PROLOGUE
Bizzle, Nanny, Beard, and Stitches had just returned from retrieving the recipe for “Venom”. They carried the instructions and a sample of the vile poison to Rooster. The warren seems uncharacteristically empty.
Before they got to Rooster’s office the door burst open. “Took you long enough! Hurry up, were shorthanded, and we’ve got a code Gray.”
“Who?” all four reply in unison.
“Epi Glottis”, replies Rooster. Al four respond with the loudest stunned silence you have never heard.
“Three other half shares were his escort, Larry, Moe, and Curly. They were due back last night, or at least I expected a message from Epi. The fine folk over in Baellart have a large clock tower that has not worked for quite some time. They contracted with us to get it fixed. Epi loves tinkering, and it wasn’t a dangerous mission so he went out in the field. They took a P.T.A.T.A. and I expected them back same day. I just have a bad feeling about this one.”
“Business is good as you can see, so good, we’ve got no one left to respond to this code Gray. Grab Wings from the infirmary, he should be all better after getting mauled by that gaggle of squirrels. Barbarians are good against most foes, but a sea of squirrels, just ain’t right. I need you all to get to Baellart and make sure everything is alright with Epi and the other three stooges.”
“Roger” responds Bizzle, looking around the empty hanger, Bizzle asks “How do we get there? I can P.H.A.R.T. if I haven’t been there?”
“All of our hardware is out, grab some horses, reload your coats, and get going, it’s a half day’s ride to Baellart. Bring back Epi and your comrades.” Rooster says in a dour tone.
…..
After a half day’s ride South, the town of Baellart comes into view. The clock tower is easy to spot, and a signature silver orb rests off to the east of the tower, the P.T.A.T.A.
Riding up next to the vessel, you dismount, and you tie off the horses inside the belly of the P.T.A.T.A.
Nothing seems particularly amiss. The clocktower is sixty feet tall, but calling it a tower is probably a misnomer. It’s a wide blocky building, with one wall that hosts a large clock face. Below and to the right of the clock face is a pair of closed double doors.
LOGUE
Business is booming at R&S so all the good operatives are deployed. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, Rooster calls on Nanny, Stitches, Beard, and Bizzle for a Code Grey: missing operative. Epi Glottis and his three reliable technicians, Larry, Moe, and Curly, were tasked with repairing the historic clock tower in Baellart and have not checked in.
The team grabs Wings, a barbarian in feathered headdress who has been convalescing from a mass squirrel ambush. The feisty five set off on the HORSES, which it turns out is not an acronym for an especially clever contraption, it’s literally just some horses.
After an uneventful half-day ride to Baellart, the team first checks out Epi Glottis’s P.T.A.T.A. parked nearby the sixty foot clock tower. Nothing is out of place and Wings even finds the repair contract with all i’s dotted and t’s crossed. The party continues on to the clock tower whose clock isn’t right twice a day.
Beard knocks on the clock tower doors a couple of times. Bizzle and Nanny hide in the bushes to see what Beard’s audacious fate will be while Wings scouts for another entrance, finding only a very high and grimy window. Stitches grows impatient and easily hammers the unlocked double doors open.
Wings enters the empty room which contains a desk and small chest. Nanny and Bizzle search the desk for documentation of mischief. Bizzle finds the log book of clock worker guild member Jenneline Gyer from three years prior in which she reports that after the inspector’s death the clock will never be right. Nanny finds a lined drawer partitioned to hold 30 specific tokens, now gone. Beard munches on his thinking ham.
Wings finds enormous moving clockworks in the next room, comprising gears five feet thick and suspended five feet off the floor by shafts through to the level above. Beard announces with his most penetrating Yoohoo! that they have arrived to help with the clock problem, but there is still no response.
Wings explores a ladder up to the mezzanine above the entry room where two waiting kenku attack him. One opens up with a semi-automatic assault-style crossbow that fires three bolts at Wings and the other kenku stabs him rogue-like. This predictably enrages Wings who gives the rogue a dose of his macuahuitl.
