The party stumbles home from a long day and tucks up in bed. They had not acted on their discussion to move the portraits out of their bedrooms and all are sleeping soundly when the next tour of the Kobolds arrives. The Sorceror is woken to find Historian Drap, two of the Clerics sisters and some other mixed nobles of the city filing in.
With some sputtering and complaint the Sorceror orders everyone out, but with the nature of tours, people are filing in to get the message and then shuffling past each other in the doorway to leave. The Bard and Cleric have both been woken by the commotion and the Cleric steps out into the passage way in her housecoat to see what is up. The Bard guesses correctly what is going on, pens a 'do not enter note' to hang on her door, arms her bat-cat-imp thing with a poker and shoves it out into the hall on guard duty. The imp-thing hams up its role and snarls and froths before the Bards door, making the tour members in the hall back away down towards the other rooms where another cousin and one of her entourage have opened their doors.
Meanwhile the Sorceror, muzzy with sleep, decides the best way to emphasize his point is to summon a giant spider to scare everyone off. This works to a point; the giant spider accelerates the departure of the few remaining tour members but then fails in that it is an actual monstrous spider. Usually the Sorcerer summons celestials he can talk to but this is a standard big spider and he promptly loses control and it leaps on Historian Drap.
Bowling the Historian over the spider lunges for a bite but the warding candle on Dreps head provides the vital margin of defense. The apprentice kobolds leap into the fray and realising he may have gone to far, the Sorceror dismisses his spell and the spider vanishes. The unexpected dissappearance of their target briefly causes even more confusion until the kobolds help Historian Drep up.
Seeing people spill out into the hallway shouting about a giant spider and with the imp-thing still snarling up a storm down the hall, the Cleric throws open her own door and ushers everyone in. Pulling her sword of her armour stand she marches across the hall into the Sorcerers room. The imp-thing waves its poker at her just as the bard looks out to tell it to calm down. Ignoring the imp thing the Cleric enters to find a junior kobold helping Drap to his feet and the Sorceror sitting in bed.
After the Sorceror denied all knowledge of any spider the Cleric decided to deal with it over breakfast, ushers the Kobolds out and tells them to get on with the tour in her room while she goes down the corridor to fetch the other tour guests who had fled from the imp-thing. Some she fetches from the room of her cousins companion, others from her cousins room. Smoke flows out from the blessed warding candles the cousin had been given after a run-in with a portrait of a dead god, a point to become relevant soon.
Once all the guests have been collected the cleric waits for them to clear her room, serving as a living reference to the old family portraits on the wall until her cousin, who had just had a very perceptive moment in her room, tugs on her elbow and passses her a note she had just found. A plea for help is scribbled on it, referring to something 'in my mind'. Waiting for the tour to move along, then warning the second tour group with Historian Gneg to confine itself just to the open rooms, the Cleric visited her cousin fearing the cousin was having a relapse to the malign influence from the dread portrait.
The cousin explained that this was a note one of the people in her room had left, written as it was in her best ochre which she would never have used so shabbily. Realising that this might be the infiltrator they had long suspected, the Cleric sets off after the tour and catches up with them in the floor above. The Earl having left for the battle-front, the tour is in the now empty room. Sidling up to one of the folk that had been in the cousins room, the Cleric lucks into speaking with the person she sought.
After denying knowledge of the note this apparent halfling guildsman tour-guest tries to excuse themselves until the suspicious cleric spots tell tale mismatches in the quality and cut of their clothing and tries to stop them. Racing down the stairs, correctly guessing they will head for the door into the basement the Cleric stops at the first floor balcony and cries warning to the guard on duty, one known well from stake-outs and through-portal raids of previous weeks. By the time the Cleric reaches the ground floor the guard has been wounded and disarmed and is fighting a bare-knuckle brawl on the stairs to the basement with the halfling.
While the tours progress around the bedrooms above, the Sorceror deeply asleep and the Bard suspecting but unsure if they heard something, the Cleric and the guard on the door end up in a fight at the bottom of a staircase in front of the door to the sub-structures of the palace. The halflings features melt and shift as it becomes apparent they are both a shapeshifter, as suspected, but also very adept at using this gift to avoid being grappled. Some broken lips and bloody noses later, the Cleric fails to land their punches, then suddenly has a moment of realisation and remember their spell-casting.
A divine command Holds the shapeshifter down and the Cleric sits on them while the guard scrambles up the stairs to find bindings. At this point the Bard hears the Cleric shouting instructions and dashes down to help. They find blood sprayed across the floor of the great hall, the guardsman swearing as they dig through a storage cupboards looking for string and arrive as the Hold spell wears off. The shapeshifter breaks the Clerics grip and sprints up the stairs, just in time for the Bard to round the corner and cast Sleep in its face.
Down again, this time the guardsman has time to get string and hog-tie the shifter. They drag their prisoner through the bitter wind across the freezing courtyard to the guardhouse, where the night-captain consults the protocol book for shapeshifters and directs them to a treasure chest in one of the cells. They shapeshifter is dropped in and the chest locked with belled locks.
The Bard and Cleric cross back across the bitterly cold courtyard to find the rest of the tour. They pick up a guard as they descend back down into the old throneroom where the tour is wrapping up for a paranoia check that there was not both someone mind-controlled and the shapeshifter in the same group. Using Historian Dreps lecture on the merits of the art of their ancestors the party works their way through the group, subtly questioning the other people seen in the cousins room. After satisfying themselves that noone else recognises the note, they wait out the lecture, bid Historian Drep goodnight and head back to bed.
The next day the once again underline 'move all the art pieces out into the grand hall down stairs' and 'help the kobolds retreive the second masterwork before they get themselves killed' on their to-do list.
Our next encounter with the kobolds is here: the Delve.
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