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Sagiro's Story Hour Returns (new thread started on 5/18/08)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Thank you everyone for your good thoughts! Kodiak and little Elanor are doing very well, and the sleep depravtation is starting to feel normal. The wee beastie just turned 17 days old.
You can see more pictures of her here:
http://home.comcast.net/~dorian.hart/elanor_week_1/elanor_week_1_main.html
For the last couple of nights, wife and daughter have been sleeping, at the same time, for as much as three hours in a row. This has afforded me some precious story-hour-writing time, so here's the next installment. Enjoy, and again, thanks so much for all the congratulations. And if you're really feeling nice, you can come over and change a diaper or two any time you want!
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 226
Lightning
“I never thought I’d be so happy to be in the Elemental Plane of Air,” says Kibi. The dwarf, together with the rest of the Company, reclines against the edge of the world and looks up at the now-gray Way.
“That was close,” says Aravis, still panting. His head throbs with the after-ache of heavy Maze use.
“Whaddya mean, close?” asks Dranko. “We had a good twenty seconds to spare!”
“In the future,” says Ernie, “I vote we don’t plug Kibi into any strange machines.”
“At the very least we should have a rule about not destroying Slices,” says Morningstar.
“We knew there was a rule about blocking off Ways,” says Aravis. “Now we know the same things applies to pouring energy into them. An overload is as bad as a blockage.”
“I’m glad the Vree got away,” says Kibi. “I liked them.”
The air is clean and fresh – almost too fresh, really. It feels in their throats and lungs as if the air is extremely cold, though in fact it’s barely cool.
“It’s just more airy than normal air,” observes Ernie. Flicker and Dranko light up Blacktallow cigars, and the smoke hovers in clouds around their heads, dispersing slowly. Ernie wrinkles his nose.
“Do we have a plan?” he asks.
“The Lord of the Roses, I guess,” says Kibi, though it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll find him now.
Since the clock is ticking on Morningstar’s find the path, the group adjusts their gravity and plummets “downward” through the air. They soon reach terminal velocity, but not long after that they see something white coming up fast. A quick reversal of gravities slows them up before they reach it, and they are relieved to see it’s only a puffy cloud. Even though it doesn’t rumble or threaten them, most of the party chooses to go around it. Only Dranko goes through, and he ends up soaked but unharmed. Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud.
A few minutes later they slow down again, as they approach a small flock of strange birds. One of the things, the size of a large hawk, comes whizzing up toward and then past them. It’s not natural, with four wings evenly spaced around its body. Its beak is similarly divided into quadrants. The rest of the flock follows it, buzzing the Company but then fading into specks again as they fly away.
After almost two more hours of falling, they see a patch far below that’s a darker blue than the ambient color of the Slice. Sure enough it’s a glowing blue Way, facing relatively upwards; they could fall through it like a trap door if they so chose, but instead they slow down and come to a halt by falling into the nearest planar edge.
Feeling confident, Dranko ties a rope around his waist, hands it to the others, and jumps into the Way for a quick scout.
When he emerges, his first thought is that he has arrived in an ironstorm – chain lightning field. An electrical storm rages all about him, and though he tries to twist and dodge the bolts, there are just too many. Even before the others have reached their count of five Abernathies, Dranko comes popping out of the Way, screaming and smoking. The rope is nearly burned through.
“It’s the elemental place of electricity, or something,” he reports as Morningstar casts a healing spell. His fiancée then casts another find the path, figuring there must be a better exit than this one – and finds that there is none. With the Way back to the Vree destroyed by Cleaners, the only way out of here is through the electrical storm.
“Oh, crap,” says Aravis. The others express similar sentiments.
For a few minutes they discuss various elemental protection spells. Energy immunity is the best bet, but they don’t have enough for everyone. Energy buffer only goes off once. Protection from elements would be used up in less than a minute. They wonder if they could stuff someone into their bag of holding, or have Kibi and Aravis polymorph into something immune to electricity.
