I'm not sure exactly what happened, but most of the new characters did not show up this time. Namely, that bard chick and the minotaur ranger. The other minotaur was there, the barbarian, but not for very long. Dravis didn't show up again, and has shown up infrequently enough that I no longer consider him "main cast". This means the group consisted of Bob, Jack, Titania, and Toryc. I don't think I've mentioned Jack's small companion "Stumbleduck", a gnomish artificer who took an interest in Jack after noticing that he's a machine.
Stumbleduck is a small time tinkerer who's more interested in figuring out how stuff works than pretty much anything else. He's a bit egotistical to the point that he either doesn't respond or insults people who shorten his nickname to get his attention, and he considers himself the smartest person he's ever met. He's reasonable otherwise, but the only member of the group he actually likes is Jack, the rest of the group he considers stupid or unrefined. Anyhow, he was around this time.
As this session began, the group was in another room with those weird mechanical doors they couldn't get through without bashing. There were two such doors, one in the middle of the South wall and another in the middle of the East wall. Bob realized Stumbleduck was still upstairs, checking out all the mechanisms and technology they had discovered on the first floor. Stumbleduck wasn't only arrogant, he's also pretty smart, so Bob decides to go upstairs to get him and see if he can figure out how to open the doors without breaking them. On his way up the stairs, Bob sees a tiefling at the door to the first basement. The tiefling quickly shuts the door, and Bob runs down to tell the rest of the group about the tiefling he saw and to determine if it's a threat and what to do about it.
The group decides to go investigate the first basement to see what the tieflings are up to and if they can be reasoned with. The whole group stands on the stairs as Bob investigates the door. He hears something strange about the door as he gently raps on it near the top. The sound is different. He doesn't know how to explain that difference, so the group assumes it's a trap of some kind. The group goes back down the stairs and Toryc kerplodes the door down with scorching bursts. As the door burns off the hinges and falls to the floor, a large mallet on a stick attached to the ceiling with a hing swings down into the doorway. This is an example of one of my favorite kinds of traps. I call them "Bricks on ropes", after the first version of this trap I ever used. Basically, something is tied to or near the top of a doorway and propped up with a stick. Once the door opens, the stick no longer holds up the weight and it swings down into the chest or face of the door opener. This is the first time I've included such a trap and it did not successfully loosen someone's teeth.
In that room were more tieflings waiting for them. Two of the tieflings seemed to be holy warriors of Altua, the goddess of honor. One of the tieflings was an arcane caster of some kind, and the fourth a sneaky roguish type who can, on occasion, turn invisible. The two tiefling paladins immediately engage Bob and Jack, indicating that while they may be honorable, they aren't very diplomatic. Of course, the group also killed three of their friends upstairs, and the roguish tiefling was the one who survived that combat and told his friends all about it. While the two paladins keep the group's tanks busy, the roguish one focuses on Titania, since he knows she's the healer. As this goes on, the caster takes pot-shots at whomever seems the best target in order to maximize effectiveness while staying out of the limelight.
Thanks to rolling low, Bob and Jack aren't very good during this combat except in taking up the attention of the tiefling paladins. Titania is surprised at the mobility of the teleporting, invisible turning roguish tiefling trying to kill her, rendering her movements basically irrelevant and her attacks wasted. Toryc is offended at the tiefling flinging fire around, as that's his shtick, so focuses on that guy for the first few rounds. The minotaur's player had to leave at that beginning of this combat, so after he takes a single swing the minotaur decides the group has this fight in hand and simply leaves.
