Having smoked the horned devil in the west bedroom, the party splits organically to ascend the parallel staircases up across a mezzanine overlooking the sanctuary and into a meeting room to the north. Ten’s aura of vitality revitalizes Sqyylarr and the others as needed. Ash covers a roof hatch at the top of a ladder on the north wall while the party assesses the room’s religious contents and incompetently destroys some furniture. Sqyylarr notices a drip “falling” from floor to ceiling for no good reason. Ander experimentally injects decantered water, part of which also flows upward. Watc reckons the anomaly to be a benign bit of remainder magic and dispels it.
Ash ascends the ladder and enters the belfry through the hatch. When he circles around the one-ton bell, it swings at him aggressively. He drops below the bell to have a look for an aggressor within the bell, but there is only the clapper. Sqyylarr follows Ash and gets ready to ring the bell but waits for Ash to get clear in case the bell is knocked off by her mighty swing. Watc follows Sqyylarr and deduces that the bell is possessed by Bill the poltergeist. Ander follows Watc and deduces that whatever motivates Bill the Bell, it will be easier to manage at an eighth of its mass. Reduced off its mount, Bill the Bell breaks toward Watc and crashes through the belfry floor landing at Ten’s feet below. Ten need only glare turningly at the bell, and Bill departs to find an easier object to haunt.
The final unexplored room on the east side of the sanctuary is barred from the other side of its door, so the party goes ‘round the outside. The outside door is barred as well but no match for Ander’s force ballista which breaks the door across the bar. Unlimber Sqyylarr removes the bar and enters the bedroom, last occupied by the skeleton on the bed. She pages through a prayer journal and observes some mold-covered dirty dishes on a drainboard. Finding no prayers on Ulrozax, the mission target, she moves past the mold toward the sanctuary door. The mold cold spores Sqyylarr. Barika confirms the trigger by following Sqyylarr. Word of the mold gets back to Ander who breaks into the room through the window. Ten notices another journal and locates a mention of Ulrozax at the end. Ten makes a dramatic reading of the final page. Brother Micah, barricaded in this room, accused Ulrozax of tinkering with the food supply and causing folk to monster out. Ulrozax himself took refuge in the crypt. Mission clues are always in the last place you look.
Watc approaches to study the natural origin of the mold; it has clearly mutated beyond its known mycology and possibly got monstered from eating some of Ulrozax’s superfood. The mold likes Watc’s torch and starts filling the room. She tosses the torch into the corner to amuse the mold and possibly arson a church that has already sustained considerable damage since their visit began.
The mold room is evacuated. Stylish Ten night steps. The party adjourns to the crypt west of the church building and finds the entrance barred from the other side, of course. Passing too close to the graves in the yard invariably causes a shrieking skeleton minion to pop out of the ground, possibly as a single use alarm system. Ten heals up the skeleton dispatchers. Ander selects reduction as the solution to the hefty stone door problem, and the miniaturized door plops out of the entrance. Inside, stairs downward promise a cryptological adventure. The waiting barbed devil that Barika notices promises the adventure will begin immediately.
