ADVENTURE 6: QUEST FOR FIRE REPELLENT
PC Roster:
Game Session Date: 24 September 2025
- - -
At the request of the town leadership, the group of planar scouts - and a few other teams who were also in town between scouting trips - gathered in the town hall to be briefed on a new mission.
"The southern teams have learned that Elsewhere has landed inside the southern border of a thousand-mile-radius barrier that protects everyone inside from Avernus's naturally occurring fireballs," explained Father Solaire. "That explains why most of the other teams haven't had to worry about fire literally raining down from the sky."
"If the source of the barrier could be studied," added Lady Kalistra, "and, better yet, replicated, it could be a revolutionary new line of defense for Elsewhere, possibly capable of preventing future disasters like the fire incursion 23 years ago." Here the marilith demon was referring to the attack by local fire elementals that burned up the town's library and a few other buildings before being driven back.
"Finding the source is now the top priority for the northern teams," Father Solaire declared. "To that end, questioning the natives should yield a lot of valuable information. Thus, the villages belonging to the barbed devil Grelthax the Vile are now primary targets of investigation." Avoroth frowned at this information, as he'd been grateful the one such camp whose location they had learned about was in a different scout team's jurisdiction. The three idiots who'd been foisted on him were just starting to be able to work as a team, but he still knew they wouldn't last long against a barbed devil.
The solar was still talking. "To greatly increase the chance of cooperation, the scout teams are now to impersonate servants of Bel, Lord of the First. Grelthax is of low enough importance - from what information we've gathered about him - that his minions shouldn't be able to question the authenticity of your claims. You will be given a black token with his unholy sigil carved upon it, which should impress the locals enough to believe your cover story." The kolyrut inevitable, Obsidian Omega Shi, passed a disk of black marble to Avoroth, who looked at it with distaste and pocketed it in his belt pouch. "The information gleaned from the goblin camp, likely to be destroyed upon Grelthax's next visit over his slain hell hound pets, tells that the nearest village belonging to Grelthax within your zone of exploration" - here he fixed Avoroth with a steady gaze - "is about a month out. The village of Calvar is home to the human descendants of Calvar, the man who foolishly sold his entire family line to Grelthax in exchange for power."
"A month out," repeated Avoroth. "Wonderful." That was a month he wouldn't be able to pore over Asharen's notes on the workings of the Elsewhere Compass.
Lady Kalistra slithered up on her serpentine torso and handed a pair of scrolls to Amris. "You are being given two scrolls of sending," she informed the witch. "Use them to report to Aurora Sunbeam, your designated contact, who will be camping outside the boundary of Elsewhere so the divination spell can reach her." She went on to remind the group that neither divinations nor teleportation effects worked within the confines of the town of Elsewhere, making rapid communication from outside somewhat difficult. "You are to use a sending scroll once you find the source of the barrier so Aurora can scry and teleport a survey team to your location. The backup scroll is to be used if something of equal or greater importance is discovered that needs to be delivered immediately to Elsewhere."
"And in the meantime, we're sending a team to recover the arcane library you unearthed in the lich's secret lair," Father Solaire added. Another of the scout teams nodded at this information; they'd apparently been given that task. After that, the teams were released to go their separate ways.
After a month of travel through the vastness of the plains of Avernus, Avoroth was beginning to believe the real torment of the Nine Hells was the bleak emptiness, for the weeks-long journey through the dreary, barren landscape was pretty much uneventful. Not much grew in the landscape but stunted trees with twisted limbs; even Wilbur's wilderness lore wasn't able to find much in the way of food, and the dried rations they carried with them got to be tiresome after so long in the field. But eventually they approached the walled village of Calvar.
Calvar was ringed by wooden posts driven into the ground, forming a complete wall around the interior buildings. Each post had been sharpened to a point at the top, to discourage anyone from trying to climb over their defensive wall. But there were definitely the sounds of combat coming from inside the village, and when the team got there, they found the front gates had been forced wide open. Rushing forward, it became apparent the fiendish humans of Calvar were under attack by a raiding party of fiendish orcs.
