In-game Session Start Date: Sar, Barrakas 27 998YK (Saturday August 28)
In the cogs after the fight from previous session.
Searched Zagodin's Cogs Engineering complex; Found five large crates stacked in the far corner of the warehouse with a shipping manifest on a clipboard. The manifest was torn off by small clawed hands, but Centerleft did a Coal impression of the clipboard to make out some information left impressed on the surface. It appears that this shipment was destined for Metrol, and dated to be sent this month. This was a curious fact due to Metrol being at the heart of Cyre, which was destroyed over two years ago in the Mourning.
They inspected the crates, finding them to be trapped with poison, which Centerleft proceeded to bypass and tear open. The inside of the crates were lined with lead and contained various pieces of machinery, Khyber Shards, Lightning Rail Conductor Stones, Warforged Components and even a crate filled entirely with inactive Warforged Scouts.
Tarius took 2 Armblades sized for Large Warforged, as well as a monocle of Darkvision made as a Warforged component, the Lesser Monocle of the Ebon Hunter. Centerleft found a small orb inside the crate which he found interesting; the Auto-Repair Bit. The party also split up the 40 unattuned large Khyber Dragonshards between them to bring them up to the surface and sell. They then went back through the complex and searched the remaining rooms. The western hallway contained a dead kobold body, shot in the head with a crossbow bolt, and when Tarius went to investigate a door he suspected to be trapped Thrash also spotted a set of lockpicks hanging from the keyhole and recklessly pulled them from the lock. A crossbow bolt shot forth just missing the two, and then Tarius disabled the trap and continued searching. They found the office/personal workspace shared by Colonel Zagodin and the complex foreman. The foreman was decapitated in what appears to have been a struggle with the kobolds who had stormed the complex, and the room had been ransacked.
The party found a great amount of correspondance between the foreman and an anonymous sender who signed the letters with a symbol of a Hammer within a Cog, assumed to be Colonel Zagodin. From analyzing the correspondance they noted that there was a pattern of a recurring shipment of some importance every two months, and while all of the messages are postmarked as coming from message stations around Breland the important one every two months comes almost every time from the station in Vathirond. They also found a mug which can summon cheap ale, which Todd pocketed. The party then did a quick search of the remainder finding nothing significant. They did ascertain that the purpose of the facility was to manufacture various types of machinery in small scale and discretely using an efficient forge fueled by a naturally occurring lava flow running through the building.
Centerleft then locked the complex up with an Amazing lock and proceeded to question the locals in the cogs with Todd about the symbol on the correspondance. It was uncovered that the symbol was once Zagodin's personal seal but it has been adopted as the symbol of an underground engineer movement which shares Zagodin's philosophy; "Magic will become either obsolete or unstable at some point and only self-reliant machinery can be trusted." The movement, known as the Eternal Cogs, has grown to include members in several larger cities, and the dragonmarked houses are extremely opposed to their existence, which forces them into hiding for the time being.
The party went up to the surface where they went with Thrash to the House Tharashk enclave in Dragon Towers to sell off 30 of the 40 stones, splitting the profits and the remaining 10 stones between the five of them. Thrash negotiated only a 25% house share from the sale for a total of 112,500, equaling 22,500 gp and 2 large khyber shards worth 5,000gp a piece for each party member.