Thinking that maybe the lightning storm was just a localized and passing phenomenon, Morningstar leaps in to make sure all this discussion isn’t a waste of time. A few seconds later she too pops back out with clothes and skin blackened. Now she and Dranko are a matched pair of smoldering adventurers.
“How cute,” says Grey Wolf dryly.
“Not a good look for the wedding, though,” says Flicker.
“It’s a good thing Aravis’s Maze manipulations worked out,” says Morningstar as she now applies the healing to herself. “Otherwise this would have been the last march of the Vree.”
As they seem in no danger here in the plane of air, they decide to wait until the next day, when Morningstar can pray for the energy buffers she needs, and the wizards can be properly loaded with teleports. For the rest of the day they fly around, polish their armor, munch on travel rations and play cards. Weird native birds fly by unconcerned, and puffy white clouds drift up and down the long, narrow Slice.
* *
Dranko wakes the next “morning,” sobbing and sweating. His head is pounding with ache. He doesn’t remember the details of the nightmare, just that he had one, and that it involved tentacles. He groans and mops his brow. The others are up before him, and staring.
“Did anyone else have bad dreams?” he asks, gulping for air and reaching for his water skin.
“I didn’t sleep very well,” says Kibi, motioning vaguely to the complete lack of ground anywhere. “But no, no nightmares.”
“I slept like a baby,” says Aravis, stretching.
Everyone else shakes their heads, and Dranko frowns.
“Well, yesterday was a horrible, horrible day,” says Kibi.
“I wonder if it’s because of the bottle I threw,” says Dranko to himself. Aravis overhears.
“What bottle?” he asks, startled.
“I, uh, I threw a message in a bottle into where the Cleaners were,” admits Dranko.
“Oh, Gods,” moans Aravis. “What was the message?”
“Um. ‘Dranko was here.’”
Aravis just buries his face in his hands.
“It’s like what you do on a ship in the ocean,” says Dranko defensively. “There was a big ocean out there, figuratively speaking, and I had an extra empty bottle...”
“What I do on the ocean is throw up a lot,” says Ernie.
“Don’t do that in the Black Circle’s ocean!” says Aravis to Dranko.
“I guess not,” Dranko concedes. “It felt like someone was stomping through my dreams with spiked boots.”
Morningstar prays and puts her hands on her fiancée’s head, trying to get a sense of what his dreams had been about. She senses nothing specific, but it’s very, very disturbing.
“Do I have any magic lingering on me?” asks Dranko to the wizards. He strips himself of all his magic items, and Aravis casts detect magic. Yes, he has some magic on him, but its type is very strange.
With nothing else to do about it, Dranko and the other spellcasters start to prepare their arsenals for the day. But when Dranko tries to pray, he feels something disturbing in his head. It almost feels like a tentacle is writhing behind his eyes. To his horror he realizes that he can’t achieve the serenity he needs to regain any spells.
“Maybe I’m cursed?” he asks the others. Aravis tries casting a greater dispelling on him, but it does not remove the strange magic the half-orc is radiating. Kibi, though, looking again with detect magic, notices now that the magic is stronger in a thick stripe extending diagonally from Dranko’s upper chest, down to his left knee.
It’s exactly where the Cleaner struck him.
"Restoration might work,” suggests Aravis.
Grey Wolf uses the undead-bane sword to cast the spell on Dranko; it clears Dranko’s head, but the magic is still there. Ernie examines Dranko’s body and determines that it’s not a physical ailment, while Grey Wolf speculates that they’ll have to restore him every day. Maybe greater restoration would work? At least now, albeit with difficulty, Dranko is able to reach the calm necessary to renew his spells.
