The creature slithered up out of a hole on the cavern floor, its rubbery body undulating like a monstrous caterpillar as it inched its way toward the hapless Monster Hunters.
[11] Its four tentacles spread wide, revealing an acid-scarred parrot beak wide open in a silent scream of attack.
[12] Even in the flickering torchlight, Buntleby could tell the jagged, serrated edges of the creature's wriggling tentacles were wickedly sharp.
[13]
The wizard took careful aim and hurled his dagger at the onrushing creature. It flew straight on but hit the grick's beak, bouncing harmlessly to the stone floor with a clatter.
"Other dagger?" asked Rhionda.
"With Willowquisp," admitted Buntleby.
"So you've thrown--your only weapon away."
"Um, yeah, kinda looks like it."
With a wince of pain, Rhionda reached over and slid her longsword along the floor to Buntleby. "Try not to--throw this one away," she suggested, then started dragging herself in the opposite direction. She left a trail of blood on the ground as she crawled, but swallowed the pain of movement with visible effort and pulled out her boot dagger as she scooted away.
The grick was almost upon Buntleby as he hastily grabbed up Rhionda's sword. Suddenly, in a blur of motion, the little green flumph darted between the two, spraying the grick with its defensive mist. Even though he was out of the path of the spray, Buntleby got a good whiff of it and felt his gorge rise. He was more than familiar with that particular odor, having once experienced it for himself firsthand.
He wasn't the only one to have noticed it, either. The grick's body convulsed violently as it succumbed to the flumph's defensive spray. The flumph took off straight up, jetting out of the way now that it had bought Buntleby some reaction time.
Buntleby was unused to the weight of a sword in his hands, and had never practiced with the weapon.
Still, he thought,
how hard could it be? Rhionda certainly made it look easy enough. He hefted the sword up over his shoulder and brought it crashing into the side of the grick's body in an unconscious imitation of the gavel-bashing from his dream.
He expected the sword to slice deep into the creature's side, and was more than a little surprised to find it practically bouncing back at him.
[14] Thrown off balance, he staggered back and regained his equilibrium as the grick shook its body in a final convulsion, snorted air out of its nostrils, and turned to face him again.
Buntleby raised the unwieldy sword above him in a ready stance, waiting for the grick to make the next move. He moved slowly to the side as he did so, eager to focus the monster's attention on him and away from Rhionda, but still not wanting to stray too far away from the dropped torch, their only current source of illumination. The grick followed him, then struck with all four tentacles at once.
Buntleby did his best to block the oncoming attacks, but he had only the one blade against the grick's four, and he wasn't anywhere near as proficient as the monster was. He managed to block one of the jagged tentacle-blades on the edge of the sword, but the other three cut their way through, slicing into his thigh, side, and left arm. Buntleby howled in pain, dropped the sword, and backpedaled fast to get out of the grick's range.
"What's going on down there?" came Willowquisp's voice from the narrow shaft leading to the surface. "Are you guys okay?"
"Kind of busy right now!" Buntleby shouted back, keeping his eyes on the still-approaching grick and looking around for a new weapon. "I could use my dagger back, though, if you're not using it!"
"Hang on, I'll toss it down!"
"Torch, Bunt!" suggested Rhionda from the darkness. Buntleby shuffled over to the torch, scooped it up, and held it out at the grick in an attempt to keep it at bay. The creature seemed unimpressed with the flames, striking out at Buntleby's hand holding the torch. He continued to back away, drawing the grick after him and farther away from Rhionda.
Rhionda, meanwhile, had put the time to good use. She cut the left leg of her leather armor off with her boot-dagger, then tied it into a makeshift tourniquet just above her left knee. Shrugging the scabbard of her longsword off of her back, she used it as a splint against her shin and tied it in place with its own leather strap. Now no longer in danger of bleeding to death or passing out from the pain when she moved her broken leg, she scooted along the cold stone floor of the cavern to the place where she had last seen her sword.
Suddenly, there was the clanging sound of metal on stone from overhead as Buntleby's dagger came clattering down the narrow shaft. Buntleby glanced up and repositioned himself when he realized he was standing almost directly underneath the shaft; the grick lunged at him again and, in an act that couldn't have been better coordinated with years of practice, was struck blade first by the falling dagger. The weapon buried itself upright into the top of the creature's back just behind the tentacle-junction,
[15] and a thin stream of bluish blood oozed down the grick's side.
"I don't believe it!" yelled Buntleby in amazement. "You got him!"
"Really?" called Willowquisp. "You want me to do it again?"
