2026.02.20: Eleven Fifty-Nine

When last we met...

The Freaky Gray Company retreated from the electrocution room and took shelter in the puzzle chamber among the six hooded statues, which were kind enough not to animate and murder anyone during the night. They have earned a full rest. They took it. Somewhere below them, something with glowing eyes waits in a hallway that smells faintly of acid. Something else waits at the end of the hall in a dimmer kind of darkness. The party is about to find out what both of those things are.

What the Long Rest Carries

Before anyone sets foot back in the hallway, Phelan makes his rounds. Identifying five magic items ritual-style takes the better part of two hours, which means the rest of the party lingers over bedrolls and camp supplies while he works. The inventory sorts itself out as follows.

The necklace Khoraka has been carrying is a Necklace of Fireballs — seven beads, which is more than practical and edging into editorial on the part of whoever put it down here. The cloudy gray glass bottle turns out to be an Eversmoking Bottle. The lightweight gold ring is a Ring of Feather Falling, available to whoever has an attunement slot to spare. And the rusty three-inch iron sphere that no one thought to throw at anyone? Iron Bands of Bilarro — a weapon that snaps open into a restraining cage around whatever you hit with it.

(The announcement comes with audible regret that no one lobbed it at a party member during the past several sessions.)

The large sapphire, the platinum armbands, and the various rings recovered from the Sultan's body are valuable but inert. The diamond is theoretically the right size to split into two resurrection components — if someone with jeweler's tools, a steady hand, and a willingness to make a consequential DC roll wants to try.

"Do any of these platinum rings smell like crotch? I just want to make sure we're not picking up a cock ring." — Khoraka, conducting a thorough inventory assessment

Eleven Fifty-Nine

Phelan's hands begin to tremble about an hour into reassembling Phase. A cold sweat. He knows this feeling.

Phase has a dial on his chassis — a small moon-phase tracker, the kind you'd find on an antique watch face. Phelan uses it to track Catha, Exandria's moon. He has not been able to use it since Phase went offline before the confrontation with Vecna. He has no idea how long it's been since he last tracked the cycle. When Phase comes back online now and the clock self-calibrates to defaults, Phelan gets his answer.

11:59 PM. Catha full.

One minute from a problem. (Roughly... moonrise is the ACTUAL problem.)

"Cuff me to something." — Phelan, calmly and immediately

The King of Wishful Thinking

Khoraka is the something. The dimensional shackles go on — left wrist to right wrist — and Phelan explains his reasoning as he locks them. These aren't ordinary restraints. Dimensional shackles prevent magical travel: no misty step, no dimension door, no teleportation of any kind. What they do not prevent is shifting. Which Phelan will be doing. The shackles resize to fit any creature between medium and large, so whatever shape he takes, Khoraka stays attached.

The logic is clean. The rest of the party considers who would be best positioned to hold onto a werewolf under a full moon. Khoraka's name is the answer. He doesn't argue, though Ferric seems skeptical, having dealt with this several times before.

Phelan digs into his bag and produces a vial of bright violet liquid that smells faintly of something floral. He opens his field notebook, makes a careful series of annotations, and drinks it. He does not explain what it is. He notes only that it will probably not work — and that this is, in fact, the point.

"I am literally shackled to the King of Bad Ideas." — Phelan

"I prefer the King of Wishful Thinking." — Khoraka

Clean Floors, Old Questions

The group replaces the crown on the statue in the room, and the stone door rolls back. The basalt hallway opens ahead of them, and it is, as always, immaculately clean. A little further along, still faintly bubbling, the remains of the gelatinous cube spread in a congealing slick across the floor. Valgara was inside that. Everyone is very diplomatic about bringing it up.

The hallway continues downward. Past the scorch marks of the electrocution room, the party picks up a smell: faint but familiar. Acid. Not draconic — the stone here isn't pitted or eaten the way black dragon acid leaves walls. It's cleaner than that. More clinical. Someone says what everyone is thinking: probably the gelatinous cube. The hallway is again 20 feet wide and 20 feet tall.

At the far end of the hall, two dim red glows hang in the dark at approximately the height of eyes in a very large head. And on the right-hand wall: an iron door, older than everything else they've encountered down here.

