Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
You read the whole thing in a week, and you say I deserve the medal?ToddSchumacher said:
That's 600 pages of PDFs! But, thank you for posting. I'm glad you're enjoying the story! (Really, though, my players deserve the medals for enduring my machinations for so long.)
Hey, while I'm here, everyone have another post!
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 252
Evacuation
Ernie strains, reaching as far as he can, but still Snokas’s outstretched hand is beyond his reach.
“Sorry, Snokas!” he thinks, just before using his ring of dimension door to escape. Snokas tries to wriggle free from the grasping tentacle but it holds him tight. “This sucks,” he thinks to the others.
Ernie reappears where he expects – still right next to the Trunk. Once he has recovered from the dimension door he starts hacking away again, but luck is not with him. Beryn Sur, the dancing blade, gets stuck in the Trunk’s flesh. Then one of the Trunk’s cilia pushes the sword even deeper into the main mass, until it’s completely enveloped by the monstrosity’s rubbery flesh.
“Give me back my sword!” shouts Ernie, but it’s clearly going to take some doing. Does he have the time? Step’s light continues to fade, and the green glow forming in the center of the Trunk gets brighter.
Kiro pegs the one remaining animated body – the high-up armored one that’s been casting ice storms – with a searing light. Morningstar follows that with a flame strike that catches the body as well as the remaining Mass. While the Mass is still relatively healthy, the body is finally damaged enough that it slides off its tentacle and falls seventy feet to the ground. There is nothing now between the entire assemblage of adventurers and the Trunk.
Kibi casts hold monster on the Trunk, which of course has no effect. The same can be said for his large earth elemental, which has been beating fruitlessly at the Trunk since its arrival. Kibi glances up at the bobbing Mass at the top of Aravis’s reverse gravity, and has an idea that he knows the elemental is not going to like.
“See that tentacly thing in the air?” he says to it. “Move underneath it.”
The elemental doesn’t understand, but it does as it’s told. It starts to fall upward.
“I’m losing contact with the ground!” it roars in a panic, and thanks to their recently-bought translator discs, everyone understands its cry of terror. “Heeeeeellllllp meeeeeeee!”
“I’m sorry!” shouts Kibi. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” It’s a hard thing to do to an earth elemental, but it does what he hoped. Six thousand pounds of rock essentially fall onto the Mass, seventy feet in the air. Kibi feels terribly guilty and expects Scree to take him to task, but his Familiar merely comments, “hard times call for desperate measures.” The Mass is injured, but is still alive and bobbing like a cork along with the elemental.
As the green glow starts to shine brightly from within the Trunk, Aravis nails it with a disintegrate spell. In return, the still-alive Mass activates its runes, and for the second time a long thick tentacle bursts out of Aravis – from his shoulder this time. Aravis screams in pain, and the tentacle immediately starts to slam his head.
The rest of the party doesn’t have much time for sympathy. From deep inside the trunk the green glow grows a hundred times brighter, filling the cavern with a burst of sickly light that contests with the dying radiance of One Certain Step. A wave of revulsion sweeps over them, and tentacles burst forth out of Ernie, Snokas, Ox, Sagiro and Kibi. (Snokas’s is particularly gruesome, as it’s coming out of the side of his neck.) Their screams of pain and terror fill the cavern, even as the greenish light dims and fades out.
Despite his dissembling, Ox is pretty powerful spellcaster. He’s honed his craft for years, working as a “troubleshooter” for his barony back home. He’s never been in as dire a strait as the one he’s in now, but if there’s one thing he’s learned over the years, it’s how to concentrate on spellcasting even in some harrowing situations. Now, granted, he’s never tried to cast while a huge tentacle, growing out of his own back, was whipsawing back and forth and slapping at his head...
He concentrates furiously, and somehow keeps his hands moving in the proper intricate patterns to cast chain lightning. The Trunk is his main target, and almost all of his friends’ (plus his own) new tentacles are his secondary targets. (Only Kibi is out of range.) Electricity crackles around the cavern, and when it’s finished... all the tentacles are badly damaged but still attached to their hosts. Ox wants to cry.
Dranko decides it’s time to try something new. For months now he has carried around a magical crown that, according to an identify spell, allows him to cast something called paroxysms of fire. He has no idea what that spell does, or how dangerous it might be, and it’s possible he could make things worse. But, really, how much worse can things get right now?
