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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1728319" data-attributes="member: 1210">Within the Inner SactumThere’s a moment of dizzying disorientation, so bad that our heroes’ stomachs twist and momentarily threaten to empty themselves as the group appears in a chamber with four exits and-Two large quadrupeds, tufted with ruined patches of fur, spit bile instantly at our heroes.  Before the adventurers have even a moment to respond, they’ve been hit by a tremendous amount of damage.*  Screams of pain echo as the group tries to shield themselves from the assault.  Furious, Thrush springs forward, his full plate sounding like a kitchen’s worth of pots and pans as he launches into a series of deadly sword moves that leaves the first bile beast twitching on the ground and the second wounded in barely a second and a half.  Then, snarling, he draws back into a guard position.  Just in time for Kagera to leap in and spring away again after missing with a kick.  But then the one that Thrush assumed he killed roars and struggles back to its feet, and he grits his teeth and hammers his greatsword down again.  “Stay down, dammit!” he snarls, cracking the bone of its skull, and the creature collapses again.  The other beast, meanwhile, tears into him, dragging its viciously sharp claws across his left side and tearing a slab of his arm away with its massive bite.  Thrush snarls again, but glances meaningfully in Horbin’s direction.Horbin’s busy.  He fires off a sunray, damaging one of the bile beasts and blinding it for good measure.  Then he unleashes the fury of Dexter in the form of a flame strike, which sears the monster badly.  He glances over at Thrush- another round of attacks from the monster leaves him barely standing- and prepares a mass heal.If anyone needs that, it’s Jezebel.  The twin breath weapons almost killed her.  But her head is cocked; she heard something squeaking down one of the passages, and retreats that way, hoping to avoid any more large area attacks.  Sybele manages to transfer some health to her psionically as she hurries back towards the center of things after a glance in the direction of the noise. “More bile stirges!” she cries out, her voice panicky.  Orbius!  Where are you when I need you? she moans inwardly.  Kagera turns to the new threat, looking composed, as Jezebel shoots a fireball from a wand pulled from her belt.  “What the hell are those?” cries Kagera.“Sh*t!” shouts Sybele.  “Headless!”Four weird creatures have emerged from one of the other halls leading away.  They look at first glance like headless humans, but as they come forward they do weird little jumps and twists, shifting from one set of two limbs to the other.  It seems that all four of its limbs work well as hands or feet. Then they’re moving with unbelievable quickness, moving in gracefully to attack with their bare hands (or is it feet?).  They shuffle back and forth, baffling to watch, hard to anticipate and difficult to defend against.It’s just the sort of challenge that Kagera is looking for.  The monk leaps forward, and soon there is an almost blindingly-fast exchange of punches, chops, kicks and grabs between her and the headless.  Sybele belches psionic acid at a pair of the headless, who dodge it completely and move to her, but they are interrupted as Thrush finishes off the bile beast and whirls to chop at them, baffling attack or no.  There’s another flare of light and a whump! as Jezebel continues launching fireballs from her wand.  “They’re coming!” she screams.Kagera spins through a tremendous kick, striking one of the headless in the midsection, and is gratified as it drops to the ground.  An especially strong blow drives the wind from another, leaving it stunned for a few precious instants- instants it cannot afford.  “KIIIAII!!!” the monk screams, and flips the headless over and snaps its spine over her knee.“The bile beasts are regenerating!” cries Horbin, trying to finish one of them off.  Her curses.  “Fire, or acid!”“Stirges!” Jezebel screams again, and this time her fireball is just outside the room the group is in.  She’s almost running backwards into the chamber, and she heads towards the exit opposite the stirges.  She knows she can’t handle another volley of bile breath weapons at this point.  She glances around the room- the bile beasts are regenerating quickly, the stirges are coming, and the headless are just about down.  One is fleeing from Kagera, headed the way Jezebel herself is going, but a headless is probably a better bet than a ton of bile stirges.  She tosses another fireball on the way, and then runs without looking back.The headless turns out to be a much less safe enemy to pursue than she had calculated; as Kagera bursts through the door the headless springs through at the end of the hall, a terrible figure becomes visible- yellowed and old-looking, with bile dripping like sweat from it.  A horrendous stench emits from it.  Kagera tumbles away from it, gagging on the stink.“The Bile Lords!” Sybele howls, seeing the figure from her position for an instant.  Then there’s a crack of lightning, and she can’t see what’s happening...Jezebel, reappraising her strategy, twists and runs into the corner of the chamber the group arrived in, blasting more of the bile stirges- and one of the unconscious bile beasts- with another fireball.  The stirges are just about cleared out; she notes that the bile beast doesn’t seem to regenerate the fire damage and smiles to herself.  I can finish them off with my scorching rays, she thinks. The rest of the party is moving towards the Bile Lord.  “We’ve already gotten two of you!” Horbin shouts.  “Now we’ve come to finish-“  He chokes off as he recognizes the face of their adversary as Amnor.Who they’ve already killed.“Hey, no fair!” Horbin protests, but Amnor has already waved a hand at Thrush and made him vanish into a maze.“Aw, man,” Sybele groans.  Seconds later Amnor the Bile Lord, grinning ferociously, conjures an acid storm.  Fat droplets of greasy liquid begin raining down, and they don’t really seem to bother him.  Our heroes, however, find the liquid painful and hiss and yelp as their skin burns at its touch.“Dexter’s nadlies, you’re going to get it!” shouts Horbin, and invokes a holy aura around himself and Jezebel.Amnor, meanwhile, has put our heroes completely on the defensive and now casts another spell, which, unfortunately, turns out to be a wall of force separating the party.  He follows this up with an attempt to disintegrate Kagera, which leaves the monk very badly wounded.  She springs away and gulps down a potion even while Horbin uses a miracle to disintegrate the Bile Lord’s wall of force, just in time to get caught in a freezing cone of frigid air.  Ice crystals form on the wall, floor and ceiling as cold slashes out.Sybele whips out her great big bow, fires at the Bile Lord, and manages to wound him while Horbin puffs up with righteous might.  Then another wall of force cuts our heroes off again, but it lasts an even shorter time than the first one as Sybele uses her psionics to disintegrate it.  Then she launches more arrows at Amnor.As Amnor tries to cast another deadly spell, Horbin strikes.  He was waiting for just such a thing, and his blow interrupts the Bile Lord.  And then, suddenly, Thrush reappears, having finally found his way out of the maze that Amnor had consigned him to.  Suddenly things aren’t looking so good for the Bile Lord Amnor.  He sneers, but there’s a combination of fury and fear on his face.  Oh yeah, baby, we gonna kill you again, that’s what the look on his face is telling our heroes.Horbin and Thrush press Amnor together.  He pulls out and quaffs a potion, and his wounds are healing with tremendous speed, but he just can’t keep up with the damage our heroes are dealing to him.**“Die, you bastard!” Thrush shouts, hacking brutally into the Bile Lord’s arm and leg.  “Die and stay dead!!”  Amnor staggers under the assault, and then Kagera leaps in with a kick and his neck snaps.  The Bile Lord sags to the ground.  As quickly as they can, our heroes burn his body (minus loot, of course), along with the regenerating creatures.“Well,” says Horbin afterward, “now we know for sure that they can bring each other back.”“I thought Orbius said they didn’t have a cleric?” inquires Jezebel.Horbin shrugs.  “Maybe he was wrong, or maybe they have another way...”  He trails off.  “Let’s just find them and finish this.”A quick look at Amnor’s loot reveals bracers, a belt, a mask and a vial.  Everything except the vial is magic.  The vial turns out to be full of bile.  With a shrug, Angelfire puts it into her belt pouch, just in case.But a search of the level reveals no sign of any other inhabitants.  Thrush knows the level well from his time as First Servant of the Bile Lords; he leads the group, from the initial chamber the teleporter led them to, down each hallway in turn.  The first- leading west- leads to the chambers of the various servants of the Bile Lords.  “But I think we’ve killed them all,” Thrush comments.“As we’ve just seen, that may or may not matter,” Sybele points out.“Crap, you’re right,” Thrush grumbles.  But none of the servants’ quarters show any sign of having been used recently.  North is the chamber the stirges came from, along with the forms of various creatures imprisoned in cages, mostly outsiders.  But this direction leads nowhere else, and there are no enemies to strike down there.South is the direction of the Bile Lords’ chambers, which are empty and do not appear in recent use with a single exception.  That, they presume, was Amnor’s room- though even Thrush isn’t sure.  The only thing they find in there is a flask, which, when uncorked, proves to hold bile.“These guys are disgusting,” complains Jezebel.East leads to a rougher area of natural caves.  A year or so ago, when the party came here before, these were full of bile-infected creatures that they cleared out.  Now it seems as though there’s nothing left here either, although there are still deep pools of bile in some places.  Also in the eastern section of the level is the large chamber that had previously held the Crux Crystal that kept the bile running from the mountain and, seemingly, had maintained the anti-teleportation and divination aspects of the mountain.  Sybele half expects to see the Crystal restored; but it is as shattered as ever, thousands of tiny pieces everywhere.   “Where the hell are they?” muses Horbin.  “I guess it’s time to search the whole place for secret doors,” Drelvin suggests with a wry grin.  “We elves are good at that, you know.”“Maybe not,” says Jezebel, peering intently into space in the middle of the chamber.”What is it?” Sybele asks.    “Well, I’ve got a detect magic going- I thought maybe there’d be a residue from the crystal or something...”  Even as she speaks, Horbin is casting a detect magic of his own.  “But it’s not a residue, there’s an effect hanging there in space.”  She pauses and looks around at everyone significantly.  “I think it’s a portal.”Next Time: The most shocking events of the entire campaign to date!*Two breath weapons, each dealing 10d12 hp of acid damage.  Pretty much everyone was caught in both of them.  Ouch!**Fast healing 20, folks.</blockquote>

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