“... so then I met up with Spugnoir here, and we got down to looking for these weeds he was collecting,” said Mojo, grease from a spit of squirrel-meat dripping off his fingers and face. The pair of them, the sorceror Mojo and apothecary Spugnoir, ate like men who'd been trapped for two days in a room guarded by snappish gnolls and filled only with broken bits of furniture, fittingly. Apparently they'd eaten a rat at one point, which Mojo had “accidentally cooked” from across the room.
The entire experience had been shattering for Spugnoir, Hommlet's potion-master, who wanted nothing more than to return home as quickly as possible. “I must away. My daughter's alone!” he said, sounding panicked, but Pho had comforting words. “Your daughter's Renne, right?” she offered, smiling a bit. “She's fine. Better than fine. She's worried about you, though.”
News of his daughter's resourcefulness seemed to shame the potion-maker a bit; after the exchange, all he could talk about was returning home, “as soon as possible, risks be damned.” Mojo had different ideas: “I'm gonna stay with these folks,” he countered. “I'm not from around here.” What he didn't say was “the answers I need don't lie at the bottom of a potion bottle.”
So, once the food was eaten, Pho and Zeppo scouted the stairs and moathouse. Finding no dragon, they sent Spugnoir on his way. “Look me up in town,” he said just prior to vanishing along the trail to Hommlet. “I'd be honored to repay your kindness with my craft.”
Here, then, is the group: Pho, bold and inscrutable; Kedrin, upright and confident; Zeppo, gleefully vicious atop his big cat; Vig, obdurate and meditative; and this new fellow, Mojo – whose entire affect seemed off-kilter, whose clothing looked outlandish even to worldly Pho, and whose ability to assist the group was in some question. The earlier quartet edged closer together in the discussion that followed, herded by the feeling that the new guy wasn't from around here.
For his part, Mojo was struggling with a rising tide of panic. He'd fallen asleep at home, in the Suzerainty of Glin-Bermont; he'd dweomered his Tik-Tok Timepiece to awake him just before dawn; he laid upon his canvas cot for some time, thinking over the Orders of Binding, worried about the next day's test. And then he'd awoken here, this somewhere else – at least he thought so – in the woods. He'd wandered about for a few minutes before finding Spugnoir, who insisted on checking him for head wounds after his questions. “Glinbermon? Academy of Thoth?” he'd repeated, clueless.
So he'd followed the potion-maker toward the moathouse, where a particular weed grew in abundance in the marshes. So they'd discovered the dragon. So they were driven down the stairs in a panic. So they'd had to hide. So they'd spent two days peeking out the door. So here he is, here these people are; they seem decent enough, but more than that, it was clear they had power. They'd come into this dungeon like a wave of the commanding hand of Order, and butchered Mojo's prisoners in a 30-second orgy of violence and magic. If he really was somewhere else, he'd need powerful help. “So, hello, new friends!” he thought, giggling a little at his cynicism.
A search of the rest of the complex turned up some items of interest. Pho found the secret door through which the cultist had escaped; the rogue marked it to make it easy to find, and then spiked it closed to prevent any surprises. On a folded expanse of snowy-white cloth were some items the cleric had left in her haste, possibly products of the 'excavation' here mentioned in Master Dunrat's letters. Some of the items had a magical aura (a small black sphere, a heavy iron torch) while others did not (a black scepter decorated with violet gems, a smooth black metal tube). Unequipped with the proper divination magic, and exhausted from the effort of two rapid-fire brushes with mortality, the group bargained for watch order and fell into slumber.
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