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[5E] The Age of Worms - Solid Snake's Campaign
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<blockquote data-quote="Alexander Bryant1" data-source="post: 7474664" data-attributes="member: 6916184"><p><strong>The Journal of Eleanor 03</strong></p><p></p><p>Rest Day</p><p>Ah, our order of liquid mischief has arrived. What do we have here?</p><p> • Four water breathing distillates which typically last an hour each</p><p> • An invisibility mix, another hour, I have read</p><p> • One mid-level healing drought</p><p></p><p>I’d spent much of the day receiving details about these people’s recent pasts, filling in gaps where I have missed information. After a bland lunch livened by the spices I always carry, we demonstrated one another’s abilities a bit more thoroughly with light sparring. I use illusions to call upon mine as it is quite wearing to actually cast higher-order spells. We are not a fighting force, not yet, but we are a step closer to behaving like a team in the future.</p><p></p><p>That evening, an early and uninspired dinner of “meat rolls” later (what are we, apprentices?), we decide to use the potions to swim to the location with the hole leading up into a non-arena area. We would need to leave the Village unobserved.</p><p></p><p>The ambassadors slip away before I even realize they are gone leaving Officer Vereene and myself. I make a great show of my unhappiness with our performance yesterday, an easy temper to feed as I am still sparks and thunder about it. Officer Vereene manages to move off as well, though I find out she used our sole invisibility potion – as precious an item we have down here – to merely walk away. This is akin to using a wish ring to order breakfast (although down here, it would be tempting). Where did she get it the elixir? Why did she have it? Oh yes, the Ambassador Rey collection. Easy come, easy go. This will become my mantra around these people, I suspect: they are not fastidious with details nor rigorous planners. They are resourceful, and fearless, but impulsive. I must find some way to contain that.</p><p></p><p>My ruse works and I am left alone: no one wants to talk down the mad storm woman. I go soak myself in the river, swimming noisily back and forth. I am wearing too much for this to be entertaining to the puerile, so people tire of me and wander back to what they were doing. I retrieve the rest of my gear and submerge.</p><p></p><p>It is a winding trek to the room the two ambassadors had discovered the previous night. When we emerge to considerable stench, I realize we have decided to infiltrate their toilet system. Flows and essence! this was not in the job description, and I mentally increase my fee before mist-stepping into the room above as quickly as possible, taking Ambassador Rey’s rope and grapnel with me. I tie it off on one of four chain rings spaced … hmm, equidistant … around the room….</p><p></p><p>This is not a toilet, it is a torture room or at very least one where bodies are suspended over the hole presumably for bloodletting.</p><p></p><p>The party climbs up behind me. The scent is earthy, the air tingling with magic but also rot. It is well-lit with ever-burners on the walls and I can see into the next room. Boxes, no, <em>coffins</em>. Oh yes, they are already beginning to vibrate. We arrange ourselves to meet them, and here they come, greenworm-infested corpses shambling to their feet.</p><p></p><p>“They were sealed into the coffins, sealed in with the worms,” a woman says, her voice shaking with emotion. It is my voice but not me, not my thoughts. “By the blood of Our Savior, who would do this?” I continue. I feel tears!</p><p></p><p>It is Eleanor again. Not Lucienne, not me, but this woman from another life, the one from whom I am merely wearing her name.</p><p></p><p>People became theseworm-infested creatures, but what am I becoming right now? Who isthis? Who is Our Savior?</p><p></p><p>I have to snap out of this. I lash out with a Witch Bolt raising the hair on everyone’s arms and swirling the air in the tiny chamber. The ambassadors line up behind Mel who has bottlenecked the horrors in the corridor, and they throw their own lightning and frost. I am unnerved, even frightened, fighting my fears as much as these shambling nests of disease.</p><p></p><p>Ambassador Rey looks back at us. She is also wide-eyed and pale as I had not seen on her before nor imagined her able to wear. Her look is one of, “Wish me luck,” and she pushes ahead to one of the things. She melts it with a touch! It stiffens, the worms burning. The current in the air isn’t from me, or not solely so: the ambassador is wielding lighting not merely with a magic spear but something else, something intrinsic to her. Fascinating.</p><p></p><p>With her lead and Officer Vereene’s armor, we kill the monsters.</p><p></p><p>Two corridors lead out ahead as does the unhidden side of a secret door on the side. Stairs roll up to another secret door behind this one seeming to exit somewhere within the round, closed-off area of the first floor. I think we should investigate there but our paladin is concentrating and predicting that each of the hallways leads to walking corpses, one direction far worse like a volcano next to a bonfire.