An hour later, heads full of prayers and dweomercraft, the Company is ready to execute their plan. Kibi, Ernie, Morningstar and Aravis all get energy immunity: lightning from Morningstar, along with some endurances, just in case. They leap through the Way, and are soon floating in the violent electrical storm. It’s just like Morningstar remembers it from the day before, though with less burning pain. Instead it feels like she’s being softly punched from all directions. She casts find the path to the nearest exit.
“This is cool!” exclaims Aravis, looking around and grinning.
“That way,” says Morningstar. She points in a random-seeming direction, since there are no landmarks of any kind, and no visual clues to offer any sense of perspective at all. With the Ellish priestess in the lead, they change their gravities and plummet through the storm.
They can’t see very far in front of them, and the ambient blue-white light here isn’t very distinct from the glowing blue of the Ways. So it is that after a mere 30 seconds, the Way out comes upon them in a flash! Morningstar spots it soonest and is just able to alter her gravitational direction, and so avoids falling in, but her warning to the others is lost in the crackling din. Ernie, Kibi and Aravis go shooting right into the Way, and the sucking blackness between the Slices.
In hindsight, it’s a darn good thing that one’s momentum is cancelled out on a trip through the Ways. The three of them pop out of a horizontal-facing Way hovering twenty feet in the air and fall unceremoniously onto hard-packed dirt. Aravis ends up on his back looking up, feeling bruises forming and hearing the empathic complaints of the somewhat squashed Pewter. Twenty feet above him is the Way, like a stage trap-door through which he’s just tripped.
They spend a few seconds looking around and getting their bearings. Around them is a partly-ruined oval coliseum; they lie at one end. There are tall, cracked stone pillars standing in rows near the center. Rising up around them are rings of carved stone steps, which could have seated thousands of spectators on a good day. Above them a huge sun, over twenty times larger than their sun back on Charagan, hangs yellow in a gray sky. Nevertheless, the air around them is cool.
Just as the three adventurers get to their feet, they hear a sound from the other end of the coliseum floor. A couple hundred feet away something is moving, a large reptilian creature, over fifteen feet long, with a dark, translucent blue body. It starts to unwrap itself from one of the pillars with a scaly, rasping sound.
Ernie activates the flying ability of his shield, grabs Kibi, and hauls the dwarf straight up. They touch the plane of the Way and are sucked back into the plane of lightning. Morningstar has “flown” back around in the lightning plane and is just about to go in after her friends, when Ernie and Kibi come popping out of it.
Aravis casts gaseous form on himself and flies slowly upward himself, only remembering when he gets to the Way that creatures made all of vapor (wind walkers, specifically) cannot travel through the portals. It turns out he can’t either.
The blue lizard makes some sniffing noises in his direction, and then starts moving towards him, gracefully, purposefully, and (thank goodness) slowly. There’s a strange clanking sound behind it as it moves, but Aravis doesn’t spend any time wondering about that. He flies back to the ground, dismisses his gaseous form, and casts rope trick such that the opening is right next to the Way out. As he starts to climb the lizard gains speed, now charging in his direction, though still more slowly than it looks like it should.
Aravis makes it half-way up the rope, slips, and falls back down to the ground with a thud. Fearfully he cranes his neck to see the lizard, and notes with relief that he still has a few more seconds before it reaches him. His mood changes, though, as the air around him seems to drop a hundred degrees for a second, chilling him to the core.
What’s more upsetting is that something also dispels his rope trick.
Enough is enough. Aravis decides to stand, fight, and spare no expense. He targets the lizard with power word: stun. Alas, this spell turns out instead to be “power word: discover the enemy has more than 150 hit points.” The lizard is unimpressed.
“Oh, CRAP!” exclaims Aravis.
Back in the plane of lightning, it’s become clear to Morningstar, Ernie and Kibi that Aravis has either not picked up on the “we’re fleeing now” plan, or something has happened to him that will require a rescue. Kibi teleports back to the Way to the plane of air and falls through it, while Ernie grabs hold of Morningstar (so she doesn’t fall twenty feet on arrival) and the two of them plunge into the Way close at hand.
