Bruce decides that he is too good to have lunch with the rest of the rabble, so the group assembles somewhat later and more gradually than normal. Everyone does manage to make it, though Chris (Gruul), Chuck (Arnoux Urag), Paul (Marik) and Tim (Antok of the Storm Tribe) all bridle under the casual assumption of their inferiority.
The characters start out in the zombie-strewn remains of Ulgutulgun's weapons shop. Antok of the Storm Tribe is badly wounded and unconscious from lack of fatigue. Marik is simply out cold. One of Ulgutulgun's relatives has recently run out of the shop, promising to return with a badly-needed healer.
Unable to help his comrades' suffering, Arnoux Urag passes the time by searching the zombies, using a long pointy object to keep his personal contact with them to a minimum. He finds that all of them have the same sigil branded on the backs of their necks. He also discovers that their armor consists of iron plates literally bolted right through the zombies' bodies.
Concerned that someone who can come up with eighteen zombies once might be able to do it again, Gruul sets two of Ulgutulgun's relatives to standing guard. That problem taken care of, he spends an hour and a half of quality time with a wrench, unbolting the zombies' armor plating.
The bausker healer is the matriarch Yachircuchek. She carries a long, gnarled staff with several iron rings welded to the end. She is escorted by several of her children, each of them one of her apprentices.
Yachircuchek and her relatives work their healing magic upon the characters, restoring 8 hits to everyone who needs it. Ulgutulgun thanks the characters for saving his life. Gruul is at first baffled by this claim, but quickly recognizes that he should capitalize upon it, commenting, "Uhh, we saved your life? Oh, yes! We saved your life!" In gratitude, Ulgutulgun gives the characters a 20% discount upon the weapons the characters have ordered from him.
Marik examines the brand Arnoux Urag found upon the zombies' necks. He recognizes it as Mournful Sara's maker's mark. He knows that Mournful Sara is an undead creature who lives in a section of the ninth and tenth levels of the Doorway City Stacks. The entire area could rather charitably be called "low rent", as it has many clavar barriers leading up to the Deck. As a consequence it is often awash in danngerously insane creatures. Even better, several hundred Voyages ago the Sours were used extensively as a catacomb. Both of these factors combine to make it an ideal haunt for the likes of Mournful Sara.
The characters go around to a series of local bars to drum up some useful information about Mournful Sara and the Sours. Arnoux Urag feels that it makes perfect sense that local rummies and laborers will know detailed information about regional undead masters. Oddly, most of the other characters are perfectly willing to go along with him. In particular, Antok accompanies Arnoux so he can learn how to parrot normal human behavior. Marik simply wants to get drunk, caring little about undead things.
Alone among the group, Gruul disagrees with Arnoux Urag's plan. He decides to stay at Ulgutulgun's shop with bolt, whetstone and axe instead. He sits on the floor near the doorway, sharpening his axe and making occasional encouraging comments to Ulgutulgun's scampering relatives: "So, you got any valuables here...? Shkkk... Shkkk... Shkkk... So, are bauskers good eatin'? Shkkk... Shkkk... Shkkk..."
The characters finally end up in the Skull and Scepter Pub, an establishment a couple of blocks away from the Market Plaza. The innkeeper is a corrupt-looking paurkend named Tanuk. Most of his customers are paurkend and red-skinned Faian humans. The characters quickly discover that there are only two things on the menu: thick and yeasty beer for two clavars, or urine-colored rotgut for four. Marik examines them both and triumphantly recommends the rotgut, noting that, "It couldn't support life if it tried!"
The characters spend some time lost in their thoughts and their liquor, then return to the matter at hand and start talking to the other patrons. They are rewarded with a chunky Faian who walks over to their table and introduces himself as Sawuk Ehro. He claims that he sells things. And buys things. And arranges things. The characters ask him if he can tell them about Mournful Sara. He gives them a freebie: he tells them that Mournful Sara doesn't have the Firesky Opal. The thing was actually lost in the Bilges.
Marik explains that the characters only want to talk to her. Sawuk is a bit surprised by this, but willing to run with it. He offers to find a way to get them an audience for 100 clavars. Arnoux Urag thinks this is a bit steep, but not totally unreasonable. After the deal is made Sawuk walks over to the bar and talks to two others: a tough-looking, scarred Faian and a bookish-looking lower-class paurkend. The two of them leave, at which point Sawuk goes back to talking to the bartender.
Sawuk's guys come back to the Crown and Scepter slightly after the evening bell. Soon afterwards, he comes by the characters' table to tell them that they can go up a stairway shaft from the fifth level into the Sours, carrying a white flag, and Mournful Sara will talk to them (and, incidentally, will not have them killed). For another 100 clavars, he tells them that Igway Rufo, a vicious Zatulph magician with a checkered past, had been asking after Mournful Sara about four days ago. Rufo backed up his words with quite a pile of money. Sawuk knows that Rufo was kicked out of the Zullkreftsskul and has been seen associating with the flelling flesh-eater things.
