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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1756482" data-attributes="member: 1210">The Gruesome Wedding, pt. 3 (Conclusion)Thanks! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Here you go, but remember- you asked for it!***7:23 p.m., 9/30/368 O.L.G., the Bile King’s DemiplaneThe corpulent creature shambles at a full run into the wedding ground, then halts.  The Bile King, his soon-to-be Queen, the other Bile Lords and the Queen’s gutlings- all are in attendance.  A sacred moment is approaching.  The priest is ready to perform the ceremony.  To interrupt at this moment is inadvisable, for anything less than an incredible occurrence.Someone has penetrated into the demiplane.The Bile King draws himself up to his full height.  The white-hot fires of anger are burning in him now.  To interrupt, now, at his very wedding!  This affront cannot be allowed to stand- no, to allow that would be to show a callow disregard for his love.  For the Queen of Guts.The King of Bile strides forward, the single word, “Come.” exiting his lips.  The Bile Lords surge to their feet after him, shocked beyond words.  How long has it been, Chemnu the Bile Lord thinks gleefully, since the King has struck his enemies personally?To the surprise- and, to a certain extent, consternation- of the Bile King and his Lords, the Queen of Guts and her gutlings silently rise and follow them out.***7:25 p.m., the Inner Sanctum of Bile MountainThe terrible four-headed chuul makes a horrifyingly satisfied-sounding roar as its great pincers tear at Horbin, grabbing him and squeezing him severely.*  The cleric struggles mightily to break free, but to no avail; it’s too strong, even with his many magical enhancements.  “Hey!” he screams at the top of his lungs.  “A little help here!”But nobody hears.  Horbin gasps as the blood pours down his body.  The chuul holds him with one claw and tears at him with the other, and he screams again as it savages his chest, popping ribs and crushing a lung.  Blood pours from Horbin’s mouth.**Desperately, he struggles to tear out of the thing’s grasp, and since it is only clutching him in one of its pincers, he manages to wriggle free, leaving a lot of body parts behind.  He coughs and a great spasm of pain runs through him.  I can’t take another one of those, he thinks woozily.  Can barely stand...  He bares his teeth in a glare of concentration and casts defensively, mass healing himself.  To his surprise, not all of his wounds heal.There’s nobody else left, he realizes with a shock as he calls out again.  They’re all down, captured or worse.  Grimly, he braces himself for another assault-And then Angelfire appears, blurring in from out of time, and her falchion is everywhere.  She had virtually no time to prepare for this fight, so she simply rushes into it with a psionic lion’s charge, dealing a series of tremendous, punishing blows to it.  Her falchion tears great chunks from it, and she splits it between its two central heads almost to the midsection.  The monster gives a high-pitched shriek and collapses, dead.Horbin and Angelfire look at each other.“Holy crap,” Horbin says after a moment.  “I think the others are dead.”  He glances over at the meager remains of Jezebel.  Angelfire cries out, “Londo!”  But there is no answer.***7:27 p.m., 9/30/368 O.L.G., the Bile King’s DemiplaneThe remains of the three famine spirits that Angel and Horbin killed lay in all their gruesome glory.  The remaining famine spirit devours one of the corpses in but a pair of bites, then guiltily rushes over to attend its master.“Tamult,” the King of Bile says, and the Bile Lord Tamult falls quaking to one knee before him.“My King!” he cries, head bowed, his voice betraying naked fear... as is only proper.“Bring them,” the King grates, gesturing at the portal.  The Bile Lord nods eagerly, rising and turning towards the portal.The Queen of Guts makes no sound, but a gutling detaches from her retinue to accompany the Bile Lord on his mission.***7:26 p.m., the Inner Sanctum of Bile MountainGrimly, the two take stock of their situation.  Horbin is grimly angry. Why do I have to get stuck with Angelfire, of all people? he wonders with a silent groan.  ”What do we do now?” he wonders aloud.  “Well,” Angelfire says, and stops.  Their options, here in the inner sanctum of Bile Mountain, where they are cut off from teleportation and plane shifting magic, are sorely limited.  Quickly, they discuss things.  Horbin points out, “My mass heal should have fully restored me, but it didn’t.  Something’s wrong.  I think it’s a type of terrible wound that requires a sanctified area in order to heal.”“Not much of that here,” remarks Angelfire idly.Horbin sighs gustily.  “Well-“Then, suddenly, through the portal step a Bile Lord and a gutling.The gutling looks like a giant with deep grey, almost black, skin.  His hair is a stark white that contrasts dramatically with his dark skin.  He stands about twenty feet tall- so tall that Horbin and Angelfire stand only thigh-high to him.  Worse yet, his intestines are hanging in gruesome loops from his belly.  