Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 222
Ocean’s Nine
To a hypothetical outside observer, it would have been a fascinating conclusion to a hard-fought battle. The Company seemed to have the upper hand, with Slaad variously blinded, wounded and killed, not to mention outnumbered. But the party too was quite injured, and one should never count out a Death Slaad in Limbo. Alas for the hypothetical watcher that victory was achieved by neither side in the end.
The battle, you see, was interrupted by an ocean.
* *
The actors involved are so preoccupied with their life-and-death struggle, they fail to notice that water is starting to become a more prevalent element in the general maelstrom. What floating globules there are, are larger and more numerous, and they herald the arrival of the ocean by about ten seconds. Only the Death Slaad notices, and even for it, it’s too last-second for an escape.
Miles across and moving at over fifty miles per hour, the body of water known to planar scholars as “The Transient Sea of Limbo” comes crashing through the battle, a dark inexorable tide breaking around the Slaadi boulder and sweeping all and sundry away with it. It snuffs out bits of fire and electricity, engulfs chunks of earth and stone, and pushes the air in front of its enormous leading edge. The party is at first (for a few seconds) sent hurtling along with the ocean’s border, but soon they become swallowed up, after which they slow down and eventually seem to stop moving at all, all things being relative.
Each member of the Company finds him or herself alone in submerged darkness, unable to see, unable to breathe. Kibi immediately dons his helmet of water breathing. Grey Wolf draws Bostock, since while gripping the hilt he has no need of air. Most of the rest, with concentration that only seasoned adventurers could muster in such straights, make for themselves pockets of air in which to survive.
Flicker, not exactly a bulwark of wisdom, can’t manage it. He tries for a few seconds to make some air, but succeeds only in making little clusters of bubbles that disperse unhelpfully around his head. For a few seconds after that, he panics. Soon after he calms down a bit and wonders what drowning will be like.
Then he sees light. The halfling adjusts his gravity towards it, and with a good thirty seconds left before asphyxiation, falls into Dranko’s air bubble. The half-orc has lit a lantern, intending it as a beacon for the others to find him.
“Whew. Thanks!” exclaims Flicker, floating in the air pocket. “I thought I was a gonner!”
It takes some time and coordination, but enough of the party creates light that everyone is soon congregated in one large bubble of air. (Morningstar, having activated the daylight power of her holy shield, is the easiest to spot.) Kibi makes a stone slab near the bottom of the bubble so people can stand or sit more naturally. Step is the last to join; he emerged from the Death Slaad’s maze to find himself completely submerged, and far removed from the rest of the Company. He only learns what happened through a sending from Morningstar, and eventually he spots the bright but distant light of the Company’s air pocket.
Morningstar casts a second sending, this time to the invisible slaad that had clearly been the most powerful of the bunch: We strongly suggest that you stay away from us. There is no reason for us to fight., and we are leaving your territory.
The response: Exit as quickly as possible. You are ten. We are legion.
* *
So there they are all, in a big bubble of air. The “walls” show a warbling reflection of themselves; Dranko spits at it and watches the air/water border ripple.
“So,” he says to no one in particular. “Here were are, in a tiny little shard of eternal Chaos, trapped inside a bubble, trapped inside an ocean. It doesn’t get any weirder than this.”
“Morningstar agreed to marry you,” Ernie points out. The others nod. Yeah, that’s weird.
“I never thought I’d get married,” says Morningstar, looking at Dranko and smiling.
“Me neither,” says Dranko. “Or at least, I thought if I did get married, it would be to a bar-room trollop who was drunk at the time. And blind.”
Morningstar raises her eyebrows at him, and Ernie clears his throat. Realizing he may be heading in the wrong direction, Dranko adds, “And now I’m marrying so far above my station, it’s not even funny!”
An unlucky fish swims into the bubble and flops around on the stone. Dranko mentions that maybe Kay could talk with it, and that gets everyone to thinking about Kay and what happened to her.
“I miss her,” says Ernie.
“Me too,” says Snokas. “She was the only one who knew which direction we were going.”
After the brutal fight against the Slaad and their minions, the Company needs to rest and get their spells back. After some discussion of the logistics, Aravis, casts a secure shelter on the stone slab, and rope tricks inside the shelter. Only Ernie remains outside, wearing Step’s magic ring that reduces the need for sleep. He also gets the Stabilizer, and he ties one of the rope trick ropes around his waist.
