(Cydra) Great Conflicts

[Angel of Adventure]

King of the Update!

All hail Jester, King of the Update!!! (Bump-bumpa-bummmm!!!)

Seriously, nice work dude. We appreciate all the effort you are putting into this and the readers will definately enjoy the shocking, gruesome, and horrifying end to this thread. (Which, dear readers, still awhile off . . . unless Jester can continue this updating marathon a bit longer . . . )

 

[Knightfall]

Amazing stuff, as usual. I hadn't realized you were updating this one so frequently, lately. I was several pages behind.

Anyway, good stuff.

KF72

 

[the Jester]

Hey KF1972!

Yeah, tons of updates lately- I'm trying to catch up with the actual campaign under the theory that if I can catch up I can keep up.

Meanwhile, anyone who doesn't know what a Jack Kirby humungous fish demon would look like should try to find some images of Kirby monsters. When I described the Ur-Fish as 'a Jack Kirby fish demon' a couple of my players instantly went pale.

 

[the Jester]

The Ur-Fish, pt. II

Gerontius leaps onto the broad back of the Ur-Fish, hoping to ride it into submission, but he’s kidding himself. It’s much too big, and he’s much too small. However you look at it, he’s not controlling- or even influencing- its movement like that. Well, he thinks, I can do more than try to shoo it away up here! His daggers sink deeply into it, and blood billows out into the water.

The Ur-Fish, surrounded by an inky corona that makes it difficult to see and hit, has left Inoke to flounder, at least momentarily, and takes a huge bite out of Veil. Veil screams as her body is torn nearly in two. Gleaming tubes of metal and plastic are strewn through the water like innards- in fact, they are the Chaos-changed Veil’s innards. The Ur-Fish savages her, and she mewls in pain. One more bite like that, she gasps to herself, and I’m done for.

Then she feels the Chaos gripping her, as it does at some point every day now. She suffers the curse- it keeps changing her, day after day, at some random point. And it looks like today that point is now, as Veil struggles on the edge of death and oblivion.

Her body transforms into an almost liquid state. Veil becomes an ooze- and just in time, as the Ur-Fish rends her again.* But now she is mindless, and she has a new problem. As a construct, she had not needed to breathe. She had not bothered to have water breathing cast on her. Now, as an ooze, it does need air. Groping wildly, the mindless Veil starts seeking air, exuding tentacles and feelers in all directions.

Inoke, too, is having issues with breathing, but he has a solution. Digging frantically in his pack, he finally pulls out his necklace of adaptation. He slips it over his head and clasps it. Suddenly a bubble of air forms around him, and he gasps in a great breath. Then, glaring at the Ur-Fish, he expands to huge size again. “Now let’s try that again!” he rasps, glaring at the even bigger monster.

The Ur-Fish, meanwhile, has shown another terrifying capability: its mouth is so huge that it can bite more than one person at a time! It snaps up about a 10’ cube of water with each bite, and hits Lillamere and Horbin with a single snap. Every bite deals formidable damage. Lillamere falls into its gullet, though Horbin manages to escape that terrible fate.

Horbin hits it with a harm, opening wounds all over its body, even as Inoke charges it using his chain of overwhelming force. It is mighty, though, and it continues to fight, biting the enormous Inoke and almost snapping him in two between its jagged teeth. He catches its jaws in his bare hands, but loses two fingers in the process!**

The ooze Veil reaches the ceiling and starts groping sidewise, oblivious to its former companions battling for their lives. It seeks one thing only: air. Without it, it will perish.

Then- miraculously- it finds it. A narrow crack in the ceiling gives it just a tiny bit, just enough to keep searching- until it brushes up against the bubble produced by Inoke’s necklace of adaptation. Then Veil oozes forward and into the area the bubble keeps intersecting as the big fighter dodges and weaves, strikes and parries. He’s hurt pretty badly; in fact, so our many of our heroes- and the Ur-Fish.

Meanwhile, in the Ur-Fish’s belly, Lillamere is thrown about in a wet fleshy chamber that burns with acid. He tries to stand, but is thrown from his feet again. Muscular action pounds him.

