The Mazaraid

With the necrobard defeated, we could return to more pressing matters, like dethroning Lady Justine's rival Patrice. In order to do so, we would have to further discredit her, causing such a debacle that she could never recover from. Justine knew of an arms deal that would implicate Patrice because it involved completely illegal and immoral weapons of mass destruction in exchange for some of her proprietary designs. Our mission; steal these projects after the trade off. Who better to assist us than the infamous pirate Mazery who vowed to help us take down the Tide. The spoils of this heist would certainly aid in that conflict so we 'recommended' a group of dissenting Tharashk mercs (that we would pose as) to help him with the job. Successfully intimidating his guards to gain an audience, Jeeng convinced Mazery of our qualifications with his nautical expertise. After returning to base, we spoke with the dead bard to gain further intel for disrupting their endgame plan to raise Carmen to god stature. We then returned to preparations for the raid with Mazery and trusted a stealth recon mission to Penny and Darren who would find out just what kind of cargo Patrice was after. They also discovered Patrice's trading partner, Lady Maury, head of Canith operations in the region, handing documents to Patrice, implying her intentions to burn Justine for good. Aside from the anticipated Scorcher bomb, they also found a vitaray chamber of some sort, dragon shard-enhanced warforged, a giant dragon shard, and the ship armaments. Darren left Penny's familiar rat formed in the crate with the warforged to scout and track Maury's ship. Under cover of night we prepared to raid, but despite our best efforts, the enemy crew would not be taken by surprise. Their cannons threatened heavy damage upon Mazery's vessel & our own team while their mages proved mighty as well. Jeeng held back their biggest brawler while I took the opportunity to fire my own cannon along with Darren, Justine & Penelope's efforts to neutralize the big guns. All that while, the rest of their crew prepared more defenses below deck. After finishing off the remaining guards above, we caught a breath before heading downstairs to encounter a few unopened loot and a warded door to the rest of the ship. Justine wanted to convince the captive captain to unlock the door for us by pretending to be one of the crew, but when threatening the false barbarian did not loose his tongue, we switched tactics to target his ego. And to further sell the bate, Justine assumed the guise of one Prismatic Fang raiding Mazery's raid to further convince the capt to give us the 'key' to the door. With the rest of us taking cover, Jeeng opened the door only to be greeted by a blast of strange green light emanating from an orb at the center of the room. The crated warforged Darren & Penelope scouted at the docks were also active and aggressively pursuing any who tried to cross the threshold. Darren tried to obscure the enemy and strange pulsing orb in darkness but to little affect as they already set a beeline toward us. We decided to play this safely, at least most of us, and bottleneck the enemies at the door. Meanwhile Darren rushed toward the back of the room as he was the only one who could see through his own darkness. We quickly learned the pulsing orb's reach as it blasted us through walls and doors, its nature changing with each pulse. Given the confinements, Justine's well placed fireball helped turn the tide and reduced the orb's effective radius. Just then, from inside the darkness we heard Darren shouting "spare the orb!" which we did as we cleaned up the rest of the guards. Jeeng persuaded the wisp powering the orb to calm down, sparing us from its wrath, which it was keen to unleash upon its captors without discrimination. Within the vault, an ominous letter attached to the goods warned Mazari & his conspirators (us) that we would soon regret our decision to raid this vessel. Looming threat aside, we now had to negotiate the treasure divisions with Mazari. Justine and Jeeng successfully convince him to release both the mecha parts and the Vitaray chamber to us under the condition that Mystery Inc would replicate and deliver weapons from the schematics at a later date (and 10000 in platinum). A docket in the office confirmed the items this crew traded Patrice which included true sight goggles, mechs, and the redacted files on a certain orphan. Suspiciously enough, the bomb was omitted. Back ashore, we gave Mazari the honor of opening the chamber containing the sleeping Sahagin as we watched from a safe distance of 80ft. To no one's surprised, the captive lashed out at Mazari's greeting however soon they came to an understanding in a language most abyssal to hear (we later learned was Infernal) Darren attempted to eavesdrop but Mazari didn't let him hide for long and brought him into the light to meet this new 'Legion'. Darren deduced multiple presences within this vessel, one of which he could speak to in to common tongue of the Lizardfolk and told them the crimes of the high houses upon their people. This 'Legion' did not take that history kindly, proceeding to rage indiscriminately and inconsolably, so fiercely that even Mazari shied away from trying to quell this storm. Eventually the rage subsided and we parted with Mazari and Legion for now while we had to figure out how and where to store this contraband booty.