Note: Piratecat and Kibi's player pointed out small errors in my order of events. I've made some changes to the very end of my last update; you might want to go back and take the 5 seconds to re-read the last paragraph, so it makes more sense...
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 139d
Grey Wolf has been flying invisibly and watching the proceedings. Although he cannot see Dranko or Ernie, he can tell that one of the guards has just hit something with his sword. He uses the mirror of whispers to communicate the state of affairs to the others. There is much shaking of heads. Kibi casts fly and invisibility on himself and flies over to the garden himself, intending to cast his newly-learned confusion on the guards. He decides against it in the end, since that might end up making the guards kill each other. Instead, he realizes that Scree could easily do some underground scouting of the glass cylinder. The earth elemental Familiar goes underground at Kibi’s behest, and starts reporting back what he sees:
"Hmmm. There’s a glass tube under the ground, just like you said. And it goes down very far. I’m not sure how far, though. I’ll see. Hmmm. More than twenty feet, I’d say. Maybe thirty. Ah! Fascinating! There’s a chamber of air under here. I’ll just poke my eye a tiny bit through the ceiling to see what’s in there. Hmmm. The glass tube ends at the ceiling of the room. There are people in the room, wearing chain clothing and with weapons. Three of them. They are looking up at where the glass tube pokes out of the ceiling and pointing at it. They must be sensing the vibrations from Ernie pounding on the other end of the tube. Oh, but they’re people, so they probably are just hearing the noise. Oh, and there’s something sticking out of the ground, directly below the glass tube. It’s a big glowing sapphire on a stone pedestal. It’s creating a cone of light that’s shining upward and hitting the bottom of the long glass tube. It’s all quite interesting."
Kibi relays this to Ernie, who stops swinging and smacks his forehead. Thirty feet! Aargh! So much for smashing it. But that gem… that seems to be the target. All three of them fly back to the street to tell the others about what Scree has discovered. Hearing the news, they devise a new plan. Grey Wolf flies Morningstar over to the garden, where there are still guards standing. They gape as Morningstar casts a pair of monster summoning spells, creating one small Xorn and one medium-sized one. The guards ready their weapons, but Morningstar warns them that the Xorn will not attack unless provoked. Then she address the Xorn (who fortunately speak common): "40 below here is a open room with a large blue gem in it. I want you to burrow down to the chamber, come up from the bottom, and eat that gem. Defend yourselves if you have to, but that gem is your priority. Now go." The big xorn tells the smaller xorn: "It’s mine," and they vanish into the earth. Scree follows, giving Kibi a play-by-play.
"The Xorn are moving easily through the earth. Now they’re going around the room to come up from below. I’ll just poke my eye a bit through the wall again. They should be arriving… ah! There they are. There are a bunch of people with the chain clothing in the room now. They see the xorn! There’s some commotion. The big xorn has the gem in its mouth. It… hmm… the gem seems to be rooted to the pillar. The xorn cannot bite it off. The people are attacking the xorn with their weapons, but aren’t having much luck. The Xorn is trying to envelop the gem in its mouth. It’s trying to pull the gem free, but can’t. Oh, one of the people seems to have made a gash in the smaller xorn’s body. It’s fighting back. It… ooooh, that was painful. One of the people has fallen over. The people are crowding around the small xorn. Another one of the people has fallen. Oops! The smaller xorn has been killed. I think the larger one has given up on the gem. Now it’s fighting the people. It just tore one of them apart! They’re attacking it, but it’s much stronger. It… it just bit the head off of someone. My, you people are filled with lots of fluid! There’s a lot of shouting. More people are arriving and swinging swords at the xorn. One of them has shouted: "Shouldn’t we get the masters?" Another has answered, "No, they can’t break off at this point." Oh, another person has fallen. There are many bodies on the ground now. Six or seven. Wait! Oh, the xorn has vanished."
Thinking that they have caught their enemies with their pants down, the Company decides to move in for the kill. A combination of flying and dimension dooring gets the whole lot of them into the garden, where the guards have seemingly given up and gone back inside. Aravis uses two charges from his staff of earth and stone to create two steep-ramp passages, intending that a third such passage will allow entrance to that underground room from the side, rather than the top. The party slides down the ramps, and casts a bunch of haste spells before Aravis fires off the third passwall. Then they go charging down into the room.