After a while, the tanks squaring off lead Titania to lacking much more healing, while the sneaky guy whittles her dangerously close to death. Toryc decides to square off with the sneaky tiefling in order to rescue Titania, which was a particularly un-Toryc thing to do, and the whole group noticed. While Toryc does a good job at distracting the sneaky tiefling, the burny, caster tiefling takes up the "kill the shaman" role, and Titania winds up on the ground, bleeding to death. At the conclusion of the fight, both paladins are dead, as well as the caster, but the sneaky roguish one got away... again. Titania was saved by some field dressings Bob applied, and the group decided to take a short break and use a bunch of healing surges. I'm not sure Bob hit a single target the whole combat, and Jack rolled almost as bad. This fight was technically an easy one, but low rolling made it last a while longer than it should have, which made it more difficult than it should have been.
The group, demoralized and drained of most of their healing surges, go up the stairs to see if Stumbleduck is alright. When they find him in the room they left him in, playing with a control panel, they're excited he didn't get attacked. They take SD down to the mechanical doors, and he figures out how to use the control panel to open each door. The group finds, through the East door, a hallway with magical lamps on the wall. When they make it to a pressure plate, the lights fire radiant beams at Bob. He takes a bit of radiant damage, and he finds the pressure plates that set them off. The group jumps over the plated area and continue on to the super-door at the end of the large hallway. This door is exactly like the magical-mechanical doors they've seen before, each of which lead to the rooms the keystones are kept in.
Bob uses the same key the group has used to enter each of those rooms to enter this one, and they find the room they expected to. The room was all metal and octagonal, with a pedistal in the center of the room with a bowl shape at the top. Pipes led from the pedestal to the walls and up the ceiling. Floating in the bowled top of the pedestal is a familiar shape; A football sized crystal with bright energy being drained from it, the energy leaving it brighter than the darkening crystal itself. There are no controls in the room, and Stumbleduck determines that if the crystal is simply removed it will probably shatter.
The group goes through the other doors in that last room, going South. This looks like a primary control room. As they enter the room, they hear a deep, loud, intimidating voice boom from the stairs "Destroy the heretics, save the crystal!" From the stairs charges a huge tiefling, perhaps six-foot-five and incredibly broad and strong. He's equipped similarly to the tiefling paladins, except his gear is obviously superior quality and he has an air of authority about him. He'd be intimidating if he were calm, but he was obviously out to seek vengeance for the death of his friends, and he may have even been an insane zealot of some kind who couldn't be reasoned with but the group never got the chance to talk to him while he was calm. Behind him was another tiefling paladin, two of the fire-flingers, and that same sneaky bastard that got away twice before.
This fight went poorly for the group for multiple reasons. The first, and probably the least, reason was Jack having one of his memories from another life flash to him a few moments before. This memory was of him looking out of a glass tube he was trapped within, at the woman he loved whom it seemed trapped him. Something was being drained from him, as the energy from the crystal (the catalyst of the memory). The feelings that flooded back at the memory, the love, the betrayal, the helplessness, sent him into a berserk fury. He rolled a timely 20 and criticalled the large tiefling paladin with his arm-bolt that SD gave him, and then ran into melee with him.
Unfortunately, where the two groups met, tiefling paladin and warforged fighter, was one of the doorways between the rooms. Jack's rage meant he wasn't thinking very strategically, so he simply stayed there, as he and the large tiefling exchanged blows. Titania was basically out of it for this fight as well. She's still not quite over her pacifism (cowardice), and she mostly avoided involvement in the fight since she almost died in the last one and had very few healing surges remaining. SD was surprised at the viciousness of the tiefling and spent his healing powers in the first few rounds, healing Jack. To make matters worse, Bob was marked by the other tiefling paladin, behind his leader and out of reach. That tiefling threw spears at Bob, to very little effect, but Bob had a -2 on attacks against the bigger tiefling and took 7 damage every round on the first attack he made. Given the good defenses the bigger tiefling had, this meant Bob was spending another encounter missing more often than hitting, since he couldn't actually get to anyone except the guy with the best defenses. Toryc was fairly effective, except he was missing more than usual himself. However, he placed his blasts and bursts where they hit the largest number of enemies.
