Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 6308998" data-attributes="member: 726">Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 382“What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?”Dranko’s detour into the Far Realms is shorter this time, and his memory of it is sparse – lurking madness, shimmering stars, things.  Then that is replaced by a nostril-puckering fume of acid and a stinging prickle on his skin.  He and the others are standing knee deep in some kind of cloudy liquid, in a dark, damp space surrounded by organic looking walls. There are no light motes; the Company can only see because Aravis has been diligently casting mass darkvision every morning.The water-walking function of Dranko’s ring of elemental command kicks in; he rises to the surface.  Everyone else is starting, slowly, to dissolve. The acrid odor is strong enough to bring tears to their eyes.  Floating in the water with them are hundreds of fish bones, the flesh dissolved from them.  The “roof” above them is glistening, a thick liquid dripping from it. Some forty feet away, in that ceiling, a tunnel leads up and out.  Another tunnel, off in the other direction, snakes away and downward.“We’re in something’s stomach,” Ernie observes.Flicker’s eyes grow wide. “Even a Ventifact Colossus wouldn’t have a stomach this big… uh, would it?”He’s right; a creature with a stomach this size would dwarf one of the Great Sand Turtles from the Mouth of Nahalm.  Dranko shakes his head in disbelief, then uses his ring to cast control water, lowering the level of the acid so that his friends are no longer melting.The room shakes, and there’s a sudden sound like thunder.  A huge slurry-fall comes gushing out of the tunnel above, disgorging a pungent effluvia mixed with rocks, fishbones, clumps of something organic but unidentifiable, and half an old rowboat.  “Yup,” says Dranko. “We’re in a giant monster.”On their clothes and skin, a film of something like dust is accreting. Whorls of it are drifting around them, settling on them, pulled in as though each member of the Company is exerting a local gravity.“We should get out of here,” says Aravis.  Ernie casts wind walk on them, and they float up toward the ceiling tunnel, figuring it’s better to try exiting the monster’s mouth than its nether regions.  As they float, the dust tries to mix in with their airy forms.  It stings.The tube – which they assume is the esophagus – bends this way and that but goes more or less straight upward, its walls covered with undulating cilia the size of human forearms. Dranko takes the time to resolidify, since he can climb as fast as the others can waft, and now he can spray away the stinging dust with his decanter of endless water.  The only trouble comes when something plummets down the shaft toward him – it’s the half-digested body of a huge shark. He squeezes himself into the repulsively slimy wall of the tube as it falls past him.Wait… it was already half-digested?“We arrived in its second stomach,” he says.  “There must be another one up there.”Sure enough, they emerge into second stomach-like chamber, larger than the first, filled knee-deep with sludgy acid.  An extruded fleshy lip prevents the liquid from draining constantly into the lower stomach. This place is full of chum, mostly sharks and other large fish in various stages of digestion. These remains are pushed gently along by cilia poking up from the acid, and when enough stuff is ready to the make the journey, the lip retracts and a gout of material gets flushed.Then more stuff comes down from yet another tube in the ceiling.  Eight or nine grayish green blobs, roughly man-sized, drop to the floor with loud plopping sounds. They rise up amorphously, and fire off blobs of goo at Dranko, who is the only physically solid member of the Company.  He is entirely enveloped in a thick jelly-like substance.  He feels his flesh start to dissolve, and his muscles freeze up.  His decanter is gummed up and won’t activate.Dranko fights down a flashback to the time he was similarly paralyzed in the center of a gelatinous cube. “I can’t move, and I’m being digested,” Dranko thinks to the others over the mind-link. Ernie dismisses the wind walk so they can free Dranko.  Grey Wolf quickens a sound lance, firing it at Dranko’s gelatinous cocoon.  It bursts in a splattery explosion, and (as a bonus) buffers Dranko from the damage.  Dranko topples onto his side, but doesn’t sink into the acid because he’s still water walking.Grey Wolf follows up with a chain lightning, fired into the cluster of huge antibodies.  All are damaged, but none are destroyed. Kibi follows with a maximized cone of cold, but the antibodies seem immune to cold. His spell does precipitate a rumbling shake of the entire stomach.  