Sagiro's Story Hour Returns (new thread started on 5/18/08)
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Kid Charlemagne
I am the Very Model of a Modern Moderator
I liked it better before you fixed the typo....
KidCthulhu
First Post
el-remmen said:Please sir, might we have some more with a nasty fight with several dozen ice-demons of some kind? It would be ever so exciting!
Oh, there will be demons aplenty, and before you know it. Trust me, you'll have your fill.
We certainly did.
)
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
spyscribe said:
I'm glad my story inspires such erudite commentary.
A short teaserrific post:
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 230
A Snowball's Chance in the Abyss
The wind isn’t blowing as strongly today as yesterday, but the air is so cold that their vaporous forms are sluggish and slower than normal. Beats walking, though.
Morningstar leads, following today’s first find the path while the rest of the party follows her. At two hundred feet in the air they can see the flat icy landscape for a good distance – snow-covered tundra, frozen boulders, roaming packs of ice-demons. Only once that morning do they land, just long enough for Morningstar to cast a second find the path when the first one runs out. Half-way through the second one they finally spot the hoped-for shimmer of blue light on the ground. As they get closer, it resolves into two glowing blue doorways, one right next to the other.
A thorough search reveals a large, monstrous footprint in the snow, its owner leaving this frigid Slice, heading into one of the two Ways. There is no sign of foot-traffic headed into or out of the other one. Aravis, who hasn’t tried using the Crosser’ Maze to any advantage since the flight from the Vree’s monastery, decides to do so now. After a warning to the others, he focuses his thoughts on the artifact in his head and quickly finds himself perched on the metaphorical window-ledge between the Inner Maze and the Outer Maze. Back in the Demon Slice, his body falls into the snow, Pewter resting on the shoulder in case he needs to drive his master in an emergency.
Aravis ignores the world of the Inner Maze (a stray thought: has King Vhadish XXIII forgotten him?) and focuses his attention on the model of the cosmos. As before, the view of Het Branoi is much different to look at than that of the “normal” universe. The whole of creation seems to be the single Slice he’s in, and it takes tremendous effort to get a sense of what’s beyond, but again as before, he manages to get a sense of the Slices adjacent to his own. One of these two Ways, he sees, leads to a large Slice, clearly more Abyss, with many life-forces therein. The other leads to a very small Slice, probably not in the Abyss, and with no living beings at all.
Learning that much drains Aravis of mental wherewithal; he finds himself back in his body, lying in the snow with Pewter licking his face. He gets up, dusts of the snow, and shares his findings. The footprint, not surprisingly, heads into the larger of the two Slices.
“We should check out the smaller one first,” says Dranko. “After all, look how useful that woman’s bedroom turned out to be.”
The others agree. Ernie volunteers to scout, by the usual rope-around-the-waist method, and with a ten-Abernathy count. He jumps through, endures the seconds of pulling blackness, and emerges into... more blackness. It’s completely dark, though he notices at once that the ground is solid stone, not crunchy snow. All is quiet. He fishes a coin from his pocket enchanted with continual flame and looks around for a few seconds before the others tug the rope.
“I got a piece of the house,” he announces to the others. “It’s a store-room, with that blue-diamond pattern on the walls. It’s really dark. Morningstar should go first and get some thought captures.”
“Watch out,” warns Flicker. “Whatever horrible monster that’s lurking in there and saw Ernie, now it’s waiting to pounce on whoever goes through next.”
Thus admonished, Morningstar pops into the storeroom Slice. Her keen senses tell her that the room is large – certainly more than twenty feet on a side – and full of large stacked objects. She pauses for a minute to listen; it’s perfectly silent. Then she casts five thought captures.
Capture #1 is a thought of someone well and truly fed up with excessive manual labor.
Capture #2 is a clearer thought, that they really ought to procure a larger wheelbarrow.
Capture #3 is the most interesting. Morningstar gleans a specific thought: “I never want to be in the room again when those two get into a fight. I thought that Clouds and Words were going to kill each other.”
Capture #4 is also specific, though more mundane: “I’m not sure there are enough bricks left in this storeroom.”
Capture #5 is a general thought of pain, suffered by someone who has just pulled a muscle lifting something heavy.