There are seven armed guards in the small room, taken mostly by surprise by the emerging party. It’s a slaughter; the guards would be plenty tough to take on normal folk, but are no match for the Company. There a brief moment of worry when a black-robed figure comes through an open doorway at one end of the room. He shouts "two!" and the few armed guards still standing close their eyes, just as the mage casts a color spray. Kay and Flicker are briefly stunned, but the rest of the party is unaffected. The caster, along with the remaining fighters, are hacked down with ease.
Morningstar goes over to the glowing gem on the pedestal; it is throwing a cone of light up toward the ceiling, where they can see the bottom end of the long glass cylinder. The gem still doesn’t budge, but Morningstar casts dispel evil on it. There is a popping sound, and though the gem continues to glow, Morningstar is now able to lift it free of the pedestal!
And now the Company faces a choice. Do they take the gem and flee back up the ramps? Or do they press on, hoping that the important Black Circle figures who "can’t break off at this point," won’t be able to put up much defense? They still have several more rounds of haste… what will they do?
…to be continued…
Hey! I've discovered a whole missing chunk of the story that should be here. I'll go copy it from StevenAC's page and reinsert it here, where it belongs:
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 139e
The Company decides to strike while the iron is hasted, as it were. They leave the room with the gem they think is the source of the Divination Sink (taking the gem with them), and head into the underground complex. Scree is generally scouting ahead, occasionally poking his eye-gems out into rooms and hallways and reporting what he sees back to Kibi. Morningstar casts a sending to Captain Cobb, that he should send some soldiers to the area (at street level) and wait for further reports. He answers that troops will be sent immediately.
Because of shield other spells cast, Dranko and Grey Wolf make sure to move as a team, staying within spell range. Morningstar and Aravis have a similar relationship. It makes maneuvering and scouting tricky, but they manage.
A short stretch of stone corridor ends at another door, on the other side of which is a large storeroom. There are crates and barrels smelling of onions and fruit, but nothing of real interest. There are three doors leading out of the storeroom.
Scree reports that one of the doors leads into a long hallway, and a second door leads to a parallel hallway that soon bends away from the first. Aravis casts arcane lock on the second door, to keep guards from arriving while they investigate the first door. Speaking of which, when Ernie heads down that way, someone down at the end of it fires off a crossbow bolt. It misses Ernie and skips harmlessly down the stone hall. Kibi, using Aravis’s wand of fireballs, follows up behind Ernie and shoots off a fireball
down the hallway and into the room beyond. Kaboom!! Scree reports general unhappiness in the room, and a number of smouldering people. Dranko heads down to deal with any survivors, and ends up killing the only one with a nasty whip-shot to the eye.
While Scree is still off scouting behind the arcane locked door, he pokes his eye into a small guard alcove, and sets off a clanging alarm spell. There are three guards there – two armed with swords, one wearing robes – and these become even more alert than they already were.
Morningstar opens the third door, and is greeted by both another alarm spell and a color spray from a second guard-alcove. She shrugs off the latter, and the party moves in to make quick work of the three guards.
Aravis drops into the Crosser’s Maze for a moment, thinking that perhaps these guards are from the other Prime, and as such might be drawing power from the power-sources he has noticed coursing through the cosmos. But he sees nothing unusual, unless you count the impending complete overlap of the two Primes.
The stone hall continues on the other side of the small guardroom, and empties into a small library. There are several hundred books and scrolls there, crammed into free-standing shelves. There is an alcove with a desk and chair, and a stack of paper on the desk. The party takes them for future reading, since they, like the books, are written in an unfamiliar script. (Kibi has comprehend languages prepared, but the Divination Sink still seems to be affecting them.)
One door leads from the library to a long flight of stairs going up. Flicker stays behind to carefully search it for traps, while the others leave by a second exit. It leads to another small guard post, where another clanging alarm goes off when they open the door. The guards in this one actually manage a couple of lucky shots on Step before he butchers them; Morningstar keeps him well healed. Each guard post is the same – a small room containing two or three fighters and a mage. Clearly they are readying actions so that when anyone comes through the door, the mage fires off a color spray and then the fighters attack. They are obviously disciplined, staying at their posts even when alarms elsewhere are sounding. The Company has them easily out-powered, but this only makes them worried. It all seems too easy.
