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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LordVyreth" data-source="post: 1639110" data-attributes="member: 9626">Fiendish InterludeExhausted, the party stumbled into the next area, to find a shivering Fnipper waiting for them.  He had long since recovered his sight and hearing, since he was stuck waiting for them for a few minutes.  “So, did you figure out where we are now?” Tal asked.Fnipper shrugged.  “I think we’re inside a small cave on the outside of the mountain again.”“The same one we started from?”“It looks that way to me, but I barely went to the edge of the cave so far.”“Well, do you want to check it out for us again?”Fnipper looked at Tal like he was crazy.  “After the last two times I did that here?  I’ll pass.”Grockith sighed and got back on his rhino mount.  “Fine, I’ll do it then, but you come right behind me.  Forward!”  Grockith and his “steed” bounded forward, and ended up on a mountain path just outside of the cave.  He carefully ascended it, and ended up on a much larger ledge about fifty feet up.  The rest of the party followed, while using healing magic to recover from the damage they took in the last room.  Eventually, the whole group made it to ledge, only to find that the path ended there.  As they were planning their next move, the entire ledge suddenly lit up, and Fnipper noticed that there was something slowly winging its way towards the party.  Quickly, the party took up defensive positions, and prepared whatever was coming there way.  As it got closer, they saw that it was a strange monster with the upper body of a dwarf and the lower body of a giant bat.  It neared the party, and announced to them, “Nothing personal, but I have to kill you.”   It dawned on Tal, Tsine, and Robin that this was the same thing the orc and dragons that attacked them earlier had said.  Before they could respond, however, they were suddenly attacked by more enemies that appeared out of no where!There was a small humanoid with red claws, a winged monster that was wreathed in flames, and a bulky winged humanoid with a red, glowing third eye.  Fnipper’s sharp senses noticed that there was a fourth being in the middle of the other three, but it was invisible and it left again almost immediately.  The party quickly split up to deal with this new threat.  Grockith, Galeron, and Thorrun charged towards the little one, which was the closest of the three, while Robin backed into a corner and started firing at the three-eyed one, and Fnipper tumbled into combat with the flaming monster.  This left Tal and Tsine to deal with the initial threat, who was getting ever-closer.  Tal and Tsine pummeled him with magic, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down.  Tal then made the mistake of sending Violet out to attack, since he didn’t own her long enough to know what her real level of strength was.  The creature managed to hit, but her poison didn’t even slow the powerful warrior down, and instead it gave the dwarf-bat an easy target.  Without even slowing down much, he attacking the unlucky dragon with his axe, causing the dying creature to plummet to the ground far below them!  Lucky for her and Tal, she landed in on a smaller ledge just below one the party was fighting on, and didn’t plummet down the entire mountain to certain doom.  While Tal scrambled to help his endangered companion, the fight raged on.  Fnipper easily defeated the fiery monster, since he was too agile a target for the slow-moving monster, and though the creature’s flames licked at Fnipper every time he got close, the agile gnome evaded them every time.Surprisingly, the smaller demon proved to be one of the greatest threats.  Grockith, who reached the monster first, certainly had no trouble hitting it, but every time he it, it released a wave of negative energy which slowly sucked the life out of Grockith, Robin, Galeron, and all the rest of his companions that were nearby.  Grockith has had years of training as a warrior and easily shrugged off the wounds, but some of the others weren’t as tough, and pleaded with him to stop attacking the creature.  Grockith considered this, until he noticed the creature was slowly recovering from the wounds it just received.  “We’ll have to kill it eventually,” he thought.  “If I don’t do it now, all the damage we took already would be wasted.”  So thinking, he continued to attack the monster, killing it, but it died laughing as Grockith and almost all of his friends winced in pain.Robin wasn’t having an easy time of it, either.  Besides the damage he was slowly taking from the small creature’s negative waves, he was cornered by the large monster.  Even worse, there was something very strange about the creature’s third eye.  Robin tried to avoid looking into it, but as the fight wore one, he soon found himself staring right into it.  As he looked at it, he could feel the creature peering right into his very soul, and pulling his life force right out of him…Suddenly, the nightmare ended, as Fnipper plunged his sword right into the creature’s back and out his chest.  All three of his eyes glazed over, leaving Robin drained but alive.  However he would need magic before he recovered completely, and those eyes would haunt him in his nightmares for months.With the rest of the party victorious, the dwarf-bat monster was an easy target.  He had been mostly harassing the party’s spell-casters up to this point, but wasn’t able to get close to them and stay close enough to really tear into them.  But now Grockith and Fnipper were bearing down on him, and eager to take out their anger on something that didn’t hurt them back whenever it got stabbed.  The creature soon died, and plummeted down the mountain to the ground below.  Luckily, Violet was still breathing at this point, and Galeron was able to stop the bleeding and bring her back to consciousness.  “What was that all about?” a confused Fnipper asked.Tal grimaced.  “Well, I think that whoever sent that bat-thing after us also sent a pair of dragons at us earlier.  I think he’s either hiring mercenaries or forcing them to attack us.”“And those reinforcement of his were demons, albeit some more obscure variants,” Tsine said, now that he could look back on his old school research with a clear head.  “I bet this is more of Bas’ doing,” Tal grumbled.  “She’s worked with all kinds of evil outsiders before.”“But we can’t do anything about it for now,” Robin admitted.  “Hey, maybe we could ask Shekuldellstra when we get back!”“But where can we go from here?” Grockith asked, before suddenly noticing that another cave opened up at the end of the back.  “So, we’re still being tested,” he grumbled.The party took a few moments to heal their wounds, and prepared for the next challenge.  OOC Notes:  I got the Monster Manual 2 right around now, like you couldn’t tell.  Hence the use of the Tauric template, and the new demon types.  Jovocs are so much fun to use!  Sorry for the small update, but it’s been a hectic weekend what with the Fourth of July and all.  Plus, after the events that I mentioned last time, you can imagine I’m not in the most enthused mood about this update anyway.</blockquote>

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