Flashpoint: Lovely Island

The team rejoined at a tavern and headed to the Calistrian temple and paid for a room to sleep as they were being hunted by devils and it was best to be out of sight.  Arexia, Wellard, and Haylei explained what they had learned.  There's rumors that a Cypher Mage married an important tiefling prostitute.  The Cypher Mages have recently gone to ground - thought to have something to do with an earlier expedition to Lenore Island.

The following day, as Lhye and Lunjun studied to regain their spells, Proteus headed off to find out some information about the missing Cypher Mages and learned that they used to hang out at a club run by an aged sailor known as Higgins.  This chubby old sailor turned out to be an old captain of Proteus and so he went to visit the club only to find the doors smashed open, two dead dwarven looters with their faces and chests eaten open, strange pawprints like disfigured hands leading away in the bloody prints, and a ransacked bedroom with a warning on the wall in Abyssal and ledger notes ripped out of the desk and defecated on.  The defecation was bloody and had a ribcage in it - Proteus thought it might be a baby, though in truth, it was a dog.  There was a ship in a bottle (a smuggler-type vessel) which Proteus took.

Proteus took out a piece of charcoal and copied down the Abyssal words onto a plank of wood.  He headed back to the others and Lhye translated it as: "Since you came here, we know your scent.  We can find you.  Meet us at the broken belltower and tell us what we need to know or we'll kill you."

So they headed straight for the docks and dunked themselves in the icky dock water.  As they went, Haylei worked on opening a secret compartment in the ship without destroying it.  They bribed a boat over to Lenore Island.

Lhye had been on the island fifty years ago with his mother when she had hidden from her pimp for a short while in what had felt to him to be an extended camping trip.  He knew there was a small version of a monolithic site (basically, a mini Stonehenge) somewhere on the rather flat and monotonous island.  They passed through rocky reefs covered in barnacles and saw in the distance a Thassilic Behemoth splashing into the water and were given a greater sense of their place in the world.

Haylei finally gets the secret section of the ship open and pulls out a flat piece of white string with gold thread sewn into it.  Using a jeweller's glass, she can point out a line that Lunjun recognises as sylvan.  Lunjun can only do a poor translation as he knows Elven and rolled a reasonably Linguistics check but lacked the time for real study.  It said: 'The gift of afar brings undeath glory land'.

There were narrow crevasses and ravines amongst the reefs, through which those with Darkvision could see the edge of reefclaws crawling.  They paid the boatsmen 10gp and requested them to return by the evening for a further 10gp and the boatsmen poled off.  As they clambered out onto the dry barnacle covered rocks, they could also see a shark-eating crab 90 yards away, plucking a reefclaw out of the rocks, shattering and eating it.  As they go along their way, Arexia and Wellard slip and scrape their legs on the barnacles - doing themselves some damage.  One of them also kicks a bit of shell across and a chunk of rock disperses - revealing that they were actually baby reefclaws (a medium swarm) - and disappeared through the gaps in the rocks.

They moved onto the actual land where a green peat-like material gave the ground a spongey feel.  As they walked along, a goat-headed demon (a schir) ran around the corner, jumped onto the rock and bounced off, twirling its halberd.  Lhye cast Unnatural Lust on it toward the shark-eating crab and it ran towards the huge vermin but didn't quite reach it.  Proteus then used Fascinate on the schir to hold it in place and then shot the crab with a bolt to anger it and cause it to rush forward.  It killed the schir in three attacks over two rounds, thus clearing up a problem for the team.