You might remember the post I made around this time last week, featuring the magnificent double-cross my DM, /u/inkcharm, managed to pull on the entire party. If not, go check it out, it was great.

So flash forward to this week.

We are in the party's common room, confronted with a dangerous foe. As we watch, Cerise Lamore's appearance changes - her dark hair turns platinum-blonde, her pale skin grows unnaturally paler, her features shift into those of the vampire we confronted before, the one who escaped. Sil'gadia Daethra smiles at us and asks if we wish to talk.

In response, the half-orc fighter rushes her and attacks. Roll initiative!

Our bard, with some help from said fighter, immediately rushes out of the door to raise the alarm - well, I say raise the alarm, when really she bolts into the hallways yelling "WE FUCKED UP" at the top of her lungs. A magical alarm goes off and she hears commotion from downstairs, in the guild's main room. Which, when we arrived, was still playing host to a fair few adventurers. So, you know, the entrance is secure.

Inside the common room, we're trading blows with the vampire. This is complicated, somewhat, by the fact that my cleric is entirely tapped out on spells (partly due to a character sheet mishap, partly just because we had yet to rest), so she spends her turns using... Sacred Flame. And yet the fearsome vampire? Completely bombs every single Dex save. In the course of three rounds, she fails all three saves, and burns through her Legendary Resistances to succeed on them.

As the fight begins to go south for her following the arrival of a paladin NPC we'd previously met in the guild, she uses Greater Invisibility - I'm still kicking myself, by the way, because we knew she had invisibility of some kind - and escapes into the hallway, where the paladin proves her usefulness by pointing the vampire out to us.

(Okay, so, the greatsword and the Lay on Hands was also pretty clutch, @DM please don't make Nell kill Magnolia in her sleep?? I love her really???)

Some more fighting ensues in the hallway, hampered by Daethra's invisibility... at least until our elven fighter smacks her out of it, and my cleric chimes in with a Radiance of the Dawn that sends the vampire fleeing back into the common room - she couln't go further down the hall because she'd run into the other fighter, and she couldn't go downstairs because that's where everyone else is waiting.

Inside the common room, Daethra confronts the party warlock - the only one of us not currently out in the hallway - and instantly drops her to zero HP with a single Blight. When the rest of the group re-enters the room, they beat her about some more but ultimately, it's the warlock herself who gets the killshot: she Eldritch Blasts Daethra off of the roof, and she falls... directly onto the outstretched rapier of the elven fighter.

She turned into mist and escaped after that, leaving the paladin to demand we check in with the boss and tell her how we fucked up. She did make sure to compliment us on surviving the encounter, telling us lesser adventurers would have been killed before storming away to chase down the vampire.

And that... that is how we reached sixth level.

(Then we woke up to undead swarming the city canals. Never a dull moment with the Five still in play, I suppose...)