Shilsen's Eberron SH (Finished - The Last Word : 9/20/15)
shilsen
Adventurer
The next morning, while the others have a cold breakfast and prepare their spells, Six casts around the camp and eventually discovers that the runehounds had been following the group's tracks for about a mile and had split up to attack the camp from all side. Six follows their tracks south until they eventually bend east, heading in the same direction that the group will go. When he returns to the camp and informs the others, Trillia says, “They’re definitely from Yarkuun Draal. If not currently from the city, they must have been released into the surrounding area by the creatures there.”
“So what exactly can we expect to run into there?” asks Gareth.
“Well, the last time I was there - and bear in mind that was a decade ago - we saw many kinds of aberrations. Including some I haven’t encountered anywhere else. There were a lot of strange plants, especially poisonous ones. You guys did prepare some anti-poison spells, right?”
“I’m immune to poison,” says Luna, a little smugly, “But I do have a couple prepared for the rest of you.”
“Same here,” confirms Korm, while putting even more of an edge to his sword. Sheathing it, he says, “This is enchanted to be particularly effective against aberrations.”
“You’ll need it,” promises Trillia.
After a little more discussion, the adventurers break camp and head out. The trail that they are following heads directly southeast, so they continue along it. As they travel, they notice that whatever few animals they had seen in the area have disappeared. Not a single bird flies overhead, with the only ones visible being little specks in the sky miles to the north and west.
After about a mile, they catch sight of a blue expanse a couple of miles directly to the south, which Trillia identifies as the ocean. At almost the same time they spot a huge crack in the earth about a mile away, which dwarfs the small crevasses they have seen along the way.
The gorge is directly in the group’s path, and as they near it they realize exactly how large it is, stretching approximately ten miles. As the trail they are on nears the edge of the gorge, they can see it descend into a cutting, like a small nick cut into the side of the huge blade that forms the canyon. More such cuttings are visible to north and south, with other trails leading into them.
As they enter the cutting, the group finds that either wall has carvings set into it, depicting goblinoid figures in the full panoply of war. Most seem to be hobgoblins, but there are larger figures that seem to be bugbears, and some goblins are represented too. It is difficult to be sure, since thousands of years of erosion has worn away at the carvings, and most have been at least partially defaced.
Passing through the cutting, the adventurers emerge into a large stone courtyard, which gives them their first good view of the inside of the gorge. At the bottom of the canyon is an inlet of the ocean, extending nearly two miles and forming a natural harbor. Descending in terraced levels from the top of the gorge to the inlet at the bottom, along the two inner walls of the canyon, is a huge city. It extends horizontally from the sea for miles into the gorge.
Parts of the city have fallen into rubble, but the majority of it is in remarkably good condition. Great statues and elaborate arches decorate the entrance to a labyrinth of caverns and dwellings. In fact, in certain ways the city boasts more evident life than the plateau top on either side of the gorge. Partly natural and partly artificial streams flow along the sides of the gorge and descend into cisterns that overflow into decorative fountains. Small gardens and collections of lush palms decorate the airy walkways and the balconies that line the various levels of the city. The only thing missing are any moving denizens, of which the adventurers see none around them.
“Welcome to Yarkuun Draal, jewel of the Dhakaani!” says Trillia, smiling at the expressions on her companions’ faces, ranging from mildly impressed to awed.
“Bigger than I expected,” says Six. “And I don’t see any signs of aberrations.”
Korm, looking around with an expression of wariness, says, “They are here. I feel a … wrongness here.” Beside him, the bear Luna growls in agreement.
“I’m sure we’ll see some soon enough,” says Trillia. She points out that the path leading down from the cleft descends to blend into one of the many horizontal streets that separate the various levels of the city and that there is a large courtyard a few hundred feet to the north. “Let’s head down there and decide what seems a likely direction to explore.”
The group proceeds along the path. Within moments of stepping onto the horizontal street, the group has its first violent encounter. They are passing beside a large stretch of vegetation, when long, green tentacles lash out at them. A couple of the adventurers are struck painfully, discovering that not only are the tentacles lined with leaves which have long barbs along their edges, but the barbs contain poison. Most of them shake of the effects, or are simply immune as Six and Luna are, but Korm feels the poison slow his reflexes and sap his vitality.
The source of the attacks are revealed to be four animated bushes, shuffling forward on ambulatory roots, more tentacles lashing out as they come. Even as the Angels strike back, four more such bushes appear at the edge of the level above, their long tentacles striking down as well.
The Angels quickly respond, Luna using an entangle to hold the plants on the upper level immobile, while Nameless summons some of his bison to butt, chew and trample them. Gareth and Six settle for slashing apart the bushes on the lower level, while Korm sends an arc of lightning racing across them.
Ironically, Trillia is the one who seems most surprised and twice fails to cast a spell while avoiding the storm of lashing tentacles*. Nameless diplomatically pretends not to notice.
Despite her failure, the plants are quickly dispatched, but not before all of the group have been wounded. As soon as the last plant collapses, the adventurers quickly tend to their wounds, especially those that might have been poisoned. With Luna, the only skilled healer in the group, in her bear form and unable to help, Korm** has to take recourse to his magic to prevent further effects. “That was a painful experience,” he says.
“Yes,” agrees Trillia, “And that was just the first of many, I’m sure.”
“Oh joy!”
* I rolled a 1 and 3 for her Concentration checks
** Rolled two 2s for his Fortitude saves, requiring him to use two action pts. Korm’s player, Michael Tree, wasn’t around, so it was clearly a bad day for the NPCs I was rolling for.
“So what exactly can we expect to run into there?” asks Gareth.
“Well, the last time I was there - and bear in mind that was a decade ago - we saw many kinds of aberrations. Including some I haven’t encountered anywhere else. There were a lot of strange plants, especially poisonous ones. You guys did prepare some anti-poison spells, right?”
“I’m immune to poison,” says Luna, a little smugly, “But I do have a couple prepared for the rest of you.”
“Same here,” confirms Korm, while putting even more of an edge to his sword. Sheathing it, he says, “This is enchanted to be particularly effective against aberrations.”
“You’ll need it,” promises Trillia.
After a little more discussion, the adventurers break camp and head out. The trail that they are following heads directly southeast, so they continue along it. As they travel, they notice that whatever few animals they had seen in the area have disappeared. Not a single bird flies overhead, with the only ones visible being little specks in the sky miles to the north and west.
After about a mile, they catch sight of a blue expanse a couple of miles directly to the south, which Trillia identifies as the ocean. At almost the same time they spot a huge crack in the earth about a mile away, which dwarfs the small crevasses they have seen along the way.
The gorge is directly in the group’s path, and as they near it they realize exactly how large it is, stretching approximately ten miles. As the trail they are on nears the edge of the gorge, they can see it descend into a cutting, like a small nick cut into the side of the huge blade that forms the canyon. More such cuttings are visible to north and south, with other trails leading into them.
As they enter the cutting, the group finds that either wall has carvings set into it, depicting goblinoid figures in the full panoply of war. Most seem to be hobgoblins, but there are larger figures that seem to be bugbears, and some goblins are represented too. It is difficult to be sure, since thousands of years of erosion has worn away at the carvings, and most have been at least partially defaced.
Passing through the cutting, the adventurers emerge into a large stone courtyard, which gives them their first good view of the inside of the gorge. At the bottom of the canyon is an inlet of the ocean, extending nearly two miles and forming a natural harbor. Descending in terraced levels from the top of the gorge to the inlet at the bottom, along the two inner walls of the canyon, is a huge city. It extends horizontally from the sea for miles into the gorge.
Parts of the city have fallen into rubble, but the majority of it is in remarkably good condition. Great statues and elaborate arches decorate the entrance to a labyrinth of caverns and dwellings. In fact, in certain ways the city boasts more evident life than the plateau top on either side of the gorge. Partly natural and partly artificial streams flow along the sides of the gorge and descend into cisterns that overflow into decorative fountains. Small gardens and collections of lush palms decorate the airy walkways and the balconies that line the various levels of the city. The only thing missing are any moving denizens, of which the adventurers see none around them.
“Welcome to Yarkuun Draal, jewel of the Dhakaani!” says Trillia, smiling at the expressions on her companions’ faces, ranging from mildly impressed to awed.
“Bigger than I expected,” says Six. “And I don’t see any signs of aberrations.”
Korm, looking around with an expression of wariness, says, “They are here. I feel a … wrongness here.” Beside him, the bear Luna growls in agreement.
“I’m sure we’ll see some soon enough,” says Trillia. She points out that the path leading down from the cleft descends to blend into one of the many horizontal streets that separate the various levels of the city and that there is a large courtyard a few hundred feet to the north. “Let’s head down there and decide what seems a likely direction to explore.”
The group proceeds along the path. Within moments of stepping onto the horizontal street, the group has its first violent encounter. They are passing beside a large stretch of vegetation, when long, green tentacles lash out at them. A couple of the adventurers are struck painfully, discovering that not only are the tentacles lined with leaves which have long barbs along their edges, but the barbs contain poison. Most of them shake of the effects, or are simply immune as Six and Luna are, but Korm feels the poison slow his reflexes and sap his vitality.
The source of the attacks are revealed to be four animated bushes, shuffling forward on ambulatory roots, more tentacles lashing out as they come. Even as the Angels strike back, four more such bushes appear at the edge of the level above, their long tentacles striking down as well.
The Angels quickly respond, Luna using an entangle to hold the plants on the upper level immobile, while Nameless summons some of his bison to butt, chew and trample them. Gareth and Six settle for slashing apart the bushes on the lower level, while Korm sends an arc of lightning racing across them.
Ironically, Trillia is the one who seems most surprised and twice fails to cast a spell while avoiding the storm of lashing tentacles*. Nameless diplomatically pretends not to notice.
Despite her failure, the plants are quickly dispatched, but not before all of the group have been wounded. As soon as the last plant collapses, the adventurers quickly tend to their wounds, especially those that might have been poisoned. With Luna, the only skilled healer in the group, in her bear form and unable to help, Korm** has to take recourse to his magic to prevent further effects. “That was a painful experience,” he says.
“Yes,” agrees Trillia, “And that was just the first of many, I’m sure.”
“Oh joy!”
* I rolled a 1 and 3 for her Concentration checks
** Rolled two 2s for his Fortitude saves, requiring him to use two action pts. Korm’s player, Michael Tree, wasn’t around, so it was clearly a bad day for the NPCs I was rolling for.
shilsen
Adventurer
We aren't playing again until the 24th of June, so there'll be a bit of a gap until the next segment.
I'm canvassing for ideas for things that I can use in Yarkuun Draal, so (if you're not a player), please stop by this thread and toss in your thoughts.
All increased suffering for the PCs will be much appreciated
!
I'm canvassing for ideas for things that I can use in Yarkuun Draal, so (if you're not a player), please stop by this thread and toss in your thoughts.
All increased suffering for the PCs will be much appreciated
!
shilsen
Adventurer
Session 33 - Prodding Sphincter and Taking Names
With the strange plants dead and healing taken care off, the adventurers continue towards the courtyard they head been heading for. Six notices that Korm is still moving a little sluggishly* and jokes, “I didn’t think you could get any slower.” The big orc grunts at the equally large but much nimbler warforged. “All of us can’t be acrobats.”
Reaching the courtyard, the Angels find that it contains one of the many fountains that dot the city, this one with a stream of water descending to it from the higher terraces of the city, which then flows out again and down towards the stream at the bottom of the gorge.
Examining the fountain, which seems to have been carved in one piece out of the stone of the plateau and has examples of the often abstract Dhakaani art running around it, Six notices that beneath about two feet of water it is full of a translucent, milky-white substance. He is just about to drop a piece of rock to see what it is, when Nameless stops him. “I’m quite sure it is an ooze of some kind.”
The alienist looks around and asks the group, “As long as it’s not attacking us, can anyone think of a good reason to bother it?”
“No,” replies Trillia, who has been looking around with interest. “I suggest we check the nearby buildings and then spread out further, if we find nothing. Last time I was here - and admittedly that was years ago - we found that the aberrations that lived on the surface did so in clumps spread across the city rather than occupying all of it. And most lived below the surface.”
Everybody agrees and the group randomly picks a building and enters. Over the better part of an hour, they check four buildings. Each is uninhabited and has had most of its contents removed. Only carvings that are physically part of the structures remain, with nearly a quarter of them having been defaced. Though there is less dust that might have been expected in such a place, it does coat the various chambers, revealing that there has been no recent passage through them.
The dust in the sixth building shows the first signs of life in Yarkuun Draal besides the strange plants. There are clear signs of passage, the majority of them being halfling-sized tracks, thought there is one set that is larger than human-sized, and one non-humanoid track left by something that slithers along the ground. Most of the tracks lead inwards, though the smaller ones lead both in and out.
The Angels follow the tracks to the rearmost room, the back wall of which reveals the mouth of a large tunnel, ten feet tall and wide, leading into darkness as far as their various forms of vision can see. The tunnel is quite rough in shape, and examination reveals that it was made from the far side, rather than being made from the building.
“Something burrowed in here?” asks Six, looking into the tunnel and studying it with his head-lamp.
“Or things,” says Trillia. “There are a few aberrations that can burrow through rock and leave a tunnel behind them.”
“Delvers, for example,” adds Nameless.
“Delvers?” asks Gareth.
“Yeah. Big creatures, as wide as this tunnel. They secrete a slime that dissolves stone.” Nameless nods at Gareth's plate mail armor and Kizmet. “And metal. Even magical metal.”
“Great!” grimaces Korm, looking at his own greatsword. “I believe mine is resistant to such effects.” I hope.
