Harry the Hill Hermit told us some more about his escape from the slavers' hideout. He said he'd escaped in the company of a guy in red robes. "Like him?" I asked, pointing to Vrba. "Actually, yeah. He gave me this scroll."
I looked at the scroll, but I couldn't read it-- it looked like magic. Sanjay couldn't read it either. Vrba could, though, it was written in Grey Elven magical script, a spell of invisibility. We discussed what we should do. Instead of the usual barge-in-and-get-in-a-fight strategy, we decided to try sneaking into the hideout and looking for information. The idea was that we didn't want to alert the slavers to our presence, since it was likely we would have to go elsewhere to rescue Draco, and we didn't want these guys to alert their comrades. Finally, we came up with a plan.
Sanjay and Vrba would copy the spell to their spellbooks. The next day, they'd cast Invisibility on Hal, Sanjay, and me, and the three of us would sneak into the temple and look for information. We did this.
The three of us kept in contact by voice as we snuck up to the crack in the wall. Beyond the crack was a pile of rubble which we had to climb over in order to enter the complex proper. We wandered a bit, eventually coming to a room where six figures were hunched over something. We snuck past them, and I saw that they were three ghouls munching on the remains of a fighter. Yuck. They didn't notice us. We saw signs of fighting as we proceeded into the temple. Eventually, we came to a room whose floor had collapsed into a cellar, about 30 feet down. Somebody had put a plank across the hole. I crossed it easily, and told Hal and Sanjay to come ahead, it was no problem. It was a problem. Sanjay fell down. He saved himself by using magic, but he ended up in the basement. Hal got across okay, and we pulled the plank across, so that the end near the ghouls fell into the cellar. While we were about that, Sanjay called up, "Guys, there's somebody screaming down here," followed by the splashing sounds of him running off.
Of course there was somebody screaming; we were in a bloody slavers' hideout. I didn't know what he was thinking he was going to do, but I went on forward, I thought Hal followed me, but I later discovered that he went after Sanjay.
Down in the cellar, Sanjay and Hal met up. They went towards the direction from which Sanjay heard the screaming. After slogging through open sewer for a while, they came to a room filled with cages, each holding a filthy person. Three humans and three orcs occupied the room, poking at the slaves. There was an office area on the far side of the room. Hal and Sanjay went over there. They saw three humans-- a chick in chainmail, a merchant type, and a spooky guy in red and black robes. The chick and the robe guy were Sea Folk, and the merchant was Steinhallish (or was it vice versa). They were negotiating the sale of some slaves.
Hal and Sanjay proceeded up some stairs. At the top of the stairs was a room with a raised floor and open slave pits. The slaves were guarded by ant-men. Two hallways led out of the room. Hal chose one, and the two of them went that way. They found another stairway going down. Midway down the stairs, there was a second door. They went through the door, and down more stairs. After a few steps, the stairway collapsed into a slide. They fell down, and landed on a circular platform in the center of a circular room. The platform was surrounded by a moat of sewage. Beyond the moat was more floor; several confused orcs stood there, looking up at the slide. Off one side of the chamber was the entrance of another room. A man sat in that room, in the company of five giant weasels. Yes, five giant weasels.
The man twigged to what was going on, and called out, "You idiots! Shoot!" The orcs shot their crossbows at the center of the platform, but Hal and Sanjay had moved out of the way. The man yelled out, "Weasel Boys, attack!" The weasels slithered out, swam through the sewage, and sniffed around for the infiltrators. As one of the weasels sniffed Hal, he said to them, in Weasel, "Please don't kill us!"
The lead weasel said to his fellows, "He knows our tongue!" Turning to Hal, he asked, "Do you know the Weasel Dance?"
Now, Hal didn't know the Weasel Dance, but he was invisible at the time, so he said, "Yes."
The lead weasel called out, "Weasel Dance!" The five giant weasels, as well as Sanjay's familiar then began to dance. The orcs ran out, as did the weasel-master. Hal and Sanjay went into the office, and the dancing weasels followed. The room was the nerve-center of the operation-- they found supplies, maps, and communications-- exactly what we were looking for.
In the meantime, I explored the ground floor. I came into a room which had some odd stuff in it-- a pile of filthy, tarry rags which emitted a honey-like odor. This smelled (no pun intended) like a trap, so I left the room quickly, through a door on the other side. I passed a corridor leading to the stables. Finding my way to the front entrance to the temple, I saw a guard-house (more like a guard-awning, really) manned by six orcs. There was a creepy-looking cemetary nearby. There didn't seem to be anything interesting here; I went back through the stables into the temple proper. I went down some stairs into a dank tunnel. As I proceeded down the tunnel, I barely missed being trampled by ten screaming orcs running by. I followed them, not wanting to meet something which sent ten full-grown orcs screaming down the hallway. They ran all the way back to the guardhouse. One of them yelled to their commander, "It doesn't matter how much you pay us, nothing is worth watching five dancing weasels!" They all ran out the front gate.
