Hurath's Tower... Final
Merideth struggled in vain among the thick, reddish strands as fist-sized spiders swarmed over her. Athan and Greppa, having managed to avoid getting completely stuck, were nonetheless trapped as the spiders jumped on them. And the spider began spitting some kind of paralytic, thin webbing at Greppa (he ignored it).
And then Merideth got all angry and still. Green lightning began flashing from her fingers, and slowly but surely, one spider after another quivered and died under her hostile life spells.
Greppa and Athan, perhaps taking heart from her example, swung into action.
Greppa summoned a shadow servant and instructed it to pull spiders off of him. Then he tried his only new spell, shadow strands, to turn the tables on the spider... And then he focused on Hurath's conjuring plate, on one of the laboratory tables. Sure enough, there was a puckered hole, dimly red on the other side, floating in the air above the platter.
While the others fought, he sent a lesser shadow killer to smash the plate... and the got down to the business of shoving as many lesser shadow killers down the big spider's throat as he could before he went down.
Athan, shouting incoherently (in orcish?), swelled with primal fury and shoved his way through webs he could not have otherwise broken. Ignoring the spiders climbing on his flesh, he went, spear in hand, for their leather-skinned master.
Suddenly far more on the defensive than it intended, the rune-marked spider faded into the web's shadows around it, neatly circumventing Greppa's strands. Athan howled and looked around, spotted it, chased it...
Until it finally appeared next to Greppa, and Athan, desparately, hurled his spear through the webbing and impaled it to the table next to Greppa, preventing its further escape.
The black spider died shortly thereafter, and its infernal, heat-resistant webbing dissolved into a sticky, but harmless, mass with its death.
The three grinned at each other.
The remainder of the afternoon was spent cleaning out the tower. The library was particularly tricky, due to all of the cramped shelving and Greppa's unwillingness to use torches near the precious books and unbound scrolls, but they triumphed. Brown-furred spiders of all sizes were systematically cornered and killed.
Afterwards, Greppa spent some time in the library, reading about the infernal realms, summoning spells, and hell hunters.
From Hurath's Journal...
"Test 3: My observations from last week were very profitable, and the infernal fire spell is working like a charm. I have opened a more or less permanent eyehole into the other's workshop, and I am certain he does not suspect it's presence, as it is at floor level, about the level of a mousehole, and I keep it closed whenever I am away."
They checked Hurath's study, particularly the desk, and Greppa grabbed two useful looking potions, both resembling milk of magnesia, but forbid Athan and Merideth to take anything else. And despite Merideth's covert glances, she didn't cut off the big spider's rune-marked leather.
"We don't know that Hurath's really gone. I'll just clean the place up a bit, make sure there's no other nasty surprises waiting to develop, and then we'll go."
Greppa also took some of Hurath's hidden money, and left an IOU for the money and potions. And after that, there was little left to do but plan for their first foray into adventuring.
. And I don't think you're weird.
