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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2111917" data-attributes="member: 1210">The Ur-Fish, pt. IIGerontius 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! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)***135 hp of damage after DR over four hits.  Crikey.</blockquote>

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