Evermoor Way III: Olostin’s Hold-Part Deux
…The door opened so T’Sai, Thaminor, Pix, and Sigismund could emerge from the secret hallway and join Molish in the tea room. Just then, a thud was heard in the hallway! Rushing that way while calling out for Reynard, Molish found the ranger laying unconscious next to the griffon statue… a faint green mist swirled in the air. Seeing nothing around, the party moved the tiefling into the tea room and Sig started tending to him.
Wanting to finish the battle with the demonic little doll, Molish entered the dusty but otherwise empty dining room. As soon as he stepped over the threshold, however, the air grew warm and the room came to life: ghostly apparitions appeared seated at the once empty table. A large dinner party was being held, as a roasted hog materialized along with plates of all varieties of food. Jugs of foaming ale were being shared between ghostly companions, seemingly enjoying themselves and chatting merrily. A large spectral human man stood at the head of the table, saying nothing, but with a serious scowl cemented over his face as he overlooked his guests.
After looking around the room and finding to trace of the doll, Molish approached the man at the head of the table. When he tried to address the apparition, the room abruptly became quiet; all talking and laughter ceased. Every ghost in the room was facing Molish, and the man at the head of the table turned toward him. “You should not be here! LEAVE THIS PLACE!!!” he screamed, as he suddenly rushed through Molish and disappeared. Then, as quick as the party had started, the room was empty, dark and cold again. The ghosts were nowhere to be seen.
After a moment to shake off the chill, Molish continued his search. Checking the single door in the southeast, he found a pantry with a dumbwaiter that apparently connected to a kitchen on the second floor. Next, he opened the large double doors to the south into the mansion’s ballroom. Another chandelier hung from the high ceiling, and an old dance floor stretched out before him. Molish was joined by T’Sai, Thaminor, and Pix in time to witness another scene from the past:
Materializing from thin air, he saw the man who had rushed at him in the dining room appear once more. He seemed younger somehow, as if this was a vision into an earlier time in his life.
A beautiful woman entered from nothingness, dressed in a flowing black gown, her eyes dark and dangerous. He held her and looked into those eyes, and she looked back into his. “We will disappear, just the two of us, my love” the man says dreamily.
“Oh, General Montharthas, but what of your wife? And we have work to do” she said, seemingly reminding him.
“Never mind her, she will cope. And your army of undead… Let us not talk of this tonight” he replied… as their apparitions faded and the room was once again empty.
A large, mirrored folding door led to another area on the east wall. The apparitions gone and the ballroom empty, Molish opened the mirrored doors to an alfresco area containing a fenced off private swimming pool, with three ruined deck chairs at the southern end of the pool. The water remaining in the pool was still and algae green, nothing could be seen beneath its surface. Every now and then, a ripple emerged from its depths. There were multiple skeletal remains around the sides of the pool. T’Sai noticed a gleaming, bejeweled sword laying under a skeleton on the deck on the far side of the pool. As he tried to make his way around the water towards it, a Beholder Zombie rose from the murky green water!
Leaping on top of the undead sphere, T’Sai drove his short sword into the top, only to be hit with a ray of magic from one of the eye stalks. Thaminor, Molish, and Pix began attacking with spells and weapons alike. T’Sai sliced off one of the eye stalks, and leapt away, only to be blasted with another eye ray. Firing from the cover of the ballroom, Pix finally took the abomination down, its undead body falling apart as it fell back into the water. T’Sai grabbed the longsword, and Molish patched him up a bit before the party moved on.
Having finished covering the first floor, and still no sign of the doll, the party returned to the stairwell at the heart of the mansion. With the top blocked by the gate, They ventured down to the basement. The door at the bottom was unlocked, leading to a 20′ x 20′ room. There was an incomplete flesh golem lying on an operating table, missing only hands, feet and a brain. Three large buckets holding many numbered feet, hands, and brains sat beside the side wall. On a desk along the closest wall, Thaminor found a lab diagram with notes scribbled over it. One of the notes is an incomplete “formula” that allowed Molish to identify the correct body parts to use to complete assembling the golem. A large mechanism with a crank and coils sits behind it with rods connected to each of the golem’s temples, and another machine sat nearby with four number dials. After some debate and experimentation with the machines, Pix reattached the body parts that Molish had identified. Thaminor pulled the lever and the air energized, static energy tingled around the room, and the now completed golem began to move. It awoke, straight away sniffing the air. Moving quicker than expected, it stood and moved towards the machine with the dials and entered a combination. Standing guard on the first level, T’Sai saw the gate blocking access to the second floor retract into the wall.
As the party moved up to the upper level of the mansion, they found a soft green glow flickering in the hallway, but there seemed to be no source for the light. They followed the hallway to the right, coming to an unlocked door at the end. Molish opened the door to a room beyond that appeared to be a small office, with a writing desk sat in the south-western corner and a single door on the eastern wall.
Behind the desk, a skeleton was busy at work writing down something in a translucent, ethereal ledger book.
The skeleton looked up at Molsih with empty eye sockets, its jaw starting to move as a hauntingly high pitched voice said “ahh, you are here! He has been waiting for you!… You may proceed Advisor Gertrude!”
From behind, the party felt something evil and dark trespass through their bodies, as the aspect of a dangerously beautiful woman with dark and deadly eyes walked straight through them, a smirk on her ghostly smile. She walked straight through the closed door on the opposite wall and disappeared, whilst the skeleton clerk went back to his duties.
The room beyond held a long bench along the northern wall. On the southern wall, two large oak doors stood closed. A tree was carved upon the door, leaves carved at the end of each branch that were engraved with the names of souls long gone from this world and a range of dates underneath their name. The names appeared from the earliest dates at the top to those later further down. The last name on the tree says “General Oscar Montarthas.” As the party looked around the room, it appeared empty at first. Suddenly, however, the scene shifted:
A small ethereal girl, no more than 5 or 6, was suddenly sitting on the long bench along the northern wall, seemingly waiting patiently. The dark and deadly-looking woman appeared then, smiling at the child, and offered her a children’s doll. The girl smiled with joy as the woman dissolved into the etherealness once more.
The child’s smile turned to pain and anguish, as blood soaked stab wounds began to appear on her silky white dress. She fell limp and tumbled to the floor, before disappearing. The doll was left lying on the previously empty bench.
Molish could see clearly that it was the same doll that had attacked him earlier. Now, however, its dress had stitches in the middle, and the left leg looked as if it had been glued back together… like someone repaired the doll after the previous fight. The doll held a knife in its hand and wore an evil grin on its face. It looked up and locked eyes with Molish, letting out a haunting bout of laughter as it leapt and attacked! The doll ran back and forth between Molish’s and Thaminor’s legs, hacking at them with its knife. The combined efforts of our party were enough to take the doll out before it could run away again, and Molish was glad to have rid the world of it for good.
As soon as the party opened the double doors to the south, they were pulled by some unseen force into the room beyond and the doors slammed shut behind them! A great gust of wind blasted the room around them; sending dust, paper and curtains flying around the room. Piles of rotting corpses littered the creaky wooden floor. They saw on the ceiling a shell of a man, shriveled, tortured and used. His body and arms were semi moulded into a blackened muck that coated the ceiling. Slimy black vines crept through his flesh and pinned him to the ceiling, as the ends of the vines expanded into drooling suckers that fed from his life force. A glow of green hue emanated from his chest where a green emerald spewed out evil energies into the mansion, distributing the feed to all areas of the living building. The most potent looking of those green energies flowed directly into a lifeless body below, slumped with its head flung back over a wooden chair…