Avoroth fished the black token of Bel from his belt pouch as he cast a shield of faith upon himself. Then, stepping through the open gates, he called out in the Infernal language, "STOP THIS FIGHTING AT ONCE! YOUR BICKERING DOES NOTHING BUT DIMINISH THE FORCES OF BEL, FIRST OF THE FALLEN! LINE UP AND REPORT TO ME AT ONCE!" A few of the humans spared a glance at the Boccobian cleric but then concentrated fully on the rampaging orcs before them. It was then Avoroth noted two things he should have noticed right away: while the humans were all decked out in matching armor, the orcs - who acted as if they hadn't understood a word of Avoroth's commands (in fact, one of them cut down a human warrior with his cold iron falchion, ignoring Avoroth's edicts altogether) - all wore mish-mash armor, nothing even remotely uniform about them. That's when he realized these were Abyssal orcs, joined with the demonic forces, against the Hellish, devil-aligned humans - no doubt as part of the interminable Blood War that raged across the lower planes.
"Take out the orcs," Avoroth commanded to the other members of his team - whom he considered to be his underlings (although they would have had a few words to say to the arrogant cleric had he been foolish enough to voice his belief aloud).
Amris looked up and saw an orc spellcaster of some sort standing upon the slanted roof of a watchtower along one side of the gate. She focused on him and cast a spell that was new to her: Melf's acid arrow. The spell hit the orc warlock in the back, but when he spun in place to see where the spell had come from, the celestial elf witch was already pressed up against the outer wall, beneath the overhang of the roof upon which her target stood, blocking his view of her entirely. Pivot, for the moment, stayed upon his mistress's shoulder, likewise hidden from view.
Wilbur reached down, placed a hand upon Tamaskan's furry head, and cast a magic fang spell upon his dire fell fox companion. Then the two of them advanced, following Avoroth through the gate into the village's interior, where there were currently four humans in combat with five orcs, not counting the sixth orc warlock on the rooftop who up until being struck in the back with an acidic spell, had been focusing his attention on the villagers within.
Gonkle sped forward, charging into a second orc warlock and nearly killing him with one blow of his keen unholy falchion. Wilbur almost called out a warning to the humans of Calvar that Gonkle wasn't one of the invaders, but then he figured that much was already rather evident, as the fiendish orc fighter was focusing all of his substantial bloodlust on taking out the other fiendish orcs all about him.
This did not go unnoticed by the orc warlock up on the rooftop. He cast down a frightful blast invocation that struck Gonkle, leaving the fighter shaken. The other warlock, near death from Gonkle's initial attack, tried catching him up in a sickening hideous blow invocation, but missed.
Then Avoroth cast a new spell he'd never tried before. "Ripper, I call thee forth to do battle against my enemies: slay all fiendish orcs before you save the one before my immediate left," he said as the final spoken words to the summoning spell he'd cast, and a fiendish wolf suddenly manifested behind the orc warlock Gonkle was currently trading blows with. He went for the warlock's right leg, but the orc stumbled at just the right moment and dodged the lupine attack.
The fiendish human warriors continued their resistance against their Abyssal attackers, fighting with cold iron longswords and greatclubs. One of the orcs suddenly dropped beneath the onslaught of one of the larger humans, his greatclub bashing in the side of the orc's apelike skull. But the orc warriors, armed with silver falchions, were holding their own, and one of the less experienced human warriors fell beneath an orcish blade, to lie unmoving in the heavily-trampled dirt of the village.
The acid from the celestial elf's spell still burning through his armor and the flesh beneath it, the rooftop warlock began another invocation, but was taken down by a shocking grasp spell cast by Amris into her familiar, who flew silently up to the rooftop and delivered it quite effectively to the back of the warlock's head with a quick brush of his talons. Back arched in pain, the orc toppled over the side of the sloped roof and was impaled upon the spiked tops of the wooden wall around Calvar.
Wilbur cast a shillelagh spell upon his runestaff and ran forward into melee combat, attacking the nearest of the orc warriors, while Tamaskan finished off the second - and last, from what could be seen - of the orc warlocks, ripping his throat out as he foolishly focused his attention solely on Gonkle. Gonkle, deprived of the ability to slay the orc warlock himself, took his frustration out on the nearest orc warrior to him, easily slicing the head from his shoulders with a single stroke of his falchion's ever-sharp blade.
Avoroth strode forward and cast a bless spell upon himself and his teammates, including the fiendish humans in his spellcasting. But then a new combatant entered the fray: a human-sized fiend, with reddish skin that looked to be glistening with sweat. It had a curved horn growing out of the back of its head and, curiously, only had one arm - its left arm had, at some point in the past, been severed near the shoulder, for the flesh of the stump had grown over. "Babau!" Avoroth called to the others, then, realizing not everyone on his team would likely know the ramifications of such an identification, added, "It's a demon, allied with the orcs! We need to take it out!"
