05/30/2026
Star and Scale approached the home of Garrick's contact, Exile, to find her being harrassed and beat in an alley nearby by two thugs
The group approached and learned that Exile had a gambling problem and she owed a lot of money to a local bookie.
Star and Scale paid off her debt and the thugs left without incident and on mostly good terms
Inside her home, Exile explained that her abilities that allowed her to get the group to the Nine Hells were actually a dagger she owned, a Jade Dagger that could open a rift between planes.
Unfortunately, that dagger had been given to the very bookie those thugs worked for in order to pay off a previous debt.
In hearing about their plight, Exile also have Zeb information on Ziffizek, the devil who took Lubomir for Ezekiel's soul. Apparently, his weakness was that he was bloodthirsty, and the trick was to get him to agree to a fight that Zeb knew he could win.
She also mentioned to never fight him in the Nine Hells, because he simply never lost there.
The group agreed to talk to the bookie, who they learned was Sixes the Stonetouched from the Roydian, who they'd previously met, and try and get the Jade Dagger back.
Arriving at the Roydian, the group met Bert, Sixes's imp who apparently lived on his desk, and were welcome into Sixes's managerie of rare and magical items, in which the dagger was kept.
Unfortunately, Sixes did not trust Exile to use the dagger and simply give it back, calling her perpetually irresponsible, and claimed he would only allow them to borrow it if he could put in a failsafe.
That failsafe came in the form of an Obsidian shard that could be implanted in the Jade Dagger to cancel out its properties and render it inert if Exile tried any funny business.
And the only Obsidian shard Sixes knew of was in the hands of a powerful Animancer named Vayne who lived in Bal'Aljani.
The group decided to sneak into Vayne's mansion, and were able to locate the Obsidian shard, although as Zeb procured it, he was apparently helped by some unseen entity within the mansion -- it helped the group avoid traps and showed Zeb where the shard could be found.
Additionally, the unseen helper showed Zeb a journal of Vayne's that spoke of how much Vayne despised Ravana and Chalice in Demon's Hollow, as well as their Animancy.
Escaping the mansion, the group and Sixes took the dagger and shard to Exile's home, where May had been watching her.
May forged the killswitch into the dagger and handed it over to Exile, who promply opened a rift into the Nine Hells.
As the group stepped through and the rift closed behind them, they found that Exile had also walked through and brought the dagger with her, knowing about the Obsidian plan all along, and confident now that Sixes could activate it from another plane.