The skeleton seems quite friendly actually! So that’s good. The heroes chat with her via a chalkboard, and she doesn’t seem to remember a lot and the last thing she remembers is like from 600 years ago. Oh also Skadi clocks the Alchemist as a woman just from the pelvic bone? So. Nice work?

The Alchemist

• was imprisoned here by Mallory, the titular Wizard of Glass
• is a researcher working with sirablood
• had a keystone that she happily gave the heroes
• left after they toppled the tower!
• recommended that the heroes not release those monsters in the vats, no thanks

It’s better than bad, it’s good

The heroes head up to hourglass room with the final keystone, fuse that thing together (into a keylog, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s stone), and get ready for the big flip. They try to harass the fire snake as it swims along the surface of the sand, but it soon ducks under.

Blikz bravely heads out to turn the key in the door, and Helewynn jumps in to defend him. Skadi and Buck take potshots at the fire snake until it is dead.

The heroes try a few ways to open the five-door with a five-key but without a five-notch. Blikz gets duck’d and Buck solves the damn thing and turns it to a position between five and one, thus solving the puzzle. Neat.

The heroes pop into Mallory’s final room, and it looks like a nice place. Suits of rusted armor. Junk everywhere. Books. Before anyone does anything Blikz casts detect magic, detecting that the stained glass window is an illusion! So he throws a ball bearing at it, and uh, this turns out to be like a glass construct with a sword.

Your ass is glass

The glass creature attacks the heroes, blinding Buck and Skadi momentarily, but Blikz is able to maneuver the creature with his thorn whip and allow Helewynn to get a lucky (1 in 8) thunder attack on him, disabling its healing. Once Buck and Skadi snap out of their blindness, Buck bashes the thing with his spear butt, also disabling its healing, and creating a crack in its armor that spiderwebs through its glass body, and Skadi fires a well-placed arrow right in the weakest point, shattering the creature. Honestly, everything went super well, and the gang starts to recover the treasure.

After realizing everything is bolted down, they jump out the window, feather falling all the way down as the top half of the tower crumbles around them. Tal is still alive somehow. The Alchemist, nowhere to be seen.

As the heroes drift down the river back home very late at night, they begin reading by torchlight.

Loot

The treasures follow:

Notebook of the Salt King written in three hands in three different languages. The original research contains schematics of arcane engineering. The annotations seemingly written by the Salt King are in a steady hand in a language unknown. In Celestial, Mallory (it is assumed to be him) obsessively writes on every page

GUILT IS A USELESS EMOTION. You did what you had to do. The salt dries all. They would have wanted you to have it. One step closer. One step out.

One book, untranslated.

Another, written in Elvish, about Vampires and how to fight them. Nice.

A rock.

A scroll of see invisibility.

A wooden mallard, which is given to Selawynn.

A telescope through which can be seen

1. an island covered in worms
2. an astral sea with a dead and dreadful creature floating in it
3. a white void with a humanoid creature covered in worms hanging by its feet from the unseen ceiling; it appears to be sleeping
4. a chamber deep underwater with what appears (to a modern eye) to be a large metallic hub with machinery that has three slots at three stations surrounding it; the machinery plugs into a gargantuan black cord that pulsates as if it is the tendril of an immense creature
5. a golden pyramidal room where 12 identical white-masked golden-robed creatures stand around a pool of black living tendrils; a tendril touches each of them, as if they feed from it; at various points when viewing this space, some or all of the 12 are missing, and will often return

A deck of divination cards.

A mirror, shattered and abandoned.

Whatever that is

The heroes hole up in a hideout that Helewynn knows about. Along the way, you run into some town guards, but Buck is able to smooth it out, though hears that Gert is looking for him and itching for a fight.

In order to go shopping for parchment to transcribe the Notebook of the Salt King, Blikz and Helewynn do a race swap, like Black. White. the race-swapping show executive produced by Ice Cube. But like not racist. More like a mall montage.

They buy 200 sheets of parchment, enough to write a novel, whatever that is, and successfully copy the whole book over the course of three days. Rough stuff. Skadi messes up 5 sheets, and they are left with 45 surplus sheets at the end of it.

The heroes arrive at Hespero’s villa. Must be nice. He got a fountain of a tiger, loot of gold, statues of panthers. Wow. Anyway, you manage to haggle with him and get 400 gp total. Nice work. He tells you to meet him at the Warped Pour in a few days for another job.

Oh he told you some lore about the [[ Salt King]] and the [[Sleeper Queen ]].

Haha, I know where your grandmother lives

After some more shopping montages and after Hespero gets cakes from Helewynn’s nan, the heroes meet up with the guy and get a contract to kill the fleecemane lion and retrieve its fleece.

Here’s what you know:

1. It’s in the fey wild
2. It’s magical but not fey
3. Try not to damage the fleece please!

Here’s what you don’t know:

1. Which part of the Snarlwood it lives in (north or south)
2. Who else lives in the Snarlwood
3. What’s with the Orphans Cemetery?
4. Whether the lion has minions

Feel free to ask around town for more info or to ask people on the road as you go out. Also keep in mind that this is a hunt, which may require camping in case you don’t find the creature right away, and that the woods are very dangerous.

The heroes manage to negotiate 1.5 hazard pay if someone falls unconscious to the lion.

On the way out, Hespero is stabbed in the back by Gert, who has come to harass Buck. Gert, angry at Hespero for wearing purple, an illegal color for all but the royalty, gets his face just fucking obliterated by a firebolt to the skull. Yikes. Buck puts away his weapon that he was going to use to defend Hespero and instead loots Gert under the pretense of disposing of the body. Buck recovers the dagger Gert stabbed Hespero with, untainted by blood.

Hespero leaves a pouch of silver for the barkeep’s trouble and hurries out the bar.

The heroes are in the Warped Pour with the contract to hunt the fleecemane lion in the Snarlwood.

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