Musical Chairs

The heroes speak to the Inkbassador who tries to set them up in the parlor. Upon their departure, the Kodama show up! Hurray! Oh there’s a lot of them. Oh god they’re everywhere. They point you not so subtly to the graveyard outside.

Once all of the telephone game is played out we have KB, Hobbes, and Nahk outside a mausoleum and Livius, Cas, Rho, and Sora being toured around with the Inkbassador, who gives them a tray of acorns and a pitcher of something. They also show the gang the special features of the house, like the faces that ooze out of the walls and do what you ask.

Owlicious ends up finding some cursed creature feeding on frozen corpses upstairs during the Inkbassador’s tour. So yeah, they leave.

Meanwhile, the Wildboyz + KB find a three headed skeleton man weeping at a tomb and after being not too pleased to see them, the three heads agree that these trespassers gotta go. Since the heroes have been told that this is Aramestes, they don’t question it and come up with a plan to lure it out of the mausoleum, which KB discards after realizing this guy is a spellcaster.

The gang of three and Rho run into the graveyard, pursued by a cursed creature! A vampire! Fun! She starts attacking Rho, who has a few swings and a misses.

“Just what dad ordered. Soft and moist he says. Five stars.”

Oh whoops Aramesteens is a summoner too. Some beef jerky zombies (what?) rise from the grave and start attacking KB. Nahk and Hobbes are still outside when suddenly more vampires pop out of the ground and start giving Nahk and Hobbes a hard time.

Aramesteens dimension doors right out of the mausoleum, leaving KB to fight five zombies at the same time. Bah gawd, the action economy alone.

Livius thwarts a cloudkill while Sora pops off some arrows. A third vampire pops up to back up the one that came out of the house. Casimir and Rho and Sora have their hands full with the vampires and eventually the zombies.

“I’m gonna feed one of your heads to one of your other heads”

Livius pops off a sickening radiance on Aramesteens (avoiding hitting Hobbes), but the dude fails and decides to succeed instead, summons more zombies (to distract Hobbes and act as undead human shields), teleports to Livius, and beats him up like he owes him money. And then walks away without provoking any opportunity attacks! Legendary monsters are so rude.

The three heads bickered all the while, like incels on a message board. They keep healing the zombies too.

The vampire attacking Nahk keeps trying to climb him, but no means no and longsword means so long, vampire, and she dead (again) and loving it.

Half-dead Livius tries to fireball his three-headed foe, but the dude straight backflips over the whole conflagration. It was pretty sick.

Honestly you all got some good hits off on Aramesteens, so when Casimir slipped in there, he just cleaved the dude in threes, in a manner that I guess you just kind of had to see because it was hard to explain, leaving one of the skulls alive. Not even mad because the guy really crushed it.

Yolo Yoldo

After Yoldo tells you his name, you deduce that the other two must be the other suitors, Sull and Temarian from Grandmother Nervepeelers spellbook. You learn from Yoldo the following:

Aramestes’s top generals: Temarian Yoldo and Sull were in love with Aramestes’s sister Natalya. They each proposed to Natalya in turn but she rejected each of them in turn. Aramestes discovered this, incensed that his top generals would pine over his sister and shirk their duties in the battlefield (each of them lost a battle directly after the proposals and they bickered in front of Aramestes one day), he cursed them to be bound together as one undead creature.

Livius says fuck you and yolos Yoldo into a stone cage that Rho fabricates. But the dude is surprisingly cooperative.

After Sora burns a slot trying to Knock open an unsealed coffin, the gang finds a couple of things:

You’ve retrieved:

• The Epic of Baatarkesh containing diagrams for Infusions
• A small black obsidian cube with a keyhole

It is late afternoon on day 29 since the Battle of Aurochs Island, the first engagement in the Argoti-Mineosi War.

The heroes are on Iskos, having defeated Yoldo, Temarian, and Sull, at the Castle of Aramestes.

Thirurl, Rox, and Goliath are escorting the rescued people from the witch’s hut to the village on the coast. The rest of the dogs are at the abandoned farmstead.

Four islands left: Iskos, Nistora, Dorost, and Charatos.

One beast left: The Skyswimmer.

You are on a demiplane, and Zulon is arriving on the material plane in two days.

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