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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altalazar" data-source="post: 3893726" data-attributes="member: 939">Baron Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Eighty-Five – The Moon is Aligned    After carefully preparing for several weeks, our secret moon was full, and we were ready to go dust some vampires.  Just before we left, Larch found a still pool of water and attempted to scry some of the vampires in order to see where they were and what they were up to.  After several failed attempts, we finally viewed three of them sitting in the sitting room at the top of their tower.      Higgins spent several minutes preparing all of us with various magical protections and enhancements for the battle ahead.  In particular, he put a planar bubble around myself, himself, Larch, and Nimue to bring with us the native magic of our home plane.  There would be no problems will spells or powers this time.      Fully prepared, we joined hands, and Higgins shifted us directly into their midst.  They were caught completely by surprise.  Within seconds, two of the three vampires were slain, and then disintegrated into dust.  The third was nearly down, but survived long enough to send a signal to the rest of them before she, too, was mere dust on the wind, dumping the contents of her body onto the marble floor.  Unfortunately, that signal was enough to cause us some trouble.      Baron Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Eighty-Six – Anti-magic of a different kind    The entire room was sheathed in anti-magic.  We did not know where it came from.  It made it very dark.  We also heard a rushing of air.  Higgins rushed to the fireplace to stop it up.  Nimue and Morwen joined him.  Larch transformed himself into an elemental of fire to shed some light.  What he saw was not encouraging.  The small window slits that were originally in this room were gone.  And thick, black smoke was filling into the room from the ceiling from a fist-sized hole.  Larch’s fist soon filled that hole, but this just revealed another hole as a source for the smoke.      Quickly tiring of the situation, I shouted to Nin and Morwen to put their adamantine weapons to use on the tower walls.  Morwen started, but made little headway.  Then Nin stepped up, putting the full power of his attack into his swings, he hit the wall with both ends of his swinging chain, probably faster than one solid blow per second.  Within fifteen seconds, the wall was rubble.  The last few hits of his chain got stuck in something, which we had to help him pull it out from.  Then one more swing opened up the wall wide enough for us to step through it.  Not wanting to wait for any more surprises, I jumped through the hole.  As suspected, the anti-magic did not extend much beyond the tower and so soon all of us were floating in the air by the tower, courtesy of Higgins’s earlier magic.      From out vantage outside the tower, we saw a vampire standing on the roof holding some rope and supplies and another vampire standing on the ground about a hundred feet away from the tower.  Nin flew toward the tower vampire and quickly reduced him to gas.  Thinking quickly, I grabbed Morwen and transported her to the vampire on the ground, where she quickly reduced her to gas as well.  Then they both “ran.”      Higgins pursued the tower gaseous vampire, flying around the tower just in time to target her before her mist disappeared into the sandstorms raging below us.  Higgins pulled out a scroll and as the magical writing slowly dissolved, taking the paper with them, the vampire soon followed suit, her gas reduced to dust, her belongings clanging out onto the rocky ground beneath her.      I chased down the vampire by Morwen, but it fled quickly into the mist and then was lost in the blowing sand.  At this point, Morwen brought something to my attention.      Baron Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Eighty-Seven – A New Voice in Morwen’s Head    “There’s a voice in my head that isn’t yours,” Morwen told me.      “What is this voice saying?”      “He’s asking for us to rescue him from his confinement at the bottom of the tower.  He has asked that we teleport to his location.”      Thinking back on what happened the last time we teleported into a level of the tower with no windows, I rolled up my sleeves and said, “Sure thing,” before disintegrating a 20 foot wide hole in the side of the base of the tower.      Seconds later, we were all in the room, surrounding a man.  Or rather, a former man, because this man was now a vampire.      “I asked you to teleport to me,” he said, looking at Morwen.      Before she could answer, I responded, “it will be a cold day in hell before we listen to mysterious voices that want us to teleport into rooms with no exits, particularly after what happened just a few levels above you.”      Apparently aware of the futility of questioning my reasoning, the vampire said, “My name is Largger.  I am a vampire, but I have learned the error of my ways.  I have taken a pledge of non-violence.  Ages ago, I was spreading evil through the land.  I created the dozen vampires you faced here and together, we hurt many.  We came to this plane as a base of operations, perfect for striking out against the world of the living.  But then something changed in me.  I saw the harm I had done to others and I understood that it was wrong and that it had to stop.  I used the black orb to seal off this plane, trapping all of us here.  I could not defeat the twelve, but they could not rid themselves of me, either.  They sealed me into this tower and have been plotting escape ever since, luring others here to feed upon as they plotted.”      “If they could not escape,” I asked, “How did they lure others here?”      “They have done magical experiments, particularly two of them, and found a way to transport paper to other planes.  