Session 19: Flames of the Efreeti
General Summary
"Before you venture south, my most trusted assets," says the beholder, Lord Tyranax Calyops as the adventurers turn to leave their patron's watchtower lair, "I have one small task for you. You are free to decline. It IS dangerous, after all."
"What is it?" Ruhst asks, eyes narrowing.
"As I have said, I have a very powerful enemy in the sands of the south. The very Sultana of Zhin, she called the Thorned Blossom of the Moonlit Night, has it in for my head. And, as that's all there is of me--" the beholder pauses and when no one laughs, sighs. "Well, I have been trying out humor. No matter. She knows, somehow, of my endeavor to collect these art pieces for my collection, and will stop at nothing to deny me my small pleasures. Thus, she sent earlier this night, at the same time you were being accosted in the streets by her Scorpion Fanatics, her foreign legion of assassins, she sent into my very sanctum here a djinni called Thunder of Sand. I was barely able to fend him off before he could breach my vault and rob me blind."
The beholder glides back and forth, pacing in midair. "I would not have you leave Etherian Elps with that fiend still at large. Hunt him down, slay him -- or render him otherwise harmless -- and I shall reward you handsomely once more."
After a short conference, the Temple Thieves agree to Lord Calyops' terms and set out to investigate the matter, with the hopes of finding where the djinni had taken to ground. Suspecting it might be the same place where Alys and Fenz fled to, they ask around until getting a lead: a group of the southern Scorpion cultists have been spotted frequenting an area of warehouses on the edge of inner crown wall of the city. Several buildings there are known to board less reputable types, so little is thought of the southerners in their tan-and-gold cloaks.
When the adventurers arrive at the street in question, they find it bustling with business, and so they are unnoticed by a cultist as he exits a boarding house at the end of the street and makes his way toward the shopping district, obviously distracted counting foreign coins from a snakeskin pouch he carries idly in one hand.
Unnoticed until he nearly bumps into Percy. Recognizing her from, presumably, descriptions, he reaches for his weapons, but is quickly cut down. However, this alerts the Scorpion guards placed in the alley next to the boarding house, and soon the fight is on!
More cultists pour out of the building, along with Fenz, the magician the Thieves had encountered the previous evening, patched up now and healed of his previous injuries. Magic flies, swords sing, and bowstrings twang. The warehouse workers, porters, and other sundry townsfolk scatter as the conflict escalates.
Fenz is taken down, but Alys takes his place, yelling at someone ... or something ... inside the building. "They have come!" she cries. "We are beset!"
There is a strange roar and crackle from within the boarding house, and the wooden street side wall of the building begins to blacken with heat cast from the opposite side.
Her call for reinforcements doesn't come in time to save Alys, though. In the light of day, without a small army of Scorpion Fanatics to back her up and protect her while she casts, the magician is quickly slain, as are the remnants of the Scorpion cultists who had been hiding out here.
But as Alys falls to arrows and bolts of energy, the wall of the boarding house bursts outward in a gout of flames and burning shards of wood. Framed in the hole thus created is not, Dolan realizes, a djinni, but rather an efreeti -- one of those terrible creatures of myth that can command the essence of fire to burn those who dare to stand in their way!
There is no time to lament the misinformation given them by the beholder, though. Thunder of Sand flings balls of flames in all directions. But just as he is about to summon an elemental to aid him against those who killed his allies, Kelpip surrounds him in a dome of silence, negating most of the spells the efreeti could cast. Though this also hinders Trajinous' ability to cast Shatter into the fray, it gives the team the advantage they need.
Arrows and swords and magic, oh my!
The street is lit up with it, brightened to summer sunshine levels even on this smoggy, overcast day. And with a howl, Thunder of Sand is defeated, sent back to his native plane or discorporated, who is to know?
What the Thieves find in the gutted boarding house, though, is not what they were expecting. Instead of a slovenly hovel of fugitives, they find a ... portal. A globe of golden brilliance provides a glimpse into a warmer place than Etherian Elps: like a city of stucco trapped inside a snow globe -- except this globe filled with eddies of sand and a hot, blue sky, one of the few non-nomadic enclaves of the peoples of the Ten Thousand Trackless Sands is revealed in the portal. It is Mahashanda, City of Doves, and seat of the Sultana of Zhin herself.
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