The door that answers no

The iron door is different from everything else in these halls. Carved basalt, ornate stonework, continuous relief — that's the Sultan's aesthetic. This door is iron, old iron, and it isn't locked with any mechanism anyone can see. Khorka can't move it. Phelan's lockpicking roll comes back at 29 — a critical success — and the lock clicks correctly, perfectly, and then clicks immediately back. It resets faster than the handle can turn.

Arcane lock. A spell that can only be undone by the right word, the right creature, or the spell Knock — which, as Phelan notes with some feeling, artificers are not given, despite having Arcane Lock, a design failure that will apparently be pursued with the appropriate authorities.

Shouting the Sultan's name at the door does nothing. Peering through the keyhole reveals only darkness. The door stays closed. Other ground to cover.

The Sultan in Stone

At the end of the hallway: the source of the red glow.

A statue. Two feet of plinth, nine feet of figure — polished obsidian plated in solid brass, seated on a throne in the pose of someone who has never once questioned his right to occupy any space he chooses. Grand Sultan Marrake al-Sidan al-Hariq ben Lazan, claws elongated, small goatee rendered in such painstaking detail that looking at it too long produces the uncanny impression of motion. Set into the face: two ruby eyes, still catching light that has no obvious source. It is the most lifelike depiction of the Sultan the party has seen. Being near it produces a sensation adjacent to being watched.

Khoraka runs his hands along the neck, the arms, the legs, searching for seams, joints, anything that slides or rotates. The statue doesn't give. Meanwhile, Ferric detects magic on the iron door, confirms it, and Erash dispels the arcane lock. The door swings open.

At the exact same moment, a foot finds a pressure plate which drops an inch into the floor between Phelan and Khoraka.

The Sultan's ruby eyes ignite. The space directly in front of the statue becomes a very brief, very thorough, very personal fireball. Phelan and Khoraka take it full — enough fire resistance between them to survive it, but not to enjoy it. The pressure plate's secondary function, it turns out, was unlocking the iron door.

Valgara puts her shoulder to the door and walks through.

Older than the Fire

Beyond the iron door: an almost-hexagonal chamber, and the first thing everyone registers is what they're standing on. The floor crunches. Bones — or what used to be bones, now so desiccated that picking one up crumbles it to chalk. The chamber is full of them, but there's no sign of struggle. No shattered skulls, no blade marks, no evidence anyone died unwillingly. The remnants of silk gowns suggest attendants. People who were meant to be here.

In the center of the room, a raised dais ringed by six columns supports an onyx box — eight feet wide, twice as long — its surface inexplicably wet. Everything else in this room has been reduced to dust. The sarcophagus sweats moisture from stone in a space where the air itself is desiccated, and no one can determine why. No drip from the ceiling. No seam at the floor. Detect Magic finds nothing. The stone just weeps.

On the base of the box: inscriptions in Infernal, worn with age. What can be read confirms that whoever is inside was a royal. Female. Notably regarded — unusual enough in an Efreeti society that whoever built this chamber thought it worth recording.

Against the far wall, through a doorway without a door: a room that glows red.

Phelan peeks around the corner into the red room with a mirror. The floor of the adjacent chamber is covered in ancient runes forming a complete circle, glowing crimson. Around the walls: skeletal figures, arms at rest. Not moving. Yet.

The party decides to open the sarcophagus first.

She who was Royal

It takes a combination of Phelan, Valgara, and Khoraka to shift the lid. It grinds sideways and the chamber breathes — one long exhale of stale air carrying the smell of deep age, dry rot, the particular mustiness of a sealed space undisturbed for thousands of years.

Inside: mummified remains wrapped in silk so fine it's nearly transparent. Through it, the glint of platinum and gems. An Efreeti of consequence, reduced to bones and burial cloth. No phylactery. No obvious threat. Just the silent fact of someone powerful, once.

Phelan resignedly moves the veil.

The burst of wind comes from the chest of the mummy — a column of cold air releasing from wherever it was compressed, centuries of held breath finally escaping. Above the open sarcophagus, mist begins to coalesce. A wraith — vast, half-transparent, ancient — taking shape above its own remains. Its mouth opens. There's no sound that carries in air, but something reaches the party anyway, something that touches the back of the spine without going through the ears.

Initiative is called.

Grovel

Snow had her bow ready, and Erash was prepared with a spell. They let loose the moment the wraith manifests — a storm of arrows and freezing hail buying the party the critical half-second of composure to get their bearings. The wraith turns its full ancient dread on the party, and Erash turns it right back: he raises his hand and casts Fear at the thing, a cone of raw terror projected outward in a voice that does not sound entirely like his own.

