The heroes start the episode at the gladiatorial pit in Shagambi’s shrine, fighting the four clay Omuan spear-bearing fighters. The heroes that jumped into the pit, Krariak, Chos, Silas, and Sophi, realize their tactically disadvantaged position, between stone walls and in close quarters with four dangerous clay gladiators, and decide to disengage and move to a more advantageous position elsewhere in the shrine.
After a few rounds of heavy combat and a big dose of spells, more effective on the monsters than their normal weapons, the heroes defeat the gladiators, take their bronze spears they were holding and use them on the entrance statues, revealing the eight cube.
The heroes then go back to their camp to rest but get ambushed by an elderly tabaxi who calls himself Bag of Nails. Sophi hurts him a bit, and the tabaxi changes his attitude and invites him to have dinner at his place. The heroes happily accept and, over dinner, learn that the tabaxi came to Omu thirty years ago in search of an amulet to find his lost son. After dinner, the tabaxi insists they honor him by staying at his place, which they agree to.
At midnight, everybody who drank Bag of Nails’s dinner stew, that is, everybody except Ellie and Thorn, wakes up in excruciating pain from poison that the tabaxi sneakily slipped into the stew.
Surprised that it didn’t kill them, Bag of Nails tries to escape, but Krariak and Silas combine athleticism and arrows that magically slow their targets and catch him. Krariak then applies his special ops torture techniques to interrogate the tabaxi, but the feline doesn’t hide his motives: he tried to kill them because when you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.
Several minutes of strong moral conflict follow. Unable to decide, they decide to tie the tabaxi and leave him hanging from the door frame.
During her watch, Sophi, out of a strange feeling that others might call compassion, drops Bag of Nails to the ground but leaves him tied to the frame and goes back to sleep. The tabaxi later tries to escape, but one look from Silas, who was next to stand watch, is enough to persuade him to stop. During her elven trance, Sophi has her recurring vision of the creepy skeleton guy approaching him over Omu’s streets. He’s getting pretty close, and she can now clearly see he’s looking malevolently at her.
The next morning the group decides to leave Bag of Nails tied in the room, alive but unable to hurt them, but, after everybody leaves the room, Krariak who had stayed behind, feels the right thing is kill the tabaxi so that he can’t try to kill them again, and executes it before joining the rest of the party.
A bit later and under heavy rain, the party reaches Ijin’s shrine. As soon as they arrive, they stumble upon a group of mercenaries and skeletons led by a what looks like a female Red Wizard heavily tattooed, who talks in a sadistic, mechanical and completely out of tune way. Fionghan spots something on one of the skeletons and screams, “My bag, thieves!” Before asking any questions, the heroes cast Shockwave on the mercenaries, pushing them against the skeletons who were standing behind them, and then Avilos casts fireball, Chos casts silence, and the rest of the party hunts down and kills the few survivors.
Avilos quickly loots the bodies and finds the last cube. Next, the party tries, under the heavy rain, to set the pile of corpses on fire but fail. Now with all the cubes in their possession and a clear conscience of what just happened, the heroes head to the tomb’s entrance.
When they arrive, they first go into the Eastern cave, the one with the trickster god statues holding oil basins. As soon as they enter, the oil basins all magically start burning but otherwise nothing happens. Avilos looks around and finds a pendant hanging from Unkh’s statue, which he then takes.
The party leaves this cave and goes to the Western one, and, as they’re walking past the obelisk, Avilos feels the pendant tug at him, pulling him to the bushes that lie further west, also covering the cliff wall.
Krariak, who was already inside the cave with the eight cavities, starts putting the cubes and as soon as he puts them all in, a stone slab starts falling closing the entrance. Ellie can get outside in time, but Sophi, Silas, and Krariak stay inside, the last two voluntarily.
Fionghan’s joke of the day
“What do you call a executioner who tells jokes? A head-liner!”