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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 4244910" data-attributes="member: 1210">A Foray into Entropy“Why Darkhold?” asks Inoke. “I am not really interested in just going on random adventures...”“Where else are we going to find information about the Angels of the Apocalypse?” Alcar retorts. “All right,” Inoke says. “As long as we’re on the trail of the Angels of the Apocalypse, it sounds good to me. But how do we find Darkhold?”Baron Lillamere lifts the Staff of the Emerald Mage and easily balances it on a single fingertip. The large gems set in either end pulse with bluish light. With his other hand, he sets it to spinning, and soon, compass-like, it comes to rest. The stone at one end slowly shifts the color of its radiance to an emerald hue. It points to the northeast.“That’s how,” Lillamere says. “Zelman is inside it. His staff can find him.”Alcar casts wind walk on the party, and they move rapidly northeast for about ten minutes before JJ suggests telepathically, Why don’t we just teleport to the nearest land mass to the north east?Good idea, acknowledges Lillamere. Our heroes gather together in the air, and an instant later they vanish, reappearing on land. Lillamere spins the staff again, and this time they head in a nearly westerly direction. We must have overshot it, thinks the baron.Our heroes fly into the northwest sky. Soon they spy a pale blue moon, almost invisible against the sky, hanging like a drop of water in the distant sky. Not far below it sits a new island. Our heroes move to it and descend. They fly at breakneck speed above it. Gerontius calls out, There are ruins, over the link.I don’t see Darkhold, Alcar replies. There’s no sign of the hedges, or of the keep... maybe we should land and spin again.Wait! he cries suddenly.What is it? Blaze asks. I saw a sphere of annihilation down there, Alcar replies. There are some other things too! Thrush warns.Suddenly, from below, two shadowy forms erupt upwards from the surface. One of them slams Wankerman, and he shrieks as he erupts into cold, black flames. He can feel them searing his very soul, shriveling his spirit itself!Then the orb of utter blackness that Alcar saw moves swiftly upward, speeding towards Thrush. The would-be emperor throws himself aside, suffering only a graze, but the blot of darkness blasts a scrape’s worth of him to dust! “Watch out for that thing!” he cries.Almost as if it were intelligent, the sphere of nothingness begins zipping in at Thrush, buzzing him with obvious malign intent. He yelps every time it brushes against him, and takes frantic evasive action. “How do I fight this thing?” he shouts.The rest of the party has their hands full, too, though; the two void shadows put up a terrific fight, and have no trouble landing horrible blows on our heroes. Then again, Blaze and Lillamere have no trouble unleashing a telling barrage of force. Combined with a flame strike from Alcar, one of the shadows of the void goes down.Wankerman, who is still aflame and shrieking in terrible pain, tries stopping, dropping and rolling, but without success. The black flames won’t extinguish! Alcar quickly sends a Bless’ grasping hand to aid Thrush against the sphere, then tries to dispel the flames on Wankerman. They stubbornly refuse to go out!“I’ve got an idea!” Baron Lillamere exclaims. He swiftly grabs up the big man (currently, Lillamere is in the shape of a gold dragon) and superior teleports to the Halls of Healing in Var. “Take me to Horbin!” he cries to the startled acolytes. “NOW!!” Meanwhile, Blaze finishes the other shadow of the void with another volley of magic missiles. That leaves the sphere of annihilation.And whoever is controlling it, Alcar thinks grimly. He is keeping his eyes out, but so far he hasn’t seen even the faintest indication of one...Suddenly his eyes widen as an old, old legend occurs to him. Thrush! he shouts over the link. Everyone! It’s worse than it looks!!And just ‘ow can it be worse than it looks? Gerontius sends back.It isn’t a sphere of annihilation at all. It’s a creature.What? It’s a blackball, Alcar theorizes. It’s basically like a sphere of annihilation, only it’s intelligent. They are also called ‘executioners of the gods.’ I don’t know what the hell we can do about this thing!Down below, in the ruins, in the midst of a set of cyclopean pillars, a figure garbed all in yellow emerges from within a shallow cave. He is tall and humanoid, but a deep cowl obscures his features. He chuckles gleefully as he steps out.He’s too far away to control it from there, Alcar thinks. Who is that?“Hello!” cries the man in yellow. “The green pumpkin touches the gate!”Blaze says, “What?”“Watch out!” Thrush flies by, the blackball hot on his tail. Blaze dodges away, arrowing through the air. Gerontius buzzes the blackball, and it veers after him. He gives a gleeful shout and begins a series of dramatic aerial acrobatics, trying to shake it off. There appears to be some kind of ‘atch in the floor of that cave, the halfling reports as he speeds by.Maybe that is where we need to go, Chakar suggests. He begins to move in that general direction, keeping a careful eye on both the yellow-robed figure and the blackball. “Who are you?” cries Alcar to the man in yellow.