Session #16 - The Streets of Cretia
With the beast defeated and Ornstin saved, the party crawls back to the Order of the Claw’s encampment and attempts to recover from their fight. You wake up, determined to use the day as fruitfully as possible – but before any experiments can take place there is still the matter of a missing Salamander that Sulu set loose on the streets of Cretia. As you search through town, you come upon an angry mob that has formed around the docks which wields curses and accusations as sharp as any of their spears.
Squeezing through the crowd of canid and tabaxi locals, Sulu pops out the other side and is shocked to find his amphibious companion has not only been incarcerated, but has seemingly been inflated to the point of comatose. Sulu bargains for the release of his renegade daughter but the fisherman demand compensation for their lost income. An unenthusiastic payment is made and Sulu is reunited with his boulderous beast that is so lacking in strength that she must be rolled to their next destination.
Hoping to find a suitable lab to conduct their experiments, Veera and Maria follow Kiwi to ‘the juice hut’ which is ran by an elderly, eccentric lizardfolk named Serpica. Her store is brimming with the overwhelming presence of Mouts that looked slightly different than the ones from the night before (which your DM, in all his wisdom, forgot to tell you). Much to her insistence, you all partake in her magically-infused smoothies that make po fear podrick, Yuka grow his hair out, and Sulu vomit 100 silver pieces onto the ground.
Serpica shows you her strange, magical basement but you decide it is not a very good place to conduct your experiments. You bid the old woman farewell and look around for a more suitable test site – a forge, perhaps! And a forge you find, and are able to commandeer with a very modest bribe. With what little ichor you have, you’re able to determine that this substance is hydrophobic, gets tougher the more you stir, and at least partially resistant to heat. With your final experiment, Po provides a caterpillar from his foliage that Veera drops into the black substance.
The necrotic ooze wraps itself around the small insect and takes the form of a dark, violet-eyed rat that furiously tries to claw out of its enclosure. Maria throws it in the forge, where the creature is slowly incinerated as it tries to escape.
As the party talks over what just happened, Kiwi’s childhood friend, Bourbon, stops by to meet Team 287. He says he’s late for his shift at Logjammer’s, a ‘sexy tavern’ run by a woman going under the name ‘Madam Hatchet’ – who just so happens to be running a ‘Logjamboree’ for the whole town.