We began making preparations for our upcoming raid on The Rock, while waiting for sundown when we were to meet old Pete at the docks. I was being taught how to protect myself from attackers we were likely to face, Smoke was directing lab assistants to help him make flash grenades, and the others were also training in various combat techniques for when things most likely go bad during our mission.
We met old Pete at the docks and got into a relatively small boat. We were warned of the dangers of the defenses surrounding the rock, including the mutated sharks that spanned 8 to 20 feet and were covered in red armored growths, as well as the patrolling maze runners that would shoot anyone approaching the rock on sight with Gatling guns. Suffice to say, we were extra sure to be quiet and not rock the boat.
Luckily we managed to slowly get through unnoticed by either the maze runners or the sharks as we slowly moved to the sewer entrance, with reddish brown muck coming out of it. The smell nearly floored some of us it was so intense. While at the sewer entrance, old Pete informed us that we would need a key to get to Jasper and the HoD, and that two people had the key, one would be in the top floor in Grimme's office, and the other would be on the warden, and that when we were ready to leave we should send up a flare. He also provided us with a scrap of cloth to convince stone that we could be trusted.
After sneaking in through the sewers we came on an opening into the furnace room, where two scientists were babbling about something or another, it wasn't anything noteworthy. So we snuck in and I electrocuted one of them unconscious and Casanova intimidated the other into going back to work. And then we knocked him out just to be safe.
Of course then we heard foot steps coming our way, and so we quickly hid ourselves and the unconscious workers, while Malady used his magic to make himself look like Grimme himself and began shovelling coal into the fire. After somehow convincing the person that it was some sort of religious symbolism that the coal was the unbelievers fueling the flame of the belief of the true followers he headed off with the person to attempt to get the key we needed. Meanwhile we began to look around the hallways, and when I used my newly crafted spirit lens (it allows me to see into the spirit world, I figured it might be useful for this mission) to look into one of the dead ends, I saw terrible things, that I dare not try to recall.
So we avoided that hallway, and opened another door, only to find there were 3 people butchering human bodies, who quickly attacked us, and if it weren't for a lucky deflection on my part one of them would have taken my head clean off. I retaliated by shooting him point blank in the chest. Cassanova and Ziggy run in and attacked another with their sword and throwing knives respectively. and the third was quickly finished off.
We continued sneaking through the hallway, but were attacked by a man with a shotgun, and a for lack of a better word supernatural "song" was playing casing all of us except Coleen and Smoke to go up the staircase past a pile of bubbling bones, which horrifically coalesced into a slurping, laughing, burbling mutant. Luckily we managed to shake off the effect, and Malady showed up in the room with the man we had moved to, with the warden held hostage. So we returned down the stairs to help coleen and Smoke fight the blood golem. The sight of it was revolting and caused many of us to lose the contents of their stomachs. I Took my rifle and shot it in the center of mass, hoping that it would be damaged by that. and then a third time before it could reach me, which was enough to destroy it.
The monstrous blood golem was apparently created using an object that the warden threw (a bone) which he had 3 more of.
Finally after more searching of rooms we found a storage room, which was full of flour for "meat pies" as well as ghost rock fuel. At this point it was fairly clear how Grimme was keeping people fed, and some of us were quite shocked by this despite the clues left for us in previous rooms. After that we went down another hallway and found 2 locked doors which, led to 5 cells that seemed to suppress all arcane effects, in which I felt strangely fine, unfortunately the cells were empty so we had to search elsewhere for where Jasper was being kept.
Another path led to a torture room with a creepy man sharpening knives, Smokes ended up tripping and alerting him to our presence. So I reacted quickly and nearly shot him perfectly, but he chose that moment to duck upon hearing a noise so the shot was a glancing shot. Luckily Ziggy threw his knives at the torturer and killed him, a rather fitting for him I suppose.
The next room had several large ovens, several cutting tables and gore covering the floor and walls. Occupying the room were 3 chefs that were nearly as wide as they were tall, and they towered at nearly 9 feet tall, wearing bloody chef's hats and wielding blood stained cleavers. These chefs began SLIDING towards us on the gore covering the floor, and I began to fire at them but was quickly blinded by a bright flare of light as a flash grenade went off in front of my face. Luckily Cassanova was able to use his pistol to damage one of them (female possibly, I didn't really want to check). And the other two were dispatched fairly easily, although they did get a few good hits of their own in before we took them down.
