Siblings and a daemon lord

After a day packed with being dragged to every sightseeing opportunity and tourist spot the town has to offer (surprisingly many, given its small size) you start to walk to the church mentioned in the bounty as the sun sets, a happily humming warlock on your right arm. You arrive to discover that the church is a small, mundane affair: a squat stone rectangular building with a tall, triangular roof and relatively little in the way of decoration. A statue of Semaj—stylized as a thin, bearded man wearing a flowing robe—stands in a small fountain out front, but otherwise this could be easily mistaken for any old shop or establishment. It doesn't seem like anything especially daemonic is going on, so you sit down on a nearby bench and let your mind wander while your companion dozes off on your shoulder. The world fades as you gradually nod off.

Around 11pm you're pulled from your slumber by chanting in a guttural language: the windows of the church glow with a blood-red light. You shake Ari awake, earning a glare and a pout in protest, and step up to the church door. Nobody answers when you knock, so you push it open to find it unlocked and empty except for the sounds of chanting and the seemingly omnipresent red glow. The temple interior is a plain affair: rows of short pews, a small simple altar topped with a white cloth, a few more statues of Semaj in the corners, and various alcoves filled with little shrines. The two of you split up and start looking under and behind random objects, but nothing seems out of place.

You're surprised at the relative lack of interest that other adventurers are showing in this quest, until finally around an hour later a group of four adventurers between levels 12 and 15 walks in and joins you in your search. They're made up of three adventurers you've never seen before: a male elf rogue, a female elf ranger, a female human cleric. The last one, however, is a familiar, huge warrior: Jared. Luckily the poor lighting makes it hard for anyone to see much, given he had a front-row seat to your companion's faction change. Shortly after, you feel someone grab your arm and see Ari has come back.

"I noticed some writing around the altar. It looks like the same language that's written on the one we have back home: maybe that's the trick?" She whispers into your ear quietly enough that nobody else will be able to make out the words.

"What are you two on about? Have you figured out this stupid puzzle?" Jared butts in.

"Nothing much. We've been looking around for an hour and it feels like all we've done is waste our time. We're going to head out. As for the whispering, none of your business." You deliver the last line with as playful a voice as you can muster and lift Ari up in your arms, giving her an exaggerated kiss to let them speculate on what might have been said. You're almost out of the church when you feel a powerful hand grip your shoulder.

"Wait a minute, dude." Uh-oh. "I recognize that chick you're with. You might want to put her down and step away from her."

"What do you mean?" You turn around, not seeing much choice in the matter, but hold on to her; Ari tenses in your arms.

"She backstabbed me and my friends back when we were attacking this imp's dungeon. She's working with the monsters somehow." Well, this is awkward.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Ari squeals. "He used some kind of mind control magic on me! It was awful. But don't worry, Adam already knows. After all, he's the one who figured out how to break the spell and free me." She looks at you with an adoring expression and gives you another peck to punctuate her statement.

"Well, evidently he didn't cure you being such a slut." The elf ranger pipes up and you take a look at her. She's the spitting image of Arialle and her voice sounds familiar somehow, but you can't place it. Ari just giggles in response and hugs you again and you smirk.

"Why would he want to fix that, sis? I wouldn't if I were him." The rogue interjects: he also sounds oddly familiar.

"Eww, gross David, that's, like, almost me you're ogling." Wait a minute: David was the name of the rogue from your first day of the new patch. That means... you grin as you piece everything together. You won't have much opportunity to do anything right now, but you'll have to watch out for Celestina Silverhair the elf ranger in the future.

"Well, on that subject I think we might want to go and investigate some of these allegations of your behaviour in the bedroom." You grin and turn around with Ari still in your arms to an eye roll from the ranger, a lecherous stare from the rogue, and utter confusion and amusement from the cleric. Jared, for his part, looks like he utterly regrets bringing this up, and you walk off to hear him try to mediate the brewing argument between the two elves as the cleric laughs. Once you're out of sight, you sit down in one of the side alleys: hopefully they'll either get bored or get themselves killed and then you can go back to questing.

"I hadn't really thought about being recognized. It's a good thing I've only seen Jared the one time, but it would be really bad if we bumped into some of the other adventurers here: some of them probably have seen me helping you enough times to be a bit less believing than he was."

