Trust is the color of death...

 Sorry for how late this post is, you can blame George R. R. Martin and A Dance With Dragons.

When we last left our... morally gray adventurers, they were holed up in the Bloody Hand, Aeon was a fugitive from the Band of the Red Hand, whose officers frequent the Bloody Hand, and the group was spread across the city on account of the spartan laws enacted by the mad wizard lord Obidyr.

Roxy, lacking any subtlety whatsoever, asked Aeon if he knew anything about any Assassins' Guilds in the city.  Aeon knew nothing himself, but used message to tell her that Telino Aethomai, his fellow apprentice, was likely privy to such information.  She went off in search of him, while Arjhan went down to the bar to see if she could extract any information from the Band's officers.  Spazed headed off to the local monastery to get his monk on, leaving Aeon to prepare his spells, with Holly passed out in the corner.

Once Aeon was practically alone in the room, an assassin scaled the wall of the inn, snuck in through the window and attacked him.  Aeon sudden shifted away from the assassin and cast mirror image, littering the room with illusory copies of himself, as the racket woke Holly up.  Confronted with eight Aeons and no way to discern which was real, the assassin took the logical course of action, and attacked the one target he could be sure of: Holly.

Holly was slow to get up, and once he did, he stepped out of the assassin's reach.  Aeon then hasted himself and Holly, and cast phantasmal killer on the assassin, and snuffed his life force out with pure fear.  Aeon quickly sent Holly to secure lodging at an inn where he'd not been subject to an assassination attempt (yet), and remained in the room to deal with the body.

In the meantime, Avier, who'd remained outside the second wall in order to retain his weapons and armor, discreetly examined the wall for weaknesses in its defense, after a couple of hours he found a trap door which he surmised would lead to a tunnel.  He waited for a break in the patrols along the wall, and made for the trap door, waddling as quickly as his stubby dwarf legs would carry him, flung it open, with a minimum of noise, and dropped into the tunnel, closing the door behind him, undetected.

He was confronted with a tunnel that led underneath the second wall, and exited into the cellar of the Squeaky Wheel.  He snuck out of the cellar and made off to locate the Bloody Hand, where he knew the rest of the group awaited.

At the monastery, Spazed asked the master of the monks there, Kathatos, if there were any chores that he could assist in.  Kathatos thanked him for his gracious offer, but declined, and offered to allow him to stay as long as he pleased.  Spazed, somewhat dejected at the lack of chores, settled in, and began to meditate.

Roxy found Telinos on duty at one of the gates in the third wall, and took him aside, away from the guards, to talk business.  She rather unsubtly inquired about the assassin's guild, and Telinos told her he had knowledge of where one might contact them, but that such knowledge, and the time spent to impart it, had a price.  She inquired as to what it was, and he asked her to make him an offer.

She offered him ten gold, and he asked her what kind of silly drow girl she was.  Eventually she forced him to just name his price, though not before he threatened to put a contract on her head just for the sheer annoyance she had caused him.

Money changed hands, and Telinos informed her that the monastery in the city was also the headquarters of the city's assassin's guild.  Roxy proceeded there immediately.  She and Spazed both noticed each other, but she took no note of him, and he couldn't quite overhear her incredibly unsubtle request to join the assassin's guild.

She was led through a maze of passageways, blind-folded, of course, and heard traps and locks and such being disarmed, until her blind-fold was finally removed, and she stood face to face with Kathatos, Guildmaster of the Forlorn Fellowship, the assassin's guild of Erash.

She asked him if she might join, and he asked her if she understood the requirements to join the guild.  She did, she would need to kill someone for him.  Kathatos had just the person in mind for her to kill: a man one of his assassins had just failed to slay, and of whom she was a traveling companion, Aeon.  She balked, claiming no familiarity with the wizard, but Kathatos dismissed her objections, and pointed out that she only had two choices: agree to, and fulfill her task, or die here and now.  She chose the former, obviously, and was allowed to exit the monastery.  On her way out, she scooped up Spazed and brought him with her back to the Bloody Hand.

Through all this, Arjhan passed the afternoon in the common room of the Bloody Hand, speaking with the various officers of the Band as they took meals and ale.  He happened to speak to one of the captains of the Band, Nomelion Peritas, and learned a great deal from him.

The captain told her that the supposed vampire attacks were occurring in the north of the city, on both sides of the inner wall, and that he would have dealt with this coven of vampires already, if not for the orders from the wizard lord to hunt down his wayward apprentice, Aeon.  Arjhan tried in vain to cover the flicker of recognition at the name of the wizard.

Fortunately for him, though Peritas knew of Aeon's dark reputation, he also believed he was the only one who might restore Obidyr to sanity, and as the vampire attacks had coincided with Obidyr's madness, there might be a connection.  He let Arjhan know that he'd have the majority of his guards searching for Aeon in the south of the city that night, and then took his leave of the inn.

Shortly thereafter, all the wayward members of the group returned to the Bloody Hand, to find Aeon in the room, standing over an assassin's corpse.  He informed them that their location was compromised, and they needed to move, and that he'd sent Holly to get new accommodations at the Squeeky Wheel.  Aeon used rope trick to hide the corpse, and then they all made their way to the Wheel, Aeon under a the veil of invisibility.

Once they'd settled into rooms at the Wheel, Arjhan laid out for them what he'd discovered during his discussion with Captain Peritas.  Aeon concluded, and the group agreed, that the time to move was now.  Arjhan remembered something about needing silver to fight vampires, so the group set off to find a smith that was open during the late hours of the night.

They discovered an extremely rude dwarven smith who refused to give his name, and insulted them all in turn (Avier was a whelp, Spazed a git and Arjhan a fool; I believe), but he knew what they needed: weapons plated in alchemical silver.  He told them he could have the weapons ready in an hour, and he did.  A set of alchemical silver-plated steel knuckles for Spazed, a longsword for Avier, and a second greataxe for Arjhan.

While the others were at the smith, a ghostly presence attempted to speak to Aeon privately, though he was in the presence of Holly and Roxy.  It turned out to be the ghost of Lela Uskeldi, whom Avier had murdered(alledgedly by accident) after they'd freed her from the bandits.  The ghost attempted to blackmail both Aeon, and then Roxy, before Holly used his wand of magic missile to banish her, at least for the moment.  Spazed returned from the smith first, in time to hear about the dwarf's treachery, deepening his mistrust for one of the party's least evil members.

They searched the north of the Merchant's district for a time, finding an entrance to the sewers that seemed to have more traffic than one might expect.  They descended down, and Avier tracked whomever was using that entrance to the sewers into a series of catacombs.  The group entered these catacombs warily, prepare for a confrontation with the undead.

Roxy took the fore, searching for traps and such that might be within the old ruins.  She did not find the one that caught her in the first intersection, the walls of the ruins seemed to shout some incantation, and she was paralyzed where she stood, unable to move.  Meanwhile, Avier heard whispers approaching from the hallway to the left, apparently called by the sound of whatever trap they'd tripped.

More to come...