Cleric Ten finds the party just waking from a long rest, eyes the piles of defeated undead and undefeated dead, and transmutes the shillelagh aspect of his club. Barika wastes no time opening the door across the hall to find a room strewn with rubble and a couple of sarcophagi. Barika wastes only a little time returning to the hall to express her rage before returning to examine the north sarcophagus, already open and mostly empty. Watc kicks through the rubble and frostbites a lurking huecuva. The lid flies off the south sarcophagus and a second huecuva pops out in time to see his buddy pitched into the wall by Ander’s firebolt and eldritch cannon combo. Ten utters a word of radiance before luring the huecuva into Sqyylarr’s sentineling smash and fatal follow-up. Ash sneaks a final arrow into the other prey.
Observant Barika locates a secret door behind the rubble. Sqyylarr leads the party into the secret earthen passage beyond up to the unsecret side of the far secret door. The small, secret room is crowded with urns and what seems like a lucrative collection of treasure chests at first, but conceal a deadly secret. Watc knocks open a convenient padlock and the roused mimic attempts to eat her face. Sqyylarr destroys the mimic and regards the other five treasure chests suspiciously. Ash and Watc excuse themselves as Ander adopts a reconnaissance-by-fire tactic. Sqyylarr, Barika, and Ten ruin each mimic as it is revealed. Having run out of mimics and chests to provoke, Ander invites the urns to leave peacefully and obliterates the most valuable one as a demonstration of his zeal.
Ash locates a secret door on the other side of the mimic room. Through the door Sqyylarr finds yet more sarcophagi, dust, and an ouchy layer of green slime on the floor. Ander declares that the solution to pollution is dilution and washes the acid slime against the far wall with his decanter of endless geysering. The party crosses the room unperturbed by the displaced slime.
Through the unbarred door beyond the slime is a collapsed tunnel. Ash warns of a shifty shadow. The shadow gives Watc a touch of necrosis. Readied Ander gives the shadow a taste of firebolt. The shadow absorbs back into the rubble. Barika hoists her greataxe, ready for the shadow’s return. The shadow, not one to disappoint, foolishly emerges to necrotize Barika but fatally catches her greataxe right in its shadowy vital bits.
The next door opens into a grand hall lined with sarcophagi beneath a high, columned ceiling. A large, fancy, jade sarcophagus, disturbingly chained closed, prominently adorns a central dais. Sqyylarr and Watc try to pull the lid off the nearest mundane sarcophagus but find the effort is unnecessary as several mummies all around the room eagerly pop their own lids off and gaze dreadfully at the party. Ander scorches rays, fires off his cannon, and closes the door behind him as he advances to the rear.
Cleric Ten rises on light-draining night steps and turns the mummies from his righteously floating vantage. Ten designates unfleeing mummies to be pasted by Barika and Sqyylarr in battle order. Controlling Ash goads the unturned into distraction. Ten drops a circle of power to ward the mummies’ attempts to curse and rot. Ander pops into the room momentarily to lend his ballistics and check on the battle progress. Progress is favorable and well-coordinated until a sneaky, spider-climbing vampire spawn claws at screaming Ten from the ceiling.
Barika chops through a mummy and flings a handaxe at the ceiling vampire in a single motion. Ten, maintaining concentration on his power circle, telekinetically yanks the vampire off the ceiling and crashes it to the floor within reach of Sqyylarr. Sqyylarr brutally pulverizes the prone vampire with repeated, heavy, surging, overhead smashes. Not much remains of the unspawned vampire spawn, not much that’s solid at least. Suck on that.
Ander ballistas the last turnt mummy into the wall it has been hugging. Barika takes long steps to chop the mummy. Ten’s thorn whip snaps around Barika and slays the mummy.
Ash opens a door up on the mezzanine he occupied as a firing position. A locked treasure chest just beyond a winged warrior woman statue attracts a precautionary arrow from his longbow. It’s either a genuine chest or a well-disciplined mimic. Barika moves closer to determine which, and the statue’s considerable stone sword falls on her attackingly. Barika returns strikes on the completely indifferent statue. Ash notices a pressure plate under Barika’s weighty feet and concocts a cunning plan to defeat the statue: step over the plate. That solution is too simple for artificer Ander who helps himself to the statue sword arm’s essential animating clockworks.
Ander picks the lock easily but regrets his success when he finds within the chest a macabre human corpse, its eternal scream captured in the molten gold poured over its head and torso. The assembly is as valuable as it is disgusting.
