2025/11/07: Halloween Special Part 2

Ruby, Et-Kehri, Ba'alzamon, Bael, Zen, Trinity, Malakai
  When we last saw the party, they were at 3 of 9 clues and were outside the kitchen.
  The party was now in the great hall, a stereotypically large room with tables, seating, and corroding silverware. Doilies and other fine diningware were still on the tables, though no food.
  A spectre floated abruptly up from the floor. Garbed all in black. Wearing his era's equivalent to a suit, perhaps. Ribcage on black was the style, apparently, with white brocade. A bit of a mustache and an aristocratic bearing. Name (found out later) was Reginald.
  Ba'alzamon recognized a slave band on the spectre, hidden in the sleeve construction. While Bael opened diplomacy, Trinity stepped into the background and started searching for secret doors. From her inspections, these seemed to be cobblestone walls with little space for tricks and traps, but the table looked oddly thick.
  The butler introduced himself as Reginald, butler and castellan of the Black household. He requested the intruders remove themselves from the premises immediately. Ruby tried to aggressively shake his hand and make a deal, but took a bunch of damage when she tried.
  Malakai declared that he was here to see this guy's boss because the boss's guys had invaded his own place. Ba'alzamon told Malakai to get the man's armband; he'd be a lot more helpful after it was off. This was about when the butler called security.
  In the midst of this, Trinity snuck up on the butler at took his arm off with her dagger of dismemberment. The armband stayed stuck to the rest of him by a thread of smoke while the rest of the arm dissolved into white mist.
  Malakai swung at the armband and, after a barrage of strikes, managed a successful hit that put a big notch in the armband and launched it across the room.
  "Damien" then showed up. A demonic Void horror thing. Like a figure covered in Hallownestian Void, one that burbled up from the floor and then became a spiky figure with hands on some of the protrusions. Et-Kehri recognized that that was definitely Void, but apparently centered around or corrupting a person.
  The butler engaged Malakai in melee and launched him across the room. Buzz cast division of magic on the shackle, but nothing happened; apparently the thing was made of Xiyanmitache soul magic ridiculousness.
  As Ruby was preparing to do something, a distorted black spider leg cut through the floor from below and caused cracks in reality to appear throughout the room. Apparently it was a voidbeast of some kind. A feminine voice with some reverb on it said "Hey, cut it out!" when Ruby started smacking the arm around.
  Et-Kehri cast soothe Void to try to weaken the Void demon thing. The effort failed, and it just seemed to get more agitated. His intuition was that there were souls wrapping around the Void wrapping around an undead human, and the Void seemed to be puppeting the man but also was him, somehow. Whatever it was, it was powerful.
  Bael, on the other side of the room, put another notch in the slave band. Malakai did a perfect acrobatic flip over the table to pursue the slave bland where it landed after Bael's smashing. With a final vindicate, the band gave up the metaphorical ghost and exploded into thousands of pieces.
  Damien, clearly seeing Et-Kehri as the largest personal threat, headed for him, growing four giant mantis Void limb-scythes. Trinity launched herself from hiding on the other side of the table to intercept him. This didn't work out particularly well for her, as the Void aura around him intercepted the attacks and slashed back at her.
  In the background the freed butler started to visibly turn into a rakshasa. He muttered something about "insufferable humans" and began casually ripping out of the butler uniform. Then he cast unholy word. Et-Kehri and Trinity didn't take that well. Ba'alzamon responded by raising the Blackstaff like a rifle and blasting the rakshasa in the head. A wicked-looking line of energy punched a hole clean through the guy, the wall on the far side, and off into the distance. The rakshasa deformed into particulate matter and then, just as he was muttering something about being "free", the cloud got drawn in and eaten by whatever spidery thing was under the floor.
  (His soul has been utterly absorbed and destroyed for all time.)
  The cane he'd been holding started to rattle around and gain a silvery bleach. It was likely the haunted item the party was looking for.
