I don't think that was Arcanist Quor'landris at all that we fought! He was some kind of undead and he was coming after the Magus in particular. The Magus bailed on the fight right away, using some sort of illusion, I guess. Some of his people stuck around to help us for a bit, but I think his people were mostly focused on getting back safely behind those glass doors. They had their own problems to deal with, what with the Coldlight Walker back there and all.
Anyway, we beat the undead drow. He had some sort of regenerative properties, maybe like a vampire? I didn't get in close to check his teeth. Atar grabbed his bag, which had a tablet preserved inside with something written on it in Deep Speech.
There was a giant blob of zombies outside, but we killed them and sort of left their bodies to plug the hole of the door behind us as we left the facility. Fresh air was pretty nice.
I got to see Mortalis again.
It's been such a long time, but it's just as beautiful as I remember. I think for most of the others it was their first time seeing the Dark Star.
Administrator Salient Truth told us that we had three options. We could lie down in the snow and die (a joke), we could go three miles south to the portal, or we could go about five miles south to the edge and jump off the edge. We chose the portal. It was a long walk, during which we had time to identify the tablet.
It's a minute-long summoning spell for an ascended vampire, Chilitract. Yikes. Big big yikes. WHO WAS THAT UNDEAD DROW WE KILLED AND WHY DID HE HAVE THIS?
Alta and Atar immediately wanted to give (sell) it to the monastery - it'll probably earn us a lot of money if we can get it to them intact. Ceres had another idea - summon it and then kill it, presumably with a huge amount of firepower behind us. I feel like it'll be a long long time before we have the amount of allies required to do something like that. And what if it's already sealed somewhere and this just undoes somebody's hard work? We don't know enough. This sounds like a research project for when we get back home.
Anyway, I did a little bit of scouting once we got to the portal, and there were twelve people guarding it instead of four - meaning lying our way through was probably off the table. So we came up with a plan! We got the Administrator to agree that we wouldn't kill anybody, just knock them unconscious. Asteria would stand in the center of the platform and start channelling once the area was clear. I would throw a lightningball at them from the southeast; Administrator Salient Truth would approach from the west and lock them down with control spells. And it worked pretty well, actually! We did some carefully controlled violence, we hurt but didn't kill anybody. Some of them ran, some of them we knocked out, and we got everybody off the center disc of the portal but ourselves.
As Asteria was channeling through the portal, the rest of us saw a really beautiful drow woman with a crown appear about sixty feet away from us, who Alta immediately identified as Archmagus Valani Salvos. She got a good look at most of us, I think, although Atar was hiding behind Sylas and he kept his back turned. Asteria dropped her concentration early on purpose as soon as she realized the Archmagus was present, which was probably pretty smart because it meant she didn't have time to do something like misty step onto the platform with us and murder us all when we arrived at the other end of wherever we were going.
We did actually successfully teleport this time! And the place where we ended up... I don't actually know where we are yet!
It looks like a desert. There's a road over there, though, and I hear something like a cart approaching...
