bluegodjanus
Explorer
Shemeska said:
Buying WotC? I live about 40 miles south of their HQ. Need anybody there abducted for "re-education"?
Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Buying WotC? I live about 40 miles south of their HQ. Need anybody there abducted for "re-education"?
demiurge1138
Inventor of Super-Toast
Emphasis mine.Gez said:
In the words of the dabus (another except from the Dabus-Common Phrasebook), "Awl+C Meat-T A 'Dog-G Boot-T' Egg+N Hand-H Isle Kilt-T Ewe".
Ahh... I love Uncaged.
Demiurge out.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Krafus said:
That one was just a statue. About half of the statues where actual creatures in temporal stasis or turned to stone, and the other half were normal statues with illusory componants to demonstrate their nature in life. However it wasn't always the weak ones that were the real thing held in stasis.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Dakkareth said:
My geuss (Likely incorect) is whatever killed the Marut probably also bespelled the various exemplars in that chamber. Killing a marut is no mean feat, and neither is placing a powerful fiend in stasis, and there are not all that many beings out there which could do either or both (assuming that both cases are the work of an individual, and yes, I know that there are actualy a ton of beings capable of that sort of thing, but given the size of the planes, they are proportionaly uncommon).
Shemeska
Adventurer
Take a look into my bag of wonders, I'll pull out something special just for you...
“Tempus doesn’t need to worry because I’m not going near that thing…” Nisha said as she backed away from the statue of the Baernaloth.
Clueless glanced at Tristol and then Tristol glanced at Fyrehowl, but none of them had any knowledge of what type of yugoloth the statue was meant to represent. But even without that knowledge, the thing gave them a cold feeling.
“It isn’t a real one, there’s no dweomer on it.” Tristol said as he peered at the largest of the yugoloth statues with relief in his voice. “That ones just a statue.”
“Still doesn’t answer what it actually is though. One of the unique ‘loths? A former Oinoloth maybe? I guess it kind of looks like Anthraxus…” Florian mused.
“Not sure, but that little refrain does seem to summarize their nature… rotten hearted little bastards…” Clueless stated.
“I don’t recognize some of the … things… mixed in with the Baatezu either. And I don’t have any intention of touching them to find out anything.” Tristol said.
“Alright…” Skalliska said as she glanced at the exit, “Shall we forgo any mammalian curiosity to do something dangerous and dumb and perhaps start moving again?”
Toras smiled and patted the kobold on the head as he walked past her to the exit. She nipped her teeth at the air.
As they walked into the next chamber their sense of dread vanished and was replaced with an equal amount of amazement and wonder. The ‘room’ was a corridor, really a walkway, which hung suspended through the center of a massive model of the torus of Sigil itself. Each of the streets, all of the buildings and even the razorvine was modeled down to the last cobblestone. And the model was slowly rotating to give those standing on the walkway a chance to examine every one of the wards in turn.
“Whoa…” Clueless said with a giddy grin.
They all stared transfixed with the level of detail on the diorama, and then they noticed suddenly that the city was crawling with illusory figures of the inhabitants: tieflings, humans, fiends, celestials, rogue modrons, and all the others right down to the dabus patching holes in the roads. Enraptured by the tiny moving figures making their way through the city they realized that it was a living model of Sigil as it currently existed. The illusory people were doing the same things that their real counterparts were doing in the actual City of Doors.
“Oh cool! There’s Kylie the Tout!” Nisha said with a giggle as she pointed to the ubiquitous guildmistress of the Tout’s guild as she strolled through the Lower Ward.
“Hmm…” Clueless said as he pointed up towards the tiny sign outside A’kin’s shop several streets over. “I wonder if you can see inside the shop and find out what he’s really up to?”
Florian laughed, “Yeah just pop the roof off and look in. Probably catch A’kin taking a bath or feeding starving kittens or something amusing like that. He’s a nice guy.”
Fyrehowl gave a wry grin, “He’s different. I’ll grant him that.”
They chuckled some and continued to glance around at the various wards of the city, every so often managing to pick out notable individuals of the city. However they did notice two things: there was no figure of The Lady present at all regardless of how many times the city rotated around them. They passed it off as probably a good thing. And then there was the fact that the Dabus seemed to look up at them as they watched them working…
Nervous glances were exchanged.
“Maybe it’s just something enchanted into the magic of the model?” Clueless mused nervously.
“Creepy. Very.” Florian said.
