Session 8: The Skew Job¶

The party went looking for a warehouse and found a zoo. The cages were full of things that should not exist on this side of the veil.

Dazz’s second location led the party into the Skew, one of the rougher corners of Nicodranas. They did not get far before a gang of street thugs blocked their path. Their leader, a blunt-instrument of a man who called himself Mirt, warned them to turn around. The thugs were Myriad -- the thieves’ guild that had its fingers in half the commerce on the Menagerie Coast -- and they did not appreciate strangers poking around their territory. A brief scuffle ensued before the party disengaged and slipped away, bruised but wiser.

A block later, a hand shot out of a doorway and pulled them inside. Gimbleblock Turnscrew -- a gnomish artificer with wild eyes and an accent thick enough to cut -- had been watching. He knew the warehouse. He knew the gnome who ran it, a Myriad boss named Crawley. They had been friends once. “He’s beyond saving,” Gimbleblock said, with the certainty of someone who had tried. “He doesn’t tinker anymore.”

Gimbleblock offered to help, and the party accepted. He led them through a winding route of sewers, tunnels, basement corridors, and narrow alleys, bypassing the Myriad patrols entirely. The infiltration was surgical. Alarise rolled through a window with a natural twenty, stunning a guard mid-stride and jamming the roof access before the sentries above knew anything was wrong. Lucien turned a guard against his own comrades with a well-placed Suggestion. Gimbleblock, carried aloft by a swarm of tiny automata that poured from his coat pockets, floated up to the second floor like something out of a nightmare. Helga faced down the remaining guards and forced their surrender. Crawley was pacified without a single alarm being raised.

What they found inside was worse than stolen goods. The warehouse was a menagerie of caged creatures that had no business being on the material plane -- a celestial serpent of Ioun curled protectively around an egg, demonic larvae writhing in a crate, gricks and grell clicking in the dark, a lone hippogriff with clipped wings, and assorted imps chattering from iron boxes. A magic mirror sat in a wall safe; the party wisely kept their faces hidden from it. The loot was substantial -- gold, potions, a pair of sending stones, and a silver figurine shaped like a raven.

The warehouse was theirs, for now. But the Myriad patrols outside would circle back eventually. The lantern Dazz had given them sat unlit in Shin’s pack. And inside those cages, dozens of creatures waited for someone to decide what to do with them.