The only really alarming thing to come from the battles at the guard posts is Aravis’s hair. Twice he uses a charge from his wand of magic missiles to pop the enemy mages. The first time turns his hair a purplish-blonde color. But the second time turns his hair into a very medusa-like (though non-petrifying) tangle of snakes! There is a sudden thrashing from within Aravis’s pack, and Pewter’s frantic voice sounds in the wizard’s head.
"Aaaaahh! Boss! Your pack is full of snakes! They’re all over me! Boss, help, help!"
It calms him a bit to learn that the snakes are actually a part of his own fur. Ick!
Further exploration (preceded by advanced scouting from Scree, relayed via Kibi) reveals two more storerooms and another guard post. Kay is actually stunned briefly by a color spray, but the others come up quickly and finish off the guards. Although they look like any other human guards, and although they use numbers spoken in Common to announce their maneuvers, they don’t seem to understand when the party briefly talks at them. Strange.
One of the storerooms is long, and contains stacked metal beams, some over twenty feet long. A few of them have notches cut out of them every eight inches or so. There are also stacks of wooden planks, and Kay spends some time slicing these up with her magical Woodcutter sword. The second storeroom is smaller, and holds stacks of dozens of obsidian bricks. There are also several large metal gears leaning against the walls. On a table are a variety of hand-tools – chisels, a hammer, some spikes, an awl. Dranko takes a chisel (to replace the one that broke when Ernie smashed it with a mace) and several party members take souvenir obsidian bricks.
One of the two doors from this last storeroom leads to a small prison. There is a disturbing room with manacles bolted into two of the walls, and a wooden chair in the center surrounded by a black circle set in the floor. There are four small five-byfive feet cells adjacent to this room, and all are empty, though Scree sees a large dried bloodstain on the floor of one. Dranko tries focusing holy energy on the black circle on the floor, but it has no effect.
By this time the haste spells have run out, but the party continues in the only unexplored direction other than the stairs up (the hallways eventually formed a loop back to the other side of Aravis’s arcane locked door). As they head down this last hallway, a familiar feeling of unease starts to grow stronger in the minds of the wizards – null shadows nearby! Scree very carefully pokes his eye into the room beyond the door at the end of the hall. He sees no null shadows, but instead reports that the room looks like an alchemy lab, full of bottles, beakers, tubes and flasks. Strange liquids are bubbling and dripping through some of them. Most disturbing is a black half-circle set into the floor along one wall, and a closed cabinet bolted to the wall above that half-circle.
Cautiously, about half the party enters the lab, while the others (Dranko, Morningstar, Grey Wolf and Aravis) hang back in the nearer storeroom. Kibi takes a few minutes to study the lab equipment, and finds it very strange. Certain chemicals appear to be being used in unusual or even dangerous combinations, without resulting in the disasters he would expect. He does figure out enough to guess that the final product of all this alchemy is meant to be consumed by a living creature. The party has a sudden thought that maybe they are brewing something which, when fed to people, turns them into null shadows. Certainly the feeling of unease has become even greater, especially among the mages.
The Company really wants to see what’s in the cabinet guarded by the black half-circle. Kay takes a deep breath, and while the rest of the party stands far back, she waves her arm through the air above the circle. Immediately, horrible wounds open on the skin of her hand, and spread quickly over her entire body! Blood is spilling out all over the floor, and she cries out in terrible pain, reduced near to death! The others rush forward, and with spells and uses of healing wands, Kay is quickly healed back to near full strength. And with the trap – er – disarmed, they open the cabinet to find almost twenty small glass vials full of a light green liquid. Dranko takes them, wraps them in cloth, and puts them in his Heward's widemouth pouch.
