Everyone was chilling at the Two Silvers until an old woman walked in to the counter, wearing thick clothes despite it being summer. The woman is named "Brenna", and she asks the party for a favour after hearing someone has not been around for two days. Husband of her friend, stuck in his workshop, requests that the party check it out. Apparently, the lady is named Loxa Kremmel. The family name is quite well-known and has widely contributed to the community. The husband, Mr Nicholas, has the habit of gifting children toys.
His workshops are guarded by ELFs. Three-storey building, a utility building with empty spaces around it, which clearly had buildings before. Very few windows, they are round and can only be barely squeezed through by a child. Upon a more specific look, there are actually four floors. The utility building seems to be a large furnace, built out of clay bricks. Pretty sturdy. Heavily wooden-studded door with a small peek window beside it.
When the door is knocked, the party hear metal footsteps before a small figurine peeks out of the window. It's very thin and looks like a bolted-together little tin man. A lot of beeps and mechanical voices. The figurine disappears for some time and slaps a piece of paper on the window. "Beep beep beep." Jett expands the peek window with magic, and immediately after the wall is a set of stairs leading up to the side.
A dozen or so ELFS are having a party, which freezes the moment the Aetherforged walks in. The sound of alarm and panic rings throughout as the ELFs rush at Jett, then past Jett, up the stairs with everything left behind. On its hands are claws bolted onto the ELF, clearly made or added after. The ELFs magically animated a child-sized action figure. Alan can discern that a lot of modifications are slapped on later, hazardously. The ELF the party caught starts to lose battery, but Alan was able to get it to lead him upstairs to the proposed leader.
On the second floor, the other ELFs immediately deemed the persuaded ELF a traitor and aimed at the party with a giant pencil ballista. Jett tries to create a rift under the Ballistaes to swallow it. It works, but before the effects take place, the party realises there are also bigger ELFs with fancy crown-like hats indicating their status. ELFs from the glasswork area throw a glacier bomb at the party, and everyone dodges the brunt of it as they try to run to the second floor out of the affected range. They don't reach the stairs yet, but the party is now at the centre of the room. Banners hang from the ceiling, "Independent Elf Republic" written with ketchup. A simple grate gate with a giant metallic lock seals the other half of the floor away from the party. Alan creates a barrier against the person working on the gate while Jett stasis the Glasswork ELFs that were throwing ice bombs. Clement quickly works through the lock.
Delaney immediately weaves through the open door only to be forced to roll an Agility Defence Roll. To the left of Delaney is a conveyor belt with a giant gift machine. The Giant Gift suddenly bounces at Delaney and swallows her. Jett rushes forward to try to pry the Gift Packer open. There was a metal window to the Gift Packer; the window ripped itself half apart and swung around. There are many arms inside, wildly swinging like an eldritch horror mimic. Belaney transforms into a horrifying lizard and lands on Jett's shoulder. Alan quickly runs towards the other party members. He almost made it, but an ELF stopped right in his path. He backed away just in time, however, to avoid the worst. Clement quickly followed up with a freezing spell, buying Alan enough time to reconvene.
Delaney the Lizard scouts out the third floor; it's an old man's garage filled with stuff. A labyrinth storehouse. It's just a large "The Pile". On the second floor, Jett expands, hitting the ceiling before smashing the giant gift packer against the wall, shattering it. However, as the Gift Packer is torn away, Jett is damaged too. Then Alan quickly clears out the ELFs on him with his prismatic beam attack, major arcana shotgun, and blasts them away so he can join the others on the other side of the gates. The garage also smells of cabbage. As Delaney crawls above the ceiling, she finds the exit and the Head Elf lying in ambush with a spear. She crawls just above the Head Elf and turns into an alligator before dropping right on the ELF. The Head Elf got squished, really hard. Delaney then shifts back and summons the rest to the exit to the fourth floor. The Glasswork ELFs made an explosion, the intention unclear, and further affected the workshop's stability.
After climbing up the ladder, the party finds themselves in an Artificer's Laboratory. There are a lot of inventions here, some with a purpose, others not. There's a life-sized boy puppet and a cannon named Super Gravity Something aimed at the ceiling with a hole in it. Its objective is to send something far away quickly and safely by blasting it. The Artificer is nowhere to be seen, but there are notes indicating experimentation. The landing spots seem to be just outside of Baston's non-recovered zones, like the Slums. Alan test-fires the cannon, and it works well. After Feather Flower Jett and Delaney transforms into a bird, the cannon fires with Jett inside a box and holding open a pocket dimension holding Alan and Clement.
On the landing spot, there's another crate that crashed into the wall, and the lid is stuck shut. As the party emerges, they find themselves surrounded by a dozen or so thugs. Jett and Alan play the good cop and bad cop to try and intimidate the thugs away. After they left, the party freed the Artificer, and he was a genuinely nice guy, but not Santa.
When the party returned to the workshop, it had collapsed. The ELFs pretend to be nice, but Alan partially revealed their evil nature by influencing the ELFs to forget Nicholas was present. Nicholas then promises to look into it.
