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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 6302220" data-attributes="member: 726">Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 379Rock StarDranko retrieves one of the fragments of Ylerba’s head as a souvenir, but there’s nothing else to loot unless one wants to start a collection of Scuttle chitin. The Drevin on the walls let out a whoop and cheer.Kibi is soon restored from his petrified state via break enchantment and he shares the dire warnings that the earth spoke.“You talked to the planet?”  asks Grey Wolf.“Well, it talked to me, but yeah, I guess you could say I chatted with Abernia.”  Kibi can’t keep a smug look from his face.“You are such a name-dropper!” says Dranko.Some of the Drevin throw rope ladders over the wall and come to the cavern floor, collecting the remaining bits of Ylerba.  Ernie thinks they shouldn’t be so overtly gleeful about the demise of a Goddess’s avatar, but Aravis disagrees. “Wlaqua has declared war on Yavin,” he says. “It’s good for the Drevin to pick a side.”The Drevin invite the Company to stay as long as they wish, and insist that they take part in a celebratory victory feast that evening.  Tired and spent, the party happily agrees.  The Drevin crowd around them, paying particular attention to Kibi, the “Dwarb” from the surface.Dranko sniffs.  “Maybe someday we’ll find a race of ‘half-erks’ down here, and they’ll want to hang around me.”Flicker grins. “I doubt it. They won’t know who you are.”Dranko glares. “I hate you so very, very much.”“Don’t feel badly,” says Aravis. “I’m happy to hang around with you.”/*/The Drevin don’t have a formal clergy, but Gehentas introduces the Company to a cleric named Folant at the celebration feast. Dozens of Drevin are packed into a low-ceilinged banquet hall, drinking, laughing and gorging themselves.Folant, like all the Drevin, recognize that the Sister Gods, Yavin and Wlaqua, are the most powerful beings in the world, but he doesn’t hold them in quite the same regard as surface dwellers do with their Gods.  He refers to Wlaqua as the “White Witch,” and that’s when he’s being polite.Someone has set the largest chunk of Ylerba as a centerpiece. Folant gestures to it. “So what did you do to get that thing on your bad side?”“Wlaqua has allied herself with our enemy,” says Aravis.Folant tugs his beard. “Huh. She’s a God. I’d expect that other beings would ally with her.”Morningstar gives a short laugh. “Our enemy is a ‘destroy the world’ type enemy.”“Literally,” adds Dranko. “Like killing every being on the planet and starting over.”“Huh,” says Folant again. “You’d think the Sisters would put aside their differences and try to put a stop to that.”“The Adversary is violent, like Wlaqua,” says Morningstar. “And has a very corrupting power.”Most of the Drevin are drawn to Kibi, and want to hear about how his devastating earthquakes laid waste to the Scuttle, but all of the Company are treated as celebrities. Only Dranko is left mostly alone; his abdication of fame to the Cleaners seems to extend even into the Underdark.  He broods a bit, hanging on to the edge of conversations, but perks up when cigars are passed around. He pulls out a Blacktallow, lights it on Ernie’s armor, and blows out a stream of smoke.It forms into words that everyone can see.  One more before she comes herself. His table grows quiet as Dranko explains how his cigars sometimes produce prophecy. Everyone is thinking the same thing.  Wlaqua will send one more avatar to stop the Company’s quest, and if it fails, Wlaqua Herself will make an appearance. It’s a disturbing notion.  One of the Drevin looks sidelong at Dranko. “Er, is there any chance you could, uh, move onward with your quest before that happens?”The Company assures the collected Drevin that yes, they won’t be staying long enough for an eventual showdown with Wlaqua to occur in Drevin territory. This restores the feast to its previous levels of merriment, and the party continues uninterrupted for another hour or more. The Drevin tell Kibi about the ancient stone tablets that speak of Dwarbs and the surface world; Kibi talks in hushed tones of the horrors of oceans (“like subterranean lakes that take weeks to cross!”); and Morningstar uses an Ellish power to show them what the night sky looks like, the demonstration of which causing some Drevin to stare in amazement, and others to run fleeing in terror from the feast hall.In the center of the table at which the Company is seated, a being appears, pop, and falls into a large pudding.  It sits up, splutters, and shakes itself off.  It’s one of the militant kobold-ish creatures from the Dreamscape.  A Keffet! The Drevin have weapons out in seconds, pointed at the confused-looking creature.  Morningstar motions them not to attack; unlike every other Keffet they’ve seen this one isn’t armed, and it has a manic look in its eyes.“Are you looking for me?” asks Morningstar.“And are you insane, or asleep?” adds Dranko.“I’m awake… mostly,” says the Keffet.  The Drevin look at it without comprehension, but the Company can understand it, thanks to the translator beads.The creature looks at Morningstar.  “Yes, I’m awake! My name is Checkle. It’s nice to see you in the… the waking sleep?  Or the sleeping world?  I… I can’t tell… anymore.”“This is the waking world,” Morningstar assures him.“For you, yes!” Checkle agrees. “But  I have fallen asleep at last, and woken up here.  I’m trying hard not to fall asleep again.”“Do you need help?” asks Morningstar.“No, not yet, but you need mine!  Or you will.  Soon.  I think.  Does it work that way in dreams, when you can’t tell?”“You are one crazy little monkey,” says Dranko.“No! I’m a Keffet!  You’ll need my help.  And I’ll make you a bargain, because I will be awake and you will be asleep, but you will be awake and I will be asleep. Then we all will be awake and they will all be asleep.  Don’t you see?”Morningstar doesn’t see, but nods politely. “Interesting.  I’ll have to think on that.”“I think I’m waking up!” says Checkle in a panic. “No!  I have to stay asleep! No, I have to stay awake!  What’s the difference?  Will you tell me the difference?”  He looks pleadingly at Morningstar.“They are both states of mind,” says Morningstar calmly.“But they’re the same.”“Not really,” says Dranko.Checkle gives Dranko a sly look. “No?  I am awake, but soon I will fall back asleep.  But when I wake again, I will give you something that you need, and you will do something for me.  For all of us!  Then we will all be asleep, and all be awake. Or maybe the other way around. And then it will all be over.” “Uh, very well,” says Morningstar, unsure of the point of all this.“Because you will want to fly!” says Checkle. “Though the rock, I mean.  And I’m almost there. I’ve almost learned it all. And when I do, I will have what you want , and then you can give me what I want, what we all want. You will fly through the rock.”  Now that is intriguing. “To reach the surface, or the core?” she asks.“The what?  What was that first one?  I don’t know that one.  It must be the other one.”“And what do you want?” asks Dranko.“An end to it all!  And victory!”  “For whom?” asks Morningstar. “For us!  For the Keffet!  Wait.  I’m waking asleep.  Or am I falling awake?  I am…”Checkle vanishes, and after a heartbeat pause the Drevin all start babbling, demanding to know what that exchange had been about, and what sort of creature Checkle was.  Morningstar takes a few minutes to explain about Ava Dormo and the Keffet civilization that’s taken up residence there.“Are they all batsh*t crazy?” asks Gehentas.“No, but they’re at war.”Once the excitement from Checkle’s unexpected visit has died down, the party turns the conversation to their pursuit of the Evil Trio.  It turns out that Seven Dark Words and his friends had appeared in Kehentohantas several months earlier, and had fled over the wall before anyone could stop or challenge them.  They were headed toward the back of the buffer cavern which this morning had been swarming with Scuttle.Morningstar explains the Leaping Circles to the Drevin, and while most of the dwarfish people aren’t familiar with them, one fellow with a long beard pipes up.  “I heard of ‘em!” he says. “One of the Myconids told me ‘bout ‘em once. Said there were magic circles here and there, that let people travel all around in the world in an instant.”He doesn't have specific knowledge of Leaping Circle 5, but the party has coordinates from the Mehar scholar Corriv. “0.7 miles anti-coreward, 6 miles lateral, 37% east 63% north,” says Aravis.  He explains that as best he can to the Drevin, who figure that’s on the far side of Scuttle territory.“We’ll just have to…” begins Dranko, when a little ball of orange flame appears hovering over the table, not far from where Checkle had appeared.“Oh, Hello!” says Dranko. “We see you!  Can you hear me?”The Drevin are starting to take this sort of thing in stride; they watch, calmly.“Someone’s trying to contact us,” Dranko explains. “We don’t know if they’re trying to kill us or not.”Unlike the previous time the ball of flame appeared, no voices emerge from it, and it’s short lived, guttering a bit like someone was pouring water over it. It winks out in less than ten seconds./*/The party spends the night in a Mordenkainen’s Mansion.  (And many of the Drevin come in for a tour, amazed at the spacious rooms and the table heaped with exotic surface food.  One enterprising Drevin takes a bite from an apple, warns his fellows off of them by loudly proclaiming it disgusting, and is caught a short while later piling them into his shirt.)  The next morning the Company makes final preparations for departure.  The Drevin give them plenty of fresh supplies, and hundreds of them stand on the Wall to see them off.“Stop back after saving the world,” says Gehentas, speaking gravely to Kibi. Kibi bows low to his hosts, and then the party is off, flying on their phantom steeds toward the far side of the great cavern.  The Scuttle have not come back to clear their dead, and the ground below them is still littered with bodies crushed and burned, and the shattered remnants of siege towers.  In a few minutes they reach the back wall of the cavern, and find it riddled with dozens, no, hundreds of holes.  