Got to get out of here, he thinks desperately. He focuses his mind and greater teleports out.

Our heroes rally as Horbin casts a mass heal. Inoke roars in triumph as he pounds through the Ur-Fish’s defenses again and again, inflicting massive amounts of damage.*** It starts to falter, and Gerontius rips into it. It lets out a loud bellow of rage and anger as the little halfling tears into it, breaking the massive bone of its face where Inoke had cracked it. It bellows again, and Gerontius thrusts hard with his dagger, sticking his hand into the Ur-Fish’s eye up to the wrist. It bellows again, weakly, and thrashes for another moment; but its threat is ended. The Ur-Fish is no more.

Next Time: The return of Lester and Orbius!

*If not for the hp she gained by regaining a constitution score (she didn’t have one as a construct), that particular attack would have slain her.

**Just to give you an idea of the damage being tossed around at this point in the campaign, Horbin’s harm managed 75 hp of damage, Inoke’s chain of overwhelming force dealt another 65 points after DR, and the crit the Ur-Fish got that tore off a coupla fingers did 128 hp of damage. All three times there was a roll vs. death from massive damage. These rolls are made almost every hit at these levels, but it’s very rare that anyone fails one (hi Aaron! )

***135 hp of damage after DR over four hits. Crikey.

 

[the Jester]

Making Yet Another Enemy

“Dexter’s nadlies,” swears Horbin, “that thing was tough.”

Lillamere shudders, covered in stomach goop, which the water all around them is washing him clean of. “Yeah,” he answers, then, “Hey, where’s Veil?”

“I have her, sort of,” Inoke says unhappily. The ooze formerly known as Veil is kind of oozing around in his air bubble. “But she’s... messy.”

Horbin sighs. “I hope, if we can recover her, she learns her lesson about tampering with Chaos. It’s dangerous.”

The party returns to Var to recuperate, where the ooze is placed in a large sack. “Hundred fifty pounds of ooze,” grumbles Inoke, lugging it over his shoulder. “Dammit, Veil!”

***

9/8/370 O.L.G., 1 p.m., the Halls of Healing, Var

“I must leave you for the time being,” Proto states. “I have been called in for refitting.”*

Our heroes have gathered in preparation of returning to the strange Miloxi-era ruin they have been exploring. Proto’s abrupt announcement stuns them.

“Refitting?” asks Sybele. “That sounds... painful.”

Seethe mutters under his breath. In his opinion, the warforged is an abomination. It is unnatural; just as well if it’s gone for good.

“I will be deactivated while the actual work is done,” Proto responds. “A flaw in my programming must be corrected.”

“I thought you were going to help me?” Inoke queries. “After all, if we’re going to help you, you need to help us too.”

“I will aid you- but first, I must be refitted. Otherwise critical flaws in my behavior could result.”

Inoke frowns, but seems to accept Proto’s apologetic departure. Then our heroes return to the business at hand, distributing the yellow, rubbery suits they found as well as the harder ceramic suits with dials in the chest. Gerontius cuts one down to his size; the others eye is askance. Will it still function? Time will tell.

Suddenly Horbin stiffens. “Hold up,” he says, “I’m receiving a sending.”

“Is it Proto already?” asks Sybele. Seethe frowns darkly.

“No, it’s Lester!” Horbin exclaims excitedly. “He’ll be here in a minute...”

“Oh, man, I hope he doesn’t hate me for killing Drelvin,” Inoke groans, a worried look on his face.

And then, there they are: two long-absent friends, Lester the Elementalist and Orbius Visionary. Lester appears as a dark-skinned half-elf, a bushy afro with a single white streak through it topping him like a comic hat. Dark-lensed glasses are perched on his face. Great feathery wings flex from his back, and he wears sigils and signs of the four elements. Orbius is a human, obviously a scholar and a wizard even at first glance. From his neck hangs the sign of Boccob, an open eye over a book. Boccob is one of the so-called ‘new gods’ that have come only recently to Cydra. Orbius is called, among other things, ‘the Eye of Boccob.’

