The Stone Lord had been built up like a ghost story. Guild politics. Ambushes. Drunken informants. A trail through Baldur's Gate that kept narrowing around one name the Four finally understood: Minsc.
They had promised Jaheira they would find him. That promise—not Nine-Fingers, not a quest log, not the bank—was why they walked into the Counting House.
They expected criminals.
They did not expect Gale to become a financial-services professional.
Gale Discovers Banking
The teller was agitated. Gale noticed. Gale pressed. Gale rolled a natural 20.
A temporary vault pass appeared.
This was already funny because Gale's Charisma modifier is negative. It became funnier because his partial-illithid social expertise has turned Deception, Intimidation and Persuasion into +7 skills anyway. Wyll remains the party's actual face. Gale has simply become the sort of man who can walk into a bank, look concerned, and somehow acquire credentials.
Then Gale remembered he had forgotten to cast Shadow Blade.
He cast the psychic murder sword on the stairs.
A guard came running.
Gale rolled another natural 20.
Wyll, perhaps sensing a threat to departmental boundaries, tried to pick a chest.
Natural 1.
He tried again.
Natural 20.
Order was restored.
The Ledger
Inside, the visitor log settled one thing cleanly. The Stone Lord had been there.
Minsc's trail was no longer rumor moving through the city. It was written into the bank's own record.
The next obstacle was less philosophical: the vault code sat behind a watched office door. Two guards objected to the Four's interest in it. The Four tried not to make that objection terminal.
Then the guards saw kitty.
That was apparently enough.
Combat followed. The guards died. Nobody celebrated it. They had come in with a legitimate pass and had not planned to murder bank security over a filing problem.
Wyll opened the office anyway.
Natural 20.
The code was theirs.
The Reveal
The Four descended into the vaults and found the room the whole investigation had been leaning toward.
Then Minsc arrived.
Not through a door.
Not by teleportation.
Not with the grim theatricality expected of a criminal kingpin whose name had been moving people around Baldur's Gate.
He came out of a mimic.
The Four watched from the balcony as the Stone Lord burst out of a monster chest below them.
It was him. No more inference. No more aliases. Minsc, in person, making an entrance so aggressively Minsc-shaped that two sessions of ominous buildup collapsed instantly into something much better.
Some truths arrive with dignity.
This one had teeth.
The Wrong Jaheira
The Four stayed hidden for a moment and watched.
Then Jaheira appeared below.
Shadowheart knew better.
Someone had stolen Jaheira's face.
She said it aloud, and the knowledge became the party's. Whatever was happening to Minsc, he was moving with an impostor wearing the face of the woman trying to save him.
Before the Four could intervene, the false Jaheira escaped with Minsc.
The people left behind were Bhaalists.
The observation period ended.
The Room Belongs to Shadowheart
The fight opened with an unpleasant lesson. The Death's Heads had Unstoppable, and Lae'zel learned that fact after already feeding two expensive arrows into a defense that reduced each hit to almost nothing.
Gale corrected the problem with Magic Missiles: many cheap impacts instead of one beautiful wasted shot.
Then the Death's Heads stunned Lae'zel and Wyll.
The Reapers vanished.
For a moment the room threatened to become exactly what the Bhaalists wanted: scattered targets, invisible knives, everyone chasing shadows.
Shadowheart refused the premise.
Radiant Spirit Guardians came up around her.
The Four collapsed inward. Gale moved toward the aura. Lae'zel Misty Stepped back into the same defensive center. Instead of hunting invisible Reapers through a bank vault, they made the Reapers come through Shadowheart.
Kitty knocked one prone.
A Reaper killed kitty.
This proved motivational.
Shadowheart started removing Bhaalists from the room in groups. A surviving bank fighter finished a wounded Death's Head. Wyll put down the Invoker. Lae'zel killed the penultimate Reaper from a range that was, in practical terms, another postal district.
One remained on the far southern balcony.
The Four did not scatter after it.
Gale solved the distance problem by becoming the projectile.
He flew down, launched himself into the Reaper with his paladin stomp, and knocked it prone.
Shadowheart killed it.
Kitty was avenged several times over.
Coin Has Entered the Chat
After the fight, Rakath Glitterbeard offered a reward for the stolen Counting House gold.
The Four are not bank employees.
They are, however, trying to buy Wyll extremely expensive armour.
This distinction matters.
Recovering a banker's money for its own sake might have inspired philosophical discussion. Recovering a banker's money for a large reward while already following the same people anyway required considerably less debate.
They took the job.
Then they found the note.
There it was: one line tying the stolen gold and Minsc's escape route together.
The sewer trail was not an instruction handed down by some authority. The Four had earned it themselves. It served two reasons they had already chosen: find Minsc for Jaheira, and recover enough coin to make Wyll harder to kill.
Back to J
The Four returned to camp before going underground.
They spoke to Jaheira.
They could finally tell her something concrete: they had seen Minsc with their own eyes. Someone wearing her face had taken him. The trail led to a cistern in the sewers.
That was enough for the night.
No short rest. No long rest. No magical reset button after the vault fight.
The next time the Four leave camp, they will leave with whatever the Counting House cost them.
And somewhere below Baldur's Gate, there is a cistern containing either a criminal operation, a pile of stolen bank money, Minsc, another fake Jaheira, or—given how this campaign works—some combination of all four.