Morningstar pops back out and shares the results with the others. Some suspicions have now essentially been confirmed. “Words” is almost certainly “Seven Dark Words,” whose home, according to the Eye Prophecy, is Het Branoi. And given that “Clouds” is a person whom a) the Mad Sculptor holds in deep contempt, and b) apparently quarrels seriously with a person named “Words,” it is now clearer than ever that Seven Dark Words and the Mad Sculptor are the same person. It’s not a huge surprise, but it’s always nice to have corroborating evidence.
Snokas and One Certain Step agree to stand watch while the others go in to search the storeroom. (That way, the party won’t be surprised by anything waiting outside when they return.) Once inside the rest of the party breaks out lanterns and gives the place a thorough combing.
It’s a pretty large place – a 40’ x 50’ chamber supported by wooden columns every ten feet or so. There are wooden crates, some large trunks, and piles of building materials including many black obsidian bricks, nearly identical to those used in the Mokad’s ritual room back in Kallor. Grey Wolf fires off a detect magic, and the only things registering are a dozen thin metal hoops, the size of hoola-hoops, glowing faintly with enchantment. Flicker looks at them and declares in amazement they’re made of adamantium.
“Whoa. It must have been a royal pain to make perfect hoops out of the stuff. Seems like a waste.”
Aravis and Dranko launch into a brief digression about how, while these hoops might have no obvious use, it would be funny to “link” two of them together somehow. Aravis suggests it could work with a careful use of dimension door.
“This is what we’ve come to,” says Ernie. “you guys are talking about using magic to do... to do magic tricks!”
“It doesn’t sound so wrong when you put it like that,” says Flicker.
Most of the storeroom is filled with mundane building materials: planks, bricks, tools, slabs. The most valuable item is a huge chest of perfect steel nails. There’s also a crate full of green glass slabs (of varying sizes) of the same sort that were used in applications of stasis-magic, at the Black Circle bestiary visited by the Company years ago.
While Flicker takes inventory, Dranko goes out to make sure Step and Snokas are all right. Both of them are still standing an uneventful watch.
“You can come in if you want, and I’ll stand guard,” Dranko offers.
“No, no, it’s fine,” says Snokas. “Really. I’m having a lot of fun out here.”
Step stifles a laugh.
“You know,” says Dranko just before he hops back through the Way, “if you were being sarcastic, you just blew your chance.” Snokas grins back at him.
Scree discovers that the Slice ends at the walls and floor, and that there are no secret or hidden doors out. So, having discovered that there’s nothing of particular interest here, Dranko decides there’s only one thing left to do before leaving and trying the second Way.
He spells out “Black Circle Suxks” (sic) on the floor with obsidian bricks.
Aravis shakes his head. “It’s one thing to provoke the Black Circle. It’s another to make them think we’re stupid.”
“It’s part of the plan to make them underestimate us,” says Flicker.
* *
Ernie again volunteers to be the scout. Rope tied around his waist, he hops through.
His first impression is: red. The light is red. The ground is a mars-like red stone. The air feels red. Hot. Dry. Sulfurous. The Abyssal nature makes his skin crawl. The ground is pitted with shallow craters, varying is size from six inches to six feet in diameter. A few dozen feet away is a small fissure in the ground, ten feet long and a foot wide.
Ten seconds later he feels the tug and returns to the others.
“It looks nasty,” he reports. “Red rocks, red light. Even with the protection spell up it felt warm, so it must be way over 100 degrees in there. It still feels icky, though I didn’t see anyone.”
So everyone steps through the Way, Dranko scooping up a last handful of snow as he leaves. It starts to melt the moment he arrives. Kibi arrives a few seconds later and is quicker on the draw; having grabbed his own snowball he throws a strike at Dranko’s face. Dranko tries to return fire but his snowball has mostly melted and so is ineffectual.
Ah, the zany hijinks. Pity that it gets interrupted by attacking demons.
...to be continued...
Graywolf-ELM
Explorer
Good Fleshy post. Not everything can be combat.
GW
GW
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 231
Okay, here’s your fight with demons already!
