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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1713527" data-attributes="member: 1210">To the Inner Sanctum2:30 p.m., 9/30/368 O.L.G., inside Angelfire MountainOur heroes creep up the stairs and make their way through a stinking mass of dead stirges and bile froth.  The devastated area smells terrible.  “This place is gross!” Jezebel snaps.  “I don’t like it here.”  Sybele pats her on the shoulder.The party moves through several chambers containing the moldering corpses of illithids, which only add to the smell, and they even spot the wall of temporal energy behind which they long ago found the body of Reth Fire-Scarred.  Then they find a chamber with a strange creature levitating asleep in the air.  Although it is more or less humanoid, its head is distinctly teardrop-shaped.  Its skin is a bright bluish-silver, and long shaggy hair the color of a lime spills down its back.  Its large eyes are closed and the lids twitch and spasm as if it is in the midst of an incredibly vivid dream.  All around it on the ground are strange creatures ranging from demons to archons to noble salamanders.  They, too, seem to be asleep.Suddenly the creature gives out a strained, high scream.  A momentary sense of fear washes over our heroes, but all of them throw it off.  “What is that?” wonders Rex.Nobody has an answer.  On the ground, one of the outsiders lets out a strange coughing scream, but all the creatures seem to remain asleep.  The demon scream doesn’t seem to have the same effect as that of the weird levitating creature, so our heroes cautiously move in and start searching.  Almost immediately, Rex’s draconic senses find a secret door and our heroes slip through it to a staircase leading upwards. “I don’t think we ever fully explored this level,” comments Sybele thoughtfully.  “We did a lot of teleporting around in Bile Mountain when we came in before.”Thrush shakes his head.  “I don’t want to explore this place.  I want to find and kill the Bile Lords and be done with it.”The group ascends, the dragon disciple eagerly taking the point.  He’s itching for a fight, and as the stairs open into a chamber, he sees an icy humanoid standing guard there, with a beard like an icefall, covered in runes.  Rex leaps forward and smashes it down in an instant; it never even has a chance to respond.  Grinning, he moves on.“Well, that was easy,” Thrush comments.This level of the dungeon is riddled with small holes that its previous residents, the beholders and their leader Red-Eye, had disintegrated to make the entire thing a shooting gallery for their eye rays.  Sybele shivers remembering how many beholders there were.The party enters a beholder dueling chamber, set with various small walls and pieces of cover.  Many vertical tunnels in the ceiling and floor are there as well, and it is by flying up one of these that the group moves forward.  Even without Orbius’ presence, the magicks he had employed to aid the group do their job.  Jezebel sighs.Soon the group arrives at a four-way intersection.  To each side except behind a door awaits only 20’ away.“One of these was the door that led to the stairs up to the final level,” Sybele says.  “But I can’t remember which.”  Thrush swallows, increasingly looking nervous about the prospect of returning to face his former masters.“How did you get through there before?” asked Ulla.“We got the key,” Horbin remembers.  “In fact, if I remember right, we actually made a deal with the leader of the ice giant guys.“Wait,” interjects Rex.  “Like the guy I killed at the top of the stairs?”Horbin nods.  “Yeah.”  Rex looks perturbed- if he’d known about that, he wouldn’t have killed the rune-covered creature.  But Horbin continues speaking before he has a chance to talk.  “I think one of these doors leads to his chamber, and I think one of them leads to the upper level, like Sybele said.”The group fans out enough to look over each door, and one of them is made of a strange coppery metal.  “Orichalcum,” comments Sybele.“That’s probably part of why the place is so hard to teleport or scry into,” Rex comments.“You have no idea.  That’s actually more of a plug than a door.  It’s forty feet thick.”  Horbin shakes his head balefully.  “Let’s go talk to the ice king guy.  His door was opposite the plug, I think.”Indeed it is.  The immoth ruler greets our heroes’ return to Bile Mountain with a grim look, but when they tell him that they’re attempting to overthrow the Bile Lords, he loses much of his air of threat.  Then he seems persuaded to a helpful stance after a long negotiating session in which Sybele reveals her plan to open a casino in Bile Mountain.  Soon the two are partners.“We need the key again,” Sybele pleads.”I do not have it,” the immoth ruler replies.  “Since I gave it to you, it vanished.”“It sank into the door,” remembers Horbin.