Ernie has a bit of trouble keeping the stone slab and the air bubble intact by himself, but he finds that it gets easier as the time wears on. Still, it’s a tedious and difficult eight hours. The only excitement comes in the last half hour, as a rain of small boulders rolls through the water around him. A few come right into the air bubble, mostly bouncing off the sides of the shelter. Ernie has to dodge one or two.
Step wakes, drops out of his extradimensional pocket, and laments the absence of sun. (He declines Grey Wolf’s offer of standing atop the shelter and casting body of the sun.)
“I can give you a moon,” says Dranko, grinning.
“Having learned now what you mean,” says Step, “I can safely say I don’t want to see that again. Ever.”
Over breakfast, Kibi announces that he can disguise the entire party for 12 hours if they desire, by casting veil. They decide to look like Slaad, thinking that will help scare off potential trouble, and other Slaad will be less like to attack on sight.
Hey, does anyone notice it’s getting a bit warm in the air bubble?
While they cast daily buffing spells, the air continues to grow warmer, and slightly humid. Step puts his hand out into the ocean and it’s definitely warmer than it was the night before, but there’s no sign of what’s causing it. Hm. Morningstar casts find the path to reestablish the direction toward the closest Way. Kibi casts his veil, and it’s mightily disturbing (for a few seconds, anyway) to see everyone else looking like big frog-beasts. The dwarf can’t help having a bit of fun, and makes Dranko look like a Gray Slaad with pinkish polka dots.
“I don’t need to look like a Slaad,” says Scree to his master. “I have an instant disguise.”
The earth elemental spreads out in zero-G, his component rocks looking mostly like any other cluster of stones in Limbo.
“Your Eyes of Moirel are showing,” notes Flicker.
When everyone’s ready, they start moving the slab-and-air-bubble in the direction indicated by Morningstar’s spell. As the minutes pass, it continues to grow warmer in the bubble. Thin vapors of steam appear around them, and then over the course of a minute, the water out in the ocean starts to bubble and roil. The water is also starting glow orange, and the glow is rapidly getting brighter.
“Maybe we should...” begins Aravis.
FWOOOOOOOSH!
There’s a big flash of blinding steam, and then the water outside of their air pocket is replaced with roaring flame! The steam vanishes, but now the Company is effectively in an oven, and they realize that in a few seconds they’ll start to cook for real. Everyone starts concentrating frantically not just on the air around them, but on the temperature of that air – a heretofore irrelevant detail. Morningstar exerts the most control, and it’s enough. The air cools inside, and fog immediately forms all around the border of their air bubble. Fortunately the mass of fire is nowhere near the size of the Transient Sea, and after twenty more minutes it moves off, leaving them once more in the “normal” maelstrom of Limbo.
Two and half hours later, with Morningstar on her second find the path, and having fended off a lightning storm that knocked chunks out of their reformed hangar, they spot a twinkle of blue light in the distance. After another half hour they reach it: a large Way, fifteen feet on a side. There’s nothing around it, and no sign of slaad or other creatures. From their talk with Medina back at the Eye of the Storm, they presume that it leads to another Slice of Limbo.
>>At this point, for some reason, my players got sidetracked onto a long discussion regarding a hypothetical “Leomund’s Secure Latrine,” and how it might work, and the perils of using it in conjunction with disintegration fields or teleportation circles. It was just one of those things. You had to be there, I guess.
Ernie volunteers to be the first one through. They tie a rope to him, and he hops through the Way. There’s the familiar empty blackness, the unnatural pulling, and... WHAM! There’s a huge piece of earth just on the other side, less than a foot from the Way. It knocks Ernie right back through, back to the waiting Company. He’s rubbing a bump on his head.
They wait a few minutes, and Kibi goes next. Before he goes he uses his Earth Mage ability to cast xorm movement, just in case. He grabs the rope and jumps through. Sure enough the huge rock is still there, but Kibi phases cleanly into it. The only problem is the rope, which he is forced to let go since it can’t move through stone with him.
“This is a nice place,” comments Scree, as the two of them go swimming through the enormous chunk of earth. “High quality stuff they’ve got here in Limbo. Oooh, look. Rubies. We could tell Flicker and Dranko, but there’s no good way to get them out.”
Scree discovers the edge of the mass, does some calculations, and deduces it will clear the Way in another five or ten minutes. Having figured that out, Kibi and his familiar head back to the Way to rejoin the others. The find the rest of the party looking worried. Dranko and Aravis look like they’re in pain.
