….almost a TPK. Seriously, we were so close. So, so close.
The session began with the party, along with Cedric and Rain, in the Kennels, surrounded by Winston and his men. He was calling for us to come out, while we were exploring our options. While Rain, Cedric and I kept vigil at the front door, Hector, Leo, Kaly and Gad tried the back, and discovered that the door had been blocked by a pile of crates and boxes that had also been lit on fire. It was around this point that Winston’s men decided they were getting bored and threw their volley of Molotov cocktails at the building, lighting much of it ablaze.
I started firing arrows at the men out front, and Rain quickly joined me. Cedric decided that valour was the better part of valour and charged his wheelchair right out into the open, taking a crossbow shot at Winston himself. Kaly rushed out to join him shortly after.
Hector, on the other hand, decided that he didn’t enjoy being in the building any more, nor that he fancied the idea of going out the front, so he jumped from the second story window that overlooked a side alley and started hewing into the men there. Leo and Gad followed him, but before the fighting could escalate further, two mysterious figures appeared on the far side of Winston and his men, one a dapper elvish gentleman with a cane, and the other a winged tiefling. The latter was me.
I have decided to switch characters, for two reasons. The first reason being, in the previous two fights, I neither liked how Thomas played, nor felt like I was contributing a whole lot. The second reason was that I knew our journey was going to take us north, and between the south being Thomas’ stomping ground and his not particularly liking any of the other members of the party (considering their shaky start, especially the fact that Hector almost killed Rain), I couldn’t justify why he would ever choose to continue travelling with them.
Mr. Speaker, the elvish gentleman, and myself, Zero, are members of Barber’s organisation. We had been told of Winston’s intentions towards the party, and had arrived to intervene. Speaker very politely suggested that it wasn’t in Winston’s best interests to keep up the attack, and because Speaker is a super-badass, Winston agreed. He also agreed to cease his hostilities against the party, in light of the fact that the spikes had been destroyed, but Speaker warned that this agreement might not hold up indefinitely if Winston decided that it was preferable to eliminate the party after all.
Speaker was also able to deal with the Trinity’s quibbles with the party, so there’ll be no more trouble on that front.
Once Winston was dealt with, Thomas left to speak with his military contacts and get the whole business about the Kennels burning down sorted out. Cedric and Rain went off to the next-closest Kennels, to the west, and Gad left to go back home. To clarify things, that leaves the party makeup as Leo, Hector, Kaly, and Zero.
Speaker led us to a safe house run by a pair of gnomes called Johann and Sebastian, where he explained that there had been reports of a woman that sounded suspiciously like Vixen in a certain area of the city, and that I knew where to lead the party to investigate. He also explained that, now that we had helped the party, it would behove them to help us, and that their first task should be to deal with Vixen and Brimscythe (with my help) so as to not leave any loose ends behind them.
So we went shopping. Leo sold all the loot that had been accumulated over the preceding few weeks and bought himself some nice armour and a bunch of potions of healing for the party. Now, without Gad, we are seriously short on healing, so any little thing helps.
The following day, I led them to the rundown house where Vixen had been sighted. Inside there was little but a large mirror, which suddenly rippled and turned into a portal kind of thing. Brimscythe’s voice called out, requesting the party to enter, and since he threatened to harm friends (including Gad) if we refused, we did.
Inside, we found ourselves in a chamber of glass. We were standing on a bridge over an endless chasm, with a stairway leading up around the perimeter of the chamber at the far end. Standing directly opposite us, mirroring us, were three figures: Hector, Leo and Kaly. As a complete fluke, I, being a variant feral tiefling, have no reflection, and so, no reflected version of me was there to face us. When I moved, nothing happened. When the others moved, their reflection mirrored exactly what they did, so perfectly that when Hector set down his axe, I could not even shift the mirrored version’s set-down counterpart.
After some experimentation, we discovered that the mirrored forms were eminently breakable. I was able to destroy Hector’s reflection without trouble, and then he helped with destroying the others’. Had I not been there, things would not have gone so smoothly, as any damage done by the others would have been reflected by their mirror selves, but the sheer fluke of me not having a reflection meant we got through the obstacle without a scratch. Just as well.
We ascended the stairs to the second level, where we found Brimscythe standing, waiting for us, on a shallow platform. He said a few brief words, before suddenly, woomph, Vixen came flying up out of a section of the floor that was ten feet deeper than the rest and sliced Leo nearly in two. He went down instantly, and the fight was on.
It was not a comfortable fight. Like me, Vixen and Brimscythe both had wings, and between that, teleportation abilities, and both Legendary and Lair actions, they were not the easiest to pin down. It was a smart move taking out Leo first, as that shut down the best of our ranged damage and left them almost completely free to focus fire blasts on Hector, circumventing his damage resistance. Things were particularly rough for him when Brimscythe hit him with a Slow spell, but thankfully he was only under its effect for one round.
Vixen had some high damage capacity early on, reducing me from 51 hit points to 9 with a single attack. I managed to stay there for the bulk of the fight, however, and put a bit of damage on both of them. Hector, too, meted out a lot of punishment in the moments where he was able to get to one or the other.
Kaly did a respectable job of getting Leo back on his feet as well as striking the fiends for a bit of damage, but because of unfortunate ordering in the initiative, Leo was brought back down on almost every turn before he could do anything. Kaly was also taken down a couple of times, but thanks to not one, but two natural twenties on death saving throws, she was able to get back up. The second one came at an incredibly clutch moment, and was all that kept us from a TPK.
Leo was unconscious. Kaly was unconscious. Hector had just been struck by a Vitriolic Sphere, and he was at low enough hit points that the residual damage was guaranteed to drop him at the end of his next turn. I was still at nine. Vixen and Brimscythe were both still up, but looking fairly rough.
It was my turn. With little options, I ran at Vixen and Brimscythe, who were standing side by side about ten feet from Kaly. I attacked Brimscythe first, knowing that Vixen’s AC was very high, but he cast Shield and blocked it. Switching targets, I went for Vixen, hit twice, and managed to take her down, punching her nose up into her brain. She crumpled and I circled around a now very pissed off Brimscythe. Before Hector could have his turn (he was directly after me) Brimscythe used a Legendary action to fly away, burning me in the process, bringing me down to six. Hector took his turn, ran over to Brimscythe, and threw his handaxes at the flying, out-of-melee-range fiend. He hit and did some damage, but not enough, and dropped due to the acid.
Then it was Brimscythe’s turn, he flew down and hit me with Blight, and I went unconscious. For those keeping track, that was a TPU (Total Party Unconscious) moment. Very briefly, though, as, on Kaly’s next turn, she rolled her natural twenty and woke up. Luckily, I was unconscious at her feet, so she was able to heal me with a potion and Hector with a Healing Word, getting us both back up. I hit Brimscythe a couple of times, bringing his health down, and Hector came in swinging to finish him off. He died with a breathy threat of “we’ll be back”, but for now, they, and the arc, are done.
Everything started to break and crack around us. Kaly healed Leo, and we fled up another staircase, finding ourselves in Vixen and Brimscythe’s living quarters. We made an attempt to loot, but giants shards of glass were falling around us and we were at too low health to risk it. We fled out through an exit mirror and found ourselves coming out of the same mirror in the rundown house that we had entered just a little while before.
A quick trip back to the safe house for a long rest and we were golden. Mr. Speaker showed up and informed us our next port of call is to be a town to the north called Pelor’s Blessing, which had recently suffered an attack by giants. Now we are headed in that direction to deal with the giant troubles currently happening in the north. Hopefully this visit to a recently-giant-attacked town will go better than the last one did.