one: Chute!”
Devo had additional questions about the cats—where the third one was and how to tell three nearly-identical black cats apart—so I took this moment to survey the others of the party: Thava wanted to investigate the stairs up to the upper floor, though she promised to be right back down, Lek and Aurora were now at the far end of the right-hand corridor, and seemed to be planning to open that door, Pop was chuckling to himself as he stared up at one of the paintings—I couldn’t see the subject from where I stood—and Phelan was behind Devo, peering curiously into the kitchen.
“Is there anything dangerous here that we should look out for?” Devo asked.
“There should not be anything dangerous here!” one of the homunculi protested. “The masters take care of everything!”
“There was a man in here—” Devo began, and was immediately cut off by the second homunculus.
“Ooooh, that man was mean!” it proclaimed.
“Yeah, he was mean!” the tiefling agreed. “Do you know who he was?”
“He said his name was Matreous,” that second one replied, then repeated, “but he was mean!“
“Did he say why, uh, what he was doing here, what he wanted?”
“He said that he came to look for Master Freyot, but Master Freyot was not home!” explained the calmer homunculus.
Devo then pressed the homunculi for the whereabouts of their masters, but the tiny creatures had no knowledge of where the wizards had gone, nor any real understanding of the passage of time to accurately describe for how long Freyot and Fistandia had been away from the mansion
While straining to follow this conversation, I was also attempting to keep track of Casi as she muttered to herself while flipping through the journal she studied. Having apparently found something of interest in it, she slipped the journal into her pack, then began to search the shelves, opening journals at random, scanning the contents of the pages, then returning the volume to its place on the shelf before finally skipped to the first journal in the collection, seating herself in the chair in the corner the cat had recently vacated.
In splitting my attention thusly, I lost track of everyone else, and with Casi now settled, I was startled by the sudden sound of splintering wood, a dwarven roar of outrage, and Thava racing down the stairs and turning toward the now-open doors at the far end of the right-hand corridor.