carborundum
Adventurer
I don't know what to say.
Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
steeldragons
Steeliest of the dragons
I concur. "Wow." is all that comes to my mind...and my mind is usually fairly good with words...It is utterly inadequate for this magnitude of awesomeness but, just, "wow."
One question. So...from the permanent loss of 7 hit points, but then receiving the "wishy earth magic" auto-max for his class(es) which I am assuming was averaged for his Thief and Cleric classes [or is he considered some other special/paragon/epic class now or since his interactions with the Cleaners?] did Dranko actually lose any hit points?
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
I think the result was a net gain of hit points.
Going into that battle, I was guessing Dranko would lose somewhere in the 30-40 HP range (assuming he survived), but I underestimated the party's cleverness; obviously I should have designed the Tenthousandfold instead!
carborundum
Adventurer
Is there still a thread where you share monster stats, Sagiro? I'm darned curious about the Thousandfold ( and a few other things)
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 381
Leaping Circle Five
Everyone is disturbed by Aravis’s latest vision.
“Does this mean the bad guys know about the Archmagi having no powers?” asks Morningstar. They can’t exactly recall the timing of when that revelation was made, but it seems likely.
“And now that… thing… can impersonate the King!” says Ernie.
“On the plus side, Rosetta was right about there being a traitor,” says Dranko. (Though that is not technically true, it’s not a very meaningful distinction.)
Aravis doesn’t bother to hide his priorities “And the ancient scrolls are destroyed! I feel badly about the king, but he was on his way out, and there’ll be another king after him. But the scrolls were irreplaceable!”
They note one interesting detail about the vision. The monster said “A shame your heroes will find everyone dead when they return from the Abyss.” So, the monster, at least, expects the Company will return to the surface one day. And the Abyss? That could be a metaphor for the Underdark, or an indication that the party is destined to wind up in the actual Abyss somehow. Dranko is terrified by the thought of meeting Tapheon again, even though it carries the implication of escape from beneath Yulan’s Barrier. “I don’t want to die by being turned into an inside-out fish!” he wails.
They march on in the direction of the next Leaping Circle, but the caves and tunnels don’t cooperate, and eventually Kibi can find no passage that’s heading the way they need to go.
“Time to make a shortcut,” says Aravis. He casts shapechange, turns into a void-mouthed Digger, and starts eating a tunnel in the direction Kibi indicates. (There’s a bit of worry beforehand; where does the stone go when a Digger eats it? If it gets teleported away somewhere, and that teleportation is prevented by the nature of the Underdark…? He takes a bite, and the rock goes… somewhere, at least. Maybe it’s simply annihilated, a possibility Kibi finds quite disturbing. In the future, when they have some time, they should have Aravis eat some specific piece of rock and then cast discern location to see where it went.
Aravis can only move at a slow walking speed while he digs, but the distance is not great, perhaps two miles in a straight line, albeit at an upward angle. For a time the party is quiet, listening to the sound of Aravis tearing a path for them. Sometime after an hour has passed, Aravis realizes he had tuned out of the party’s telepathic bond for a good thirty seconds, and only regained his focus because Pewter has been batting the side of his head and thinking “Boss, come on, snap out of it!”
Kibi corrects their course; Aravis is coming in low. After twenty more minutes he breaks into a huge cave, and it’s clear right away they’ve come to the right place. The cave is filled with long-abandoned ruins, old crumbled facades built right into the walls, and in its center is an enormous circle of adamant set into the floor. The Leaping Circle!
Aravis stops, then starts to dig another tunnel through the floor for no apparent reason.
“Aravis, stop!” Kibi shouts mentally at him. It takes all of the others shouting into his mind to bring Aravis back. This time he had zoned out for over five minutes, thinking of nothing but the satisfaction of eating the stone and clearing a path.
He changes back to human form. “Perhaps that’s not something I should do for long periods of time.”
The gentle sound of running water sounds from all around, dripping down the walls and into small pools. Most of the natural stone is blooming with brightly-colored fungus, and the place has a rich, damp, earthy smell.
Unfortunately, that smell is mingled with the rank odor of corpses. Staked to the walls in twenty different places are dead Lizardman bodies. From the state of their decay, the party estimates they’ve been there at least a month or two. Each one has a huge incinerated hole where their heart once was.
“I hate them so much!” Ernie shrieks. “Now they’re just doing this for fun.”
It gets worse. On the ground at the feet of one of them, scrawled in the creatures’ own blood, are the words: “Morningstar, think here.”
“Soooo much!” says Ernie, in case anyone missed the sentiment the first time.
As a final kick in the teeth, a stone tablet at the north-facing point of the Leaping Circle, a tablet that once held the instructions for activating it, has mostly been pulverized. Little piles of dust lay around it.
Dranko walks to one of the creatures pinned to the wall. “You probably don’t have souls anymore, but if you do, I commend them to whatever Gods you worship. And, uh, sorry about all this.”
Morningstar casts multiple thought captures, but none in the place indicated by the blood. Many come up blank, but she does get three distinct thoughts.
The first is: “I hope Yavin is wrong.”
The second is: “Stop! What are you….augh!” It’s the thought of someone being killed, and not understanding why.
The third is: “Don’t bother with that; you know they’ll figure out something.” She guesses that’s Meledien, referring to the destruction of the tablet.
So… should Morningstar take the bait, and cast thought capture where the Evil Trio wants? It’s certainly a trap. There’s a faint aura of magic around the bloody words.
Aravis looks at the area with greater arcane sight. There’s a spell effect there, but something is masking exactly what it is. He believes it to be a combination of transmutation and necromancy, but not evil per se. Morningstar remembers the Null Shadow trap that was triggered by her casting thought capture, and remains highly skeptical.
Ernie is dead-set against it. “What could they possibly have to tell us? This is either a neener neener, or a trap, or both. They think our curiosity is so great, we can’t resist, but what could we possibly gain?”
Aravis disagrees. “I can’t deny, I’m keen to find out. Maybe they’ll be giving something away without realizing or intending it.”
Ernie shakes his head, but offers up an idea. Morningstar could use miracle to spoof a thought capture cast at range, so she could hear the thoughts there without standing on top of the magical trap. She’s not sure this would work, but decides it’s worth a try.
They buff Morningstar with protective spells first: fortune’s fate in case she takes physical damage, and protection from evil in case something assaults her mind. Dranko holds on to Ell’s Will for her while she casts her spell from thirty feet away.
The thought is from Meledien: You’re so predictable, you pathetic Ellish witch.
Aravis watches the spot intently with his greater arcane sight. The strength of the necromancy and transmutation magics grow a hundredfold, filling the area, and then dissipate.
“Can we take a moment to think about what we just learned?” says Ernie, voice a-drip with “I told you so.”
