"Nice crowd control!" Wikwocket laughed.
"Hey!" Al shouted as he ran to catch up, "You can't just run off like that around the guards, you'll get us thrown out of the city, or worse!"
"There's no time for that, this situation obviously requires decisive heroic action!"
Wikwocket pointed to the smoke from the upstairs window.
"The longer we take, the more will burn! Hurry!" She shouted, hurrying to the front of the building to look through the large window of the shop. The window was one large pane of glass, with the words "The Elixir Emporium" etched and then gilded in artistic lettering across the middle of it. Wikwocket took advantage of the view to look inside and assess the situation.
"How does it look?" Al asked as he caught up and peered inside as well. In addition to the sight of a gnoll not bothering to look before barging through the door into the shop, they saw the wreckage of the storefront inside. Broken glass, spilled powders, puddles of colorful liquids, scattered papers, and even a few loose coins seemed to litter every surface, including the unmoving body lying face-down on the floor.
"At least there doesn't seem to be any obviously poisonous fumes in there," Al grumbled as he watched Gruntle sniff the air curiously and carelessly walk further inside. The gnoll yelped quietly and stopped to pick a piece of glass out of his foot. "No smoke here yet, either."
"Well, let's go save that guy if he's not dead already and then hurry up and get that fire upstairs put out!" Wikwocket declared. This time, Al managed to get in front of her before she sprinted ahead.
"Wait! I agree, but carefully, if this is an alchemical lab on fire, we're not going to be able to save anyone if we get ourselves burned, blown up, poisoned, or dissolved into pink slime! And we can't just drag the body out of the building, either. If he's alive he might be injured, and dragging him might make it worse."
"See, that's why you're the leader! Good work taking charge, I graciously defer to your leadership!" Wikwocket said with apparent sincerity. Al cut his exasperated growl short as Bote caught up to them.
"I believe we may have upset the captain's hope of an orderly prisoner transport, but he will keep Haunch safe for us," the dwarf declared.
"Good timing, we may need your medical skills. There's someone dead or unconscious inside, can you find out if we can move him out of here?"
"That is probably why I am here, if rescue is in the ineffable plans," Bote answered, moving to enter the building. "Also, good work taking charge so decisively."
Al ignored Wikwocket's giggle at his annoyed huff and followed Bote inside to inspect the victim, who appeared to be a middle-aged balding man. Bote knelt down. "Are you hurt badly?" the dwarf asked, gently shaking the man's shoulder. A pained groan was the only answer.
"It appears he is at least still alive. I will tend to him, so the rest of you can proceed quickly to keep this building from burning down around us."
Al hastily examined the shop. The man lay on the floor in front of the counter. The shelves behind the counter had a mix of colorful intact bottles, broken glass, and dripping fluids. A narrow set of stairs led along one wall up to the second story of the building, and Al hastened to climb them. Wikwocket hurried up behind him, but the shoeless Gruntle had decided to step more cautiously through the broken glass and was left behind.
The top of the stairs turned right into a short hallway. Al cautiously put his hand on the nearest of the two doors, and feeling no heat he pushed it open.
Apprentice's room, Al guessed, seeing the small cot in the narrow room. The books on the nightstand looked too small to be technical books of magic or alchemy. There was nobody inside, nor any fire, so Al deferred any investigation to check the door at the end of the hall. He could smell smoke now, but the door didn't feel much warmer than the hallway. He risked pushing it open. Although there was a lock built into this door, it was unlocked and opened easily.
Smoke billowed out from the room into the hall. Directly across the room, the top of a desk was burning. It probably hadn't been burning for long since most of the room was intact, but the flames had spread to the curtains drawn across the windows and up the wall. Spotting a bed on the opposite end of the room, Al rushed to pull the blanket off, hoping to smother the fire with it. He shook off the tiny scraps of a destroyed sheet of paper that had been on top of the blanket and, coughing at the thick smoke, set to work trying to put out the fire without setting the blanket alight.
"I have a great idea!" Wikwocket announced, following Al into the room and seeing what he was doing. She quickly took off her pack and dug into it.
"Will you... just help me... put out this fire!" Al yelled between coughs.
"That's what I'm doing!" Wikwocket insisted, pulling a small bottle from her pack and holding it up triumphantly. Then, she hurried over to the bed, pulled the stopper from the bottle, and dumped the thick greasy substance all over one of the pillows. She smeared it more or less evenly over the cloth. By this point, Al was coughing too hard to complain about the delay as he desperately tried to sandwich burning curtain cloth between the sides of the blanket while slapping at the spots where the fire threatened to spread to the blanket itself. Wikwocket could tell that he wanted to complain, though.
"Ready! Here I come!" Wikwocket shouted, though she was beginning to cough as well. She ran, leapt into the air, and brought the pillow down firmly on the patch of spreading fire across the top of the desk. A few burning droplets of something spattered away from the impact, but when Wikwocket pulled the pillow away, the pillow-shaped space underneath burned no more.
