Rylee rushed down the stairs behind Mortlock, grumbling again about getting dragged into another fight. Most of the bystanders in the room made themselves scarce as Amrik jumped up and drew his dagger, although one large man joined the fray to balance the numbers somewhat as Mortlock shoved his way to his brother to...well...
Okay it took a bit more than that, but being the unfavorite and suffering abuse at the hands of his brothers and mother, Mortlock was itching for a smackdown.
There are only so many ways you can describe a fight (something I'm already not very good at), but one thing that happened was getting the Spined Devil to kill itself. As a redemption paladin, one of Seliph's abilities is called Channel Divinity: Rebuke the Violent (all paladins can use Channel Divinity but the different subclasses have different uses of it), which, when used, would cause an attacker to have to take a Wisdom save and suffer radiant damage equal to the damage their attack just did. It had fired a spine at Sissy and done some damage, and the way I imagine that was Seliph looking at the Spined Devil, shouting, "Hey! Knock that off!" and the Spined Devil just falling off the wall it was on, dead from...shame? I guess?
Between the Spined Devil's cessation of existence and the thug being taken down, Amrik soon found himself in the midst of...well...
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| Man I love using wrestling gifs |
At almost the same instance, Seliph and Rylee realized that Amrik would be of more use to the party alive than dead and separately made plans to try to put him down without doing any further damage. However, because Seliph's Dexterity is at a whopping 8 and because my rolls have been absolute garbage, I was dead last in the turn order, so Rylee's plan went into effect, using the Command spell to...umm... command Amrik to grovel at the feet of the party, a spell he failed his save against and, against his will, began begging for mercy.
With the sudden awkward shift in the mood of the combat situation, Seliph decided to cast the Sleep spell anyway, under the hopes that he was weakened enough to be captured in a Pokeball fall asleep without further resistance. He was not. So the party tied him up instead.
During the ensuing interrogation, the party was able to get some more information out of him. Specifically, that Amrik's mother was working with a man named Thavius Kreeg, the ruler of the since yeeted to Hell (DM's Amrik's words) city of Elturel. She and Kreeg had orchestrated the disappearance of the current ruler of Baldur's Gate, and her goal was to repeat in Baldur's Gate what happened to Elturel, offering it as a possible exchange for power from the lord of Avernus.
Naturally, this is a problem.
The party resolved to quickly make their way to the Vanthampur manor to capture Amrik's mother and Thavius Kreeg in the hopes of stopping this plan before it got too far ahead, but this first left the problem of how to deal with Amrik. He had pointed out that taking him to the city guard would be fruitless without physical evidence. Seliph and Rylee didn't want to kill him if that could be avoided.
Faust suggested tying him up and locking him in his office, though Rylee was against that as well. As a means of expediting the process, Amrik himself offered the party a one hour head start. For one hour, he would sit in his office and do nothing towards trying to capture the party, after which no promises.
Now, I know you, as the reader, are thinking, "There's no way the party would be stupid enough to agree to that!"
And the truth is, Seliph thought about it for quite a bit, weighing the options in his mind. The man was clearly unrepentant. He would never be repentant. Ending him for the safety of others was certainly option. But he was also tied up and defenseless.
On the other hand, even if he went against his word, they'd already beaten him and his buddies once. Plus, from the sounds of things, something far more troublesome was in the works. If the party was unable to stop his mother from conducting the ritual, whatever Amrik did before he skipped town wouldn't mean anything anyway.
I'm really underselling it with these paragraphs, we went over this problem for quite a while.
But at the end, we concluded that though he was probably safer dead than alive, the party opted to leave him alive, honoring his word.
As the party left the Low Lantern, the cloaked woman before pulled them aside again.
"Sorry, I didn't get a chance to introduce myself earlier. My name is Reya. I was wondering if you could fill me in on that information you got in the tavern."
Seliph and Faust quickly filled Reya in, Reya listening intently until they came to the subject of Thavius Kreeg.
"Excuse me, Thavius is the one responsible for what happened in Elturel?! Thavius, the one in charge of protecting the city?! I'm coming with you. I am going to murder that little bastard!"
And while that's not how the session ended, the next two sessions really had the content of a single session for a few reasons outside of the group's control, so I'm going to go ahead and combine those two sessions into one entry.
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