After some more discussion and the casting of numerous protective spells, the group heads into the tunnel. Six takes point, an extensible pole in hand to check the ground ahead, with Korm right behind him. Luna’s ursine bulk fills the tunnel behind them, with the two alienists behind her, and Gareth brings up the rear.
About a hundred feet in, they encounter a 5 ft wide archway, a soft pink in color that clearly sets it aside from the stone of the tunnel before it, which runs around the tunnel and the floor. Beyond the archway, the tunnel - which has the same pink color - becomes absolutely smooth. A series of greenish-blue striations run along the tunnel walls from the archway.
Six prods the archway carefully, having no effect, and then the group moves up to study it. It is hard, but has a little more give than the stone. Six scratches at it and finds he is easily able to do so. He also digs the knife into it with some effort, penetrating an inch (the distance the archway stands out from the stone before it) before he stops. While he is doing this, he feels a very slow, soft movement, or rather a throb deep in the material. After a few seconds, it happens again and continues to do so at regular intervals.
“I think the archway has a pulse,” says Six.
“What?”
“Yeah. I think it’s alive in some way.”
“I’m not really surprised,” says Trillia. “The daelkyr, and less so their followers, take great pleasure in crafting aberrant - pun unintended - forms of life.”
“Those could be veins, ” says Nameless, pointing at the striations, drawing a growl of disgust and a shake of her head from Luna.
“On the bright side,” says Six, “I don’t see any big teeth or a...”, when he is interrupted by another growl from Luna, this time a warning one.
“What is it, Luna? You smell something?” The bear shakes her head and lifts a paw to tap her ear, before waving it in the direction the group was heading.
“You hear something? Coming towards us?” Luna gives as much of a shrug as a bear can.
The discussion quickly becomes moot, with everyone hearing the click of crossbows, as half a dozen bolts come flying down the tunnel.
***
The leader of the dolgrims crouched in the dark chamber smiles as two of the people standing in the tunnel are hit by the bolts, and motions the remaining dolgrim forward.
Then all four of its eyes widen in shock as one of the humanoids gestures and pronounces some words. Two large tentacled bison appear in the tunnel and charge into the chamber, goring and trampling the shocked dolgrims. Behind them comes the humanoid that seems to be made partly of metal and wood, striking out with a long chain weapon to drop the closest dolgrim.
The humanoid that summoned the bison shouts, “Surrender and you will be ... um, just surrender.” The dolgrim leader has no time to be surprised that the humanoid actually speaks fluent daelkyr, since the call to surrender is followed by a growling bear and another humanoid wielding a sword longer than any of the dolgrims are tall. They charge into the chamber and respectively decapitate and rip in half the two dolgrim fleeing for the sphincter that makes the primary exit.
The leader screams and turns to flee, but it’s too late. The last thing it sees are the gleaming spikes on the chain that whips past its left ears and then snaps back.
***
“You know,” says Trillia, as the adventurers look around the large chamber, now littered with the bodies of dolgrims, “Next time someone asks for a surrender, maybe you should give them a chance to do so.”
“They’re dolgrims,” says Korm grimly, wiping his sword on a rag. “You wouldn’t be getting any information off them.”
Luna growls in agreement and then carefully nibbles one of the corpses. Hmm, tastes like chicken.
The oval-shaped chamber is about fifty feet across, its surfaces made of the same living material that lined the tunnel. The only things it contains is some crudely made furniture and a couple of wooden crates. A small opening on either side leads to a smaller chamber. The more unusual exit is in the far wall from the tunnel entrance, a ten foot wide sphincter.
Korm, having checked one of the smaller chambers, returns and says, “Great! I found their privy. And they’re storing their refuse too. And no, I don’t want to know why.”
In the other one, Six stands over six wooden tubs and notes that each is stuffed full of raw, bloody, very fatty, meat. He carefully prods it with his pole. When there is no response, he says, “Well, at least it doesn’t seem alive.”
Gareth, standing near him, says, “It isn’t evil either.”
“Good to know,” says Nameless sarcastically from the doorway behind him. “Hey, everybody, their larder isn’t evil!”
Six ignores them and takes a sample of the meat, before rejoining the others. As they gather near the sphincter, it slides open, revealing the chamber beyond, from which a foul odor emanates.
The chamber is at least as large as the previous one, illuminated by green light emanating from three large crystals embedded into the ceiling. The veins/striations along the walls and ceiling are much thicker here. There is another large sphincter on the far wall and a slightly smaller one on the left wall. But what draws the group’s attention are the three circular pools in the room. Each is over a dozen feet in diameter, filled with a dark fluid that is constantly bubbling, though there is no appreciable change in temperature here. The liquid also flows from each pool to the other through one of three channels that link them in a triangular shape. Another channel carries fluid into each pool from a hole near the ceiling. Each pool contains something - or things, since there appear to be a number of them - that is floating on the surface, but from the entrance it is unclear what they are.
After a moment’s hesitation, the adventurers enter. As soon as they do, a number of them feel a sense of deep, abiding depression overcome them. Trillia turns and asks, “Do any of you feel really, really crappy?”
Six, for whom this is a very new emotion, shakes his head and says, “I don’t feel good. I feel like this is ... futile. Why is that?”
Gareth, having been unaffected, asks, “What’s going on?”
Korm rubs his temple and says, “Probably a trap of some sort. And yes, I feel lousy.”
Nameless casts a detect magic and scans the area. Looking at the crystals, he says, “They’re giving off transmutation, divination and enchantment auras.” And a second later, he adds, “And just created a spell effect. Each of them. Enchantment.”
Luna, previously unaffected, is now affected and growls her irritation. After some experimentation, including backing up and letting the sphincter close and waiting till the effect passes (which takes five minutes), the adventurers quickly work out that the crystals each emanate some effect every few seconds, which creates the depressing emotion. With three such effects occurring regularly, everyone is affected sooner or later.
Nameless’ experience is a little different to the others. A few seconds after as he is affected, he has a distinct feeling of something going “click” in the back of his head. There is no recurrence to the effect for him.
Resigning themselves to the feeling, the Angels move into the chamber, experiencing the strange amalgam of depression, curiosity and apprehension at the same time. As they reach and gaze into the pools, Luna growls what can only be an ursine version of “Oh, yuck!”, summing up the group’s general response.
The pools each contain two or three roughly humanoid figures, ranging in size from about goblin-sized to slightly larger than a human. It is difficult to say if they are really humanoid, since none has four complete limbs, and they keep (slowly, but certainly) changing in form, though retaining a basic humanoid template. Parts of their bodies literally wash away in the bubbling fluid and then reform. As the Angels watch, they see skin and muscle dissolve, revealing throbbing organs, oozing brains, and squirming intestines.
The only two constants about all the creatures are their eyes, which are completely clear and bulging out of their sockets, and their gaping mouths, which have a thick glutinous film covering them. Each creature also has at least one individual feature that is unchanging, which is linked somehow to the other inhabitants of the pools. Each pool also holds a number of much smaller creatures, which resemble nothing so much as small jellyfish. Most are simply floating back and forth in the bubbling water, but some are attached to parts of the larger creatures. Whichever part they attach to never seems to change, and also seem to be the most aberrant parts of the larger creatures. One has a pair of mandibles, like those on a giant ant, attached to its chin, while another has insect-like feet growing out of its chest, while a third has either a muscular tail or tentacle attached to its back.
Trillia, kneeling to take a lower look but carefully staying some distance away, says, “It’s some kind of a transformative process.” Her voice holds much more fascination than disgust.
“Is this common with aberrations?” asks Six.
Nameless replies. “The daelkyr treat the crafting of living creatures ... or rather, living intelligent creatures ... in new shapes and ways as an art form. Some aberrations also practice it. The processes have never been really worked out, though some mages have found ways to mimic them. Somewhat.”
Trillia adds, “I’ve never seen a process like this.”
“Do you know what that fluid is?” asks Six. At her reply of "No," he fishes out the piece of meat recovered from the previous room and drops it in. It bobs on the surface, a couple of the small jellyfish-like creatures floating up to nuzzle at it and then moving away.
“Stop throwing things in there,” says Gareth. “Whatever the creature that’s doing this, I think it’s safe to say that it’s evil. These are probably innocent creatures being tortured.”
Six doesn’t respond, pulling his bow off his back and putting an arrow into one of the jellyfish-things. It explodes under the impact, leaving only tiny specks that are lost in the churning water.
Korm, who has been kneeling near another pool with an expression of increasing distaste and anger, stands up and says grimly. “Gareth is right. If you listen carefully, you can hear them screaming through that stuff on their mouths. We need to put them out of their misery.”
Luna gives another growl and lifts a paw to point at the meat Six threw in. The meat has a soft pink covering over it. Gareth peers at it and then says, “By the Flame, it’s actually growing skin!” He looks again and adds, “And so is your arrow!”
“That does it!” says Korm. “Six - if you will?”
Six nods and carefully takes aim at one of the larger creatures, before putting an arrow neatly through its right eye. The arrow sinks deep, punching through its skull. The creature doesn’t make a sound, but after a second its other eye closes, followed shortly by its mouth. Six proceeds to do the same to the others in the pool and then move to the next one. Behind him, there is the sound of a weapon chopping into flesh as Korm uses his sword on the ones near him.
After the distasteful task is over, Trillia takes a sample of the liquid from a pool, as does Nameless. After doing so, she says, “Interesting. The liquid’s flowing out of the pools and not in.” She points at the streams and adds, “And up the walls.”
“Whatever’s doing this must have very powerful magic to hand,” says Gareth.
“Actually,” corrects Nameless, “Aberrations don’t necessarily use magic - or at least not the kind we use - in their shaping of other creatures. Much of what they use replicates magic and can be detected or identified using spells, but is not magic per se. That liquid gives off a number of magical auras, but it’s some sort of a biological mix, I’m sure, not magical.”
Six interrupts, having had something else pointed out to him by Luna. “Umm - guys? Remember that meat I threw in?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s started growing hair now. I don’t know about you, but I’m leaving before it climbs out and bites me.”
Nobody disagrees, and the group moves on to the sphincter in the left wall. Six moves up to it, and when this one does not open, pokes it with his pole**. At which point the sphincter opens slightly and fires a cloud of green gas that envelops Six and Korm (who was standing next to him).
After a second of shock, Luna gives what sounds as close to a laugh as a bear can, while Gareth turns to Nameless and says, “Did the door just fart on him?”
Korm quickly backs out of the mist, which now fills a ten foot wide space, and snorts, “Gah! That’s a stinking cloud.”
Gareth smirks and taps the ring of adaptation that they found on the island. “Good thing I can’t be bothered by things like that.”
Six, who has followed Korm, says, “Then why don’t you try getting it open?”
“Okay.” Gareth unsheathes Kizmet and walks into the mist, the thin shell of constant fresh air around him keeping the vapors at bay. Setting his feet, he hits the sphincter once.
As soon as he does so, a horizontal gap opens in the sphincter. A flat, muscular appendage over two feet in length shoots out of the gap and promptly smacks Gareth across the face. Though his helm prevents serious damage, its wet surface touches his flesh and he feels an acidic burn.
From outside the mist, Korm asks, “What’s going on?”
“Aargh - the door licked me! ”
“What?!”
Gareth hacks at the appendage and shouts, “Stop asking questions and get in here!”
Korm steps into the mist, holding his breath. After a momentary pause at seeing Gareth engaged with what does really look like a huge tongue, Korm joins him and the two quickly slice it into pieces. The tattered appendage retracts and after a couple of blows, the sphincter slides open, even as the stinking cloud fades away, revealing the chamber beyond.
* Korm was down to 8 Dex for the entire session, from his normally staggering height of 10 Dex.
** First session I've ever run where a player got to say, “I prod the sphincter with my pole.”
With the strange plants dead and healing taken care off, the adventurers continue towards the courtyard they head been heading for. Six notices that Korm is still moving a little sluggishly* and jokes, “I didn’t think you could get any slower.” The big orc grunts at the equally large but much nimbler warforged. “All of us can’t be acrobats.”
Reaching the courtyard, the Angels find that it contains one of the many fountains that dot the city, this one with a stream of water descending to it from the higher terraces of the city, which then flows out again and down towards the stream at the bottom of the gorge.
Examining the fountain, which seems to have been carved in one piece out of the stone of the plateau and has examples of the often abstract Dhakaani art running around it, Six notices that beneath about two feet of water it is full of a translucent, milky-white substance. He is just about to drop a piece of rock to see what it is, when Nameless stops him. “I’m quite sure it is an ooze of some kind.”
The alienist looks around and asks the group, “As long as it’s not attacking us, can anyone think of a good reason to bother it?”
“No,” replies Trillia, who has been looking around with interest. “I suggest we check the nearby buildings and then spread out further, if we find nothing. Last time I was here - and admittedly that was years ago - we found that the aberrations that lived on the surface did so in clumps spread across the city rather than occupying all of it. And most lived below the surface.”
Everybody agrees and the group randomly picks a building and enters. Over the better part of an hour, they check four buildings. Each is uninhabited and has had most of its contents removed. Only carvings that are physically part of the structures remain, with nearly a quarter of them having been defaced. Though there is less dust that might have been expected in such a place, it does coat the various chambers, revealing that there has been no recent passage through them.
The dust in the sixth building shows the first signs of life in Yarkuun Draal besides the strange plants. There are clear signs of passage, the majority of them being halfling-sized tracks, thought there is one set that is larger than human-sized, and one non-humanoid track left by something that slithers along the ground. Most of the tracks lead inwards, though the smaller ones lead both in and out.