This lab seems to be a dead-end, and there have been no other avenues besides the upward-leading staircase. But Scree rumbles, and says to Kibi: "There’s something wrong with this room. It’s not… solid, like it should be." Aha! A secret door! Scree’s sense of something amiss isn’t sharp enough to detect the door’s location, and Kibi is hesitant to send him out to scout after what happened to Kay. The party searches the room, and eventually discovers the seams of a secret door, as well as a small button hidden in the cabinet. They all line up, mages at the back, ready to face null shadows if they come out. Morningstar presses the button…
The door swings open, revealing an empty ten feet of hallway, ending at a blank stone wall. Hmm. Morningstar presses the button again, and a second door swings open. Dranko looks into the space beyond; it’s a small room, with what looks like a pit in the floor. He casts light, steps into the short hallway, and sees that the pit is really a very narrow spiral staircase leading down into darkness. Still no sign of null shadows, but the feeling of unease is palpable, even for him.
Morningstar starts to send another sending to Cobb, when Dranko steps into the small room. He is immediately beset, but not by null shadows. Instead, two large gargoyles, one just on either side of the door, step forward and attack! And once that happens, then the null shadows come boiling up from the spiral staircase, attacking Dranko where the gargoyles have left space.
Dranko tumbles backwards into the alchemy lab. The others line up in formation, wizards protected at the back, fighter-types up front. In a display of excellent tactics, the party makes short work of both the gargoyles and the null shadows, despite the problem that one can only be damaged by magical weapons, and the other only by non-magical weapons. The wizards at the back are able to cast spells that damage the gargoyles – Kibi and Grey Wolf launch fireballs over people’s heads into the room beyond, so that only the gargoyles are in the blast area. Aravis, having reactivated his boots of speed, casts rope trick, and then shoots a sonic bolt over Ernie’s head. When the gargoyles are killed but some null shadows still remain, the three wizards – Kibi, Aravis and Grey Wolf – go up into the extra-dimensional rope trick space, out of harm’s way.
The null shadows are eventually killed, though both Kay and Dranko lose a spell out of their heads from the creatures’ touch before the last one is dispatched. Grey Wolf realizes that with the Divination Sink technically in another plane, perhaps divination spells will function outside of it. It works! A detect magic spell reveals that some of the alchemical apparatus is magical, as is the green liquid in the vials from the cabinet.
Morningstar also finishes her sending during the battle, telling Cobb it’s time to move him and his troops down to this underground complex. Then the Company spends fifteen minutes filling up empty spell slots, and Kibi takes a closer look at the notes he took from the desk, finally able to use comprehend languages to read them. The notes are on the subject of a spell called forbiddance, and more specifically about how that spell will interact with, and possibly interfere with, some other large area-of-effect spell. What that other spell is is hard for Kibi to puzzle out, but it’s some vast, customised large-volume spell the likes of which he’s never seen before.
Fifteen minutes later, as Cobb and his guards still haven’t found their way down, the party decides it’s time to head down the spiral staircase; Morningstar leaves a note with instructions for Cobb tacked to the door to the alchemy lab. Kay, in the front, takes the first step down, and sets off another magical trap. It’s not as gruesome as the last one, but she still takes a great deal of damage from spontaneous wounds opening up on her hands and arms. Again she is healed up, and Flicker is sent to the front of the line to search for traps. Slowly he inches forwards, step by step, eyes sharp, looking for any clue to where the next trap might be. He finds it, about half-way down the stairs, but only because he steps into its area of effect. Soon Flicker is writhing on the stairs in pain, near death, trailing blood from a dozen horrible wounds. Yet more healing from one of the wands of cure serious wounds is administered.
And it’s around now that someone mentions that, with the Divination Sink still up in the rope trick, they can probably find these magical traps with a simple detect magic spell. There is the sound of nine hands slapping against nine foreheads, and Ernie casts detect magic. He goes down with Flicker to the bottom of the stairs, and does detect a strong source of abjuration magic at the very bottom. Gingerly, he draws a chalk outline for Flicker, showing where the magic of the trap is. And while Flicker is decent at searching for traps, he’s very good at disabling them. A little scratching at just the right places along the edge of the spell, causing slight disruptions, and soon Ernie sees the magic fade and vanish. Flicker is ecstatic; he’s never tried to disarm such a dangerous, purely magical trap before, and wasn’t sure it would work.
The stairway empties out into a long, narrow hallway that recedes into the darkness, and from that darkness comes an ominous sound. It’s a low, steadily-pulsing thrum of power. Ernie, still concentrating on the detect magic, moves forwards with Flicker. The others trail behind, spaced ten feet apart in case some area-effect spell goes off. The thrumming gets louder as they proceed, and eventually a huge iron door comes into view. The thrumming is coming from that door, or something beyond it. When Ernie gets within range, he sees that the door is covered with abjuration magic.