Kibi follows up with a quickened wall of force, the placement of which is calculated to give them partial cover from the jelly-blasting blobs.Dranko reminds the others over the mind-link that even paralyzed he can activate the prismatic spray function of his helm of brilliance. The only problem is, he’s lying down with his back to the enemy.  Flicker runs up and flips Dranko around, the half-orc's body rolling slickly on the surface of the acid.  Dranko fires his spell.Most of the antibodies are struck with beams of either acid or fire, both of which they are immune to. They cannot be sent to another plane, nor can they be poisoned. As such, only two of the things are neutralized, one turned to stone and sinking beneath the  surface, and another blasted to bits by electricity.  Seven still remain.Ernie activates the flight power of his shield, flies up and out of the acid, and casts a quickened mass cure moderate wounds.  Then Aravis finishes the fight with a maximized chain lightning that rips through all seven remaining antibodies.  The threat taken care of, Morningstar wades to Dranko, takes off one of the magic rings he wears, and replaces it with a ring of freedom of movement.Ernie recasts wind walk on the party, though Dranko stays solid so he continue spraying the acid-dust off the others before it can do its damage.  Morningstar casts water breathing on everyone, figuring that eventually, if all goes well, they’ll be emerging into a body of water.Up they waft, though yet another organic tube.  The smell continues to be nearly overpowering, a potent reek of acid and rotting fish.  Sixty feet up, and the tunnel narrows and ends abruptly.  The Company has reached a fleshy ceiling with spiraling creases arranged in an iris. “It’s a sphincter,” says Dranko.  He activates his immovable rod, perches, and examines the obstruction, prodding and poking it to see if it will open.  It does not.“On the other side of the sphincter is a magical land of sunshine and honey,” he says.  “No, just kidding, it’s probably seawater.”“Should we be worried about getting chewed up once we reach its mouth?” asks Flicker, worried.“I doubt it,” says Ernie. “All the sharks here are whole, just dissolving. This creature probably just swallows its food whole.”  Without warning the sphincter irises open and a powerful gush of liquid, fish and detritus comes blasting downward like a water-cannon.  Dranko just barely manages to hold on to the immovable rod, which prevents him from getting knocked back down to the upper stomach, though some large chunk of soggy fungus-wood bruises his shoulder.  The others, in gaseous form, are buffeted downward somewhat but manage to stay in the general vicinity.  After ten seconds of this, the sphincter slams shut, leaving only a gurgling sound beneath them.“Hmm,” muses Aravis. “What happens if you cast knock on a sphincter?”  He solidifies long enough to try it, but it doesn’t work.  In fact, this proves to be an extremely difficult puzzle to solve. The nature of the Underdark precludes casting dimension door or teleport to any location you cannot currently see.  But while the sphincter is open, the tunnel is filled entirely with liquid, and there’s no line of effect to the far side of it.  And the sheer power of the water blasting downward prevents them from swimming upward during the ten-second windows while the sphincter is open.  Dranko tries casting a wall of ice in the opening, and manages the split-second timing to get it set, but the sphincter merely seals around it, eventually crushing and dissolving it.  During the next flushing of stuff Dranko is nearly knocked away from the immovable rod by, of all things, a large fungus-wood door that accompanies the fish and seawater.“I officially hate this place more than Mouth of Nahalm,” he says.“We’re expected to fight a God,” says Morningstar. “And yet we can’t get out of the stomach of a giant monster.”The sphincter is opening like clockwork, spiraling open every seventy-one seconds, and staying open for nine.  Dranko is protected from acid, but soon grows weary of  being sprayed with a sludge of dead fish and sundry debris.  The Company wracks their collective brains, wondering how they’ll get past this obstruction.  (They have considered simply hacking their way out, but there is some worry about drawing more of the creature’s natural defenses toward them.)When the lightbulb goes off, it’s over Aravis’s head.  He explains his plan, and the others agree to try it.Kibi comes out of gaseous form and clings to the immovable rod.  Dranko helps to brace him. With timing that only someone with a superhuman intelligence could muster, Kibi casts a solid-walled forcecage as the sphincter opens, such that half of its interior is below the sphincter and half above.  