A competition gone wrong

Nothing of interest happened until the night when a woman came close to our camp, after some talk she introduces herself as Fiona and somehow got separated from her friends Flora and Martin while reading a book. She tag along and we find ourselves to the campsite of the competition where Martin and Flora are as well. They announced that the hunt was for harpies and after a nights rest it were to begin, and for some reason the party thought that it was a good idea for us to join. Fiona had been talking about some mysterious stones, the sounded familiar to the kind of stones that the masters servants had been using to access pocked dimensions.

Now interesting things starts to happen. In the forest were a lot of harpies, but not normal harpies it turned out, but mutated harpies. We advanced slowly and killed some off. But we heard screams and fighting noises from other fights. But the corpses we found were much older than they ought to be, and then we found Martin, Fiona and Flora. But they said that they had been fighting the harpies for 3 days, when merely hours had passed for us. And they were trapped in some spatial loop, when they were exiting on one side they ended up on the other side. Following them they lead us to a place with hundreds of harpies, and the stones in the middle of them. We decide to see if we can find others and managed to find Baldour and Friskie (Baldour Jr. was too scared to join). They had been here for over three weeks. We decided to sleep, and then fight the harpies as a team in the morning and see if the stones lead to a portal. But they cast a spell on our watch and ran ahead to lure the harpies away to create free way for us to get to the stones.

We found a key to opening the portal and jumped into the portal. This lead to the pocket dimension. We found a very old room, the papers were falling apart when touched but we found another of the cryptics that Merula has been using to decipher her books. There were also a paper with some instructions on how to disable the time spell and the trapping spell. Continuing on we met another kind of mutated harpy, turned out to be a brood mother of some kind.

After some annoying bickering it turned out that the pocket dimension was some kind of trap for something called “flutterby”. We defeated them and continued to the next two rooms and disabled the magic there to dispel the fey magic. After the dispelling the dimension got unstable and we hurried out.

“Flutterby” also turned out to be the code to the cryptic we found. Inside the Cryptic we found a cipher as well as a note insinuating that Illestra was one of the ones responsible for this place.

Outside we met up with Fiona who told us that they had had a week while we were inside this pocket dimension and Martin and Friskie had been killed by the harpies. We also found a slimy trail leading away from this place towards the encampment. There we found Baldour Jr. trying to hatch a cocoon with fire in the belief it would kill it. Instead it hatched with some creature and a lot of mist, letting the creature sneak away.

We then found the creature and she said her name is “Dredulai-enai” and told she had been caught by the masters charm and got twins with him. Then she realized that what his plans were and got locked up and transformed into a worm. I believe that the twins were the sisters we met after rescuing Merula. She had no name of the master, but apparently he seeks a weapon he needs according to some prophecy to rule everyone. After our talk she said she were going to kill the master and went ethereal.

After what happened to Friskie, Baldour said he is happy to help with killing the master should we find him.