Continuing the narrative begun on the previous page, this section of the writing is a bit darker and more jagged than that now ruined by the stain covering the previous iteration of this same tale. I would hazard a guess that perhaps Mr. Brisby was a bit upset at having to write this chunk of the adventure over again. Given the likely difficulty of translating common to goblin and goblin to this phonetic frankensteining of the written language, I would not necessarily blame him...
"Mayim and I, still hanging from the hatch we'd opened with her coin, peered into the upcoming room while we waited for the rest of the party to catch up. The place was dark, but it seemed even Mayim had little trouble noting the layout of the place, which was an irregular layout of raised platforms in a rectangular room. I was unsure of the usual purpose of this room, but at the moment it was most likely a point of ambush. My fears were partially confirmed when I noticed a slight movement on the floor below. At first appearing to be a cloud of mist or large puddle of water, I quickly realized that this room was home to a large slime of some sort, and quite possibly one of those annoying gelatinous cubes. Nasty critters, though their essence was as good as any other living thing's for my usual purposes. Pointing this danger out to my companion, the two of us entered the room via the trap door's rope ladder. I moved onto an outcropping behind our entry point, still in rat-form, while Mayim leaped outwardly onto a far ledge. I heard a cry of surprise, and realized that the halfling had unwittingly landed on a waiting assailant, who had hidden himself beneath a pile of rags. I glanced around expecting the worst, and the worst it was; we were surrounded by such piles, all of them filled with the stench of the ruffians who had attacked us earlier.
I quickly assumed my hybrid form, hoping to catch the beggar within the pile nearest me by surprise, possibly even terrifying him into falling from our shared perch into the clutches of the slime below. Oddly, he barely seemed phased by my appearance. Slightly surprised at my sudden appearance and proximity, perhaps, but completely calm about the sight of what surely must have looked like a rabid were-beast appearing before him. To their credit, these beggars (if that's truly what they were) were of much sterner stuff than most men. Setting his lack of shock aside to be pondered at a later point, my diminutive cohort and I set about slaying those nearby while the rest of our number arrived. They did, in due course, and Nathaniel was the first to make his way down in the traditional manner (being ahead of both Alin and Aelon in the tunnel, with Saffron teleporting her way down to assist Mayim directly). There was a moment of dread as the ladder snapped under the weight of the man's armor, then one of disbelief as something I have never seen took place. Before he had fallen more than a meter, there was a flare of fiery magic from within the plates of Nathaniel's armor, and he flew through the air, landing safely on a platform to my left. When I asked him about this phenomenon later, he claimed that he had something called a 'spellscar', inflicted upon him years earlier, that had awakened these semi-random traits in him. I may have to research these 'scars' at a later date, but for now I'll simply take his word for it...
The fighting continued from there in a fairly standard way, odd terrain layout notwithstanding. Many attempts were made from both sides to force foes from the edge and into the waiting protoplasm of the gelatinous cube, but few directly succeeded until Alin decided to dive into the room and fill it with a whirlwind capable of wresting nearly all of the brigands from their positions, dumping most of them unceremoniously into an acidic demise. Although one lucky (?) bastard survived his ordeal long enough to emerge from the cube's membrane, his face soon met with Nathaniel's hammer and simply ceased to be. Such is the way of this group... All that stands in your way is to be blasted, smashed, and teleported as quickly and violently out of the way as soon as possible, consequences be damned. Thus far I have not seen them hurt anyone I would deem 'innocent' in this unholy fervor, but I shall have to be on my guard in case they begin to go to far...
Our combat concluded in that chamber, we rested for a moment before moving on. The rest of the party seemed disinclined to touch the remains of our slimy foe, even at the prospect of gold and new equipment with which to continue our crusade, and I made a point of the oddity of a blood-thirsty party such as them seemingly having an aversion to grime. "I would be perfectly willing to do it myself," Alin replied calmly from a ledge above me. "But why get my hands dirty when I have these Mage's Hands to do it for me?" He seemed to find himself quite clever at that, and the rest of the party was more than willing to allow him to sift through the ooze in this way, so I let the point drop. It made sense, in its way, but I felt that such a distant method of searching, even if it were only done on the rare occasion of a particularly moist enemy corpse fouling up an area, left much to be desired in terms of a thorough inspection. It seems my line of thought got through to Aelon, however, as he eventually joined me in the pit. He trusted my search of the bodies (aside from their fairly standard weapons and armor, they had nothing of real value), but he thought he might get something of worth from the acidic slime left behind by the cube. As everyone else was rested by the point, he suggested that we move on without him, citing that we were more than capable of handling ourselves, and there weren't likely to be all that many more beggars anyway, considering how many we had slain in the courtyard earlier. We agreed that his logic was sound and moved on.