Another orc warrior was dropped by the fiendish human he'd been fighting, but soon after another human warrior was laid low, bleeding out into the parched dirt beneath his fallen body. Then Amris, who had advanced into the village through the gate now that the rooftop sniper warlock had been slain, cast a magic missile across the battlefield to hit the babau demon straight in its torso; Avoroth was impressed that she'd not only listened to his orders but obeyed them at once, and used a spell guaranteed to strike true and deal the fiend a bit of damage.
There was, by this time, only one fiendish orc warrior still standing, and Wilbur and Tamaskan took it out with a shillelagh-enhanced runestaff and a strong set of vulpine jaws and sharp teeth; Ripper snapped at it as well but had been unsuccessful in his attacks. Gonkle, although bleeding from several wounds, went racing across the battlefield, strewn with bodies from both sides of the opposing forces, to strike the babau with his magical falchion. (Fortunately for him, the magic of his weapon helped it avoid the acidic damage caused by contact with the babau's skin secretions.) Gonkle wasn't smart enough to note the likely effects of the acidic sweat, but he was savvy enough about weapons combat to realize the babau's thick skin was giving it protection greater than that provided to normal people, like him or that bossy Avoroth.
"That bossy Avoroth," in the meantime, had noted the numerous wounds on the fiendish orc fighter's body and had moved forward to provide him with a healing spell, only for the eager fool to go racing off into combat with a creature much tougher than anything the group had faced thus far. Running to try to catch up with Gonkle, he called out to the others, "The humans' weapons are cold iron - they'll do much more damage to the demon than our own will!"
The advice was almost too late for Gonkle, as the babau leaped forward and bit the orc on the shoulder while raking his one set of claws across his face. Gonkle didn't give the babau the satisfaction of hearing him cry out - he clamped his jaws shut until his teeth hurt - but he almost passed out from the pain of its attacks.
The two remaining human warriors, one wielding a greatclub and the other a longsword, both crafted of cold iron, raced up beside Gonkle and attacked the babau from opposite directions, but the nimble fiend dodged their attacks; its lack of an arm didn't seem to be hampering it much. But Amris, pretty much out of attack spells that could conceivably harm the demon, bent over one of the fallen humans and retrieved his cold iron longsword. As an elf, she'd been trained in the weapon's use since childhood, unlike most who followed the path of the witch, and she knew she could put the blade to good use. With Pivot flying reconnaissance overhead, she advanced across the field of battle, headed for the babau.
Wilbur got to Gonkle before Avoroth did and cast a barkskin spell on the orc fighter; it wouldn't close up any of his existing wounds - the shadow druid didn't have any healing spells of his own prepared - but maybe it would help the poor bugger from picking up any new ones. Tamaskan, perhaps sensing the danger of touching the acid-covered demon, wisely hung back by Wilbur's side instead of engaging the fiend in combat.
Gonkle, close to blacking out, stumbled backwards away from the one-armed babau and picked up a cold iron longsword from the hand of a slain human - he'd no longer be getting any use from it, so the orc figured he might as well do what he could with it. Then Avoroth finally reached him and channeled an unneeded spell through his Boccob's tome of knowledge, converting its ambient energy into a cure moderate wounds spell. That filled the orc up with a second wind, and he grinned a tusked grin at the babau, eager for a second go at the fiend. Avoroth, in the meantime, stepped over to two of the humans lying on the battleground, noting their ragged breathing - they were still alive! That was good, for the team wasn't here on a humanitarian mission - he fully expected to query them on what they knew of the effect keeping this part of Avernus free from the fireballs that otherwise dropped down from the sky.
The babau thrashed forward suddenly, ripping with teeth and claws, and one of the two humans still in the fight fell lifelessly to the ground, his throat ripped out. The other human swung at the demon with his cold iron greatclub but missed. Amris, still too far away to engage the babau in melee combat, tried casting a scorching ray at it, although she couldn't recall whether demons were immune to fire or were only partially resistance to the effects of burning flames. (She was pleased to see it was the latter.) Then Wilbur cast a summon nature's ally spell that brought forth a hippogriff from the Plane of Shadows, directly behind the babau. It reared on its hind legs and raked at the demon with its foreclaws, but the beast's talons struck only empty air.
