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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6725195" data-attributes="member: 11697">“F*ck!” Florian screamed as Clueless’s lifeless body fell to the ground like a beheaded rag doll discarded by a yeth hound.Cackling in her moment of gory success, the nightingale that was Taba burst forth from the branches of its elm tree bower and rocketed across the meadow. In the confusion and panic its deathblow had caused, the altraloth passed through the now open portal and vanished, with the archway bursting forth a shower of light as she entered.“Clueless?!” Fyrehowl yelped as she looked down at the splatter of the half-fey’s brains now on her clothing.Nisha dashed to the corpse, frantically babbling in panicked Xaos speech, picking up pieces of shattered skull and pulped brain like puzzle pieces she might somehow, someway put them back to the way they were.“It’s alright Nisha.” White as a ghost but remaining a sense of calm where his girlfriend had thrown her own to the wind, Tristol knelt behind the tiefling and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get your hands messy. Florian can bring him back, just as good as new.” Without making eye contact with Nisha, he turned back to look, pleadingly at the cleric.“I. Don’t. Know…” She mouthed as she pulled out her holy symbol and began half-praying, half-begging her divine patron Tempus to return her companion to life, alive and whole once again.A golden nimbus flowed from the holy symbol and covered the body. Bits of brain, blood, and bone evaporated and regenerated or simply crawled back into place from where they’d fallen, slowly stitching themselves back together until Clueless was once again whole.“Please come back big brother…” Nisha whispered.The stars overhead twinkled in sympathy it seemed and a sudden rush of wind blew across the meadow, stirring the grass and flowers. The wind grew still and with a gasp of surprise and shock on his lips, Clueless inhaled.“Motherf*cker!” Clueless was livid with anger as he opened his eyes. “Motherf*cking ‘loths! Every f*cking one of them! AAARRRGGHHHH!” His lips pursed with another pending torrent of curses, this time in a decidedly vulgar and dark dialect of sylvan.In the flickering light of the still active portal, Clueless balled his fists and pounded them into the ground. Fyrehowl put a hand down to help him up as Florian kissed her holy symbol, uncertain if under normal circumstances she’d have been capable of actually bringing the bladesinger back given the creature which had killed him. A moment of grace from the Foehammer might have been at play.“F*ck Taba.” Clueless spat as he took the lupinal’s hand. “That f*cking hurt!”“You’re alive and you have something new to add to your list of things to kill and keep killing until they give up.” Toras extended the bladesinger a second hand and helped him to his feet.“That’s a lot of f*cks.” Nisha giggled. “You might get shushed by angels, but this is the Beastlands. It’s a chaotic place. Sort of. I’ll vouch for you.”“Thanks?” Clueless looked up at the Xoasitect that he considered nothing-so-much as his little sister and smiled.Nisha’s tail rattled the bell at its tip and she returned his smile warmly. “Welcome back.”Toras glanced towards the portal. “Shall we go after that thing now?”“Sounds good to me.” Clueless picked up Razor and wiped it clean of his own blood onto the grass. “But this time, let’s be a bit more wary. I don’t want to run into another ambush.”“Let’s go then. Everyone be ready!” Toras shouted as he dashed towards the archway.No sooner of course had Clueless jinxed the entire party by uttering the words ‘ambush’, Toras and Florian along with their respective bags of holding were the first to dive through the portal that Taba had carefully crafted centuries earlier as a hidden entry point to one of her many refuges and boltholes across the planes. The portal, while active, was dual keyed such that any creature could activate the portal by proximity and intent, but only the presence of a second and very specific key would prevent it from redirecting them to another location. In the case of that particular portal, it would lead them to a closed extradimensional space which would normally cause them to eventually suffocate and die, except of course for the presence of their own extradimensional spaces in the forms of bags of holding.Taba had no intention of being followed without throwing up a deadly array of metaphorical deadfalls in her pursuer’s paths.--BOOM!--The laws of reality preventing the overlapping of such freakish planar geometry, and the result was a explosion of Astral energies and a rejection of entry into the bound space.“F*ck!” Toras shouted as he and the others were forcibly expelled from the portal in firestorm of roaring flames and raw force.As the group collectively picked themselves up, groaning from burns and bruises, their chorus of discomfort was soon joined by shouts of anger as the sky began to rain not just the bones of those few random mortals who had fallen prey to the portal since its construction but also coins and random assorted items: the contents of their now destroyed and dispersed bags of holding and handy haversacks. Relatively little seemed to have been lost, but it would take time to recover it all, and even more time or expense to repair or replace the destroyed bags.Picking himself off of the ground and brushing dirt and soot from his hair, Alex winced in pain and looked across at his new companions, “It just gets more and more interesting being around you folks doesn’t it?”