The tunnels beyond the chamber we had been in were strange. Apparently this had once been a part of the town above, but in time it had fallen into disrepair, and the new district had been erected on top of it. While much of the area was filled with rubble from the buildings that had once lined these now-subterranean streets, this small alleyway appeared to have been excavated some time ago, leading to a simple door. Mayim and I surveyed it for traps (there was a simple one, though we were unable to determine what setting it off might have accomplished before disassembling it), before revealing a short hallway beyond it. The walls were decorated with the image of a black-haired sorceress, and the door at the end of the hall with a five-headed dragon of many colors. Mayim, showing a bit more knowledge of the world than I had come to expect from her, announced that these were aspects of the goddess Tiamat, a deity of greed and envy. Fitting, for a cabal of lowly thugs, criminals, and beggars, I thought.
Happy, perhaps, that she had managed to dispense some knowledge before either of the two competing bookworms had piped up, Mayim strode confidently up to the door and (after a cursory check for obvious traps) carefully opened it. Inside, yet more beggars stood behind rows of pews, obviously awaiting us. "Whoops! Wrong door..." Mayim lied quickly, hiding her surprise well. "Praise Tiamat!" With that, she shut the door.
We looked at her for a moment, dumbfounded. From the sounds of it, the beggars were just as confused. "They shut the door. What do we do now?" I heard one ask. "Kill them, you fools!" was the immediate response. They tried to explain that we would kill them if they tried (a correct assertion), but the second voice, obviously a leader of some kind, commanded them to do it before he slew them himself. Moments later, the door opened slightly, revealing the silhouette of one of the beggars, a dagger whistling past his ear and lodging itself uselessly in the door behind me, just over my shoulder. Terrified, but unable to resist his master's orders, the beggar attacked, but was met by Nathaniel's hammer, slamming into him from the fighter's position immediately to the left (our right) of the door. From there, we blasted into the room with a fair amount of noise and mayhem.
The room was some kind of temple, it seemed. At one point, Alin later told me, the place was used to worship Ioun, but these miscreants had defaced all of the previous religious symbols with those of their draconic goddess, and at the far end of the chamber, across a small channel that separated it from our starting positions, was a large pile of treasure, obviously the reason these apparent vagabonds were able to have some adequate weaponry, but also where all the money that weaponry could earn for them was going. Directly before this pit was the leader of this little band, an absolutely filthy man who had taken the title of the Filth King. Whether he was a legitimate priest of Tiamat's or he had simply taken to her tenants and begun gathering a cult around him I was unsure at the time, but nevertheless he seemed to be the one keeping this group going in the first place.
Without a second thought, Alin ran directly at the Filth King, using his prestidigitation to instantly clean the man up (rather well, I might add, it even combed his hair!) to shame him in some way, before teleporting once again and unleashing another swirl of space-bending magic upon the room. This instantly killed two of the beggars, and everyone else was sent cascading into the pit. This was a brilliant move tactically, as it gave us the high ground against a foe that might have otherwise been quite a problem (despite his ragged appearance, the Filth King did wield some fairly powerful poison and divine magic), but it also ended up causing us quite a bit of trouble down the line. As Mayim charged forward to kick her foes while they were down, attempting to clamber out of the hole they'd been dumped in, she did comment that the thing was full of corpses in varying stages of decomposition, stating that it was a disgusting sight. Several people beat me to telling her that she dealt with corpses on a semi-daily basis, having probably created more corpses than this over her lifetime. "That's different!" She cried in response. "Those are my corpses! I know where they've been!" The remaining beggars and the Filth King seemed nonplussed by this comment.
Unfortunately, just as things were wrapping up, everyone of import being relegated to the pit and on their last legs, there was movement from the treasure pile. It seemed that Alin treading on the golden stash had triggered some sort of magical defense, as the whole thing reared up and assumed the form of a five-headed dragon, bellowing with the sound of cascading coinage, with teeth made of daggers and gems and hide of literal gold. Not having much choice in the matter, we attacked..."
At this point, the narrative cuts off once more, this time with a different stain. There is a small note jotted to the side in the common tongue, but in Nehl's handwriting.
"Damn that Alin! First a beer and then this vial of blood! If he weren't such an asset to this team I would likely have torn out his throat by now! His shenanigans are getting out of hand..."
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