Then, as Avoroth used a cure minor wounds spell to stabilize one of the unconscious humans (and noting the other one was already stable, his bleeding having stopped on its own), Gonkle charged the babau again, pushing the sole remaining human warrior out of the way to do so. The babau hit Wilbur with a claw, but as was often the case when anyone fought the shadow druid, Wilbur had been partially hidden in the shadows and the strike was a bit off-center; as such, it was more of a glancing blow instead of the gut-ripper the fiend had intended. Wilbur rolled with the blow, landing on his feet beside a downed human warrior, and picked up his cold iron greatclub. He swung it at the babau and missed, realized it was a much heavier weapon than any he'd ever trained on, and called over to Gonkle, "Swap!" while tossing the greatclub his way. Gonkle plucked it out of midair and tossed his borrowed cold iron longsword in return over to the druid. Then he spun back towards the babau and clocked the fiend - hard - with his new weapon. Broken teeth went flying from the astonished babau's face and it was blood that went spurting from the blow, not just the acidic, protective goo coating its body.
And then Amris, the slightest of the four of them, stepped up and channeled holy smiting energy through her own borrowed cold iron longsword before stabbing it deep into the babau's chest. The blade went completely through the demon's body and poked out the back before the celestial elf pulled it right back out again, flicked the corrosive goo it had picked up from contact with the fiend, and dropped back into a defensive stance. But there was no longer a need for defense, and the light went out from the babau's eyes and it toppled lifelessly to the ground in an undignified heap.
"Nice!" called out Gonkle. He'd have preferred to land the killing blow himself, but he couldn't help but be impressed with the lithe elf's skill with the blade.
Avoroth said nothing; he'd missed Amris's display of blademastery as he'd been tending to the wounded human warriors, using charges from his wand of cure light wounds to bring them back to consciousness. "Ah," he said, once they sat up in confusion, looking around to see only slain orcs - and the dead bodies of the two humans who'd been killed before the Boccobian cleric could get to them. "Good - you survived. Fall in with the other members of your troops: I have questions for the lot of you."
- - -
But that's where the game session ended; Logan said the answers the fiendish humans will be giving us is the beginning of next week's adventure.
PC Roster:
Amris Goodwitch, celestial elf witch (wizard) 3
Avoroth Bleakborn, fiendish human cleric 3
Gonkle Bu'Onk, fiendish orc fighter 3
Wilbur Von Schattenwalde, shadow human druid 3
Game Session Date: 24 September 2025
- - -
At the request of the town leadership, the group of planar scouts - and a few other teams who were also in town between scouting trips - gathered in the town hall to be briefed on a new mission.
"The southern teams have learned that Elsewhere has landed inside the southern border of a thousand-mile-radius barrier that protects everyone inside from Avernus's naturally occurring fireballs," explained Father Solaire. "That explains why most of the other teams haven't had to worry about fire literally raining down from the sky."
"If the source of the barrier could be studied," added Lady Kalistra, "and, better yet, replicated, it could be a revolutionary new line of defense for Elsewhere, possibly capable of preventing future disasters like the fire incursion 23 years ago." Here the marilith demon was referring to the attack by local fire elementals that burned up the town's library and a few other buildings before being driven back.
"Finding the source is now the top priority for the northern teams," Father Solaire declared. "To that end, questioning the natives should yield a lot of valuable information. Thus, the villages belonging to the barbed devil Grelthax the Vile are now primary targets of investigation." Avoroth frowned at this information, as he'd been grateful the one such camp whose location they had learned about was in a different scout team's jurisdiction. The three idiots who'd been foisted on him were just starting to be able to work as a team, but he still knew they wouldn't last long against a barbed devil.
The solar was still talking. "To greatly increase the chance of cooperation, the scout teams are now to impersonate servants of Bel, Lord of the First. Grelthax is of low enough importance - from what information we've gathered about him - that his minions shouldn't be able to question the authenticity of your claims. You will be given a black token with his unholy sigil carved upon it, which should impress the locals enough to believe your cover story." The kolyrut inevitable, Obsidian Omega Shi, passed a disk of black marble to Avoroth, who looked at it with distaste and pocketed it in his belt pouch. "The information gleaned from the goblin camp, likely to be destroyed upon Grelthax's next visit over his slain hell hound pets, tells that the nearest village belonging to Grelthax within your zone of exploration" - here he fixed Avoroth with a steady gaze - "is about a month out. The village of Calvar is home to the human descendants of Calvar, the man who foolishly sold his entire family line to Grelthax in exchange for power."