I had to see this for myself. I went back the way I'd been going, eventually coming into the same circular room Hal and Sanjay had fallen into. I saw the office off the side, and went in. Sure enough, there were five dancing weasels. There were also papers shuffling themselves, from which I deduced that my comrades were here. "Hey, it's me!" I said. The weasels stopped dancing and took up a menacing pose. Fortunately, Hal reassured the weasels that I did know the weasel dance, even if I didn't speak to weasels, and that I was okay.
We looked through the papers, and discovered that the slavers (who had five leaders, called "Slavelords," one of whom was the Dread Pirate Roberts) had been kidnapping leaders from the NE of Steinhall, and holding them. Draco and Lucy were sent to the Slavers' Island, which was off the coast of Greece. The young Baron of Lubeck is being held in a fort on the Greece-Steinhall border, about 50 miles from the secret navy base. The fort is manned by a few hundred men. It is notable that unlike Lucy, they hadn't arranged the baron's kidnapping; he'd been sold to them.
We left, and headed towards the way out. The weasels followed us. Hal tried to get rid of them, but they said they were his minions, and were going to follow him. We heard a scrambling noise from above; the weasels said it was a troop of ant-men coming down a ladder. We decided to scram. We went back up to the slave-pit room. The weasels knocked the ant-men in there into some of the cells. Hal called out to the slaves to climb out. Chaos ensued, and the three slave-traders Hal and Sanjay saw earlier came in. The wizard blocked one of the exits with a web, and one of the three yelled, "You slaves! Get back into your cells!" One of the weasels tried to attack them, and the wizard zapped him. Hal told the weasels to retreat, and we all ran out the remaining exit. Eventually, we got out, and back to our comrades.
Hal explained about the weasels. After a while, he managed to convince them NOT to follow us. They ran off to the woods, but not before telling Hal that they wouldn't forget him. The lead Weasel Boy told him he was the Weasel Lord. "You are a weasel who wears trousers. We shall call you 'trouser weasel.'" The Weasel Boys ran off, presumably to spread Hal's fame among the weasels of the South.
We debated what to do next. Obviously, go to the slavers' island and free Draco, Lucy, and anybody else who needed it. The question was, how? It would be another week or two before a slaver ship came here again, and it would be risky to attempt stowing away on a slave ship, anyway. Hiring a Sea Folk ship of any sort would be out of the question. I proposed hiring or purchasing a fishing boat, which would not be under SF control. This was received as a good idea, so we set off for the nearest port city, Sandhaven, where we would likely be able to find something that would suit our needs.
When we got to Sandhaven, we discovered that the harbor had been blockaded by the Sea Folk. This was unacceptable. We found out that the SF had attacked Sandhaven two days ago. The lord's wizards were killed in the fighting, although the attack was repulsed. We volunteered to break the blockade, in return for a boat and small crew. The lord of Sandhaven agreed.
The plan was straightforward: massive amounts of fire. Our mages would fireball as many of the ships as they could. Erose and I would team up to burn the rest, using the manta-ray cloak and the Magic Guitar. The day after we arrived, we set out in a sloop to attack the SF ships. They were arrayed roughly in a line across the harbor mouth. When we got into range of the first ship, Vrba let off a fireball. Sanjay got the second, and so forth. By the time we got to the fifth ship, the SF had figured out what was going on, and some mage on one of the ships let off a huge blast of lightning on our boat. Most of us weren't hit too badly, but one of the sailors was killed. Vrba was really pissed about the lightning strike, so his final attack was a fireball of extraordinary magnitude.
While he was at it, Erose jumped into the water, and became Manta-Ray. I perched on her back, tying myself on with some rope, so I wouldn't have to worry about falling off. I played the Invisibility charm until we got into range, and then switched into the wall-of-fire song. A ring of purple fire shot up around us, part of it intersecting the Sea Folk ship. It burned as quickly the Spitting Camel had.
When we tried to do the same to the eighth ship, it didn't work. I surmised that maybe the guitar could only do that trick once a day, or once a week, or something. I quickly thought of something else to try. I raised a wind to blow the seventh ship into the eighth. That worked well. Sanjay used the Lightning Rod we got from the Drow to damage the last two ships. In short, we cleared the blockade in a matter of hours.