In their attempt to rescue the young girl, Jane, who had dashed off in search of her recently deceased parents, the party had become embroiled in combat with a swarm of undead who were somehow allied with denizens of the Circus Gondofino. Things were looking promising, however. Only a handful of the undead remained standing, along with just a couple of roustabouts, and three of the four big cats were down. However, something or someone was still casting spells at the party, and the clowns were unaccounted for.
Jerry took out the last of the lions with a burst of Magic Missiles. However, just as the party thought they had things under control, a new round of reinforcements arrived. A black jaguar came dashing out of the darkness to join the fray, accompanied by a gorilla. Worse, the hill giant who had been guarding the Freak Show tent came lumbering in as well. A new batch of undead could be seen clambering over the wall and starting to descend the ladder, and the evil clowns chose this moment to reappear on the opposite side of the party. As if that wasn't enough, Phil felt the power of his Prayer suddenly evaporate.
Things rapidly turned ugly for the party. Mary dashed off to try to topple the ladder and prevent any more undead from escaping the cemetery. She succeeded, but found herself backed against the wall fighting off two ghasts and a ghoul who had managed to get over the wall. Joe, who had been dishing out damage like there was no tomorrow (and perhaps there wasn't) suddenly felt a pinprick in his neck and fell into unconsciousness. Jerry and James both decided that they'd be better off above the fray and each cast Fly on themselves, James simultaneously activating his Ring of Invisibility. However, Jerry had barely started to move towards the new undead threat when some form of Confusion spell went off, catching Jerry, Phil, Chuck, and Ice. At the same time, a Stinking Cloud went off in the same area.
That left James and Mary as the only members of the party still able to carry on fighting. Mary remembered her Cloak of Arachnidia, and used it to envelope the undead attacking her in thick webs, which the Cloak allowed her to pass through to escape. Unfortunately, that merely brought her face to face with the hill giant. James, meanwhile, got hit with a very paltry Lightning Bolt. He couldn't see the caster, but the bolt gave him a general sense of where the spell had originated and he replied with a much more effective Fireball of his own. Before he could do anything else however, a horrid, fanged, winged creature materialized out of the darkness and swooped in to attack him. It missed, and James used the Wand of Force to enclose it in a sphere of force. But not for long; once it realized it was trapped, it appeared to Dimension Door out of the sphere, and came back in to attack. This time it sank its fangs into James' throat, and he fell senseless to the ground.
One by one, those still on the ground began to fall, each feeling a needle prick before losing consciousness. Mary got in one good lick against the hill giant, but then found herself suddenly unable to move. Jerry, still confused, was drifting over the cemetery wall when the gorilla clambered atop it, leaped up, and grabbed him by his feet and pulled him down. They too fell into unconsciousness. The combat was over, and the party's fate unkown.
After some time, they began to rouse from the blackness that had descended outside the cemetery. They didn't know how long they'd been unconscious – it might have been hours, or weeks. They had dim memories – being carried and tossed into foul smelling straw. Jostling and bumping, the squealing of wagon wheels and the rattling of tack. Bright flashing light, the stench of blood, intense pain. Then lying on cold stone, unable to move, aching all over, feeling sick.
As each regained their senses, they found themselves locked in iron cages in a large, high-ceilinged stone room. They felt sick and injured, and could barely control their own limbs. With mounting horror, they began to realize that this was because they were not their own limbs ... they were in the bodies of some sort of horrible monstrosities, imprisoned with other members of Gondolfino's freak show! They were unable to speak - some because they could not yet control their lips and vocal cords, but others because they had no lips or vocal cords.
Chuck - A tall man with the head of an alligator
Ice - A gorilla with large black wings sewn onto its back
Jerry - A giant spider sprouting the torso of a young man
Joe - A large constrictor snake with the head and arms of a child
Phil - A woman with almost 4' of cobra where her neck and head should be
James & Mary - Two heads sewn onto a fat man's body. James' head is female and Mary's is male
There was only one human inhabitant of the room. In a cage in one corner, young Jane from the inn sat rocking endlessly back and forth, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall and humming some unknown tune to herself. Her clothes were torn, her hair tangled, and her face was smeared with dirt and blood.
Soon after the party revived, the door to the room opened and Gondofino entered, flanked by two of his clowns. Gondolfino explained that the party were his guests here at Castle Lightningspire at the specific request of Lord Strahd himself. Apparently Strahd had foreseen the party's coming, knew that they were being pursued, and that if killed it would, in Gondolfino's words, "be very bad for Barovia" (not to mention the rest of the multiverse). So he had arranged for Gondolfino to "protect" them by transferring their souls into these new and unique bodies. Their former bodies would be transported to Castle Ravenloft, to serve as bait for Twynillios.
Gondofino explained that there was only one small side effect to the procedure. Apparently the human consciousness is a delicate thing, and doesn't adapt well to new surroundings. Within a few days, he explained, they would lose all capacity for conscious thought, speech, or free will, and would become drooling idiots. On the bright side, they would be wonderful additions to his circus!
Gondolfino walked back to Jane’s cage, followed by his grinning clowns. “And this little moppet – we have great plans for her, don’t we, boys?” The two clowns capered about, somehow managing to snarl and laugh at the same time. “She was the bait for our little trap, but now that we’ve caught her, too, we just can’t pass up such an opportunity.” He turned back to the party. “You see, Grave Clowns don’t breed. They’re created through a very unusual – and unpleasant – combination of circumstances. My three associates constitute perhaps half the entire population of Grave Clowns in the world. Which is unfortunate, because the world can never have enough clowns, don’t you agree? Ah, but with this precious little beauty, and my special skills, we intend to change that, don’t we?” The two clowns slobber and scream with an obscene combination of rage and lust.
The party spent the next day trying to acclimate to their new bodies. After a night's rest, they felt a bit more comfortable with them, and those who were physically able were able to talk. Their movements were still uncoordinated, and fine motor skills were more the exception than the rule. Roustabouts would occasionally come in to toss rancid food into their cages and set small buckets of water outside them. They taunted the characters about their "new looks" and easily evaded their clumsy attempts to grab or hit them.
But as their faculties returned, they began to look for ways to escape. The buckets seemed the only available resources, so Mary/James disassembled one while Chuck chewed another into splinters. They discovered that young Jane could squeeze between the bars of her cage, and they enlisted her aid in distributing the scraps of wood from the broken buckets among the party members. Various members began trying to file the staves of wood into something that might be sharp enough to do some damage, while Phil tried to milk venom from his fangs into his bucket. Jerry experimented with shooting webs, although the sensation was extremely embarrassing. Jerry bemoaned the fact that he had used all his spells in the previous combat, but James still remembered a couple of Magic Missile spells that might come in handy. James tried picking the lock with some of the splinters, but between the poor quality tools, his lack of fine motor skills, and the fact that he could only control his left hand while having to tell Mary what to do with the right, all he succeeded in doing was breaking off several pieces of wood in the lock.
But hope was returning. They didn't yet have a plan, but then again, when did they ever?
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