“It’s go to see you, my friends!” Lester cries. “I knew we’d meet again in the ends!” Horbin, Sybele and Jezebel rush to greet them. Laughing, they all embrace. Jezebel and Orbius join in a long, drawn-out kiss.

“Orbius Visionary, the diviner!” breathes Lillamere. “I’ve heard of him! He’s supposed to be one of the best!”

And, of course, everyone has heard of Lester: the L, the self-proclaimed Angel of Adventure.

Turning to Lillamere, Lester remarks, “Wow, Drelvin, you look handsome today!”

Lillamere sighs. “I’m not Drelvin. I’m his nephew, Lillamere.” And, heavily, he adds: “Drelvin is dead.”

“And I killed him,” announces Inoke. “It was an accident, but I did.” He sounds miserable. “I was out of my mind at the time. So if you’ve got a problem with me because of it, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“We understand,” Orbius says immediately. “Magical compulsions happen. Why, Lester’s killed adventuring companions a time or two while magically compelled himself!” The Eye of Boccob shrugs. “These things happen. You can’t always help it.”

“That’s... very enlightened,” Inoke replies slowly. Maybe these two won’t be so bad after all. After he met Hobbes at Drelvin’s funeral, he’d thought he would have trouble with all of Drelvin’s old friends. Maybe not.

The rest of the necessary introductions are made, and our heroes are back to square one in making their plan of attack. But that’s okay, as it rapidly becomes apparent that the brilliant mind of Orbius and the long experience of Lester will be valuable tools while planning.

“I’m not completely loaded for bear, but if we’re adventuring I don’t care!” declares Lester, and Orbius nods in agreement.

“We’ll be fine- no need to rest a day or anything. Lester’s always ready for adventure.”

So Lillamere greater teleports to the site of the battle with the Ur-Fish. Its humungous carcass hangs in the water, drifting lazily in the current. Dozens of small fishies are there, nibbling on the carcass, but Seethe scares them away when he approaches wild shaped into a dire shark. Then the party begins heading up the slope they were ascending when the Ur-Fish attacked them.

“I’m growing more powerful in the ways of Chaos,” Sybele comments as they advance. “Hey, if we run into trouble I’m going to do something kind of dangerous.” She grins.

“What do you mean?” Lillamere asks.

“Well...” She pauses, then smiles again. “I can initiate a wild zone around myself now.”

”What’s that?” Lillamere asks, but Orbius has the answer.

“It’s a zone within which magic will go wild. Your spells may not work properly, or at all. Anything can happen when you use magic in a wild zone.”

“Wow,” says Sybele, “I just know I can do it. I didn’t know what it would do.”

***

Thousands of years ago the Miloxi Empire spread out over hundreds of thousands of miles, using portal technology and ancient forms of magic relying on radiocrystal and radiation. They grew great in power but, as is often the case with such races, hubris brought them low. What caused the end? Nobody knows, these days, but whatever it was destroyed their empire and wiped out most traces of it in only a few centuries.

Long years ago, a small group of tabaxi fled the Miloxi settlements, trying to set up a small independent nation. They called their settlement Thixil Testa, which was Miloxi for Free Minds. Led by a powerful psionic tabaxi half-rakshasa named Virri Mosswistrow, who had overcome his own innate tendency to evil, the tabaxi of Thixil Testa built a small radiocrystal power plant to provide them with the niceties of life.

But something went wrong. The reactor’s crystal core was defective, mined from local radiocrystal deposits that were flawed and imperfect. Soon it was generating more power, and more radiation, than intended; and as his people began to die, Virri Mosswistrow girded himself and traveled deep within the power plant to try to prevent disaster. He succeeded, damping down the radiation levels enough that his people could flee in safety, but sealing the area behind him as he descended with a field of force.

Time passed; years and years, and then decades, centuries, millennia. Mirri remains in his prison, trying to prevent radiation from leaking out and poisoning the outside world. Seismic shifting has already opened several passages to the outside world, which distresses him to no end; and he does what he can to seal them off, but once there’s a hole, there’s a hole, and it becomes damage control instead of prevention.