Dranko glares at Kibi, wiping the snow from his face. He thinks, “...as if it’s not bad enough that the dwarf managed such a lucky shot, now Kibi is pulling the old ‘look over my shoulder in horror like there’s something behind me’ trick. How gullible does he think...”
Then: “say, why is everyone looking at me like that?”
Behind Dranko an enormous demon has appeared. It towers above him, a fifteen-foot-tall humanoid of horrific aspect. Its torso and limbs are covered with mottled black and green scales, and its muscular arms end with oversized lobster claws. Two smaller arms, more “human” looking save for the sharp claws, protrude from its chest. Multifaceted insect-eyes bulge from a monstrous horned head.
At about the same time as its arrival, half the party starts to fall. Upward. Aravis, Grey Wolf, Snokas, Ernie and Morningstar are caught in a reverse gravity (origin unknown) and plummet sixty feet into the air, bobbing against the sky when they reach the edge of its effect.
A second demon appears near the first, human sized, with uniformly red skin that glistens sickeningly. Its large hands have long taloned fingers. A long horn juts straight from its forehead, and another protrudes from the back of its skull.
Kibi’s eyes grow wide. His mind races. Does he remember rightly that creatures of the Lower Planes are often telepathic, and able to understand any intelligible language?
“We’re not very interesting,” he says, casting a mass suggestion. "I suggest you just go away and leave us alone.”
The massive Glabrezu is unimpressed, but to the smaller Babau this makes perfect sense. It blinks, nods, and turns to leave. Partially satisfied, Kibi moves off to the side and out of “fireball formation” with the others.
Sixty feet up, the floating half of the Company takes stock. Grey Wolf burns a charge from his wand of flying before grabbing Aravis and preparing to land. Aravis similarly casts fly from a scroll, upon Snokas.
On the ground, Flicker activates his ring of blinking and like Kibi moves away to create spacing. He’s already sizing up the hideous demon for sneak attacks – mostly an analysis of ankle-tendons, from where he’s standing.
A third demon appears, different in appearance from the first two but no less terrifying. Shorter than the Glabrezu but taller than the Babau, it resembles a bony humanoid vulture with enormous talons. “A Vrock,” thinks Aravis, looking down on the battlefield. “This just gets better and better.”
So, where a few seconds ago Dranko was wiping snow from his brow, now all Abyss has broken loose, with Demons teleporting in and half the party flung up and away. He whips around to find the Glabrezu looming over him, snapping its huge crustacean claws. He immediately activates his sash of improved invisibility and moves into attacking position. It’s unfortunate for him that the Glabrezu, like all demons of its kind, is possessed of true seeing.
The monstrous demon leans over Dranko and a pair of enormous mandibles unfolds from its maw. It seizes the half-orc in one of its lobster-hands, savages him with its remaining three claws, and chomps on him with the mandibles for good measure. That’s the injury; the insult is that Dranko is now clamped firmly in the thing’s claw. As he’s grappled by the Glabrezu, Dranko hears its deep telepathic voice in his head.
“Mmmmmm. Crunchy little man.”
Dranko answers, “Do you like being trapped in here?”
“I do now,” replies the demon.
Morningstar doesn’t stay disoriented by the gravity reversal for long – the Chaos was worse. She gets her bearings and casts darkbeam at the Glabrezu, striking it square in the face. But as Dranko discovered its true seeing ability, now Morningstar learns of its spell resistance. The darkbeam dissipates harmlessly. Snokas grunts in dismay, grabs Morningstar, and flies them both down to the ground.
“If we rescue Dranko, we can flee,” says Aravis.
“Kick... its... ass!” shouts Dranko, as the breath is squeezed out of him by the Glabrezu’s claw.
But things just get worse. Yet another creature teleports into the battle. This one is a huge arachnid, ten-feet high and just as broad, standing on six jointed legs. The remaining two legs, serrated and glinting, are already poised to strike. The whole creature seems to made of metal. The beast is called a Retriever in Abyssal circles, and is not technically a demon, though this would be of little comfort to the party even if they knew. It clacks its mandibles together ominously.
