Tenants of the University of Murkow Report

After a short summer break the students have ALL returned to their university classes. Beginning their second year, they take the opportunity to find housing to share for a better price than the tiny schoolground dorms, especially since the school district struggles to hand out enough dorms for all students. With some financial help to broker a deal from her dad, Irma ends up getting mr. Funderberker the bullywug broker interested, who invites them to check out his old storage attic.   Irma, Olivia, Nicolás and Katia all meet up after a seminar to start moving in. Mr. F instructs them that while he will begin to draft the contract, he could need some help cleaning up whatever stuff might be scattered in what he originally bought as a state-accuired abandoned wizard's abode. While he no longer keeps his storage there, there may be any number of forgotten baubles either he or the wizard has left behind.   Entering the main living room, the party finds a couple of chairs, some crates and a huge fireplace. Irma immediately runs over to shout greetings up the chimney, while Olivia starts looking for hidden compartments. Katia finds an old carpet tucker and begins opening crates, revealing, just, so many potatoes, all hardened and inedible. Nicolás jumps the armchairs and finds enough dust to cover a terrasque, and uses a maintained gust to try and clean it out. Doing so ends up disturbing... something in the fireplace. As Irma watches, the heat builds, and a spark ends up creating a hearty fire, which then adresses the party. Piqued by the idea of an elemental that speaks common, the party questiones the fire some dub ''mr ground'' (not their name). Olivia brings up some healthy concerns for the masculine hetronormativity the fire might be subject to, while Katia summons her booksmarts to highlight how unusual this is. The fire explains it has some knowledge of the world and language through a stack of books by the fireplace, which he is brough by ''the wind''.   With the fire being less helpful in actually explaining the house's lore, the party sets out to explore. Olivia opens a door adjecent to the staircase, and is hit by the awful smell of rot and stale food. A bedroll, some scraps and a knapsack of moldy bread, fruits and bones is all there is to see, perhaps a squatter has been here a while ago? Next, the party opens up a large room making up the front of the house. A large circular stained window makes mosaics of red and orange ligths with the midday sun. Some crates, chests and a wardrobe makes up the room, but Katia takes interest in an old bust. Worn by time, she has a moment of extreme memory, and remembers the visage of Stanislaus the vampirelord and generally problematic guy, who ran an disgusting civil war seventy years prior. In a crate she also finds a pirate flag with a blue dragon emblem and some other junk.   As Olivia moves to lockpick the giant chest (''mimic'' she says, pah), the mimic moves to attack. With some polarising initiative, the party manages to keep some distance from the chest mimic and a wardrobe mimic ambushing from the opposing side. Katia and Olivia gets some clean hits in, and Irma summons her inner fire-serpent and hits the chest with fiery blow after blow. Nicolás ends up in a brawl with the wardrobe, but manages to hold them both down with a strategic immovable rug. Being used to scrawny squatters, the mimics turn out to be outmatched by a group of mages-in-traning, as Irma and Katia each delivers their killing blows. Shaken by the sudden combat, and highly sceptical of a specific chair of its potential mimicry, Katia and Olivia continues to loot the room and start cleaning. An old trader's scale, a ball of fog, a ritualistic mask, two urns of ashes, a diary written in an unknown language and a jar with a dead pixie is found. When Katia finds a small gnomish made metal box with two mouthpieces, Olivia confidently proclaims is a ''Habbernackle''. Katia keeps an eye on where the item ends up, and makes sure it stays in the crates for mr. F to claim (or at least that's where the item stays for now).   After a short rest (with no moving-pizza?!), the party resumes, and opens another door. A room full of faint swirling incense-smoke holds a single crystal ball. When touched, it manifests short vine-length visions of smoke: Nicolás failing at eating a sandwich, Irma accidentally squashing a bug, Katia having an embarrasing classroom experience. Excited, Nicolás insists the fireplace elemental should try it, which results in the crystal to crack a bit. Katia confirms it to be a cheap divination party-trick. The party then finds a room waterlogged from a hole in the roof, and several bookcases of destroyed literature. Katia manages to rescue one third of them, and dries them by their literate fireplace. Irma excitedly rescues a large luggagebox, which seems unharmed. All manner of opening it is tried, and few seem to have any effect. When their efforts are pushed further, a cut on each lock reveals faint letters on the leather: ''G. I. S.''. Speaking the word as a whole, Irma summons a honeyed voice in all the humanoids' heads. ''Gis'' is cryptic, but asks for a deal to be made in order to open the luggage. Irma and Nicolás tries to barter some small trinkets, which Gis counters with either Irma's dreams or one of Nicolás spells. Permanently. Catching on to the art of this deal, Olivia offers her newfound home in exchange for the contents. Gis is listening. Katia uses a detect magic to realize that while the box itself is only residually magical, it contains an object of divination-properties. She offers a year of her life, reasoning that hers either is diminishing or will be prolonged indefinitely anyways. Gis is sated, and bids farewell. The luggage opens to a cluster of amethysts and a old, ornate telescope.   Continuing their search to secure their new home, the party finds another waterlogged room, this one full of... frog eggs? Irma scoops some in a jar she daintily labels ''for Laymon <3''. Katia had also found the balcony, which houses several pots and gardenboxes of overgrown weeds and whatnot. They eventually enter another large room only containing a dinner-table and an icebox, the latter seemingly having been set on max for years, now covering the room in rime and frost. Olivia proposes to trim the cooling-crystal inside to sell off the shavings. At last the party uncovers their final room... a bathroom. Along their cleaning they have found several scraps of paper journaling someone's increasingly haunted stay, and the final pages lies next to the toiletpaper: A discarded application letter to a publishing firm to be their new... horror-novella writer. Seems this ''V. G.'' was only drafting stories from their environment... unless it was from their own experience?   The party addresses Katia's concerns on keeping what would be mr. F's property, reasoning that several of these items must have been the now disappeared wizard's. The party then prepares for repairing the roof, cleaning out the rest and installing some beds for their conveniently numbered rooms. In the following days they invite their friend(s) to move in too, sell off some stuff, and further befriend their new hearth-friend. Olivia sneaks off with her pocketed habbernackle to pawn it off for 8gp to an oblivious half-elf looking for a nifty gift for their son.   Now, rent will soon be due, and however will a group of unemployed students manage to pay up?