“Sure,” says Aravis. “We learned they can leave thought capture traps.” He’s staring intently at where the trap went off, mentally sifting through the dispersing magical energies. “I think I know what it would have done,” he says. “If Morningstar had been standing there, she’d have been permanently afflicted with a condition that would have caused damaging backlash to her whenever she healed someone. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Probably something Seven Dark Words cooked up.”
Dranko takes out a cigar and lights it on Ernie’s armor. He blows out a stream of smoke that forms into the words “Kibi reigns supreme.” The dwarf grins. “Ooh, do it again!” Dranko obliges, but this time the prophetic smoke spells out “He will send you back.”
Hm. That’s mysterious. He tries one more time, and gets “Kibi is a genius.”
Dranko looks thoughtful. “Maybe someone will send us back to the surface! I hope it’s after we finish our quest. That means we have hope!”
“I’ve always had hope,” says Aravis.
“We have to get back,” says Morningstar. “Yoba and Ernie have to get married, and she’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t show up. She’ll smite us all.”
“And you don’t want to miss a halfling wedding!” says Ernie.
Dranko gives a lascivious grin and adds, “…and you haven’t been to a bachelor party until you’ve…”
Flicker interrupts, uncharacteristically surly. “Can we talk about something else, please!”
Dranko gives Flicker a look of mock pity. “I’m sorry, are you lonely?”
Flicker’s not laughing. “I’m sorry, did you misunderstand what I asked?” He looks pointedly at the Leaping Circle. “How about the tablet? Why don’t we get to work on that?”
“You okay, Flick?” asks Ernie.
“Yes, I’m fine!”
“You don’t sound fine,” says Dranko.
“I’m fine!” Flicker is practically shouting. “Stop it! Argh!”
The others drop it for the time being, and talk does in fact turn to how they’re going to learn the activation ritual now that the Evil Trio have destroyed the instructions. They decide that some of the deceased lizard-folk may know, and by their robes identify the two who seemed most senior. Ernie starts with one of these. The Lizardman priest, despite having had his soul burned out, can still answer the call of speak with dead, which uses an imprint left on the body when it was last alive.
“How do you operate the Leaping Circle?” Ernie asks the corpse.
“Cast the ritual on the tablet.” The dead Lizardman sucks in a raspy mockery of breath.
“Given the tablet is broken,” says Ernie, “what would you do to activate the Leaping Circle?”
“Find someone who had memorized it.”
“Have you memorized it?”
“I could recite some of it.”
“What is the part of the ritual that you know?”
“Stand… equilateral… facing north point…" The Lizardman starts to recite all the details he can remember, and it’s quite a bit, but not everything. “That’s all I know,” it finishes.
“What portion of the ritual was that, and where did it fall chronologically?” asks Ernie.
“First part. More than half, less than three-quarters.”
“Who among you might have known the rest?”
“Gemigiss. Tall, with prominent eye ridges. The other shaman.”
At Dranko’s urging, Ernie asks a few more questions.
“What would you like done with your remains?”
“Fertilizer. For the fungus gardens.”
“What’s the funniest joke you know.”
“What’s the difference between gray fungus and riven fungus? Riven fungus hangs upside down all day long!” The Lizardman wheezes out something like a laugh.
They locate the second shaman and ask the same questions about the ritual. Gemigiss knows the back half, and explains it in detail, but they’re still missing about a tenth of the ritual, the part right after an 8-hour pause in the middle. Aravis and Kibi think they could figure out the missing bit themselves, given what they’ve witnessed in the preceding two rituals, and what they now know of this one.
Morningstar casts a speak with dead on a third Lizardman.
“One of your number hoped that Yavin wasn’t right about something,” she tells it. “Do you know what that was?”
“Yes,” groans the corpse. “Yavin prophesied our deaths. We would die by the sharp fire, to our enemies’ gain, but we should have faith in the greater arc of time. She told us our souls would also die.”
“Is there anything that can be done for your souls?”
“I don’t know.”
“The woman who wielded the spear that burned out your hearts. Did she have one arm or two?”
“Two. One of flesh, one of silver.”
So, Meledien has acquired a prosthesis.
“Thank you,” bows Morningstar.
Dranko gets Flicker roaring drunk and tries to draw the little halfling out, but Flicker refuses to talk about what’s bothering him. He has unusually solid defenses on the subject of Ernie’s wedding. Dranko assures him that if they get back to the surface, he’ll be so famous, he’ll be fighting off halfling women with a stick. And if they’re stuck down here, he’s bound to find some cute lizard-folk woman or something.
“Dranko,” slurs Flicker. “You know I love you like a brother, but shut up before I stab you to death.“
“You couldn’t hit me right now. You’re drunk.”
“I’ll wait ‘til I’m sober, and kill you then.”
The ritual is fairly simple, but long. It will last for almost three full days – 25 continuous hours casting by three ritualists, then an eight hour pause, then 25 more hours. Kibi, Grey Wolf and Aravis first have a heated discussion about the details of the missing section. They agree on almost all of it, but there is some dissent about the somatic component for a particular 20-second stretch. Aravis is certain that component needs two hands; one hand alone would not be capable of the complex gestures necessary. Kibi, on the other hand, is certain that a second hand would disturb the built-up aetheric substance, and that there must be a one-handed solution. It’s Grey Wolf who realizes that they are both right in a sense; two of them have to perform that section in perfect mirrored synchronicity, each with one hand only, and standing at least ten feet apart.
Morningstar asks the wizards about failure cases; what if they’re wrong? There isn’t one answer to that; all sorts of different things could happen, depending on the precise nature of the failure. Most likely the whole thing would fizzle harmlessly (save for the time lost), but there are worse possibilities. They could be sent somewhere else entirely from their intended destination. Or they could all be sent to different places. Even worse, they could be sent to someplace occupied by solid rock and killed instantly. Similarly, their bodies could be broken apart and the pieces teleported severally to any number of locations.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” says Kibi, right before donning his helmet of water breathing.
The first half of the ritual goes off without a hitch. The three wizards then go immediately to sleep, having exactly eight hours before the next stage of the procedure must be performed. They sleep for seven, and Aravis reports he had another dream of the surface from the Crosser’s Maze.
Upon the vast fields outside the city of Djaw, armies are massing. Formations of armored soldiers march in crisp rows, reacting to the barked orders of their commanders. Almost a third of them are mounted cavalry. The soldiers’ insignia are varied, as is their armament, but they all move with well-ordered purpose into an enormous square, five hundred feet on a side, marked upon the grass with stone pylons at the corners and ropes upon the ground. Over the course of an hour these regiments shift into place, until almost the entire square is full. Mingled with the warriors are dozens of supply wagons, and here and there are clerics of Kemma, Goddess of the Sun.
Standing at each corner of the square, and at the center of each edge, are eight figures in wizard garb. One of these is Five Silent Crow, his golden head in perfect synchronicity with his illusionary body. At some pre-arranged signal, the eight wizards begin to cast a complex spell; their chanting goes on for almost half an hour, while the several thousand soldiers stand silent. Only the occasional whicker from a warhorse intrudes upon the rhythmic intonations of the casters.
