After your rest, you make your way down the stairs. Green smoke billows out from a bronze cauldron in the middle of this twenty-foot-high vaulted hall. Barely visible through the haze are three rocking chairs, several work benches heaped with haberdashery, a spinning wheel, and a rusty iron cage containing a prisoner. Galleries stand ten feet above the floor to either side of the room. As you reach the bottom of the stairs three tiny figures waddle toward you through the smoky haze: a straw doll with rusty pins sticking into its body, a faceless child molded from clay, and a stuffed monkey with the lower body of a unicycle. The straw doll says, "You need to run away! The Sewn Sisters will be back any moment now!" "Hello small ones", says b'Urp who has entered the area first, "what are the sewn sisters?" The straw doll explains that they are three sisters who live in this room. They torture people and take their souls. When pressed to where the sisters are now the doll exclaims that they are right here. "You need to run, they will return any minute". "But where are they?" "THEY ARE HERE". But nothing appears. You ask more about the hags and this place and they explain that the hags are nursing some kind of creature that lurks through the mist on the other side of the skeleton gate, but the dolls don't know what the creature is. You also ask about the prisoner in the cage. "It is one of the lookielikes", the doll explains, "the rest are in the town collecting children for the sisters. They were made from his hair". "You know exactly who I am", says the figure in the cage. It turns to face you and you see it is Trayzeal, who you had thought had died up above in the tomb". However this is not the Trayzeal you remember. This version of Trayzeal is shorter and skinnier, and has growths and mutations all over his body. He is also filthy and covered in scars and old blood. He looks at you with manic eyes. "Let me out of this cage", he shouts, "I can't stand it, I've been in here for so long. I DIED. I remember it, but I was here as well. WHY DID YOU DESERT ME? Please let me out". His voice cracks into uncontrollable sobbing. You discuss and decide that this creature is not Trayzeal, but some simulcrum created by the sisters that inhabit this room. You can't bring yourself to kill him, but you also don't want to let him go. b'Urp produces a gust of wind and while the air is clear you all climb up onto the gallery above the level of the smoke. As the last of you climbs up, Javlin tosses a large needle he grabs from a table and throws it to Trayzeal. "I couldn't stand him being trapped", he says. The false Trayzeal starts to work trying to pick the lock on the outside of the cage with the needle. In the meantime you look around from this vantage. Five wooden doors are set into the walls of the galleries, each carved with a geometric symbol: a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and an octagon. At the other end of the sisters room, rising above the smoke you see a twelve-foot-high, ten-foot-wide door made of green stone, its surface carved with grinning goblin skeletons. A belt of smooth stone spans the door at a height of four feet, set with five gold symbols in a row: a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and an octagon. Each symbol is engraved on a recessed circular seal. You realise that you need to open the seal somehow to reveal the keyholes and that these are the spaces that the skeleton heads are for. You suspect that the rooms around you will help, so you start to explore: Trial of the Triangle A five-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling glass cylinder near the back wall of this room is filled with light, the source of which is not apparent. A tiny triangular hole is cut through the glass, five feet above the floor. Inside the cylinder, an iron lever is set into a metal plate on the floor. You solve this by summoning a mage hand in the cylinder which then secures a rope that you thread through the hole to the lever. You are then able to pull the lever by pulling the rope. This reveals the triangle keyhole in the skeleton door. Trial of the Pentagon As some of you are looking at the triangle room, Javlin opens this door. The delicious aroma of spiced meat greets him. At the end of a twenty-foot-long corridor, a room opens up with red tapestries covering the walls. A feast is spread out on three tables, consisting of roast boar, squash stew, and a tray of iced cakes. Flagons of frothy beer complete the banquet.
A gaunt human male in a dusty black suit quietly arranges the items on the cake table, taking notice of your intrusion. Without a word, he gestures for you all to come forward and sample the feast. Javelin enters the room and nibbles an iced cake. Delicious. He puts it in his pocket for later. He looks carefully about and notices that one of the tapestries has a secret opening with a lever in it. He pulls the lever. Problem solved. He exits, sharing his leftover cake with Rutgar on the way out. At this point, Trayzeal escapes and starts heading towards the stairs. You realise that this would be a bad idea, but Tlad puts a stop to this escape with a well placed lightning bolt. Connundrum solved. Trial of the Hexagon A large, cracked, six-sided mirror is mounted above a stone shelf protruding from the opposite wall. Five unlit candles stand on the shelf, each made of yellow wax and covered with tiny black sigils. Scrawled on the wall above the mirror in dried blood are the words "PIGGY PIGGY PIGGY." This room is the most frustrating to solve, only worked out when eventually you realise that there is a sixth candle hidden in a secret compartment under the mantle. The ritual requires six candles to be lit before the lever appears. Trial of the Octagon The ceiling of this plaster-walled room is fifteen feet high. A leather-backed tome rests open atop a wooden lectern bolted to the floor. Set into the wall behind the lectern are eight human skeletons, arranged so that they appear to be falling and screaming. Javlin notices a secret compartment in the lecturn and he and b'Urp work together successfully opening it. Suddenly gravity is reversed and Javlin falls up, through the ceiling and into a set of rotating blades. Ouch. He is able to avoid being further hurt by lying flat on the ceiling as the blades whir below him. b'Urp does not fall up due to his sticky fingers holding him to the floor. He pulls the lever and then gets help. You all manhandle Trayzeals cage up into the room and then let it fall into the blades. It jams the blades allowing Javlin to escape. Trial of the Square This room is filled with flying sheets of parchment, with writing on the pages visible as they flutter by. A metal plate bolted onto the far wall is set with a ghostly lever. Tlad realises that the sheets are spells and starts grabbing them and stashing them away. As he grabs his fourth spell, all remaining sheets suddenly disintigrate, which then coalesces into a dust mephit. The mephit is easily destroyed and transforms into a stick of black chalk when defeated. You look at the chalk for a moment and then draw a square with it around the ghostly lever. The lever becomes solid and you pull it. Now all the keyholes on the skeleton gate are revealed. b'Urp casts a gust of wind, pushing the smoke away and you line up in front of the door, each of you with a key in your hand ready to activate the gate. Suddenly, behind you you realise that there are three hags. They didn't just appear, somehow they had always been there. Widow Groat has tarnished gold coins covering her eyes and ants nesting in her skull. Peggy Deadbells wears a string of chattering children's teeth and thumps about on a heavy peg leg. When she laughs, yellow gas billows out of her nose and ears. Around her neck, she wears a pouch made from gnome skin. Baggy Nanna has a squirming leather sack sewn over her head. The bag also contains a cockerel, a viper, and a terrier each of which emerges from the bag at a time. The three hags attack.