The blue lizard (once called a Lumbrese by the cheering fans who watched it freeze and devour criminals) lumbers toward Aravis. The clanking sound is coming from a pair of thick chains attached to an iron collar around its neck, which once tethered it to one of the pillars. They trail behind it in the dirt, slowing it down. Still a round away, the lizard freezes the air around Aravis a second time, and with a flash of its icy eyes it dispels his endurance. Aravis targets it with a disintegrate spell but the lizard shrugs it off, taking only minimal damage. The monster finally reaches Aravis, freezes him a third time, rips into him with its two front claws, and for good measure chomps down with a mouth full of icicle-like teeth. The wizard finds himself stuck in the creature’s jaws, feeling its icy breath all around him, burning his skin.
The back end of the lizard is engulfed in a pillar of holy Yondallan fire. The front end is struck and blinded by an Ellish darkbeam. Aravis can just see, through a haze of cold and freezing blood, the forms of his friends come to save him.
* *
Kibi emerges into the plane of air. “Guys, quick, come through! Aravis needs our help! He’s probably getting eaten by a dragon! Quick! I can teleport all of you but one. You’ll have to survive in the lightning for just a second, but we’ve got to hurry!”
Flicker volunteers to stay behind, and the rest follow Kibi back into the lightning storm.
* *
Aravis, finding himself pinned and having no desire to spend a second more as a chew-toy, teleports out of the ice lizard’s jaws, landing next to Morningstar.
“I think it’s blind,” says Morningstar approvingly, noting its lack of focus.
The lizard fires off a point-blank greater dispel, not realizing that its blindness isn’t caused by magic, but by honest-to-goodness burned-out eyeballs. (It does at least manage to dispel Ernie’s fly and the remainder of Morningstar’s darkbeam.) It thrashes around, starts to head off in a wrong direction, and bumps its head into a pillar before picking up the enemy’s scent and pegging all three with another freezing attack. Ernie notes that when it does so, its wounds seem to heal.
The halfling steps to the side and hacks twice with Beryn Sur, but the lizard’s hard icy hide deflects both sword strokes. Morningstar gives Aravis some much-needed healing.
The rest of the party falls out of the Way. Grey Wolf tumbles gracefully and Dranko feather falls, leaving Snokas, Step and Kibi to fall in a clumsy heap. Thump. Thump thump. Ouch!
Aravis looks over at Grey Wolf.
“Grey Wolf, I’d like to request an ironstorm around that creature’s back end.”
“I can do that,” answers Grey Wolf.
“We think cold damage will just heal it,” warns Ernie.
“And we think it’s blind,” says Morningstar.
“And we think it’s got pretty thick skin,” says Snokas, as both of his picks fail to penetrate its scales.
Dranko lashes with his whip, but also fails to damage the creature. Step has better luck, stepping forward and slashing between rows of scales with his bastard sword. Blood fountains out, and the lizard hisses and splutters. Its blind frustration is evident as it whips its head back and forth.
Grey Wolf lays down the iron storm, and Aravis delivers the pain. His chain lightning is sucked into the sphere of iron filings, creating a crackling ball of deadly electricity that essentially causes the lizard to explode into icy chunks. Dranko winces in sympathy, knowing how that feels. Grey Wolf ducks as a piece of chain whistles past his head.
Dranko looks down at the mutilated head and neck of the Lumbrese.
“I’m so glad I hurried here so I could save the day,” he mutters.
...to be continued...
You can see more pictures of her here:
http://home.comcast.net/~dorian.hart/elanor_week_1/elanor_week_1_main.html
For the last couple of nights, wife and daughter have been sleeping, at the same time, for as much as three hours in a row. This has afforded me some precious story-hour-writing time, so here's the next installment. Enjoy, and again, thanks so much for all the congratulations. And if you're really feeling nice, you can come over and change a diaper or two any time you want!
