Briar hacks at the bars imprisoning Hops and the footless man while Ash works on the lock. A cloud of kill rolls over the rest of the party and takes out Professor Steele. GG runs to help but is also overcome. Nicodemus heals Professor Steele and GG back into action. Jump-empowered Professor Steele makes a running leap for safety out of the cloud kill but instead falls into the misty chasm. Sqyylarr, running just ahead of the cloud kill, hucks a rope end to Professor Steele and, backed up by Barika, arrests his 280 pound fall.
Freed Hops heals Briar. Ash passes without a trace into a side area to rummage for Hops’s armor. Nicodemus heals GG and drops his large scroll man spiritual guardian between two of the hags. They claw at it disturbingly. Sqyylarr and Barika reel in Professor Steele. The cloud kill mercifully rolls off the edges and dissipates into the misty chasm. The elder hag, behind her two sisters, lightning bolts through Sqyylarr, Barika, and one screaming sister. Hops preserves the lives of Sqyylarr and Barika, but not the stricken hag. GG summons a force turret that combos with his scorching ray to hit back at the hags. Nicodemus, while keeping GG alive, pops a spiritually weaponized scroll on the elder hag. Briar attempts to turn the faithless hags, but they are not so faithless and scoff derisively. He lays hands on Barika and on Nicodemus.
The party begins a general advance to the rear. Hops abjures a beacon of hope. A phantasmal killer sticks to GG and he has difficulty staying conscious. Sqyylarr hauls Professor Steele up to the edge of the chasm in view of the strangely charismatic elder sister who resists his banishment. Ash comes sailing over the misty chasm with Hops’s gathered armor and weapons, and he boops GG with a bit of healing on his way by.
Nicodemus’s guiding bolt drops a hag. GG aims his turret at the next hag and catapults a rock into the elder sister. Briar covers the retreat until the party is safely at the exit. The two surviving hags appear to withdraw as well.
The party spends an hour in the marketplace preparing a rescue mission of the footless man. GG speculates, and Hops confirms, that the footless man is none other than Tenrath Albessac, the proprietor of Lost Things Found who featured prominently in the mission briefing for being the source of a much-needed partial planar map. Nicodemus is dispatched in haste to prevent the final destruction of the three “hags” slain in error earlier by Silverymoon’s finest.
The refreshed party returns to the hag cave. The area is quiet, and the body of the slain hag remains unrecovered. Briar ties off 20’ of rope to the nearest bridge support and leaps non-magically over the misty chasm and through the anti-magic barrier to Tenrath’s cage. He slings Tenrath over his shoulder and, under the extra weight, does not succeed the return jump. Briar holds on to Tenrath as they fall to the end of the tether. Briar effortlessly climbs the rope, dragging Tenrath to safety, and clobbers a grabby tentacle with Ash’s help. Hops takes Tenrath and, with a healing word, carries him from the hag cave.
The party whisks Tenrath to Nicodemus’s beautiful Temple of Ogma for regeneration. Once Tenrath’s safety is secured, the party decides to risk another foray into the hag cave to retrieve the body of the defeated hag as evidence.
Briar, covered by his cohorts’ readied spells and ranged weapons, dashes across the bridges up to the fallen hag. A tentacle foolish enough to reach for Sqyylarr gets an overdose of readied brutality. Briar capitalizes on the absence of obvious threats to explore a nearby tent, the apparent dwelling of one hag with a penchant for deconstructing humanoids and chewing their bones. Ash clears a chest for traps and Briar finds a stash of bougie dresses within. GG shares his suspicion that the lady Aerasume might be one of these hags.
Sqyylarr carries off the load of dresses for evidence. Briar makes a 20’ tether to cross a rotten bridge to a second tent where he locates another chest, containing more fine dresses plus a ledger which he gathers into the handy haversack. Hops and Barika follow Briar and are fortunately tethered when the bridge collapses under Hops’s mass.
Briar locates the third hag’s tent, this one characterized by a pool of water and pervasive dampness. Briar collects fine dresses from a third chest.
Briar and Barika examine a conspicuously placed chair fashioned from skulls. Briar can’t help but think there is some significance to the skull chair, but he and Barika fail to discover anything at all special about it. A nearby wooden panel seems to be a gate into another area, but it’s already mid morning and everyone is too spent to want to find the hags again.
The party departs the hag cave for the third time and makes for the palace with the dead hag and a pile of dresses.