Mandraiv's Diary 17

Upon searching the rest of the emperor’s “palace”, we did indeed find the artist.  As well as a few of his paintings interestingly in two batches – one good, one bad.  The ugly elf priestess went into borderline rapture firstly over the good paintings, and secondly over the artist.  Turns out that he’s apparently lost his muse, and thus the second batch of massively inferior paintings was explained.  Supposedly, he used to dream of the scenes for his art, but the dreams have fled.  The dwarf suggested, quite sensibly, that this may be because he was actually possessed by some kind of demon, which has left him for greener pastures, in the queen.  This could explain how she has become so powerful, but leaves questions as to why she would gain such power from the evil spirit, while all that the artist gained was a few dreams to inspire paintings.  Swings and roundabouts, I guess.  Maybe it’s just that the artist was a good man who subconsciously fought against the evil possession and prevented it’s most overt manifestations, and the queen is an evil bitch power, and as such embraced the spirit and profited more significantly.  Either way, the artist is somewhat doomed, I suspect, and potentially in for a rough time of it if he can’t get his muse back, since his fans, such as the ugly elf cleric are potentially the kind of people who may adopt drastic measures in order to “help” him to produce more of his highly disturbing works.

We also found a few monsters in another room, apparently called chokers.  The one that tried to grapple Artox was amusing, making a fatal mistake in that tactic.  Regardless, the creatures were dealt with comfortably, although one got away, and we left the building.

Once outside, we were able to ascertain, from the artist, that the sword master we seek is at the house of the noble family that runs the underworld in Korvosa, presumably being held along with some other guy who will have evidence that the queen killed the king to take the throne in her own right.  We then left him with the ugly elf chick to escort him back to the mainland.  I’m glad that she’s finally found someone to latch onto, someone ugly enough to suit her.  Hopefully this means that any jealousy she felt towards that last woman I was with, the one living opposite the artist’s house, will fade away and not cause the poor woman any grief.  Hmm, maybe I should pay her another visit before we leave town.  She was quite good looking.

Having accomplished our goal with the emperor, it was time to move onto our next clue, and we headed to the noble’s house.  Amusingly, for a change, we didn’t simply storm the place, and I talked our way in to see the boss.  He was quite receptive, and even rewarded us for killing the emperor, before explaining that the man we seek was in his labyrinth and that it was too much bother to have him removed, although we were welcome to go and get him.  He also explained a couple of the properties of this labyrinth, and unfortunately refused to accept us going shopping before entering, so we headed straight in.  On the way in we discovered a figurine of wondrous power of an elephant, quite a cool item, and pocketed it before hitting the elevator down into the maze.

Sadly, we were sorely tested by the first denizens of the labyrinth, a trio of fungus infested skeletons.   They were big, flying and highly venomous.  We managed to overcome them in the end, but it was a tough fight leaving many of us suffering from quite debilitating poisons, and the funniest fact of all.  Apparently four-arms, about the only one of us (apart from me) not to be poisoned had, in fact, magically delayed the onset such effects.  We sat around for a while, with the cleric ministering to him until his spell ran out.  At which point, with all of his wounds coming to strike him at the same time, he came very, very close to dying.  We decided that we were best of waiting until we could reverse some of the effects of the poisons and rested immediately so that the cleric could pray for some different spells.