</p><p></p><p>“We must burn every unclean thing here,” she says, and everyone begins to nod. Everyone but me: I think we should move up into what is probably offices or storage or someplace civilized so we can talk about this and, with luck, perhaps arrest ringleaders right there on the spot. Failing that we should retreat and bring news of all this to the surface world. But Ambassador Rishkar pronounces the worms-corpses anti-nature creatures and so must slay them now, and Ambassador Rey hopes still to find Lord Chosik’s sister here – at least as a body – so they move forward.</p><p></p><p>We take the lightly-cursed corridor first to an old, desiccated combat training room. Six worm zombies are here which we dispatch. All but one who turned out to be important for it managed to crawl to a double door, open it, pull itself into the short corridor behind and open yet another double door which led into…. </p><p></p><p>I think I’ll call it the Cosmic Evil Ripening Room.</p><p></p><p>A simple altar ofstone squatted in the middle of this oval chamber. It faced a largeset of stone double doors. On the altar are two scrolls glowing withan unnatural green light and casting green beams into a gem whichfocused the ray onto the doors, bathing them in the same green glow.I sense the temporal magic: this is a time-speeding spell. Whateveris behind those doors is not being held in stasis – at least not bythis process – but rather is being <em>accelerated</em>. The scrollsare not actually in this time shard and so cannot be destroyed. Theoverall spell is necrotic but also evocational.</p><p></p><p>A being who I imagine to be the Faceless One, based on listed descriptions, comes out of a door in the back.</p><p></p><p>"Who are you?" I ask.</p><p></p><p>"The future"</p><p></p><p>"I am interested in the future."</p><p></p><p>"Indeed?"</p><p></p><p>Mel is charging but is stopped by an invisible barrier in front of the being.</p><p></p><p>"Is your future pain and suffering for the people of Greyhawk?"</p><p></p><p>"Quite the contrary: I bring glad tidings, a world without pain."</p><p></p><p>"A world withoutfree will," I return. "A world without hope or light. Yes, I recognize yourspecific brand of evil."</p><p></p><p>But the creature, I immediately sense, is more powerful than we are prepared to do battle with. He will kill or capture one or more of us, I feel it not only in my bones but as a buzzing sensation up and down Thoth, my silent armband, who is already preparing to remove the two of us. I don’t know wherethis information is coming from, but it is almost certainly tied towhy I know that the energies here are temporal.</p><p></p><p>“Retreat! Everyone retreat!” I command.</p><p></p><p>The Faceless One casts a black field of sharp, writhing tentacles behind Officer and Vereene and me. It snags and slices Rey, but she electrocutes the ground and pulls free, running away. Rishkar dances through the things which don’t seem to be interested in him for some reason. They also leave me alone as I charge through.</p><p></p><p>That left Officer Vereene facing the Faceless One alone with her escape route cut off and the party retreating. But I could see in her eyes a sort of elation: she wants to die, or at least to die in this way, perhaps facing an unbeatable foe while securing our escape.</p><p></p><p>Paladins! Flowsbless them.</p><p></p><p>As my final action, I fire a Haste spell at her.</p><p></p><p>“Use this magic, Melinde. Run!”</p><p></p><p>Thankfully she sprang alive and raced through the tentacle field right past the rest of us running for our lives back to the stream from which we crawled.</p><p></p><p>The Faceless One has in the meantime walked behind us and now enflames the entire corridor. We have no choice but to continue running through necrotic fire sucking our lives away.</p><p></p><p>Ambassador Rishkar,however, turns and – I don’t know what part of his soul or spiritor chakra he has that he dumped into the spell, but he concentrateslike never before with that Ray of Frost of his and somehow freezesthe cult leader to the wall. This also succeeds in dropping theflames.</p><p></p><p>Everyone dives into the water.</p><p></p><p>I feel overcome, just exhausted. Officer Vereene, still Hasted, helps me swim further down the stream.</p><p></p><p>…into a functionally invisible gelatinous cube taking its afternoon constitutional there. Desperation drives Officer Melinde, and particularly Rey, straight through it – tearing it to pieces – and we wash up on the beach beyond.</p><p></p><p>As we lay there gasping, I notice some symbols carved into the walls of wherever we now are.</p><p>- a triangle with a circle on top, a little like a pawn from the Royal Game</p><p>- some waves</p><p>- a circle with a jack through it</p><p>- a spiral</p><p>Bits of bone remain in the grooves of each one indicating they were carved from the many bones around us.