Recap - 2025-12-04

Leaving the Bridge of Khalas behind you, you can see Dreri relax slightly, as she drives the boat forward. The river ahead of you winds around the massive volcano at the center of Khalas, and its climb is growing steeper and steeper.
To your left, around a small pile of obsidian rocks, a group of humanoid figures fight with literal tooth and claw to be on top, even as the rocks cut into their bodies. As soon as one makes it up, the others grab them and drag them down, starting the cycle anew.
A few hundred feet upriver, to your right, an enormous creature with two massive horns jutting out of its skeletal face carries a limp figure by its head, the dirty fingers of the fiend digging into its scalp. It smirks at you as you pass, shaking the limp creature like a puppet.
Tabi keeps checking his spyglass for the Crawling City, but has lost sight of it as you’ve transited to the other site of the volcano. “Hopefully they’re smart enough to know where we’ll be coming round,” he says.
As you continue up and around, the air thickens further. The smell of sulfur becomes almost an afterthought as the smoke itself clogs your nose and coats your tongue with its thick, acrid taste. Your visibility has dropped as well, the smoke making everything over a few hundred feet away hazy and indistinct. The smoke has an eerie underglow from the constant lava pools, leading to a eerily well-lit yet dim atmosphere. With this, it’s a surprise when, looming out of the smoke, are the first actual structures you have seen since coming to this plane. You see two large totems, one on each side, and a wrought-iron fence encircles the ledge between them. The ledge seems bizarrely flat and stable compared to the rest of the plane, and the smoke even seems thinner, more breathable.
At the center of the outcropping is a crowded bazaar, filled with milling yugoloths, petitioners, devils, fiends, other outsiders, and the occasional mortal visitor. Standing at the edge of the market, closest to the river, is a massive Maelephant.
A hulking ten feet tall, this creature looks like a horrifically mutated loxodon, with horn-like protrusions coming out of its head and shoulders, giving the body an impression of armor melted into its skin. It sits on a large chest, and gestures for you to pull the boat over.
“I AM BROOZE,” it bellows, “I STAND GUARDIAN OF THESE SHRINES. TOUCH NOT THE SHRINES, BUT APPROACH THE BAZAAR, FOR WE HAVE THAT WHICH YOU SEEK.”
Tabi and Dreri both voice a desire to pull over, but for different reasons. Tabi wants to peruse the wares, and Dreri wants to check the boat.

The group decided to pull over, and left Dreri and Angelus with the boat. Tag offered to stay behind as well, but Angelus urged him to leave, to give him some time to talk to Dreri.
The group approached Brooze and the shrines, and Brooze shared that Angelus has a price on his head, but that the price is too low for Brooze to be interested.
He also sees Greebo with the group, and is incensed. He tells the group that Greebo is a trickster fiend, of the lowest kind, and offers them a magic item from his chest that he sits on if they let him crush Greebo’s head.
When Josiah shared that Greebo fell in the Styx, Brooze laughed heartily, and let the matter go, warning the group that others have fallen prey to Greebo’s traps, and may not be as willing to let his eternal forgetfulness be punishment enough.
Chibro and Brooze have a relatively deep philosophical conversation, with Brooze sharing his purpose in guarding the shrines, in being made specifically for doing so, and is horrified that Chibro does not have a built-in purpose. He calls Chibro a monstrosity, small, and seems to view him as inferior.
After they talk for a while, however, Brooze shares that there used to be another guardian, who was long since killed, and he offers Chibro a purpose: Join him as the guardian of the other shrine.
The party splits, with Tag and Chibro going south, and Gobbie, Josiah, and Kor going east.
Josiah runs into a white abishai who offers to show him around the place for some coin. Josiah gives him a couple of soul coins, and the abishai introduces himself as Dalgumok.
Dalgumok takes them to see a merchant friend of his, Togek. Togek has a seemingly magical stall that allows him to summon things from all over.
He sells Josiah a Spoon of Soup, and manages to pluck a lost artifact of Jesse’s from the ether beneath his desk.
He offers these to Josiah for a significant cost, but Josiah manages to convince him to take a lesser amount of money and a taste of ‘whiskey’ from Angelus’ flask.
The whiskey takes hold of Togek quickly, as he is a grell, and basically all brain.
His Tanarukk servant, GarGanath, chews up and spits out the flask, which Josiah collects hoping to be able to mend later.
Kor requests a handful of magic and regular items, which he is able to procure.
Gobbie refuses any items, feeling rather untrustworthy of anything provided by these creatures.
Chibro wanders down, seeing the market:

You had started to feel accustomed to the odd and varied creatures and objects you see on a daily basis living in Sigil, and the Great Bazaar there was a heady experience every day, to be sure. But this bazaar, this fiendish perversion of the markets you know, still sets your teeth on edge. Even if you are not put off by its ignoble tilt, to put it mildly, you still struggle to make sense of some of the products being hawked.
In the first booth you come across, a gnarled crone with shriveled orange skin, tangled gray hair, and massive rams horns chitters softly to itself, working with its bare hands forming a tangled mass of string looped around and through some animal’s ribcage. She whispers to you as you pass, “A long face takes time to unwind the gears.”
The booth across from hers is manned by two insect-headed, five armed creatures, whose bodies whirl in circles independent of their heads. They stare at you as you approach, their eyes unblinking and unmoving, despite the whirling dervishes of their bodies. Their claws are cutting some sort of carcass to literal ribbons, and tossing the cuttings onto a bed of coals. The smell from the cuttings is that of rotting meat mixed with rotten eggs.

Chibro continues on, being followed by Tag. He arrives at a building made of stacked and formed lava rock, with a large hole cut into the roof, and a beautiful celestial sitting in front amidst a glowing circle.
The deva introduces herself as Chamenal, and talks to Chibro about his purpose. She shares she is looking for a friend, an aaismar, lost long ago, named Festova.
Chibro shares they travel with an aaismar who does not know her origins, and Chamenal begs him to bring her to him, as she cannot leave the circle or will be forced to cleanse the market.
Tag, meanwhile, wanders down a side alley and comes upon a Aminzu named Arrukaan who casts feeblemind on him and begins to kidnap him.
Chibro sees this, as does the rest of the group, and they manage to intimidate the Aminzu into giving Tag back.
As they sigh in relief, Chibro hears a scuffle, glances over, and sees Angelus being carried off by four slaads and a goat fiend.

Song of the Session

Rox in the Box by The Decemberists

#sigil/recap

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