Mirri the Mad, the genie of the bottle would have called him. For who would stay down here for so long if he was not mad?

He hears them again, now, the intruders that killed the Ur-Fish. That spoke volumes about them. Virri knew all too well what kind of a threat the Ur-Fish was. His own lair was through an 80’ long passage too narrow for the Ur-Fish to come through. Even so, Virri often wondered if the monstrous fish could force its way into his lair if it had really wanted to? The thing had been both exceptionally arrogant and exceptionally dangerous.

Nonetheless, while he might not exactly mourn the Ur-Fish’s death, it did make him profoundly uneasy. As the noises come closer, he lays out his immovable rods and then begins casting spells, beginning with shield and see invisibility. Then- curse them!- he can hear them coming down the stairs, and he sees them enter his room: grotesque, almost hairless humanoids showing a range of stature and dress.

One of them, the largest-looking one- probably female, based on the mammaries, and wielding a bow- shouts something he can’t understand in its primitive, gutteral language: “Zits teh raksasha! Vatch oot, I’m using me new powwer!” She rushes forward at Virri- and right into his immovable rods! “Urk,” she adds, and he understands that just fine.

I wonder if that affects psionics, Inoke thinks, and manifests schism. Everything goes as it should; grinning, he moves up.

Another one teleports next to Virri. This one has wings and a sword in its hand. Well, that’s nothing a repulsion won’t fix.

Virri casts his spell- and suddenly he can’t breathe. He can’t move. He can’t anything. The adventurers move in around him, poking and prodding him; he hangs limp in the water. He wishes he could yowl and scream and bite, but he can’t. He can’t do anything. They talk about him for a little while, strip him, take all his gear. He wants to howl. He wants to kill. He wants to die. He starts to wonder if, maybe, he is dead. Eventually the adventurers leave him behind, still immobilized, and leave.

He lays there, never blinking, for several more hours.

He knows that if he isn’t dead, he’s going to have to move very quickly to get out alive. When at last he feels his limbs loosen and movement returns, he keeps his wits about him and swims as fast as he is able to the nearest air. It’s in a higher-radiation zone, but it’s better than drowning.

Those bastards, he thinks bitterly. All those mostly hairless apes are the same. Some day I’ll pay them back. Some day, somehow. But for now... I can’t stand up to those adventurers now that they have all my gear. I can’t even safely stay here.

His heart heavy, Virri gives up his millenia of guardianship over Thixil Testa for the outside at last.

Next Time: Our heroes fight golems again and more!


*Hey Angel of Adventure, look at that! An in-game justification for those two missing levels!

 

[Brain]

I didn't realize that guy wasn't dead. Oops

I'm looking forward to the upcoming episodes which include some tense moments.

 

[Angel of Adventure]

Yeah, that is a good hook there, Jester. I think I'll probably add a Spellsword level and finish out the Warforged Paragon progression. (I think Level 3 is a +2 Str enhancement.)

Thanks for making Lester rhyme, too. I keep forgetting to mention that to you.

Per Brain's comment on tension building, all I can say is that these next updates will be RADical.

-AoA

 

[hippiejedi2]

haha the cat went catatonic, stupid pussy cat, he was most fortunate all we did was loot him taking a cat nap on the job. perhaps its not to late to get a rakshasa/tabaxi as a pet, after he was unable to defend his post he'll need a new job. does anyone suppose he is housebroken?

 

[the Jester]

2:30 p.m.

The underwater area, though full of nastiness, has not yet yielded anything of great interest, but that changes as our heroes continue up the slope, leaving the dead rakshasa behind. Staring into the murky ahead, they see a flickering violet radiance.

“Uh oh,” whispers Lester. “I think something RADICAL is ahead. We’d better be careful, or we’ll be dead!”

“I bet it’s the golems we knocked into the water. I think we’re coming up to the bottom of that shaft we say.” Lillamere gestures ahead. The light is visible through a ragged rent almost 20’ in diameter torn in a wall that is clearly composed of some kind of metal.