</p><p></p><p>Hmm. The spiral looks out of place from the others. It would have been an onerous task to carve that into stone and as well as it was done. Curious.</p><p></p><p>“Catastrophe,” a woman says. “Remember?”</p><p></p><p>It is I, or a rather a translucent version of me, in a very strange metallic outfit. I am holding a metal-wound staff of some sort. “Thee burn away precious minutes.”</p><p></p><p>“What?” I say to her.</p><p></p><p>She disappears.</p><p></p><p>“What was that?” asks Ambassador Rey. Of course, only I can see the apparition.</p><p></p><p>“We have doomsday to avert. We must get back to the village.” The half-elf nods to a passage, indicating, <em>Yes, it’s right there</em>. “And we must leave the Games. We need to tell everyone what we have found.”</p><p></p><p>“That would mean forfeiting, withdrawing from here permanent-like,” says Officer Vereene.</p><p></p><p>I nod vigorously. “The good we can do here is slight compared to what an activated Royal Guard, Watch, Church of Greyhawke and all the other organizations I intend to alert can bring to bear.”</p><p></p><p>They still do not look convinced, particularly the paladin whom, I have no doubt, honestly believes she can wade into any problem requiring something evil to kill and simply handle it. I suppose she is still here so it is working for her so far.</p><p></p><p>“Each one of you has deposed to me and others your opinion of the magnitude of the danger these worms bring. My own research has borne everything you say out. We do not have a problem with a couple of corpses lurching about somewhere in a tunnel: this is a powerful cult leader with an artifact building a disease bomb in the middle of the city. This is beyond our skills to deal with.”</p><p></p><p>“We will be prevented,” Officer Vereene says. “They know about us, and to be right there in the middle of the Arena, they are obviously tied into Loris’ operation, and so the guard here is going to nab us.”</p><p></p><p>“They’re welcome to try! But keep this in mind, Officer Vereen: you, all of you, are extremely well-known. You might be the most famous people down here other than Orik’s Warriors. Two of you are ambassadors. I am working for the palace. You are a member of the Watch. If they cause a scene with us, then they are pointing out for us whom to fight, a great risk. I suspect they are, instead of looking for us, speeding up preparations for their attack or abandoning it altogether and fleeing.”</p><p></p><p>This seems to convince the girl, so we go to the Grey Wardens nearest the exit and tell them we are forfeiting the match. We have been summoned by Lord Chosik and must leave for the surface immediately. This very much confuses and dismays the guards, but they allow us to leave. One of them on the way out confides that he bet a hundred clinks on us. Ambassador Rey rolls her eyes and hands him a palmful of gold coins. I believe she has made a lasting friend today.</p><p></p><p>We go our separate ways to alert the city.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alexander Bryant1, post: 7474664, member: 6916184"] [b]The Journal of Eleanor 03[/b] Rest Day Ah, our order of liquid mischief has arrived. What do we have here? • Four water breathing distillates which typically last an hour each • An invisibility mix, another hour, I have read • One mid-level healing drought I’d spent much of the day receiving details about these people’s recent pasts, filling in gaps where I have missed information. After a bland lunch livened by the spices I always carry, we demonstrated one another’s abilities a bit more thoroughly with light sparring. I use illusions to call upon mine as it is quite wearing to actually cast higher-order spells. We are not a fighting force, not yet, but we are a step closer to behaving like a team in the future. That evening, an early and uninspired dinner of “meat rolls” later (what are we, apprentices?), we decide to use the potions to swim to the location with the hole leading up into a non-arena area. We would need to leave the Village unobserved. The ambassadors slip away before I even realize they are gone leaving Officer Vereene and myself. I make a great show of my unhappiness with our performance yesterday, an easy temper to feed as I am still sparks and thunder about it. Officer Vereene manages to move off as well, though I find out she used our sole invisibility potion – as precious an item we have down here – to merely walk away. This is akin to using a wish ring to order breakfast (although down here, it would be tempting). Where did she get it the elixir? Why did she have it? Oh yes, the Ambassador Rey collection. Easy come, easy go. This will become my mantra around these people, I suspect: they are not fastidious with details nor rigorous planners. They are resourceful, and fearless, but impulsive. I must find some way to contain that. My ruse works and I am left alone: no one wants to talk down the mad storm woman. I go soak myself in the river, swimming noisily back and forth. I am wearing too much for this to be entertaining to the puerile, so