NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 6313234" data-attributes="member: 726">Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 386No Question About The Smoke This Time“You should have more jolly visions,” says Dranko.  Like everyone else, he finds it depressing that Azhant The Ancient has been resurrected after all the trouble they went through killing it.“Why did we even bother?” groans Morningstar.“Think of all the people Azhant would have killed between then and now,” says Ernie. “Starting with every last dwarf,” adds Kibi./*/Down the Plunge they fly, weaving between the long crystals.  Scree feels great pity for Kibi, who is obliged to travel in mistform while he gets to revel in the glory of this geologic paradise.  At half a mile down, there cease to be side tunnels, though the earth elemental tells Kibi he can sense open spaces beyond the Plunge.  If one were to bore a tunnel sideways, they could emerge into one of those spaces, but the find the path still indicates downward, and the need for haste overcomes any desire for exploration.Another two miles down, and the Company can feel their misty bodies growing a bit heavier, a bit more solid.  The wind walk is still holding, but its effects are weakening.  They descend further.At last Kibi is certain that they have reached the proper altitude, almost four and a half miles below the stomach of the Leviathan.  The find the path would have them keep flying downward, but Scree reports that less than fifty yards to the west is a large tunnel, heading more-or-less in the direction they need to go.“Find the path wouldn’t know we can just tunnel through rock,” says Ernie.  Kibi casts mass xorn movement on the party, and they slide through the rock.  “Doesn’t it feel amazing down here?” thinks Kibi over the mind-link. It’s like a warm swimming pool without the awful water.  He exults in it, though everyone else still finds it unnerving. They pop out into a large tube-shaped tunnel, thirty feet in diameter, corkscrewing away to both the north and south.  Immediately Ernie’s find the path changes its mind, now directing them to march southward.  Their altitude is nearly perfect, but they’ve overshot laterally by several miles.  But assuming this tunnel goes where they want, they’re now only a few hours' travel from Leaping Circle Nine.The tunnel is filled with a rich, earthy, organic smell, but mixed with less pleasant odors.  One of these is a faint stink of acid, and the other, weaker but more troubling, is the awful tang of Adversary blood.“Something wicked this way came,” mutters Ernie.It’s obvious that some very large creature created this tunnel, though not recently.  It charts a spiraling path into the dim mote-illuminated distance. The sense of Essence grows stronger as they progress, though not greatly.  After a half-mile of this they pass an opening into a small side-tunnel, this one only fifteen feet across instead of thirty.  The smell coming from that direction is particularly foul – a mixture of rotting fungus and earthy excrement – though the sense of Essence is no stronger.  A faint sound of slurping and squirming comes from there, punctuated with a sporadic high-pitched whining. Kibi casts greater prying eyes and sends them to investigate in all directions.  While most report only ongoing tunnel, the one sent down the side passage shows Kibi a disturbing image:  it ends some 500’ down in a pill-shaped chamber with a large pit, and that pit is full of worms. But not ordinary worms; these are four feet around and twenty feet long, with dark violet half-formed chitin. They writhe in a restless mass, occasionally stretching their bodies to scrape fungus off the high walls of the pit with their toothy maws.“It’s a nest,” says Dranko.  “Which means there’s a mommy somewhere nearby.”“Hmmm,” says Kibi. “Maybe ‘mommy’ would make a good monster for Galdifain to…”The tremor grows quickly, from a distant rumble to thundering roar in less than five seconds.  An enormous purple worm crashes through the tunnel wall, spraying the Company with a shower of rock. It’s fifteen feet around and indeterminately long.  Worse, its purple chitin is speckled with huge black patches, and strong waves of Adversary blood roll off of it.  It’s mouth is a gaping hole lined with hundreds of sharp teeth.Dranko tumbles to the side and whips it several times, while Flicker does likewise on its opposite flank. Grey Wolf quickens true strike and slashes with Bostock, channeling a maximized acid orb into the monster.  Ernie casts firestorm upon it, then quickens a blade barrier in the center of its massing coils.When all of this is done, its blood pools thickly on the ground, and huge swaths of its hard plates are sheared or burned off.  And it keeps coming, pouring out of the tunnel breach like a river, filling up the available space, crowding the Company to the edges.  It looks at Dranko, who feels the hot skin-bursting pain he has come to associate with Essence-tainted monsters.  And the infected purple worm is whip-quick for its size; its huge mouth comes swooping in, gulping down Dranko and Grey Wolf in a swift, practiced motion.  It chews them a bit, then swallows them.  Inexorably powerful muscles force them down its gullet, into the depths of its digestive system.  There are no light motes down here, but with darkvision they can see its fleshy muscles undulating, squeezing.  They are crushed, burned by acid, and bombarded with the horror of Essence. “And to think,” says Dranko.  “This isn’t even the largest stomach we’ve been in recently.”The creature’s tail finally trails into the tunnel, tipped with a wicked-looking stinger.  It whips the stinger into Morningstar’s side, and the damage is severe, but thanks to the daily heroes’ feast she is spared the brutal effects of its poison.Kibi blasts the worm with a maximized cone of cold followed by a quickened, empowered earthbolt. Morningstar cast another firestorm and quickens divine power.  It’s heavily damaged, but keeps on thrashing, looking for its next targets.  Aravis strikes it with energy drain, sapping it of lifeforce.  