Realizing that something extremely dangerous is likely beyond the door, they decide to escort Grey Wolf back up to the alchemy lab and away from the danger. As they ascend the staircase, they can hear voices above; Cobb and his soldiers have found them, and are methodically performing their own search. Cobb reports that when they tried to come down here via Lord Southinghorn’s estate, they were unexpectedly attacked by his personal house guard when they found the walled garden with the sundial. One of his men was killed, and two others – one of his own guard, and an Ellish priestess – were wounded. Some of his forces escorted the wounded back to the Temple of Ell, and others have apprehended Lord Southinghorn. Still, about twenty soldiers are now at their disposal. The party instructs that they should concentrate on securing the two ways out – the passwall ramps and the stairs leading up out of the complex. Also, they tell Cobb about the Divination Sink, hidden in the rope trick. Lastly, they soberly inform Cobb that if there’s still no sign of the party in about half an hour, he should take the Divination Sink and get the hell out of there.
The Company, minus Grey Wolf, heads back down the stairs, and then down the hallway to the abjured door. Flicker again tries to disable the magic around the door, but isn’t so lucky this time. He sets off at least two wards. One is an alarm bell that starts ringing loudly, and which Ernie quickly casts a silence on. The other is yet another greater glyph of warding dispensing a harm spell. Flicker is again brought near to death, and is again healed back to near-full health. Flicker’s starting to look a bit shaky from being such a health yo-yo, but he takes a deep breath and tries the door. It’s locked.
Dranko casts another detect magic, and sees that there’s still abjuration magic there. Aravis, guessing what it is, casts knock on the iron door. It swings open, and Ernie, flying up near the ceiling, floats through just enough to see what’s beyond. What he sees is vast, puzzling, and terrifying.
It’s a huge chamber, over a hundred feet on a side, with a ceiling nearly forty feet high. The iron door is at one corner, and what immediately holds Ernie’s attention is at the opposite corner. There are two huge translucent spheres, each forty feet in diameter, slowly moving towards a convergence in the corner, above a huge, magically pulsing black obsidian circle set in the floor. The spheres look like planets viewed from space, but muted in color – grey, brown and dark blue, rather than bright blue, green and white. In the center of each sphere, maybe ten feet in diameter, is a solid black core.
There is more, much more in the room. In the center of the room is a circular three-feet-high stone wall, also about forty feet in diameter. (Only the fact that Ernie is flying allows him to see over that wall to the far corner beyond.)
The floor of the rest of the room is covered with smaller black circles, ranging in size from five to twenty feet in diameter. These are connected with lines, some drawn, some made with obsidian bricks set in the floor. Weird glyphs are scrawled all over the floor around these circles, along with symbols and figures depicting geometric forms and angles, wide arcs and tangents.
There is more. Between some of the obsidian floor-circles, blue energy plays across the ground in straight lines. The air above these lines shimmers faintly, like curtains of warbling air.
There is more. Three figures stand within three of the circles. About ninety feet across from the door is a human woman, heavily armed, with a breastplate emblazoned with a lightning bolt. She stands within a large circle. To Ernie’s right, equally far away, is a halfling woman, wearing a black robe, standing in a small circle.
Just beyond the halfling is a tall, pinched man with a goatee, also wearing a black robe and standing in a small circle. From all three of these inhabited circles, black energy is spilling along the floor and up a short, wide stair, where it flows into the large pulsing black circle. But this energy is tailing off, as if from a faucet that has been shut off but is still dripping a last few drops of water. Ernie can also see black energy coming from another source, that is probably the base of the other side of the large circular wall. That energy is also emptying into the pulsing black circle beneath where the two huge world-spheres are converging, but that energy is not abating.
The thrumming noise is coming from all around the room, and is timed with spikes in the pulses of black energy spilling into the circle beneath the spheres. With each thrum, the two huge spheres inch closer towards each other.
Ernie squints across the dizzying space at the man with the goatee. He has seen that man once before, across a dining-room table in a poison-filled hall, in the city of Hae Charagan.
It’s Mokad.
...to be continued...