Then, with a whoosh and a pop, every animal and object within the square vanishes at once, as do the wizards themselves.
They are glad of the good news; it seems help is being sent to Charagan from allies in Kivia, to combat the Emperor and his forces. But will it be enough?
Ernie spends an hour mixing various herbal brews meant to keep the wizards awake and alert by their scents. During the next phase of the ritual he keeps a close eye on Kibi, Aravis and Grey Wolf, looking for signs of fatigue. Sure enough, with about an hour remaining, he notices that Aravis’s left arm isn’t going up as high as it had been on some oft-repeated gestures. He doesn’t want to interrupt, but he slides a jar of an invigorating concoction close to the edge of the circle, and the vapors cause Aravis to perk up.
At the conclusion of the ritual, they have two minutes before it powers down. The Company crowds into the center of the Leaping Circle. Kibi, ever cautious, casts mass xorn movement on the party, and then speaks the final word of the ritual.
They leap.
…to be continued…
Leaping Circle Five
Everyone is disturbed by Aravis’s latest vision.
“Does this mean the bad guys know about the Archmagi having no powers?” asks Morningstar. They can’t exactly recall the timing of when that revelation was made, but it seems likely.
“And now that… thing… can impersonate the King!” says Ernie.
“On the plus side, Rosetta was right about there being a traitor,” says Dranko. (Though that is not technically true, it’s not a very meaningful distinction.)
Aravis doesn’t bother to hide his priorities “And the ancient scrolls are destroyed! I feel badly about the king, but he was on his way out, and there’ll be another king after him. But the scrolls were irreplaceable!”
They note one interesting detail about the vision. The monster said “A shame your heroes will find everyone dead when they return from the Abyss.” So, the monster, at least, expects the Company will return to the surface one day. And the Abyss? That could be a metaphor for the Underdark, or an indication that the party is destined to wind up in the actual Abyss somehow. Dranko is terrified by the thought of meeting Tapheon again, even though it carries the implication of escape from beneath Yulan’s Barrier. “I don’t want to die by being turned into an inside-out fish!” he wails.
They march on in the direction of the next Leaping Circle, but the caves and tunnels don’t cooperate, and eventually Kibi can find no passage that’s heading the way they need to go.
“Time to make a shortcut,” says Aravis. He casts shapechange, turns into a void-mouthed Digger, and starts eating a tunnel in the direction Kibi indicates. (There’s a bit of worry beforehand; where does the stone go when a Digger eats it? If it gets teleported away somewhere, and that teleportation is prevented by the nature of the Underdark…? He takes a bite, and the rock goes… somewhere, at least. Maybe it’s simply annihilated, a possibility Kibi finds quite disturbing. In the future, when they have some time, they should have Aravis eat some specific piece of rock and then cast discern location to see where it went.
Aravis can only move at a slow walking speed while he digs, but the distance is not great, perhaps two miles in a straight line, albeit at an upward angle. For a time the party is quiet, listening to the sound of Aravis tearing a path for them. Sometime after an hour has passed, Aravis realizes he had tuned out of the party’s telepathic bond for a good thirty seconds, and only regained his focus because Pewter has been batting the side of his head and thinking “Boss, come on, snap out of it!”
Kibi corrects their course; Aravis is coming in low. After twenty more minutes he breaks into a huge cave, and it’s clear right away they’ve come to the right place. The cave is filled with long-abandoned ruins, old crumbled facades built right into the walls, and in its center is an enormous circle of adamant set into the floor. The Leaping Circle!
Aravis stops, then starts to dig another tunnel through the floor for no apparent reason.
“Aravis, stop!” Kibi shouts mentally at him. It takes all of the others shouting into his mind to bring Aravis back. This time he had zoned out for over five minutes, thinking of nothing but the satisfaction of eating the stone and clearing a path.
He changes back to human form. “Perhaps that’s not something I should do for long periods of time.”
The gentle sound of running water sounds from all around, dripping down the walls and into small pools. Most of the natural stone is blooming with brightly-colored fungus, and the place has a rich, damp, earthy smell.
Unfortunately, that smell is mingled with the rank odor of corpses. Staked to the walls in twenty different places are dead Lizardman bodies. From the state of their decay, the party estimates they’ve been there at least a month or two. Each one has a huge incinerated hole where their heart once was.
“I hate them so much!” Ernie shrieks. “Now they’re just doing this for fun.”
It gets worse. On the ground at the feet of one of them, scrawled in the creatures’ own blood, are the words: “Morningstar, think here.”
“Soooo much!” says Ernie, in case anyone missed the sentiment the first time.
As a final kick in the teeth, a stone tablet at the north-facing point of the Leaping Circle, a tablet that once held the instructions for activating it, has mostly been pulverized. Little piles of dust lay around it.
Dranko walks to one of the creatures pinned to the wall. “You probably don’t have souls anymore, but if you do, I commend them to whatever Gods you worship. And, uh, sorry about all this.”
Morningstar casts multiple thought captures, but none in the place indicated by the blood. Many come up blank, but she does get three distinct thoughts.
The first is: “I hope Yavin is wrong.”
The second is: “Stop! What are you….augh!” It’s the thought of someone being killed, and not understanding why.
The third is: “Don’t bother with that; you know they’ll figure out something.” She guesses that’s Meledien, referring to the destruction of the tablet.
So… should Morningstar take the bait, and cast thought capture where the Evil Trio wants? It’s certainly a trap. There’s a faint aura of magic around the bloody words.
Aravis looks at the area with greater arcane sight. There’s a spell effect there, but something is masking exactly what it is. He believes it to be a combination of transmutation and necromancy, but not evil per se. Morningstar remembers the Null Shadow trap that was triggered by her casting thought capture, and remains highly skeptical.
Ernie is dead-set against it. “What could they possibly have to tell us? This is either a neener neener, or a trap, or both. They think our curiosity is so great, we can’t resist, but what could we possibly gain?”
Aravis disagrees. “I can’t deny, I’m keen to find out. Maybe they’ll be giving something away without realizing or intending it.”
Ernie shakes his head, but offers up an idea. Morningstar could use miracle to spoof a thought capture cast at range, so she could hear the thoughts there without standing on top of the magical trap. She’s not sure this would work, but decides it’s worth a try.
They buff Morningstar with protective spells first: fortune’s fate in case she takes physical damage, and protection from evil in case something assaults her mind. Dranko holds on to Ell’s Will for her while she casts her spell from thirty feet away.
The thought is from Meledien: You’re so predictable, you pathetic Ellish witch.
Aravis watches the spot intently with his greater arcane sight. The strength of the necromancy and transmutation magics grow a hundredfold, filling the area, and then dissipate.
“Can we take a moment to think about what we just learned?” says Ernie, voice a-drip with “I told you so.”