Ernie looks down from above and sees that the Glabrezu has something invisible in one of its claws. From the sound of the pained grunts, it’s probably Dranko. He activates his winged shield and flies down to help, staying (for now) just out of the huge demon’s reach. Step (already on the ground) likewise closes with the Glabrezu. The Babau turns and discovers the other demons aren’t following him. It motions angrily and says something to them in a screechy high-pitched voice. Why the others aren’t following the dwarf’s eminently sensible suggestion, he has no idea.
And speaking of the dwarf, Kibi positions himself for a lightning bolt and blasts the Glabrezu and the Vrock. Aravis watches closely, thinking he remembers that demons are immune to electricity, but these take a moderate amount of damage from the blast. Dranko, in the Glabrezu’s grip, manages to lift his legs and dodge the bolt, and shouts out a warning.
“Hello! Invisible half-orc here!”
“Maybe you should tell us when you’re going invisible,” Kibi mutters.
Grey Wolf and Aravis land out of the demons’ reach, and hardly need to discuss the plan they both intend to execute. Grey Wolf lays down the ironstorm, picking an ideal spot that encompasses all three of the demons (and hopefully not Dranko, held, they surmise, in the Glabrezu’s outstretched claw). Aravis follows with the inevitable chain lightning, which gets sucked into the sphere of iron filings and fills the air with the smells of ozone and cooked demon. The Glabrezu roars in pain and rage, while the Retriever shivers as electricity plays along its legs and body, setting its mandibles to an almost comical clatter.
The Vrock seems entirely unaffected. With a screech it takes a flying bound toward Morningstar, raking her with its talons. Worse, its body puffs up and releases a cloud of noxious green gas flecked with particles of filth. Both Morningstar and Snokas feel their skin start to sting and burn.
Dranko desperately tries to wiggle free of the Glabrezu, but the demon’s grip is too tight. Its cruel voice sounds again in his head.
“Whatever’s the last thing you want to see in this life, you should look at it now.”
Backing out of the ironstorm, it squeezes with the grasping claw, and tears at Dranko’s body with the other three. For good measure it sinks its teeth into the half-orc’s shoulder. Somehow Dranko survives, though his blood is now pouring down the Glabrezu’s claw to soak the rocky ground. Dranko goes limp, hoping the Glabrezu will think he’s dead, but the demon doesn’t buy it.
“Oh, I guess I killed the runt!” thinks the Glabrezu tauntingly via telepathy. “I suppose I’ll just drop the body and turn my back on it!”
It leans over and leers at Dranko.
“Or not.”
Morningstar fires another darkbeam, this time at the menacing Vrock, but it shrugs off the effect as easily as it did the chain lightning. Snokas leans in and drives one of his picks into the vulture-demon’s body, but the thing’s natural resistance prevents almost all the damage. And it’s not bad enough that the beast is ignoring their attacks – green fungous growths start to sprout painfully on their skin. The Vrock’s face twists in an evil grin, while the Retriever moves quickly out of the ironstorm.
Ernie looks intently at the huge outstretched claw of the Glabrezu. He can’t see Dranko, but he can see blood pouring out of the air in numerous places. All he needs is to be sure...ah! There! A particularly well-defined stream of blood is drizzling from down low, probably Dranko’s lower leg or foot. Ernie casts a quickened heal from his quickscroll tube, leaps, and swipes at where he desperately hopes Dranko is. His hand comes in contact with Dranko’s boot, which is enough. Healing energy flows from him into Dranko, sealing his friend’s wounds and erasing his bruises. Ernie follows up the spell by swinging Beryn Sur but the blade is turned by the demon’s thick hide. Step steps in and smites with his own weapon, scoring the demon’s legs. The Babau, completely fed up by now with his fellow demons’ failure to see reason, teleports away.
Kibi nearly fires off another lightning bolt before he remembers it will be drawn (now harmlessly) into the ironstorm. Instead he tries to hold the Vrock, but the demon resists. Grey Wolf tosses a fireball that’s barely more effective. At Grey Wolf’s side, the longsword Bostock speaks softly in his mind.
“You see?” says the sword eagerly. “Spells are no good against them. I, on the other hand, will be effective. Wield me!”
Flicker has been blinking in and out since putting on the magic ring. It’s strange, he thinks idly. Not only are those weird ethereal leeches nowhere to be seen, the entire place he goes when blinking seems to be different. Darker. Disturbing, even. Aravis has told him he goes in and out of the Ethereal Plane when he wears the ring, but it’s always looked the same before today. Now...