Each is the mouth of a tunnel, just wide enough for a Scuttle to pass, and the tunnels worm their way off into the darkness.  Meledien & Co. must have traveled through one of them, but which one? Flicker reluctantly crawls into a few closest to ground level; each spirals away in a different direction.Morningstar peers into one.  “How are we going to fight Wlaqua?” she asks nervously. “Same way we fight everything else,” says Dranko.Morningstar thinks she might learn something from some thought captures, but only picks up the vague and alien thoughts of the Scuttle. She senses from these thoughts that the scorpions were being driven to wage war, driven against their will.“Should we just pick one at random?” asks Flicker.“No,” says Kibi.  “I have an idea.”He casts stone tell, and approaches the stone around the mouth of the closest tunnel opening.“Hello, Kibilhathur,” says the stone.“You know my name.”“All the stones know your name.”“Even down here? I’m a long way from home.  I am trying to save Abernia, and we need to find our enemies, who are trying to destroy it. They went through one of these tunnels, but we don’t know which one.”“Ah,” says the stone. “You are asking about creatures more like you, and less like the large insects?”“Yes!  Have you seen them?”“No. But there are many stones here.  Was it you?”This last question is not directed at Kibi, but at some of the rocks in the wall farther up.“No!” comes the voice of a different section stone, from higher up on the wall.  “Was it you?”Twenty or thirty lugubrious stony voices call out from around the various tunnel mouths, each repeating the question to the nearby rock.  Kibi grins at the sound.  They’re so helpful!“I think it was me!” calls the stone from near one of the highest tunnels.  “Were there three of them?”Kibi flies his Phantom Steed up to where the stone had spoken.“Hello, Kibilhathur.  I saw the three you’re looking for.  But they were in an awful, awful state, like they hardly existed!”“Oh, were they misty?” “Yes.  I don’t know how they survived!  But they traveled this way, a long way, out of the range of my consciousness.  I don’t know where the tunnel ends.”“Thank you!” says Kibi.“I’m very happy to have been of service.”“I’m going to have to go misty too, to follow them.”The stone is horrified.  “No! Kibilhathur, don’t!  Is there no other way?  I wouldn’t do it.”“Neither would I” shouts a nearby piece of granite jutting from the wall.  “Me neither!” cries another.But the Company has little choice.  Ernie casts wind walk, they leave their phantom steeds behind , and into the tunnel they go.  It’s slow going; the serpentine nature of the tunnel precludes the “fast travel” mode of the spell.  Hours go by. There are no signs of living Scuttle, but here and there are little sections of snapped-off chitin, and the insect smell is dismayingly strong.Eventually the tunnel opens into a large cave, though one not nearly so large as the Drevin buffer cavern.  Only six smaller tunnels exit from this one, and of these, only one is headed in the right direction.  With no better options, they take it, enduring several more hours of slow, misty, claustrophobic creeping.  Though the smell only gets worse, there are no sounds of Scuttle.  It’s eerily quiet.After nearly a day of this gaseous travel, the party pours out the end of the tunnel and into another enormous cavern, this one nearly as big as the one in which they fought the Scuttle.  The ceiling is barely in sight, and like the walls, is riddled with holes. There are hundreds of Scuttle-sized tunnels leading out of the cavern, and it occurs to each member of the Company that this is a pretty obvious place for an ambush.“Better here than in the tunnels, though,” says Aravis.The cavern has one significant curiosity: a collection of siege towers, maybe eight or nine, in various stages of construction.  Boulders are piled up next to them. At first this is a head-scratcher, as none of the machines would come close to fitting through the tunnels.  But as the party wafts slowly out to investigate, they see that each engine is of a different design, and that the more primitive ones are more incompletely built.  The only fully intact catapult is identical to the model the Scuttle were using to assault Kehentohantas. “It’s a catapult laboratory,” says Grey Wolf. Kibi looks around nervously.  At least, if this is a Scuttle ambush, they’ll hear the clattering of scorpion feet well in advance. The smell is musty and foul, like the inside of a cage of snakes. The only sounds are those of their own footsteps, their own breath.“I guess it’s not an ambush,” says Flicker.He’s wrong. It’s an ambush. Mostly from the ceiling, but somewhat from the holes high on the walls, comes… something strange.  They look like thin blankets, some three feet on a side, flapping in an unseen wind as though loosed from a drying line. They make no sound as they emerge, but as they get closer the noise of their fluttering grows louder. They easily number in the hundreds. Each one is glowing aquamarine, and heading in a mostly straight line for Dranko.“See?” says Kibi to Dranko.  “You get attention too!”…to be continued…</blockquote>

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