  The spider-thing started to climb out from beneath the floor. The body alone was about 12 feet wide. Its thorax was colored crimson and violet. It was smashing its way through soul-ice as it went. She has to burrow her way through the soul-ice to get anywhere. The speed at which she was going, though, suggested she had ridiculous damage output on top of a concerning amount of spiritual mass. That was when the party decided discretion was the better part of valor.
  The party made their various means of escape toward the door they hadn't yet been through, with Et-Kehri grabbing the cane and Zen leaving a wall and distraction on the way out.
  The next room was ominous and dark and had lots of chairs and bookshelves in the corners. It was a study of some sort, with a big, creepy bear rug and an ominous skull bedecked fireplace. Zen closed the door behind them.
  Zen pointed out that the rug was strangely pristine. Which probably meant it was animated.
  The decorations included a lot of bone as materials, both human and animal. Roughly 50/50 between humans and large predators.
  Bael stabbed the bearskin and it writhed around and attacked him in a boneless fashion. As it tried to trip him up entangle him he mostly didn't notice (being too busy staring at Zen for a comment), it revealed some interesting flagstones beneath. Ba'alzamon realized that this was the parlor.
  While most of the party was investigating the flagstones, Zen cast summon dark knight and set his minions to guard the door. They wouldn't do much, but they'd buy a half second for Zen himself.
  The party set about searching for a way to open the floor. Trinity found a dial inside the fireplace, hidden under some old rotten firewood. When she turned it, the stones descended to form a staircase down into a natural cavern. The party headed down. After a winding path, it opened out into a natural underground ritual space. Behind them, the stairs retracted back up after about 30 seconds. Ahead of them, there were a variety of 9 premade magic circles, with some being purpose-specific ritual circles and a few being general protection and divination, including what Bael recognized as a daemon-summoning (not demon-summoning!) circle.
  As the sounds of soul-ice breaking passed by above, a man in a black robe appeared in the middle of the room before them. He carried a large, fancy dagger with a crossguard made of bone or animal claw.
  "No one is allowed here but the master."
  He threw the souls of the damned at them. After a bit of back and forth with the party slowly chiseling through the wizards defenses through raw violence and the wizards being frustrated by some sort of soul magic counterspell field that fizzled their offensive spells, Trinity eventually back stabbed him into a ghostly blood fountain.
  The party looted the room. A mist of trap detection by Ba'alzamon failed to detect any traps, but Ruby saw that there was an orb shape in the corner that didn't get filled. It turned out to be a crystal ball that was so clear as to be utterly transparent.
  Combination of phylactery and spellbook, not currently in use. Currently bonded and may or may not be real. It may be a memory rather than a real thing.
  After some discussion, the party opted to just have Ba'alzamon buff Ruby sky-high and bash a hole through the ceiling. By the end there was a red-hot hole and Ruby's adamantine staff was glowing with heat from the hundred and twelve impacts of doubled titan-strength-empowered monk strikes that hit it in under 3 seconds.
  The party climbed out with air walk, came up in the courtyard, and ran for the ritual site where they first showed up. They made it back without incident. The mages had been doing the ritual this whole time and looked like they could definitely use a nap and a sandwich.
  Dunn (Catalus's apprentice necromancer), Rubricks and Ambertine (a pair of rogue chronomancers), and a negative energy life mage (who Trinity stabbed). Dunn is one of Catalus' apprentices. Ba'alzamon gave Dunn the orb, per request, and Dunn dropped it into what looked like a time-space containment bag. (Bag of paradox protection.)
  Ba'alzamon: "If you get a chance to say something to the guy before he dies: Say 'fuck you'."
  "Wait, are you actually here? That's not how this is supposed to work."
  Ba'alzamon was told to get out, as Dunn realized he might actually be there for real. He did using his ability to travel through the planet directly. It was revealed that the rest of the party were not actually there, as they were memories stored in the Renedge Ley Lines that had been summoned and animated as some sort of strange ghost-like memory. The party being a projection of the ritual, they faded when the ritual stopped.
  However, the haunted items the party had found, including the bucket from Sandy, the knife from the cultist, the lantern from the lighthouse and the cane from the butler were still bound to the characters who had had them, revealing the strange dream the party had had to be something more real.