“Oh you haven’t seen us at our best!” Nisha chirped with a grin, completely nonplussed by the current events.“What in the blazes just happened?” Florian demanded as she began casting the first in a series of healing spells.Tristol was already next to the glowing portal, whispering divination magic and trying to determine the answer to that same question. The answer was obfuscated behind a layer of misleading magic woven into the stones by the altraloth, hiding the trap from casual inspection and dooming any who attempted access.“The portal was keyed.” Tristol explained, turning back with a sigh. He knew the key and they didn’t have it. “Without the proper key it redirects you to an extraplanar space.”“Hence the explosion.” Alex chipped in with a sigh.“What’s the key?” Clueless asked.“Nothing we happen to have.” Tristol frowned.“Ok, but what is it?” Toras tapped his fingers against the pommel of his sword with impatience.The aasimar’s ears drooped, “The blood of a greater yugoloth.”“Oh…” Fyrehowl’s ears drooped to match Tristols.Clueless smirked, “How convenient for Taba…”“Sh*t…” Toras hung his head and sighed.Seconds passed into a minute and the grumbling and muttering continued. The wind picked up against, rustling grass and hair with equal measure. That was when the cleric paused and beamed a smile.“I know where we can get some!” Florian tapped a finger to her forehead. “Quick! Back to Sigil!”****Nestled in a quaint corner of the Lower Ward as it had for centuries, and having rarely wandered more than a few blocks from there at The Lady’s whim, The Friendly Fiend magic and curio shop stood open for business. Having only opened the doors moments earlier and switched the dangling placard from ‘closed’ to ‘open’, the titular smiling and oddly talkative and downright cheerful yugoloth brushed with a broom at the night’s ashfall from the nearby smokestacks and workshops from the stoop.“That looks almost ready to go.” Akin muttered to himself as he looked down at the freshly brushed and cleaned doormat. “Hmm, or not perhaps.” He paused and focused his mind, taking a finer grained approach and flicking away a few errant, singular grains of dirt and snowflakes of soot and ash with a momentary finger’s flick of telekinesis. “Now we’re ready to open.”The ‘loth turned and walked back into his shop, the opening of the door ringing the polished brass bell situated above it. A faint glimmer of force walls lay across the surface of each shelf and hemispherical shells draped each table surface. Given the not-infrequent periodicity that his shop suffered from “random” firebombings or spontaneous mob violence in the middle of the night, the otherwise obnoxiously overwrought use of magic to protect the shop’s knickknacks and curios seemed downright judicious. With a casual flick of his claws, the ‘loth triggered the permanent protections to toggle off until closing. “It should be interesting to see who comes in today.” A’kin mused to himself as he walked away from the door and across the shop. “It always is.”Just as the Friendly Fiend stepped behind the proprietor’s counter, his ears swiveled in warning. Suddenly, the shop’s door swung open hard enough to hit the front wall and partially rebound as Florian rushed inside.“Akin!” She shouted, “We need your blood!”“AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” A’kin shrieked in horror as he dove behind the counter, not turning around to see who had burst shouting into his shop. The claws of his feet scrabbled against the wooden surface to carry him across and over, and with a soft whimpering noise, a single hand reached back over, wildly waving a wand in warning.“Dude! No! I’m so sorry!” Florian called out, realizing her error.“A’kin it’s just us.” Clueless added in, “We’re not thieves or well dressed tiefling assassins in service to anyone who doesn’t like you.”Warily, the ‘loth poked his head over the edge of the counter. Once he recognized who it was he seemed to calm down at least somewhat, catching his breath and finally giving a soft, self-effacing chuckle at his actions. “What’s this about now?”“He’s just so obnoxiously friendly!” Nisha giggled as she strolled around the shop with a delicate clip-clop of her hooves. “Even if he thinks that we’re here to rob or murder him. It’s so cute!”“We don’t have a lot of time.” Clueless explained, unconsciously rubbing the back of his head where the altraloth had sent a bolt of lightning through his skull. “We’re chasing something that went through a keyed portal.”Toras put his fist down on the counter in front of A’kin, “You can help us with that.”“Maybe? Perhaps?” A’kin twitched his whiskers in confusion, “What sort of portal key do you need?”“The blood of a greater yugoloth.” Florian explained. “Hence my bursting into here.”“Well now,” A’kin’s ears perked in surprise and rubbed his well-manicured hands together with slight unease, “That’s rather specific isn’t it?”“You’re the only greater yugoloth that we know.” The cleric explained before Toras added in a choice qualifying comment of his own.“You’re the only one we know who isn’t a gigantic flaming b*tch.” Toras made a face. “Over the edge of Sigil, one of these days I swear.”The ‘loth gave a short bow and allowed himself a smile at the latter comment of comparison. Inwardly he laughed as well as smiled at the visual it brought to mind.