A Giant Ancient Underground Ghost City

It’s nice to be back in town. Although… I’m worried about the Black Network sellswords. Wester is completely incompetent, but I don’t trust Halia and I don’t like that she is using our name to get what she wants. “The Heroes of Phandalin”. Everything was so much easier before everyone was trying to suck up to us. At least I finally had a chance to talk to Sister Garaele. She didn’t know that much more than us, but it’s nice to feel like there’s someone in town who is actually on our side other than Toblen.
 
The others tried to negotiate a higher fee from Wester, which seemed… kind of pointless? I mean, I have like 700 gold in my bag right now and literally nothing to spend it on, haggling for 8 extra gold each feels like a waste of time. Plus, Fortune and Damaia immediately gave all their money away anyways. And I’m no expert in negotiating, but they seemed… needlessly aggressive? I just don’t think we can afford to alienate potential allies right now.
 
Also, when did Phandalin become a town full of wizards? Glasstaff, the Black Spider, Wilmanric, Eethyl kind of, me (hah, as if!)… Mom? I can’t ignore it anymore, this is a spellbook. Was she a wizard? Why else would she have a spellbook? But… then why wouldn’t she have told me? I don’t think Dorin knew either. Sister Garaele said she knew Mom; would she know anything about this? I swear, Phandalin used to just be this boring farming town, when did it become this hotbed of crime and magic and crazy shit?
 
…
 
Okay, so scratch that completely. There is a giant ancient underground ghost city beneath Phandalin. Full of crazy ghost suits of armor. Have we been living on top of this the whole time? That’s insane! I mean, it’s a whole gigantic city! That’s thousands of years old! I desperately want to explore it and also do not feel comfortable just leaving it here to do its thing underneath the town without knowing what it is and what happened to it and why everything around it is cold and necrotic and ghosty.
 
But at the same time… Eethyl is right, we’re out of our depth here. We should try and find out more information before just rushing in blindly like we always do. Mortis is into necrotic stuff and worships a death god and got a necropolis shard from Glasstaff, that all fits this place’s vibe (I mean, if there ever was a necropolis) and surely Glasstaff knew this was here. Those two are our best bet for finding out more information about this place. Unfortunately, we don’t have any actual leads about either of them. I hate to say we should just ignore this for now and go find that magic sword, but… I mean, what else can we even do? Tell the town? Who would we even tell? Wester? Halia? And the dragon still is a threat, that hasn’t changed. But how do we just go back to what we were doing before now that we know we are literally walking on top of a giant ancient underground ghost city?