Deep in Waterdeep
The Sea Ward is quiet at this hour. You and Crowley find the alley — a narrow run between two warehouse blocks, exactly where you were told it would be. At the entrance: a hunched old woman with a begging bowl and a voice like gravel calling "alms for the poor."
She gives you pause. The bowl has some nuts in it. The amulet around her neck doesn't belong on someone begging.
Before you can walk past, she tells you not to go in. "It is much too dangerous. There are many foul monstrosities down this alleyway. It's cursed, I would say." Crowley says something about breaking curses. She looks at him the way people look at someone who has clearly tangled with the divine and come back a little wrong.
Then she drops the act.
The arthritis goes. The stoop goes. The whole old woman goes. What's left is a drow operative — strong, capable, and annoyed. She was working the warehouse when the curse hit. She was out on an errand. She didn't turn. She can't go back in. One of the cursed ones inside is still wearing her house amulet — the one thing that marks her as who she is — and she wants it back. She'll pay. She's been waiting in the sun for too long as it is.
"Slaughter them all," she says, as a closing thought.
You kick the doors in.
Light pours into the warehouse in a long stripe. High walls on both sides, crates stacked to the ceiling, a depressed pit ahead, an elevated platform far to the left. Spider webs in the rafters. Dust undisturbed on the floor. Whatever's in here isn't walking.
You pry open a crate. Amnian wine, packed in straw. You note it for later. Everything in here came from somewhere different; none of the crates match.
From behind a stack of crates, a voice speaks in a language you don't understand.
"That was words," Emmith reports.
"Yes," Crowley says.
"Do we go near it?"
"They said there are five of them. I think we can take five."
Crowley calls out, in Deep Speech: "I'm a helpless fly. Don't eat me."
Roll initiative.
The first drider acts before either of you. A stream of something — acid, digestive fluid, something the Underdark produces and the surface world would rather not think about — hits Crowley and burns across his new armor. The metal holds. It doesn't even scratch. A patina forms on the surface, like old coin, and that's all.
From somewhere above, in the dark: "We are waiting. Come come into the darkness."
Emmith says the magic word. His staff transforms and he throws it ten feet — by the time it lands, it has become Monty, all vast coiled muscle and blind-sight, thirty feet into the dark. Monty finds something, wraps around it. You hear the squeeze. Fourteen points of force and then the drider is pinned.
Crowley teleports — a pop of ash and brimstone — thirty feet into the dark, already swinging the trident. The first hit grazes it. The second goes deep. Seventeen damage, fire in the wound. The drider is badly hurt.
Round one ends.
Round two starts worse.
The pinned drider tears into Monty with its forelegs — blades, basically, attached to something that used to be a drow, which is almost the saddest part. Forty-three damage. Monty is in trouble.
A second drider hits Crowley from behind — thirty-two points — and before Crowley can recover, darkness drops. Not ordinary darkness. The kind that swallows darkvision. The kind that swallows everything.
What the drider didn't account for: the thing that hit Crowley has its own ideas about being struck. Hellish fire detonates outward. Just for a moment — just a flash through the black — you see them. Bulbous, wrong, reeling back. Thirty-two points of necrotic returned. The drider makes a sound that doesn't have a name.
A third drider finds Emmith anyway. Twenty-six more damage. Then someone web-fills a twenty-foot cube.
Emmith breathes fire into the dark, aiming at what he can only guess is approximately the right direction. Three damage. Maybe some crates start to smolder. Maybe not.
He throws a punch. He misses cleanly.
"Crowley, can you grab the staff?"
Emmith says the word. Monty reverts. Somewhere in the dark, a staff hits the floor. Crowley, who used to know where Emmith kept that staff, goes to find it by sound and muscle memory. He picks it up. He starts walking toward the door.
Both of you come out into the sunlight. You close the doors.
The drow woman looks at you.
"How you told you it was cursed by the gods?"
"The gods can fuck themselves," Crowley says. "We need reinforcements. It was five on one and a half."
Alive. Both of you. The snake will be fine. The warehouse is still full of driders. The Amnian wine is still in there, behind closed doors, waiting for someone to come back with better odds.
Next session: the full party returns — or someone has a better idea.