The Angels follow the tracks to the rearmost room, the back wall of which reveals the mouth of a large tunnel, ten feet tall and wide, leading into darkness as far as their various forms of vision can see. The tunnel is quite rough in shape, and examination reveals that it was made from the far side, rather than being made from the building.
“Something burrowed in here?” asks Six, looking into the tunnel and studying it with his head-lamp.
“Or things,” says Trillia. “There are a few aberrations that can burrow through rock and leave a tunnel behind them.”
“Delvers, for example,” adds Nameless.
“Delvers?” asks Gareth.
“Yeah. Big creatures, as wide as this tunnel. They secrete a slime that dissolves stone.” Nameless nods at Gareth's plate mail armor and Kizmet. “And metal. Even magical metal.”
“Great!” grimaces Korm, looking at his own greatsword. “I believe mine is resistant to such effects.” I hope.
After some more discussion and the casting of numerous protective spells, the group heads into the tunnel. Six takes point, an extensible pole in hand to check the ground ahead, with Korm right behind him. Luna’s ursine bulk fills the tunnel behind them, with the two alienists behind her, and Gareth brings up the rear.
About a hundred feet in, they encounter a 5 ft wide archway, a soft pink in color that clearly sets it aside from the stone of the tunnel before it, which runs around the tunnel and the floor. Beyond the archway, the tunnel - which has the same pink color - becomes absolutely smooth. A series of greenish-blue striations run along the tunnel walls from the archway.
Six prods the archway carefully, having no effect, and then the group moves up to study it. It is hard, but has a little more give than the stone. Six scratches at it and finds he is easily able to do so. He also digs the knife into it with some effort, penetrating an inch (the distance the archway stands out from the stone before it) before he stops. While he is doing this, he feels a very slow, soft movement, or rather a throb deep in the material. After a few seconds, it happens again and continues to do so at regular intervals.
“I think the archway has a pulse,” says Six.
“What?”
“Yeah. I think it’s alive in some way.”
“I’m not really surprised,” says Trillia. “The daelkyr, and less so their followers, take great pleasure in crafting aberrant - pun unintended - forms of life.”
“Those could be veins, ” says Nameless, pointing at the striations, drawing a growl of disgust and a shake of her head from Luna.
“On the bright side,” says Six, “I don’t see any big teeth or a...”, when he is interrupted by another growl from Luna, this time a warning one.
“What is it, Luna? You smell something?” The bear shakes her head and lifts a paw to tap her ear, before waving it in the direction the group was heading.
“You hear something? Coming towards us?” Luna gives as much of a shrug as a bear can.
The discussion quickly becomes moot, with everyone hearing the click of crossbows, as half a dozen bolts come flying down the tunnel.
***
The leader of the dolgrims crouched in the dark chamber smiles as two of the people standing in the tunnel are hit by the bolts, and motions the remaining dolgrim forward.
Then all four of its eyes widen in shock as one of the humanoids gestures and pronounces some words. Two large tentacled bison appear in the tunnel and charge into the chamber, goring and trampling the shocked dolgrims. Behind them comes the humanoid that seems to be made partly of metal and wood, striking out with a long chain weapon to drop the closest dolgrim.
The humanoid that summoned the bison shouts, “Surrender and you will be ... um, just surrender.” The dolgrim leader has no time to be surprised that the humanoid actually speaks fluent daelkyr, since the call to surrender is followed by a growling bear and another humanoid wielding a sword longer than any of the dolgrims are tall. They charge into the chamber and respectively decapitate and rip in half the two dolgrim fleeing for the sphincter that makes the primary exit.
The leader screams and turns to flee, but it’s too late. The last thing it sees are the gleaming spikes on the chain that whips past its left ears and then snaps back.
***
“You know,” says Trillia, as the adventurers look around the large chamber, now littered with the bodies of dolgrims, “Next time someone asks for a surrender, maybe you should give them a chance to do so.”
“They’re dolgrims,” says Korm grimly, wiping his sword on a rag. “You wouldn’t be getting any information off them.”
Luna growls in agreement and then carefully nibbles one of the corpses. Hmm, tastes like chicken.
The oval-shaped chamber is about fifty feet across, its surfaces made of the same living material that lined the tunnel. The only things it contains is some crudely made furniture and a couple of wooden crates. A small opening on either side leads to a smaller chamber. The more unusual exit is in the far wall from the tunnel entrance, a ten foot wide sphincter.
Korm, having checked one of the smaller chambers, returns and says, “Great! I found their privy. And they’re storing their refuse too. And no, I don’t want to know why.”
In the other one, Six stands over six wooden tubs and notes that each is stuffed full of raw, bloody, very fatty, meat. He carefully prods it with his pole. When there is no response, he says, “Well, at least it doesn’t seem alive.”
Gareth, standing near him, says, “It isn’t evil either.”
“Good to know,” says Nameless sarcastically from the doorway behind him. “Hey, everybody, their larder isn’t evil!”
Six ignores them and takes a sample of the meat, before rejoining the others. As they gather near the sphincter, it slides open, revealing the chamber beyond, from which a foul odor emanates.
The chamber is at least as large as the previous one, illuminated by green light emanating from three large crystals embedded into the ceiling. The veins/striations along the walls and ceiling are much thicker here. There is another large sphincter on the far wall and a slightly smaller one on the left wall. But what draws the group’s attention are the three circular pools in the room. Each is over a dozen feet in diameter, filled with a dark fluid that is constantly bubbling, though there is no appreciable change in temperature here. The liquid also flows from each pool to the other through one of three channels that link them in a triangular shape. Another channel carries fluid into each pool from a hole near the ceiling. Each pool contains something - or things, since there appear to be a number of them - that is floating on the surface, but from the entrance it is unclear what they are.
After a moment’s hesitation, the adventurers enter. As soon as they do, a number of them feel a sense of deep, abiding depression overcome them. Trillia turns and asks, “Do any of you feel really, really crappy?”
Six, for whom this is a very new emotion, shakes his head and says, “I don’t feel good. I feel like this is ... futile. Why is that?”
Gareth, having been unaffected, asks, “What’s going on?”
Korm rubs his temple and says, “Probably a trap of some sort. And yes, I feel lousy.”
Nameless casts a detect magic and scans the area. Looking at the crystals, he says, “They’re giving off transmutation, divination and enchantment auras.” And a second later, he adds, “And just created a spell effect. Each of them. Enchantment.”
Luna, previously unaffected, is now affected and growls her irritation. After some experimentation, including backing up and letting the sphincter close and waiting till the effect passes (which takes five minutes), the adventurers quickly work out that the crystals each emanate some effect every few seconds, which creates the depressing emotion. With three such effects occurring regularly, everyone is affected sooner or later.
Nameless’ experience is a little different to the others. A few seconds after as he is affected, he has a distinct feeling of something going “click” in the back of his head. There is no recurrence to the effect for him.
Resigning themselves to the feeling, the Angels move into the chamber, experiencing the strange amalgam of depression, curiosity and apprehension at the same time. As they reach and gaze into the pools, Luna growls what can only be an ursine version of “Oh, yuck!”, summing up the group’s general response.
The pools each contain two or three roughly humanoid figures, ranging in size from about goblin-sized to slightly larger than a human. It is difficult to say if they are really humanoid, since none has four complete limbs, and they keep (slowly, but certainly) changing in form, though retaining a basic humanoid template. Parts of their bodies literally wash away in the bubbling fluid and then reform. As the Angels watch, they see skin and muscle dissolve, revealing throbbing organs, oozing brains, and squirming intestines.
The only two constants about all the creatures are their eyes, which are completely clear and bulging out of their sockets, and their gaping mouths, which have a thick glutinous film covering them. Each creature also has at least one individual feature that is unchanging, which is linked somehow to the other inhabitants of the pools. Each pool also holds a number of much smaller creatures, which resemble nothing so much as small jellyfish. Most are simply floating back and forth in the bubbling water, but some are attached to parts of the larger creatures. Whichever part they attach to never seems to change, and also seem to be the most aberrant parts of the larger creatures. One has a pair of mandibles, like those on a giant ant, attached to its chin, while another has insect-like feet growing out of its chest, while a third has either a muscular tail or tentacle attached to its back.
Trillia, kneeling to take a lower look but carefully staying some distance away, says, “It’s some kind of a transformative process.” Her voice holds much more fascination than disgust.
“Is this common with aberrations?” asks Six.
Nameless replies. “The daelkyr treat the crafting of living creatures ... or rather, living intelligent creatures ... in new shapes and ways as an art form. Some aberrations also practice it. The processes have never been really worked out, though some mages have found ways to mimic them. Somewhat.”
Trillia adds, “I’ve never seen a process like this.”
“Do you know what that fluid is?” asks Six. At her reply of "No," he fishes out the piece of meat recovered from the previous room and drops it in. It bobs on the surface, a couple of the small jellyfish-like creatures floating up to nuzzle at it and then moving away.
“Stop throwing things in there,” says Gareth. “Whatever the creature that’s doing this, I think it’s safe to say that it’s evil. These are probably innocent creatures being tortured.”
Six doesn’t respond, pulling his bow off his back and putting an arrow into one of the jellyfish-things. It explodes under the impact, leaving only tiny specks that are lost in the churning water.
Korm, who has been kneeling near another pool with an expression of increasing distaste and anger, stands up and says grimly. “Gareth is right. If you listen carefully, you can hear them screaming through that stuff on their mouths. We need to put them out of their misery.”
Luna gives another growl and lifts a paw to point at the meat Six threw in. The meat has a soft pink covering over it. Gareth peers at it and then says, “By the Flame, it’s actually growing skin!” He looks again and adds, “And so is your arrow!”
“That does it!” says Korm. “Six - if you will?”
Six nods and carefully takes aim at one of the larger creatures, before putting an arrow neatly through its right eye. The arrow sinks deep, punching through its skull. The creature doesn’t make a sound, but after a second its other eye closes, followed shortly by its mouth. Six proceeds to do the same to the others in the pool and then move to the next one. Behind him, there is the sound of a weapon chopping into flesh as Korm uses his sword on the ones near him.
After the distasteful task is over, Trillia takes a sample of the liquid from a pool, as does Nameless. After doing so, she says, “Interesting. The liquid’s flowing out of the pools and not in.” She points at the streams and adds, “And up the walls.”
“Whatever’s doing this must have very powerful magic to hand,” says Gareth.
“Actually,” corrects Nameless, “Aberrations don’t necessarily use magic - or at least not the kind we use - in their shaping of other creatures. Much of what they use replicates magic and can be detected or identified using spells, but is not magic per se. That liquid gives off a number of magical auras, but it’s some sort of a biological mix, I’m sure, not magical.”
Six interrupts, having had something else pointed out to him by Luna. “Umm - guys? Remember that meat I threw in?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s started growing hair now. I don’t know about you, but I’m leaving before it climbs out and bites me.”
Nobody disagrees, and the group moves on to the sphincter in the left wall. Six moves up to it, and when this one does not open, pokes it with his pole**. At which point the sphincter opens slightly and fires a cloud of green gas that envelops Six and Korm (who was standing next to him).
After a second of shock, Luna gives what sounds as close to a laugh as a bear can, while Gareth turns to Nameless and says, “Did the door just fart on him?”
Korm quickly backs out of the mist, which now fills a ten foot wide space, and snorts, “Gah! That’s a stinking cloud.”
Gareth smirks and taps the ring of adaptation that they found on the island. “Good thing I can’t be bothered by things like that.”
Six, who has followed Korm, says, “Then why don’t you try getting it open?”
“Okay.” Gareth unsheathes Kizmet and walks into the mist, the thin shell of constant fresh air around him keeping the vapors at bay. Setting his feet, he hits the sphincter once.
As soon as he does so, a horizontal gap opens in the sphincter. A flat, muscular appendage over two feet in length shoots out of the gap and promptly smacks Gareth across the face. Though his helm prevents serious damage, its wet surface touches his flesh and he feels an acidic burn.
From outside the mist, Korm asks, “What’s going on?”
“Aargh - the door licked me! ”
“What?!”
Gareth hacks at the appendage and shouts, “Stop asking questions and get in here!”
Korm steps into the mist, holding his breath. After a momentary pause at seeing Gareth engaged with what does really look like a huge tongue, Korm joins him and the two quickly slice it into pieces. The tattered appendage retracts and after a couple of blows, the sphincter slides open, even as the stinking cloud fades away, revealing the chamber beyond.
* Korm was down to 8 Dex for the entire session, from his normally staggering height of 10 Dex.
** First session I've ever run where a player got to say, “I prod the sphincter with my pole.”
Somehow I see a similiar quote being used in the CITY campaign if, and when the party ever kills, or allies themselves with, one Jack Fancy, Esq.shilsen said:
BTW, nice work so far with Aberrationville. It sounds far more interesting the troll-wrestling and advanced shadow-hunting session I played over the weekend. Though on the plus side, my character did pick up a nice set of +2 studded leather armor, which accents his usual outfit of loincloth, fur-lined boots of levitation, necklace of human molars, and tricorne hat quite nicely (he's a barbarian airship pirate...).
shilsen
Adventurer
Mallus said:
Sounds like it could be the start of a beautiful friendship. At least between Fancy and Meiji. Until Rackhir shot both of them repeatedly in the face.
It did go quite well. There was a nice combination of humor, paranoia and "WTF?!" moments. The next update should have a couple of those. Two words - goblin flipbook.