"It works!"
Coughing and laughing joyously, Wikwocket gave the remaining flames a vigorous beating with the pillow. Al stepped back and sat down on the floor to get down below the smoke and catch his breath, until Wikwocket pointed out that she couldn't reach the ceiling to get the last of the fire. She handed the pillow over to Al, who was glad nobody else was watching as he jumped awkwardly up and down to slap at the fire spreading across the ceiling with the pillow. Once the fire was out, Al coughed his way back over to the window. He pushed the burnt remains of the curtains aside and opened the window to let the smoke out, leaning out himself the get some fresh air.
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Once the fresh air allowed the coughing fit to die down and his eyes to stop watering, Al noticed the guards on horseback, now stationed at each corner of the building while the captain, Ebeneezer, and even Haunch the donkey looked expectantly up at the window Al was leaning out of.
"Got the fire out!" Al called down to them.
"What about my formula book, is it okay?" Ebeneezer called back worriedly.
"I don't know yet, where was it?"
"It should be in that room, in my safe! Oh, and what about Eric?"
"Who?"
"Eric! My apprentice! Lazy good-for-nothing kid probably caused the fire, but I don't want him to get hurt!"
"Is he a middle-aged balding man?"
"What? No! Teenaged kid, about this tall. Probably more like this tall if he'd stand up straight! He's probably hiding deeper downstairs, avoiding the chores he's supposed to be doing down there!"
Al waved down and ducked back into the room to look around. With the smoke mostly cleared out and nothing distractingly on fire, Al felt more comfortable investigating. Much like the shop downstairs, papers and a few pieces of broken glass were scattered on the floor. Al guessed the glass had come from the oil lamp that he could now see was broken across the top of the desk. Next to the bed, a safe lay open. A thick codex was inside among a few other papers. Al opened it and found page after page of dense diagrams of alchemical and arcane symbols. He closed the book and returned to the window.
"Is this your formula book?"
"Yes! Thank the gods it's safe!" Ebeneezer cried out, falling to his knees in gratitude. Al sighed, stepped away from the window, and gave the ceiling an accusing look.
"We run into danger to put out the fire and he thanks you," Al grumbled to the imaginary god he liked to complain to.
Wikwocket stood in front of the safe, holding one of the sheets of paper from inside.
"Are these magic words or something?" she asked, holding the page out for Al to inspect. He leaned closer to look, and the magical concepts represented by the symbols on the page seemed to eagerly offer to leap into his eyeballs and gallop through his brain. He squinted his eyes shut and looked away, blinking, to avoid the temptation to find out what would happen if he let them.
"I think that's some kind of spell scroll," he said. "Ebeneezer is probably a real alchemist and uses magic-work in his alchemical processes."
"So, it is magic words!"
"In a very real sense, yes. It's kind of an advanced form of wizardry, where someone actually embeds the magical concepts and even the intent of the spell-work into the symbolism written on the page, forming what dwarvish magic-workers would call a gestalt and... you're not understanding any of this, are you?"
"Nope! Try again!"
"It's like a magic spell stuck to the paper, so anyone who knows how to work magic can finish casting it easily, sometimes even if it's too complex for them to work the magic on their own."
Wikwocket turned the page around and stared closely at it.
"It's not working, it just makes my eyeballs itch!"
"You have to know how to do actual magic-working to be able to try it," Al explained. "I still say you're smart enough, if you spent a few years studying..."
"Boring!" Wikwocket countered, tossing the spell-scroll back into the safe.
"It takes some expensive supplies to make those along with the magical experience. Either Ebeneezer is a competent wizard himself or he makes a lot of money on alchemy to pay someone who is."
He put the book on top of the stack of unrolled spell-scrolls, then gathered up the papers that were scattered on the floor to put them in the safe as well. On the way back to close the safe, he noticed the bits of paper he'd shaken off of the blanket scattered on the floor. They didn't appear to have been torn up. The pieces were all oddly shaped, with neatly curving or straight edges that looked more dissolved than burnt.
"Look at this," he said, pointing them out to Wikwocket, "I think this might have been one of those spell-scrolls. When you cast the spell from the paper, it usually destroys it completely, but the edges of these pieces could have been parts of the same kind of symbol-system whoever crafted the other ones was using. The spell-pattern is gone but maybe if someone didn't quite do the working correctly it wouldn't take the whole paper with it."
"Sounds like you've seen them before, are they fun?"
"They can be," Al admitted. "I got to demonstrate one once during my schooling, so I have some idea of how it's supposed to work."
"Did you blast something with a bolt of lightning?" Wikwocket asked excitedly.
"No, it was magic to make someone's speech understandable to everyone. We had a visiting lecturer who only spoke Elvish. However that spell worked, it's still beyond what I can comprehend on my own, even now I think. I felt dizzy for an hour after I let the spell run through my mind like that. When I did it, the paper it was written on completely disintegrated, but they said the effectiveness of the magic was exactly what it should have been, all of us there understood the lecture, and the lecturer understood all of our questions even though none of us spoke Elvish."