They used this power to transport maps to “treasure” that have lured many an adventurer here to their doom.”      “I see,” I said, fingering the treasure map in my pack.  “So what do you want from us?”      “Nothing now.  You have freed me.  I can depart.  The others will never leave this place.  Even now, they have fled this tower with their coffins in their bags of holding.  You will never find them in the storms.”      “That’s what you think,” I said.  “I am not leaving here until every single last one of them is hunted down and destroyed.”  I then turned my mind outward to the vampires.  “Come back to the tower,” I told them, “come back and we’ll help you leave this place in exchange for your possessions of magic.”  I received no response.  I guess no talking was going to matter to them.  They knew their fate was sealed.      I found a puddle of water for Larch to scry them.  He scryed the gaseous one first, finding her position.  We quickly transported to her and then reduced her to dust.  We found two more the same way, scrying them as they ran, surrounding them, and destroying them.  Unfortunately, we ran out of scrying when there were three remaining.  We left the plane for the night, then returned the next day and finished off the remaining three.  Largger was still there, waiting for us, when we returned.      After inventorying all of their possessions, we noted that there was only enough equipment for ten of them.  “Where are the possessions of the two we destroyed on our first visit?  For that matter, where are the bodies and possessions of all of the adventurers that met their end here?”      “I do not know,” was all Largger would say.  No matter.  We got what we came here for.  We ended the undeath of these foul creatures and took everything of value that they owned.  Now it was time to return home.      Baron Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Eighty-Eight – My Companions Choose Poorly    “Do you want to come back to Cauldron with us,” Morwen asked the good vampire.      “I know not where that is,” he replied, “but my sense is that my fate is to take me through this archway.”  He pointed at another portal like the one that originally transported us to this plane.  He arranged the stones in front of it and activated it.      “Do you want us to go with you?” Morwen asked.      “I do not mind if you wish to do so,” he replied.      “Uh…” I said.  “I’m NOT going through another one of those portals, particularly not blind, with no idea what is on the other side.”      “I think we should go with him,” Morwen said, and Nin agreed.  Something inside me said that if Morwen was advocating this, this definitely was the wrong way to go, even though Morwen did not seem to be as unwise as this feeling indicated.  I should definitely trust my feelings more.  My feeling turned out to be right.      “We should go back to Cauldron.  We do not need to go with him.  Let him follow his own path,” I implored.  They ignored.      I sat and watched with a frown as Largger, Morwen, Nimue, Nin, and Larch all entered the ring and vanished.  I tried to reach them, to no avail.  They were gone and I could not touch them.  Then the ring cycled down and closed.  Finally, I got a response.      “I think we have a problem.”      I listened to the explanation that followed.  The portal took them to a barren world.  A world that was covered in black rock, in large craters that never held lava, bombarded from the sky.  It was also a world without magic.  Were it not for the planar bubbles around Larch and Nimue, I would not even have been able to contact them.  They would have been trapped.  I sure would not have followed.      Larch assured me that he could get them all home.  “How can you do that,” I asked.      “I don’t need to get into that, just trust me,” he replied.      “Uh, sure.”      I waited.  They explored for over an hour.  I waited.  I reminded them that the planar bubble only lasts a few hours.  Finally, I heard from Morwen.    “Help! Come get us.”      “Larch?”    “I lied, I guess I can’t get us out.”      I sighed.  I really did not want to go get them.  But if the bubbles worked for them, they should continue to work for me.  I transported Higgins and myself to them, then announced, “grab my hand, we’re leaving now,” then did just that, Higgins returning us directly to Cauldron.      “No more portals,” I said as I walked up the stairs of my stronghold to my room.  I did not wait to see where my companions went.      Baron Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Eighty-Nine – Trouble In Cauldron – Small Fires    My followers informed me that there was trouble of a small sort in Cauldron since we left.  Three rooms in my abode had been burned, albeit only shortly.  Someone or something had thrown in oil-soaked rags through open windows on each of my three floors.  Two bedrooms and my dining table were singed.  No one saw anything.  This will bear further investigation.  I wondered if this had anything to do with the strange dreams I’ve had lately about many people, only some of whom were my followers.      I also discovered that there was a small earthquake in Cauldron that has utterly destroyed the construction done on Nin’s temple.  And Nin’s architect is no longer available, as he is busy with Ee, helping to rebuild his peoples’ village in the woods outside of Cauldron’s Crater.      Dreams, fires, and earthquakes.  What else is there to occupy us?  Time to get to work investigating.  But first, I decide I need a short rest.  I retire to my room to find Crystal waiting for me, as she often is.  She has grown much over the time I have known her.  Her telepathic skills are progressing quite nicely.  She did not even need to open her mouth to greet me, and so it was with a closed mouth and a solemn expression that she said to me as I entered, “I’m pregnant.”</blockquote>

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