Because the group didn't do anything about the bottleneck, the group behind the large tiefling used ranged attacks to whittle away at the group, and the sneaky guy got behind that front line to focus on Titania again. Even though there was a squishier target behind the bottleneck, where the whole group might get at him, the only person who fought him off was Titania, though the others occasionally hit him with orbital effects of their attack powers that he happened to be within. His invisibility power was regained more frequently than it should have been, so he was invisible pretty often. He was the first of the "bad guys" who were killed, Titania finishing him off with a daily power that incidentally hit him while he was invisible. The big guy healed himself a few times, making him a long lasting, hard-hitting, truly difficult opponent in his own right, and he continued to operate as a wall between the party and the rest of the "bad guys". Though Jack fell down a few times, he got healed and finally finished off the tiefling in front of him. Two of the other tieflings were soon dispatched, and one of them got away.
After taking a while to search the corpses and take a rest, they discover some money and magical items, but most curious is a small, silver rod they discover on the large tiefling. It was about a foot and a half long, fully silver, with carving's of dragons along it's length. At one end was a female screw end, where something obviously screwed in. The other end had a male screw and a latch, where it screwed into something else. The item is magical, but it's power was a mystery.
Stumbleduck investigates the control room, but just can't roll high enough to figure out how to shut off the crystal room. If he even can from there. The rest of the group tries, except Jack since he realizes he's not exactly smart, and none of them can figure it out. Toryc gets the ides to disenchant the bowl part of the pedestal if they can, and he and SD work on that for the greater part of a day, doing it slowly to avoid a sudden stop which may shatter the crystal. They succeed at that, and they use a bunch of residuum to restore the crystal as far as they can, getting rid of the crack in it and making it less brittle.
While the keystone itself is restored, if dis-empowered, minor earthquakes start to occur shortly after this. The group is around playing with the technology and trying to restore the crystal for several days, the earthquakes consistent at about every two hours. When some of the group leave the building to investigate outside, they see a storm to the East. The storm is obviously unnatural, with purple and red lightning and an unnatural glow. When Bob and Jack walk to it to investigate, they figure out it was about ten miles off. There are high winds and the clouds travel in circles above them, constantly crackling with colorful lightning. The clouds block the sun and make everything dark aside the purplish glow and cracks of the lightning. They find the center of the storm, where the ground itself seems to be pushing past itself, out of cracks. When a crack can be seen without dirt spilling out, it glows a burning red.
This is where Bob sees the silhouette of a man and a large wolf on the other side of the storm. Bob and Jack approach, and Bob is delighted to see Steve, his long lost wolf companion. Steve is now an awakened animal, as intelligent or more than any typical man. Bob knew of this from earlier, however. He talks with Steve for a while, and the figure with him is Titania's brother, Jolthian. Jolthian, as before, seemed much colder than during his youth. He was never much for being social, but he was never really cold, either. He informs them that he thinks the storm is the physical location of the demon's prison, and the storm is a sign that he's attempting to escape it. This means either the demon is stronger than he was before, or the keystones not as powerful. Since several of the keystones have been broken, that makes sense. He goes to a tower in the city they've been in, the city now lacking the static jumps of the tesla coils as the keystone was powering them, and he uses the Portal engraving to teleport to Lys (a city the group frequently visits, with a branch of the Philosopher's Guild in it). The group finds a scroll of "linked Portal", and are in the tower awaiting Jolthian's return.
Their plan is currently to see what information and resources Jolthian brings back with him, as well as trying to get to the nearest city of they can. They were originally going to a recent city build in the desert, which was closer than Lys and Toryc knows where, but then they got Linked Portal. Next session, we find out where the group goes and what they plan on doing. Oh, by the way, the reason the storm began is that the location the keystone is at no longer powers the demon's prison, as the bowled pedestal it was in was the lock, and it was disenchanted. They must now figure out how to fully restore the crystal and replace it at another such pedestal if they want it to keep the demon from escaping instead of doing nothing, but they don't seem to have figured that out.