Kenku spring from all directions, several of them atop the room’s gears on level to fire their repeating crossbows at Wings and Bizzle. More kenku rush Nanny, Stitches, and Beard on the tower floor below. Nanny picks one off with her shortbow and Beard summons a flaming sword. Above, Bizzle takes out the rogue while Wings charges the crossbower. Many volleys of bolts fly at Wings and Bizzle from the safety of the geartops.
Epi Glottis’s voice rings out not to hurt the birds; they’re just a little panicked and don’t understand. Beard snuffs out his flame sword and explains patiently to the kenku that he and his friends are from a distant land: outside the clocktower. Nanny and Stitches pause hostilities but adjust their grip on their weapons, ready to react to any further aggression. They don’t wait long.
Another volley of bolts sails overhead to strike at Wings and Bizzle and five kenku surround and assail Nanny, Stitches, and Beard. Nanny and Stitches drop two of the five. Wings and Bizzle corner and knock out their crossbower.
Beard declares they come in peace as he transforms into a giant fire elemental with a split beard and he runs in a circle through the surrounding kenku burning them and fire punching one into flames. The wooden floor ignites in a perfect circle around Nanny and Stitches as they dispatch the last few up-close kenku.
Fire Beard yells primordially that none shall escape his wrath as he blazes a runway of fire toward the gear-perched crossbowers, dispersing them. It occurs to Beard that incinerating Baellart’s historic clocktower might earn a gig at his next performance review so he noshes his Ransom & Salvage brand Salvage Bar and reforms as a water elemental, retracing his steps to extinguish his own conflagration.
Wings observes the flame-engulfed ladder and drops off the edge of the mezzanine. As he runs at the kenku crossbowers now fleeing Beard’s flames, he swerves to knock out a wizardly kenku he finds attending a large electrified brass sphere evidently powering the clockworks. The rotating gears coast to a halt.
Bizzle watches Wings disappear into the gathering smoke and steam. He attempts to employ the nifty repeating crossbow dropped by the kenku to give them a taste of their own, but it snags on his scimitar and breaks. He drops off the side of the mezzanine following Wings and stops to ineffectually consider the purpose of the electric sphere. He offers Beard assistance, but Beard, beating down the fire with his heavy winter hermit blanket, waves him on. Everything under control here.
Stitches backs out of the fire and sees movement in a pile of rubble that had concealed the kenku ambush. A closer look reveals no further danger or movement so she fishes out a gear suitable as a hat, thus inventing steampunk fashion.
Nanny dashes around the back of the gears to pursue the fleeing kenku with sneaky shortbow shots as they surround Wings. She comes across a bloody greycoat abandoned under the gears which Stitches nabs on her way by.
Wings and Nanny clear away all but two remaining kenku who flee up a spiral stairs in the corner, pursued closely by Wings.
Wings emerges on the second level and finds himself in his usual position of strength: surrounded. He’s pressed into the corner by three repeating crossbowers and three fighters. Bizzle joins the fray, running past a fighter to tie up the crossbowers. Nanny dodges up the stairs and goes to work on the fighters harrowing Wings. Stitches follows and joins Bizzle against the crossbowers.
Downstairs, Beard extinguishes the last of the flames with a tidal wave. For his next trick he dumps five wasps out of a jar and then embiggens them to giant size, dispatching them up the stairs to mix it up with the second kenku wave.
Wings takes a significant beating but the kenku are no match for the operatives and quickly succumb. Wings freshens up with his salvage bar while the wasps form an escort around Beard as he rejoins the group. Stitches presses on to the next room.
The clockworks in this room, three feet off the floor, are driven by the shafts from below. It appears to be a workshop with tools and replacement gears at the ready. Stitches climbs the gears and has a great view across the room to the back of the clock face. Beard proclaims his motto, Go big or eat a ham, and is carried up the gears by his five wasps. Nanny follows in and can see legs under the gears on the opposite side of the room. She also hears the skittering of many small things and can make out two heaps of bloody greycoats.