"A month out," repeated Avoroth. "Wonderful." That was a month he wouldn't be able to pore over Asharen's notes on the workings of the Elsewhere Compass.
Lady Kalistra slithered up on her serpentine torso and handed a pair of scrolls to Amris. "You are being given two scrolls of sending," she informed the witch. "Use them to report to Aurora Sunbeam, your designated contact, who will be camping outside the boundary of Elsewhere so the divination spell can reach her." She went on to remind the group that neither divinations nor teleportation effects worked within the confines of the town of Elsewhere, making rapid communication from outside somewhat difficult. "You are to use a sending scroll once you find the source of the barrier so Aurora can scry and teleport a survey team to your location. The backup scroll is to be used if something of equal or greater importance is discovered that needs to be delivered immediately to Elsewhere."
"And in the meantime, we're sending a team to recover the arcane library you unearthed in the lich's secret lair," Father Solaire added. Another of the scout teams nodded at this information; they'd apparently been given that task. After that, the teams were released to go their separate ways.
After a month of travel through the vastness of the plains of Avernus, Avoroth was beginning to believe the real torment of the Nine Hells was the bleak emptiness, for the weeks-long journey through the dreary, barren landscape was pretty much uneventful. Not much grew in the landscape but stunted trees with twisted limbs; even Wilbur's wilderness lore wasn't able to find much in the way of food, and the dried rations they carried with them got to be tiresome after so long in the field. But eventually they approached the walled village of Calvar.
Calvar was ringed by wooden posts driven into the ground, forming a complete wall around the interior buildings. Each post had been sharpened to a point at the top, to discourage anyone from trying to climb over their defensive wall. But there were definitely the sounds of combat coming from inside the village, and when the team got there, they found the front gates had been forced wide open. Rushing forward, it became apparent the fiendish humans of Calvar were under attack by a raiding party of fiendish orcs.
Avoroth fished the black token of Bel from his belt pouch as he cast a shield of faith upon himself. Then, stepping through the open gates, he called out in the Infernal language, "STOP THIS FIGHTING AT ONCE! YOUR BICKERING DOES NOTHING BUT DIMINISH THE FORCES OF BEL, FIRST OF THE FALLEN! LINE UP AND REPORT TO ME AT ONCE!" A few of the humans spared a glance at the Boccobian cleric but then concentrated fully on the rampaging orcs before them. It was then Avoroth noted two things he should have noticed right away: while the humans were all decked out in matching armor, the orcs - who acted as if they hadn't understood a word of Avoroth's commands (in fact, one of them cut down a human warrior with his cold iron falchion, ignoring Avoroth's edicts altogether) - all wore mish-mash armor, nothing even remotely uniform about them. That's when he realized these were Abyssal orcs, joined with the demonic forces, against the Hellish, devil-aligned humans - no doubt as part of the interminable Blood War that raged across the lower planes.
"Take out the orcs," Avoroth commanded to the other members of his team - whom he considered to be his underlings (although they would have had a few words to say to the arrogant cleric had he been foolish enough to voice his belief aloud).
Amris looked up and saw an orc spellcaster of some sort standing upon the slanted roof of a watchtower along one side of the gate. She focused on him and cast a spell that was new to her: Melf's acid arrow. The spell hit the orc warlock in the back, but when he spun in place to see where the spell had come from, the celestial elf witch was already pressed up against the outer wall, beneath the overhang of the roof upon which her target stood, blocking his view of her entirely. Pivot, for the moment, stayed upon his mistress's shoulder, likewise hidden from view.
Wilbur reached down, placed a hand upon Tamaskan's furry head, and cast a magic fang spell upon his dire fell fox companion. Then the two of them advanced, following Avoroth through the gate into the village's interior, where there were currently four humans in combat with five orcs, not counting the sixth orc warlock on the rooftop who up until being struck in the back with an acidic spell, had been focusing his attention on the villagers within.
Gonkle sped forward, charging into a second orc warlock and nearly killing him with one blow of his keen unholy falchion. Wilbur almost called out a warning to the humans of Calvar that Gonkle wasn't one of the invaders, but then he figured that much was already rather evident, as the fiendish orc fighter was focusing all of his substantial bloodlust on taking out the other fiendish orcs all about him.
