Rooster announces a priority one mission to recover a shard of the Bloodstone Emerald. The Ransom & Salvage operatives will know it by sight because it pulses red beams of light. There’s no time to waste so they will use Bizzle’s FHRTT helm to teleport to the entrance of Sune’s Muse, the same location of the Quicksilver heist previously.
The doors stand open despite the lateness of the evening. Bizzle finds a tripped needle trap on the door upon which an impaled orc finger still hangs, sans orc. Inside, a troll, whose name Nanny later learns is Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh Uhh, guards the lobby. Bizzle queries the troll who reveals his gang is onsite to find the Bloodstone Emerald shard. Figures.
Bizzle, who has always considered it less than ideal to steal from others in the business, bids farewell to the troll who laments the gnome’s small brain. Strings persuades Bizzle that whoever these guys are they probably aren’t going to use the shard for niceness and Bizzle’s ideals need calibration.
Nanny and Catty Batty, who need no convincing, attack the troll. Uhh Uhh can’t land a claw or bite but does manage to yell out an alarm in orcish. Setting aside personal ethics to help his friends, Bizzle slashes in with both scimitars, severing the troll’s right arm. Strings mocks the asymmetrical troll which inspires Nanny’s twin-handed piercing. Batty places a critical strike on the troll’s dexterity just as three orogs arrive.
The orogs don’t contribute much, either because of confidence or disinterest. They observe for a while and depart after Strings banes them.
When Bizzle slashes off the troll’s left arm and both arms self-animate to grapple Nanny and Batty, Batty points out that maybe Bizzle ought to stop subdividing the troll. She teleports to a torch and lights it. When Nanny sneaks a devastating attack that drops the troll, Batty puts the torch to its open arm socket and Uhh Uhh burns up immediately.
Strings and Nanny go to work on the left arm which Batty flings off her leg and ignites with the torch. Bizzle eventually stomps the right arm lifeless but not before impaling his foot on a troll fingernail. He’s about to ignite the arm but Batty stops him, pointing out Nanny’s attached leg. Bizzle punts the arm away from Nanny with his good foot and Strings ignites it with Batty’s torch. Nanny extracts the debilitating claw from Bizzle’s foot.
Strings listens at one of the closed doors and hears a hissing sound. Batty listens at another door and overhears snippets of a conversation regarding adventurer tacos. Nanny hears four orcs and an orog walking around. Bizzle, unacquainted with subtlety, pokes his head out and inquires of the orcs what they’re doing, to which they reply candidly they are waiting to ambush some adventurers. Nanny peeks out a different direction and sees an oil bomb, fuse lit, against one of the doors.
When the doors are blown apart, the party sneaks through the smoke, covered by Batty’s pass without a trace. Batty teleports to the ceiling and uses her bat cloak to walk along to the stairs. The others thread their way through the orcs standing around taunting for the adventurers to come out of the lobby.
Ahead on the gallery stairs, Craig, looking somewhat wispy, ethereal, and purple, meets a werewolf who has failed him for the last time. Craig extends a bony black hand and green flames engulf the werewolf.
Craig ascends to the second floor, followed surreptitiously by the party who observe him using his silver and emerald sword as a pulsing red directional indicator. They follow him to a drake statue as his sword pulses faster and faster until it glows a steady red. He reaches into the mouth of a drake statue and pulls free a “tooth” matching the description of the shard of the Bloodstone Emerald.
Now or never time, Bizzle crosses the room from his hiding place using the mithril banding to silence Craig’s spellcasting and attempts to grapple Craig unsuccessfully. Batty taps her ki and rains a flurry of blows on Craig. Craig’s sword transforms into a warhammer and he sends Bizzle, croquet-style, into a statue each time he returns to miss grappling Craig. Strings keeps his inspiration and mockery flowing, and his rapier stabbing. Nanny uses these distractions to sneak in attacks until Craig explodes into smoke and departs with the shard back to, they guess, the astral plane. The silence spell hopefully prevents the scuffle from attracting unwanted orc attention.
Batty teleports into a nearby alcove to investigate some murmurs that might be undercommon. She finds a nothic, whom Strings recognizes as the oracle, babbling away in undercommon and wearing blinders. The oracle, like Craig, suffers from some interplanar effect of seeming a little wispy around the edges and fading.
Nanny conversates with the oracle telepathically and reports to the party that the oracle is warning about some kind of coming Skullguy Flamesword Colossus. Batty removes the oracle’s blinders and, panicked, it attacks her with a rotting gaze, as though it is mistakenly seeing something other than its rescuer. Suddenly the oracle solidifies in this plane and ceases hostility.
Bizzle doesn’t care for the sound of this colossus business so he pounds his untested salvage bar, version 2, to ready himself. In addition to the expected effects of eight hours rest, he finds he’s moving twice as fast and no longer conversant in common. He confides in Nanny that he feels especially splendid and capable, but all she hears is “flgr8”.
An additional unexpected benefit of the salvage bar is that Bizzle may now converse with the oracle. The oracle explains that the colossus isn’t arriving here and now, but instead the oracle has had a vision of Craig collecting all seven of the Bloodstone Emerald shards and summoning the colossus to Daggerford.
Bizzle explains that R&S is a for-profit enterprise and that the oracle should hire them through one of their many fine outside salesmen for the Craig and colossus project, but that the oracle’s rescue is already covered by a previous scope of work so of course it would be no problem to fight their way through the dozen orcs to the front entrance for that purpose.
As it turns out, the oracle’s teleport is not affected by the magical suppression field and the rescuers find themselves back at headquarters, rescued by the hostage.
Introductions, awkward because of the communication barrier, are made between the oracle and Rooster.
Rooster pays the party but takes back half for losing the Bloodstone Emerald.