We notice that the goblins have that same reptilian eye symbol on their shield as the goblins we fought on the way here.  Ulric steps around the front sarcophagus and charges the goblins using the mace we found earlier; its head disintegrates.  I fire at one of them, but he doesn’t go down.  Briggette charges at the one I just hit, but seems to lose her balance a bit going down the stairs.  However, her swing connects, and she fells the beast.  Korvinean shoots at two others, killing one, but not the other.  Three of the goblins gang up on Ulric, but do not do significant damage.  Brianna runs up to one of them and punches through its skull, dropping it.  Ulric kills another with a mighty swing of that glorious mace.  I shoot at the last one standing, and it falls.

We search the bodies and find some copper and silver.  None of their weapons or armor are in good repair, so we leave them.  We do a cursory search of the room, then go back into the main room with the rubble.  We follow around to the next hallway on the right.  It continues down sixty feet, ending in a door, with another door at forty feet on both sides.  We stop at the door at forty feet, and finding no traps, I pick the lock and open it.  This opens into a long hallway with doors along it at regular intervals.

The first door opens to a room that is filled with straw on the floor with a straw mattress enclosed in cloth.  There is fresh food by the bed.  I search the bed and find a silver bracelet with the Elven script “Marisa” carved into it.  We carefully lock that room back up and continue to the next door on the right, and the room is laid out in exactly the same manner.  We continue to the next door on the right.  It also has the same layout.  As I’m searching the bed, a giant spider attacks me.  His jaws clamp down on my shoulder.  I can feel the poison seeping into me.  Ulric charges the spider and bashes at it with the mace.  Korvinean steps forward and shoots the spider, landing his shot well, but the creature doesn’t fall.  Instead, it digs its fangs in deeper, and I feel even more club-footed and fat-fingered.  I tumble away back toward the door of the room, allowing my peers to keep attacking the beast.  Ulric swings at it again, and bashes its head in.  Just for good measure, he smacks it again and again.

“Are you okay?” Ulric asks as he starts to look me over.

“My fingers feel fat…  And my feet feel heavy,” I reply.  He patches me up, and we find a giant spider web containing leather armor for a female warrior.  In one of her pouches, we find 50 silver, 20 gold, and 10 beryls.  Then we move to the room across the hall.

The layout here is the mirror of those on the other side, but this one contains an elven woman.  She is chained to the wall, and I begin to work carefully on her locks to free her.  She says her name is Maryala, and she is from the village we’ve just come from.  We advise her to stay in this room for her own safety after our spider incident, and we assure her we will be back for her.

At the back of the next room, there’s a man in robes chained to the wall.  As soon as Ulric sees the man, he collapses to the floor.  I turn the corner and see Ulric down.  The only other person in the area is the chained man in robes, so I fire on him.

About that time, Korvinean comes around yelling to the man, “Stop!  We’re here to rescue you!”

He looks warily at us, and asks, “Who are you?”

Korvinean playfully kicks at Ulric and says, “Well, that was my leader.”

Briggette looks at him carefully, then says, “Well, you’re not evil.”

“I should say not!  So, you don’t work for the people here?”

“No,” Briggette replies, “we’re working against them.  May I have your word that you won’t put any more of us to sleep?”

I lower my bow, but don’t release the draw.  Korvinean nudges at Ulric and he begins to stir.

“I assure you that I will not cast against you.”

“What’s your name, sir?” Briggette asks.

“Murdese.  I came here hearing there was a villain with much treasure.  I came here to kill the villain and take his treasure.”  He goes on to ask us if we have seen his friends.  He describes one named Lisa, who was wearing armor like that we found in the spider’s web.  We give him some food, and ask if he knows the elf woman in the next room.  He does not.  We make our introductions, and I apologize for shooting him.  He agrees to help us kill the people who did all of this, but we admonish him not to kill the elves—only to subdue them.

The next room, the final one to return back to the original hallway, is much like the others, but has nothing of note inside.  We go back to the original hallway, and to the door at the end of the hallway.  The charred remains of a long, elegant table run the length of the room, as well as long bookshelves with burned leather books.  I find a piece of parchment that was never bound, which appears to be notes.  It contains some burned spots, but says:

Once the three are snared in the trap I have prepared for them, I, ----, after this I will take it to the throne and -----.  The destruction shall signal ---- banish for all eternity.