This did not go unnoticed by the orc warlock up on the rooftop. He cast down a frightful blast invocation that struck Gonkle, leaving the fighter shaken. The other warlock, near death from Gonkle's initial attack, tried catching him up in a sickening hideous blow invocation, but missed.
Then Avoroth cast a new spell he'd never tried before. "Ripper, I call thee forth to do battle against my enemies: slay all fiendish orcs before you save the one before my immediate left," he said as the final spoken words to the summoning spell he'd cast, and a fiendish wolf suddenly manifested behind the orc warlock Gonkle was currently trading blows with. He went for the warlock's right leg, but the orc stumbled at just the right moment and dodged the lupine attack.
The fiendish human warriors continued their resistance against their Abyssal attackers, fighting with cold iron longswords and greatclubs. One of the orcs suddenly dropped beneath the onslaught of one of the larger humans, his greatclub bashing in the side of the orc's apelike skull. But the orc warriors, armed with silver falchions, were holding their own, and one of the less experienced human warriors fell beneath an orcish blade, to lie unmoving in the heavily-trampled dirt of the village.
The acid from the celestial elf's spell still burning through his armor and the flesh beneath it, the rooftop warlock began another invocation, but was taken down by a shocking grasp spell cast by Amris into her familiar, who flew silently up to the rooftop and delivered it quite effectively to the back of the warlock's head with a quick brush of his talons. Back arched in pain, the orc toppled over the side of the sloped roof and was impaled upon the spiked tops of the wooden wall around Calvar.
Wilbur cast a shillelagh spell upon his runestaff and ran forward into melee combat, attacking the nearest of the orc warriors, while Tamaskan finished off the second - and last, from what could be seen - of the orc warlocks, ripping his throat out as he foolishly focused his attention solely on Gonkle. Gonkle, deprived of the ability to slay the orc warlock himself, took his frustration out on the nearest orc warrior to him, easily slicing the head from his shoulders with a single stroke of his falchion's ever-sharp blade.
Avoroth strode forward and cast a bless spell upon himself and his teammates, including the fiendish humans in his spellcasting. But then a new combatant entered the fray: a human-sized fiend, with reddish skin that looked to be glistening with sweat. It had a curved horn growing out of the back of its head and, curiously, only had one arm - its left arm had, at some point in the past, been severed near the shoulder, for the flesh of the stump had grown over. "Babau!" Avoroth called to the others, then, realizing not everyone on his team would likely know the ramifications of such an identification, added, "It's a demon, allied with the orcs! We need to take it out!"
Another orc warrior was dropped by the fiendish human he'd been fighting, but soon after another human warrior was laid low, bleeding out into the parched dirt beneath his fallen body. Then Amris, who had advanced into the village through the gate now that the rooftop sniper warlock had been slain, cast a magic missile across the battlefield to hit the babau demon straight in its torso; Avoroth was impressed that she'd not only listened to his orders but obeyed them at once, and used a spell guaranteed to strike true and deal the fiend a bit of damage.
There was, by this time, only one fiendish orc warrior still standing, and Wilbur and Tamaskan took it out with a shillelagh-enhanced runestaff and a strong set of vulpine jaws and sharp teeth; Ripper snapped at it as well but had been unsuccessful in his attacks. Gonkle, although bleeding from several wounds, went racing across the battlefield, strewn with bodies from both sides of the opposing forces, to strike the babau with his magical falchion. (Fortunately for him, the magic of his weapon helped it avoid the acidic damage caused by contact with the babau's skin secretions.) Gonkle wasn't smart enough to note the likely effects of the acidic sweat, but he was savvy enough about weapons combat to realize the babau's thick skin was giving it protection greater than that provided to normal people, like him or that bossy Avoroth.
"That bossy Avoroth," in the meantime, had noted the numerous wounds on the fiendish orc fighter's body and had moved forward to provide him with a healing spell, only for the eager fool to go racing off into combat with a creature much tougher than anything the group had faced thus far. Running to try to catch up with Gonkle, he called out to the others, "The humans' weapons are cold iron - they'll do much more damage to the demon than our own will!"
The advice was almost too late for Gonkle, as the babau leaped forward and bit the orc on the shoulder while raking his one set of claws across his face. Gonkle didn't give the babau the satisfaction of hearing him cry out - he clamped his jaws shut until his teeth hurt - but he almost passed out from the pain of its attacks.
