We headed upstairs looking for the doctor, and sure enough
we found him. He had a few more Grey
Maidens and Queen’s Physicians with him, but we were able to kill
everyone. He kept accusing us of being
the cause of the plague throughout the fight, which seemed a bit odd, but did
bring on an interesting slagging match between him and the cleric. While everyone else was going about their
business, the cleric started yelling abuse at the doctor. The most interesting thing in this was that
he started out cursing him in the name of Abadar, sensibly enough, but then
started invoking the names of other gods.
Looks like he might be having a crisis of faith. I wonder which way he’ll go with that –
hopefully he’ll convert to a church that will thus provide us with free
healing. Anyway, after we’d killed the
doctor the last remaining Queen’s Physician opted to suicide instead of
fighting to the end, cursing us in the name of Urgathoa. Unfortunately, this was still a little short
as far as useful evidence as to our killing of a bunch of people supposedly
responsible for stopping the plague tearing the city a new and very ugly,
bloody asshole at the moment, and in their hospital as well.
Searching the place and completing our looting of the
bodies, we discovered a couple of things.
Firstly, it seems that some Varisians are immune to blood veil. We discovered this because there was a room
upstairs filled with Varisians, all restrained to beds, all in really bad shape
and all having been experimented on. We
also found some notes in the doctor’s office regarding the experiments and the
possibility of this natural trait leading to a cure for blood veil. We took the notes, not exactly the kind of
thing we could afford to leave lying around if there happens to be an investigation
into the slaughter we initiated in this hospital. We also noted, on removing the helms of the
Grey Maidens, that their faces were all hideously disfigured. I can barely conceive of such a monstrous
act, or of joining a cult that requires that all members remove any hint of
beauty that they possess. I think I’ll
suggest that the ugly chick join though – she’d look much better in full plate
armour, and she wouldn’t need to suffer any rituals scarring to fit right in. I’ll also need to investigate this. If this is a part of any specific cult, I may
have finally found a cause that I can ride to political power – the eradication
of such an evil cult is just the thing to get the people behind me and
believing that the tragic demise of any opposition occurred purely by
coincidence, regardless of how many similar hunting accidents befall them.
We also discovered a lingering aura of evil around the
corpse of the doctor, more inadmissible evidence that we are on the right
track, and a lever that was clearly the way to get the lift downstairs to take
us down into, hopefully, the Urgathoa cult headquarters. And then the arguments began.
Four-arms declared that he was unwilling to proceed until we
had released the restraints on all of the Varissian test subjects. Talking to them revealed that they had all
been abducted and experimented on, almost to the point of death. Despite their ordeal, I was concerned about
letting them go, as we still had no evidence with which to defend ourselves in
a capital trial for the hospital ruckus, assuming that there is even the
slightest semblance of a trial. It
seemed to me that letting them go was a sure way to reduce the time it would
take for our activities to come to the attention of some kind of officials, and
without any evidence I think even the city watch captain would be hard pressed
to overlook this one. I contemplated
getting in some practice for my future political career by initiating a few
hunting accidents with the Varisians, but figured I’d be unlikely to hide this
from my companions, and a few of them might arc up a bit at the murder of a
dozen or so innocents. So I argued,
along with the gun nut, to keep them restrained until we had some hard
evidence. We lost the argument, and the
restraints were removed and the test subjects asked to stay here until we got
back to take them away for medical treatment.
I’m sure that people who have effectively been tortured will stay in the
room they were tortured in because we asked them to, quite nicely. Regardless, there was little I could do,
except move on to the next clear issue.
Many of us wanted to rest and recover, having taken a fair
beating from the doctor and his cronies, as well as having used quite a lot of
their spells and such. Unfortunately,
given our situation I felt that this was impossible, as without evidence we
were doomed. We also faced the problem
that having clearly discovered the source of the plague (assuming that we were
right about the cult being under the hospital) there was a god chance that they
would clear out overnight, leaving us once again empty handed after warning the
bad guys that we were onto them.
Eventually, we proceeded.
The lift took us down to the cult’s headquarters, an
apparent temple to Urgoatha. We headed in and found several Queen’s Physicians,
undead and priests of Urgoatha. Then we
found four-arms nemesis, Fyffe.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, Fyffe proved too tough, as we
had allowed him plenty of time to prepare for our attack and as an alchemist he
was a very tough opponent, once prepared. He poisoned the warrior, causing him
to fall unconscious (a familiar poison) and things went bad from there. We were pretty much unable to hit the man,
and as such were forced to retreat, although we did kill most of his minions
during the fight. All that remains to be
seen now is whether I’ll be able to convince the others to head back down in a
few minutes, hopefully to catch Fyffe before he flees.
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