The Hall of the Water Wizard

Having decided that FABULUS CALAMUS is a likely suspect, the Valerians infiltrate in two ways:

BROTHER AQUILA, POUNCEQUICK, DECINQUE and BJERN OF BRITAIN enter disguised as monks performing a routine blessing.

JUNIUS, RETARIUS, ROSA, and SYLVIA enter through the storm sewers. This means leaving Connel and Gnorfank behind.

The sewer team comes up in a storeroom full of bottles of strange potions. JUNIUS grabs one for later use.

The monk team is led by servants through several rooms, which they pretend to ritually purify.

Then they enter a room from which they can see the owner, Calamus himself. Calamus, after giving orders to a servant, turns and hurries from the room.

Then gladiators emerge from many doorways, moving to block the exit! BJERN fights his way to the door, sees about twenty gladiators pursuing him, gets cut by a spearpoint, and goes berserk. Between that group and the next, he kills sixteen gladiators and sets the survivors to panicked flight.

Meanwhile, JUNIUS is also attacked by gladiators. He hurls his potion bottle at them. It is full of liquid screams, and a quart of screams is enough to deafen everyone in the building.

SYLVIA sees Calamus escaping and shoots him in the leg. But her arrow passes through his flesh, which seals the hole like water.

Calamus summons water elementals to crush Junius' group.

SYLVIA uses the lightning arrow she took from Karinthia the Arrow Mage back in the Temple of the Four Winds. That hurts the elemental pretty badly! It halts, hesitating. RETARIUS ducks his head and plows through it, like bulling through a wave in the sea.

Retarius reaches Calamus' room, which has a hot bath built into the floor. Retarius demands answers from Calamus, who seems oddly willing to discuss his plans. He, Calamus, has kidnapped the Elvish ambassador in order to win favor with MARCUS LICINIUS CRASSUS, who does not approve of his daughter's love for the Elf. Calamus used Crassus' favor to have the XX Legion reassigned; he doesn't want any Roman legions in Brittania, because he has plans in that province that the Army might interrupt.

At this point Junius arrives and attacks Calamus. Calamus stops telling Retarius his plan (you crafty devil! You got me MONOLOGUING!) and steps into the bath. His body turns into water and starts going down the drain, but Junius grabs the wooden drain plug and stops up Calamus' escape route. Calamus swirls around (he's water, what else is he going to do?) and then summons an enormous purple worm out of the drains, which busts up the bath and attempts to do the same to Junius and Retarius. But Retarius shovels a shieldfull of hot coals into the worm's mouth, and that takes care of it for a while.

When the worm recovers its wits and lurches out into the hallway after the retreating Romans, it runs into several angry water elementals. With Calamus controlling them all would be harmony, but without him, the very different, very upset monsters fall upon each other. Which actually seems to happen rather often when the Elemental Evil guys go up against the House of Valerius.

ROSA and PETER follow the advice of some rats (rats know everything) and locate BOWENN IVORYBOW in the frigidarium. He's chained down in icy water, dying of hypothermia. Rosa invokes an ancient rune and fills the room with roaring flames, which warm Bowenn right up. After apologizing in verse for not using verse during this crisis, Bowenn illusionizes the wall of the villa and walks right through it as though it did not exist. Peter and Rosa follow.

Bowenn has also taken up his bow, made from a pair of huge tusks, and his cloak, which makes him look like a piece of a dirty Roman alley. So he's pretty hard to see, since they're in a dirty Roman alley which looks exactly like a dirty Roman alley. He leaves Rosa with a teardrop-shaped red stone and hurries off into the night, perhaps to seek his beloved.

BJERN eventually calms down, mostly by passing out from his injuries. But he doesn't die, although if he did, he'd have a dozen escorts to the Underworld.

Moments after he collapses, the Cardinal and the Rebukers, along with four Knights of St. Michael, break down the door and dispell all the evil within, one monster at a time. The Cardinal even invokes a Sunspear, a shaft of pure golden light that banishes the water elementals back to the nonsense from which they were formed.

Participants earn 3 xp for the defeat of Calamus, as well as earning the Cardinal's trust. Perhaps one of us will be appointed Witchsmeller Pursuivant ...