Session 13: A Lost Empire - Mystery at the Monolith Report

General Summary

The party makes way through the gates of Empire Port, all of Annulus in ahead of them.   We cut across weeks at a time as they ride on the back of Kenrith's T-Rex, rolling random encounters every biome change. They travel through the grasslands, walking through a battlefield from the Cerasium Civil War. Then they came across a stampede of giant boars, easily taking care of the 4 that charged them. Finally, they took care of phase spiders as they drew near to the Monolith.   They arrive to see the town at the Monolith is having a Harvest festival, celebrating the first successful harvest in decades. The party heads to the tavern to drink and befriend some locals. The bar owner shoes out two young children as the party enters. Nolfravell dances with the barmaid, Isabella, a woman in her 60s. Korac'h hits on and then confuses two friends in their early 20s. Kenrith chats up a local old-timer and finds out that the reason for the harvest is that all the vermin have disappeared (and a few pets).   The party falls asleep drunk off their asses in a room and wakes up hungover. They decide to try and investigate the Monolith. They walk through the field of flowers surrounding it and find a door. They use detect magic, noting Abjuration magic around the door and conjuration magic inside that leaks onto the roof. They then climb/teleport up to the top of the Monolith finding a strange artifact-like fissure in planar space. Korac'h sticks his hand in and it looks all distorted as he feels pins-and-needles but is otherwise unharmed. He then casts identify, seeing vissions of the locations of the Stones of Power, feeling earthquakes and an incompleteness that leads to a massive explosion. 5 dragons breath down breath weapons upon him and the vision ends. Kenrith recognizes one of the locations, a tower on the peak of an island mountain, as the place that Amethyst's mother Opal protects the Opal stone. They call Opal and she is at first disturbed that her daughter is not the one calling her, and calms down just long enough to hear the party out. She sternly insists that the party not contact her again (she'll reach out), but that she will research through her archives to figure out if she knows what this means. The party then returns to town, only to find that the town is comforting Emma, one of the people Korac'h was hitting on the night before. Her daughter is missing. The last person to see her was another boy in the town who she was playing with.   The party ventures out to make sure Rex the T-Rex didn't eat the missing girl. He is too distracted by a butterfly to care much and his teeth are clean. The party then stops by the farmhouse of Maurelle, the town cleric and only other mother to have a child disappear in town. Her 4-year-old son disappeared 3-4 months ago. She's a recluse, still too overwhelmed by grief to be of any use talking to.   Upon returning to town, the crowd around Emma disperses. The town magistrate, Adelard, is staunchly trying to return things to normal. The party gets really annoyed with him because he's incredibly harsh. They threaten him and just as they were about to throw hands, the town Sheriff, Balimaar, shows up to cool things down and bring the party over to a small militia post to talk things over. The party reluctantly agrees, hoping to get more information about the missing children.