Our heroes are ready to do battle- between overcoming the rakshasa so easily and the return of Lester and Orbius, they’re feeling more than a little sassy. They are one of the most powerful groups of adventurers in all of Cydra, and they know it.

“Golems, you say?” Orbius murmurs. “I think I have just the thing.”

The party moves up and Orbius casts his spell- and a reality maelstrom opens, a tear in the very fabric of space that sucks everything within it through to another plane! A loud roaring sound emanates from it, and a mighty current begins pulling our heroes towards it as water is sucked through with increasingly insane speed.

“AAAHHH!!! HELP!!!”

Both golems are sucked through, but so is Jezebel.

Jezebel! Lester cries over the Rary’s telpathic bond the party is hooked up with. I’ll save you! And he dives right into the reality maelstrom.

The rest of our heroes struggle against the current, and Orbius only needs a minute to dispel the reality maelstrom. Gasping, the party swirls in the violently twisting water.

I got her, Lester comes through telepathically a moment later. We’re almost back- I’ve already plane shifted us to Cydra, and now we’ll use my boots of teleportation to get back to you guys. And indeed, he reappears, Jezebel on his arm.

“Jezebel, I was so worried!” exclaims Orbius.

“Then why didn’t you come yourself?” she replies reproachfully.

“Well... Lester went...”

“Why didn’t you come?” A beat passes. “Never mind. Let’s go. We’ll talk about it later.”

He really doesn’t have much choice there, does he?

Beyond the golems is indeed the bottom of the shaft. Though deeply muted, the sound of klaxons can be heard from above. At the bottom of the pit is a square hatch, about 10’ across. The water in the shaft is noticably warmer than the surrounding water, and close to the hatch it is almost uncomfortably hot.

Inoke and Lester exchange a glance.

“Now, at a time like this, you might think you want to brashly open that hatch,” Orbius says, “but take it from Lester, you don’t. Over the course of his career he’s pulled a lot of levers that he shouldn’t, and generally you want to have an idea of the consequences first. Otherwise you’ll let out someone like Fuligin.”

“Right,” says Inoke. “But what if the answer is down there? What if we can turn it off?” He is wearing one of the hard ceramic suits, and it has absorbed some of the radiation that is doubtless pouring into him. One wrist has a strange rod fixed parallel to it that crackles more the more radiation is around; it’s making a lot of noise just now.

“You don’t want a lot of RADs,” Lester exclaims. “That would be really bad!” Telepathically, he continues, Trust me on this one! You get sick, your hair falls out... ugh! It’s bad. You get sores all over your body... it’s very, very bad. Trust me. Been there, done that. Speaking of which, let’s get the hell back away from this! Look up there. There’s another way out. Two, in fact.

Indeed, there are two other rents in the wall below the waterline. Our heroes ascend quickly now that Lester has expressed his concern; and they ascend to the nearer one and swim down another stone passage, apparently natural, perhaps begun by seismic activity at some point and expanded by the umber hulk above.

In they go.

***

Many places at once

Another dim light flickers into being in Master Control’s awareness. There are all too few, all too few... This one has a runaway reactor, but contained. Master Control begins to assess its status, sees that it is stable, and shifts an informational avatar to it.

Think of the bodiless, voiceless equivalent of a gasp. How does information gasp? Think of that for a moment.

Master Control gasps.

Lester is here.

Immediately it begins the process of calling up whatever weapons this new possession may have-

Nothing. Only the reactor itself, which has already burned itself low. There really isn’t anything to work with.

Not there, anyway. Master Control sends out a command, and several hundred miles away a deadly prototype aswarm with copper clockwork horrors begins checking its systems. The activity of the horrors changes. They begin loading ammuntion, fuelling, preparing for launch. A few panels of armored plating must still be welded on. It is a significant expenditure of resources, but one that Master Control is gambling Lester has not foreseen.

If only there were better sensors at the lower levels, for that is where Master Control’s old enemy is! But only within the upper levels could it actually see anything.