"Maybe you should just start wearing a hood? After all, we wouldn't want to ruin your perfect looks." You earn a flick and a blush for your compliment. With that, the two of you doze off again until you hear the adventurers leaving bored and frustrated an hour later and, thankfully, driving off another group by saying much the same thing that you told them. It's around 1am when you finally can re-enter the church and examine the altar.

The altar shows no obvious clues: the stone under the cloth is bare, the cloth itself is monochrome and undecorated, and you still can't read whatever daemonic language is inscribed on it. After around ten minutes of investigation you finally give up and lean against it to take a quick break, when you fall on your ass with a loud scrape. "Oww, what the hell—"

"Look!" Ari motions to the altar and you turn, rubbing your sore rear, to see it's moved slightly. An even more powerful red glow emerges from the open crack that the altar covered moments ago. Pain forgotten, the two of you give it a firm shove to reveal a staircase leading down underground: once you step down, you find a button on the wall which causes the altar to close the way back with a loud scrape. Hopefully no one heard that, but it'll at least keep anyone from following you down here. You set on down the stairway and a few steps later a popup blocks your vision.

Cultists in Broadbridge
Quest started! Warning: if not stopped, the cultists will summon a daemon in 15:00... 14:59...

Oh, so it's some sort of timed quest? Not that you really mind them summoning any daemons, but you don't have much else to do but set out and see what's going on. The stairwell bottoms up into a room lined with ominous-looking skull torches and blood-red curtains. The moment the two of you step inside, the curtains shift to reveal you're surrounded by robed humanoid figures clutching jagged daggers. As they advance towards you slowly, daggers pointed at the ground, you have a look at them: mostly around levels 3 through 5. Apparently the plan is to just drown you in low-level enemies to run down the timer, unless they've got something more impressive in a later room. You consider just fireballing them all and being done with it when one of them breaks their solemn pace and charges at you.

"None shall stop the Faithful from summoning the Master!" The robe falls back to reveal a crazed, white-haired old man now holding the dagger above his head in a wholly impractical fighting stance.

"Uh, honestly we don't really care if you summon daemons. We were just in the neighbourhood and decided to check this place out." You grab the cultist's arm to prevent him doing anything annoying but otherwise stand in place. For his part, he looks confused. This is probably the first time anyone's ever said that to him.

"Preventing the Faithful from summoning His Daemonic Majesty is what thou adventurers art here for, no? Faithful! Don't believe his falsehoods! He seeks to charm his way past thee with deceit and honeyed words!" He struggles with his knife but even with your magic-focused stats he's nowhere near strong enough to break your grip.

"Look, uh... cultist guy, we honestly wouldn't mind meeting your master. Why don't we just hang out here while you guys get on with your ritual?" At this point you're more curious about what sort of daemon cultists in these parts summon than anything, and worst case if you fail the quest you can just try again tomorrow or something.

"That... would be... acceptable?" He sounds completely unsure. No doubt most adventurers aren't interested in letting crazy robed old men summon daemons. You exchange a few more words and then you and your companion sit down in the middle of the room and idly chit-chat; the cultists retreat to the edges of the room, watching you cautiously and somewhat curiously. Finally, an ominous bell tolls six times, then another six, then another six, and finally a rumble and popup announce that something has changed.

Cultists in Broadridge
Quest updated! Zoxxzzixxaith has been summoned! Drive away his avatar on this plane to complete the quest!
Warning: quest difficulty has increased considerably.

"Master! Master!" The cultists chant. 'Cultist guy,' whose name is apparently—and rather underwhelmingly—'Carl' walks back over to the two of you and scratches the back of his head. He dropped the archaic language and started talking much more normally once he realized he didn't need to play the part of crazed cult lieutenant for the two of you.

"Look, uh... thanks. Usually your kind just comes in and kills us. Do you want to meet the master?"

"Sure, we might as well stop by. What's he like?"

"Uh, this is a bit embarrassing... but... I honestly don't know. First room and all." You wince in sympathy and follow as the chanting group of cultists leads you past various side passages and down into a large, hemispherical room. The area is dominated by a large pool of boiling lava, currently occupied by a huge male daemon with a bull's head. His arm span looks like it's at least fifty metres when fully spread and could easily stretch from wall to wall, while fire spouts from his nose whenever he breathes.

"Hello, imp." His voice is deep but otherwise surprisingly mundane.