Nisha squealed and pointed at the tiny illusory figure of Factol Rhys as she walked out of a building in The Lady’s Ward. The tiefling waved at the factol with a giggle, and then the tiny figure of Rhys paused and looked around as if she had noticed or felt that she was being observed. Nisha immediately stopped and looked over to Fyrehowl.
Fyrehowl smiled and had a similar look of amazement in her expression as she answered, “I wouldn’t put it past her to have noticed that. The last time someone tried to assassinate her she acted to stop it before the berk had released the arrow from his bow. She just stepped out of the way of one, caught another and kept right on talking to the people she was with. She doesn’t think about it, she just acts instinctively, and she feels that all the time. You’ve seen me go into a trance. Rhys never leaves that state of mind.”
Nisha nodded, but the idea that the model might have some actual connection to the city and its inhabitants had made them wary of looking at it too closely. After a few more minutes of looking and then gleefully finding their own inn and the spelljammer sticking out of its roof they smiled proudly and passed through the model and out the exit.
Ahead, the passage branched in two directions, and much to Nisha’s content the group chose one of them at random to proceed down. Moments later they discovered that the other passage sealed itself off the moment they had made their choice.
“Lovely. So much for going back if we don’t like this one.” Skalliska muttered as they continued.
They walked for several more minutes and noticed a slight dip in the ambient temperature, and then a slight trace of moisture on the floor as they approached a larger room at the corridor’s end.
“Fog?” Toras asked with a perplexed expression.
“The hell with the fog. I smell trees…” Fyrehowl said with a sniff at the air. “Evergreens.”
And sure enough, the corridor opened into a massive, dimly lit natural cavern that resembled nothing so much as a forest plucked up from a prime world and deposited inside an underground labyrinth. The ground was no longer stone but thick, moist, dark soil. Mist cloaked the ground and the thick verdant treetops rose out of sight above them. The air was moist and fresh but cold, and outside of the trees there were no other signs of life. A true forest would have contained the sounds of small animals, birds, insects and the like, but all was silence as cold as the fog that shrouded the trees up to knee height.
Clueless was grinning like a fool. “Well damn, this is just impressive. Whoever set this up, I mean, they had to provide for actual water down here and I’ll presume that there’s a day/night cycle in here as well.”
“It’s trees. Nothing special, they’ve got some stunted ones in the elf ghetto in Sigil. Big deal.” Skalliska said with a bored tone to her voice.
“Actually, yes it is special.” Clueless quipped back as he walked over to the nearest stand of massive pines. “Because if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I’m going to talk to the trees.”
“Talk to the trees? Huh?” The kobold said with confusion.
Tristol chuckled, “He’s part fey.”
The grinning half-fey walked over to a cluster of trees and sat down next to them, looking up into their branches. Since he had lost his memories to the yugoloths he hadn’t had the opportunity to use his innate ability to converse with trees till now.
“Hello there.” Clueless said as he called out to the pines with his mind, making the connection with them as he laid his hands on the trunk of the closest tree.
“Hello.” The trees answered back collectively.
“I didn’t expect to find a forest down here, it’s very nice. I was wondering if you knew anything about this place or what things you might have seen before down here.” Clueless asked them.
“It has been a long time since anyone came through here except for the two. You are the first in a very long time. It is good to see you here. Welcome.” The trees responded back.
“Two? Who are they?” He asked curiously.
“The tall one, the Holder of the Keys. And the little one, his servant, the one who tends to us, takes care of us, brings us those who come here.”
“Brings you…?”
“Food. Sustenance. Richness of the soil.”
“Hmm? What was that?” Clueless asked them back.
“Those who have passed through here before. They come back to us. The little one brings them back. They nourish our roots.”
Clueless paused suddenly, a cold feeling rising at the edges of his mind as he pondered what the trees were telling him.
“Show me if you can.” Clueless said to the trees, half wanting to know and half dreading the answer.
A series of sensations flooded into his mind from the trees. The disjointed memories and sensations were slowly filtered into images by his mind and he watched from the perspective of the trees as something approached them out of the fog. It was small, perhaps half the height of a human and dressed in a hooded robe under which no details could be seen. And it was dragging something behind it, something the trees were happy to have delivered to them. The small figure seemed to slither across the ground without any motion under the robes to suggest walking, and it began to bury what it had carried: an elf, its face frozen in a look of horror in death, mangled almost beyond recognition.