His mind, for whatever reason, refuses to think about it. Instead he concentrates on the ankles of the Glabrezu, but his sword-attacks are ineffectual.
“You all right Dranko?” shouts Aravis.
“He’s healthy as ever,” Ernie answers for him. “I just gave him a heal.”
“Then duck,” says Aravis. He fires a cone of cold at the Glabrezu, hoping Dranko can evade it. It’s a vain hope. The Glabrezu instinctively uses Dranko as a shield, and while it takes some significant damage, Dranko gets the full blast. They both scream in pain.
The Vrock tears again at Morningstar, screeching and spluttering. It bites deeply into Morningstar’s shoulder, and thinks “tasty!” to its victim. Meanwhile the fungus continues to burst painfully from her arms, her neck, her face. The stench of the spores reeks in her nostrils. It may even be growing there.
The Glabrezu looks down at the frozen Dranko.
“Looks like I’m not the only one who wants to kill you,” it thinks to him. “Heh. Heh, heh.”
“Oh, shut up,” replies Dranko. “If you were a proper demon, you’d be tempting me instead of killing me.”
“That’s devils,” says the demon.
“Oh, you’re all the same thing,” says Dranko.
“Grrrraaarrrrrrrrrrrr!”
While the demon roars in rage, Dranko makes one last attempt to squirm free of the giant claw. He’s slippery with ice, and the claw is slick with half-orc blood, and with a mighty twist of his body, Dranko slips from the Glabrezu’s grasp. He lands on the ground. The Glabrezu moves to grab him again, but thinks better. Dranko’s not the problem. That puny wizard is the problem.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” it thinks to Dranko. Then it straightens up and targets Aravis with a power word: stun. The powerful syllable rings loud in the air and Aravis feels the world go fuzzy.
Having no luck with the darkbeam, Morningstar switches tactics slightly and tries casting flame strike on the Vrock, but the demon’s constant lunges and feints prove too distracting. Her attempt to cast defensively is thwarted and the spell fizzles. Snokas again hammers the vulture-demon with his picks, but it’s just no good – he might as well be poking it with knitting needles for all the good he’s doing.
On the other hand, the Retriever has no such problems. While Snokas does resist a beam of white magic that shoots from its glowing eyes, he is shredded by its two serrated forelegs.
The Glabrezu looks down with amusement; now that the human wizard in the silly hat is out of the combat, the rest should be easy. It chuckles as Ernie’s swords bounce off its legs. It smiles as Step fails to overcome its resistance to weapons. And it barely blinks as Kibi pulls out a scroll and casts an ineffectual cone of sound.
What finally gets its attention is the sound of its right ankle being sheared off by Flicker’s short-sword. The blinking rogue has finally landed a pair of sneak attacks, having figured out through trial-and-error where the vulnerable tendons and sinews must be. A shower of bone and ichor spews from the wound, and the Glabrezu slumps to the right, standing unsteadily on one foot and a stump. Time to teleport away, it thinks, if only it can buy just a few seconds more. Dranko hears its voice in his head: “I think we should call a truce. I will agree to let you live.”
“You should never gloat before you’ve won,” says Dranko out loud. He snaps his whip backward and then forward, lashing it around the huge demon’s left knee, and yanks back with all his might. The Glabrezu tips backward and falls, bones jutting through its skin where Flicker carved it up. It screams once more in pain before its head bounces hard off the rocky ground and it lies still.
“Jackass,” adds Dranko, gloating.
After that it’s just a matter of mopping up. The Retriever is dispatched by a flame strike from Ernie followed by a coldfire from Kibi, which melt and fuse its entire back half before it can tear anyone to pieces. And the Vrock, finding itself alone among enemies who somehow killed a Glabrezu, decides that discretion is the better part of eternal damnation and teleports the heck out of there. The caustic growths on Morningstar and Snokas continue to grow for about a minute before withering and falling off.
At Dranko’s request, Step decapitates the dead Glabrezu. You can never be too sure about these things.
...to be continued...
Okay, here’s your fight with demons already!