The characters return to Ulgutulgun's shop to find Gruul sitting in the front room on a cushion. Still sharpening his axe. Shkkk. Shkkk. A couple of bauskers guard the place. All the rest of Ulgutulgun's relatives are down in the fallout shelter, protected behind a clavar barrier. The characters have images of big piles of bauskers writhing down below in an indiscriminate mass of fur and limbs and teeth and... brrr...
The characters sleep in Ulgutulgun's shop overnight.
The characters decide to look for Igway Rufo on the thought that he is the root cause of their problems. Knowing that he is Zatulph, they go to where they can find a lot of Zatulph: they find the Zatulph ghetto down in the first three levels of the Stacks. They delve into the depths of the Stacks, listening to the locals jabber at each other in Janoberay. They ask about Igway Rufo, and hear nothing but rumors about the flelling flesh-eater things in the middle levels of the Stack.
Remembering that Sawuk Ehro had mentioned something about Igway Rufo and the flelling flesh-eater things, the characters head up to the flelling enclave on the fifth level of the Stacks. They find the enclave easily enough, noting that it is guarded by two fierce-looking flelling armed with curious barbed spears.
The characters talk to the two flelling for a while, learning that their names are Skin-eater and Bone-sucker. The characters suspect that the flelling might have more in common with the characters than they had previously imagined.
The conversation really doesn't go very far before the flelling figure out who the characters are. One of them goes for a nearby alarm bell while the second menaces Antok with his spear. Obviously, violence breaks out right fast. Antok ignores the flelling's initial spear thrust. Marik tries to silence the alarm and trap the second flelling with a Glue spell. He is less than happy to see that the flelling steps right out of the glued region, though the alarm sound does stop.
Gruul steps up and clubs the first flelling, killing it instantly. He grins and croaks out, "I like these things! They're so soft and mushy!" The flelling offers no comment as it oozes off the head of Gruul's mace.
The second flelling decides that things are way out of hand and tries to retreat back to the edge of the Stack and the safety of a five-story fall (remember that flellings are winged). Marik stops this plan right fast with a Glue spell. Antok ends the fight by hurling Ogango's Hound at the flelling, then dispatching it with a dramatic floor lunge (18 points of damage).
The characters search the flellings. Each of them was carrying fifty clavars, plus the single green clavar Antok gave one of them as a bribe. The money goes to Arnoux to compensate him for the bribes he paid out to Sawuk Ehro. Antok thinks that the flelling javelins are nice, so he keeps them. Reasoning that someone is sure to come and investigate the alarm, the characters head back out of the ghetto as quickly as they can.
Halfway out of the Zatulph ghetto, in a strangely dark and uninhabited section of corridor, a piece of crockery smashes itself into dust only inches from Antok's head. Antok is curious about this development, and peers into the darkness, hoping to see the thrower. He is rewarded with another piece of high-velocity crockery. He only barely manages to get out of it's way.
By this time, the characters have figured out that the problem is emerging from an abandoned potter's shop. They advance to see a hulking lizardlike thing with unnaturally long arms and a long, flexible neck. It is covered with patchy, green-tinged fur. Rotting algae festoons it's body. It stares back at the characters with pale, rheumy eyes full of unthinking hatred.
Antok decides there is only one thing to do with the creature and tries an aggressive floor lunge. He doesn't manage to fell the thing in one blow. Instead, the creature avoids his attacks, then almost breaks him with a blow. Antok falls to the floor unmoving.
Arnoux Urag carefully observes Antok's problems and tries an alternate approach. He makes a careful attack and puts the creature's eye out. He knows that he hurt the creature when it goes berserk on his ass. He knows that it's upset with him when it claws a goodly portion of his intestines out. He falls to the ground right next to Antok. His last thought is, "I hope it eats Antok alive first."
Marik tries to slow the thing down by Levitating it, but is discomfited to find that it is strong enough to overwhelm the spell, and long-armed enough to hold itself in place. Gruul steps in to chop at the creature, hurting it badly, then thinks better of this idea when he realizes that the thing is strong enough to snap him in half. He goes with the alternate plan of peppering it with poorly-aimed crossbow bolts while Marik sets it on fire.
The creature stops moving long after Marik and Gruul would have thought that it should have succumbed. Marik heals Antok and Arnoux, bringing them back into the land of the living (though his heal attempt upon Arnoux proves to be nothing more than a "useless illusion", not that Arnoux knows this yet). Antok inspects the body and proclaims that the creature was a Beast of Dost, one that apparently took a long, hard road to reach him. Unwilling to pass up the opportunity, he follows this analysis by digging the creature's heart out and eating it. The discovery that the algae discoloring the thing's fur also permeates it's entire body (including it's heart) only gives him temporary pause. He suffers an immediate shock of madness, followed by barely-cohesive visions of cold, slimy rocks, plus hatred and The Voice.
Gruul is uninterested in eating body parts from obviously-diseased monsters, so he spends his time checking the pottery shop for valuables. He comes up with three cloth-wrapped bundles. Two of them contain fine pieces of porcelain that are probably very valuable. The third is a simple, sealed clay pot.
The characters limp their way back to Ulgutulgun's.
The session ends with the characters back at Ulgutulgun's shop somewhat more the worse for the wear. Each character gains four experience points.