people tire of me and wander back to what they were doing. I retrieve the rest of my gear and submerge. It is a winding trek to the room the two ambassadors had discovered the previous night. When we emerge to considerable stench, I realize we have decided to infiltrate their toilet system. Flows and essence! this was not in the job description, and I mentally increase my fee before mist-stepping into the room above as quickly as possible, taking Ambassador Rey’s rope and grapnel with me. I tie it off on one of four chain rings spaced … hmm, equidistant … around the room…. This is not a toilet, it is a torture room or at very least one where bodies are suspended over the hole presumably for bloodletting. The party climbs up behind me. The scent is earthy, the air tingling with magic but also rot. It is well-lit with ever-burners on the walls and I can see into the next room. Boxes, no, [I]coffins[/I]. Oh yes, they are already beginning to vibrate. We arrange ourselves to meet them, and here they come, greenworm-infested corpses shambling to their feet. “They were sealed into the coffins, sealed in with the worms,” a woman says, her voice shaking with emotion. It is my voice but not me, not my thoughts. “By the blood of Our Savior, who would do this?” I continue. I feel tears! It is Eleanor again. Not Lucienne, not me, but this woman from another life, the one from whom I am merely wearing her name. People became theseworm-infested creatures, but what am I becoming right now? Who isthis? Who is Our Savior? I have to snap out of this. I lash out with a Witch Bolt raising the hair on everyone’s arms and swirling the air in the tiny chamber. The ambassadors line up behind Mel who has bottlenecked the horrors in the corridor, and they throw their own lightning and frost. I am unnerved, even frightened, fighting my fears as much as these shambling nests of disease. Ambassador Rey looks back at us. She is also wide-eyed and pale as I had not seen on her before nor imagined her able to wear. Her look is one of, “Wish me luck,” and she pushes ahead to one of the things. She melts it with a touch! It stiffens, the worms burning. The current in the air isn’t from me, or not solely so: the ambassador is wielding lighting not merely with a magic spear but something else, something intrinsic to her. Fascinating. With her lead and Officer Vereene’s armor, we kill the monsters. Two corridors lead out ahead as does the unhidden side of a secret door on the side. Stairs roll up to another secret door behind this one seeming to exit somewhere within the round, closed-off area of the first floor. I think we should investigate there but our paladin is concentrating and predicting that each of the hallways leads to walking corpses, one direction far worse like a volcano next to a bonfire. “We must burn every unclean thing here,” she says, and everyone begins to nod. Everyone but me: I think we should move up into what is probably offices or storage or someplace civilized so we can talk about this and, with luck, perhaps arrest ringleaders right there on the spot. Failing that we should retreat and bring news of all this to the surface world. But Ambassador Rishkar pronounces the worms-corpses anti-nature creatures and so must slay them now, and Ambassador Rey hopes still to find Lord Chosik’s sister here – at least as a body – so they move forward. We take the lightly-cursed corridor first to an old, desiccated combat training room. Six worm zombies are here which we dispatch. All but one who turned out to be important for it managed to crawl to a double door, open it, pull itself into the short corridor behind and open yet another double door which led into…. I think I’ll call it the Cosmic Evil Ripening Room. A simple altar ofstone squatted in the middle of this oval chamber. It faced a largeset of stone double doors. On the altar are two scrolls glowing withan unnatural green light and casting green beams into a gem whichfocused the ray onto the doors, bathing them in the same green glow.I sense the temporal magic: this is a time-speeding spell. Whateveris behind those doors is not being held in stasis – at least not bythis process – but rather is being [I]accelerated[/I]. The scrollsare not actually in this time shard and so cannot be destroyed. Theoverall spell is necrotic but also evocational. A being who I imagine to be the Faceless One, based on listed descriptions, comes out of a door in the back. "Who are you?" I ask. "The future" "I am interested in the future." "Indeed?" Mel is charging but is stopped by an invisible barrier in front of the being. "Is your future pain and suffering for the people of Greyhawk?" "Quite the contrary: I bring glad tidings, a world without pain." "A world withoutfree will," I return. "A world without hope or light. Yes, I recognize yourspecific brand of evil." But the creature, I immediately sense, is more powerful than we are prepared to do battle with. He will kill or capture one or more of us, I feel it not only in my bones but as a buzzing sensation up and down Thoth, my silent armband, who is