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 226
Lightning
“I never thought I’d be so happy to be in the Elemental Plane of Air,” says Kibi. The dwarf, together with the rest of the Company, reclines against the edge of the world and looks up at the now-gray Way.
“That was close,” says Aravis, still panting. His head throbs with the after-ache of heavy Maze use.
“Whaddya mean, close?” asks Dranko. “We had a good twenty seconds to spare!”
“In the future,” says Ernie, “I vote we don’t plug Kibi into any strange machines.”
“At the very least we should have a rule about not destroying Slices,” says Morningstar.
“We knew there was a rule about blocking off Ways,” says Aravis. “Now we know the same things applies to pouring energy into them. An overload is as bad as a blockage.”
“I’m glad the Vree got away,” says Kibi. “I liked them.”
The air is clean and fresh – almost too fresh, really. It feels in their throats and lungs as if the air is extremely cold, though in fact it’s barely cool.
“It’s just more airy than normal air,” observes Ernie. Flicker and Dranko light up Blacktallow cigars, and the smoke hovers in clouds around their heads, dispersing slowly. Ernie wrinkles his nose.
“Do we have a plan?” he asks.
“The Lord of the Roses, I guess,” says Kibi, though it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll find him now.
Since the clock is ticking on Morningstar’s find the path, the group adjusts their gravity and plummets “downward” through the air. They soon reach terminal velocity, but not long after that they see something white coming up fast. A quick reversal of gravities slows them up before they reach it, and they are relieved to see it’s only a puffy cloud. Even though it doesn’t rumble or threaten them, most of the party chooses to go around it. Only Dranko goes through, and he ends up soaked but unharmed. Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud.
A few minutes later they slow down again, as they approach a small flock of strange birds. One of the things, the size of a large hawk, comes whizzing up toward and then past them. It’s not natural, with four wings evenly spaced around its body. Its beak is similarly divided into quadrants. The rest of the flock follows it, buzzing the Company but then fading into specks again as they fly away.
After almost two more hours of falling, they see a patch far below that’s a darker blue than the ambient color of the Slice. Sure enough it’s a glowing blue Way, facing relatively upwards; they could fall through it like a trap door if they so chose, but instead they slow down and come to a halt by falling into the nearest planar edge.
Feeling confident, Dranko ties a rope around his waist, hands it to the others, and jumps into the Way for a quick scout.
When he emerges, his first thought is that he has arrived in an ironstorm – chain lightning field. An electrical storm rages all about him, and though he tries to twist and dodge the bolts, there are just too many. Even before the others have reached their count of five Abernathies, Dranko comes popping out of the Way, screaming and smoking. The rope is nearly burned through.
“It’s the elemental place of electricity, or something,” he reports as Morningstar casts a healing spell. His fiancée then casts another find the path, figuring there must be a better exit than this one – and finds that there is none. With the Way back to the Vree destroyed by Cleaners, the only way out of here is through the electrical storm.
“Oh, crap,” says Aravis. The others express similar sentiments.
For a few minutes they discuss various elemental protection spells. Energy immunity is the best bet, but they don’t have enough for everyone. Energy buffer only goes off once. Protection from elements would be used up in less than a minute. They wonder if they could stuff someone into their bag of holding, or have Kibi and Aravis polymorph into something immune to electricity.
Thinking that maybe the lightning storm was just a localized and passing phenomenon, Morningstar leaps in to make sure all this discussion isn’t a waste of time. A few seconds later she too pops back out with clothes and skin blackened. Now she and Dranko are a matched pair of smoldering adventurers.
“How cute,” says Grey Wolf dryly.
“Not a good look for the wedding, though,” says Flicker.
“It’s a good thing Aravis’s Maze manipulations worked out,” says Morningstar as she now applies the healing to herself. “Otherwise this would have been the last march of the Vree.”
