Run 3 - 20210302
In the attic that we just broke into, there’s a big wasp nest and a door that some lifestealers just ran into.
I hear a bar ‘clink’ down on that door as a wasp comes out. I move in and get into a defensive stance; Chad moves behind me with his polearm, and we are basically waiting for the wasp to come play. Nyla hits it with a blast of light. The first one comes out and tries to go for Nyla, but Chad hacks it down with his halberd. The second one comes out and stabs me in the chest with its stinger, and for a moment I feel a horrible burning, but it must not have triggered too much venom on the first attack because aside from a scratch it didn’t do too much.
D.va comes out of the shattered doorway and sends a lightning bolt into the wasp trying to stab me, and there’s this sharp ‘snap’ and a charred crumpled wasp drops onto me. I’m fine with shit getting zapped so that’s fine.
I hear a clanking sound just after I get the wasp dropped on me that sounds a lot like someone’s raising the portcullis. Hopefully it’s not the goblins deciding that we’re chumps and they’re going to claimjump, that would be sad all around. We’ve got windows looking out over the causeway, though, so that should work out OK.
More wasps come out - well, one. And even though all three of me, Caleb, and Chad are waiting for it, only Chad hits it, and it manages to get out of the nest and start flying up, but Nyla manages to take it out with another blast of light. Its friend comes out, though, and stings at Chad, but fails. Not like the one that managed to get all tangled up in my chest hair. D.va tries to hit it with a bolt of lightning, but fails on this one. Close, though, everything tastes like ozone for a bit.
Caleb tries to take out the wasp, but fails; I stab it, fail to punch it, but then handspring up into it with both boots and finish a flip into slamming down on the wasp with both feet, killing it. Chad moves over to the window to see if someone’s running across the causeway. Out the window, he can see a yardarm for getting supplies up here, and across the causeway there is a picture-perfect hill with a beautiful wizard’s tower on it, but nobody seems to be heading over there.
The nest doesn’t seem to have anything else large and buzzing, so we decide to do the whole “Caleb kicks in the door with a crowbar wedged in it” trick again and bust into the next room. The door continues, and barely misses the person waiting for us in the hallway behind the door. Several other figures are down the hallway, and now we’re going to mess them up, it’s more of these lifestealers anyway.
Looks like a pair of archers and a guy with a sword, maybe some more. Caleb gets shot twice, and I toss a dart to try to help him out, but before Chad can get in there to help the bowmen start shooting again. One of them gets a real good shot in, but there’s a large cracking sound and it looks like the arrow breaks just after it breaches Caleb’s armor, and doesn’t skewer him like it would have skewered me.
Chad goes in and hacks at this dude that’s in the way of us getting to the bowmen, but misses. Nyla runs in, gets right next to Caleb, casts a thunderwave, and then bails back to ‘safety’, taking a swipe from the swordsman in the way. She did manage to smack the shit out of the two in the back, though.
D.va tried to toss some lightning in a good direction, but doesn’t manage to hit anything, and Caleb gets stabbed again. Caleb’s not looking great at this point. Caleb manages to stick his axe in the guy, though, smashing into his skull and removing it and him from being our problem. He takes a minute and gets his wind back as I run in past him to take out the two bow assholes before they shoot again. I stab one of them through the neck and try to kick the other one in the nuts, but I also take time to give Caleb a couple of quick hits in the fourth and fifth meridian pressure points to stop his bleeding real quick. Chad runs in as well, gets cut by that last guy, and misses them, and then Nyla manages to hit them with an eldritch blast, well enough to drop them.
Someone runs up the stairs and shoots Chad in the gut with a hand crossbow bolt while we’re all gawking at this, and then flees back down the stairs. D.va has some kind of primal urge to pounce on fleeing prey, and goes after the person going down the stairs. Right after that we hear this loud, thunderous meow from downstairs.
Caleb heads down the stairs to back D.va up. I check the room one of them was standing in front of real quick - looks like officer quarters, trashed, there might be a long-dead body on the floor but i don’t see anything living in there - and then head downstairs, jump down the stairs, and throw a dart at the more injured of the … two … lifestealers that D.va seems to have found down here. Chad takes the long way down the stairs, and comes up behind us with Nyla.
The guy with the hand crossbow hits D.va with a bolt, almost dropping her if it weren’t for Caleb’s psionic shielding, and then D.va shocks the hell out of the one dude still in the way while hand crossbow dude manages to flee into the next room, again.
Caleb runs out of the corridor and into a side room right as we hear some massive screaming from presumably that hand crossbow guy, so of course I have to go see what is up. We figure out that he … ran straight into a gelatinous cube. right into one.
We decide to retreat, collect ears and loot and shit. Go back to the officer’s quarters, check out that corpse. We’re all pretty injured but we figure we should check this out first before resting. It looks like the lifestealers just decided to defile and … kick … a mummified body that was in here. The mummified body in here, D.va thinks, was killed by whatever had rapidly aged and desiccated the rest of this location. And the body was reaching for something … in a back corner of the room. Which looks like it is just stone, but then we go check to see what is there, and we find a secret panel, with a large number of things.
[We take a short rest.]
We help ourself to the cool magic stuff and then take a bit of a rest, because most of us have gotten pretty beaten up by all this shit. Also, that accounts for 11 of 11 lifestealers, so maybe we should go get those ears traded in at the First Bank of Rando Goblins.