Clueless jumped at the images as the tiny figure pushed the corpse down into the earth, feeding the trees nourishment that was otherwise absent in their isolated ecosystem. Its long, heavy sleeves gave no indication of arms or a distinct form. It was almost fluid in how it moved…
As the images faded from his mind, Clueless looked down at where he was sitting. The soil was thick and rich with organic material, and what he had originally taken to be stick, cones or pebbles in the soil were in fact bones, hundreds of them. The ground was littered with them including a series of phalanges sticking up out of the earth where the hand of some previous unfortunate had been buried to nourish the trees.
“We’re leaving. Now!” Clueless jumped up from where he was sitting and gave a worried look at the mounds of earth that surrounded each of the trees in the forest whose purpose and origin he knew all too well.
“What?” Florian asked as the others gave worried glances at the bladesinger’s sudden change in attitude and expression.
“Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. This place was designed as a deathtrap.”
Clueless pointed to the bones scattered within the soil of the forest and then without comment made for the exit door at the far end of the cavern. The others noticed with obvious discontent and quickly followed as fast as they were able.
“The trees were hoping that we were going to be more fertilizer.” The half fey said while they proceeded up the passage and left the cold chill of the wood behind them.
“Evil trees?” Nisha asked with a weird expression.
Clueless shook his head, “No, just pragmatic. There’s no real ecology down here, so whatever poor berks died down here in the past ended up getting buried for mulch in there to keep the forest alive; creepy but practical. Whoever made this place though…”
Ahead of them again the passage branched and they took the left fork. Several hundred feet later it ended abruptly at a set of polished wooden doors. Muffled sounds of laughter and revelry could be heard through them. Confused glances were exchanged.
Nisha flicked her tail side to side and mused, “And now is when Jeremo pops out and goes, ‘Haha! It was aaaallll a joke! Hehehe!’ ?
“Oh if only…” Clueless said with a hopeful grin.
“I’d kill him.” Toras stated with a chuckle.
“Remind me never to play any jokes on Toras from now on.” Nisha whispered to Fyrehowl.
“You just don’t take jokes that well.” Florian said to the fighter. “Lighten up some.”
“Oh I’d laugh at it yes. But I’d also be hacking him apart at the same time. Jokes don’t include rats trying to fry my brain like a cracked egg.” Toras said with a firm smile as he opened the doors.
Beyond the doors was no dungeon, no passage, no trapped chambers of death and dismemberment. Beyond the doors was a massive grand ballroom decorated in an antique style that would have put to shame the chamber that Jeremo had held his own party within.
“What the hell?” Florian said as she looked at the figures within.
Nearly a hundred semi translucent people cavorted across the floor. Dancing in joyous revelry to put a Bacchanal to shame, they were dressed in rich but ancient and outdated clothing, easily centuries or more out of fashion for Sigil’s elite. They danced in rapture to the sounds of a translucent orchestra and they seemed to be aware of the entrance of guests.
One of the translucent figures broke away from the dance and approached the group with a radiant expression. She twirled one and inhaled deeply from exhaustion as she strode up to Clueless.
“More guests for the Jester’s high revelry. Welcome, all of you are welcome. The players are struck, the cups are a’high and we’ll not stop till the moon is broken ‘neath the bends.”
Clueless smiled back at the woman who seemed to be some manner of aasimar. Her accent was old and her version of Sigil’s cant was equally antique. Still, there was something about her that struck the half-fey as attractive.
“Greetings m’lady. I would be pleased.”
Fyrehowl protested as the bladesinger took the woman’s hand and began to dance with her to the tune of the translucent players. Other dancers called out to them to join in the dance but they resisted as best they could.
“This isn’t right, whatever it is.” Fyrehowl said in muted tones to the others. “We need to get Clueless out of there and leave. This doesn’t feel right at all.”
Clueless smiled at the woman as he took her hand and began to dance with her. Still, as much as he was enjoying himself he wasn’t sure why he did so so readily. It was as if he was watching himself laugh and chuckle and enjoy himself without actually being a part of it. And then he began to notice himself starting to fade into the consistency of the other dancers.
The half-fey winced and tried to divorce himself from the sounds of the music, the laughter of his dance partner, and the shuffle of his feat to the spectral players. It was beguiling and it was seductive, but it wasn’t right. As he fought the effects of the dancers around him he became aware of the shouts of warning from his companions and then the trance was broken.
“No! Come dance with us! Dance with us forever!”
Clueless ignored the woman and stumbled back to his fellows as they made for the door on the other side of the spectral revelers. Clueless was nearly transparent but as they closed the door behind themselves and shut out the sounds of the music and laughter, he slowly regained his consistency.
“You alright?” Florian asked Clueless.
“Just too many weird things happening down here. I don’t like this place anymore.” He said as he shook with a cold feeling.
