Saintsday, 14th Day of Firewane, CY 916

The party stops by their new base of operations before heading out to the docks to find The Arrowhead. Lucius Quill is sitting on the doorstep and beseeches the party to allow him to travel with them. He can no longer stay at the Temple of Knowledge; he has a desire to find out what happened during his missing 18 months and the other priests now treat him with disdain…obviously suspicious of his reinstatement. He has no true friend there except Brother Eigil and even that seems strained now.

The party, now down a cleric, agrees to allow Lucius to travel with them.

The group travels down to the docks to investigate the location of The Arrowhead. An old man named Tom, fishing off the pier saw the whole thing. He gives party the general direction and distance where he saw the merchant vessel go up in flames and quickly sink in the harbor two day ago.

The party hires a boat ride piloted by a gregarious gondolier named Gregory. He is extremely flirtatious on the ride out to the harbor and makes Balasar a bit uncomfortable with his attentions. At the site, the group quaffs their potions of water breathing and dives into the murky depths.

The heavily armored warriors sink like stones but amazingly land right on top of the sunken ship. The party quickly discerns that most of the cargo of the ship has been taken, but as they are investigating, they are attacks by a pair sahuagin and their pet sharks. After a quick fight, the sahuagin and sharks are slain, but there is still no sign of the missing cargo.

While they are searching, the group is approached by a cautious merman named Zoolander. He witnessed the group’s victory over the hated sahuagin and tells them that the sahuagin have been moving crates from the ship into an underwater cavern over the last several hours. He takes the party to the cavern entrance and offers to watch for more sahuagin while they enter.

The cavern is murky and pitch black; Balasar is effectively blind. The group explores the cave complex with Arya scouting ahead. She runs right into 4 sahuagin returning to the sunken ship. The sahuagin almost overwhelm her with one pinning her to the cavern wall by pithing her through the shoulder with its spear. The rest of the group intervenes, but a sahuagin priestess paralyzes both Dunkelbock and Balasar.

Though Kali’s fire magic is diminished in the water, she managed to boil several of the monsters like lobsters. Arya’s survival instinct kicks in; she sunders the spear pinning her to the wall and drives the ruined shaft through the eye of the sahuagin who had her pinned. Lucius proves his worth by keeping the beleaguered party in the fight.

The sahaugin had come from a 30 foot vertical shaft opening into a large underground chamber with a beach where the stolen crates and coffin had been deposited. A group of bandits and some slaves were opening the crates and loading the contents through an iron door to the rear of the cavern. One of the slaves, an aaraocka with his wings cut off was particularly mistreated.

The party was able to swim up to the beach undetected and surprise the bandits. Despite Arya again being a one-woman wrecking machine, the fight with the bandits was treacherous with Balasar, Dunkelbock, and Lucius succumbing to the organized defense of the bandits. Thankfully, Arya and Kali were able to finish off the bandits and a potion of healing found in the satchel of one of their fallen foes.

The slaves are grateful to be freed. They warn that shortly after the coffin was brought ashore that the glass lid exploded and a child leapt out and ran off to the south. Everyone was alarmed and had been quickly loading the cargo into the iron door before the unnatural child came back. They also warn that the iron door leads to the manse of one of the major Freeport crime families.

The two slaves were allowed to take the rowboat on the beach out of the cavern to the harbor and encouraged to go to the party’s base of operations after they got back to Freeport.

Examination of the coffin does show that the lid was busted open from the inside, and small child-sized tracks lead south. The tracks lead to a shaft leading back down into the underwater caverns. The party jumped down into the shaft and took a much needed short rest at the bottom.

Refreshed, the party followed the cavern to a small underwater chamber. There they were mentally assailed with telepathic images:

_In the vision, they see themselves on a stormy, rocky shoreline. They see a pretty young girl and her small black dog playing in the surf, with a compound of buildings beyond, as well as a ship (the Arrowhead).

Then, the vision changes. The Arrowhead is gone, and the structures are all in flames. Figures in black move around the compound, putting survivors to the sword, but they all are too far away to recognize or identify. Linele asks the PCs plaintively, “Why?” This time, the dog is gone, but she holds an amulet with nebulous, shifting gemstone in her hands._

The telepathic images are overwhelming but the group manages to see them for what they are. They see a frightened girl in the corner of the underwater chamber curled up stroking the amulet around her neck. This is Lenele who has just transformed into a vampire!!

The party tries to sooth her, but her hunger is too great and she attacks. Though her vampiric powers are diminished being submerged in water, she still proves to be a dangerous enemy…almost draining Arya in her insatiable hunger. The party prevails and they stake the girl when she returns to her coffin.

The party carries the coffin back to Freeport across the harbor floor. They give poor fisherman Tom a fright when they trudge out of the surf towing the coffin. They eventually get the coffin with Linele back to Linech in Scurvytown. He frantically searches the coffin for the amulet and accuses the party of stealing it. The party convinces Linech that this is all they found. Linech hurriedly pays them and send them on their way while his servants start packing up for a hasty retreat.

The party returns to the Scholar’s Quill for their last night before moving into their new warehouse. Lucius contacts Brother Egil and they identify and research the amulet. The gem is one of the 333 chaos gems, a potentially useful, yet dangerous artifact. One gem by itself has no overt magical effect, but will subtly warp reality around it, causing random events. If combined with its siblings, it creates a more powerful “chaos field” effect.

The party decides to hide the artifact in a vault in their new base of operations.

Marketday, 15th of Firewane

The next morning, they pack up their belongs in the Scholar’s Quill and move into their warehouse. The aararocka they rescued is camped on the steps of the building and pledges himself to the party. They take him to Theodoric to see about healing his wings. Arya is also in a bad way from her encounter with the vampire Linele.

Theordoric offers to siphon off the black humors that are plaguing Arya. After inserting an enema, hooking Arya to a series of tubes hooked to a bellows, and making her drink a foul concoction of holy water, peat moss, and powdered zombie skin, he extracts black liquid from Arya’s veins and heals her.

For the aaraocka, he creates two wing structures made of sticks and feather like leaves. He bandages those to the aaraocka’s stumps and leaves him overnight. The next morning, the aaraoka is miraculously healed. The large crowds that now watch Theodoric works are amazed.

Thunderday, 19th of Firewane

Maester Brau is laid to rest at the Runestone Social Club. The day features a steady thunderstorm, somber dwarven burial rites, several racial slurs against the elves in attendance, and a drunken wake that goes until the wee hours of the night.

Fireday, 20th of Firewane

Brother Egil arrives with news that they’ve found the location of another Chaos Gem if the party is interested. Passage has (ironically) been booked on the Lastrap…