“Sure,” says Aravis. “We learned they can leave thought capture traps.” He’s staring intently at where the trap went off, mentally sifting through the dispersing magical energies. “I think I know what it would have done,” he says. “If Morningstar had been standing there, she’d have been permanently afflicted with a condition that would have caused damaging backlash to her whenever she healed someone. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Probably something Seven Dark Words cooked up.”
Dranko takes out a cigar and lights it on Ernie’s armor. He blows out a stream of smoke that forms into the words “Kibi reigns supreme.” The dwarf grins. “Ooh, do it again!” Dranko obliges, but this time the prophetic smoke spells out “He will send you back.”
Hm. That’s mysterious. He tries one more time, and gets “Kibi is a genius.”
Dranko looks thoughtful. “Maybe someone will send us back to the surface! I hope it’s after we finish our quest. That means we have hope!”
“I’ve always had hope,” says Aravis.
“We have to get back,” says Morningstar. “Yoba and Ernie have to get married, and she’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t show up. She’ll smite us all.”
“And you don’t want to miss a halfling wedding!” says Ernie.
Dranko gives a lascivious grin and adds, “…and you haven’t been to a bachelor party until you’ve…”
Flicker interrupts, uncharacteristically surly. “Can we talk about something else, please!”
Dranko gives Flicker a look of mock pity. “I’m sorry, are you lonely?”
Flicker’s not laughing. “I’m sorry, did you misunderstand what I asked?” He looks pointedly at the Leaping Circle. “How about the tablet? Why don’t we get to work on that?”
“You okay, Flick?” asks Ernie.
“Yes, I’m fine!”
“You don’t sound fine,” says Dranko.
“I’m fine!” Flicker is practically shouting. “Stop it! Argh!”
The others drop it for the time being, and talk does in fact turn to how they’re going to learn the activation ritual now that the Evil Trio have destroyed the instructions. They decide that some of the deceased lizard-folk may know, and by their robes identify the two who seemed most senior. Ernie starts with one of these. The Lizardman priest, despite having had his soul burned out, can still answer the call of speak with dead, which uses an imprint left on the body when it was last alive.
“How do you operate the Leaping Circle?” Ernie asks the corpse.
“Cast the ritual on the tablet.” The dead Lizardman sucks in a raspy mockery of breath.
“Given the tablet is broken,” says Ernie, “what would you do to activate the Leaping Circle?”
“Find someone who had memorized it.”
“Have you memorized it?”
“I could recite some of it.”
“What is the part of the ritual that you know?”
“Stand… equilateral… facing north point…" The Lizardman starts to recite all the details he can remember, and it’s quite a bit, but not everything. “That’s all I know,” it finishes.
“What portion of the ritual was that, and where did it fall chronologically?” asks Ernie.
“First part. More than half, less than three-quarters.”
“Who among you might have known the rest?”
“Gemigiss. Tall, with prominent eye ridges. The other shaman.”
At Dranko’s urging, Ernie asks a few more questions.
“What would you like done with your remains?”
“Fertilizer. For the fungus gardens.”
“What’s the funniest joke you know.”
“What’s the difference between gray fungus and riven fungus? Riven fungus hangs upside down all day long!” The Lizardman wheezes out something like a laugh.
They locate the second shaman and ask the same questions about the ritual. Gemigiss knows the back half, and explains it in detail, but they’re still missing about a tenth of the ritual, the part right after an 8-hour pause in the middle. Aravis and Kibi think they could figure out the missing bit themselves, given what they’ve witnessed in the preceding two rituals, and what they now know of this one.
Morningstar casts a speak with dead on a third Lizardman.
“One of your number hoped that Yavin wasn’t right about something,” she tells it. “Do you know what that was?”
“Yes,” groans the corpse. “Yavin prophesied our deaths. We would die by the sharp fire, to our enemies’ gain, but we should have faith in the greater arc of time. She told us our souls would also die.”
“Is there anything that can be done for your souls?”
“I don’t know.”
“The woman who wielded the spear that burned out your hearts. Did she have one arm or two?”
“Two. One of flesh, one of silver.”
So, Meledien has acquired a prosthesis.
“Thank you,” bows Morningstar.
Dranko gets Flicker roaring drunk and tries to draw the little halfling out, but Flicker refuses to talk about what’s bothering him. He has unusually solid defenses on the subject of Ernie’s wedding. Dranko assures him that if they get back to the surface, he’ll be so famous, he’ll be fighting off halfling women with a stick. And if they’re stuck down here, he’s bound to find some cute lizard-folk woman or something.
“Dranko,” slurs Flicker. “You know I love you like a brother, but shut up before I stab you to death.“
“You couldn’t hit me right now. You’re drunk.”
“I’ll wait ‘til I’m sober, and kill you then.”
The ritual is fairly simple, but long. It will last for almost three full days – 25 continuous hours casting by three ritualists, then an eight hour pause, then 25 more hours. Kibi, Grey Wolf and Aravis first have a heated discussion about the details of the missing section. They agree on almost all of it, but there is some dissent about the somatic component for a particular 20-second stretch. Aravis is certain that component needs two hands; one hand alone would not be capable of the complex gestures necessary. Kibi, on the other hand, is certain that a second hand would disturb the built-up aetheric substance, and that there must be a one-handed solution. It’s Grey Wolf who realizes that they are both right in a sense; two of them have to perform that section in perfect mirrored synchronicity, each with one hand only, and standing at least ten feet apart.
Morningstar asks the wizards about failure cases; what if they’re wrong? There isn’t one answer to that; all sorts of different things could happen, depending on the precise nature of the failure. Most likely the whole thing would fizzle harmlessly (save for the time lost), but there are worse possibilities. They could be sent somewhere else entirely from their intended destination. Or they could all be sent to different places. Even worse, they could be sent to someplace occupied by solid rock and killed instantly. Similarly, their bodies could be broken apart and the pieces teleported severally to any number of locations.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” says Kibi, right before donning his helmet of water breathing.
The first half of the ritual goes off without a hitch. The three wizards then go immediately to sleep, having exactly eight hours before the next stage of the procedure must be performed. They sleep for seven, and Aravis reports he had another dream of the surface from the Crosser’s Maze.
Upon the vast fields outside the city of Djaw, armies are massing. Formations of armored soldiers march in crisp rows, reacting to the barked orders of their commanders. Almost a third of them are mounted cavalry. The soldiers’ insignia are varied, as is their armament, but they all move with well-ordered purpose into an enormous square, five hundred feet on a side, marked upon the grass with stone pylons at the corners and ropes upon the ground. Over the course of an hour these regiments shift into place, until almost the entire square is full. Mingled with the warriors are dozens of supply wagons, and here and there are clerics of Kemma, Goddess of the Sun.
Standing at each corner of the square, and at the center of each edge, are eight figures in wizard garb. One of these is Five Silent Crow, his golden head in perfect synchronicity with his illusionary body. At some pre-arranged signal, the eight wizards begin to cast a complex spell; their chanting goes on for almost half an hour, while the several thousand soldiers stand silent. Only the occasional whicker from a warhorse intrudes upon the rhythmic intonations of the casters.