As they seem in no danger here in the plane of air, they decide to wait until the next day, when Morningstar can pray for the energy buffers she needs, and the wizards can be properly loaded with teleports. For the rest of the day they fly around, polish their armor, munch on travel rations and play cards. Weird native birds fly by unconcerned, and puffy white clouds drift up and down the long, narrow Slice.
* *
Dranko wakes the next “morning,” sobbing and sweating. His head is pounding with ache. He doesn’t remember the details of the nightmare, just that he had one, and that it involved tentacles. He groans and mops his brow. The others are up before him, and staring.
“Did anyone else have bad dreams?” he asks, gulping for air and reaching for his water skin.
“I didn’t sleep very well,” says Kibi, motioning vaguely to the complete lack of ground anywhere. “But no, no nightmares.”
“I slept like a baby,” says Aravis, stretching.
Everyone else shakes their heads, and Dranko frowns.
“Well, yesterday was a horrible, horrible day,” says Kibi.
“I wonder if it’s because of the bottle I threw,” says Dranko to himself. Aravis overhears.
“What bottle?” he asks, startled.
“I, uh, I threw a message in a bottle into where the Cleaners were,” admits Dranko.
“Oh, Gods,” moans Aravis. “What was the message?”
“Um. ‘Dranko was here.’”
Aravis just buries his face in his hands.
“It’s like what you do on a ship in the ocean,” says Dranko defensively. “There was a big ocean out there, figuratively speaking, and I had an extra empty bottle...”
“What I do on the ocean is throw up a lot,” says Ernie.
“Don’t do that in the Black Circle’s ocean!” says Aravis to Dranko.
“I guess not,” Dranko concedes. “It felt like someone was stomping through my dreams with spiked boots.”
Morningstar prays and puts her hands on her fiancée’s head, trying to get a sense of what his dreams had been about. She senses nothing specific, but it’s very, very disturbing.
“Do I have any magic lingering on me?” asks Dranko to the wizards. He strips himself of all his magic items, and Aravis casts detect magic. Yes, he has some magic on him, but its type is very strange.
With nothing else to do about it, Dranko and the other spellcasters start to prepare their arsenals for the day. But when Dranko tries to pray, he feels something disturbing in his head. It almost feels like a tentacle is writhing behind his eyes. To his horror he realizes that he can’t achieve the serenity he needs to regain any spells.
“Maybe I’m cursed?” he asks the others. Aravis tries casting a greater dispelling on him, but it does not remove the strange magic the half-orc is radiating. Kibi, though, looking again with detect magic, notices now that the magic is stronger in a thick stripe extending diagonally from Dranko’s upper chest, down to his left knee.
It’s exactly where the Cleaner struck him.
"Restoration might work,” suggests Aravis.
Grey Wolf uses the undead-bane sword to cast the spell on Dranko; it clears Dranko’s head, but the magic is still there. Ernie examines Dranko’s body and determines that it’s not a physical ailment, while Grey Wolf speculates that they’ll have to restore him every day. Maybe greater restoration would work? At least now, albeit with difficulty, Dranko is able to reach the calm necessary to renew his spells.
An hour later, heads full of prayers and dweomercraft, the Company is ready to execute their plan. Kibi, Ernie, Morningstar and Aravis all get energy immunity: lightning from Morningstar, along with some endurances, just in case. They leap through the Way, and are soon floating in the violent electrical storm. It’s just like Morningstar remembers it from the day before, though with less burning pain. Instead it feels like she’s being softly punched from all directions. She casts find the path to the nearest exit.
“This is cool!” exclaims Aravis, looking around and grinning.
“That way,” says Morningstar. She points in a random-seeming direction, since there are no landmarks of any kind, and no visual clues to offer any sense of perspective at all. With the Ellish priestess in the lead, they change their gravities and plummet through the storm.