He gets his spell off just as the blasting inverted geyser smashes him downward. He tumbles, but like Dranko he is saved from a plunge to the stomach by the bottom of the forcecage.  One small difficulty: when the spell went off, almost all of its area was filled with liquid.  As such, the entire company is now encased in a forcecage filled almost completely with acid. Breaths are held. The good news is, the sphincter cannot close around the middle of the box of force, and they can swim to the top of the enclosure, which is on the far side of the sphincter.  Partial success! Aravis enacts stage two, casting rope trick in the six-inch sliver of air at the top of the forcecage.  One by one they rise up into it, until everyone is safe in the extradimensional pocket space.Finally, Kibi sticks his head back out into the box of acid, long enough to dismiss the forcecage.  Now, when they depart the rope trick, they’ll be in the space above the sphincter.  Kibi reports that wherever they are now, it’s (unsurprisingly) underwater.Dranko wants to scout, but needs to time things so he doesn’t end up getting sucked back down through the sphincter. He ties a long length of thick rope around his waist and dives out. The liquid is still acidic enough to prevent water-breathing, so he holds his breath.He goes shooting upward through opaque liquid and pops out on its surface some forty feet higher. He’s in a cavernous space, so wide he cannot see any walls, but above him, near the outer range of his darkvision, is the ceiling of yet another stomach, with a wide tube snaking away upward.“How many stomachs does this thing have?”Around him, the surface of the “water” is clogged with remains. Dozens of shark carcasses float with him, bobbing in a surface layer of dead fish, wads of fungus, and shells of giant tortoises.  Dranko thinks he sees a skeletal humanoid leg poking up fifteen feet to his left.  The place stinks like a devil’s bait-house.The water level drops a bit as far below him the sphincter opens and sucks down a few thousand gallons of flotsam.  Concurrently, a hail of objects comes from above – it’s a hail of sharks, many of which are thrashing in the air. Surprisingly little water comes  with them. The sharks are alive! (At least, before the acid kills them.) The Company must be close to escaping.  Dranko dives and swims back down, returning to the rope trick.  “This is the best dungeon ever!  How many places have we ever been where sharks rain from the sky?”Everyone returns to mist-form, leaves the pocket-dimension, and bubbles up to the latest “surface.”  In the first ten seconds after they emerge, three discrete loads of stuff get dumped in with them.  One consists only of small grey fish, over a thousand of them.  Another is tons of crumbly fungus.  The final looks like a combination of green moss and pebbly rocks.“It has three mouths?” guesses Morningstar.  “Two land mouths and a sea mouth?”“Maybe it’s an extradimensional monster?” adds Dranko.Onward and upward!  They race through one last esophageal tube, and finally, high above them, they can see light motes.  All at once they emerge into the bowl of a two-hundred-yard wide mouth.  Something like a fine-meshed fishing net, thirty yards across, looms over them.  Is it trying to catch them?  No, they can see the net is full of fish of varying sizes.  A fleshy tentacle serves as the handle of the net, a tentacle that snakes off into the darkness where, one presumes, it’s connected to the body somewhere.  The net flips over and dumps tons of fish into the impossibly-wide mouth.Thirty long tongues slither through the bottom of the mouth, shoveling the masses of fish, fungus, and everything else the nets have scooped, toward dozens of gaping esophagi. More of the organic nets are coming in from every direction, each unloading its cargo of foodstuffs into the world’s largest mouth.The Company rises high above the Underdark Leviathan, the single largest creature on Abernia, the scourge of the Hidden Sea and all the surrounding regions.  Its head rises from the sea, but its enormous body, which must stretch for miles, is hidden beneath the dark waters.Dranko can’t help himself.  He comes out of wind-form and activates the immovable rod.  Perched there near the ceiling above the Hidden Sea, he calls pen and parchment from his haversack and scribbles out a note.  “Dranko was here.”  He pops the note into a vial and lets it fall into the Leviathan’s mouth.Now that Kibi is near to the solid stone of the Underdark, he regains his perfect sense of where they are.  They are almost four miles deeper than Leaping Circle Five, but to reach the location of Leaping Circle Nine, they’ll need to go down even further, another four miles, and sixteen miles generally southwest.Dranko frowns.  “We should have gone out its butt.”…to be continued…</blockquote>

Verification