Then, with a whoosh and a pop, every animal and object within the square vanishes at once, as do the wizards themselves.
They are glad of the good news; it seems help is being sent to Charagan from allies in Kivia, to combat the Emperor and his forces. But will it be enough?
Ernie spends an hour mixing various herbal brews meant to keep the wizards awake and alert by their scents. During the next phase of the ritual he keeps a close eye on Kibi, Aravis and Grey Wolf, looking for signs of fatigue. Sure enough, with about an hour remaining, he notices that Aravis’s left arm isn’t going up as high as it had been on some oft-repeated gestures. He doesn’t want to interrupt, but he slides a jar of an invigorating concoction close to the edge of the circle, and the vapors cause Aravis to perk up.
At the conclusion of the ritual, they have two minutes before it powers down. The Company crowds into the center of the Leaping Circle. Kibi, ever cautious, casts mass xorn movement on the party, and then speaks the final word of the ritual.
They leap.
…to be continued…
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Surviving the thousand-fold was step 1 in "Dranko learns about humility."
I was of mixed mind about the mechanics involved with permanent hit point loss. On one side, it's so far from common that it's virtually unheard of, permanent con loss aside. Nuking Dranko's hit points stabs into the heart of his character. On the other side, Dranko had a high con and better than average rolls, and I enjoy character optimization so long as the character is personality-driven as well. I know that Sagiro was finding it trickier to balance encounters when Dranko's hp and defenses are high; I trust him, and if he thought the game would be more fun with a less durable Dranko, I'm not the one to gainsay him. I did, however, pretty much crap a brick in surprise and post-dated fear when I found out about the permanent loss and what could have happened.
EDIT: Dranko at 20th level had a 20 con and 202 hp. That's from 5d8, 11d6 and 4d10, which averages out (including max hp for 1st level) to 187.
I seem to remember offering to lower his hit points or Con voluntarily after the fact, and Sagiro graciously declining. I may be imagining this. Considering the rest of this campaign, I'm even more grateful in retrospect.
I was of mixed mind about the mechanics involved with permanent hit point loss. On one side, it's so far from common that it's virtually unheard of, permanent con loss aside. Nuking Dranko's hit points stabs into the heart of his character. On the other side, Dranko had a high con and better than average rolls, and I enjoy character optimization so long as the character is personality-driven as well. I know that Sagiro was finding it trickier to balance encounters when Dranko's hp and defenses are high; I trust him, and if he thought the game would be more fun with a less durable Dranko, I'm not the one to gainsay him. I did, however, pretty much crap a brick in surprise and post-dated fear when I found out about the permanent loss and what could have happened.
EDIT: Dranko at 20th level had a 20 con and 202 hp. That's from 5d8, 11d6 and 4d10, which averages out (including max hp for 1st level) to 187.
I seem to remember offering to lower his hit points or Con voluntarily after the fact, and Sagiro graciously declining. I may be imagining this. Considering the rest of this campaign, I'm even more grateful in retrospect.
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Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 382
“What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?”
Dranko’s detour into the Far Realms is shorter this time, and his memory of it is sparse – lurking madness, shimmering stars, things. Then that is replaced by a nostril-puckering fume of acid and a stinging prickle on his skin. He and the others are standing knee deep in some kind of cloudy liquid, in a dark, damp space surrounded by organic looking walls. There are no light motes; the Company can only see because Aravis has been diligently casting mass darkvision every morning.
The water-walking function of Dranko’s ring of elemental command kicks in; he rises to the surface. Everyone else is starting, slowly, to dissolve. The acrid odor is strong enough to bring tears to their eyes. Floating in the water with them are hundreds of fish bones, the flesh dissolved from them. The “roof” above them is glistening, a thick liquid dripping from it. Some forty feet away, in that ceiling, a tunnel leads up and out. Another tunnel, off in the other direction, snakes away and downward.
“We’re in something’s stomach,” Ernie observes.
Flicker’s eyes grow wide. “Even a Ventifact Colossus wouldn’t have a stomach this big… uh, would it?”
He’s right; a creature with a stomach this size would dwarf one of the Great Sand Turtles from the Mouth of Nahalm. Dranko shakes his head in disbelief, then uses his ring to cast control water, lowering the level of the acid so that his friends are no longer melting.
The room shakes, and there’s a sudden sound like thunder. A huge slurry-fall comes gushing out of the tunnel above, disgorging a pungent effluvia mixed with rocks, fishbones, clumps of something organic but unidentifiable, and half an old rowboat.
“Yup,” says Dranko. “We’re in a giant monster.”
On their clothes and skin, a film of something like dust is accreting. Whorls of it are drifting around them, settling on them, pulled in as though each member of the Company is exerting a local gravity.
“We should get out of here,” says Aravis. Ernie casts wind walk on them, and they float up toward the ceiling tunnel, figuring it’s better to try exiting the monster’s mouth than its nether regions. As they float, the dust tries to mix in with their airy forms. It stings.
The tube – which they assume is the esophagus – bends this way and that but goes more or less straight upward, its walls covered with undulating cilia the size of human forearms. Dranko takes the time to resolidify, since he can climb as fast as the others can waft, and now he can spray away the stinging dust with his decanter of endless water. The only trouble comes when something plummets down the shaft toward him – it’s the half-digested body of a huge shark. He squeezes himself into the repulsively slimy wall of the tube as it falls past him.
Wait… it was already half-digested?
“We arrived in its second stomach,” he says. “There must be another one up there.”
Sure enough, they emerge into second stomach-like chamber, larger than the first, filled knee-deep with sludgy acid. An extruded fleshy lip prevents the liquid from draining constantly into the lower stomach. This place is full of chum, mostly sharks and other large fish in various stages of digestion. These remains are pushed gently along by cilia poking up from the acid, and when enough stuff is ready to the make the journey, the lip retracts and a gout of material gets flushed.
Then more stuff comes down from yet another tube in the ceiling. Eight or nine grayish green blobs, roughly man-sized, drop to the floor with loud plopping sounds. They rise up amorphously, and fire off blobs of goo at Dranko, who is the only physically solid member of the Company. He is entirely enveloped in a thick jelly-like substance. He feels his flesh start to dissolve, and his muscles freeze up. His decanter is gummed up and won’t activate.
Dranko fights down a flashback to the time he was similarly paralyzed in the center of a gelatinous cube.
“I can’t move, and I’m being digested,” Dranko thinks to the others over the mind-link.
Ernie dismisses the wind walk so they can free Dranko. Grey Wolf quickens a sound lance, firing it at Dranko’s gelatinous cocoon. It bursts in a splattery explosion, and (as a bonus) buffers Dranko from the damage. Dranko topples onto his side, but doesn’t sink into the acid because he’s still water walking.
