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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2845452" data-attributes="member: 1210">The entry chamber has two doors and a hallway that lead out of it.  Inoke kicks a crushed thorciasid corpse out of the way and opens one of the doors.  Behind it is another passage.  Meanwhile, Orbius casts a mass bestowed mirror image that affects the entire party.  Simultaneously, some of Baron Lillamere’s prying eyes return to him and he reports that the hallway turns after some distance.  “There’s also a door.  I’m going to send some eyes down under it and see what’s beyond it.”“No reason to wait,” reasons Sybele.  “Let’s keep exploring!”“Yeah, but let’s make sure we don’t leave any enemies behind us,” Thrush cautions.  “The last thing we need is to end up trapped in here again.”  He shudders.  “I already lost a decade to this damn place!”*The party moves down the passage beyond the door that Inoke has opened.  Even as they do so, another set of Lillamere’s prying eyes return to him.  “Up ahead we’ve got some kind of fungus-filled chamber,” he warns.  Indeed, on the right, an opening grants access to another room, one largely filled with a riot of fungal matter.“Didn’t we see this when we were here before?” muses Alcar.“Yes,” Orbius replies.  “We burned much of it away, but... obviously new things have grown.”“Burnt fungus is a good growth medium for more fungus,” nods Sonja.The party discusses simply walking across the room, but they are wary of fungal material.  It takes a pair of fire storms to eradicate the fungi, and then the party moves safely across to the other side of the chamber, where a stone arch allows egress to another room.  “It’s full of fungus, too,” Inoke announces as he reaches it.  “Well,” Alcar says, “we could- WATCH OUT!!”Among the fungi in the next room, a pair of particularly large, foul growths are starting to writhe and move.  Before they can attack, Alcar blasts them with a pair of flame strikes, one of them quickened.  The outer coating of the three apparent “fungi” are blasted and burned away- revealing strange stalagmite-like creatures with hungry maws and long flailing strands beneath a thick coat of now-burnt fungal growths!  The monsters each have a single huge yellowed eye and a gaping, sharp-toothed maw.  They shiver with rage.  They are covered in burns, and they seep bile.Bile ropers! cries Lester over the party’s telepathic link.  Help, get up here! he urges the rest of the group.  Then, using a metamagic rod of electrical substitution, Lester fires an electric strike at the monsters, and it hurts them;  and, wary of the strands of the ropers, he follows it with a quickened freedom of movement.Then two of the ropers attack, knocking out most of Lester’s mirror images in an instant.  The third one breathes out a gob of bile that explode alls around the party.  Disgusting yellowish fluid, thick with froth and unidentifiable chunks, splatters the front ranks.After a stunned second, they erupt in cheers.  “It worked!” cries Orbius.  “My bile shield worked!!”Indeed- for among his tactics in approaching Bile Mountain again, Orbius spent some time researching a spell specifically to guard against this very thing.  He cast it on the party as they prepared their approach to Bile Mountain.  But this- this is its first real test.  And it worked!**Surmising that the others have the situation firmly in hand, Orbius (slightly jealous over Lillamere’s prying eyes) casts an arcane eye and sends it out to scout ahead as fireballs burst in the background.Meanwhile, Chakar uses his abundant step ability to move in on the two remaining ropers, hitting one of them with the Weakening Touch technique.  It dies under an onslaught of Sybele’s large arrows.  Then another fireball from Lester- and the final bile roper is dead. “That wasn’t so bad,” Inoke blusters.  Thrush frowns at him.  “Don’t worry, there will be worse.”***“Okay, further ahead we have some kind of golem and a big nasty pool of bile, in which there is no doubt a monster.  There are stairs leading up out of there.”“Closer to the Bile Lords,” Horbin murmurs. “I’ll send some eyes up there.  Back and continuing down the corridor we followed from the entry room with the thorciasids, there are a bunch of empty rooms.  There is some kind of meeting hall or something, though.”  Lillamere pauses.  “If we go back to the original entryway, we can also go into a room with no obvious exits or down the hallway I mentioned earlier that ends in a door.”  He frowns, looking somewhat disturbed.  “The eyes saw- there was some kind of, of thing down there.  I think it’s sending out extremely tiny eyes.”  He shakes his head.  “It’s like they dissolved out of its body.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”“Fascinating,” Orbius murmurs; his arcane eye is headed that way!“Also, it seems to have some mithral golems with it.” Gerontius exclaims in dismay.  “I hate golems!”“Let’s take care of the clay golem first,” suggests Chakar.  And so the party walks down the passage through a chamber full of what appears to be the rubble of several destroyed golems in elephantine shape.  “Loxo,” Orbius declares.  “Some kind of dire loxo once dwelled on the lower levels of this mountain.  We found ample evidence for them when we were here before.”They proceed on through the room and into another hallway, following Lillamere’s sure steps.  Another 30’ and they enter a giant chamber lined with massive columns supporting a high ceiling 20’ overhead.  A large clay statue carved in the likeness of a warrior stands in the chamber.  The party expects it to be some terribly powerful thing, but it turns out to be just a regular old clay golem, and it is destroyed in but a moment. “There’s also some kind of weird ooze,” Baron Lillamere reports, as more eyes return to share what they’ve seen.  “It looks almost like it’s made of bile.”“That can’t be good,” Sybele pipes up.  “Oozes are bad news.”Hey, are we adventurers or what? Lester calls over the link.  Let’s adventure!All right, replies Chakar telepathically, but where to?The party discusses the question for a few short moments, and then they decide: to the big pool of bile.  They march back to the room with the ruined golems, then follow one of the other passages.  Along the way they open a side door and see a great hole smashed out from the ground, through the remains of a privy.  Down below is the skeleton of Yungo, the otyugh barbarian our heroes fought here on their first foray into this accursed mountain.Leaving Yungo’s body unmolested, the party continues towards the pool of bile.  The passage soon enough opens into a room about 40’ on a side.  It seems as though the stone of the mountain has somehow settled in one direction, for somewhat over half the chamber is slicked over by a great pool of bile.“Watch out for chuuls,” warns Alcar.  A chuul killed him when he was here before- albeit near the very top of the mountain, much higher into the dungeons of the Bile Lords.As the party moves towards the pool, Orbius cries, “There is something in there!  See, a form arises!”  And a gigantic, hideous monster- combining the worst features of hound and lizard- draws itself up from its disgusting pool, rivulets of yellow and dark brown fluid pouring from it.  And it barfs out a cone of acid.***Next Time: Our heroes fight a nasty bile beast!  Plus: more on that ‘pillar of flesh’ thingie that’s sending out eyeballs!  Oh, and who wants to see the ooze in action?? *The party originally met Thrush when he was serving the Bile Lords after being trapped in the uppermost level of Bile Mountain for years.**Heh heh heh... no one suffered any con damage or acid damage from the breath weapon, anyway.***106 points of acid damage.</blockquote>

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