And even worse yet, as our two surviving heroes watch in horror, the ropey guts begin twitching and moving on their own.Before Angelfire or Horbin have a chance to even move, Tamult, instantly recognizing them, unleashes a horrid wilting.  The magic desiccates the two heroes, draining their bodies of moisture and vitality.  Their mouths go dry as dust, their eyes grow sore and itchy with dehydration.  Both of them give out shouts of pain.This is bad! Horbin thinks.  He fires a sunbeam, catching the Bile Lord square in the chest and staggering him for a moment.  Then he turns to see how Angelfire’s doing-Not well at all, really.She scored but a single blow on the gutling before its intestines rose up and lashed out, entangling Angel in a web of dripping flesh.  She gives a grunt of displeasure as several loops go around her throat.  She grasps them to break free-But then Tamult speaks a Word of Power, and suddenly Angel is reeling, unable to think or act or resist, and the loops tighten on her throat.  Gagging on the stench of the Bile Lord, Horbin assesses the situation.  He has an idea as to an escape route, but it’s only an idea.  It might work... it might. But he can’t leave Angel to die, even if she just about left him to die just minutes before.  Even if she almost let Faericles kill them all in Moil.  Even if she is an evil bitch, Horbin thinks wryly, and hurls another sunbeam, this time at the gutling.  ZARK!!The light of Dexter is too mighty for the gutling to resist.  In a howl of pain it is blasted apart, and Angelfire collapses to the ground.Tamult leaps back through the portal. “Oh, man, this is not good,” Horbin moans.  He heals Angelfire, bringing her out of the stun, and she scrambles to pick up her two falchions that the dropped when the power word stun took effect on her.  Horbin tries desperately to gate in a solar, but curses when it fails.  I knew that wouldn’t work here, he groans in his mind.  Damn it!Then two more Bile Lords and another gutling appear through the portal.  One of the Bile Lords splits Horbin and Angelfire with a wall of force, and then the gutling lurches forward, charging at Angelfire.  But she slips aside, deftly avoiding his attack, and then timeslips and vanishes.***“Oh, you bitch!” Horbin cries, furious. And then there’s no time to complain.  He blasts another sunray forward, but it sprays uselessly off of the wall of force.  Then the gutling gestures and darkness falls over the battle.Not good at all! Horbin thinks wildly, and invokes another miracle, disintegrating the wall of force.  Not because he wants to fight the overwhelming odds before him; because he doesn’t.He rushes forward for the portal, but ropes of intestines wrap around him, squeezing an immobilizing him.  The gutling’s deadly intestines bludgeon and squeeze, and Horbin struggles mightily to escape; but when Tamult gloatingly speaks another power word stun, it becomes clear that the party’s over for him.  He can only stand the tender embrace of the gutling for another dozen seconds or so before he’s dead- less if the thing pounds on him with its huge morningstar as well.Then Angelfire reappears next to the Bile Lords. “Wait!” she cries.  “We don’t have to fight!  You’ve demonstrated your power; we can respect that.  Maybe we can do something for you...”But the gutling finishes Horbin with a terrible strength, and Tamult and Zurtneg, the two Bile Lords, sneer at Angelfire.  Tamult dominates her- the Coilite’s will cannot withstand the crushing power of the Bile Lord- and he tells her to sheath her swords.And she obeys.“Come,” Tamult growls, “we have a wedding to attend.”***7:30 p.m., 9/30/368 O.L.G., the Bile King’s Demiplane The gruesome wedding is a sight to be seen, if you can stomach it.  If you’re not of an iron constitution, you probably wouldn’t want to look.The hideous gutlings, a few flies buzzing around them (certainly not native to the demiplane) do nothing to make the wedding pretty.  Nor do the Bile Lords, with their clouds of nauseating vapor.  Angelfire is beautiful among them.  She stands out like a sore thumb.The poor Galadorian cleric that has been pressed into service to perform the ceremony- What a triumph, to have made Horbin do it! the Bile King thinks idly- is clearly terrified, but too frightened to resist.  It is obvious that she wisely doubts whether she’s going to walk away from the ceremony.But she performs it as best she can.  She certainly reads the proper passages from the Galadron, and she even loses the quaver in her voice about halfway through.  Immediately afterwards, of course, the Bile Lords and their King order Angelfire to kill the priest, which she gladly does. Then they tell her to stand in the center of a small area.  The gutlings and the Queen of Guts herself surround Angelfire.“What’s going on?” she asks idly, yawning.And they tear her to pieces.Next Time: That’s right, it was a TPK!!!  Will there be more updates in this thread?  YES!  Next time we’ll catch up with a few npcs and see what we see... *According to my notes, Horbin the MFKG Holy took 117 hp in this round alone. **Ouch!  Another 107 hp.***Timeslip is a Time domain spell imc.  Angelfire had it prepared in multiple domain slots.</blockquote>

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