“Excuse me, quill, are you still there?” Ulric asks.

“Yes.”

“Does this sound familiar to you at all?”

“I didn’t write this.”

“You have the pen.  It wouldn’t let me touch it,” Murdese says in wonder.

“Why wouldn’t you let him touch you?”

“He is not worthy.”

“Ah.”  Ulric seems pleased.

We go on to the next room which contains an elegant wooden table and shelves containing several map cases.  Ulric opens one, and it contains wine.  It is from the same winery and says, “Purple Grape Mash #3, ID Number 14231241-S.”  On opening others, we find 6 maps which stay intact when opened (3 are current charts for sailors, 1 shows the empire of the companions, showing the entire continent, 1 shows the possessions of Delrith, with major cities and major fortresses marked, some of which are unknown to us, 1 says the “Home of the Var’ashaan” and has only parts labeled.  These are the people who invaded with the brown dragons and started the Great War.); 75 bottles of Purple Grape Mash, all with the same ID number; and about 100 maps that simply disintegrate when opened.

Ulric decides to drink some of the wine once we are certain it is the same as what Korvinean and I had.  He, too, dreams of three dragons facing a single smaller dragon with only one eye.  He suggests we all drink it so we all experience the vision.  All do, and then Ulric decides to find out what the effects are of the other wine, the Red Dragon Crush.

When he wakes, he tells us he remembers an obelisk that spoke to him and demanded the answer to a question.  He feels as though he knows the answer, but can’t remember the question.  The rest of us try it, and have the same vision.

We check out the rest of the room, and I find a secret door.  It opens to a stairwell leading down.  We bar the door back and move back to the hallway that led to the charred room, before opening the door on the right.  This hallway is much shorter than its counterpart across the hall, only stretching forward 20 feet.  It has a door on each side, as well as one at the end.

I go to the first door on the right, and when I open the door, I immediately run at full break-neck speed into the room.  Ulric, rightfully alarmed follows me, but is soon moving as I am, unwillingly, toward a grand sparkling pile of treasure in the center of the room.  I keep full-tilt charging, until I run into the wall.  I fall down unconscious about the same time that Ulric smacks into the wall as well.  Briggette sees me lying in the pile of treasure, but none of the coins have moved when Ulric and I ran through. 

Briggette calls Korvinean to come into the room, and warns everyone that there is illusory treasure in the room; however, both he and Finn also charge into the wall, followed shortly by Murdese.  Briggette heals me, and I check out the next door.

We enter that room, and find a 30’ x 20’ room that ends in a curtain of light.  I walk up to the curtain of light and start to look it over closely.  Korvinean pokes an arrow through it, and it comes back out with no issues.  Ulric walks through, but immediately appears about a foot away.  He pushes his hand in, but it does not appear on the other side.  I begin to look for a mechanism when Ulric steps through again.  This time, he disappears.

“Hey, guys?” we hear Ulric’s voice.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I walked through with my eyes closed.”  We all follow likewise.  The room we are in is very old and dusty, and appears to be a lab.  Everything is desicated or damaged.  There are two alcoves on the far wall, and a woman’s green hat with a pink feather hangs between the two alcoves, and is the only thing in the room that is not old.  There is no dust on the hat.  There is an R above one alcove and a T above the other.

Korvinean puts the hat on, but nothing happens.  He walks over to the alcoves and looks around, then walks into the northern one, but nothing happens.  Then, he walks over to the southern alcove and disappears, but the hat appears back on the hook.

Ulric carries the hat and walks into the alcove, but nothing happens.  He makes us all turn around, then puts it on his head—over his helm—and walks through.  Again, the hat reappears.  We all follow suit.

We all end up lying down in a room.  The walls and floor of the room are covered with rare expensive carpets.  Pillows and cushions lie scattered around the floor.  In the center is a large carpet with a phoenix embroidered on it.  A stunning willowy, honey-haired elven woman is asleep on the cushions in the southwest corner.  An arch in the west wall leads to a ten foot alcove, which has a one foot lever protruding from the wall nearby.

