Reade stays back to drag the corpsed drow bodies inside and tidy up the scene. Janky leads the party into the windmill after Vaspar, up a staircase that traces the west wall up the main, round windmill structure to the second level. Vaspar tries to convince landlord Kalain to meet with the party. She’s a bit teched, painting a displacer beast in her studio converted from the millstone room. She’s dressed in what long ago must have been a fine gown, now worn and moldy from constant wear and persistent craziness. She repeatedly expresses a fear that the party are assassins, forgeting any trust Janky manages to develop. She deeply hates someone, probably Lord Neverember who jilted her, but she won’t utter the name out of disgust and no one else wants to guess that name out of caution.
The party gets permission to look around for potential art purchases in exchange for the looted drow coin as collateral.
One of the second level rooms, Kalain’s bedroom, is secured with a conspicuously new lock. Vincent leans into Kalain’s madness by disguising himself as Kalain and then asking herself where she left the key. The gambit fails and Kalain pulls the displacer beast off its canvas and into reality. She flees to her locked room invisibly leaving the party to battle her art.
Janky ballbearings the displacer which gives Smoll enough advantage to beat it back into nonexistence. Smoll breaches Kalain’s safe room. After Kalain’ thunderwave passes, Janky suggests she sits down and calms down. Togy makes a magic search of Kalain’s room but finds nothing beyond the drow coin she is holding. The search happens to detect a second drow coin in Vincent’s possession from the payout by Zardoz Zord for the polar bear capture. Vincent offers the second coin to Kalain as well, and the matched coins snap together.
Togy consults the Stone of Golor. SoG suggests looking for a basement trap door to access the vault. And as for Kalain, SoG recalls that she was a clingy chick that Lord Neverember had to pry off with the gifted windmill. Before that happened, the windmill was inhabited by Aurinax, a seasoned wizard.
The party earnestly searches the first floor for trap doors and soon locates a stone trap door in a small, locked closet beneath the staircase up to Kalain’s studio.
- Kalain seems to be a jilted lover of Lord Neverember, sent away to live in self-imposed seclusion painting beasts that she can summon. She is cray.
- Vaspar seems to be a faithful caretaker for Kalain and not a seasoned wizard.
- The windmill operates as a flophouse for destitute locals, none who seem to realize the enormous fortune secreted beneath them.
- If Kalain is unaware of the dragon hoard then it must be Aurinax who was the steward of the wealth. What happened to Aurinax?