“It was either we come to you or else we wander around the Hive and jump a nycaloth with potentially dubious results.” Nisha shrugged. “It’s much more fun to visit you. Also there’s less ooze portals.”Pausing a moment, A’kin reached up a claw to adjust his glasses before glancing at Clueless’s ankle and the residual magic that radiated from the artifact lodged there. He twitched his whiskers with some curious concern but otherwise gave no comment.“So do you think you can help us out with the blood thing?” Nisha quipped, “It’s an odd request sure. Hopefully it won’t be too much to ask. I’ll even return the things that I snagged from you the other week.”“I think I have just the thing.” A’kin smiled as he walked towards the curtain leading back into his stock room. “Give me just a moment. And no worries Nisha, I know that you bring things back evening. Even if you don’t, they find their way back here on their own eventually. Don’t you worry about it.”Nisha smiled as she shamelessly swiped a large red and white peppermint candy that A’kin had left on the countertop just within her reach as he walked off.Several minutes later A’kin emerged from the back of the shop cradling a large, sealed glass bottle. Drifting within its murky, preservative-filled interior, sat the gnarled form of a severed nycaloth hand. “This should serve you just perfectly for opening a portal keyed as you say it is.”Fyrehowl tilted her head to the side and raised an eyebrow skeptically, “Why do you have a pickled nycaloth hand?”“Best not to ask.” A’kin shrugged. “It’s a long story, but it’s hardly the strangest thing I’ve got stuffed into a dusty corner or another in the back. You’ll get more use out of this than I will. I was just using it as a paperweight back there to be perfectly honest.”Florian gingerly took hold of the bottle, staring at the hand contained within, worried that at any moment it might twitch and try to escape. “You sure this will work?”A’kin shrugged. “I don’t see why not really. If it doesn’t, come back and we’ll see if I can’t help out some other way. Hopefully you’ll be good to go with that old thing though.”“Ohm kaye, shounds wike a pwan.” Nisha slurred, moving the candy around her mouth with a cheerful smile on her face.“What she meant to say was thank you very much A’kin.” Tristol extended a hand to the fiend who took it, shook it, and walked back behind the counter.“You’re very much welcome, and whatever of whoever it is that you’re hunting, best of luck to you.” A’kin smiled cheerfully. “At the very least make sure that Nisha gets back in one piece. She still owes me a lot of things she walked off with last week, and I still owe her a chocolate mephit she actually paid for.”“A chocolate mephit?” Tristol peered at A’kin and then turned to Nisha to ask the same question, “A chocolate mephit? Really now?”The tiefling hung her head in shame as she poked her stomach as if she had an exaggerated paunch from eating too many sweets, even as the peppermint candy made a slight bulge against the inside of her cheek.“A chocolate mephit.” A’kin shrugged. “They’ve been rather popular lately. Milk chocolate with a filling themed to whatever particular type of mephit it happens to be. Nisha wanted a raspberry filled fire mephit.”Tristol laughed.“I hate to change the topic of conversation.” Florian motioned towards the door. “But we need to catch an archfiend.”A’kin quirked an eyebrow at the mention of “archfiend” but otherwise remained quiet for the second time in nearly as many minutes. Ignoring or simply not noting his silence on the matter, the group took their portal key in a jar and made for the door.“Best of luck to you!” A’kin called out after them. “Come back soon!”*****From Sigil to Faunel to Karasuthra, the time passed quickly and Tristol’s teleportation aided the transit immeasurably. From when Taba had ambushed them to when they stood once again before her portal, now with the proper key, it was less than an hour.“Everyone be ready.” Clueless warned them as Florian held up the nycaloth hand and pressed it past the margins of the bound space. The portal flickered and opened, this time with a distinctly different hue to the glow emanating from its boundaries.“I rather strongly suspect that Taba isn’t the sort of creature to only put into place a single ambush.” Alex remarked. “She’s probably waiting on the other side.”“I wouldn’t put it past her.” Toras drew his sword and made for the portal. “See you all on the other side.”“Let’s go.” Florian called out as she dove in after the fighter.They had the correct key. A’kin had supplied them well. Taba however was not a creature to leave any route of egress open for easy or swift pursuit, and as soon as they emerged from the portal into the altraloth’s demiplane, they realized these facts immediately.A labyrinth of twisting glass corridors greeted them, glittering and embossed with softly glowing runes and upon the floor below them, a prominent symbol of a series of clustered wheels, each of them broken and shattered in a mockery of the Oinoloth’s conspiracy.All of these details were however secondary –if even noticed at all– as they each screamed in agony as the acid which filled the entire volume of the demiplane began to drown and devour them in its corrosive embrace. Six seconds later the runes on the walls began to glow red and the acid began to boil.*****</blockquote>

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