The party meets up outside mokrab's workshop. Dave the Average, stol and pomin have just been transported out of the workshop.
Fluffy Fluffy in bat form had been searching around the level for a while. While wandering around, she discovered a possible escape route through the loading area where goods are delivered to the city. She also encountered the bureaucrat responsible for all these deliveries, and realized that among all the bureaucracy of the Folendemkar government, this particular orc may hold a good deal of power.
She also discovered something more foreboding through echolocation. Deep somewhere among the twisting hallways, she sensed a mass of bodies, each flickering in and out of physical existence. A large number of blight spores were heading their way. She eventually ran into Halt and kaea just after Halt finished washing the poop off of him in a water trough for the manatee creatures, and then ran into Dave and company further down the hall.
Kaea introduces himself jovially to the group as "Kaea, prince of thieves", and says he and Halt have got to be going. Dave insists on following (and Stol is pretty excited about it as well), and Kaea looks Dave's bulk up and down. "Well, I guess I'm not going to win this argument", he says, and lets them follow. Pomin stays behind to work on getting into the workshop.
Kaea leads them through confusing, winding passageways until they arrive at a large, metal door with two orcs with spears guarding it. They hide around the corner, and Kaea attempts to get Dave to go over and talk to them, to see if he can bring one over to be ambushed. Dave refuses to take part in harming his people, so he pushes Halt out.
Halt tries to explain that he's just a tourist who fell into some literal shit, and one of the guards offers to show him the way to the Diplomacy Office. As they both approach the corner everyone is hiding around, Fluffy turns into a bat, startling Dave, and two things happen: the guard notices them all around the corner, and they realize Kaea is no longer next to them, but is standing with his knife in the neck of the guard by the door. Kaea says "I got one, now it's your turn!"
Halt stabs the guard in the side with his dagger, but then is pushed back and stabbed with the spear. He manages however to throw his dagger into the guard's face, killing him.
Dave, fed up with killing his people, walks up to Kaea and punches him hard, slamming his face into the metal door and making a very pretty face less pretty. Kaea then covers himself in his cloak and vanishes.
Using Fluffy's echolocation, the party manages to find their way back to the main hallway of level 5. From a distance behind them as they go, however, Fluffy's bat ears hear the sound of a metal door squeaking open.
When they arrive in the hallway, they see danid, standing with four guards and Pomin shackled hands behind her back in front of Mokrab's door. Danid pleads Dave to stop all this, and just come home to her. The guards start approaching them. They turn around to go the opposite direction, only to see the hoard of Blight Fluffy had sensed earlier heading down the tunnel towards them. Frightened, Dave's mom starts heading with the party towards her office while the four guards move in to handle the Blight. Halfway there, Dave looks over his shoulder to see two have already been killed, and the other two are in a bad position as Blight begin to pass them.
They get into Danid's office and she closes the door behind them, bolting it with a wooden bar. She begins rummaging through papers and goes into her living quarters, which are in the back. When asked, Pomin tells the party what she told Quiggers, that the Blight spreads by infecting plants. Danid hears this and is immediately concerned about the Gardens. She tells them that she's the council member in charge of agriculture. They decide to see if burning plants kills the blight, and they gather torches and flint, and head out a secret passageway behind a bookshelf (Danid says these passages are very old, existing in case the leaders of Folendemkar needed to escape for any reason).
Further down the hallway, Danid tries to knock on the backside of a bookshelf leading into the office of gautil, head of the club_and_hammer. There is no answer, however, and they move on. Eventually, they arrive at a dead end. Danid scrapes her finger on the wall, and they hear a click. She slides the door aside. On the other side, they are standing on a ledge overlooking expansive fields of mushrooms of every variety below them. Some way off, they see the mushrooms are green and flickering.
Halt (with Danid) guards the door, while Dave and Pomin go to test fire on the infected mushrooms. Fluffy flies overhead. The fire singes the mushroom they hold it to, and eventually the blight on those shrooms shrieks, the mushroom dies, and it is no longer infected. Stepping on mushrooms manages to kill the blight only on the portion of the mushroom stepped on.
From the tall mushrooms ahead emerge many blight spores. They all look like orcs. Halt shoots one of his few arrows at them and misses. Dave and Pomin stick around to fight.
Halt hears footsteps coming down the hallway behind him. It's Gautil and the militia, ill-equipped but ready to fight. They join Dave and Pomin. Dave suggests they could use alcohol to make Molotov cocktails and see how many they could burn. Gautil agrees that that's a good idea, and sends two militia orcs off to her office to get some ("I have quite a stock," she says).
Dave and Pomin keep fighting. Pomin takes out two of them. Dave keeps getting injured by them. Fluffy as a bat tries to dislodge a rock from the ceiling, and succeeds. It falls and injures one of the spores. However, immediately after she does this, the brand on her hand burns hot, forcing her to land and transform back into a squirrel.
Just as this happens, Kaea and the two orcs emerge from the tunnel, each with a clinking bag of alcohol over their shoulder, Kaea with an additional bag full of treasure. Kaea greets Halt. They show up next to Dave and Pomin, and begin throwing cocktails into the fields. The fire doesn't spread, but it does kill the blight where it lands. Kaea says something to Dave along the lines of "You and me have to have a talk after this". He has a large lump on his head.
Fluffy finds the further from the group of Dave, Pomin, Kaea, and the militia she moves, the less her paw burns, but they stronger she feels a tug on her mind to go there.
During the fight, Kaea, still a bit woozy after his injury, stumbles over his treasure bag and a medium sized wooded box tumbles out. Fluffy has the overwhelming urge to go and open it. She approaches, and as she gets closer, her paw hurts more until it feels like it's actually on fire. She flips open the box, and inside is a sickle with a crescent moon shape (not even blade width, wider in the middle, like a crescent moon). Under the sickle at the bottom of the box is etched the image of an anvil. She transforms into an elf and takes the sickle out. However, she is overcome with some strange power, and starts walking towards Halt and Danid. She fights it and manages to break free of the influence, transforming into a bat.
The sickle, however, is sent flying and lands by Kaea's feet. He bends down to pick it up, and Halt, fearing what might happen, looses an arrow at him. Kaea, now standing at full height, just catches the arrow in front of his face. His eyes are fully red.
He approaches Dave, and the blight shrieks and dies around him as he walks. He's smiling in a friendly manner, which is still offset by his eyes. He speaks in a resonant voice, full of harmonic depth, displaying as much tonal skill in speech as a singer might in song. He introduces himself as moktan, God of Death and War, and asks Dave to join him in bringing Folendemkar back to its old days of glory. Dave seems very enthusiastic about this, and throws in that he really thought the guy Moktan is possessing was kind of an asshole anyway.
Moktan again begins walking towards Halt and Danid. Halt tries to throw a dagger at him while scath attacks, but he simply pushes Scáth through the air against the wall, and cuts the dagger in half with the sickle. Dave and Fluffy try to stop him. Fluffy tries to convince him that they can bring down the government without killing its leaders. He is not convinced. Danid is taking a swig from her flask, and Halt grabs it from her, rips off part of his sleeve, and sticks it in the flask, setting it on fire. He then tries to shove it into Moktan's mouth. He misses, but the cocktail smashes to the ground and catches Moktan's robes on fire. He shakes them off and drops them to the ground. He pushes Halt and he flies into the wall. Then Moktan reaches Danid and says "I will hold your mother as collateral. You are in my employ, and I will not release you from it until our task is done. At that time, I will release your mother as well." He places his hand on her shoulder, and she falls dead.