Dranko glares at Kibi, wiping the snow from his face. He thinks, “...as if it’s not bad enough that the dwarf managed such a lucky shot, now Kibi is pulling the old ‘look over my shoulder in horror like there’s something behind me’ trick. How gullible does he think...”
Then: “say, why is everyone looking at me like that?”
Behind Dranko an enormous demon has appeared. It towers above him, a fifteen-foot-tall humanoid of horrific aspect. Its torso and limbs are covered with mottled black and green scales, and its muscular arms end with oversized lobster claws. Two smaller arms, more “human” looking save for the sharp claws, protrude from its chest. Multifaceted insect-eyes bulge from a monstrous horned head.
At about the same time as its arrival, half the party starts to fall. Upward. Aravis, Grey Wolf, Snokas, Ernie and Morningstar are caught in a reverse gravity (origin unknown) and plummet sixty feet into the air, bobbing against the sky when they reach the edge of its effect.
A second demon appears near the first, human sized, with uniformly red skin that glistens sickeningly. Its large hands have long taloned fingers. A long horn juts straight from its forehead, and another protrudes from the back of its skull.
Kibi’s eyes grow wide. His mind races. Does he remember rightly that creatures of the Lower Planes are often telepathic, and able to understand any intelligible language?
“We’re not very interesting,” he says, casting a mass suggestion. "I suggest you just go away and leave us alone.”
The massive Glabrezu is unimpressed, but to the smaller Babau this makes perfect sense. It blinks, nods, and turns to leave. Partially satisfied, Kibi moves off to the side and out of “fireball formation” with the others.
Sixty feet up, the floating half of the Company takes stock. Grey Wolf burns a charge from his wand of flying before grabbing Aravis and preparing to land. Aravis similarly casts fly from a scroll, upon Snokas.
On the ground, Flicker activates his ring of blinking and like Kibi moves away to create spacing. He’s already sizing up the hideous demon for sneak attacks – mostly an analysis of ankle-tendons, from where he’s standing.
A third demon appears, different in appearance from the first two but no less terrifying. Shorter than the Glabrezu but taller than the Babau, it resembles a bony humanoid vulture with enormous talons. “A Vrock,” thinks Aravis, looking down on the battlefield. “This just gets better and better.”
So, where a few seconds ago Dranko was wiping snow from his brow, now all Abyss has broken loose, with Demons teleporting in and half the party flung up and away. He whips around to find the Glabrezu looming over him, snapping its huge crustacean claws. He immediately activates his sash of improved invisibility and moves into attacking position. It’s unfortunate for him that the Glabrezu, like all demons of its kind, is possessed of true seeing.
The monstrous demon leans over Dranko and a pair of enormous mandibles unfolds from its maw. It seizes the half-orc in one of its lobster-hands, savages him with its remaining three claws, and chomps on him with the mandibles for good measure. That’s the injury; the insult is that Dranko is now clamped firmly in the thing’s claw. As he’s grappled by the Glabrezu, Dranko hears its deep telepathic voice in his head.
“Mmmmmm. Crunchy little man.”
Dranko answers, “Do you like being trapped in here?”
“I do now,” replies the demon.
Morningstar doesn’t stay disoriented by the gravity reversal for long – the Chaos was worse. She gets her bearings and casts darkbeam at the Glabrezu, striking it square in the face. But as Dranko discovered its true seeing ability, now Morningstar learns of its spell resistance. The darkbeam dissipates harmlessly. Snokas grunts in dismay, grabs Morningstar, and flies them both down to the ground.
“If we rescue Dranko, we can flee,” says Aravis.
“Kick... its... ass!” shouts Dranko, as the breath is squeezed out of him by the Glabrezu’s claw.
But things just get worse. Yet another creature teleports into the battle. This one is a huge arachnid, ten-feet high and just as broad, standing on six jointed legs. The remaining two legs, serrated and glinting, are already poised to strike. The whole creature seems to made of metal. The beast is called a Retriever in Abyssal circles, and is not technically a demon, though this would be of little comfort to the party even if they knew. It clacks its mandibles together ominously.