Enough recriminations for now. Lester was there, and he was a target. By the time the unfinished prototype reached him, the first part of Master Control’s vengeance would already be well under way.

Accursed bags of meat.

***

Our heroes travel through a large chamber with weird slimy growths waving in the current. None of them seem dangerous, but there are two exits. Our heroes continue across the room and pass into another large chamber. Another golem moves to oppose them, but this one looks almost like a black-boned skeleton. At first they mistake it for some weird undead, but as they pound on it it becomes apparent that it is made from some sort of metal. Soon it has been cast down in pieces, and our heroes search its chamber.

“Lookie here,” Gerontius cackles, popping open a secret panel and holding up a key.

“I bet that opens the door in the bottom of the shaft,” Inoke says.

“Now don’t do anything hasty,” Orbius urges.

“Well, think about it- if we could shut this place down, we’d be doing a lot of good for my island. Who knows what terrible effects all this radiation is going to have on my folk otherwise?” He ponders for a moment, then says, “We could even use the wishes from the genie bottle.”*

“You can use it if you get it,” Gerontius says, “but if I get it as my pick I probably won’t.”

“’Pick?’” Inoke exclaims. “If we get wishes, we should use them for the benefit of the whole party.”

“How does that benefit me?”

The exchange- half-serious, but half serious- continues as our heroes continue exploring. The room with the hidden key in it has only one exit other than the passage from which they gained ingress. They take it, continuing their debate, until Lester cries out.

“Hey, look, all of youze!” he exclaims. “It’s some kind of ooze!”

Snapped out of their conversation, our heroes see a humungous greenish-turquoise ooze bristling with little hairs and growths. It surges forward, sensing prey, and our heroes dispatch it without even slowing down. The wide passage it was dwelling within has more of the bizzarre growths all over it, but soon it leads back into the central shaft.

“I think we should try to shut it down,” Inoke says again.

”Agreed,” Orbius answers, “but not today. We need to be prepared.”

Reluctantly, Inoke agrees. The party backs up a few dozen feet, away from the shaft. After a brief discussion, they recall the passageway they skipped from the first chamber they entered, and they return to it and begin to follow it.

As they do, Orbius cocks his head. I hear something, he relates over the telepathic bond.

Indeed... some kind of babbling, like many voices gibbering...

Our heroes advance towards the Gibbering Garden.

Next Time: Into the Gibbering Garden!

*The genie bottle, which our heroes encountered earlier, was on Virri when they defeated him through Sybele’s ability to generate a wild zone, which our heroes believe killed the “rakshasa” when he tried to cast a spell. Loot!

 

[the Jester]

The Gibbering Garden

The party advances into the weird gibbering sound. The passage opens into a wide chamber about 100’ across. Every surface of the place is covered in weird, colorful growths and slimes. The gibbering seems to be coming from in here somewhere. It makes our heroes nervous.

Lester starts to move forward- and the foresight Orbius cast upon him goes off. “Watch out, it’s dangerous!” he calls. Orbius casts a bestowed mirror image on him, and then the L takes another step and the gibbering grows much louder. Suddenly a pseudopod of slimy matter forms and strikes out at him! It swishes past, but it’s enough for him to cast a horrid wilting.

Then the room erupts into chaos. There are suddenly flailing pseudopods everywhere, and Inoke’s suit’s rod of radiation detection starts crackling like crazy. The pseudopods deal reasonable damage, and worse, they inflict radiation as well! Inoke and Gerontius strike back physically, but the slime regenerates with distressing speed.

Then things grow even more bizarre and five globs of stuff spit out, resolving into gibbering mouthers. “What the hell is this?” cries Inoke. “What are we fighting??”

“I have no idea!” cries Lester as he casts another horrid wilting, slaying all the mouthers and dehydrating whatever is in the slime.

“I’m starting to suspect that we’re fighting the whole room,” Orbius announces, testing the notion with a chain lightning. Indeed, no secondary bolts form. Lester follows his cohort’s spell with a cone of cold, and this seems to harm it in a way that it cannot regenerate.