Unfortunately, 2 angels showed up around the corner to investigate the loud explosion he heard, smoke is not very good at stealth operations. One of them managed to scream out something like "Code 66ba-argh" as he was silenced but not quickly enough. We quickly retreated to the store room as 2 flights of angels showed up with more reinforcements on the way. Luckily what Smoke lacks in stealth he makes up for in the ability to create explosives (often unintentionally) and so we devised a plan using flour, some of the fireworks I kept from our show in junkyard and smoke's flash grenade to make a trap for the angels. The flour would be tossed out, the flash grenade would be thrown causing the flower to spread through the air, then the fireworks would be set off igniting the flour. So Cassanova, being an actor at heart, Yelled "Feel the true wrath of God" to the angels as smoke tossed his grenade, Colleen used some sort of magic and asked if god could create a being more powerful than himself to the angels, causing them to stand in confusion while Cassanova rescued Malady (Still disguised as grimm) from the angels, and then I threw the fireworks, and we slammed the doors shut.
The explosion was nearly deafening and knocked the large iron doors we were bracing and had bolted clean off their hinges, and we fled out of the warehouse as the stockpiles of flour and ghostrock began catching fire. Throughout the compound code 666 was being repeated over a series of tubes that lead to all of the rooms and hallways. We headed down the staircase quickly only taking the time to set up a tripwire trap to trigger another "flour-grenade-firework oh my" trap (we didn't have time to think of a good name).
We reached a room with bone sculptures along the walls depicting people eating themselves, it was quite unnerving, but fitting considering the cannibalistic tendencies of Grimme and his followers. The room also contained a lamp, a heavy black curtain and an alter, to whatever monster Grimme actually worshiped most likely, there was also a thick locked door that we attempted to lockpick, which broke the lockpick before deciding we should try the key we took from the warden. When we used the key, the door practically sucked in the key like a devouring maw before releasing it and opening, revealing a huge room with a throne on the far side so red that it was almost black, and the entire room was filled with bones that were about 3feet deep in most places, and more like 8 feet high near the walls. The room was made more unnerving as every so often it almost sounded like there was rattling and shifting among the bones.
Deciding to not go anywhere near the throne unless necessary we instead traversed the bones cautiously and entered the northern most door of the room, ending up in Grimme's Laboratory, which also had some jail cells in it, as well as a emaciated body on a stone slab. We also spotted an anatomical drawing of something called a faminite near the table. The creature in the drawing may have at one point been human, but significantly altered by some occult method. The laboratory was also filled with racks of alchemical and chemical solutions. We also saw a man in one of the cells when we investigated them, surrounded by candles with a pentagram on the floor surrounding him. Walzting buffalo used his whip to extinguish a candle, and the man began looking healthier. We showed the man the cloth and he told us his name was Jasper Stone, and having confirmed he was who we were looking for we freed him from his cell. We mentioned that we need to pick up the heart of darkness before we made our escape which caused him to make a lot of weird faces, which considering it was the reason he was imprisoned and tortured by Grimme, I didn't give a second thought. We split up to search for the HD more quickly since we were running out of time, so Ziggy and I being the stealthiest looked in the other room coming off of the bone pit room, which contained bone sculptures that were most likely made by Grimme himself, clearly Grimme is a people person (I suppose making jokes about the horrors Grimme was committing might be tasteless, but better to not let things get to you and try to fix them than mourning.).
Finding nothing of value we returned to the stairs only to find it guarded by a small army of guardian angels (~60 give or take some if my estimation is right) and that our trap was disabled. Smoke throws one of his flash grenades at the trap to set it off so we can escape from them. Apparently though the grenade was made in a bizarre was that caused a simple flash grenade to be extremely lethal, as Smoke explained it later, it had somehow ended up being a poly-nitrogen grenade instead of a magnesium grenade, suddenly being blinded by his flash grenade became a much preferable option than having this happen to us. So we all bolted out through the flames before the stockpiles caught on fire completely, unfortunately as we were escaping through the sewers (luckily out escape rout was still intact after the initial explosion), the flames reached the flour and coal, as well as the alcohol reserves, and worse, the room above it was full of dynamite, so we had very little time to escape before we went down with the island. We barely made it out of the sewer vent before the fire spread and ignited the methane in the sewers. Luckily Old Pete was there waiting for us, and we quickly pile in the boat, while Ziggy pulls a whistle out of his hat and plays taps, and Old Pete increases the boats speed by a nearly 100%, and we manage to outrun both the maze runners and the monster sharks, as the island goes up in flames behind us. During this time Smoke was shell-shocked at the damage his grenade has caused (indirectly), it must have hit extra hard since he is a pacifist, and does not want to kill people, which is why he made flash grenades in the first place. Colleen appeared to also be near catatonic, and given her fear of fire coupled with the explosions we nearly were caught up in was understandable.
Old Pete pays us $1800 in union gold for getting Jasper out of the Rock, Again it seemed reasonable considering what we had just gone through. Old Pete then informed us that Grimme was going to do something big today involving the HD, and that we needed to get to the church, but that we should go to the pi shop first.
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