Ernie looks down from above and sees that the Glabrezu has something invisible in one of its claws. From the sound of the pained grunts, it’s probably Dranko. He activates his winged shield and flies down to help, staying (for now) just out of the huge demon’s reach. Step (already on the ground) likewise closes with the Glabrezu. The Babau turns and discovers the other demons aren’t following him. It motions angrily and says something to them in a screechy high-pitched voice. Why the others aren’t following the dwarf’s eminently sensible suggestion, he has no idea.
And speaking of the dwarf, Kibi positions himself for a lightning bolt and blasts the Glabrezu and the Vrock. Aravis watches closely, thinking he remembers that demons are immune to electricity, but these take a moderate amount of damage from the blast. Dranko, in the Glabrezu’s grip, manages to lift his legs and dodge the bolt, and shouts out a warning.
“Hello! Invisible half-orc here!”
“Maybe you should tell us when you’re going invisible,” Kibi mutters.
Grey Wolf and Aravis land out of the demons’ reach, and hardly need to discuss the plan they both intend to execute. Grey Wolf lays down the ironstorm, picking an ideal spot that encompasses all three of the demons (and hopefully not Dranko, held, they surmise, in the Glabrezu’s outstretched claw). Aravis follows with the inevitable chain lightning, which gets sucked into the sphere of iron filings and fills the air with the smells of ozone and cooked demon. The Glabrezu roars in pain and rage, while the Retriever shivers as electricity plays along its legs and body, setting its mandibles to an almost comical clatter.
The Vrock seems entirely unaffected. With a screech it takes a flying bound toward Morningstar, raking her with its talons. Worse, its body puffs up and releases a cloud of noxious green gas flecked with particles of filth. Both Morningstar and Snokas feel their skin start to sting and burn.
Dranko desperately tries to wiggle free of the Glabrezu, but the demon’s grip is too tight. Its cruel voice sounds again in his head.
“Whatever’s the last thing you want to see in this life, you should look at it now.”
Backing out of the ironstorm, it squeezes with the grasping claw, and tears at Dranko’s body with the other three. For good measure it sinks its teeth into the half-orc’s shoulder. Somehow Dranko survives, though his blood is now pouring down the Glabrezu’s claw to soak the rocky ground. Dranko goes limp, hoping the Glabrezu will think he’s dead, but the demon doesn’t buy it.
“Oh, I guess I killed the runt!” thinks the Glabrezu tauntingly via telepathy. “I suppose I’ll just drop the body and turn my back on it!”
It leans over and leers at Dranko.
“Or not.”
Morningstar fires another darkbeam, this time at the menacing Vrock, but it shrugs off the effect as easily as it did the chain lightning. Snokas leans in and drives one of his picks into the vulture-demon’s body, but the thing’s natural resistance prevents almost all the damage. And it’s not bad enough that the beast is ignoring their attacks – green fungous growths start to sprout painfully on their skin. The Vrock’s face twists in an evil grin, while the Retriever moves quickly out of the ironstorm.
Ernie looks intently at the huge outstretched claw of the Glabrezu. He can’t see Dranko, but he can see blood pouring out of the air in numerous places. All he needs is to be sure...ah! There! A particularly well-defined stream of blood is drizzling from down low, probably Dranko’s lower leg or foot. Ernie casts a quickened heal from his quickscroll tube, leaps, and swipes at where he desperately hopes Dranko is. His hand comes in contact with Dranko’s boot, which is enough. Healing energy flows from him into Dranko, sealing his friend’s wounds and erasing his bruises. Ernie follows up the spell by swinging Beryn Sur but the blade is turned by the demon’s thick hide. Step steps in and smites with his own weapon, scoring the demon’s legs. The Babau, completely fed up by now with his fellow demons’ failure to see reason, teleports away.
Kibi nearly fires off another lightning bolt before he remembers it will be drawn (now harmlessly) into the ironstorm. Instead he tries to hold the Vrock, but the demon resists. Grey Wolf tosses a fireball that’s barely more effective. At Grey Wolf’s side, the longsword Bostock speaks softly in his mind.
“You see?” says the sword eagerly. “Spells are no good against them. I, on the other hand, will be effective. Wield me!”
