Date: 04/07/09

XP Awarded: none

Start: The basement of Foxglove Manor on the coast south of Sandpoint, about two months after the Swallowtail festival.

After driving off the hordes of diseased rats, the party sets about exploring the rest of the basement. Behind closed doors they find a filthy pantry and a trashed wine cellar, though Signore does spot a hidden cache of several bottles of wine from an expensive vinyard in the southern nation of Cheliax. In one dark corner of the basement is a stout iron door protected by an intricate lock. Signore pulls out his set of fine lockpicks and goes to work, and is rewarded after some time with the sound of the lock clicking open.

The door swings open to reveal a darkened, narrow hallway that leads to another door. Opening it, the party finds what appears to be an arcane laboratory, though most of the equipment has been destroyed. A series of cages hold dead diseased rats, and one wall contains two more stained glass windows depicting a gaunt man drinking a foul green brew, and the same man in an advanced state of decay, with his arms and head thrown back as if in triumph, his rotting body turning into smoke and spiraling into a seven-sided box. Upon seeing the magical workshop, Gob moves over to the bookshelf to explore the contents, but as he reaches out to take one down from the shelf, he is hit by a sudden sequence of visions, all taking place in a realm of animated stained-glass windows. He sees a gaunt man researching dusty tomes, collecting magical components, and taking great care to build a delicately engraved, silver, seven-sided box. The last vision is of the man drinking a potion created from the harvested ingredients, then doubling over in agony as his body begins to quickly rot. Gob is overcome with a sense of shame that a loved one would do this to himself, which gives way to a burning rage that he must be stopped before he can finish the ritual, and fear that it is too late and that he must flee upstairs to find his children and rescue them.

The other adventurers watch Gob move over to the bookshelf and reach to take down a book, then freeze in place as a range of emotions plays over his face. Suddenly he spins around with a crazed look, and rushes out of the room yelling something about his children. Gobs companions hurry to try to follow the dwarf as he runs up the stairs and then proceeds up another staircase to the second floor. He rushes down the second-floor hallway and bursts open a doorway into a bedchamber that is caked with thick, spongy layers of dark green, blue, and black mold. As he begins to regain his senses, Gob hears a child's voice whisper "What's on your face, mommy?" and suddenly his face erupts into itches as he senses a mass of mold and disease growing over it.

Panting from running, the other adventurers arrive in time to assure Gob that there is nothing on his face. After a few minutes to catch breath, the group enters an ornate set of double doors to find a large room with sofa and chairs facing an alcove containing several musical stands and instruments. Lining the walls of the alcove is another set of stained-glass windows depicting what Gob identifies as spell components for necromantic magic. Entering another door along the same hall, the party finds another bedchamber, this one apparently belonging to a child. When he enters the room, Signore is overcome with a vision of his mother wielding a torch and his father festering in tumors and wielding a long knife, each trying to kill the other. He almost passes out from the terror, but the vision is gone just as quickly as it appeared.

Returning to the hallway, the party opens another ornate set of double doors that lead into a large picture gallery. Thick sheets of cobwebs obscure the painting subjects from view and the adventurers clear them away to view the subjects, which prove to be various members of the Foxglove family. As Kiria wipes away the last of the cobwebs, the temperature in the room plunges and fingers of frost slither across the walls. Two of the figures in the portraits slump into misshapen tumor-ridden corpses. One man grows pale as a long gash opens in his throat and blood gushes down his chest. The woman next to him blackens and chars, and her arms and legs twist as if broken in dozens of places. The portrait of Aldern Foxglove darkens as his skin rots, his hair falls out, and he deforms into a scarecrow-like monster. Another man's portrait, frame and all, explodes in a wave of fungus and disease that washes over the room, and then everything suddenly reverts to normal.

Surprised and unsettled, the party moves through a set of doors on the far side of the room to find a dusty but relatively clean bedroom. As Kiria enters the room, the party sees him rush over to a desk in one corner of the room and grasp a large, jagged piece of wood from a dark stain covering part of the desktop. For a moment he wavers as he is about to shove the piece of wood into his own throat, then seems to recover his senses and explains that he'd just been overwhelmed with the strong sensation that he'd just killed someone who he loves very deeply.

The adventurers decide that this room is a likely place to rest and recover, since they are feeling weakened by their ordeals and are starting to run out of magic. They agree to take turns keeping watch, and while Gob and Kiria lay down to rest, Signore and Deivon bar the doors and keep watch out the windows. The wind howls outside and periodic gusts of rain blow over the house, dripping into the bedroom. The two on watch hear the sounds of the house shifting in the wind, which sound eerily like moans or groans, and Kiria and Gob toss and turn restlessly.