Sounds perfect for Eberron, actually. And then it could be dinosaur-riding barbarian airship pirate. As barsoomcore said, everything's better with dinosaurs.
shilsen
Adventurer
This smaller room is apparently a laboratory, lit by a single crystal in the ceiling. An entire wall is full of racks, which seem to have grown out of the pink material of the wall. They contain jars full of organs, some of which (such as brains or hands) are recognizable to the Angels and others that they cannot identify. Against the opposite wall are a pair of large tables, which seem to have grown out of the floor, since they have the same color and consistency. Each has a groove on it, which runs partway down the legs and ends at a tongue-like protuberance. One table supports the torso of what is a large human or hobgoblin, though it is difficult to say because there is no head or anything below the waist. Patches of a pale gray fungus grow on many parts of it and the left hand is missing, having a hook-shaped bone in its stead. The far wall, between the one with the racks and the one behind the tables, has three small sphincters, ranging in width from two to four feet in width. In the far corner is a small pool, two feet in diameter with a parapet that is three inches wide and high.
After waiting for a few seconds, the adventurers enter the room and begin to examine its contents. Nameless notices that there are a number of symbols on the parapet of the pool. It is apparently a word in daelkyr repeated four times, but neither Trillia nor he have heard the word before. While he is making a note of it, he notices that the fluid in the pool, which is glutinous and an off-white in color, is bulging upwards. Nameless calls a warning and steps away.
As they watch, the raised part of the liquid forms a face. It is Nameless', but deformed with the addition of a couple of strange protuberances. When Six moves closer to look at it, Nameless' face disappears and is replaced by his, along with the same extra features.
“Any idea what this is?” asks Six.
Nameless and Trillia exchange quizzical glances and reply simultaneously, “No.”
Six looks back at it and after a moment, says, “I think it’s whispering! I hear something.”
“Somehow I doubt it’s saying anything important,” says Gareth, scanning the room with his detect evil ability and not picking up anything.
“Guess so,” says Six. He looks at the sphincters and readies his pole. “You might all want to step back. I’m going to check what is in there.”
When he pokes the first and smallest one, it splits open horizontally and extends a tongue-like tray, which seems like a less animated version of the appendage that attacked Gareth. The tray holds a variety of gleaming tools, which seem to be for a combination of surgery and torture. Trillia points out a couple which are easy to identify, as well as some which have no immediately evident function. She takes a few, as do some of the others. A little push sends the tray back into the sphincter, which closes.
Six moves on to the second one, which extends a similar but larger tray. Lying on it is what appears to be a sleeping or unconscious goblin, or if not that then a dead and amazingly well preserved one. The only thing unusual about it is a series of lines along the side, running from head to toe. Six cautiously pokes it with the pole, which slips between a couple of the lines to reveal that the goblin is not only dead but has been sliced longitudinally. More careful examination shows that the slices are incredibly fine, very close to each other, and run all the way through to a couple of inches from the right side.
Moments after they discover this, Nameless gives a partly smothered laugh. The rest look at him curiously. “What?”
“I just worked out what it is. Observe!” Nameless inserts a finger into a slit and, with a little effort, flips the upper half of the goblin open, so that everyone can see a perfectly preserved cross-section of all its internal organs. Along with amusement, there is a note of sincere admiration in his voice. “It’s a reference goblin! You flip it open like a book and can check the anatomy, starting near the surface and going as deep as you want to!”
There is a moment of shocked silence and then Trillia gives a loud guffaw, while Luna growls her disapproval. A scowling Korm says in a growl scarcely softer than Luna’s, “That is not right!”
Checking shows that the last sphincter contains a similarly preserved and dissected hobgoblin. After examining the two for a bit, which is undertaken mainly by Nameless and Trillia, neither of whom is bothered by the discovery, and Six, who has never had such a good view of humanoid anatomy, the group prepares to leave.
“Hold on,” says Nameless, awkwardly wrestling the goblin corpse off the table, “I’m taking this one along.”
“Oh, come on!”
“What? Does leaving it here improve things for it? It might be useful.” Nameless grins at a thought and adds, “Besides, if we ever run into another damn gninja, all I have to do is produce this and tell it what the aberrations have been doing to its family, and it’ll be too pissed off with them to bother us.”
“That theory,” says Six, “Is quite a good one if we’re showing them a sculpture or picture of what the aberrations here have been doing. While we are carrying around our own ... um, reference goblin? Not so much, I think.”
Nevertheless, Nameless persists in wanting to take it along, and nobody really protests. While he is squeezing it into his bag of holding, Six moves to the pool, carrying one of the dissection tools. Ignoring the face that appears in its surface, he dips the tool into it. He has to exert a little pressure to push through the surface, which is like a thicker version of skin on milk, below which is a gelatinous, similarly colored fluid. After holding the tool in there for a few seconds, Six pulls it out, to see that it has a coating of liquid. As he watches, the liquid solidifies into what looks suspiciously like flesh.
“Hey, look at this,” he says, and explains what just happened.
Nobody seems particularly keen on experimenting with the pool’s flesh-growing properties and they leave, Six dropping the tool along the way. Re-entering the larger chamber, where a few of them are again affected by the crystal induced depression, they walk up to the large sphincter, which opens to reveal a forty foot long tunnel, which ends in a chamber fifteen feet deep, the far wall of which is made of a white substance.
The group proceeds to the chamber, which they discover to be thirty feet wide. They also discover that the white substance is a thick membrane, which spans the entire thirty feet. Six carefully pokes it with his pole, trying to see if it is attached at the sides, which it is. As he is doing so, everyone hears the sounds of large feet shuffling forward behind the membrane.
Weapons are quickly drawn and spells readied, with everyone except the alienists lining up near the membrane to attack the first thing that comes through it. As they ready themselves, there is the sound of rushing feet and a number of things tear through the membrane. Two of them are large lance-like objects, but seeming to be made of bone, one of which bites into Luna's shoulder and another into Korm's side. Beside each one comes a large arm topped by a large knob of bone, as big as the head of a greatclub, which smashes down on Luna again and on Gareth.
The attacks tear large rents in the membrane, revealing a singular quartet of enemies. The larger pair seem to be bugbears, but each of which has been drastically modified. Parts of them have evidently been cut out and stretched and/or expanded, with pieces of metal and sections of flesh grafted onto them to increase their size, until the creatures stand as tall as and even broader than ogres. Each also has an extra arm fused onto its chest, and all three arms end in a large knob of bone, which is evidently usable as a club. Perhaps the strangest part of the creatures, however, are the large lumps of flesh shaped like saddles that grow out of their backs. On each ‘saddle’ is what was originally a goblin, but similarly increased in size. Like the bugbears, they have no hands either. The left arm ends in a large bony plate that fulfils the function of a shield, while the right arm ends at the elbow, above which is a long and pointed bone-spear. All four creatures have no clothing, but each has a series of thick, bony plates growing out of their torsos, which presumably function as armor.
Once the surprise of the attack through the membrane and of the sight of the strange attackers is past, they do not last long. Six leaps in to curl his spiked chain around one rider's throat and pulls back to rip its throat open, and Gareth takes the opportunity to decapitate it. Barely a second later, Trillia drops a glitterdust that blinds the mount which just lost its rider as well as the surviving goblin, leaving it defenseless when a bleeding and angry Luna rears up and seizes it in claws and fangs. The giant bear rears back and literally rips away the upper half of the goblin.
Nameless summons his famed wall of beef to join the fight, three pseudonatural bison joining Korm and Luna in hammering on one of the modified bugbears. It manages to slay one bison before going down under the combination of attacks, which allows everyone to focus on the other and drop it. Besides the crushing blows of their multiple arms, both creatures also display a vicious and poisonous bite before going down, but luckily for the adventurers the ones bitten are Luna and Gareth, one of whom is immune to all venom and the other protected with divine resistance*.
With the creatures dealt with, the adventurers check the area. The chamber is square, with membranes blocking off two walls, one of which the group entered through. To its right is the second membrane. Once they are on this side, they see that the membrane is mostly transparent from this side. Behind the membrane is an area that exactly matches the one the group came through, with a tunnel leading off into darkness. The next wall (opposite the one the group entered from) has a tunnel that runs for thirty feet before turning left. The one wall with no exit has two large alcoves, each large enough to hold a rider and mount.
Trillia, who has been checking the alcoves, says, “These things have a pair of sucker-like tubes sticking out. See?”
Nameless, who has been studying the malformed creatures, walks over and says, “And all of them have a similar thing growing out the back of the neck.”
“I’m guessing that they provide some sort of sustenance,” says Trillia. She points around the area. “There’s nothing here to show that they were living here or had anything to occupy themselves, after all.” As the others join them, she asks, “Anyone feel like sticking a hand in there to see what it does?”
“No!”
The discussion is interrupted as a humanoid figure appears where the thirty foot long tunnel enters this chamber. Humanoid only below the neck, that is. Two cold white eyes gaze at the adventurers from a bulbous face covered in rubbery, greenish-mauve skin, which glistens with slime. Below the eyes, the face consists of four long tentacles, which make a nauseatingly slurping sound as they rub against each other.
It doesn’t take the expertise of the two alienists of the Gatekeeper to identify the creature looking at them.
Mindflayer!
*** i.e. a +17 Fort save
After waiting for a few seconds, the adventurers enter the room and begin to examine its contents. Nameless notices that there are a number of symbols on the parapet of the pool. It is apparently a word in daelkyr repeated four times, but neither Trillia nor he have heard the word before. While he is making a note of it, he notices that the fluid in the pool, which is glutinous and an off-white in color, is bulging upwards. Nameless calls a warning and steps away.
As they watch, the raised part of the liquid forms a face. It is Nameless', but deformed with the addition of a couple of strange protuberances. When Six moves closer to look at it, Nameless' face disappears and is replaced by his, along with the same extra features.
“Any idea what this is?” asks Six.
Nameless and Trillia exchange quizzical glances and reply simultaneously, “No.”
Six looks back at it and after a moment, says, “I think it’s whispering! I hear something.”
“Somehow I doubt it’s saying anything important,” says Gareth, scanning the room with his detect evil ability and not picking up anything.
“Guess so,” says Six. He looks at the sphincters and readies his pole. “You might all want to step back. I’m going to check what is in there.”
When he pokes the first and smallest one, it splits open horizontally and extends a tongue-like tray, which seems like a less animated version of the appendage that attacked Gareth. The tray holds a variety of gleaming tools, which seem to be for a combination of surgery and torture. Trillia points out a couple which are easy to identify, as well as some which have no immediately evident function. She takes a few, as do some of the others. A little push sends the tray back into the sphincter, which closes.
Six moves on to the second one, which extends a similar but larger tray. Lying on it is what appears to be a sleeping or unconscious goblin, or if not that then a dead and amazingly well preserved one. The only thing unusual about it is a series of lines along the side, running from head to toe. Six cautiously pokes it with the pole, which slips between a couple of the lines to reveal that the goblin is not only dead but has been sliced longitudinally. More careful examination shows that the slices are incredibly fine, very close to each other, and run all the way through to a couple of inches from the right side.
Moments after they discover this, Nameless gives a partly smothered laugh. The rest look at him curiously. “What?”
“I just worked out what it is. Observe!” Nameless inserts a finger into a slit and, with a little effort, flips the upper half of the goblin open, so that everyone can see a perfectly preserved cross-section of all its internal organs. Along with amusement, there is a note of sincere admiration in his voice. “It’s a reference goblin! You flip it open like a book and can check the anatomy, starting near the surface and going as deep as you want to!”
There is a moment of shocked silence and then Trillia gives a loud guffaw, while Luna growls her disapproval. A scowling Korm says in a growl scarcely softer than Luna’s, “That is not right!”
Checking shows that the last sphincter contains a similarly preserved and dissected hobgoblin. After examining the two for a bit, which is undertaken mainly by Nameless and Trillia, neither of whom is bothered by the discovery, and Six, who has never had such a good view of humanoid anatomy, the group prepares to leave.
“Hold on,” says Nameless, awkwardly wrestling the goblin corpse off the table, “I’m taking this one along.”
“Oh, come on!”
“What? Does leaving it here improve things for it? It might be useful.” Nameless grins at a thought and adds, “Besides, if we ever run into another damn gninja, all I have to do is produce this and tell it what the aberrations have been doing to its family, and it’ll be too pissed off with them to bother us.”
“That theory,” says Six, “Is quite a good one if we’re showing them a sculpture or picture of what the aberrations here have been doing. While we are carrying around our own ... um, reference goblin? Not so much, I think.”
Nevertheless, Nameless persists in wanting to take it along, and nobody really protests. While he is squeezing it into his bag of holding, Six moves to the pool, carrying one of the dissection tools. Ignoring the face that appears in its surface, he dips the tool into it. He has to exert a little pressure to push through the surface, which is like a thicker version of skin on milk, below which is a gelatinous, similarly colored fluid. After holding the tool in there for a few seconds, Six pulls it out, to see that it has a coating of liquid. As he watches, the liquid solidifies into what looks suspiciously like flesh.
“Hey, look at this,” he says, and explains what just happened.
Nobody seems particularly keen on experimenting with the pool’s flesh-growing properties and they leave, Six dropping the tool along the way. Re-entering the larger chamber, where a few of them are again affected by the crystal induced depression, they walk up to the large sphincter, which opens to reveal a forty foot long tunnel, which ends in a chamber fifteen feet deep, the far wall of which is made of a white substance.
The group proceeds to the chamber, which they discover to be thirty feet wide. They also discover that the white substance is a thick membrane, which spans the entire thirty feet. Six carefully pokes it with his pole, trying to see if it is attached at the sides, which it is. As he is doing so, everyone hears the sounds of large feet shuffling forward behind the membrane.
