The adventurers were now mighty suspicious of Niklas Schulmann, and whilst they passed the remaining parts of the stone to him, they stayed close to observe him. He raised their suspicions further by his nervous, twitchy actions that they took back all of the parts of the stone and passed them to a local academic, Professor Kopfchen, who they had previously befriended.
Alas, whilst seeking healing for their ailments, the adventurers were betrayed by the academic who took the pieces of the stone straight to Schulmann, who had bribed the academic with promises of untold riches if he aided him!
The first thing they knew of this was the disturbance in the winds of magic which caused sharp pain to Magnus as the other celestial wizard made his escape.....
The party followed and the trail led to the local lake, where they commandeered a little boat that had seen better days in order to follow Schulmann out into the lake.
With the physical efforts of the dwarves to keep the boat steady in the increasingly inhospitable water (which seemed to be responding the to chants and magic of Schulmann) and the accuracy and magic use of Shaft and Magnus respectively, the errant celestial wizard was knicked from his perch and into the water where the last the adventurers saw of him was his hand, holding a pendant with a comet inscribed into it above the roiling waves. The party clapped each other on the back in triumph (Gromul caught and saved Shaft after the Dwarf With No Name nearly knocked him over the side with an enthusiastic backslap) and sank to the bottom of the boat with exhaustion, pleased with a job well done…….
……Until they saw the huge comet that Schulmann had clearly managed to summon heading straight for them!
Some measure of panic ensued as they grabbed the oars and rowed, quite literally, for their lives. They just managed to reach the shore when the comet hit, delivering grievous damage but leaving them to struggle back to Stromdorf, getting more and more excited about receiving the cheering crowds plaudits for saving their town and the area. And as a bonus, the storm had abated and the rain had finally stopped!
Which proved to be the problem. It turned out that the townsfolk had grown quite accustomed to, and proud of, the weather around them. They felt it marked them out from the other “soft” areas of the Empire. And the adventurers had stopped it. So now they were just another two horse town in an unremarkable area of the Empire.
The final ignominy for the adventurers was to be whipped out of town, the catcalls of the townsfolk ringing in their ears. This most definitely was not what the servants of Justice had signed up for……..
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