Wings surveys the gear room, thankful the gears are stationary and not mashing everyone up. Which reminds him. He dashes back downstairs to finish off the electric sphere wizard, only knocked unconscious, so the wizard can’t restart the works.
Beard declares himself master of the wasps, as anyone could plainly see. A voice answers it also is a master. Stitches confesses she is not a master. With that formality settled, many clockwork critters scurry out of the gears and attack.
Nanny struggles up and positions herself in the rear on the gear to lob in arrows. Beard sends the wasps forward to meet the clockwork critters, personally ice knifing one that tripped attacking Stitches. Adjacent Stitches gets a little frostbit from the spell but that doesn’t keep her from smashing the frozen critter to bits.
While the party battles above, Wings scoots under the gears toward the legs standing next to a red drape. It turns out the legs are attached to a caster who polymorphs Wings into an orange tabby cat. As a cat, Wings can squeeze into a cage beneath the red drape and finds Epi Glottis, quite dead. Tubes connect Epi Glottis to a cylinder with blue glowing things on top.
The battle of Beard’s pretties versus the leg guy’s pretties is trending to the R&S team. The wasps hold the line freeing Nanny to choose her lethal shortbow sneak attacks unimpeded from the back. As the clockwork critters thin out, the wasps isolate the survivors allowing Stitches and Bizzle to press through to the leg guy. Bizzle fumbles an attack and his evil scimitar Sinistra flies into Stitches.
Cat Wings isn’t the mighty fighter that barbarian Wings is, but still has the same measure of courage. He launches at the leg guy and leaves a nasty scratch. The leg guy drops concentration on the polymorph to cast a different spell as Bizzle and Stitches rush at him. Wings rages and stands to beat on the leg guy, breaking his concentration on maintaining a concealed barrier. Wings gets accidentally smacked by Rocky IV when Bizzle botches a throw aimed at the leg guy. Stitches, recently lacerated by Bizzle’s errant scimitar, falls to the ground. Bizzle collects himself with a second wind and jumps down to the leg guy for some proper introductions.
The leg guy reveals that he is none other than Birt the Insidious, son and heir of Craig the Insidious (DBA The Insidious Lich & Co., LLC). While the R&S team gasps at that revelation, Birt flies into the air, snatches up the cylinder atop the red draped cage, and makes for the grimy window. Nanny takes careful aim and her shortbow arrow finds Birt, sending him crashing through a gear and to the floor as his concentration is broken.
Beard takes out the last clockwork critter and sends the giant wasps to surround Birt. Stitches, already on the ground, crawls over to Birt and smacks him with her warhammer. Wings joins her and plants his macuahuitl on Birt. Bizzle learns from Birt that Epi Glottis is in the draped cage.
Things look bad for Birt but he has another trick up his sleeve. He passwalls through the floor to the lower level, still clinging to the cylinder containing Epi Glottis’s essence. Beard’s wasps pursue through the passwall as do Stitches, Wings, and Nanny. Wings gets another piece of Birt who tries to blink himself away but writhes in pain when he botches the escape. Nanny puts one more arrow into Birt and he crumples unconscious right before Beard falls on her. Wings snatches the cylinder just before a ring of green lights surround Birt and arms pull him into the ground.
Upstairs, Bizzle breaks open the cage and pulls the essence hoses out of Epi Glottis. Bizzle teleports his lifeless body to Rooster’s office where Rooster has no time to wonder why Bizzle always picks his office as his destination. Epi Glottis is rushed to the infirmary and Bizzle returns for the cylinder of essence.
At the after action review, Nanny reports Larry, Moe, and Curly became victims of the crushing gears, hence the bloody greycoats found beneath them. Rooster wants to know why no one administered Plan B to Epi Glottis the moment he was found. But in the end Epi Glottis is reunited with his essence and released in good health, albeit with the experience of an adventurer of only ten seasons rather than twenty seasons.