Ash, Barika, and Sqyylarr check out an exceptionally well-stocked wine room featuring a range of vintages, from the Sword Coast Classic Thunderbyyrdd to a few bougie bottles of Chateau du Dionysus. But no secret doors or misplaced tuna at all, only wine.
Watc ponders any significance or purpose to the tabletop game interrupted by the brutal destruction of the pair of war mages. None.
Ander and Ten check out the barrels and casks; the beer seems depleted far ahead of the dried foodstuffs and wine. Still, something about the room really bugs Ten. He tugs experimentally on a couple of the wall sconces revealing only rust flakes and builder-grade. Symmetry compels Ten to the wall opposite the wine room where he feels the anticipated telltale draft of a secret door in the wall.
The party stacks up at the secret door with vaguely readied violence while Ten pops the door open for the element of surprise. However, it is the party who is surprised by the element of fire as a fireball trap explodes into the room. Contrite Ten casts an apologetic mass cure wounds and charges into the secret room with summoned shillelagh. Fortunately, yet unfortunately, he absorbs a salvo of magic missiles from none other than Ulrozax himself and a snakebite from Ulrozax’s strange coworker.
Irritated protests fly out of the room: What are you doing here? I’m not finished! Firebolts fly into the room at Ulrozax and his appropriately named snake friend, Snake With A Hundred Mage Hands, interrupting their work around a purpley, waverly, arch-shaped portal thing. Ash and Barika go for Snake and take him out. Sqyylarr charges in, just about to smash Ulrozax, when Watc steals her glory with an immolation so nasty that Ulrozax flees the plane through the arch portal.
Even in a room stuffed to overflowing with magic, Sqyylarr easily spots the mission objective astral sapphire sitting next to a book on a stand. Braced for catastrophe, she picks the sapphire up. Nothing terrible happens so she hands it off to Watc. Watc inspects the adjacent book and discovers Ulrozax’s spellbook for locating his obsession, APPOTHROMAX the esoteric dragon. Watc liberates the spellbook for later study and recordation [demiplane, gate, guards and wards, forcecage].
Although entirely accomplished by virtue of Ten’s devastating circumvention of Ulrozax’s generations of planning, the party elects to continue exploration of what seems to be a perpetual pocket dimension derived from Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion, mindful of the possibly the mansion is considerably less perpetual now that immolating Ulrozax has fled the plane.
The party retraces back through the bathing room and proceeds south into a series of dorm rooms. Most of the rooms are easily accessible, but one conspicuously interesting door is magically locked. The locked door causes Barika to go insane when she attacks it with her axe, and she wanders aimlessly around into a room farther south floored with practice runes. Ander reduces the door off its hinges and it falls weirdly into the plush bedroom beyond. Ten dispels the door ward that made Barika go crazy and tosses a handful of sand all around the weird door into the weird bedroom. The sand falls unevenly. Sqyylarr enters the room and reveals a time differential: time in the room passes considerably faster than time outside the room, perfect for an overachieving wizard studying to execute his nefarious plan to locate APPROTHROMAX.
Ten chases down Barika and removes the curse of insanity. Ander struggles with his own sanity reconciling the time differential in Ulrozax’s bedroom and decides what would really help is a good night’s rest outside the contorted bedroom. His plans are interrupted 48 minutes later when the others emerge fully rested from the bedroom.