Grey Wolf follows up with a chain lightning, fired into the cluster of huge antibodies. All are damaged, but none are destroyed. Kibi follows with a maximized cone of cold, but the antibodies seem immune to cold. His spell does precipitate a rumbling shake of the entire stomach. Kibi follows up with a quickened wall of force, the placement of which is calculated to give them partial cover from the jelly-blasting blobs.
Dranko reminds the others over the mind-link that even paralyzed he can activate the prismatic spray function of his helm of brilliance. The only problem is, he’s lying down with his back to the enemy. Flicker runs up and flips Dranko around, the half-orc's body rolling slickly on the surface of the acid. Dranko fires his spell.
Most of the antibodies are struck with beams of either acid or fire, both of which they are immune to. They cannot be sent to another plane, nor can they be poisoned. As such, only two of the things are neutralized, one turned to stone and sinking beneath the surface, and another blasted to bits by electricity. Seven still remain.
Ernie activates the flight power of his shield, flies up and out of the acid, and casts a quickened mass cure moderate wounds. Then Aravis finishes the fight with a maximized chain lightning that rips through all seven remaining antibodies. The threat taken care of, Morningstar wades to Dranko, takes off one of the magic rings he wears, and replaces it with a ring of freedom of movement.
Ernie recasts wind walk on the party, though Dranko stays solid so he continue spraying the acid-dust off the others before it can do its damage. Morningstar casts water breathing on everyone, figuring that eventually, if all goes well, they’ll be emerging into a body of water.
Up they waft, though yet another organic tube. The smell continues to be nearly overpowering, a potent reek of acid and rotting fish. Sixty feet up, and the tunnel narrows and ends abruptly. The Company has reached a fleshy ceiling with spiraling creases arranged in an iris.
“It’s a sphincter,” says Dranko. He activates his immovable rod, perches, and examines the obstruction, prodding and poking it to see if it will open. It does not.
“On the other side of the sphincter is a magical land of sunshine and honey,” he says. “No, just kidding, it’s probably seawater.”
“Should we be worried about getting chewed up once we reach its mouth?” asks Flicker, worried.
“I doubt it,” says Ernie. “All the sharks here are whole, just dissolving. This creature probably just swallows its food whole.”
Without warning the sphincter irises open and a powerful gush of liquid, fish and detritus comes blasting downward like a water-cannon. Dranko just barely manages to hold on to the immovable rod, which prevents him from getting knocked back down to the upper stomach, though some large chunk of soggy fungus-wood bruises his shoulder. The others, in gaseous form, are buffeted downward somewhat but manage to stay in the general vicinity. After ten seconds of this, the sphincter slams shut, leaving only a gurgling sound beneath them.
“Hmm,” muses Aravis. “What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?” He solidifies long enough to try it, but it doesn’t work. In fact, this proves to be an extremely difficult puzzle to solve. The nature of the Underdark precludes casting dimension door or teleport to any location you cannot currently see. But while the sphincter is open, the tunnel is filled entirely with liquid, and there’s no line of effect to the far side of it. And the sheer power of the water blasting downward prevents them from swimming upward during the ten-second windows while the sphincter is open.
Dranko tries casting a wall of ice in the opening, and manages the split-second timing to get it set, but the sphincter merely seals around it, eventually crushing and dissolving it. During the next flushing of stuff Dranko is nearly knocked away from the immovable rod by, of all things, a large fungus-wood door that accompanies the fish and seawater.
“I officially hate this place more than Mouth of Nahalm,” he says.
“We’re expected to fight a God,” says Morningstar. “And yet we can’t get out of the stomach of a giant monster.”
The sphincter is opening like clockwork, spiraling open every seventy-one seconds, and staying open for nine. Dranko is protected from acid, but soon grows weary of being sprayed with a sludge of dead fish and sundry debris. The Company wracks their collective brains, wondering how they’ll get past this obstruction. (They have considered simply hacking their way out, but there is some worry about drawing more of the creature’s natural defenses toward them.)
When the lightbulb goes off, it’s over Aravis’s head. He explains his plan, and the others agree to try it.
Kibi comes out of gaseous form and clings to the immovable rod. Dranko helps to brace him. With timing that only someone with a superhuman intelligence could muster, Kibi casts a solid-walled forcecage as the sphincter opens, such that half of its interior is below the sphincter and half above. He gets his spell off just as the blasting inverted geyser smashes him downward. He tumbles, but like Dranko he is saved from a plunge to the stomach by the bottom of the forcecage.
One small difficulty: when the spell went off, almost all of its area was filled with liquid. As such, the entire company is now encased in a forcecage filled almost completely with acid. Breaths are held.
The good news is, the sphincter cannot close around the middle of the box of force, and they can swim to the top of the enclosure, which is on the far side of the sphincter. Partial success! Aravis enacts stage two, casting rope trick in the six-inch sliver of air at the top of the forcecage. One by one they rise up into it, until everyone is safe in the extradimensional pocket space.
Finally, Kibi sticks his head back out into the box of acid, long enough to dismiss the forcecage. Now, when they depart the rope trick, they’ll be in the space above the sphincter. Kibi reports that wherever they are now, it’s (unsurprisingly) underwater.
Dranko wants to scout, but needs to time things so he doesn’t end up getting sucked back down through the sphincter. He ties a long length of thick rope around his waist and dives out. The liquid is still acidic enough to prevent water-breathing, so he holds his breath.
He goes shooting upward through opaque liquid and pops out on its surface some forty feet higher. He’s in a cavernous space, so wide he cannot see any walls, but above him, near the outer range of his darkvision, is the ceiling of yet another stomach, with a wide tube snaking away upward.
“How many stomachs does this thing have?”
Around him, the surface of the “water” is clogged with remains. Dozens of shark carcasses float with him, bobbing in a surface layer of dead fish, wads of fungus, and shells of giant tortoises. Dranko thinks he sees a skeletal humanoid leg poking up fifteen feet to his left. The place stinks like a devil’s bait-house.
The water level drops a bit as far below him the sphincter opens and sucks down a few thousand gallons of flotsam. Concurrently, a hail of objects comes from above – it’s a hail of sharks, many of which are thrashing in the air. Surprisingly little water comes with them.
The sharks are alive! (At least, before the acid kills them.) The Company must be close to escaping.
Dranko dives and swims back down, returning to the rope trick. “This is the best dungeon ever! How many places have we ever been where sharks rain from the sky?”
Everyone returns to mist-form, leaves the pocket-dimension, and bubbles up to the latest “surface.” In the first ten seconds after they emerge, three discrete loads of stuff get dumped in with them. One consists only of small grey fish, over a thousand of them. Another is tons of crumbly fungus. The final looks like a combination of green moss and pebbly rocks.
“It has three mouths?” guesses Morningstar. “Two land mouths and a sea mouth?”
“Maybe it’s an extradimensional monster?” adds Dranko.