“What’s wrong?” asks the dwarf.
“Kibi!” says Ernie. “We thought you might be dead, or squished!”
“Oh, sorry,” says Kibi. “We got caught up examining the rock. It’s good solid stone, and there are some rubies deep inside it. Scree figured out how much longer it would be – about five minutes and you’ll all be able to get through.”
“Why didn’t you come out and tell us that?” asks Aravis, holding his jaw.
“I did, once we knew. If I’d come back sooner, we wouldn’t know how long the wait was.”
“While you were gone,” says Morningstar, “Aravis and Dranko tried going through to see if you were okay.”
“That wasn’t very smart,” says Kibi. “There’s a big rock over there!”
“You let go of the rope!” says Dranko, exasperated. “That’s the signal for ‘I’ve been eaten!’ What did you expect us to do?”
“I couldn’t very well come back without Scree,” Kibi protests. “I’m sorry if I made you guys worry.”
He doesn’t look that sorry, but since no un-healable harm was done, the matter is soon dropped.
A few minutes later the entire Company is safely through the Way, in yet another Slice of swirling Chaos. Morningstar again tries to locate the monastery using find the path, but it’s not in this Slice either, so they settle for heading toward the next Way. It’s disheartening; for all they know there could be dozens of Slices between them and the monastery that sent Kibi his invitation. Dranko looks out into the morass of seething elements and grumbles, “I don’t see why they spent all that effort hiding the damned tower. It’s not like anyone can actually do anything once they get here.”
Happily, he’s proven wrong. Only a couple of hours into their trek through the new Slice, they spot a movement in the distance that’s clearly a living creature. Dranko gets a decent glimpse of it, and thinks it looks like a big spider. Then he loses track of it as a shower of water blobs moves between them.
“What if whatever that was hates Slaad? That’s what we look like,” reminds Kibi.
“If that’s the case, you can just drop the illusion,” says Aravis.
“Yeah,” says Kibi, rolling his eyes. “And it’ll see a bunch of Slaad suddenly looking like something else, and think, ‘those Slaad are trying to disguise themselves with an illusion.’”
The hangar creeps forward; the arachnid creature was almost directly in their path. The party casts some preparatory spells just in case (including a telepathic bond among Dranko, Ernie, Flicker and Morningstar), and Dranko crawls up onto the roof of the hangar to get a better look. Somewhere beyond the spot he thought he saw the spider-creature, he catches a brief glimpse of blue – which is then covered as a wall of fire leaps up.
“I think it’s guarding the Way,” thinks Dranko over the mind-link. “And given that whatever it is probably hates Slaad, I also think we should drop the disguises.”
Kibi looks skeptical.
“I don’t know that it would do any harm,” continues Dranko. “And it might help. Kibi, you’re pretty intimidating just being yourself. I mean, you’re a bad-ass dwarf with a walking rock behind you!”
“And everyone knows that spiders are traditionally afraid of Dwarven wizards,” says Kibi dryly.
“They will be,” says Dranko.
“Everyone’s afraid of rocks,” adds Scree. “Who wants to get hit with a rock?”
Kibi dismisses the veil, and they move the hangar closer to the wall of fire. Dranko spots a small object floating by off to the left, heading in their direction. Kibi casts see invisible and detect magic, but neither spell registers anything interesting. A few seconds later the shape comes close enough for everyone to see that it’s a Slaad head with a sharp wooden stake driven through it.
“Good thing we dropped the disguise, huh?” thinks Dranko.
The natural ebb and flow of elements gives Dranko a better view for a few seconds, and he sees that the wall of fire is actually a sphere, probably surrounding the Way. There are also many of the spider-creatures – maybe fifteen in all – moving around nearby. They’re very large, with bodies the size of human torsos, and long spider legs extending outward. They’re like enormous daddy-longlegs. Some of them just float in the Chaos, while others stand on small stone platforms that move with them. Kibi activates his Ioun Stone of tongues and joins Dranko on the roof of the hangar, where the half-orc is waving a piece of white cloth to indicate their peaceful intentions. One of the spiders leaves the group and drifts toward them, stopping about thirty feet away. The space around it stays clear of all elements but air.
“Hello!” calls Kibi. “Will you please let us pass? We mean you no harm.”
...to be continued...
I assumed that people adjusted their gravity subconsciously on the fly, so as not to go sailing away every time they connected with a weapon or cast a forceful spell. So, yeah, I just treated the combat as if everyone were flying.
