Who knew you could use your brain like that!?

When last we left our intrepid heros, they were trapped on a staircase that lead down into a sub-sewer secret tunnel.



The swordmage drew his blade to illuminate the tunnels, and the damsel they had pursued was no where nearby to be found. The party passes a few porculus style doorways through one of which they hear female screams.

The party rushes the room to discover Lissera crouched down near the floor in fear. She immediately attacks the swordmage and confesses all the while that she is being controlled by someone else - specifically she names the newest party member Sangi as being the one who is controlling her.

Later in that same round Balahnoths appear hanging from the ceiling, revealing themselves from their invisible hiding places. They make quick work of attacking the swordmage, focusing all of their attacks on him as he was at the limit of their reach, and therefore safely removed from them. Using their minor action to turn invisible after every attack.

The Swordmage pleads with Lissera to snap out of it, all the while taking extreme amounts of damage from her dagger attacks.

After round 2 of the party makes a few perception checks to see if there is a way to lessen the difficulty of this challenge, and they hear that the portcullus style doors opposite them buzz with a strange humming noise while closed. They figure it must interfere with the creatures blindsight and their ability to teleport, because teleport requires line of sight, and if the hum interferes with the way the creatures see, then they couldn't leave the room if they closed the doors.

The group flees the room, and end up locking lissera in there with the baddies. Shortly after reconsider and reopen the doors to have her in her possessed state follow to attack them and close the door behind her.

Sangi, knowing Lissera to be a doppleganger waits till she in the space where the portcullus closes, and pushes the button from another entrance - rolling a percentile to see what happens, getting less then 20% at 17% I rule it slices her in half. Death upon her, her true form of doppleganger appears, but not before our barbarian has words with Sangi for his brash actions.

The challenge effectively over the party mops up the remaining baddies, including some that weren't at threat locked up in a nearby cell - Yay for extra xp!

With no other way out of the secret laboratory/cells the party returns to the basement below the girls dormatory, only to find at the top of the staircase the chapel bells are ringing a strange melody that has all of the girls to dawn armor and weapons similar to that of kobolds and mindlessly wander around in search of the party.

The party yet undetected had the option to close the secret door back and recover from their long drawn out battle, or to press on - Sangi says he thinks he knows what is going on and they can't wait to rest, they have to get to the bell tower. The party still suscpicious of Sangi, reluctantly agrees.

The party decides, rather than trying to use the knockout rules and wade through the horrdes of little girls in armor - they would instead climb the staircase to the roof and try to find another way to the bell tower from there.

Each level of the staircase requires a stealth check from the group - individual or assisted, the group went with individual stealth checks, ending up with 5 baddies in tow by the roof door, which turns out to be locked. Luckily someone notices a waxy grease bucket and kicks it down the stairs to slow up the on coming baddies.

Unfortunately no one has the theivery necessary to open the lock without breaking it, and so they bust down the door. Now with a broken door and no way to stop the girls from coming up after them, they survey the scene. The party discovers a classroom on the roof where animal disections were left in complete, brains sitting in chemical trays. The party ignores the classroom for now, and heads for the Crane that was mounted to the roof, because of re-roofing work that hadn't been completed yet.

They find a large size tar bucket attached to the crane and Sangi uses the crane to block the doorway to the staircase by setting the tar bucket down infront of the door, at the same time swashing a possessed girl.

The barbarian in the meantime drags a deaf little girl who had been bitten - he uses a heal check and knows he needs to suck out the poison/disease from her wounds. In doing so he becomes afflicted himself, making an endurance check every round.

The ground floor quad still full of little girl baddies, the party isn't sure if they should use the scaffolding to get off the roof or not, in the process of deliberation the wizard picked up a brain with mage hand and makes it talk with ghost sound, convincing the little brain crazed girls that the brain was living and then tosses it down the staircase they had came up, effectively ridding the party of that threat from moving the tar-bucket.

Meanwhile the quadrent leader a Mind Flayer Infiltrator Elite out in front of his thralls, comes up from the opposite staircase to the roof and attacks the Swordmage for two vicious rounds, until Sangi leaps into the crane after reattaching the tarbucket, this time intent on dropping it on the Mind Flayer Infiltrator by crashing it through the roof of the staircase. Sangi does a precision drop, using his dungeoneering skill to operate the crane, crushing the mind flayer and blocking that staircase. this leaves only the scaffolding left to use to get down. Luckily the mind flayers thralls were still following his last order, which was to converge on the roof - this cleared the ground level of thralls. The party makes some heroic skill checks to slide or jump down the roof sections to get to the scaffolding, taking the injured Kimico with them.

The wizard with another surprising use of a power, uses a poison cloud to block the line of sight from the party to the thralls, while making their way out in the open towards the bell tower, casting sleep on the 2 thralls guarding the tower entrance.

Reopening the tower door from the inside, and closing it back again with by moving all the piled up junk in front of the door, the party feels it has time for at least a short rest before they are discovered again.

Session end - Next time it's pure combat, with not skill tricks to save the day. The party was awarded xp = to the combats they defeated and bonus xp equal to 2 sixth level encounters for contributing to the encounter by significant uses of skill checks.