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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 5049295" data-attributes="member: 726">Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 301Graveyard ShiftThe next morning they prep spells with three goals in mind:  location, travel and Undead Slaying.   Before heading out, Aravis goes to the basement and retrieves the Soul Shard, a chunk of flat black rock slightly smaller than a human skull.  The stone housing the soul of Califax is rough-looking and irregularly shaped, and greasy-feeling even though it's objectively dry.   To a seasoned adventurer like Aravis the thing is, beyond question, capital-”E” Evil.Having secured the Shard in his pack, Aravis teleports the party to a spot he recalls outside the town of Feslin, not far from where he grew up.  Ernie immediately casts find the path to “Nazg Hodeth”; to his relief it points in exactly the direction they expect.   Off they fly, the green countryside below covered with stately manor houses and their surrounding well-tended grounds, though after a time these give way to knobbly pine-covered hills that rise quickly to the Black Mountains.   The name of these mountains, clear to see from this height, comes from the nearly-black dark green color of the evergreens that cover them.   The peaks are not high; there is no tree line, no snowy peaks.  The pines cover them to their hidden tops.  The Company drops altitude and flies for a time closer to ground level, and they discover that beneath the trees lurk a number of bugbear villages.   These settlements are physically sprawling though sparsely populated, as if once there was a great civilization of the monsters here, but no more.  Now the local populations resemble skeleton crews, going about their bugbearish  business in villages of empty and collapsing buildings, the forest encroaching everywhere.The party pays them little mind, and if a few bugbears here and there are alarmed by seven ghostly humanoids zooming among the trees on a magic wind, nothing ever comes of it.  Finally the last of the habitations are left behind, and half-an-hour later they overshoot something  red painted on several of the trees.  They turn around, go back, and discover that at a distinct boundary the same symbol has been drawn in red on dozens of tree trunks.  Aravis casts comprehend languages and learns (to no one's surprise) that it means “danger” in the language of the bugbears.  Undaunted they continue to follow Ernie's spell.Ten minutes later, zipping through the trees on a steady upward grade, they burst out into a huge gently-sloping clearing.  Clear of trees, at least; there are gravestones here a-plenty.   At the same time they feel the temperature drop a good 30 degrees, from summer warmth to a cold chill.  Overhead, where the sky had been sunny and clear an hour earlier, the sun struggles to shine through a thick ceiling of slate-gray cloud.   Crude and crudely-marked tombstones stretch away from them up a slope  of dirt and dead grasses, dotted here and there with larger monuments and small mausoleums.  Dranko mutters, “Delioch's blessing be upon this place,” but it's obvious that the next time will be the first time.  They discover with some quick triangulation that the find the path spell indicates the center of the graveyard,  so they drop out of wind form to be better able to defend themselves.  The cold takes on a sickening edge and seeps into their bones.    They pick their way slowly among the crooked slabs and pitted earth, wary for the inevitable appearance of the undead.It doesn't take long.  After trudging less than a hundred feet up the slope, the ground shifts beneath their feet and starts to rise violently around them.  At first the party thinks that some huge creature is pushing its way up through the dirt and gravestones, but after a few seconds it's clear that what they're facing is the dirt and gravestones.   The creature – and they all guess correctly that this is the “Walking Necropolis” referenced in the Black Circle literature – hulks upward of forty feet, a generally humanoid form of earth and stone with bones and tombstones sticking out all over.  Dranko rises with it, trapped for the moment in a huge mouth with graven stone slabs for teeth.  “Very... painful...” he gasps, trying to avoid a gruesome crushing.  The stink of the dead is everywhere around him, a stench not lost on the others as it rolls off the Necropolis is putrid waves.  Grey Wolf loads a greater fireburst into the sword Bostock and takes a mighty swing at the monstrosity's “leg.”  He makes contact and takes out a large clump of sod, but the Walking Necropolis is naturally resistant to magic and shrugs off the fireburst.Dranko, who at least has his hands free, retrieves the Lucent Tower from his pack.  For some reason he mistakenly thinks he'll end up inside it when activated.Aravis looks up in alarm when he sees what Dranko is doing.  “No, that's not the way it...”Dranko invokes the command phrase.  “Crystal Rise!”  The Lucent tower quickly expands to its full size of 20 feet long and 15 feet around; within seconds it is sticking out in two places from the Necropolis (roughly the chin and shoulder blades).    Bones, rocks, dirt and tombstones spray out in all directions, while Dranko is slammed into the air.  Feather fall slows his descent, though he finds that a detached skeletal forearm is still grasping his own arm.  The Walking Necropolis bellows in annoyance, an unearthly noise that's part low screech and part grinding of old stone.  Kibi quickly summons a huge earth elemental, instructing it to grapple the walking graveyard.  The elemental looks up dubiously at the much larger enemy, tries gamely, and only ends up getting poked with jutting bones for its trouble.  Kibi follows up with an earthbolt that, like Grey Wolf's fireburst, splashes harmlessly off the monster's spell resistance.“I could maze it,” calls Aravis.  “And we could get the hell out of here.”“No,” says Dranko, trying and failing to shake loose the skeletal arm.  “It's a monstrosity.  It's our job to destroy it.”Aravis sighs and casts disintegrate, with no more luck in affecting the creature as the other party wizards.Figuring they'll get through if they keep trying, Ernie casts a ringed blade barrier around the Necropolis, eight feet in the air so the Company can still attack beneath it.   Flicker preps his ice dagger and tumbles into melee position, and as he does so nearly a dozen new undead creatures burst up out of the ground in true horror-movie fashion.   At least these are less formidable than the Walking Necropolis; they look like rotting bugbear corpses, dirt caked into their rancid flesh and exposed bones.  They glow a deep green.Morningstar grimaces.  It always gets worse before it gets better.  So thinking, she makes things a bit better by casting undeath to death.  The burst of positive energy is powerful enough that gravestones tilt away from its epicenter, and five of the newly-risen bugbears corpses are blasted to fine powder.  She follows up with a searing darkness that penetrates the Necropolis's defenses and knocks a bunch of dirt and skulls out of its midsection.  A stone-grinding growl comes from its massive unnatural bulk.The Necropolis reaches a massive arm through the blade barrier and Ernie is gratified to see the whirling force blades slice away chunks of rock and bone.  He's less thrilled as he watches the monster pluck Grey Wolf up off the ground and bring him through the blade barrier as well.  Crushed in a tombstone-filled fist and slashed up horrible by blades, Grey Wolf looks barely alive as he stares up into the dead, cavernous eyes of his enemy.Dranko activates his boots of haste and tumbles into a flanking position with Kibi's earth elemental.  He lashes out once with his whip but the attack goes awry; the skeletal arm still clutching his own arm has thrown off his balance.  Annoyed, he smashes the clinging hand away with the butt of the whip.  Aravis shakes his head before flying up under the blade barrier, avoiding a swing of the Necropolis's other arm, grabbing Grey Wolf's exposed foot, and casting dimension door.  Pop!  The two wizards arrive safely back on the ground, at the edge of the battle.The earth elemental tries to bull rush the Necropolis; it digs in with its huge stone feet and pushes with all its considerable might, enduring the cutting blades of Ernie's barrier as it does so.   It barely manages to nudge the undead mountain backward, but it's enough – the Necropolis stumbles back and gets a fresh set of wicked slices from the blade barrier.  Skulls and clods and stone chunks fall out of its body by the dozen.  Dranko just barely manages to dodge out of the way, taking some harm from the falling detritus but keeping his feet.“Hey Dranko!” calls Kibi.  “Can you dodge of cone of cold?.  You're kind of in the way.”“Yeah, go for it!” Dranko shouts back.Kibi shifts to an optimum casting position and blasts, the cone of ice catching many of the smaller bugbear corpses as well as the Walking Necropolis.  Dranko does evade the whole of the blast, ducking behind a large tombstone as body parts and dirt and some rotting entrails go flying past.  Grey Wolf, wobbly on his feet but still able to concentrate, pegs the monster with a sonic lance that blows a gaping hole through its chest.  The creature roars again, somehow managing to maintain its cohesion despite having taken some massive abuse.   Ernie steps up beneath the blade barrier and swings his sword multiple times into the Necropolis's ankle.  He carves another hole that reveals one of the many rotting corpses inside of it – and the corpse moves, like it's trying to escape!  Ernie glares for a second before a final stroke of his sword beheads the smaller body.  “Uh, guys?  I think there's something inside this thing.  When it goes down, we may want to stand back...”Flicker runs up and discharges his ice dagger into the monster, but the magic is repelled and the physical damage is pitiful.Finally the recently-risen bugbear corpses shamble forward to attack.  Two swing their rusting weapons at Morningstar, one of which scores a gash on her face.  Another opens a wound in Kibi's leg.   Two of the corpses have less luck with Ernie, their weapons scraping off his plate mail, while another two fail to penetrate the rocky hide of the earth elemental.  The remaining four swarm around Dranko, with two of them landing blows.Morningstar grasps her holy symbol and effects a greater turning; three more of the bugbear corpses are blown to dust.      Then she quickens a mass cure light wounds that restores some vitality to both Grey Wolf and Kibi.  And a good thing, too, as the Necropolis, heedless of the Lucent Tower still sticking out of its neck, targets the little creature that damaged it with the cone of cold.  It smashes an enormous fist down repeatedly on the dwarf before picking him bodily up and stuffing him into its own body.  Kibi can feel a dozen skeletal arms grasping him and trying to force him further into the mass of dirt and graves.   Scree cries out in alarm.But now Dranko has the opening and the opportunity he's been waiting for.  He casts gravestrike, which allows him to sneak attack the undead.  And he's still flanking with the earth elemental.   With his lasher training he delivers a devastating series of blows with the whip; with each hit, huge chunks of dirt and stone shower from the creature's body.   By the time Dranko makes his last whip-crack the Necropolis literally has no leg left to stand upon.  It crumbles apart as it falls, the Lucent Tower crashing down upon its remains (and barely missing Kibi, who ends up buried beneath a pile of heavy earth).From the Walking Necropolis's dissociated rubble, some thirty bodies rise to attack....to be continued...</blockquote>

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