The new day dawns as the intrepid adventurers eventually agree that they are in Red Larch. Fortuitously, before they might form other plans, panicked shouting alerts the party to a sinkhole opening up on the southwest corner of town and they join the fray to help. The middle-aged town elders (Waelvur, Albaeri, and Ulhro) request rope, yet pointedly decline the assistance of outsiders.
Blameless convinces the townsfolk that Rollen’s Regulars are a professional and expert sinkhole rescue team who are destined to solve or exacerbate this emergency, and that the townies should stand back for either outcome. Meega anchors a couple of lines and Barrin, Allana, Simon, and Argyle rappel in to rescue the three, make that four, children and one sister of a frantic woman. Barrin, with Handel the shovel, unearths the buried, Simon and Allana innovate new rope sling techniques for the recovered, and Argyle taps Moradin’s grace to heal the wounded and locate the entombed. Meanwhile, Rollen realizes the elders are concealing a darker truth and shadows them back to the cartwright’s shop, but he learns nothing new regarding the murmured-of Dwarven Delvers supposedly angered by the presence of interlopers at the sinkhole.
The rescue team reunite the sinkhole victims with the Frantic Woman just as the officious constable shows up, typically too late to be useful. The remaining topside party would rather die jumping in a hole than conversate with the constable again so they do that. Argyle brings Rollen back from the dead using Allana’s Sword of Psychosis to amplify his power. The ropes slack from atop and flow discouragingly into the hole rendering impossible any conceivable constabulary reconciliation. The party adds “Confront the Constable” to its quest log for a later date.
With little choice but to find an exit through the cavern, the party discovers passages leaving east and north. The east passage appears more civilized, with a well-crafted stone door and some discarded cloaks, so the party explores in that direction. Barrin, scouting ahead, finds two motionless sentries on opposite sides at the end of the hallway. Upon closer inspection these carved figures are merely doors indicating, so it is believed, ladies’ and gents’ privies, but this humorous anachronism is reluctantly discarded when a chamber of death, instead of a chamber pot, is discovered beyond the second figure.
Giant forest rats, entering and exiting through cracks in the chamber of death, feast on the decaying corpses of three travellers. Exploration of the room provokes an attack on Rollen by the aggressively hungry rats, promptly dispatched by blade and missile. Simon, brandishing a smoldering corpse leg, discourages any new challengers. Allana discovers that, when alive, these travellers’ foreheads were engraved with an iconic triangle clear through to their skulls.
The next chamber contains a floating black rock. Simon domesticates the rock with a length of rope, but the rock dies when removed from the central column of magic discerned by Allana. Crestfallen, Simon rolls the rock back into the magic and sets it free to hover existentially. An elusive yet undeniable sense of purpose permeates the room.
Up ahead, Rollen eagerly opens another crafted stone door to see what wonder the next chamber reveals and barely manages to register disappointment when shot with unwelcoming glares and crossbow bolts, earning him the Dead Like Simon achievement, as he drops like a rock pulled out of a column of magic. Indecision grips the adventurers: advance or retreat? Simon’s mage hand slams shut the door, breaking contact with the aggressors, and Blameless, using a trick discovered only the night before, projects the image of a beholder to confront anyone opening that door while Argyle and Meega spirit Pincushion Rollen back a safe distance. Simon transmutes the sound of an angry beholder while Blameless evokes a fiery orb in his hand. The door opens and, for a brief but terrible moment, the room’s occupants are face-to-face with a writhing, screeching beholder spitting a deadly, fiery orb at them. The door closes urgently.
Argyle revives Rollen and the party retreats, discovering along the way that one passage has been closed off by, if cloak arithmetic serves, three new defenders. Back in the sinkhole cavern the party, forsaken by an ungrateful town, find no new dangling ropes and set about preparing a concealed corner to rest. Rollen and Barrin adeptly rig the stone door to be difficult and noisy to open, as featured one hour later when Barrin observes six figures emerging, with much difficulty and noise, from the barricaded door.
Distractedly irate at having their cloaks pilfered, the cavern occupants fail to notice the improvised berm and leave through the north passage. Exhausted from a half-day of intense spell casting, falling, and staying up late the night before, the party completes an uneventful rest.