The wraith rolls a 1 on its Wisdom save. It books it for the red room, moving away from the source of its fear as fast as a spectral form can manage.

Which leaves the red room.

Which the party advances toward.

Which has a circle of runes in the floor.

Which Phelan and Khoraka step into — and the floor ripples like water beneath them. It pulls. Phelan feels the floor begin to take him, pulling him down, toward wherever this leads. He sinks an inch. Another inch.

Ferric sees what's happening. He doesn't hesitate. He shoves Phelan out of the way — physically pushes him off the ripple — stepping onto it himself.

The floor takes him instead.

Ferric is gone.

The floor ripples a second time.

What comes out is nine feet tall, tusked, with the mass of a draft animal and the disposition of something that has been somewhere very unpleasant and would like the room to know about it. Demon. Nalfeshnee. The genuine article. It orients on the party.

Erash looks at it.

"Grovel." — Erash

One word. One arcane command. Nine feet of fiend folds to the floor, face-down, prostrate in the middle of the red rune circle while Valgara immediately climbs onto its back and starts swinging.

What the Floor Takes

What follows is a sustained inquiry into how much damage a Nalfeshnee can absorb before it stops being a problem.

The answer is quite a lot, but not infinite.

Valgara climbs it and hits it with the vorpal blade, riding out a stretch of catastrophic dice until the GM calls for a re-roll on account of the move being genuinely cool — and the second roll delivers. Khoraka stands over the prostrate creature, calls on Avandra's power with the deliberate focus of someone who has been saving this for the right moment, and brings a divine smite down on a critical hit: 12d8 radiant, doubled, against a fiend. Eighty points of damage in a single blow. The room goes white.

Across the chamber, Snow catches the wraith with two arrows and Phelan — still rattled, shooting at disadvantage — lands the shot that finishes it. One bullet, center mass. The wraith arches, comes apart at the core, and dissolves into aerial mist that doesn't come back together.

The Nalfeshnee bucks Valgara off, unleashes a psychic pulse that terrifies Phelan and deals considerable damage to everyone nearby, and takes two more rounds of sustained punishment before Valgara puts the greatsword through its chest on a "how do you want to do this?" The ichor situation is considerable. Everyone in the room is decorated.

The Cold he Brought Back

The floor ripples a third time.

Ferric comes back fetal-curled and silent, and when hands find him he's ice — not the cold of a person who's been somewhere cold, but ice in the way of surfaces submerged in something that shouldn't exist at room temperature. His eyes, when he opens them, are completely black. No iris. No white. Just black, from lid to lid, staring at nothing.

He was there for less than a minute.

But it felt... so much longer.

Ferric's eyes fade slowly back: iris, then white, until he's recognizably himself again — shaking, ice-cold, sitting on the floor of an ancient tomb while his party kneels around him. He was in the Abyss. Encased in ice. He was there for what felt like much more than a minute. He chose to go. He pushed Phelan out of the way and stepped onto the portal himself and the floor took him and he didn't know if it would give him back.

It did.

Phelan quickly sets up the Camper's Respite and ushers everyone inside. The little fireplace burns merrily. Snow pulls tea out of a bag of holding and Phelan puts a blanket around Ferric's shoulders while his bones start to thaw. The fire crackles. The bones on the floor crumble quietly at the edges of the light visible through the respite door. The red room glows through its own doorway, runes still pulsing, waiting to see if anyone else wants to play.

That is it for the Freaky Gray Company's session on February 20th, 2026!

Final Thoughts

• Not sure what was in the water or the wine this evening but... wow. The quotes. Ultimately, I decided we were all better off having those live in memory than documented here.
• Eighty points of divine smite damage on a critical hit against a fiend is an event. The table has apparently never seen 80 points of damage before. It showed.
• The wraith may have been dispelled... but the Efreeti royal's remains are a puzzle we've yet to solve. Whether it was her spirit or something bound there to protect her is still unclear. And there's the weeping tomb. Things we need to figure that out before we leave the area.
• Phelan and Khoraka can only stay chained up like this for so long... so far, nothing too bad has happened, but who knows when moonrise is on Exandria? Is there a better way to manage Phelan's impending transformation?
• If these two fighters end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, it will go badly for the party, and nobody is doing anything two-handed. Not to mention Khoraka's permanent hearing damage. 💥