Onward and upward! They race through one last esophageal tube, and finally, high above them, they can see light motes. All at once they emerge into the bowl of a two-hundred-yard wide mouth. Something like a fine-meshed fishing net, thirty yards across, looms over them. Is it trying to catch them? No, they can see the net is full of fish of varying sizes. A fleshy tentacle serves as the handle of the net, a tentacle that snakes off into the darkness where, one presumes, it’s connected to the body somewhere. The net flips over and dumps tons of fish into the impossibly-wide mouth.
Thirty long tongues slither through the bottom of the mouth, shoveling the masses of fish, fungus, and everything else the nets have scooped, toward dozens of gaping esophagi. More of the organic nets are coming in from every direction, each unloading its cargo of foodstuffs into the world’s largest mouth.
The Company rises high above the Underdark Leviathan, the single largest creature on Abernia, the scourge of the Hidden Sea and all the surrounding regions. Its head rises from the sea, but its enormous body, which must stretch for miles, is hidden beneath the dark waters.
Dranko can’t help himself. He comes out of wind-form and activates the immovable rod. Perched there near the ceiling above the Hidden Sea, he calls pen and parchment from his haversack and scribbles out a note. “Dranko was here.” He pops the note into a vial and lets it fall into the Leviathan’s mouth.
Now that Kibi is near to the solid stone of the Underdark, he regains his perfect sense of where they are. They are almost four miles deeper than Leaping Circle Five, but to reach the location of Leaping Circle Nine, they’ll need to go down even further, another four miles, and sixteen miles generally southwest.
Dranko frowns. “We should have gone out its butt.”
…to be continued…
“What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?”
Dranko’s detour into the Far Realms is shorter this time, and his memory of it is sparse – lurking madness, shimmering stars, things. Then that is replaced by a nostril-puckering fume of acid and a stinging prickle on his skin. He and the others are standing knee deep in some kind of cloudy liquid, in a dark, damp space surrounded by organic looking walls. There are no light motes; the Company can only see because Aravis has been diligently casting mass darkvision every morning.
The water-walking function of Dranko’s ring of elemental command kicks in; he rises to the surface. Everyone else is starting, slowly, to dissolve. The acrid odor is strong enough to bring tears to their eyes. Floating in the water with them are hundreds of fish bones, the flesh dissolved from them. The “roof” above them is glistening, a thick liquid dripping from it. Some forty feet away, in that ceiling, a tunnel leads up and out. Another tunnel, off in the other direction, snakes away and downward.
“We’re in something’s stomach,” Ernie observes.
Flicker’s eyes grow wide. “Even a Ventifact Colossus wouldn’t have a stomach this big… uh, would it?”
He’s right; a creature with a stomach this size would dwarf one of the Great Sand Turtles from the Mouth of Nahalm. Dranko shakes his head in disbelief, then uses his ring to cast control water, lowering the level of the acid so that his friends are no longer melting.
The room shakes, and there’s a sudden sound like thunder. A huge slurry-fall comes gushing out of the tunnel above, disgorging a pungent effluvia mixed with rocks, fishbones, clumps of something organic but unidentifiable, and half an old rowboat.
“Yup,” says Dranko. “We’re in a giant monster.”
On their clothes and skin, a film of something like dust is accreting. Whorls of it are drifting around them, settling on them, pulled in as though each member of the Company is exerting a local gravity.
“We should get out of here,” says Aravis. Ernie casts wind walk on them, and they float up toward the ceiling tunnel, figuring it’s better to try exiting the monster’s mouth than its nether regions. As they float, the dust tries to mix in with their airy forms. It stings.
The tube – which they assume is the esophagus – bends this way and that but goes more or less straight upward, its walls covered with undulating cilia the size of human forearms. Dranko takes the time to resolidify, since he can climb as fast as the others can waft, and now he can spray away the stinging dust with his decanter of endless water. The only trouble comes when something plummets down the shaft toward him – it’s the half-digested body of a huge shark. He squeezes himself into the repulsively slimy wall of the tube as it falls past him.
Wait… it was already half-digested?
“We arrived in its second stomach,” he says. “There must be another one up there.”
Sure enough, they emerge into second stomach-like chamber, larger than the first, filled knee-deep with sludgy acid. An extruded fleshy lip prevents the liquid from draining constantly into the lower stomach. This place is full of chum, mostly sharks and other large fish in various stages of digestion. These remains are pushed gently along by cilia poking up from the acid, and when enough stuff is ready to the make the journey, the lip retracts and a gout of material gets flushed.
Then more stuff comes down from yet another tube in the ceiling. Eight or nine grayish green blobs, roughly man-sized, drop to the floor with loud plopping sounds. They rise up amorphously, and fire off blobs of goo at Dranko, who is the only physically solid member of the Company. He is entirely enveloped in a thick jelly-like substance. He feels his flesh start to dissolve, and his muscles freeze up. His decanter is gummed up and won’t activate.
Dranko fights down a flashback to the time he was similarly paralyzed in the center of a gelatinous cube.
“I can’t move, and I’m being digested,” Dranko thinks to the others over the mind-link.
Ernie dismisses the wind walk so they can free Dranko. Grey Wolf quickens a sound lance, firing it at Dranko’s gelatinous cocoon. It bursts in a splattery explosion, and (as a bonus) buffers Dranko from the damage. Dranko topples onto his side, but doesn’t sink into the acid because he’s still water walking.
Grey Wolf follows up with a chain lightning, fired into the cluster of huge antibodies. All are damaged, but none are destroyed. Kibi follows with a maximized cone of cold, but the antibodies seem immune to cold. His spell does precipitate a rumbling shake of the entire stomach. Kibi follows up with a quickened wall of force, the placement of which is calculated to give them partial cover from the jelly-blasting blobs.
Dranko reminds the others over the mind-link that even paralyzed he can activate the prismatic spray function of his helm of brilliance. The only problem is, he’s lying down with his back to the enemy. Flicker runs up and flips Dranko around, the half-orc's body rolling slickly on the surface of the acid. Dranko fires his spell.
Most of the antibodies are struck with beams of either acid or fire, both of which they are immune to. They cannot be sent to another plane, nor can they be poisoned. As such, only two of the things are neutralized, one turned to stone and sinking beneath the surface, and another blasted to bits by electricity. Seven still remain.
Ernie activates the flight power of his shield, flies up and out of the acid, and casts a quickened mass cure moderate wounds. Then Aravis finishes the fight with a maximized chain lightning that rips through all seven remaining antibodies. The threat taken care of, Morningstar wades to Dranko, takes off one of the magic rings he wears, and replaces it with a ring of freedom of movement.
Ernie recasts wind walk on the party, though Dranko stays solid so he continue spraying the acid-dust off the others before it can do its damage. Morningstar casts water breathing on everyone, figuring that eventually, if all goes well, they’ll be emerging into a body of water.
Up they waft, though yet another organic tube. The smell continues to be nearly overpowering, a potent reek of acid and rotting fish. Sixty feet up, and the tunnel narrows and ends abruptly. The Company has reached a fleshy ceiling with spiraling creases arranged in an iris.