“Heh. I could have told you that an hour ago.” Skalliska said with a frown.
The air grew warmer as they left behind the spectral dancers and their grand high revelry while Clueless regained his color and healthy pallor. They continued and eventually the passage branched into several other directions that they took at random. Very quickly they noticed that the quality of the stone was becoming more and more elaborate and the passages wider at the same time. Fyrehowl was also glancing over her shoulder at the oddest moments.
“What is it?” Clueless asked her.
“Just the weirdest sensation that something is following us…” The cipher replied.
Clueless shrugged as they turned another corner, and then he saw it. A tiny robed figure that turned its hooded face in their direction for a split second before it vanished around the bend in the passage. It was the same thing that he had seen in the memories of the trees.
“What in the bloody hell was that?” Florian said as she held up her holy symbol, thinking it a wraith or specter of some manner.
Clueless was about to explain what he had seen in the visions from the trees, but then he saw it again as it peered out from an intersecting corridor at them. Where its hand should have been on the wall, there was only its heavy sleeve and a mass of wriggling tentacles. The half-fey coughed, startled by the thing’s appearance and paled as it then walked, almost slithered, with unnatural speed across the corridor to vanish out of sight.
“Run. Run now.”
“Tempus doesn’t need to worry because I’m not going near that thing…” Nisha said as she backed away from the statue of the Baernaloth.
Clueless glanced at Tristol and then Tristol glanced at Fyrehowl, but none of them had any knowledge of what type of yugoloth the statue was meant to represent. But even without that knowledge, the thing gave them a cold feeling.
“It isn’t a real one, there’s no dweomer on it.” Tristol said as he peered at the largest of the yugoloth statues with relief in his voice. “That ones just a statue.”
“Still doesn’t answer what it actually is though. One of the unique ‘loths? A former Oinoloth maybe? I guess it kind of looks like Anthraxus…” Florian mused.
“Not sure, but that little refrain does seem to summarize their nature… rotten hearted little bastards…” Clueless stated.
“I don’t recognize some of the … things… mixed in with the Baatezu either. And I don’t have any intention of touching them to find out anything.” Tristol said.
“Alright…” Skalliska said as she glanced at the exit, “Shall we forgo any mammalian curiosity to do something dangerous and dumb and perhaps start moving again?”
Toras smiled and patted the kobold on the head as he walked past her to the exit. She nipped her teeth at the air.
As they walked into the next chamber their sense of dread vanished and was replaced with an equal amount of amazement and wonder. The ‘room’ was a corridor, really a walkway, which hung suspended through the center of a massive model of the torus of Sigil itself. Each of the streets, all of the buildings and even the razorvine was modeled down to the last cobblestone. And the model was slowly rotating to give those standing on the walkway a chance to examine every one of the wards in turn.
“Whoa…” Clueless said with a giddy grin.
They all stared transfixed with the level of detail on the diorama, and then they noticed suddenly that the city was crawling with illusory figures of the inhabitants: tieflings, humans, fiends, celestials, rogue modrons, and all the others right down to the dabus patching holes in the roads. Enraptured by the tiny moving figures making their way through the city they realized that it was a living model of Sigil as it currently existed. The illusory people were doing the same things that their real counterparts were doing in the actual City of Doors.
“Oh cool! There’s Kylie the Tout!” Nisha said with a giggle as she pointed to the ubiquitous guildmistress of the Tout’s guild as she strolled through the Lower Ward.
“Hmm…” Clueless said as he pointed up towards the tiny sign outside A’kin’s shop several streets over. “I wonder if you can see inside the shop and find out what he’s really up to?”
Florian laughed, “Yeah just pop the roof off and look in. Probably catch A’kin taking a bath or feeding starving kittens or something amusing like that. He’s a nice guy.”
Fyrehowl gave a wry grin, “He’s different. I’ll grant him that.”
They chuckled some and continued to glance around at the various wards of the city, every so often managing to pick out notable individuals of the city. However they did notice two things: there was no figure of The Lady present at all regardless of how many times the city rotated around them. They passed it off as probably a good thing. And then there was the fact that the Dabus seemed to look up at them as they watched them working…
Nervous glances were exchanged.
“Maybe it’s just something enchanted into the magic of the model?” Clueless mused nervously.
“Creepy. Very.” Florian said.
Nisha squealed and pointed at the tiny illusory figure of Factol Rhys as she walked out of a building in The Lady’s Ward. The tiefling waved at the factol with a giggle, and then the tiny figure of Rhys paused and looked around as if she had noticed or felt that she was being observed. Nisha immediately stopped and looked over to Fyrehowl.