Al shut the safe. The key was still in the lock, so he turned it and then put the key in the desk drawer so that it at least wasn't obvious.
The sound of sniffing coming from the hall announced the arrival of their gnoll.
"Gruntle? Where have you been?" Al asked.
"Helping Bote move a body."
"Someone died?"
"Nah. Bote said con... con... hit on the head and shouldn't walk around yet."
"Concussion?"
Grunt.
Gruntle returned to sniffing at the open door to the apprentice's room.
"What do you smell?"
"Body smell."
Alarmed, Al hurried over and sniffed the air himself, expecting to detect the odor of rotting flesh. Instead, besides the lingering smell of smoke there was only a sort of dirty socks funk.
"You mean body odor?"
Gruntle tilted his head, puzzled. "Odor means smell."
The cramped room had only the small cot, a nightstand, a trunk at the foot of the cot, and a small stand that reminded Al of something designed to display a musical instrument - he'd seen some professional traveling musicians using something like it to hold their stringed instruments when they weren't playing them.
The nightstand held a small stack of books. The bottom one appeared to be a legitimate - if basic - textbook on alchemical principals, judging by the "Simple Alchemical Practice" title on the spine. The others were smaller and looked less valuable. The topmost had a cover stamped by a sloppy woodcutting depicting a muscular half-dressed man and an equally muscular half-dressed woman, both holding improbably large swords over their heads. "Cursed Blade of the Dark Vampire" was the title on the spine. Al shook his head. Trashy adventure novels.
A sheet of paper was sitting on the unmade bed. It was a list of chores:
- Dust Master's Room
- Sweep the Storefront
- Organize Stockroom
- Fertilize Garden
- Dust and Sweep Hazardous Chemical Room and Laboratory
- Replace Rats Water Bottles
A sloppy checkmark had been made with a charcoal stylus next to each item.
"Maybe the chores got done after all," Al mumbled. Out of curiosity, he opened the trunk, then immediately closed it again when the smell of unwashed clothing escaped.
"Normally I'd suggest searching under the bed in case there's anything important hidden there, but it looks and smells like it's just garbage," Wikwocket said, crouched down to look underneath. She stood back up and noticed the books on the nightstand.
"Oh! I remember that one! Dark Blood Throne of the Shadow Witch was hilarious!"
"It was?"
"Yes! I mean, probably not on purpose, but it was!"
"I'll take your word for that. Come on, let's go see if the guy we found on the floor knows what's going on, then we can go look for the apprentice. Given how badly this place has been trashed, there's a chance he's been hurt or in danger."
Empirical Gnollage is!
Outside / Hook: The street is full of the typical stores one might see in a city. People stand in shock as a corner of the roof of a
nearby building is on fire. The sign on the front of the building reads “The Elixir Emporium” and a large glass window looks into
the shop front. The players watch as a frenzied man with wild eyes approaches. He is wearing thick gloves and a heavy apron. His
name is Ebeneezer Elroy, and he tells the players that this is his store and that his apprentice is inside along with his spell book
which contains all his recipes. He will ask the players to save both his apprentice, spell book, and as much of his property as they
can. If pressed, he will tell the players that his apprentice is a good-for-nothing and the fire is probably his fault, but he still feels
responsible for the boy, whose name is Eric. He will also explain the layout of the building and his underground lab. If the players
ask him about a reward, he will offer the players each a potion from whatever remains of his stock along with a 25% discount on
future purchases (he will negotiate up to 50%).
of various spilled potions are strewn over the floor and smeared onto the counter top. Second, there is an unconscious man on the
floor. If the players investigate the man, he is alive but does not match the description of the apprentice. [...]
There are stairs that lead up to the second floor and a obvious trap door that leads to the basement. There is also a small locked box
behind the counter with 50 gold pieces, 76 silver pieces and 123 copper pieces.
normal, if sparsely furnished. There is an empty instrument stand against one wall and several comics piled on the night stand. On
the bed is a to do list. It contains a list of chores, and each item has a check mark next to it. It reads: dust the master's room, sweep
the store front, reorganize the stockroom, fertilize the garden, dust and sweep the hazardous chemical room and laboratory, and
replace the rats water bottles. The large room belongs to Ebeneezer and is currently filled with smoke.The desk is on fire which in
turn has caught the roof on fire. If the players try, they can attempt to put out the flames using any methods the GM deems
reasonable. This room is in similar disarray to the storefront with papers strewn about the room. Careful investigation will reveal a
broken lamp on the desk to be the likely source of the fire. The safe in the corner of the room is open and the spell book is inside.
On the bed is a scroll. If investigated, the players can discover that it is a used spell scroll (of what spell they do not know). If the
players take too long to investigate the second floor, the fire might destroy the spell book or even consume the whole shop.
Vengeance of the Dark Demon Blood Lord becoming a true story?