10. Nim Be Nimble

Nim be nimble, Nim be quick, Nim’s creation blew up the alley with his candlestick

Summary

The Ghost Bar had a windfall in the form of a case of highly prized wine that Kael noticed had fallen off the back of a cart. It was more than enough wine to push the bar into the black for the tenday, but Grick ended up serving all of it to the ‘victims’ of the fireball incident, free of charge. The line of victims grew, and the case of wine shrank, leaving the bar with a deficit for the week. The party decided to organize an ‘operating fund’ for the establishment, where they would pool their earnings together in order to invest in and pay for the business. The initial investment was 50 gold total, which is now down to 36 gp after the week’s operating costs were paid.

The morning after their meeting with Nim at the House of Inspired Hands, the party set out to scour the city for the missing nimblewright. To their surprise, they weren’t far from home when it started spinning faster, indicating a nimblewright close by. The device seemed to be pointing towards a villa owned by the Gralhunds, a noble family of Waterdeep. A tall wall and iron gate barred entrance from the villa, so Footsteps decided to scale the wall to take a peek inside. He quickly retreated after noticing a pair of very large dogs on the grounds with a gardener. Kael called out to the gardener and tried intimidating him into opening the gate before realizing that all three of them registered as undead. Changing tack, Kael used some of his divine influence to bring the gardener under his control.

Entering the grounds, the party entered the manor itself, finding a pair of humans clad in black leather, each holding a bloodied mace, standing over the corpses of several humans. The pair immediately set upon the party, but were quickly dispatched. The party headed up the stairs towards the sound of further combat to find 4 human guards fighting off more of the black-clad figures. It was here that Kael showed all present his newfound, ghostly, and quite frightening, set of wings, scaring the bejesus out of guards and thugs alike. The party joined the fray, helping the guards to take down the attacking thugs, but the guards were hesitant to trust the party at this point. A pile of bodies from both sides littered the stairs, and they did not want to stand down from the doors they were blocking.

However, when the sound of a door being kicked came from the next room, the guards said that ‘he’ must be stopped, referring to whomever was found in that room. Kael entered the room, a bedroom, and found a man, singed by fire, attempting to kick in the door opposite him. Kael, unsure of alliances at this point and expecting a nimblewright in the room instead of a man, agreed to help him kick in the door, but was unable due to the furniture piled in front of it. The situation soon changed when the man, one Urstul Floxin, realized that Kael et al. were not in fact backup, but a third party to this whole affair. He attempted to escape the room but was quickly subdued due to superior numbers, being surrounded by the party and the house guards.

Urstul subdued and Lord Gralhund now safe, the guards entered the bedroom to check on the Lady Gralhund.

Grick pushed in the door inside the locked bedroom to find another room with a birdcage full of flying snakes sitting on a table and a large teleportation circle inscribed on the floor. Lord Gralhund cowered sheepishly behind a bed with his rapier, springing out only when he realized he was safe so that he could go check on his wife in the next room. Lady Gralhund stood in the bedroom with her half-orc bodyguard. Hamidal read her thoughts while the party questioned her about the errant nimblewright. She denied any knowledge of an automaton, but her thoughts gave away that she knew it was escaping and she was just trying to buy it time.

Not content with waiting, Footsteps grabbed the Nimblewright Detector from Hamidal and dashed out the door, nimbly jumping from the balcony. Kael and Hamidal followed shortly after, while Aradaine and Grick stayed behind to question the Gralhunds further. They too left when Aradaine suggested that it might be a good idea to leave before the Watch arrived, and to catch up with the rest of the party. Footsteps, meanwhile, left a trail of arrows stuck in the sides of buildings as markers for the rest of the party to follow as he hunted down the nimblewright. The nimblewright headed north, ending up in the slums of the Field Ward. There Footsteps tracked it down to a windmill that had been partially converted into a butcher’s shop. A local street urchin was able to tell him that it was owned by a butcher named Thrakkus, but it was a place he and his fellows avoided due to Thrakkus being a frightening sort.

After spending a few minutes in the shop, the nimblewright took off again, ending up blocks away in an alley, where it stopped and sat in the detritus. Once the rest of the party arrived (Grick and Aradaine were lucky enough to run into Hamidal trying to figure out how to follow Footsteps’s arrow trail), they blocked off the alley while Hamidal attempted to approach the nimblewright. It showed no inclination to conversation, leaping to its feet and drawing dagger and rapier immediately. Obviously not interested in talking, the party attacked and took the nimblewright down. Searching it turned up a map of the Field Ward with a location circled and the word “Thrakkus” written next to it. The commotion in the alley attracted a local City Watch patrol. Seeing that the fight was with a construct they just asked the party to get out of the Ward and not to cause any further trouble. Taking their advice, the party headed back home.