Weapons are quickly drawn and spells readied, with everyone except the alienists lining up near the membrane to attack the first thing that comes through it. As they ready themselves, there is the sound of rushing feet and a number of things tear through the membrane. Two of them are large lance-like objects, but seeming to be made of bone, one of which bites into Luna's shoulder and another into Korm's side. Beside each one comes a large arm topped by a large knob of bone, as big as the head of a greatclub, which smashes down on Luna again and on Gareth.
The attacks tear large rents in the membrane, revealing a singular quartet of enemies. The larger pair seem to be bugbears, but each of which has been drastically modified. Parts of them have evidently been cut out and stretched and/or expanded, with pieces of metal and sections of flesh grafted onto them to increase their size, until the creatures stand as tall as and even broader than ogres. Each also has an extra arm fused onto its chest, and all three arms end in a large knob of bone, which is evidently usable as a club. Perhaps the strangest part of the creatures, however, are the large lumps of flesh shaped like saddles that grow out of their backs. On each ‘saddle’ is what was originally a goblin, but similarly increased in size. Like the bugbears, they have no hands either. The left arm ends in a large bony plate that fulfils the function of a shield, while the right arm ends at the elbow, above which is a long and pointed bone-spear. All four creatures have no clothing, but each has a series of thick, bony plates growing out of their torsos, which presumably function as armor.
Once the surprise of the attack through the membrane and of the sight of the strange attackers is past, they do not last long. Six leaps in to curl his spiked chain around one rider's throat and pulls back to rip its throat open, and Gareth takes the opportunity to decapitate it. Barely a second later, Trillia drops a glitterdust that blinds the mount which just lost its rider as well as the surviving goblin, leaving it defenseless when a bleeding and angry Luna rears up and seizes it in claws and fangs. The giant bear rears back and literally rips away the upper half of the goblin.
Nameless summons his famed wall of beef to join the fight, three pseudonatural bison joining Korm and Luna in hammering on one of the modified bugbears. It manages to slay one bison before going down under the combination of attacks, which allows everyone to focus on the other and drop it. Besides the crushing blows of their multiple arms, both creatures also display a vicious and poisonous bite before going down, but luckily for the adventurers the ones bitten are Luna and Gareth, one of whom is immune to all venom and the other protected with divine resistance*.
With the creatures dealt with, the adventurers check the area. The chamber is square, with membranes blocking off two walls, one of which the group entered through. To its right is the second membrane. Once they are on this side, they see that the membrane is mostly transparent from this side. Behind the membrane is an area that exactly matches the one the group came through, with a tunnel leading off into darkness. The next wall (opposite the one the group entered from) has a tunnel that runs for thirty feet before turning left. The one wall with no exit has two large alcoves, each large enough to hold a rider and mount.
Trillia, who has been checking the alcoves, says, “These things have a pair of sucker-like tubes sticking out. See?”
Nameless, who has been studying the malformed creatures, walks over and says, “And all of them have a similar thing growing out the back of the neck.”
“I’m guessing that they provide some sort of sustenance,” says Trillia. She points around the area. “There’s nothing here to show that they were living here or had anything to occupy themselves, after all.” As the others join them, she asks, “Anyone feel like sticking a hand in there to see what it does?”
“No!”
The discussion is interrupted as a humanoid figure appears where the thirty foot long tunnel enters this chamber. Humanoid only below the neck, that is. Two cold white eyes gaze at the adventurers from a bulbous face covered in rubbery, greenish-mauve skin, which glistens with slime. Below the eyes, the face consists of four long tentacles, which make a nauseatingly slurping sound as they rub against each other.
It doesn’t take the expertise of the two alienists of the Gatekeeper to identify the creature looking at them.
Mindflayer!
*** i.e. a +17 Fort save
shilsen
Adventurer
The mindflayer lifts a long-fingered hand, palm forward, and all of the adventurers hear a voice in their heads, which says calmly, “Please, do not be alarmed. I simply wish to know - who are you and why have you entered my home?” Not only do they all realize that the creature's telepathy is translating its language to one they can understand, but they realize they can hear each other telepathically too, as evidenced when everyone hears Luna’s unintentionally transmitted thought, “Aargh! Get out of my head!”
The mindflayer doesn’t respond to her thought and there is a long pause, as everyone seems to wait for someone else to reply. Gareth, while waiting, detects evil on it and is mildly surprised to pick up no such aura.
Finally, Six says aloud, “Actually, we were simply lost and happened to stumble in here and were wondering if you could show us the way out.”
Everyone hears Trillia’s mental chuckle of amusement and Nameless, similarly amused, says with a deadpan expression, “Plus we were wondering if you could fill out a survey.”
There is a telepathic sense of momentary confusion as Nameless speaks and then the creature responds directly to him, though the others can hear it, “Master?” As it transmits the query, Nameless feels a blinding headache and a momentary gabble of incomprehensible speech inside the back of his skull, as if someone were talking very quickly and indistinctly right within his cranium. Nobody else, however, picks up on that particular phenomenon, which dies down almost instantly, along with the accompanying headache.
Not that they need to. Luna’s mental “Oh - come ON!” is rendered unnecessary by her irritated growl, while Korm spins around to look at Nameless and go, “What?” Six and Trillia also look at him curiously, while Gareth, who had been about to silently detect thoughts on the mindflayer does so on Nameless instead. The alienist resists the effect and immediately realizes that something tried to use magic on him, although with the lack of any evidence from Gareth and the current situation, he thinks it was the mindflayer.
Which, after a pause, transmits the equivalent of a telepathic shrug and a “No. But as I was inquiri...”
It never gets to complete the thought, since Luna, irritated by everything that’s going on, does what she does best - drops a flame strike on the mindflayer. A column of roaring flame envelops it.
“Luna!”
With the immediate disappearance of the telepathic link, nobody can hear Luna's thoughts any more, but the bear's shrug and growl is eloquent. Even as she is responding, the flames disappear, revealing a completely unscathed mindflayer. Nameless notes the lack of any of the signs of a creature that resisted a magical attack, even one that was completely ineffectual, and realizes what’s wrong. “It’s an illusion!” he says urgently.
As soon as he speaks, the creature - or illusion - disappears. The adventurers immediately spread out, weapons drawn. Luna shuffles towards the area where the creature was and sniffs around, hoping to detect a scent, but there is no result.
Instead, she hears a soft rush of air as something flies by her, and then a creature appears in mid-air above the rest of the group. It is clearly not a mindflayer.
The creature is twelve feet long, combining aspects of worm, octopus and insect. The pallid and gray body is wormlike in shape and covered in yellow slime. Six suckered tentacles protrude from it, each tipped with a multifaceted yellow eye, like that of a giant insect. Halfway up the body is a long, muscular protuberance ending in a sharp stinger. Its “head” consists of a fleshy sheath holding its mouth, which consists of a small, forked tongue between two hooked mandibles. Two ridges circle the top half of the body, each with four thin spidery arms tipped with tiny insectoid claws that almost look like miniscule humanoid hands. Seeming strangely out of place on this already aberrant form, attached to the opposite side as the stinger, is a bugbear-sized humanoid arm, which holds a greatsword.
As it appears, the adventurers feel a wave of supernatural fear wash over them. But with a combination of will, luck and the added resistance that Gareth's aura of courage provides those near him, each of them shakes it off.
Nameless and Trillia both recognize it as an avolakia, a rare species of aberration, and yell advice to their companions about its strengths and weaknesses even as they back away and hurl spells at it. The others chop away at it, and though the slime-covered body is much better armored than it looks, it is quickly bleeding a pale green fluid. Gareth especially does substantial damage, calling upon the Silver Flame to smite it powerfully.
The avolakia, however, is not seriously hurt, and it clearly has many weapons at its disposal. As Six slashes it with his spiked chain, it gabbles the words of a spell in a surprisingly tinny voice. A tentacle of electricity leaps from the middle of its chest to shock Six even as he is leaping out of range. The spell, which neither Nameless nor Trillia have seen before, is cast in daelkyr and they note method and effect for later study.
Their enemy follows up the spell with multiple physical attacks. While the attached arm hacks away powerfully, it bites with its mandibles at one target and strikes with the stinger at another. Gareth, having inflicted the biggest wound, is its primary target and he goes down in a bleeding heap, while Luna and Korm are also wounded.
The creature then flies upwards, hovering near the ceiling, out of each of most of the attackers. Trillia hits it with an orb of ice, but it ignores the minimal effect. Korm, unable to reach it, reaches down and casts his most powerful healing spell on the unconscious paladin. A gleaming yellow-green cocoon of energy surrounds Gareth, hiding him from sight. Luna, who had been about to do the same, rears up and claws at the avolakia, a claw sliding off its carapace, and snarls her anger.
The adventurers hear a wordless telepathic chuckle of pleasure at their frustration, but the avolakia has no real idea about their capabilities. Nameless steps back and says, “You really shouldn’t celebrate that early,” and then dispels the spells on it. Which includes the fly spell keeping it aloft.
The avolakia crashes to the ground*, a telepathic ejaculation of shock barely registering on those around it as they swarm it envelop it with a hail of blows and spells. Critically wounded, the avolakia rears upright, trying to activate one of its many abilities and flee. A split second before it successfully does so, Korm brings down his sword. Specifically enchanted against aberrations, it strikes right between the mandibles and splits its “head” in two.
As the creature thrashes in its death throes, everyone hears a confused, “What the heck happened to me?!” from Gareth inside the cocoon. A second later, the cocoon falls apart and disappears, leaving him completely healed. Korm says, “Relax! I just healed you - and killed this thing.”
* I house-ruled away the “float down if dispelled”
Handled over email:
Once they are sure the avolakia is dead (and Gareth emerges from Korm’s rejuvenation cocoon), Trillia casts a detect magic. She says that the only magical thing is the faintly magical greatsword that was being wielded by the arm grafted to the creature’s chest, its hand still locked around the hilt. Now that they have time to examine it, the adventurers note that the sword is of a purple metal, probably byeshk, which overcomes the damage reduction of many aberrations. It’s clearly of antique Dhakaani manufacture and worth more than normal to a collector.
At this point, the top of the avolakia’s tongue detaches, crawls out of its mouth and begins to slither along the ground. It’s about four inches long, red and the front half is forked.
Luna quickly puts a huge paw down on the slithering tongue, pinning it to the ground, where it wriggles futilely.
“Don't damage it,” says Trillia, kneeling quickly to extract it from beneath her paw. The tongue stops writhing around when she picks it up and she casts another detect magic.
After concentrating for a while, she says, “It detects of faint evocation. Must be a symbiont. They’re a unique kind of creature created by the daelkyr, which attaches to another creature and provides it certain abilities. They work a little like magical items, so I might be able to identify it later with a spell. Nice catch, Luna.”
She concludes, "One of you want to grab that sword?"
Luna picks the sword up in her mouth, only to discover that the hand remains clasped tightly around the hilt. A little shaking and pulling does nothing to loosen it. It’s almost as if it was glued on. Trillia, having put the ambulatory tongue in a small glass bottle, looks across and chuckles. “Maybe one of you guys with hands right now should help her?”
Examination reveals that the hand is firmly attached and can’t be pried off. It does look like the fingers were actually glued shut around the hilt, or the equivalent thereof. It doesn’t, however, take much effort to sever the hand at the wrist, giving the group a greatsword with an attached hand.
As the sword is being stowed away, Trillia says, “Speaking of returning to town, how are the rest of you resource-wise? I'd like to check where the avolakia came from.” She points down the tunnel where the mindflayer-illusion had appeared, "Before we leave this place."
After a little discussion, the group decides to continue. With Luna having picked up the rancid, oily scent of the avolakia coming from the tunnel that the mindflayer appeared at, they proceed down it. The tunnel runs thirty feet before turning a corner to the left, and then another thirty feet before ending at another sphincter. The group finds nothing untoward along the way and when Six walks up to it, the sphincter slides open, revealing a chamber beyond.
The rancid, oily scent is much stronger here. From the entrance, the chamber seems to be made up of two parts, the wall to the left bulging out in a rounded protuberance to provide a partial divider. The walls are rounded, with no straight lines. The room is lit by a ceiling crystal like the ones they’ve seen, but smaller, giving off a diffuse yellow light. It seems like there’s one in the further half of the room too.
The left wall, including the protruding section, is decorated with numerous objects, some hanging on the wall and some placed along it. Those that they can see are probably of Dhakaani manufacture. The right wall, which makes a long curve, has no such decorations on or before it, but stands totally bare and has a translucent sheen that the rest of the room lacks. There is some large structure in the further half of the room, part of which can be seen around the dividing curve. One can’t say what it is from the doorway, other than that it seems to be of the same pinkish material as the walls and ceiling.
When they enter, they see that there are more decorations like the ones seen from the doorway. Seeming out of place among them is what looks like the head of another avolakia, which hangs on the wall near the entrance.
The smell is strongest in the further half of the room. Walking in there, they see more of the structure that they partly saw from the doorway. It is about ten feet long, consisting of oddly shaped lumps and protuberances, with spikes and bladelike surfaces. Right in the middle is a large sucker like ‘mouth,’ similar to the ones saw in the alcoves (which Trillia theorized were some way of sustaining the modified goblins and bugbears). The smell is strongest on the structure.
Leaning against the structure is what looks like a petrified humanoid arm with curved fingers. Near that, in a small holder, is a foot long ebony rod, topped with a bird skull and artificial feathers.
