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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2649557" data-attributes="member: 143">Gnomes to the rescue!  Eh... sorta. * * * * * Chapter 469This is crazy, crazy, crazy! that little voice in Mole’s head screamed.  The voice usually only came out at times like this, when the sensible course was just too blatantly obvious to miss.  Yet somehow, she always seemed to miss it, nevertheless…When she’d seen the Terror strike down Lok, she’d just acted, letting her instincts hurl her into a desperate maneuver in just the way that the old urdunnir had critiqued.  As the elemental monster drew back its arm, already shifting its other forward for another attack against Gaera, Mole was running up its length, following its curving course toward the Terror’s shoulder and its upper body.  She was still at a loss for how she was going to affect it; if Lok’s strikes didn’t do anything, then what could she hope to accomplish?  But she knew as clearly as she knew her own name that it was going to kill Lok and Gaera, and while she might be able to avoid it, she could not return to Uncle Cal and tell him she’d stood by while his best friend was murdered by an animated mountain. “Yaaaa!” she screamed, running across the creature’s form, rapid-firing her crossbow into what she took to be its head, the lump across the cresting wave where a twisting spiral of utter blackness was focused.  The shots did nothing, as far as she could tell; the thing did not appear to even acknowledge her.  She heard a desperate cry from below; Gaera’s voice, and sensed the creature shifting its weight, the big arm coming around to squash her, and Lok.  If Lok wasn’t already dead; could anyone have survived that slam?In frustration she threw her crossbow at it, feeling incredibly useless.  The weapon bounced off its head and vanished into the dark below, and she slipped, bouncing onto her chest in surprise, barely keeping from plummeting off of her perch to the ground far—very far!—below.  She felt a stabbing pain in her right breast.  What now? she thought, pulling herself up quickly, shifting her motion to match the movement of the creature.  Even in all the chaos and grief and fear of the moment, she was glad that no one had seen her almost fall like that.  She found the source of what had hurt her—the pebble that the old urdunnir had given her, dropped into her pocket.  It was at that moment that she finally came to the realization of what “Lord Liggett” had meant.  Stunned, she almost fell—again!—but Gaera’s second scream shook her back to reality.  This time, she thought first, a crowded insane jumble of thoughts that raced through her mind in the course of a single heartbeat.  Then she acted. The Terror’s movements had turned its “face”, if that’s what the black-spiral thingee was, away from her.  So she sprang forward and leapt, twisting her body as she passed before it, snapping the stone square into the middle of the dark pattern.  Then she was falling, and falling fast, and had to attend to not breaking her neck.  She spread her limbs wide to slow her descent slightly, and then as she reached the ground she tucked into a roll, absorbing some of the force of her fall with her legs before tumbling forward.  She detected a jutting, sharp-edged ledge that rose about a foot above the ground surface just before she would have slammed into it, and expended the last of her momentum in coming up into an easy somersault before landing on her feet. She turned and looked up.  She’d expected something at least moderately dramatic, maybe a smoking ruin where the Terror’s head had been. But the elemental monstrosity was still intact.  It just loomed there, quivering, an earthquake in place.  Mole could see that gray cracks stretched out from where she’d hit it with the magic stone, but even as she stared it seemed as though the creature was recovering, the disruption or damage or whatever she’d done to it being absorbed, overcome. “Damn, you could at least have given me a few more rocks,” she muttered under her breath.  She turned and saw Gaera bent over Lok.  The genasi was moving, now, although he was bent over on his knees and forearms.  Mole frowned—she’d give Gaera plenty of time to heal the warrior, and in terms of distractions, she’d used up her best, and apparently only, gambit that was going to work. “Gaera, look out!” Mole warned, as the Terror lurched forward once again, as if the priestess could not sense the massive form and the huge rumbling that accompanied the resumption of its assault. The priestess turned from Lok, and rose.  She called upon the power of her goddess, firing a lance of white-hot energy into its damaged face.  But like her earlier dispel evil, the beam of searing light was merely absorbed by the creature, with little apparent harm done to it. Gaera looked determined, resigned, as she lifted her mace, standing in defiance of the Terror.  But rather than attack, the black spiral twisted, and a gray beam exploded from it, sweeping over the woman, surrounding her with a soft aura that faded within just a few seconds.  And when it had disappeared, it left her changed. Turned to stone.</blockquote>

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