From the prisoner we were able to verify that the wearrat's headquarters were in the bell tower in the center of the city. He also thought it was odd that Squim (The leader) would order them to wreak a festival in broad daylight, since that's not how they usually do things. Since our prisoner admitted to being a 'natural' wearrat, and therefore incurable, we turned him over to Cheveron for purging.

Upon entering the belltower, we were greeted by a grumpy old man tending the pull-ropes. He responded poorly to our questions, and tried to attack us. Too bad. Heading up the stairs we encountered a few more wearrats and a trap that knocked the Barbarian down to the expertise of a peon. Then we disturbed a nest of regular (large) rats. I figured it would take all day to shoot all these critters, so I pulled out the chaos rod in hopes of getting a general purpose clean-up spell. First shot produced a band of loosers that wanted to attack me. Second shot put a paper hat on one of the loosers. Third shot turned me into a buff warrior, and the rod turned into a magical sword. Well, that's enough of that. I stomped out the rest of the rats and loosers. We continued on, and finally got to the leader (Squim) at the top of the belltower. I gave him a chance to surrender if he told me who he was working for, but he didn't listen and died.

After that, we decided to investigate the odd noises that people were hearing from the other side of town. On our way over there, a hole opened up in the space right in the middle of the street and crapped out a monstrous tentacled worm! Being the only useful fighter in the group, I stepped forward to greet the monster. It grabbed me and started to try to swallow me whole. Thinking quickly I whipped out a potion of reducing and threw it in the creatures mouth in the hopes that it would become small enough that I wouldn't fit in it's mouth. It shrank somewhat, but not small enough for my plan to work. It tried to chew on me and gagged on my armor and I fell to the ground. About then, a second worm plopped out of mid-air and started attacking. The Barbarian met that creature with his new found sissy-swing he acquired from the trap in the belltower. After beating those two, Whisper-Rain levitated down from his hiding spot and told us that he saw a guy running away from the rooftops. We all berated him for letting him get away and then decided to research these creatures at the local occult bookstore, The Reality Wrinkle.

There was something definitely wrong at the bookstore. Space seemed somehow... wrong. Sickness overcame one of the party members. We beat the crap out of the teller, and opened a closet door. Inside was a hideous blob with a bunch of mouths and eyes. We beat the crap out of that, too. Then we went upstairs into a fog and fought a battle with one of those giant purple tentacle worm monsters, a lesser sorcerer and a slightly more powerful sorcerer. The high level sorcerer tried to escape by spider-climbing out the window and down the building but the bard (who never entered the bookstore) held her up and the Barbarian took care of her. Then we went back and found Cheveron Lightchaser in the basement and rescued him. We then retired to The Dragon's Snout and partied it up for the night.

In the morning I awoke and found that I had returned to my usual less-than-massive self. Thank Brandobaris! Being a stand-up fighter is just not for me. I'm more than happy to spring traps and provide cover fire from the back ranks, but getting close to those smelly monsters is just no fun. The rod of chaos returned to normal as well. Now if only our half-strong, expertise-drained Barbarian would regain his facilities, we may be in business. If not, maybe we could hire or recruit some more fodder, er, fighters.