The worm sags and slows down; though it's holding on, the Company seems to have weathered the…Straight down from the ceiling, a second purple worm emerges, this one also infused with Adversary blood.  It seems the worm babies in the pit have two parents.  This second worm comes down directly over Ernie and Kibi, swallowing them easily, forcing them down into its hellish guts. Then it too whips its stinger into Morningstar, piercing her calf.Dranko feels his skin burned by acid, his bones bruised by the sheer power of the worm’s interior muscles.  He can’t see Grey Wolf.  Over the mind-link, he says, “Cut your own way out.  I’m going to take shelter in here.”In here?  What?Dranko’s whip is useless; he has limited motion with his arms, but no way to cut himself out. But he has just enough wiggle room to call the Lucent Tower from his haversack.  He speaks the command phrase.  “Crystal Rise.”Aravis, Flicker and Morningstar, now the only ones not inside a purple worm, are treated to an unusual sight.  The Lucent Tower bursts out of the worm in two different places, its base and its apex blasting out of the monster’s body. Normally the door would appear next to Dranko, but with no solid base, the tower has expanded in both directions at once.  Dranko grabs the bottom edge of the tower and rides it out, enduring a painful bludgeoning as he and the tower exit the worm.  He pops out looking as though he’s been smeared all over with green-black tar.Somehow the worm still isn’t dead.  Flicker stabs it again, and it thrashes spasmodically, but stubbornly clings to life.  Grey Wolf continues to become digested in its stomach.  He doesn’t have room to properly swing Bostock, but with a heroic burst of strength he digs his elbow into the fleshy wall of the worm’s stomach and levers the point of his sword against its flesh.  He channels another maximized acid orb.Having just seen Dranko and the Lucent Tower emerge from the body of the worm, Morningstar and Aravis now see a volcano of acid erupt from it some fifteen feet farther along its length.  It gives one last crazed thrash, and Dranko realizes he's going to be crushed between the Lucent Tower and the tunnel wall.  But the door to the tower is open!  He scrambles up and dives into the tower just before being mashed against its exterior.But there’s still the other worm to deal with, and it’s at full health, with Ernie and Kibi trapped in its innards.  Ernie endures the massive damage of its triple-attack of burning, crushing and Essence, and manages to concentrate just enough to fire off an energy drain.  Then he tries to quicken a heal on himself but can’t get the gestures right.  The spell fails, and his skin continues to burn.Kibi has similarly few options.  He can’t dimension door out because he cannot see his destination, and xorn movement won’t work for obvious reasons.  He’ll have to blast his way out.  He casts a maximized coldfire, enduring some of the damage himself in such close quarters.  But what choice does he have?  He quickens a maximized ray of enfeeblement, dropping the worm from “monstrously strong” to merely “amazingly strong.”  Morningstar casts yet another firestorm.  Thanks to the energy drain, the worm doesn’t resist any of the damage.  Aravis maximizes a single-target chain lightning with similar good results. He quickens a second chain lightning.  The collected damage is huge, but so is the monster’s capacity to absorb it.  Annoyed, it turns on Aravis, inflicting him with the skin-bursting Essence lesions, before swooping its head down and swallowing both Morningstar and Aravis in a single gulp.  Inexorable peristalsis forces them stomachward.Flicker looks around in a panic.  Dranko is still inside the tower. Grey Wolf hasn’t yet crawled out of corpse of the first giant worm.  The other four have all been swallowed.  For a panicky moment he can’t see any other member of the Company.  Too late he notices the huge stinger swooping down; it gouges his shoulder.  Ouch!Dranko crawls out of the tower, and sees only Flicker squaring off against the huge purple worm.  At least the mind-link is still active.“I’m sorry I can’t heal you,” thinks Morningstar.  “I’ve been swallowed.”Dranko reaches down toward the scary thing in his head, and draws on its power. “Do not Become!” something whispers.“I don’t intend to,” he says back.  He stops time.  While the world hangs in stillness, he retracts the Lucent Tower, moves over to flank with Flicker, heals himself with a wand, then readies to attack the moment time resumes.Time resumes. He strikes the purple worm with his whip.  Flicker is finally in position to make a full round of sneak attacks, and essentially carves himself a tunnel through its body.Grey Wolf wades out of the sludgy acidic gore of the first worm, and uses Bostock to heal himself.  Ernie, meanwhile, continues to dissolve.  He can feel his skin sloughing off, and that he is near to death. He tries to cast iron body but cannot concentrate well enough.  With a desperate prayer to Yondalla he quickens a cure critical wounds upon himself, and that succeeds, staving off his death a few more seconds. Kibi is also taking massive damage inside the worm, but at least his energy buffer triggered off the acid, so he’s in slightly less dire straits than Ernie.  Nevertheless, his straits are dire. He casts time stop, giving him time to gulp down a couple of old healing potions, cast lucubration to get back his cone of cold, and ready himself to cast it.  Time kicks in, and he casts his spell, empowered.  The insides of the worm are coated with frost.  The monster grumbles its displeasure.It’s unhappiness is about to grow exponentially. Aravis, dissolving like the others, focuses well enough to cast a maximized cone of cold followed by a quickened maximized lightning bolt.  The latter blasts a gaping hole in the side of the worm, sending out a spray of gore.  The worm thrashes once, twice, and flops to the ground, dead.  The others struggle free from the corpse of the worm, and are gratefully healed.  There they stand, huffing and panting, in an expanding sea of blood and viscera.“No more stomachs, please,” says Grey Wolf.…to be continued…</blockquote>

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