He pulls out the crown and deftly places it on his head. He concentrates on casting its spell, targeting the Trunk. One of the rubies on the crown flares red for a second before becoming a bead of worthless glass, and there is an answering flare from deep in the Trunk’s mass. Dranko holds his breath. Then, as if he’s set off a fire-geyser machine inside its body, the Trunk starts belching jets of flame out of its bulk. These jets damage everyone indiscriminately, and while the severity is not great, the wounded tentacles crisp and fall out of their hosts. Never has such a cheer gone up from people whose ally has just inflicted fire damage upon them. Seeing that Kibi is now the only one afflicted, Yoba strides over to him and lops off his tentacle just as she had done for Aravis.
As the light grows ever more dim, the Company now brings all of their remaining firepower to bear on the Trunk. More spells and weapons rip into its flesh. A chain lightning causes it to drop Snokas, but another of the Trunk's tentacles wraps around Grey Wolf and holds him fast. Ernie carves his way toward Beryn Sur, determined to get his weapon back. Morningstar activates the daylight power of her shield, but it’s immediately stifled and extinguished. There’s still enough light left from Step to see, but at the rate it’s fading, they have less than a minute before they’ll be back in utter darkness and at the mercy of Cleaners..
Kibi casts his last lightning bolt at the Trunk, and the whole length of it shivers and shakes. From the floor and the ceiling there is a now sound, frighteningly loud, of grinding and groaning stone. Many of the hundreds of smaller tentacles start pulling themselves back into the walls, ceiling and floors.
“Keep going!” cries Kibi.
Aravis fires off another chain lightning, targeting the spot where Ernie has been digging for his sword. There’s a shower of gore, and Ernie hears a tink as Beryn Sur lands on the stone somewhere behind him. As he turns to retrieve it, the entire Trunk quivers again, and then shifts upward about fifteen feet, sliding out of the floor and into the ceiling. Grey Wolf, still grappled, is carried upward as well. He struggles and squirms but can’t break free.
“We’ve got to save Grey Wolf!” Ernie screams. Grey Wolf couldn’t agree more. The Trunk continues to slide upward, pouring itself out of the ground and sliding into the ceiling, a colossal snake that’s decided it’s had enough. The sound of tortured stone fills the cavern even as the last of Step’s light is fading away. Grey Wolf watches the ground recede beneath him, then looks up to see that in seconds he’ll be smashed into the ceiling. And that’s if he’s lucky – it’s also possible that he’ll be carried away to wherever the Trunk is going...
Ox fires a final chain lightning, albeit with only one target. It blasts the tentacle holding Grey Wolf, and it twitches and unrolls. Grey Wolf has never been happier to suffer the damage from a forty-foot fall.
All around them the smaller tentacles are pulling themselves into the rock, retreating. The Trunk coming up out of the floor seems endless; surely hundreds of feet of length have already slid by. But at last it starts to taper, and then finally the end of a staggeringly huge tentacle comes up out of the ground. It whips around the air for a second before getting pulled entirely up through the ceiling. A final cilia grabs the remaining Mass on its way out, pulling the creature out with it. Behind, in the ground, it has left a gaping hole into...
Snokas, Grey Wolf and Sagiro are the only ones who happen to look into that hole, down into an alien void crawling with unspeakable horrors. All three go instantly and utterly mad, losing every mental faculty and starting to gibber like infants.
Kibi feels a surge of Earth Magic reverberate through the cavern. Abruptly the holes left by the Trunk are filled in as the natural rock reasserts itself. Morningstar’s shield erupts into daylight, brightening the cave considerably. The Way, no longer contained by the Trunk, blazes with blue energy many times more bright than any other Way they’ve seen. The horrible fear that has been beating against the heroes’ feast is gone. And amazingly, only One Certain Step did not survive the ordeal. And speaking of the departed paladin, Dranko finds himself standing almost on top of Step’s armor. He squats to examine it, and sees that beneath the twisted metal plates, miraculously undisturbed by the tentacles and the chaotic melee, is a pile of ash.
Ernie rushes over to make sure Yoba is okay. Both of the them are covered in wounds and splattered with gore. Yoba reaches out and tenderly wipes a spot of ichor from Ernie’s brow.
“Is your life always like this, Ernest?” she asks, trembling.
“No,” says Ernie, smiling. “Sometimes it’s interesting.”
...to be continued...
