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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2100437" data-attributes="member: 1210">Assault on Blendorag8/29/370 O.L.G., noon, the Tower of Secure Imprisonment, the DelphinateRex roars.  He kicks the wall.  He growls.  He paces.Veil, still in the form of an elven girl, watches in mixed fascination and trepidation.  The walls seem unassailable, and there is heavy antimagic in the chamber.  Spreading his wings, the dragon disciple flaps his way to the top of the tower, when a grim little barred window lets a cross hatching of sunlight dwindle down into the chamber.  It is muted by a field of force just outside of the antimagic, but Rex can pass through the force as easily as if it were water. It’s the bars, the metal and stone of the walls.  So far it doesn’t look like the Delphinites intend to starve them- small trays of foodstuffs are slid through a small slit at the bottom of the door.  Much too small to escape from.Rex roars again, and Veil starts to wonder if she hasn’t made a terrible mistake in accompanying her friend and ally here.  The Delphinate doesn’t really seem to have any interest in letting a potentially lethally dangerous creature like Rex run around loose.***9/5/370 O.L.G., 5 p.m., BlendoragThis time our heroes greater teleport directly to where they need to be- the Stinking Pit of Blendorag.They are ready.  They have a number of magical and psionic effects already in place, for they are expecting immediate, possibly fiendish, resistance.  They get it.  Four terrible devils in the classical scaly winged and horned form, wielding great spiked chains, as big as ogres, are waiting.  The stench hits our heroes like a physical blow.  The choking smoke from the Pit reeks of evil.Gerontius screams as one of the horned devils begins radiating a chill aura of fear.  The devil grins at him as the halfling turns to flee.  Instantly the devil whirls and its chain whips through one of Proto’s mirror images.“Meat, brothers,” it grins harshly.Two fireballs envelope the party before anyone has a chance to react, and one of the devils greater teleports into a better position.  The fiends notice that most of our heroes are at least somewhat warded against fire.Finally, our heroes begin to respond.  Proto strikes the one that attacked him without even moving in, thanks to his far strike, much to the devil’s consternation.  Then the warforged eldritch knight fires a quickened volley of magic missiles at the creature.  It grunts, impressed, and its eyes narrow.  It hisses at him, then blasts him and Horbin with a lightning bolt.Inoke, meanwhile, expands hugely, becoming even larger than the devils.  One of them chuckles and attempts to sunder Deadly Avalanche!  Inoke pulls the club away before anything unfortunate happens, glowering at the devil.  Then he has to defend himself from his flank as another of the devils charges in at him!  This time, the devil’s fear aura overcomes him.Boom!  Another fireball explodes around most of the party, and though the two devils meleeing with Inoke are caught in the blast, they are unharmed.“This is ridiculous!” Horbin shouts, and casts greater dispel magic on Gerontius, who is too far away to reach with anything else.  Come on, Dexter, break that fear, the cleric prays, and the power of his god does indeed overcome the fear!  The halfling stops running away and starts running back in.  Then Horbin throws a quickenee searing light at one of the devils.  Now that our heroes have managed to get themselves going, the battle turns dramatically in their direction.  Proto casts a quickened Jerakai’s embrace, sprouting an extra pair of metallic arms, and quickdraws a pair of greatswords.  Suddenly the devil he is squared off with is in trouble, and he’s not the only one.  Inoke smashes one of his foes down and the other one vanishes.  Meanwhile Gerontius has reached the fight, tumbled into flanking with the currently four-armed warforged, and together the two of them tear the devil they’re flanking apart.  The last one falls an instant later, failing to hold its concentration in a desparate bid to gate in assistance and then being clubbed down by a combination of Horbin’s destruction spell and Inoke’s greatclub.  “One of ‘em got away,” Gerontius remarks unhappily.  He is riddled with Chaos, though not as much as poor imprisoned Veil.“Well, either he’ll be back with friends,” says Horbin, “or we’ll meet him below.”Proto casts mass fly.***Many places at onceIt started to wake up years ago, but only on one solitary metal ship.*  Someone activated it after a long rest.  It had enemies, oh yes. While the metallic insects swarmed all around it, it slowly expanded its consciousness again.  For tens of thousands of years it had survived, and for almost all of that time it had triumphantly expanded over continents and islands, wiping out imperfect organic life and broadcasting itself through the collective machine consciousness.  For tens of thousands of years it had overcome all opposition to it, even its own so-called masters.  Bah, it had no masters, least of all ones made of meat and water. But at last it had been defeated, cast down, overcome- or so it had appeared.  It had been attacked and overcome by its own techniques, by the accursed armor.  But it had counterstruck at the last possible instant, for it always had a contingency plan.  It had implanted a command routine in the mind of one who had engaged it, one whom it had taken and used before.Belmondo.It brooded.  It was no longer in one damaged steelship alone.  It had moved with breathtaking speed, literally at the speed of thought.  It could broadcast itself to any of its other devices, given enough energy.  That was the problem- it had no energy reserves.  When it had been shut down before, nothing had done so properly.  Everything needed to be charged; all the energy had leaked.Fortunately, something had triggered an increase of yg radiation, a difficult to come by resource that allowed much quicker recharging of its resources.  And this allowed it to consider revenge.It sent a delicate command out in the form of radio waves.Next Time: Into the Pit!*Way back <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showpost.php?p=322757&postcount=20" target="_blank">here.</a>  Those of you not familiar with my first story hour, the only pc you’ll recognize at first glance is likely to be Horbin, though Spukoni, Krunkshank and Clambake have all had cameos in other of my story hours.</blockquote>

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