OOC:
Yes, Horace would only take 1 fire damage.
Bekassine's healing spell soothes some of your burns, but doesn't harm the shade much. Aurelia's attacks miss the mark, but luckily, both Horace and Yarth deliver several solid strikes. With the final blow, the hellshadow shrieks as its spectral form dissolves into harmless wisps of smoke!
A few moments after the battle ends, you receive a sending from Fallenta, hearing her voice in your minds.
"This is not part of the audition! Something has gone wrong. I hired six actors for a mock battle. Please find them and rescue them."
With some effort, you disbelieve the illusion cloaking this room. Without the illusions, the truth of this sad, abandoned theater becomes apparent. There are no audience members, and most of those seats are in ruins or have collapsed. The stage is a crumbling ruin as well, with old ropes and tattered curtains hanging from above. Props and scenery from the last play (which was set in a haunted castle) lie among the rubble or in decaying heaps along the corners and back wall—particularly to the northeast, where the ceiling has collapsed entirely into a heap of rubble that only allows brief glimpses of sunlight to filter through during the day. Below this heap of rubble lies further ruin—this area once featured a stairwell leading to the basement below, but that stairwell has since been completely obliterated.
One thing that’s noticeably new is the large, jagged hole in the floor of the middle of the stage; even at a casual glance, it’s obvious that this hole is a very recent development. Beneath the stage, the brick walls and floor of this large, twenty-foot-high space are damp and mottled with strange patterns of mold. Cracks on the floors and walls make the area seem on the verge of collapse, but several still solid-looking support pillars seem more than up to the task of holding the roof up—save for in the middle of the room beneath the hole in the stage, and in the northeast corner, where a much older collapse lies heaped around a crumbled wooden staircase. A partially buried skeleton still wearing a suit of dark-blue leather armor lies in the rubble near the northern wall. This collapse also caused part of the southern wall to topple over to the southeast, and a door is set in this wall west of the collapse. Recent blood trails lead away from the collapse at the center of the room.
OOC:
With ten minutes of work, you can extract the skeleton from the rubble. While filthy, the suit of +2 resilient greater electricity resistant leather armor the skeleton wears is fully functional, as are the +2 ghost touch striking rapier and hellfire boots.