A few hours later Kiria wakes up exhausted from a terrible nightmare, having dreamt of being trapped in a crumbling house with no exits that grows smaller with each breath. Gob too wakes up in a cold sweat, but doesn't seem to have been as badly affected by the experience as Kiria. The spellcasters are too unnerved to attempt to focus their minds on magic, and reluctantly agree to continue exploring the house in search of some kind of escape.

Returning to the hall, the adventurers open another door to find a washroom with an iron tub sitting in an area of sagging floorboards. When Signore enters the room to look around more thoroughly, there is a creaking sound and then a loud crash as the tub and much of the room's floor tumble into the washroom on the floor below. Fortunately Signore's lightning reflexes help him to leap to safety just in time.

The next door in the hallway opens into a once-fine master bedroom that has now been destroyed. The bed smashed, the curtains torn, chairs hacked apart, the walls gouged as if with knives, the paintings cut to ribbons, and the mattress torn to shreds. The one exception is a portrait, its face turned to the wall. Kiria turns it around to reveal a beautiful dark-haired woman in a thoughtful pose, labeled Iesha Foxglove. When the wind outside dies down, the group think they hear a noise coming from upstairs, and return to the hall to open a door onto a tight staircase spiralling upward.

The party climbs the squeaky stairs to find a narrow wooden hallway lined with doors, full of sharp angles and corners. The roof above drips with rainwater and gusts of wind howl through cracks and missing shingles. The first door opens onto a workroom packed with coils of rope, planks of wood, and dozens of metal pots positioned to catch leaks from the noticeably sagging ceiling. Additional doors open onto a series of storerooms stacked with old furniture, sheets, boxes and crates, and other bits. As the adventurers head towards the next door just round a sharp bend in the hallway, a sudden shriek of pain echoes through the attic from another door at the end of the hallway around the corner. Suspicious from the other haunts they've encountered in the manor house, the party decides to ignore the sounds for the time being and continue to explore the rooms behind the hall doors.

The next drafty room contains a battered and ruined telescope lying on its side and two intricate stained glass windows, one of which is broken in its lower half and patched with canvas. As Deivon enters the room, he suddenly feels uncomfortably hot and sees himself burst into flames. Panicked, he runs to the window and dives out head-first, in an attempt to douse the flames in the ocean below the manor house. Landing on the rooftop below, narrowly missing a jagged iron weathervane, he slides down the steep roof as his comrades rush to the window to peer down at him. As they ready their coils of rope to throw down to him, he manages to grasp a rain gutter just before sliding off the edge of the rooftop to a certain doom on the treacherous rocks below. The rain gutter bends and starts to tear off the roof's edge as gusts of wind catch the party's ropes and fling them away. Finally Signore manages to land a coil of rope next to Deivon's hand just as the gutter gives way with a shriek, tumbling through the wind down the cliff face. The party breathes a sigh of relief as Deivon is hauled up over the edge of the roof and back through the shattered window.

Confronting the last pair of doors in the attic hallway, the adventurers can hear the sounds of sobbing coming from behind one. Though the door is locked, Signore is able to open the lock after a few minutes of work. Inside is a cold and damp room cluttered with crates and a few pieces of furniture under the steeply slanting roof. In the far corner leans a full-size mirror over a bundle wrapped in sheets, where the now quiet sobbing noises are coming from. Cautiously Deivon moves the mirror to get a better look at the bundle, but as soon as he does so the bundle of sheets drops to the floor to reveal a ghostly woman. She unleashes a baleful shriek and rushes out the door of the room, past the surprised party members. Signore and Kiria move to follow her, though her speed is unnaturally quick. As she flies down the attic stairs, the party can hear her cry "Aldern! I can smell your fear! I'll be in your arms soon!"

The spirit races down hallways and stairs, outpacing the adventurers chasing her. Following the sound of her cries, the party make their way down into the basement laboratory, where they find a secret door standing ajar they had not previously noticed. Behind the secret door are steps leading down to a dark and dank stone room, the floor littered with broken stone and piles of dirt. A few ruined pickaxes lie on the ground next to a section of floor that has been ripped up to reveal an ancient stone set of spiral stairs, obviously much older than the surrounding basement. A foul stink like that of rotting meat wafts up on a cold breeze from the darkness.