"Hey, how's it going? Nice cult you have here."

"Thanks. They are pretty loyal, aren't they?" The cultists, meanwhile, look on in awe at two adventurers casually talking to their daemonic master. "So, what were you looking for?"

"Honestly, it's a bit embarrassing. See, we need to do a rank five or higher quest—long story—and I figured that this looked relevant enough. I was hoping to maybe pick up some new minions and knock off an easy quest, but unfortunately I need to 'drive you off' to do it. Looking at you I doubt I can, and honestly you seem like a reasonable dude so I don't really want to anyways."

"And this mortal beside you?"

"Oh, right, Zoxxzzixxaith, meet Ari. Don't worry, she's on our side. She's contracted to me, and sort of my"—Ari gives you an expectant look—"girlfriend, I guess." This results in a satisfied smirk before she turns to greet the huge daemon with a cute wave.

"Nice to meet you. Unfortunately I doubt I can pronounce your name."

He chuckles at that. "Honestly, sometimes I wonder if that's why these mortals have all these fanciful names for me."

The three of you chat for a while about this and that. The daemon lord seems interested in the day-to-day goings-on of the world, as well as keeping up with the progress of your dungeon: apparently the description of daemonic liegelord wasn't lying when it said that people across the planes are talking about you. You're somewhat less happy to hear that it's more out of boredom than awe, although that makes sense given your current power. At least it gives you a good thing to work on changing in the future.

"Well, imp, mortal, my minions... it's been nice chatting with you, but unfortunately I believe this unholy temple will 'reset' shortly." The rumble and jets of flame are still a bizarre contrast with how casual this daemon is acting. You suddenly have an idea.

"Say, how do you like being summoned here?"

"Honestly, it's mostly an annoyance. Adventurers never want to chat, so I squash them—or occasionally get this shell destroyed by someone truly dangerous—and then go back to whatever I was doing. I'd rather I wasn't, but duty calls."

"Well, I mentioned I was looking for some minions. Would you mind banishing yourself, since you have to go anyways, and then I can recruit your minions for my lair? Hopefully it'll cancel this quest and prevent you from getting distracted in the future, and I could use the help." You earn a snort of amusement.

"Sure, imp. But take this"—he throws a fireball at your feet, which instead of exploding coalesces into a ruby—"and call upon me some time. I wouldn't mind having a first-hand look at how things are going, and I might ask you for a favour in the future." You aren't totally sure what being vaguely indebted to a daemon lord entails, but given that you've managed to make your relationship with the sorceress work it doesn't bother you too much. After all, everything about Zoxxzzixxaith other than his name seems more reasonable to you than she is, although you aren't sure if that says more about her or him. With that, his body lights on fire and then vanishes in a huge plume of smoke.

Cultists in Broadridge
Quest completed! Return to the adventurer's guild for your reward.

Truly a battle which will be sung of throughout the ages. You could get used to this adventuring thing. Carl walks up to you, suddenly sporting the deferential attitude you saw him take with his former boss.

"Great unholy one! Master! The Faithful are yours to command."

"Uh, right. You don't have to be all 'great unholy one' around me, Carl. In any case, do you have anything useful in here you can bring with you?"

"Yes, your magnifi—uh, yeah man. Our mighty cult poss—ehm, we have a pretty good library as well as some gold and silver stuff."

"Good. Prioritize books about languages and the most valuable stuff. Send people out in small groups starting around 4am: there probably won't be any adventurers out then. Bring whatever you can carry, but not so much it makes you suspicious. Head to the abandoned wizard's tower on Imporne: it's pretty obvious when you get nearby. Take the above-ground route and the imp on duty will let you through the gate. Report to Rishuzan to figure out how to make yourselves useful until I arrive. I shouldn't be that long, but you never know."

"It shall be do—er, sure thing boss."

"Great, and Carl?"

"Yeah?"

"At least lose the hoods. My grandma could recognize you as a cultist from a mile away, or at least she could if I had one."

You walk off with Ari on your arm to turn in the quest, laughing at the bizarre scene she just witnessed. "You've been spending too much time around us 'mere mortals.' You're starting to sound like an adventurer."

You shrug and give her hand a squeeze. "What can I say, I didn't want to use my 'daemon lord' voice and get any more 'great unholy ones.' Besides, I can think of worse ways to pass the time."