"Thanks anyway; I'll take it from here!" The grick twisted its tentacles back toward its body in a futile attempt to dislodge the dagger. Seeing that its attention was diverted, Buntleby took the opportunity to thrust the flaming torch into the grick's side.
That got its attention back, all right. The grick whipped back at the wizard, all four tentacles slashing in unison. The torch was flung from Buntleby's grasp and several droplets of blood went flying after it as the creature's blades cut furrows into the wizard's hand. Buntleby cried out in pain once again and backed off, weaponless once more.
The flumph came whizzing to Buntleby's aid, spraying another dose of the foul-smelling liquid at the grick. Unfortunately, Buntleby was at the edge of the spray's arc and got a good dose of it himself. Rather than use the time the grick was immobilized to escape out of harm's way, Buntleby fell to his knees by the creature's side and began retching uncontrollably. He knew he had to get away, but his muscles wouldn't respond. He realized the grick was in a similar situation, and hoped against hope that the creature wouldn't recover before he did.
Fortunately, it didn't matter. Before either of the two could concentrate on returning their attention to their life-and-death struggle, Rhionda had scooted up to them, dragging her useless leg behind her. She had her blade in her hand, and she knew a great deal more about how to use it effectively than Buntleby did, or probably ever would in his life.
With a bloodcurdling scream that might have been intended to frighten the grick, or perhaps just to cover the sound of her own scream of pain as she wrenched her leg in the maneuver, Rhionda brought the sword in a gleaming arc in the flickering torchlight and cut deep into the beast's flesh, severing it almost in half. Blue blood gushed out of the grick's midsection and its tentacles writhed back and forth in an agonized frenzy, but it expired before it could retaliate against its attacker. Frothy blood spilled from its scarred beak; it lowered the front half of its nearly-severed body to the stone floor and remained still. Rhionda noticed its back half give a quick muscle spasm, drawing her attention to the serrated blades along the edge of the grick's tail, but she was too tired to be impressed.
[16]
For a while, the two Monster Hunters were nearly as still as the grick. Rhionda lay on her back, panting, her left leg held straight in its makeshift splint, her right leg bent at the knee. Buntleby, meanwhile, was finishing up a bout of the dry heaves and giving the occasional spasmodic twitch.
"You guys sure you're okay down there?" Willowquisp's concerned voice called down to them.
"Fine," they croaked weakly in unison.
The little green flumph jetted over to inspect the grick's corpse. "Good job," it squeaked in appreciation, then raced up toward the cavern's ceiling and out the second of the narrow tunnels leading to the surface. After a few minutes, it returned with a dozen or more companions, most of them the same green color but a few of them yellow or white.
The cloister of flumphs set about their tasks in a well-organized fashion. Some of them approached the dead grick and dribbled their acidic secretions into its wounds, preparing to devour the intruder that had dared to enter their holy temple.
[17] Oh well, thought Buntleby,
So much for using the grick's body for magical experimentation.
[18] Other flumphs darted down into the numerous narrow holes that lined the exterior perimeter of the cavern, only to pop up out of a different hole later on. Buntleby guessed there must be a whole network of interconnected twisting shafts down below the stone floor of the cavern. Still other flumphs kept their distance from the two Monster Hunters, staring at them warily. Buntleby thought he recognized one little white flumph from his previous encounter with them and gave a little wave. It didn't respond.
"You given any thought as to how we're going to get out of here?" asked Rhionda.
Buntleby picked up the dropped torch and scouted around to retrieve his daggers and the half of the rope that had fallen into the cavern with them. "I guess we can ask our little flumph buddy to tie the ends of our rope back together," he suggested. "Or at least to bring it up to Willowquisp and Spontayne and let them do it."
"Uh...do you know which one it is? These flumphs all look pretty much the same to me."
With excellent timing, the little green flumph spokesman chose that moment to return to the Monster Hunters, bearing an object the size of a small stone it had brought up from the tunnels below. "Grick eggs! In temple!" it squeaked in outrage, dropping its burden to the floor. Several other flumphs followed suit, forming a small pile at the wizard's feet.
[19]
Buntleby picked one up. "Hey, Willowquisp!" he called. "You want a grick egg for your next sage's conference?"
"Certainly!" beamed the elderly sage. "I'd love to have the chance to study its growth stages!"
[20] Buntleby dropped the egg into a pocket of his robe and snorted. "Hmmph! I guess that's our payment, then," he said to himself.
[21]
NOTES
11. Gricks crawl using the dual row of suction cups lining the underside of their bodies. They can do this in two ways, either by hunching up their body and thrusting it forward like an inchworm (effective for springing out at prey) or simply by using their suction cups as individual "feet," in which case the body remains low to the ground in the manner of a snake or centipede. Gricks retain a Speed of 30 feet while traveling horizontally in either case.