But what really draws the group’s attention is on the wall next to the structure. A naked hobgoblin is spread-eagled on the wall, held five feet off the ground by large strips of the pink wall material that have grown over its arms or legs. Or as much of its arms and legs as are left, since they have been amputated at elbow and knee. As has whatever genitalia it had, since there is only a pale patch of skin there. Its body is unusually pale and completely hairless. Besides the pink material holding it there, it is also connected to the wall by two similarly pink tubes that emanate from the wall, one leading to the back of its neck and one leading behind its buttocks.
Red lines of horizontal tattoos cover the entire torso, starting at the top of the chest and continuing down to the groin. Similarly colored scrawlings are on the wall on either side. The creature’s eyes are closed and its head hangs forward on its chest. After the first couple of seconds, they realize it must be unconscious or sleeping, since it is breathing, though very softly.
The two alienists can read the tattooing without much difficulty. It’s in daelkyr, and seems to be notes about what it calls the “changing pools” (which they guess are the three pools with the creatures in them). It refers to eight subjects from the breeding pens that have recently been introduced into the pools.
The scrawls on the walls on either side are individual words: Forward; Back; Up; Down; Larger; Smaller; Notes; Experiments; Supplies; History; Miscellaneous; Magic; Record; Erase.
The feathers are also carved ivory painted black. Looking at the rod, Nameless recognizes it as a Raven Skull Rod, a particular type of long-distance communication device that the Dhakaani made, and sometimes still make. The user can speak into one and the message emanates from another that it is linked to (they’re usually constructed in batches of 2-5).
Nameless is explaining the above to the rest of the group when they all notice something changing about the long curved wall which makes up one entire side of the chamber (i.e. the wall without the protuberance) and has no decorations placed anywhere near it.
The wall is swiftly turning more translucent and then glassy, reflecting the rest of the room in its surface. Along with the room it reflects all of the group, but with significant changes. Each and every one of them is reflected as malformed in some very obvious way. Six, for example, has large tentacles instead of arms, each topped with a writhing snakelike head. Luna still appears in bear form, but the center of her back has a foot-wide fleshy growth, covered in a mixture of scales and pustules. And so on.
Except for Nameless, who is reflected just the same as normal.
Looking in wonder, Gareth doesn’t see what he expected. “This is interesting,” he says a little worriedly, “I wonder what is causing this. And more importantly, what will happen.” He then averts his eyes from the image, remembering stories about magical mirrors that take action when you stare into them.
Trillia (whose reflection happens to have four eyes, all of them on tentacles) looks at the wall with interest and casts a detect magic. After a few seconds of concentration, she says, “Hmm - it’s not an illusion. I’m picking up a conjuration ... wait, make that a strong conjuration aura all along the wall.”
While she is concentrating and then speaking, a twenty-foot wide circular section in the middle of the wall begins to darken, while the area beyond that begins to turn yellow. As it does, the wall becomes less reflective and more translucent, with the result that the reflections gradually fade away.
Luna growls her disquiet and cranes around as far as she can to check whether she actually has anything growing out of her back. She is not apparently changed in any way, and as far as she (or anyone else) can make out, neither is anyone else. After having checked that she’s not morphing into something strange, Luna gives a growl that (linked with the expression on the bear’ face) is as eloquent as a string of swear words.
Six, meanwhile, first pokes the word that Nameless said is “History” with his pole. There is no response, and after waiting for a few seconds, he turns and pokes the large wall with it. When he does so, he feels just the slightest bit of give, as if it were not completely hard.
While Six is doing the above, the result of the change in colors on the wall becomes evident. The central black portion is now a huge pupil, twenty feet in width, while the yellow area around it forms the iris. The long wall is now spanned by a fifty-foot long eye.
Luna sniffs at the changing wall and doesn’t smell anything different about it, so she presumes there’s not actually a creature coming through it. Nevertheless, she growls at it in warning.
While she is doing so, the eye begins to shrink, giving the watchers a sense that it is due to an increase in distance. As it does, they all see that it is surrounded by a pale gray expanse of flesh, with creases in it that are as long as some of them are tall. Within seconds, the eye is half its original size, but it still stretches twenty-five feet in length.
Then it stops, and swivels slightly, seeming to notice the room and all of the adventurers. The eye focuses, and all of them have a sense of a gigantic mind focusing on you. It is not malign or inimical in any way; it is just totally and utterly alien to their conception of reality - and very mildly curious. For a moment, each of them realizes exactly what a butterfly (admittedly, a very intelligent butterfly) feels like in the seconds before an infant pulls its wings off to see what happens. The overriding emotion for them, even for Nameless and Trillia (who have studied alternate realities but never experienced it in such close proximity), is a combination of utter fascination and complete awe.
Luna shakes off the feeling and looks around to see that everyone else is standing stock-still and motionless, staring at the wall. After a couple of loud growls evince no response, she hurriedly drops a dispel magic in the area, hoping to remove whatever it is that affected her companions. The spellcasting has no visible effect, her companions still remaining spellbound.
Noticing motion on the wall, Luna looks back to see that the eye is simultaneously moving away and sliding by, as if the wall were a giant window through which the group were looking out at the creature, whatever it is. As the eye passes by, the wall’s color and texture begins to fade back to its original translucence. There is a brief vision of a gigantic bulk and waving tentacles more than a dozen feet across, and then the vision fades, leaving just the bare pinkish wall.
The rest of the group feels the fascination effect wear off suddenly and are back in control of their faculties. Trillia shakes her head and then quickly walks up to the wall to touch it. Then she looks back at Nameless and says excitedly, “Is it just me or did we just get a glimpse into Xoriat?”
The mindflayer doesn’t respond to her thought and there is a long pause, as everyone seems to wait for someone else to reply. Gareth, while waiting, detects evil on it and is mildly surprised to pick up no such aura.
Finally, Six says aloud, “Actually, we were simply lost and happened to stumble in here and were wondering if you could show us the way out.”
Everyone hears Trillia’s mental chuckle of amusement and Nameless, similarly amused, says with a deadpan expression, “Plus we were wondering if you could fill out a survey.”
There is a telepathic sense of momentary confusion as Nameless speaks and then the creature responds directly to him, though the others can hear it, “Master?” As it transmits the query, Nameless feels a blinding headache and a momentary gabble of incomprehensible speech inside the back of his skull, as if someone were talking very quickly and indistinctly right within his cranium. Nobody else, however, picks up on that particular phenomenon, which dies down almost instantly, along with the accompanying headache.
Not that they need to. Luna’s mental “Oh - come ON!” is rendered unnecessary by her irritated growl, while Korm spins around to look at Nameless and go, “What?” Six and Trillia also look at him curiously, while Gareth, who had been about to silently detect thoughts on the mindflayer does so on Nameless instead. The alienist resists the effect and immediately realizes that something tried to use magic on him, although with the lack of any evidence from Gareth and the current situation, he thinks it was the mindflayer.
Which, after a pause, transmits the equivalent of a telepathic shrug and a “No. But as I was inquiri...”
It never gets to complete the thought, since Luna, irritated by everything that’s going on, does what she does best - drops a flame strike on the mindflayer. A column of roaring flame envelops it.
“Luna!”
With the immediate disappearance of the telepathic link, nobody can hear Luna's thoughts any more, but the bear's shrug and growl is eloquent. Even as she is responding, the flames disappear, revealing a completely unscathed mindflayer. Nameless notes the lack of any of the signs of a creature that resisted a magical attack, even one that was completely ineffectual, and realizes what’s wrong. “It’s an illusion!” he says urgently.
As soon as he speaks, the creature - or illusion - disappears. The adventurers immediately spread out, weapons drawn. Luna shuffles towards the area where the creature was and sniffs around, hoping to detect a scent, but there is no result.
Instead, she hears a soft rush of air as something flies by her, and then a creature appears in mid-air above the rest of the group. It is clearly not a mindflayer.
The creature is twelve feet long, combining aspects of worm, octopus and insect. The pallid and gray body is wormlike in shape and covered in yellow slime. Six suckered tentacles protrude from it, each tipped with a multifaceted yellow eye, like that of a giant insect. Halfway up the body is a long, muscular protuberance ending in a sharp stinger. Its “head” consists of a fleshy sheath holding its mouth, which consists of a small, forked tongue between two hooked mandibles. Two ridges circle the top half of the body, each with four thin spidery arms tipped with tiny insectoid claws that almost look like miniscule humanoid hands. Seeming strangely out of place on this already aberrant form, attached to the opposite side as the stinger, is a bugbear-sized humanoid arm, which holds a greatsword.
As it appears, the adventurers feel a wave of supernatural fear wash over them. But with a combination of will, luck and the added resistance that Gareth's aura of courage provides those near him, each of them shakes it off.
Nameless and Trillia both recognize it as an avolakia, a rare species of aberration, and yell advice to their companions about its strengths and weaknesses even as they back away and hurl spells at it. The others chop away at it, and though the slime-covered body is much better armored than it looks, it is quickly bleeding a pale green fluid. Gareth especially does substantial damage, calling upon the Silver Flame to smite it powerfully.
The avolakia, however, is not seriously hurt, and it clearly has many weapons at its disposal. As Six slashes it with his spiked chain, it gabbles the words of a spell in a surprisingly tinny voice. A tentacle of electricity leaps from the middle of its chest to shock Six even as he is leaping out of range. The spell, which neither Nameless nor Trillia have seen before, is cast in daelkyr and they note method and effect for later study.
Their enemy follows up the spell with multiple physical attacks. While the attached arm hacks away powerfully, it bites with its mandibles at one target and strikes with the stinger at another. Gareth, having inflicted the biggest wound, is its primary target and he goes down in a bleeding heap, while Luna and Korm are also wounded.
The creature then flies upwards, hovering near the ceiling, out of each of most of the attackers. Trillia hits it with an orb of ice, but it ignores the minimal effect. Korm, unable to reach it, reaches down and casts his most powerful healing spell on the unconscious paladin. A gleaming yellow-green cocoon of energy surrounds Gareth, hiding him from sight. Luna, who had been about to do the same, rears up and claws at the avolakia, a claw sliding off its carapace, and snarls her anger.
The adventurers hear a wordless telepathic chuckle of pleasure at their frustration, but the avolakia has no real idea about their capabilities. Nameless steps back and says, “You really shouldn’t celebrate that early,” and then dispels the spells on it. Which includes the fly spell keeping it aloft.
The avolakia crashes to the ground*, a telepathic ejaculation of shock barely registering on those around it as they swarm it envelop it with a hail of blows and spells. Critically wounded, the avolakia rears upright, trying to activate one of its many abilities and flee. A split second before it successfully does so, Korm brings down his sword. Specifically enchanted against aberrations, it strikes right between the mandibles and splits its “head” in two.
As the creature thrashes in its death throes, everyone hears a confused, “What the heck happened to me?!” from Gareth inside the cocoon. A second later, the cocoon falls apart and disappears, leaving him completely healed. Korm says, “Relax! I just healed you - and killed this thing.”
* I house-ruled away the “float down if dispelled”
Handled over email:
Once they are sure the avolakia is dead (and Gareth emerges from Korm’s rejuvenation cocoon), Trillia casts a detect magic. She says that the only magical thing is the faintly magical greatsword that was being wielded by the arm grafted to the creature’s chest, its hand still locked around the hilt. Now that they have time to examine it, the adventurers note that the sword is of a purple metal, probably byeshk, which overcomes the damage reduction of many aberrations. It’s clearly of antique Dhakaani manufacture and worth more than normal to a collector.
At this point, the top of the avolakia’s tongue detaches, crawls out of its mouth and begins to slither along the ground. It’s about four inches long, red and the front half is forked.
Luna quickly puts a huge paw down on the slithering tongue, pinning it to the ground, where it wriggles futilely.
“Don't damage it,” says Trillia, kneeling quickly to extract it from beneath her paw. The tongue stops writhing around when she picks it up and she casts another detect magic.
After concentrating for a while, she says, “It detects of faint evocation. Must be a symbiont. They’re a unique kind of creature created by the daelkyr, which attaches to another creature and provides it certain abilities. They work a little like magical items, so I might be able to identify it later with a spell. Nice catch, Luna.”
She concludes, "One of you want to grab that sword?"
Luna picks the sword up in her mouth, only to discover that the hand remains clasped tightly around the hilt. A little shaking and pulling does nothing to loosen it. It’s almost as if it was glued on. Trillia, having put the ambulatory tongue in a small glass bottle, looks across and chuckles. “Maybe one of you guys with hands right now should help her?”
Examination reveals that the hand is firmly attached and can’t be pried off. It does look like the fingers were actually glued shut around the hilt, or the equivalent thereof. It doesn’t, however, take much effort to sever the hand at the wrist, giving the group a greatsword with an attached hand.
As the sword is being stowed away, Trillia says, “Speaking of returning to town, how are the rest of you resource-wise? I'd like to check where the avolakia came from.” She points down the tunnel where the mindflayer-illusion had appeared, "Before we leave this place."
After a little discussion, the group decides to continue. With Luna having picked up the rancid, oily scent of the avolakia coming from the tunnel that the mindflayer appeared at, they proceed down it. The tunnel runs thirty feet before turning a corner to the left, and then another thirty feet before ending at another sphincter. The group finds nothing untoward along the way and when Six walks up to it, the sphincter slides open, revealing a chamber beyond.
The rancid, oily scent is much stronger here. From the entrance, the chamber seems to be made up of two parts, the wall to the left bulging out in a rounded protuberance to provide a partial divider. The walls are rounded, with no straight lines. The room is lit by a ceiling crystal like the ones they’ve seen, but smaller, giving off a diffuse yellow light. It seems like there’s one in the further half of the room too.
