Caught, But It’s Complicated

Taking a breather in Clarabel‘s room, the party listens for any alerted people heading their way. Ralathen spends a moment to decompress in Clarabel‘s painting room and then rejoins the party. The group discusses their next steps, initially Ralathen indicates it’s time to give up, but the rest of the party rally around him to press on. Jukli exits the room and goes to head up stairs when he looks down the hall towards Walsh‘s office and notices a hooded figure at the door and a slumped body past them. Jukli backs behind the corner and alerts the group of the other intruder, then Ralathen pushes forward around the corner to confront the hooded figure with the rest of the party trailing.

When the figure notices them approaching, he fiddles with a ring, looks at the wall, and teleports into Walsh‘s office. Ranoa recognizes the face of the man as Bran, but hears footsteps coming up the stairs and changes himself into a house worker and pretends to faint on the ground. This distracts the house worker who came up to see what was going on. Meanwhile, Ralathen and Jukli inspect the now clearly stabbed and dead house worker as Fergus began to work on unlocking the door to Walsh‘s office to go after the culprit. Ralathen determined the weapon used was a sharply hooked dagger meant for causing as much damage as possible. The lock of the office was a complex magic lock with runic symbols and holes, which Fergus was able to figure out as elemental runes. He applied each element into each hole and was able to unlock the door just as another house worker pushed through the door Jukli was now guarding and Ornell passed by Ranoa into the hallway. Ralathen and Fergus quickly ducked into the office and looked around briefly, but was unable to find the murderer or a way they would’ve gone.

Ornell then stormed over and grappled Jukli with a vine and demanded to know what was going on. Ralathen exited the office explaining that this was not their doing and the murderer was on the loose and had just ran into the office. Ranoa dropped his facade and joined the rest during the explanation. Attempting to get the situation under control, Ornell messaged Walsh Roseburn who arrived promptly after. Ralathen and Walsh had some verbal jabs back and forth as the party made their case they weren’t the killer, including a Speak with Dead cast by Jukli on the dead house worker which ended abruptly as the soul was seemingly sucked away at the last question. Fergus was left in the office during some of this chatter and was able to snatch a handful of papers from Walsh‘s desk before emerging and playing clueless. Ralathen pressed Walsh why someone would want to break into his office with deadly force and Walsh responded simply that he ran the most successful farm in the country and that it wouldn’t be unheard of for people to want to steal his information. Unsatisfied with that answer, Ralathen slams Walsh against the wall and attempts to intimidate him which was met with a thunderous “GUARDS!” from Walsh. This resulted in the party getting escorted out by four guards who arrived to the scene. On the way out, Ralathen called out to Dahlia Roseburn for a word, but Dahlia denied, instead offering that she would meet him the following day. The party was then finally escorted out of the premises and told not to leave town.