They can’t see very far in front of them, and the ambient blue-white light here isn’t very distinct from the glowing blue of the Ways. So it is that after a mere 30 seconds, the Way out comes upon them in a flash! Morningstar spots it soonest and is just able to alter her gravitational direction, and so avoids falling in, but her warning to the others is lost in the crackling din. Ernie, Kibi and Aravis go shooting right into the Way, and the sucking blackness between the Slices.
In hindsight, it’s a darn good thing that one’s momentum is cancelled out on a trip through the Ways. The three of them pop out of a horizontal-facing Way hovering twenty feet in the air and fall unceremoniously onto hard-packed dirt. Aravis ends up on his back looking up, feeling bruises forming and hearing the empathic complaints of the somewhat squashed Pewter. Twenty feet above him is the Way, like a stage trap-door through which he’s just tripped.
They spend a few seconds looking around and getting their bearings. Around them is a partly-ruined oval coliseum; they lie at one end. There are tall, cracked stone pillars standing in rows near the center. Rising up around them are rings of carved stone steps, which could have seated thousands of spectators on a good day. Above them a huge sun, over twenty times larger than their sun back on Charagan, hangs yellow in a gray sky. Nevertheless, the air around them is cool.
Just as the three adventurers get to their feet, they hear a sound from the other end of the coliseum floor. A couple hundred feet away something is moving, a large reptilian creature, over fifteen feet long, with a dark, translucent blue body. It starts to unwrap itself from one of the pillars with a scaly, rasping sound.
Ernie activates the flying ability of his shield, grabs Kibi, and hauls the dwarf straight up. They touch the plane of the Way and are sucked back into the plane of lightning. Morningstar has “flown” back around in the lightning plane and is just about to go in after her friends, when Ernie and Kibi come popping out of it.
Aravis casts gaseous form on himself and flies slowly upward himself, only remembering when he gets to the Way that creatures made all of vapor (wind walkers, specifically) cannot travel through the portals. It turns out he can’t either.
The blue lizard makes some sniffing noises in his direction, and then starts moving towards him, gracefully, purposefully, and (thank goodness) slowly. There’s a strange clanking sound behind it as it moves, but Aravis doesn’t spend any time wondering about that. He flies back to the ground, dismisses his gaseous form, and casts rope trick such that the opening is right next to the Way out. As he starts to climb the lizard gains speed, now charging in his direction, though still more slowly than it looks like it should.
Aravis makes it half-way up the rope, slips, and falls back down to the ground with a thud. Fearfully he cranes his neck to see the lizard, and notes with relief that he still has a few more seconds before it reaches him. His mood changes, though, as the air around him seems to drop a hundred degrees for a second, chilling him to the core.
What’s more upsetting is that something also dispels his rope trick.
Enough is enough. Aravis decides to stand, fight, and spare no expense. He targets the lizard with power word: stun. Alas, this spell turns out instead to be “power word: discover the enemy has more than 150 hit points.” The lizard is unimpressed.
“Oh, CRAP!” exclaims Aravis.
Back in the plane of lightning, it’s become clear to Morningstar, Ernie and Kibi that Aravis has either not picked up on the “we’re fleeing now” plan, or something has happened to him that will require a rescue. Kibi teleports back to the Way to the plane of air and falls through it, while Ernie grabs hold of Morningstar (so she doesn’t fall twenty feet on arrival) and the two of them plunge into the Way close at hand.
The blue lizard (once called a Lumbrese by the cheering fans who watched it freeze and devour criminals) lumbers toward Aravis. The clanking sound is coming from a pair of thick chains attached to an iron collar around its neck, which once tethered it to one of the pillars. They trail behind it in the dirt, slowing it down. Still a round away, the lizard freezes the air around Aravis a second time, and with a flash of its icy eyes it dispels his endurance. Aravis targets it with a disintegrate spell but the lizard shrugs it off, taking only minimal damage. The monster finally reaches Aravis, freezes him a third time, rips into him with its two front claws, and for good measure chomps down with a mouth full of icicle-like teeth. The wizard finds himself stuck in the creature’s jaws, feeling its icy breath all around him, burning his skin.