We briefly check out the room, and then Ulric goes to kneel beside the elf.  He gently nudges her.  She wakes up, looks alarmed, and plasters herself against the wall.

“You appear to have been asleep.  Is that normal for you?” Ulric asks.

“Elves don’t usually sleep,” she groggily replies.  We talk with her some more and discern that she is Sylva, the cousin of Rahasha.  Ulric asks her about the alcove and the door in the room.  She says that sometimes when she wakes up here, there is a gate down over the alcove, but other times, it is up and has spikes at the end.  She doesn’t know where the door goes.  She does not know, and further, she cannot remember anything that happens to her when she is outside of this room.

I investigate the alcove and find nothing unusual.  We move to the door, and I pick the lock easily, but I do notice that the lock is of a higher quality than others we’ve seen.  The door opens to a hallway that has one door in the center of each wall.  At one end of the hallway there are brass doors, while at the other there are steel.  This opens into a large dumbbell shaped room that has and a large arch in the center.  Directly across from us, we see another set of steel doors.  To the left, there appears to be a treasure room, while the room on the right is empty.  Over the archway leading to the treasury, we see writing.  It is in an ancient script, and I can easily read it.  It says, “Once the portal is crossed, make no mistake, and part of my treasury you will make.”  There is nothing written above the archway on the other side.

Ulric walks through the archway to the side that is empty, and there is a pulse of white light, and he disappears.  I follow, as do the others after a moment of discussion.

We appear in a room that is 30 feet in diameter with three alcoves.  There are three 20 foot tall statues of dragons, each set with a stone in their eyes.  Two of them are set with dimly glowing blue stone in their right eyes, while the third has a pulsing red stone in its right eye.  Their left eyes are a black stone.  In the center, there is a statue of a smaller dragon, with one black eye on the left and one empty socket on the right.   Each dragon has an impression at about normal human height of a hand, and the central dragon has an iron throne set into it that matches the iron throne on the dais where we found the quill.

Ulric steps forth into the room, then boldly steps into the alcove on the right and disappears.  We all follow.  We appear on a raised platform at the end of a room that is 20’ by 20’.  There is only one door directly in front of us.  When I open it, we see that we are in the empty room beside the treasure room.  We cross to the door directly in front of us, and open it to find a room that mirrors the one we came from.  Ulric goes up onto the dais, and we follow.  We all end up back in the dragon room.  We go back through the alcove from before and end up once again in the same place.

We go through the double steel doors.  It opens into a sixty foot hallway with large heavy doors at the end.  Three alcoves are cut into the walls of the hallway with shadowy figures in each.  The statues are made of platinum.  We move to the doors at the end of the hallway and end up in a room that mirrors the earlier one with the floating blue lift disc.  We decide to ride it up to see if we can figure out how man floors there are.

A full three minutes later, we arrive in that first room.  We say the command word and ride the lift disc back down.  We continue back down the initial hallway to the next door on the right.  This room is extremely opulent with a four poster bed and ornate furniture.  The shape of the room mirrors that of where found Sylva.  The lever for the alcove here is on the outside of the gate, and a woman’s hat that is pink wit h a green feather hangs on the wall.

A quick toss of the room reveals some very nice female elven clothing and jars of make-up.  We move on to the steel doors at the end of the hallway.
This opens to a thirty by thirty room with steel grates covering openings in each wall.  A huge statue of a tremendously fat man sits in the center of the room.  The statues open mouth gapes at the ceiling in a permanent smile.  It has an inscription that reads, “I judge by taste.”  Behind each grate is a stairwell going down.

I climb up and look at the mouth of the statue.  It appears to be a chute.  I pour some of the “-S” wine down his gullet, and the portcullis on the south wall opens up.  We decide to follow the path that has been opened to us, and follow the staircase down for 20 feet.

This room has three alcoves.  Above the alcoves are the numbers 1, 2 and 3.  We decide we need to backtrack to try to find the opal.  We realize there are many things we missed, and ask the quill if it knows where Elias kept the opal.  He said he kept it on a pedestal in the front room.

We return to the front grand hall with the rubble to investigate more carefully.  We find six gems in the rubble, but not an opal.  As we are looking, we hear something coming from behind us, from outside.  We turn and see a giant 10’ x 10’ gelatinous cube.