The left wall, including the protruding section, is decorated with numerous objects, some hanging on the wall and some placed along it. Those that they can see are probably of Dhakaani manufacture. The right wall, which makes a long curve, has no such decorations on or before it, but stands totally bare and has a translucent sheen that the rest of the room lacks. There is some large structure in the further half of the room, part of which can be seen around the dividing curve. One can’t say what it is from the doorway, other than that it seems to be of the same pinkish material as the walls and ceiling.
When they enter, they see that there are more decorations like the ones seen from the doorway. Seeming out of place among them is what looks like the head of another avolakia, which hangs on the wall near the entrance.
The smell is strongest in the further half of the room. Walking in there, they see more of the structure that they partly saw from the doorway. It is about ten feet long, consisting of oddly shaped lumps and protuberances, with spikes and bladelike surfaces. Right in the middle is a large sucker like ‘mouth,’ similar to the ones saw in the alcoves (which Trillia theorized were some way of sustaining the modified goblins and bugbears). The smell is strongest on the structure.
Leaning against the structure is what looks like a petrified humanoid arm with curved fingers. Near that, in a small holder, is a foot long ebony rod, topped with a bird skull and artificial feathers.
But what really draws the group’s attention is on the wall next to the structure. A naked hobgoblin is spread-eagled on the wall, held five feet off the ground by large strips of the pink wall material that have grown over its arms or legs. Or as much of its arms and legs as are left, since they have been amputated at elbow and knee. As has whatever genitalia it had, since there is only a pale patch of skin there. Its body is unusually pale and completely hairless. Besides the pink material holding it there, it is also connected to the wall by two similarly pink tubes that emanate from the wall, one leading to the back of its neck and one leading behind its buttocks.
Red lines of horizontal tattoos cover the entire torso, starting at the top of the chest and continuing down to the groin. Similarly colored scrawlings are on the wall on either side. The creature’s eyes are closed and its head hangs forward on its chest. After the first couple of seconds, they realize it must be unconscious or sleeping, since it is breathing, though very softly.
The two alienists can read the tattooing without much difficulty. It’s in daelkyr, and seems to be notes about what it calls the “changing pools” (which they guess are the three pools with the creatures in them). It refers to eight subjects from the breeding pens that have recently been introduced into the pools.
The scrawls on the walls on either side are individual words: Forward; Back; Up; Down; Larger; Smaller; Notes; Experiments; Supplies; History; Miscellaneous; Magic; Record; Erase.
The feathers are also carved ivory painted black. Looking at the rod, Nameless recognizes it as a Raven Skull Rod, a particular type of long-distance communication device that the Dhakaani made, and sometimes still make. The user can speak into one and the message emanates from another that it is linked to (they’re usually constructed in batches of 2-5).
Nameless is explaining the above to the rest of the group when they all notice something changing about the long curved wall which makes up one entire side of the chamber (i.e. the wall without the protuberance) and has no decorations placed anywhere near it.
The wall is swiftly turning more translucent and then glassy, reflecting the rest of the room in its surface. Along with the room it reflects all of the group, but with significant changes. Each and every one of them is reflected as malformed in some very obvious way. Six, for example, has large tentacles instead of arms, each topped with a writhing snakelike head. Luna still appears in bear form, but the center of her back has a foot-wide fleshy growth, covered in a mixture of scales and pustules. And so on.
Except for Nameless, who is reflected just the same as normal.
Looking in wonder, Gareth doesn’t see what he expected. “This is interesting,” he says a little worriedly, “I wonder what is causing this. And more importantly, what will happen.” He then averts his eyes from the image, remembering stories about magical mirrors that take action when you stare into them.
Trillia (whose reflection happens to have four eyes, all of them on tentacles) looks at the wall with interest and casts a detect magic. After a few seconds of concentration, she says, “Hmm - it’s not an illusion. I’m picking up a conjuration ... wait, make that a strong conjuration aura all along the wall.”
While she is concentrating and then speaking, a twenty-foot wide circular section in the middle of the wall begins to darken, while the area beyond that begins to turn yellow. As it does, the wall becomes less reflective and more translucent, with the result that the reflections gradually fade away.
Luna growls her disquiet and cranes around as far as she can to check whether she actually has anything growing out of her back. She is not apparently changed in any way, and as far as she (or anyone else) can make out, neither is anyone else. After having checked that she’s not morphing into something strange, Luna gives a growl that (linked with the expression on the bear’ face) is as eloquent as a string of swear words.
Six, meanwhile, first pokes the word that Nameless said is “History” with his pole. There is no response, and after waiting for a few seconds, he turns and pokes the large wall with it. When he does so, he feels just the slightest bit of give, as if it were not completely hard.
While Six is doing the above, the result of the change in colors on the wall becomes evident. The central black portion is now a huge pupil, twenty feet in width, while the yellow area around it forms the iris. The long wall is now spanned by a fifty-foot long eye.
Luna sniffs at the changing wall and doesn’t smell anything different about it, so she presumes there’s not actually a creature coming through it. Nevertheless, she growls at it in warning.
While she is doing so, the eye begins to shrink, giving the watchers a sense that it is due to an increase in distance. As it does, they all see that it is surrounded by a pale gray expanse of flesh, with creases in it that are as long as some of them are tall. Within seconds, the eye is half its original size, but it still stretches twenty-five feet in length.
Then it stops, and swivels slightly, seeming to notice the room and all of the adventurers. The eye focuses, and all of them have a sense of a gigantic mind focusing on you. It is not malign or inimical in any way; it is just totally and utterly alien to their conception of reality - and very mildly curious. For a moment, each of them realizes exactly what a butterfly (admittedly, a very intelligent butterfly) feels like in the seconds before an infant pulls its wings off to see what happens. The overriding emotion for them, even for Nameless and Trillia (who have studied alternate realities but never experienced it in such close proximity), is a combination of utter fascination and complete awe.
Luna shakes off the feeling and looks around to see that everyone else is standing stock-still and motionless, staring at the wall. After a couple of loud growls evince no response, she hurriedly drops a dispel magic in the area, hoping to remove whatever it is that affected her companions. The spellcasting has no visible effect, her companions still remaining spellbound.
Noticing motion on the wall, Luna looks back to see that the eye is simultaneously moving away and sliding by, as if the wall were a giant window through which the group were looking out at the creature, whatever it is. As the eye passes by, the wall’s color and texture begins to fade back to its original translucence. There is a brief vision of a gigantic bulk and waving tentacles more than a dozen feet across, and then the vision fades, leaving just the bare pinkish wall.
The rest of the group feels the fascination effect wear off suddenly and are back in control of their faculties. Trillia shakes her head and then quickly walks up to the wall to touch it. Then she looks back at Nameless and says excitedly, “Is it just me or did we just get a glimpse into Xoriat?”
shilsen
Adventurer
Luna switches back to her normal form and asks Trillia, “Should we try to destroy the wall?”
“No, I don’t think there’s anything really special about the wall. I already checked and it’s not magical.” Trillia looks around at the rest, especially Nameless, and continues, “Remember my theory about there being a dimensional seal somewhere in Yarkuun Draal? The only reason there’d be one is if there’s a manifest zone to Xoriat here, in which case, the boundaries between Eberron and Xoriat are weaker here. Still, I wasn’t expecting to actually catch a glimpse of Xoriat itself.”
“Is that thing we saw, whatever it was, at all likely to end up here?” asks Six.
“Oh no! With Xoriat permanently sundered from Eberron by the magic of the Gatekeepers during the Daelkyr War, nothing can cross over between the two. This is as close as one can get. I’d heard of it, but never experienced it myself. Fascinating!”
After having ascertained that nothing similar is about to recur, the group moves around the chamber checking for anything hidden and collecting the Dhakaani artifacts. Examining the petrified hobgoblin arm that Korm is picking up, Nameless says, “I think that’s actually a backscratcher.”
“Really? I’m taking it anyway.”
“Maybe some collector might be interested in it,” says Luna.
“Do you really want to be doing business with a collector who likes mummified humanoid arms?”
Trillia, who has been examining the hobgoblin attached to the wall and murmuring the words written alongside, happens to say “Smaller” aloud in the original daelkyr. The tattooed writing on the hobgoblin’s torso immediately shrinks in size, more writing appearing at top and bottom to fill the extra space.
As the change occurs, the hobgoblin’s eyes snap open and it utters a gurgling scream. Trillia quickly steps away, but it shows no signs of having noticed her, continuing to scream. Korm promptly bats it on the head with the petrified arm, but that seems to have no effect even though it snaps the hobgoblin’s head sideways. After a couple of seconds, the screaming ends in a slack-jawed gasping, which reveals that its tongue has been nailed to the bottom of its mouth.
Carefully examining it, Trillia says, “It’s got to be an information storage device of some kind, with the writing stored in it accessible with those commands. But the changes torture it as well.”
“I can see how,” says Nameless. “I felt the tattoos. They’re like weals raised by a whip or burned by a hot iron. For the lettering to change, the old ones have to be removed and new ones appear.”
Trillia nods and adds, “The pain is quite possibly a serious benefit as far as the avolakia was concerned. Some aberrations consider the crafting of specific emotions, especially the traumatic ones, as an art form.”
“I’m really getting upset with these aberrations,” growls Luna.
“There’s a reason the Gatekeeepers exist,” says Korm, before turning to Trillia. “Can I put it out of its suffering?”
Trillia considers for a bit and says, “I’m sure there’s valuable information hidden within it, but accessing it would probably take hours of searching, and I’d be torturing it throughout. I’ll do without. You can go ahead.”
She steps away and Korm unsheathes his sword, steps forward, and splits the hobgoblin’s skull in two. He watches for a few moments to make sure that it is dead, and is as assured that it’s so by the slow fading away of the writing on its chest as by its lack of breath or movement.
The others have already stripped the room of whatever might be valuable, and the group leaves the chamber. After a short discussion about the risks of continuing onwards, they decide to continue a bit further.
Returning to the chamber where the corpses of the avolakia and the malformed goblins and bugbears still lie, the Angels head down the one tunnel they have not explored. At the next turn, the tunnel switches from the pink, apparently living material, to the stone of the city and the plateau. After another turn, the tunnel travels over two hundred feet without any openings or doorways.
The first thing that breaks the monotony of the stone is a wide archway on the right wall of the tunnel (which continues onwards), which has been bricked in. There are carvings in daelkyr on it, which read ‘Danger. Do not open.’
When Nameless translates, Korm says, “Something that the aberrations consider dangerous? That could be interesting.”
“Considering our current status, I’d rather not open this now,” says Nameless warily. “Maybe tomorrow, after we have all our spells available?”
“Actually,” says Trillia, “I was hoping not to return to this area again. I’d rather visit widely-spaced sections of the city, so that even when they find out we’ve been here - which I presume they’ll do soon enough - they won’t be able to trap us or prepare effectively enough to seriously endanger us.”
“Yeah,” says Luna. “Let’s check it out now.”
“After all,” says Korm, unsheathing his sword, “How bad could it be?”
“A sphincter farted on me and licked him,” says Six, indicating Gareth. “Don’t say things like that.” Gareth, who has been concentrating on the archway, nods and then says, “I don’t pick up any aura of evil, for what it’s worth.”
Korm uses his greatsword to chop through the bricked-up area, its unusual material easily reducing the wall to rubble, which Luna (back in bear form) pulls out of the way. After chopping through nearly a dozen feet, Korm breaks through into an open area.
It is a short tunnel, fifteen feet long and ten feet wide, that opens into a large chamber, the far wall of which is nearly forty feet away from the tunnel’s end, and the floor of which is much lower than the tunnel’s. The entire area is lit by a pale green light that seems to have no evident source.
Once everyone can see in, Nameless points at six glyphs set into the floor of the tunnel. “They’re inactive, but someone definitely wanted some protection here.”
Korm, having moved in a little further to allow the others to enter, points into the chamber and says, “Look.” Joining him, the others see that the large chamber’s floor is about ten feet lower. The far wall has an open doorway, revealing a tunnel that turns right. The chamber’s ceiling is thirty feet above the floor, with two large circular stone protuberances, like the bottom of a stone tube, both of which have also been sealed up.
What draws their attention, however, is on the floor of the chamber. The entire floor is covered in bones. Humanoid bones, most of approximately human size, though some are slightly larger and many smaller. There must be tens of thousands of them, making the chamber a gigantic mass grave.
There is momentary silence, except for a continuous, low growl from Luna. Then Korm, who has been kneeling for a closer look, says, “Many of them are broken.” He is correct, with a large number of bones displaying fractures and breaks, with some being broken in half.
Nameless, who has been studying the walls, points out that they are covered in writing to a height of about six feet. They seem to be in dried blood and are in goblin, written in multiple hands.
Reading the sections nearby, the adventurers find them haphazard and disconnected, including things like dates (which are meaningless to the Angels), numbers, names, and even rough pictures. A constant thread is that they often break down into raving about the aberrations.
“They probably just threw them in here and left them,” says Korm somberly. “But that doesn’t explain why it was blocked up with that message.”
“Let’s see what’s in the other room,” says Six, carefully poking into the bones with his extensible pole. “They’re a little over a foot deep.”
The group carefully descends, to a litany of cracks as they step onto the incredibly old and brittle bones. Korm decides to ride Luna, which she allows him to do. Trillia stops to read more, so the others do the same.