The back end of the lizard is engulfed in a pillar of holy Yondallan fire. The front end is struck and blinded by an Ellish darkbeam. Aravis can just see, through a haze of cold and freezing blood, the forms of his friends come to save him.
* *
Kibi emerges into the plane of air. “Guys, quick, come through! Aravis needs our help! He’s probably getting eaten by a dragon! Quick! I can teleport all of you but one. You’ll have to survive in the lightning for just a second, but we’ve got to hurry!”
Flicker volunteers to stay behind, and the rest follow Kibi back into the lightning storm.
* *
Aravis, finding himself pinned and having no desire to spend a second more as a chew-toy, teleports out of the ice lizard’s jaws, landing next to Morningstar.
“I think it’s blind,” says Morningstar approvingly, noting its lack of focus.
The lizard fires off a point-blank greater dispel, not realizing that its blindness isn’t caused by magic, but by honest-to-goodness burned-out eyeballs. (It does at least manage to dispel Ernie’s fly and the remainder of Morningstar’s darkbeam.) It thrashes around, starts to head off in a wrong direction, and bumps its head into a pillar before picking up the enemy’s scent and pegging all three with another freezing attack. Ernie notes that when it does so, its wounds seem to heal.
The halfling steps to the side and hacks twice with Beryn Sur, but the lizard’s hard icy hide deflects both sword strokes. Morningstar gives Aravis some much-needed healing.
The rest of the party falls out of the Way. Grey Wolf tumbles gracefully and Dranko feather falls, leaving Snokas, Step and Kibi to fall in a clumsy heap. Thump. Thump thump. Ouch!
Aravis looks over at Grey Wolf.
“Grey Wolf, I’d like to request an ironstorm around that creature’s back end.”
“I can do that,” answers Grey Wolf.
“We think cold damage will just heal it,” warns Ernie.
“And we think it’s blind,” says Morningstar.
“And we think it’s got pretty thick skin,” says Snokas, as both of his picks fail to penetrate its scales.
Dranko lashes with his whip, but also fails to damage the creature. Step has better luck, stepping forward and slashing between rows of scales with his bastard sword. Blood fountains out, and the lizard hisses and splutters. Its blind frustration is evident as it whips its head back and forth.
Grey Wolf lays down the iron storm, and Aravis delivers the pain. His chain lightning is sucked into the sphere of iron filings, creating a crackling ball of deadly electricity that essentially causes the lizard to explode into icy chunks. Dranko winces in sympathy, knowing how that feels. Grey Wolf ducks as a piece of chain whistles past his head.
Dranko looks down at the mutilated head and neck of the Lumbrese.
“I’m so glad I hurried here so I could save the day,” he mutters.
...to be continued...
Quartermoon
First Post
Elanor is a beautiful name, and Elanor is a beautiful little girl. Congratulations to you both! And I would happily change diapers for you.
Mine are 8 and 11 now, and I can honestly say they are the best thing about my life, and worth all the diapers and sleepless nights in the world.
Welcome to the real adventure!
Mine are 8 and 11 now, and I can honestly say they are the best thing about my life, and worth all the diapers and sleepless nights in the world.
Welcome to the real adventure!
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
Glad to hear you are adjusting. Enjoy it while you can, as soon as you get used to it she will probably change her sleep pattern.
So, can we set up a diaper change exchange for updates like Piratecat's art updates? I'd gladly change a diaper or two for an update.
So, can we set up a diaper change exchange for updates like Piratecat's art updates? I'd gladly change a diaper or two for an update.
KidCthulhu
First Post
Sagiro said:And if you're really feeling nice, you can come over and change a diaper or two any time you want!
I already did one! Do I get an update?
Nyarlathotep
Explorer
Bump!
A story-hour this great deserves to be on page 1.
A story-hour this great deserves to be on page 1.
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