already preparing to remove the two of us. I don’t know wherethis information is coming from, but it is almost certainly tied towhy I know that the energies here are temporal. “Retreat! Everyone retreat!” I command. The Faceless One casts a black field of sharp, writhing tentacles behind Officer and Vereene and me. It snags and slices Rey, but she electrocutes the ground and pulls free, running away. Rishkar dances through the things which don’t seem to be interested in him for some reason. They also leave me alone as I charge through. That left Officer Vereene facing the Faceless One alone with her escape route cut off and the party retreating. But I could see in her eyes a sort of elation: she wants to die, or at least to die in this way, perhaps facing an unbeatable foe while securing our escape. Paladins! Flowsbless them. As my final action, I fire a Haste spell at her. “Use this magic, Melinde. Run!” Thankfully she sprang alive and raced through the tentacle field right past the rest of us running for our lives back to the stream from which we crawled. The Faceless One has in the meantime walked behind us and now enflames the entire corridor. We have no choice but to continue running through necrotic fire sucking our lives away. Ambassador Rishkar,however, turns and – I don’t know what part of his soul or spiritor chakra he has that he dumped into the spell, but he concentrateslike never before with that Ray of Frost of his and somehow freezesthe cult leader to the wall. This also succeeds in dropping theflames. Everyone dives into the water. I feel overcome, just exhausted. Officer Vereene, still Hasted, helps me swim further down the stream. …into a functionally invisible gelatinous cube taking its afternoon constitutional there. Desperation drives Officer Melinde, and particularly Rey, straight through it – tearing it to pieces – and we wash up on the beach beyond. As we lay there gasping, I notice some symbols carved into the walls of wherever we now are. - a triangle with a circle on top, a little like a pawn from the Royal Game - some waves - a circle with a jack through it - a spiral Bits of bone remain in the grooves of each one indicating they were carved from the many bones around us. Hmm. The spiral looks out of place from the others. It would have been an onerous task to carve that into stone and as well as it was done. Curious. “Catastrophe,” a woman says. “Remember?” It is I, or a rather a translucent version of me, in a very strange metallic outfit. I am holding a metal-wound staff of some sort. “Thee burn away precious minutes.” “What?” I say to her. She disappears. “What was that?” asks Ambassador Rey. Of course, only I can see the apparition. “We have doomsday to avert. We must get back to the village.” The half-elf nods to a passage, indicating, [I]Yes, it’s right there[/I]. “And we must leave the Games. We need to tell everyone what we have found.” “That would mean forfeiting, withdrawing from here permanent-like,” says Officer Vereene. I nod vigorously. “The good we can do here is slight compared to what an activated Royal Guard, Watch, Church of Greyhawke and all the other organizations I intend to alert can bring to bear.” They still do not look convinced, particularly the paladin whom, I have no doubt, honestly believes she can wade into any problem requiring something evil to kill and simply handle it. I suppose she is still here so it is working for her so far. “Each one of you has deposed to me and others your opinion of the magnitude of the danger these worms bring. My own research has borne everything you say out. We do not have a problem with a couple of corpses lurching about somewhere in a tunnel: this is a powerful cult leader with an artifact building a disease bomb in the middle of the city. This is beyond our skills to deal with.” “We will be prevented,” Officer Vereene says. “They know about us, and to be right there in the middle of the Arena, they are obviously tied into Loris’ operation, and so the guard here is going to nab us.” “They’re welcome to try! But keep this in mind, Officer Vereen: you, all of you, are extremely well-known. You might be the most famous people down here other than Orik’s Warriors. Two of you are ambassadors. I am working for the palace. You are a member of the Watch. If they cause a scene with us, then they are pointing out for us whom to fight, a great risk. I suspect they are, instead of looking for us, speeding up preparations for their attack or abandoning it altogether and fleeing.” This seems to convince the girl, so we go to the Grey Wardens nearest the exit and tell them we are forfeiting the match. We have been summoned by Lord Chosik and must leave for the surface immediately. This very much confuses and dismays the guards, but they allow us to leave. One of them on the way out confides that he bet a hundred clinks on us. Ambassador Rey rolls her eyes and hands him a palmful of gold coins. I believe she has made a lasting friend today. We go our separate ways to alert the city. [/QUOTE]
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