Flicker has been blinking in and out since putting on the magic ring. It’s strange, he thinks idly. Not only are those weird ethereal leeches nowhere to be seen, the entire place he goes when blinking seems to be different. Darker. Disturbing, even. Aravis has told him he goes in and out of the Ethereal Plane when he wears the ring, but it’s always looked the same before today. Now...
His mind, for whatever reason, refuses to think about it. Instead he concentrates on the ankles of the Glabrezu, but his sword-attacks are ineffectual.
“You all right Dranko?” shouts Aravis.
“He’s healthy as ever,” Ernie answers for him. “I just gave him a heal.”
“Then duck,” says Aravis. He fires a cone of cold at the Glabrezu, hoping Dranko can evade it. It’s a vain hope. The Glabrezu instinctively uses Dranko as a shield, and while it takes some significant damage, Dranko gets the full blast. They both scream in pain.
The Vrock tears again at Morningstar, screeching and spluttering. It bites deeply into Morningstar’s shoulder, and thinks “tasty!” to its victim. Meanwhile the fungus continues to burst painfully from her arms, her neck, her face. The stench of the spores reeks in her nostrils. It may even be growing there.
The Glabrezu looks down at the frozen Dranko.
“Looks like I’m not the only one who wants to kill you,” it thinks to him. “Heh. Heh, heh.”
“Oh, shut up,” replies Dranko. “If you were a proper demon, you’d be tempting me instead of killing me.”
“That’s devils,” says the demon.
“Oh, you’re all the same thing,” says Dranko.
“Grrrraaarrrrrrrrrrrr!”
While the demon roars in rage, Dranko makes one last attempt to squirm free of the giant claw. He’s slippery with ice, and the claw is slick with half-orc blood, and with a mighty twist of his body, Dranko slips from the Glabrezu’s grasp. He lands on the ground. The Glabrezu moves to grab him again, but thinks better. Dranko’s not the problem. That puny wizard is the problem.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” it thinks to Dranko. Then it straightens up and targets Aravis with a power word: stun. The powerful syllable rings loud in the air and Aravis feels the world go fuzzy.
Having no luck with the darkbeam, Morningstar switches tactics slightly and tries casting flame strike on the Vrock, but the demon’s constant lunges and feints prove too distracting. Her attempt to cast defensively is thwarted and the spell fizzles. Snokas again hammers the vulture-demon with his picks, but it’s just no good – he might as well be poking it with knitting needles for all the good he’s doing.
On the other hand, the Retriever has no such problems. While Snokas does resist a beam of white magic that shoots from its glowing eyes, he is shredded by its two serrated forelegs.
The Glabrezu looks down with amusement; now that the human wizard in the silly hat is out of the combat, the rest should be easy. It chuckles as Ernie’s swords bounce off its legs. It smiles as Step fails to overcome its resistance to weapons. And it barely blinks as Kibi pulls out a scroll and casts an ineffectual cone of sound.
What finally gets its attention is the sound of its right ankle being sheared off by Flicker’s short-sword. The blinking rogue has finally landed a pair of sneak attacks, having figured out through trial-and-error where the vulnerable tendons and sinews must be. A shower of bone and ichor spews from the wound, and the Glabrezu slumps to the right, standing unsteadily on one foot and a stump. Time to teleport away, it thinks, if only it can buy just a few seconds more. Dranko hears its voice in his head: “I think we should call a truce. I will agree to let you live.”
“You should never gloat before you’ve won,” says Dranko out loud. He snaps his whip backward and then forward, lashing it around the huge demon’s left knee, and yanks back with all his might. The Glabrezu tips backward and falls, bones jutting through its skin where Flicker carved it up. It screams once more in pain before its head bounces hard off the rocky ground and it lies still.
“Jackass,” adds Dranko, gloating.
After that it’s just a matter of mopping up. The Retriever is dispatched by a flame strike from Ernie followed by a coldfire from Kibi, which melt and fuse its entire back half before it can tear anyone to pieces. And the Vrock, finding itself alone among enemies who somehow killed a Glabrezu, decides that discretion is the better part of eternal damnation and teleports the heck out of there. The caustic growths on Morningstar and Snokas continue to grow for about a minute before withering and falling off.
At Dranko’s request, Step decapitates the dead Glabrezu. You can never be too sure about these things.
...to be continued...
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