Once they know its weakness, our heroes grow bolder. Beau employs his frost dagger to deadly effect, and though it takes time, the thing finally stops regenerating.

However, a search reveals a strange, pulsating egg-shaped growth. They also find the skeleton of a long-dead humanoid with canine features, but neither kobold nor gnoll. The party takes a magical ring on its finger and a rich-looking helm from the helm.

“What about this egg?” asks Inoke. “Should we destroy it?”

“No way, man! I’ve got a plan!” Lester smiles a devious smile.

“We can’t leave yet,” Inoke says. “I have to check that hatch.”

“What if you make it worse?” demands Orbius. “What if you let something out that you shouldn’t?”

“I have to know what I’m dealing with.”

“All right.” Orbius shakes his head. “But we’ll probably have to retreat immediately and prepare for a couple of days before we can return and shut it down and survive.

***

The hatch does indeed yield to the key that was hidden in the room with the weird metal golem in it. Inoke wisely erects energy adaptation and turns the dial on the chest of the hard suit that he’s wearing all the way up before he opens the door, for a bubble of boiling radioactive water hisses out over and past him. Below the hatch is a 20’ diameter chamber with a number of control panels melted into slag and a ceramic door that is glowing red-hot and slumping in its frame. Inoke’s radiation detector- Lester calls it a wand of Geiger- is crackling with a solid hiss of static, the most Inoke’s heard. Quickly he moves to the ceramic door and smashes it down. Another blast of superheated radioactive water tears across him. A 30’ hallway leads down to a small core area where a violet crystal upon a strange metal pedastel glows incandescent.

Inoke can feel the radiation tearing through him. He knows he must move fast. He runs forward towards the crystal, a rumbling war cry emanating from his chest, and strikes-

And Deadly Avalanche deflects off of a force field.

With a cry of despair, Inoke turns and flees.

***

4 p.m., the Temple of Elemental Good Water

In a shimmer of teleportative magic, our heroes appear via mass teleport. They give the egg to the high priest of Elemental Water and Lester encourages him to leave it underwater and to watch it carefully, but if anything looks dangerous to get the hell away from it. Then our heroes while away the afternoon.

***

9/9/370 O.L.G., 10 a.m.

Orbius casts contact other plane.

What is our best means currently within our power to get rid of the force field around the crystal? Wish.
What is likely to happen to anyone in the chamber when the force field goes down? Radiation.
What is the purpose of that crystal area? Isolation.
How many maximized shatters would it take to destroy that crystal? One.
What will happen when we shatter the crystal? Stop.
If we cast an earthquake is that likely to prevent the evil doesers who want the crystal? No.
What do I need to do to get Jezebel to like me again? Finish.
Like, ‘sealing the deal’? No.
Finish off the Bile Lords? (Orbius shudders.) No.

He tells the party about most of his questions and answers. Then the party goes into an orgy of identification, followed by a heavy debate about what to do with the genie bottle. In the end it is put into the treasure to be divided by dice. Inoke worries about this; without the genie bottle, he may not be able to induce anyone capable of wishing into the crystal’s chamber. He breathes much easier when he gets the first pick. In the end, the divisions go as follows:

Inoke- the genie’s bottle and another cat helm (this one is a helm of underwater action)
Sybele- bracers of armor +5
Lester- the ring from the canine headed humanoid skeleton. This is a ring of the predator. It gives its wearer scent, Track, and deals extra damage against tabaxi.
Gerontius- the ring of radiance (taken from the rakshasa’s body), which casts light 2/day and sunray 1/day.
Seethe- the 4 immovable rods
Lillamere- a ring of protection +3

“All right,” says Inoke. “Orbius, will you help me? I need to go back there and shut this thing down. I don’t need you to come in there with me, but will you take me there?”

Orbius sighs. “Of course I’ll help you.” And Bocob help you see the way, he adds mentally. “I’ll even send in a simulacrum with you.”

The big warrior visibly steels himself. “All right. Thank you.”

Next Time: Will Inoke shut down the reactor? How will the radiation affect him? Find out!