The two remaining human warriors, one wielding a greatclub and the other a longsword, both crafted of cold iron, raced up beside Gonkle and attacked the babau from opposite directions, but the nimble fiend dodged their attacks; its lack of an arm didn't seem to be hampering it much. But Amris, pretty much out of attack spells that could conceivably harm the demon, bent over one of the fallen humans and retrieved his cold iron longsword. As an elf, she'd been trained in the weapon's use since childhood, unlike most who followed the path of the witch, and she knew she could put the blade to good use. With Pivot flying reconnaissance overhead, she advanced across the field of battle, headed for the babau.
Wilbur got to Gonkle before Avoroth did and cast a barkskin spell on the orc fighter; it wouldn't close up any of his existing wounds - the shadow druid didn't have any healing spells of his own prepared - but maybe it would help the poor bugger from picking up any new ones. Tamaskan, perhaps sensing the danger of touching the acid-covered demon, wisely hung back by Wilbur's side instead of engaging the fiend in combat.
Gonkle, close to blacking out, stumbled backwards away from the one-armed babau and picked up a cold iron longsword from the hand of a slain human - he'd no longer be getting any use from it, so the orc figured he might as well do what he could with it. Then Avoroth finally reached him and channeled an unneeded spell through his Boccob's tome of knowledge, converting its ambient energy into a cure moderate wounds spell. That filled the orc up with a second wind, and he grinned a tusked grin at the babau, eager for a second go at the fiend. Avoroth, in the meantime, stepped over to two of the humans lying on the battleground, noting their ragged breathing - they were still alive! That was good, for the team wasn't here on a humanitarian mission - he fully expected to query them on what they knew of the effect keeping this part of Avernus free from the fireballs that otherwise dropped down from the sky.
The babau thrashed forward suddenly, ripping with teeth and claws, and one of the two humans still in the fight fell lifelessly to the ground, his throat ripped out. The other human swung at the demon with his cold iron greatclub but missed. Amris, still too far away to engage the babau in melee combat, tried casting a scorching ray at it, although she couldn't recall whether demons were immune to fire or were only partially resistance to the effects of burning flames. (She was pleased to see it was the latter.) Then Wilbur cast a summon nature's ally spell that brought forth a hippogriff from the Plane of Shadows, directly behind the babau. It reared on its hind legs and raked at the demon with its foreclaws, but the beast's talons struck only empty air.
Then, as Avoroth used a cure minor wounds spell to stabilize one of the unconscious humans (and noting the other one was already stable, his bleeding having stopped on its own), Gonkle charged the babau again, pushing the sole remaining human warrior out of the way to do so. The babau hit Wilbur with a claw, but as was often the case when anyone fought the shadow druid, Wilbur had been partially hidden in the shadows and the strike was a bit off-center; as such, it was more of a glancing blow instead of the gut-ripper the fiend had intended. Wilbur rolled with the blow, landing on his feet beside a downed human warrior, and picked up his cold iron greatclub. He swung it at the babau and missed, realized it was a much heavier weapon than any he'd ever trained on, and called over to Gonkle, "Swap!" while tossing the greatclub his way. Gonkle plucked it out of midair and tossed his borrowed cold iron longsword in return over to the druid. Then he spun back towards the babau and clocked the fiend - hard - with his new weapon. Broken teeth went flying from the astonished babau's face and it was blood that went spurting from the blow, not just the acidic, protective goo coating its body.
And then Amris, the slightest of the four of them, stepped up and channeled holy smiting energy through her own borrowed cold iron longsword before stabbing it deep into the babau's chest. The blade went completely through the demon's body and poked out the back before the celestial elf pulled it right back out again, flicked the corrosive goo it had picked up from contact with the fiend, and dropped back into a defensive stance. But there was no longer a need for defense, and the light went out from the babau's eyes and it toppled lifelessly to the ground in an undignified heap.
"Nice!" called out Gonkle. He'd have preferred to land the killing blow himself, but he couldn't help but be impressed with the lithe elf's skill with the blade.
Avoroth said nothing; he'd missed Amris's display of blademastery as he'd been tending to the wounded human warriors, using charges from his wand of cure light wounds to bring them back to consciousness. "Ah," he said, once they sat up in confusion, looking around to see only slain orcs - and the dead bodies of the two humans who'd been killed before the Boccobian cleric could get to them. "Good - you survived. Fall in with the other members of your troops: I have questions for the lot of you."
- - -
But that's where the game session ended; Logan said the answers the fiendish humans will be giving us is the beginning of next week's adventure.
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