“I was Kale once, but how’s your mom? My cats eat all the walls. The black boots.” The figure doesn’t seem hostile, but its manner is clearly more ominous than friendly. “What... something smashed my pumpkins,” Alcar tries. “The black thing, uh, sucks. My mom is okay.”Gerontius continues to spin through the air, then whips to one side. As if possessed of no inertia at all, the blackball continues inexorably towards him. “Can’t shake it!” he cries. He tries zipping behind some foliage, but the blackball simply goes straight through it, unerringly towards him.“My family was really warm. There are places that should not go to themselves. Without a scorpion your carriage can’t fjord.”He’s mad, opines Chakar. And maybe dangerous.I can almost understand him, Alcar insists. He’s trying to tell us something!Blaze gives a telepathic snort. At the same moment, Lillamere reappears. He has a smug look on his face.The mad (?) man in yellow states firmly, “Not all hearts are meant to be purple. Yet frogs rain for summer.”Chakar moves swiftly to the cave the man in yellow emerged from. The dwarven monk spares the figure a glance, but the yellow-garbed man ignores him completely, seemingly focused on the sphere’s chase in the air. The dwarf moves over to the wheel set into the hatch in the floor, but to his surprise it seems stuck fast.“How do we stop this sphere?” demands Alcar, watching Baron Lillamere buzz and distract it from Gerontius. The sphere swoops in on him, but the baron sidesteps out of the way. The figure in yellow says, “There were always creeks on the island when we were children, my twin and I. Old friends like gems and things lost in the bad house.”“Well, I have an idea. I got something from Horbin’s portable store when I saw him,” declares Baron Lillamere. He pulls a rod from his belt. “If this thing is like a normal sphere of annihilation, one of the only things that might help is a rod of cancellation.”Good thinking! Alcar exclaims telepathically. Let me try something first! He tries to charm it, but has no effect. Oh well, go ahead.Lillamere buzzes in close, shape changed into a planetar. He hurls the rod of cancellation at the blackball, and scores a direct hit!Unfortunately, the blackball eats the rod without harm.“Well, crap!” exclaims the baron. “It was worth a try!”Gerontius swoops in and attacks, seeming to inflict some minor damage, but his dagger is destroyed immediately. He curses and withdraws, suffering a minor, glancing blow from the blackball on the way out. A direct hit would be much more severe, he realizes as a few layers of skin disintegrate away, leaving a raw, bloody patch on his arm. Maybe lethal. The blackball pursues Gerontius again, who flies up and around. Meanwhile, Baron Lillamere lands at the hatch and turns the wheel that seals it shut. As a planetar, he is quite strong; but even so, he has to exert himself hard to get the hatch open. Finally, the wheel pops free and he opens the hatch. A ladder leads down out of sight. “Entropy is coming,” the man in yellow cackles. “It’s all in the cards. Do you play?” And with that, he casts an extended fleshflow at the party. “Crap!” Blaze exclaims. Everyone manages to resist it, but he knows what a horrific spell that is by reputation, even if he has never seen it used before. He shudders to think of what it would do to them: cause their flesh to flow like hot wax, permanently- and horribly- malforming their bodies. That, Blaze decides, was unfriendly. He casts a polar ray at the figure in yellow, but misses. Wankerman has been doing his best to endure the shrieking black flames that are running over his body. Finally they gutter and go out. He groans, badly wounded. “You can go with the porcupine if you want,” the figure in yellow says, “but the desert is for me now.” With that, he vanishes. Who the hell was that? wonders Thrush over the link.I don’t know, Gerontius answers, but let’s get away from that ball before we get distracted by speculation! He tumbles into the cave, where Lillamere is retreating down the ladder revealed below the open hatch. Quickly, the others follow. So does the blackball, eating its way through the stone surrounding the shaft they are descending. It tags Gerontius more completely than it has before, and he pulls away from it, but not before it destroys about a half inch depth on a large amount of his chest. Blood gushes down him as he screams in pain.*Down they go. Chakar is the swiftest, and reaches the bottom first. He finds himself in a large cavern, much bigger than his darkvision can see. It is almost completely full of water. Huge mushrooms and strange fungi the size of houses grow alongside the water. In the distance, some luminescent lichens reveal that the room is at least several hundred feet across.Everyone else comes into the chamber behind him, rushing forward. But the blackball doesn’t seem to be pursuing them inside this area. The party makes ready, but after a few moments, it still hasn’t come down. “Just as well, really,” comments Gerontius. He thinks glumly of his destroyed dagger. Yeah, sure, he has more- but every blade is special to him. “Where the hell are we, anyway?” asks Blazier. “And where are we going?”“Time to spin the staff,” Baron Lillamere replies.Next Time: Our heroes chat with Zelman! Can the god of illusions explain anything about that yellow figure?*134 hp of damage in one hit.</blockquote>

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