Now that they are closer and can read much more, they quickly pick up more of a narrative from the various scrawling. The writings say that this area is where the aberrations used to throw the old, weak, pregnant, and sick goblinoids, that is, those that were considered unfit for their experiments. They did not provide food and only a little water trickled in from the surface. Eventually, the desperate and ravenous goblinoids began to eat those that died. And when the corpses ran out, they turned to the living. The scrawls refer to the weaker ones being killed and eaten by the stronger, some of whom banded together. They speak of the smaller goblins dying first, and the larger bugbears being slain while sleeping. They refer to pregnant women delivering babies and having them snatched away and torn apart. Some of the portions that seem most rambling and raving speak of hearing voices and seeing lights. A entire section simply repeats, over and over again, “They’re not dead. They’re watching us. They want revenge.” Another, larger area, simply consists of endless scrawls of “Revenge, forgive, revenge, forgive, revenge, forgive.…”
After having worked out what they can, there is little discussion as the group heads across the chamber, accompanied by the constant cracking sounds. They are halfway across the room when four spectral figures fly out of the floor around them. Each has a roughly humanoid form, though it ends in shapeless tatters. Each shape is made of a conglomeration of distorted faces that seem to be screaming soundlessly in agony, and constantly shifting and flowing around the creature’s body.
“Ghosts!” shouts Gareth, “I think.”
As he speaks, two of the ghosts raise their arms and a series of the faces shoot away from their bodies, trailing streams of incorporeal matter. The faces shoot into and through the bodies of the adventurers, causing a wave of supernatural terror to sweep over them, followed by a painful coldness.
Aided by the aura granted Gareth by the Flame, all of them shake off the fear and most resist the coldness, but Six feels it settle around him, strangely shaking his confidence.
Even as the Angels are striking back, the third ghost releases a single face, which flies into and through Gareth. The paladin feels it sap his strength as he swings Kizmet, only to find it pass harmlessly through his enemy.
Luna, rearing up and almost unseating Korm, similarly feels her claws pass through a ghost, but she manages to bite into it and rip away a mouthful of incorporeal matter. The hole she causes remains in the ghost, which lowers its arms and lets a number of the faces fall off it and sink into the layer of bones. A second later, they erupt from the floor, accompanied by an explosion of bone shards, many of which sink painfully into Luna. Korm, who has a few cut into his leg, dismounts awkwardly and swings at the ghost, with similar lack of luck. Six, trying to tumble past a ghost, almost falling flat on his face due to the layer of bones, and then seeing his chain swing harmlessly through a ghost, can sympathize.
Trillia too fails to affect them with a spell, but Nameless has better luck, a slow spell affecting three of the ghosts, the flow of the faces over their forms clearly slowing, as do their overall movements.
Moments later, all four of them move forwards into the bodies of the people before them. Nameless, Korm and Six all feel a momentary darkness envelop them and then each has a fleeting vision of the chamber, but now completely full of goblinoids, pushing and arguing with each other. Accompanying the vision is a distinct impression of seeing through someone’s eyes, overlaid with emotions of pain, fear and hunger.
Then the three manage to reassert their wills, sending the ghosts spilling back out of their bodies. Gareth, the fourth target, is warded by a protection from evil that he put up just before entering the chamber, and the ghost that attacks him simply hits the barrier and bounces off.
The incorporeal nature of the ghosts is what draws the fight out, with many powerful blows failing to affect them, but they are not very resistant to the damage that gets through, and the Angels soon dispatch them.
Gareth shakes his head, feeling his thoughts slowed by another draining attack he was hit with, “That wasn’t fun.”
Trillia, a little paler after having suffered a slightly different one, says, “I wonder if that’s what they were trying to keep in here.”
“One way to find out,” says Six, heading for the doorway.
“No, I don’t think there’s anything really special about the wall. I already checked and it’s not magical.” Trillia looks around at the rest, especially Nameless, and continues, “Remember my theory about there being a dimensional seal somewhere in Yarkuun Draal? The only reason there’d be one is if there’s a manifest zone to Xoriat here, in which case, the boundaries between Eberron and Xoriat are weaker here. Still, I wasn’t expecting to actually catch a glimpse of Xoriat itself.”
“Is that thing we saw, whatever it was, at all likely to end up here?” asks Six.
“Oh no! With Xoriat permanently sundered from Eberron by the magic of the Gatekeepers during the Daelkyr War, nothing can cross over between the two. This is as close as one can get. I’d heard of it, but never experienced it myself. Fascinating!”
After having ascertained that nothing similar is about to recur, the group moves around the chamber checking for anything hidden and collecting the Dhakaani artifacts. Examining the petrified hobgoblin arm that Korm is picking up, Nameless says, “I think that’s actually a backscratcher.”
“Really? I’m taking it anyway.”
“Maybe some collector might be interested in it,” says Luna.
“Do you really want to be doing business with a collector who likes mummified humanoid arms?”
Trillia, who has been examining the hobgoblin attached to the wall and murmuring the words written alongside, happens to say “Smaller” aloud in the original daelkyr. The tattooed writing on the hobgoblin’s torso immediately shrinks in size, more writing appearing at top and bottom to fill the extra space.
As the change occurs, the hobgoblin’s eyes snap open and it utters a gurgling scream. Trillia quickly steps away, but it shows no signs of having noticed her, continuing to scream. Korm promptly bats it on the head with the petrified arm, but that seems to have no effect even though it snaps the hobgoblin’s head sideways. After a couple of seconds, the screaming ends in a slack-jawed gasping, which reveals that its tongue has been nailed to the bottom of its mouth.
Carefully examining it, Trillia says, “It’s got to be an information storage device of some kind, with the writing stored in it accessible with those commands. But the changes torture it as well.”
“I can see how,” says Nameless. “I felt the tattoos. They’re like weals raised by a whip or burned by a hot iron. For the lettering to change, the old ones have to be removed and new ones appear.”
Trillia nods and adds, “The pain is quite possibly a serious benefit as far as the avolakia was concerned. Some aberrations consider the crafting of specific emotions, especially the traumatic ones, as an art form.”
“I’m really getting upset with these aberrations,” growls Luna.
“There’s a reason the Gatekeeepers exist,” says Korm, before turning to Trillia. “Can I put it out of its suffering?”
Trillia considers for a bit and says, “I’m sure there’s valuable information hidden within it, but accessing it would probably take hours of searching, and I’d be torturing it throughout. I’ll do without. You can go ahead.”
She steps away and Korm unsheathes his sword, steps forward, and splits the hobgoblin’s skull in two. He watches for a few moments to make sure that it is dead, and is as assured that it’s so by the slow fading away of the writing on its chest as by its lack of breath or movement.
The others have already stripped the room of whatever might be valuable, and the group leaves the chamber. After a short discussion about the risks of continuing onwards, they decide to continue a bit further.
Returning to the chamber where the corpses of the avolakia and the malformed goblins and bugbears still lie, the Angels head down the one tunnel they have not explored. At the next turn, the tunnel switches from the pink, apparently living material, to the stone of the city and the plateau. After another turn, the tunnel travels over two hundred feet without any openings or doorways.
The first thing that breaks the monotony of the stone is a wide archway on the right wall of the tunnel (which continues onwards), which has been bricked in. There are carvings in daelkyr on it, which read ‘Danger. Do not open.’
When Nameless translates, Korm says, “Something that the aberrations consider dangerous? That could be interesting.”
“Considering our current status, I’d rather not open this now,” says Nameless warily. “Maybe tomorrow, after we have all our spells available?”
“Actually,” says Trillia, “I was hoping not to return to this area again. I’d rather visit widely-spaced sections of the city, so that even when they find out we’ve been here - which I presume they’ll do soon enough - they won’t be able to trap us or prepare effectively enough to seriously endanger us.”
“Yeah,” says Luna. “Let’s check it out now.”
“After all,” says Korm, unsheathing his sword, “How bad could it be?”
“A sphincter farted on me and licked him,” says Six, indicating Gareth. “Don’t say things like that.” Gareth, who has been concentrating on the archway, nods and then says, “I don’t pick up any aura of evil, for what it’s worth.”
Korm uses his greatsword to chop through the bricked-up area, its unusual material easily reducing the wall to rubble, which Luna (back in bear form) pulls out of the way. After chopping through nearly a dozen feet, Korm breaks through into an open area.
It is a short tunnel, fifteen feet long and ten feet wide, that opens into a large chamber, the far wall of which is nearly forty feet away from the tunnel’s end, and the floor of which is much lower than the tunnel’s. The entire area is lit by a pale green light that seems to have no evident source.
Once everyone can see in, Nameless points at six glyphs set into the floor of the tunnel. “They’re inactive, but someone definitely wanted some protection here.”
Korm, having moved in a little further to allow the others to enter, points into the chamber and says, “Look.” Joining him, the others see that the large chamber’s floor is about ten feet lower. The far wall has an open doorway, revealing a tunnel that turns right. The chamber’s ceiling is thirty feet above the floor, with two large circular stone protuberances, like the bottom of a stone tube, both of which have also been sealed up.
What draws their attention, however, is on the floor of the chamber. The entire floor is covered in bones. Humanoid bones, most of approximately human size, though some are slightly larger and many smaller. There must be tens of thousands of them, making the chamber a gigantic mass grave.
There is momentary silence, except for a continuous, low growl from Luna. Then Korm, who has been kneeling for a closer look, says, “Many of them are broken.” He is correct, with a large number of bones displaying fractures and breaks, with some being broken in half.
Nameless, who has been studying the walls, points out that they are covered in writing to a height of about six feet. They seem to be in dried blood and are in goblin, written in multiple hands.
Reading the sections nearby, the adventurers find them haphazard and disconnected, including things like dates (which are meaningless to the Angels), numbers, names, and even rough pictures. A constant thread is that they often break down into raving about the aberrations.
“They probably just threw them in here and left them,” says Korm somberly. “But that doesn’t explain why it was blocked up with that message.”
“Let’s see what’s in the other room,” says Six, carefully poking into the bones with his extensible pole. “They’re a little over a foot deep.”
The group carefully descends, to a litany of cracks as they step onto the incredibly old and brittle bones. Korm decides to ride Luna, which she allows him to do. Trillia stops to read more, so the others do the same.
Now that they are closer and can read much more, they quickly pick up more of a narrative from the various scrawling. The writings say that this area is where the aberrations used to throw the old, weak, pregnant, and sick goblinoids, that is, those that were considered unfit for their experiments. They did not provide food and only a little water trickled in from the surface. Eventually, the desperate and ravenous goblinoids began to eat those that died. And when the corpses ran out, they turned to the living. The scrawls refer to the weaker ones being killed and eaten by the stronger, some of whom banded together. They speak of the smaller goblins dying first, and the larger bugbears being slain while sleeping. They refer to pregnant women delivering babies and having them snatched away and torn apart. Some of the portions that seem most rambling and raving speak of hearing voices and seeing lights. A entire section simply repeats, over and over again, “They’re not dead. They’re watching us. They want revenge.” Another, larger area, simply consists of endless scrawls of “Revenge, forgive, revenge, forgive, revenge, forgive.…”
After having worked out what they can, there is little discussion as the group heads across the chamber, accompanied by the constant cracking sounds. They are halfway across the room when four spectral figures fly out of the floor around them. Each has a roughly humanoid form, though it ends in shapeless tatters. Each shape is made of a conglomeration of distorted faces that seem to be screaming soundlessly in agony, and constantly shifting and flowing around the creature’s body.
“Ghosts!” shouts Gareth, “I think.”
As he speaks, two of the ghosts raise their arms and a series of the faces shoot away from their bodies, trailing streams of incorporeal matter. The faces shoot into and through the bodies of the adventurers, causing a wave of supernatural terror to sweep over them, followed by a painful coldness.
Aided by the aura granted Gareth by the Flame, all of them shake off the fear and most resist the coldness, but Six feels it settle around him, strangely shaking his confidence.
Even as the Angels are striking back, the third ghost releases a single face, which flies into and through Gareth. The paladin feels it sap his strength as he swings Kizmet, only to find it pass harmlessly through his enemy.
Luna, rearing up and almost unseating Korm, similarly feels her claws pass through a ghost, but she manages to bite into it and rip away a mouthful of incorporeal matter. The hole she causes remains in the ghost, which lowers its arms and lets a number of the faces fall off it and sink into the layer of bones. A second later, they erupt from the floor, accompanied by an explosion of bone shards, many of which sink painfully into Luna. Korm, who has a few cut into his leg, dismounts awkwardly and swings at the ghost, with similar lack of luck. Six, trying to tumble past a ghost, almost falling flat on his face due to the layer of bones, and then seeing his chain swing harmlessly through a ghost, can sympathize.
Trillia too fails to affect them with a spell, but Nameless has better luck, a slow spell affecting three of the ghosts, the flow of the faces over their forms clearly slowing, as do their overall movements.
Moments later, all four of them move forwards into the bodies of the people before them. Nameless, Korm and Six all feel a momentary darkness envelop them and then each has a fleeting vision of the chamber, but now completely full of goblinoids, pushing and arguing with each other. Accompanying the vision is a distinct impression of seeing through someone’s eyes, overlaid with emotions of pain, fear and hunger.
Then the three manage to reassert their wills, sending the ghosts spilling back out of their bodies. Gareth, the fourth target, is warded by a protection from evil that he put up just before entering the chamber, and the ghost that attacks him simply hits the barrier and bounces off.
The incorporeal nature of the ghosts is what draws the fight out, with many powerful blows failing to affect them, but they are not very resistant to the damage that gets through, and the Angels soon dispatch them.
Gareth shakes his head, feeling his thoughts slowed by another draining attack he was hit with, “That wasn’t fun.”
Trillia, a little paler after having suffered a slightly different one, says, “I wonder if that’s what they were trying to keep in here.”
“One way to find out,” says Six, heading for the doorway.
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