12. Completely aggressive, gricks attack just about anything that moves as potential prey. Size is not normally a major consideration. Even foul-tasting flumphs, whose disk-shaped bodies are filled with acid-producing glands, can fall prey to a hungry grick, although most gricks learn their lesson after filling their beaks with flumph acid.
Lacking teeth, a grick bites off pieces of its prey and swallows them whole, or uses its tentacle blades to cut bite-sized hunks of flesh from its slain victim.
13. Gricks habitually keep their tentacle blades sharp by rubbing them together in the manner of a chef honing his knives right before carving a roast. They normally engage in this behavior immediately after consuming the last of their current prey, so their blades are ready for the next combat.
14. The grick's tentacle-like body is tough and rubbery, consisting of many layers of strong muscle overlapping each other. This makes the grick resilient to blows, granting it a damage reduction of 15 points per round. At +1 or better weapon negates the grick's damage reduction. Since a grick's damage reduction is a result of its physical structure, it is an extraordinary (as opposed to a supernatural) special quality.
15. The grick's unique body structure makes the term "head" somewhat inaccurate, for while its four tentacles and beak extend forward out of the front of its body it doesn't really have a separate head as such. Lacking bones, the grick has no skull; an attempt at scientific classification would probably lump the grick in with the octopus and squid if only because of its tentacles and beak. (There's a reason D&D uses the term "aberration!")
16. Although a grick doesn't have the coordination to use its tail-blade as a weapon (it remains too far out of the grick's field of vision), the blade's existence serves as additional evidence that the grick's serpentine body is itself really just an overgrown, modified tentacle.
17. Flumphs might consume a grick after liquefying it with their acid, but most other races find grick meat to be foul tasting and overly chewy.
18. A grick's tentacle blades can be used to fashion simple weapons, usually by placing a set of blades on a hilt to form a primitive dagger, or on a longer shaft to create a harpoon. A grick's tentacle suckers can be liquefied and used in the creation of the specialized inks used to transcribe the spider climb spell. Grick blood is used in some potion of hiding formulae.
19. Gricks mate once a year. The female carries the fertilized eggs inside her body only long enough to find a good, out-of-the-way spot to lay them, then abandons them forever. Grick eggs are soft and rubbery, oblong (rather like a large grain of rice), and about three inches long. A typical cluster contains 4-6 eggs.
Newly-hatched gricks are on their own from the beginning. They look like smaller versions of the adult form and prey upon small insects, spiders, and worms. Gricks grow at a rapid pace the first two years of their life, attaining the standard size of five feet (two feet of which are tentacles, the other three being body length) at the end of that time. Gricks continue to grow throughout their lives, but at a less rapid pace once attaining adult size. Gricks have a lifespan of about 10 years. Larger specimens can grow to about 10 feet long (4 feet of which is tentacles), attaining as much as 6 HD.
20. Gricks are a bit unusual in that they have two patterns of reproduction. The first one is the "normal" one, in which a male and female grick mate to produce offspring. The second, and less frequent one, is when gricks are born from grell parents.
Grells reproduce only once in their 30- or 40-year lifespan. The female lays and abandons her clutch of 2d4 eggs in a high, out-of-reach place. Normally, these eggs hatch into young grell, which are born active and self-sufficient. However, one year out of each century, all grell eggs laid hatch into grick young. This year (called "the Year of the Great Throwback") sees an increase in the grick population and a corresponding decrease in the number of grells (as no newborn grells are born that year to replace those that are slain). Since grells perform no parenting duties, it's unsure whether they even notice this phenomenon. They certainly have no special fondness for gricks, considering them merely a form of potential food (as they view all other forms of life).
Since grells travel from world to world and set up numerous colonies, they are responsible for the grick's eventual appearance on each world that they colonize. Once the Year of the Great Throwback rolls around, a "starting stock" of gricks are brought into the world. Over the next century, these gricks gradually expand their numbers by reproducing in the standard fashion.
It's unknown whether the Year of the Great Throwback only occurs on colony worlds (perhaps as the result of some subtle difference in the atmosphere, sun's rays, or similar cause), or if the grick genetic mutation also occurs on the grell's homeworld. It is interesting to note that monastic flumphs also occasionally give birth to a "lesser species," the albino or "common" flumph. Sages point to this as further evidence of the genetic relationship, however distant, between grells and flumphs.
21. One can occasionally find treasure in a grick's lair, but it's usually just detritus left behind by the creature's previous victims. Gricks have no concept of the value of physical objects which cannot be eaten. (Unfortunately for Buntleby, flumphs care nothing for treasure either.)