“But I can help you nonetheless.”  The immoth grins, a frozen grimace.  “I can fabricate one.”5 p.m., 9/30/368 O.L.G.The key sinks into the orichalcum plug, and slowly the plug recedes, revealing a hallway leading to a room.  The plug is indeed 40’ thick, and it rides back on some sort of treads to a resting place in the midst of a room.  Beyond the room, and faintly humming, is a massive, wide stairway up.  “That’s it,” Horbin and Thrush say in unison, then grin wanly at each other.“That’s the stairway to the final level,” Thrush finishes.“The resonating fields,” Horbin says.  “Remember them?”When they had ascended previously, the party had found a series of weird energy fields leading upward, each needing to be opened in a different way.  As the group now begins to walk onto the stairway, they feel an increasingly strong resistance.  Rex pushes through by sheer strength alone, and for a moment the field collapses, but not everyone can fit on the next set of steps at once, so the group’s forces are forced to split between different fields.  Worse, as Kagera discovers, a failed attempt to push through results in a stiff electrical shock that affects everyone still behind that field.The next field won’t give to strength, but everyone can feel a strange slightly painful tingling.  Horbin recognizes it as negative energy, and snaps his finger.  “Of course!” he exclaims, and channels energy at the field, boring open a hole.  “This will only remain pierced for a moment,” he cries.  “Hurry!”  And he hustles through, followed by several others.  Meanwhile, Rex forces his way through the field of strength again, collapsing it for a moment and allowing those still trapped below to advance to the second field.The third field falls to neither strength nor a turning attempt.  Sybele rubs her chin, unable to recall what the did here previously.  Horbin shrugs when she looks at him.The resonating fields literally smell like magic.  Jezebel casts detect magic to examine the fields more closely and says, “Wow.”  There are a lot of criss-crossing energy fields here, resonating and moving in a beautiful eldritch dance.  Under her detection, the entire stairway is possessed of spiky energy; but the resonating fields themselves are entirely obvious, almost opaque with their radiance.  The one before her now seems to be made of complexly interwoven strands of energy, like a wall of tangled string.  She thinks about trying to  dispel it, only half-heartedly since she’s pretty sure such a simple tactic will fail, and then studies it further.  The string analogy is a good one... she reaches forward and touches it.  It almost feels like... she starts using her knowledge of spellcraft and her detection to unravel the field, tentatively at first and then more boldly.  She can do it!  And she does.  The field falls momentarily, and Horbin channels to bring down the second field, and everyone moves up.The next field is barely visible to the naked eye, looking like warped paper pushed together in a large mass, with small gaps visible here and there.  The group soon ascertains that they might be able to wriggle through, but their first several attempts result in splattering acid damaging over everyone on the upper level.  “This isn’t working,” Rex complains.“I can do it,” Kagera says from below.  The party rotates positions, with Jezebel dropping the arcane field again so that Kagera can move up.  Then the monk studies the wall for a moment, selects a spot to try to squirm through, and starts working her way through the field like an eel.  In a moment, it has collapsed temporarily.The final field fills everyone with a sense of being observed.  “This is where Zeebo persuaded it!” Sybele remembers.  “Please, Mr. Field, we want to get past you.  You remember some of us, right?  We’re old friends!  Let us through, please.”  And the field does.The group moves off the stairs, the field behind being squirmed through again by Kagera to drop it, and the entire party find themselves in a 20’ square landing.  In the midst of it is an arcane diagram that fills most of the floor.  Runes and glyphs of power are all around it.  “That’s the teleporter,” Horbin tells the party members who haven’t been here.“I thought you couldn’t teleport here,” Ulla says.“Right.  This is the only exception we found, and it’s of incredible complexity.  One might even say epic.”“Well,” says Thrush nervously.  His sword is out.  Sweat is on his brow.  “Man, they’re gonna be after me.  I betrayed them.”  He takes a deep breath.  “Let’s get this over with.”As one, the party moves onto the teleporter, and for the second time (for a few of them, anyway) they enter the Inner Sanctum of Bile Mountain.Next Time: What awaits our heroes on the uppermost level of Bile Mountain?!?</blockquote>

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