“It’s a sphincter,” says Dranko. He activates his immovable rod, perches, and examines the obstruction, prodding and poking it to see if it will open. It does not.
“On the other side of the sphincter is a magical land of sunshine and honey,” he says. “No, just kidding, it’s probably seawater.”
“Should we be worried about getting chewed up once we reach its mouth?” asks Flicker, worried.
“I doubt it,” says Ernie. “All the sharks here are whole, just dissolving. This creature probably just swallows its food whole.”
Without warning the sphincter irises open and a powerful gush of liquid, fish and detritus comes blasting downward like a water-cannon. Dranko just barely manages to hold on to the immovable rod, which prevents him from getting knocked back down to the upper stomach, though some large chunk of soggy fungus-wood bruises his shoulder. The others, in gaseous form, are buffeted downward somewhat but manage to stay in the general vicinity. After ten seconds of this, the sphincter slams shut, leaving only a gurgling sound beneath them.
“Hmm,” muses Aravis. “What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?” He solidifies long enough to try it, but it doesn’t work. In fact, this proves to be an extremely difficult puzzle to solve. The nature of the Underdark precludes casting dimension door or teleport to any location you cannot currently see. But while the sphincter is open, the tunnel is filled entirely with liquid, and there’s no line of effect to the far side of it. And the sheer power of the water blasting downward prevents them from swimming upward during the ten-second windows while the sphincter is open.
Dranko tries casting a wall of ice in the opening, and manages the split-second timing to get it set, but the sphincter merely seals around it, eventually crushing and dissolving it. During the next flushing of stuff Dranko is nearly knocked away from the immovable rod by, of all things, a large fungus-wood door that accompanies the fish and seawater.
“I officially hate this place more than Mouth of Nahalm,” he says.
“We’re expected to fight a God,” says Morningstar. “And yet we can’t get out of the stomach of a giant monster.”
The sphincter is opening like clockwork, spiraling open every seventy-one seconds, and staying open for nine. Dranko is protected from acid, but soon grows weary of being sprayed with a sludge of dead fish and sundry debris. The Company wracks their collective brains, wondering how they’ll get past this obstruction. (They have considered simply hacking their way out, but there is some worry about drawing more of the creature’s natural defenses toward them.)
When the lightbulb goes off, it’s over Aravis’s head. He explains his plan, and the others agree to try it.
Kibi comes out of gaseous form and clings to the immovable rod. Dranko helps to brace him. With timing that only someone with a superhuman intelligence could muster, Kibi casts a solid-walled forcecage as the sphincter opens, such that half of its interior is below the sphincter and half above. He gets his spell off just as the blasting inverted geyser smashes him downward. He tumbles, but like Dranko he is saved from a plunge to the stomach by the bottom of the forcecage.
One small difficulty: when the spell went off, almost all of its area was filled with liquid. As such, the entire company is now encased in a forcecage filled almost completely with acid. Breaths are held.
The good news is, the sphincter cannot close around the middle of the box of force, and they can swim to the top of the enclosure, which is on the far side of the sphincter. Partial success! Aravis enacts stage two, casting rope trick in the six-inch sliver of air at the top of the forcecage. One by one they rise up into it, until everyone is safe in the extradimensional pocket space.
Finally, Kibi sticks his head back out into the box of acid, long enough to dismiss the forcecage. Now, when they depart the rope trick, they’ll be in the space above the sphincter. Kibi reports that wherever they are now, it’s (unsurprisingly) underwater.
Dranko wants to scout, but needs to time things so he doesn’t end up getting sucked back down through the sphincter. He ties a long length of thick rope around his waist and dives out. The liquid is still acidic enough to prevent water-breathing, so he holds his breath.
He goes shooting upward through opaque liquid and pops out on its surface some forty feet higher. He’s in a cavernous space, so wide he cannot see any walls, but above him, near the outer range of his darkvision, is the ceiling of yet another stomach, with a wide tube snaking away upward.
“How many stomachs does this thing have?”
Around him, the surface of the “water” is clogged with remains. Dozens of shark carcasses float with him, bobbing in a surface layer of dead fish, wads of fungus, and shells of giant tortoises. Dranko thinks he sees a skeletal humanoid leg poking up fifteen feet to his left. The place stinks like a devil’s bait-house.
The water level drops a bit as far below him the sphincter opens and sucks down a few thousand gallons of flotsam. Concurrently, a hail of objects comes from above – it’s a hail of sharks, many of which are thrashing in the air. Surprisingly little water comes with them.
The sharks are alive! (At least, before the acid kills them.) The Company must be close to escaping.
Dranko dives and swims back down, returning to the rope trick. “This is the best dungeon ever! How many places have we ever been where sharks rain from the sky?”
Everyone returns to mist-form, leaves the pocket-dimension, and bubbles up to the latest “surface.” In the first ten seconds after they emerge, three discrete loads of stuff get dumped in with them. One consists only of small grey fish, over a thousand of them. Another is tons of crumbly fungus. The final looks like a combination of green moss and pebbly rocks.
“It has three mouths?” guesses Morningstar. “Two land mouths and a sea mouth?”
“Maybe it’s an extradimensional monster?” adds Dranko.
Onward and upward! They race through one last esophageal tube, and finally, high above them, they can see light motes. All at once they emerge into the bowl of a two-hundred-yard wide mouth. Something like a fine-meshed fishing net, thirty yards across, looms over them. Is it trying to catch them? No, they can see the net is full of fish of varying sizes. A fleshy tentacle serves as the handle of the net, a tentacle that snakes off into the darkness where, one presumes, it’s connected to the body somewhere. The net flips over and dumps tons of fish into the impossibly-wide mouth.
Thirty long tongues slither through the bottom of the mouth, shoveling the masses of fish, fungus, and everything else the nets have scooped, toward dozens of gaping esophagi. More of the organic nets are coming in from every direction, each unloading its cargo of foodstuffs into the world’s largest mouth.
The Company rises high above the Underdark Leviathan, the single largest creature on Abernia, the scourge of the Hidden Sea and all the surrounding regions. Its head rises from the sea, but its enormous body, which must stretch for miles, is hidden beneath the dark waters.
Dranko can’t help himself. He comes out of wind-form and activates the immovable rod. Perched there near the ceiling above the Hidden Sea, he calls pen and parchment from his haversack and scribbles out a note. “Dranko was here.” He pops the note into a vial and lets it fall into the Leviathan’s mouth.
Now that Kibi is near to the solid stone of the Underdark, he regains his perfect sense of where they are. They are almost four miles deeper than Leaping Circle Five, but to reach the location of Leaping Circle Nine, they’ll need to go down even further, another four miles, and sixteen miles generally southwest.
Dranko frowns. “We should have gone out its butt.”
…to be continued…
carborundum
Adventurer
Yuck-o! That sounded like fun
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