The party swings by Lif’t to pick up Janky on the way to the Temple of Gond to turn in the Destroy Nim’s Companion quest. Bronze dragon priestess Valleta tries to weasel out of paying on the 500 gp bounty, but litigator Luth sets her straight and the party collects 400 gp in gems, 5 pp from the back office, and 50 gp from the collection box. Nim is super sad about seeing his dismantled creation. Luth offers to liberate him from his oppressors, but Valleta wants 800 gp. As nimblewrights aren’t people, the party declines and leaves in peace.
Reade reminds everyone that the Stone of Golor needs to be recovered before it gets moved. The party’s rented mule beats feet over to the address of SoG recipient Fenerus Stormcastle.
In the alley outside of Fenerus’s modest building, Janky and Togy get run down by a runaway horse-drawn apple cart driven by a tiefling yute. Monk Reade makes an armless kip upon the horse and halts the vehicle. The apologetic tiefling is joined by a pair of urchins wielding pretend adventuring gear. The streetwise kids, once plied with 5 gp, reveal that Fenerus had been arrested very recently, that a drow brute squad subsequently showed up to ransack the place, and that a large invisible somebody schooled the drow.
Confident of an empty building, aside from at least one large, invisible drow-beating aggressor, the party enters an unlocked door, advertising Bips & Bops by Betsy, at the southeast corner into the cloakroom of a costume shoppe. The store has been conspicuously ransacked. Togy detects no obvious magics, and no hidden compartments or secret spaces are found.
Moving north into a costume workshop, further searches are interrupted by a pair of revealed duergar who make a valiant, but ultimately fatal, attempt to stop the party.