Fyrehowl smiled and had a similar look of amazement in her expression as she answered, “I wouldn’t put it past her to have noticed that. The last time someone tried to assassinate her she acted to stop it before the berk had released the arrow from his bow. She just stepped out of the way of one, caught another and kept right on talking to the people she was with. She doesn’t think about it, she just acts instinctively, and she feels that all the time. You’ve seen me go into a trance. Rhys never leaves that state of mind.”
Nisha nodded, but the idea that the model might have some actual connection to the city and its inhabitants had made them wary of looking at it too closely. After a few more minutes of looking and then gleefully finding their own inn and the spelljammer sticking out of its roof they smiled proudly and passed through the model and out the exit.
Ahead, the passage branched in two directions, and much to Nisha’s content the group chose one of them at random to proceed down. Moments later they discovered that the other passage sealed itself off the moment they had made their choice.
“Lovely. So much for going back if we don’t like this one.” Skalliska muttered as they continued.
They walked for several more minutes and noticed a slight dip in the ambient temperature, and then a slight trace of moisture on the floor as they approached a larger room at the corridor’s end.
“Fog?” Toras asked with a perplexed expression.
“The hell with the fog. I smell trees…” Fyrehowl said with a sniff at the air. “Evergreens.”
And sure enough, the corridor opened into a massive, dimly lit natural cavern that resembled nothing so much as a forest plucked up from a prime world and deposited inside an underground labyrinth. The ground was no longer stone but thick, moist, dark soil. Mist cloaked the ground and the thick verdant treetops rose out of sight above them. The air was moist and fresh but cold, and outside of the trees there were no other signs of life. A true forest would have contained the sounds of small animals, birds, insects and the like, but all was silence as cold as the fog that shrouded the trees up to knee height.
Clueless was grinning like a fool. “Well damn, this is just impressive. Whoever set this up, I mean, they had to provide for actual water down here and I’ll presume that there’s a day/night cycle in here as well.”
“It’s trees. Nothing special, they’ve got some stunted ones in the elf ghetto in Sigil. Big deal.” Skalliska said with a bored tone to her voice.
“Actually, yes it is special.” Clueless quipped back as he walked over to the nearest stand of massive pines. “Because if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I’m going to talk to the trees.”
“Talk to the trees? Huh?” The kobold said with confusion.
Tristol chuckled, “He’s part fey.”
The grinning half-fey walked over to a cluster of trees and sat down next to them, looking up into their branches. Since he had lost his memories to the yugoloths he hadn’t had the opportunity to use his innate ability to converse with trees till now.
“Hello there.” Clueless said as he called out to the pines with his mind, making the connection with them as he laid his hands on the trunk of the closest tree.
“Hello.” The trees answered back collectively.
“I didn’t expect to find a forest down here, it’s very nice. I was wondering if you knew anything about this place or what things you might have seen before down here.” Clueless asked them.
“It has been a long time since anyone came through here except for the two. You are the first in a very long time. It is good to see you here. Welcome.” The trees responded back.
“Two? Who are they?” He asked curiously.
“The tall one, the Holder of the Keys. And the little one, his servant, the one who tends to us, takes care of us, brings us those who come here.”
“Brings you…?”
“Food. Sustenance. Richness of the soil.”
“Hmm? What was that?” Clueless asked them back.
“Those who have passed through here before. They come back to us. The little one brings them back. They nourish our roots.”
Clueless paused suddenly, a cold feeling rising at the edges of his mind as he pondered what the trees were telling him.
“Show me if you can.” Clueless said to the trees, half wanting to know and half dreading the answer.
A series of sensations flooded into his mind from the trees. The disjointed memories and sensations were slowly filtered into images by his mind and he watched from the perspective of the trees as something approached them out of the fog. It was small, perhaps half the height of a human and dressed in a hooded robe under which no details could be seen. And it was dragging something behind it, something the trees were happy to have delivered to them. The small figure seemed to slither across the ground without any motion under the robes to suggest walking, and it began to bury what it had carried: an elf, its face frozen in a look of horror in death, mangled almost beyond recognition.
Clueless jumped at the images as the tiny figure pushed the corpse down into the earth, feeding the trees nourishment that was otherwise absent in their isolated ecosystem. Its long, heavy sleeves gave no indication of arms or a distinct form. It was almost fluid in how it moved…
As the images faded from his mind, Clueless looked down at where he was sitting. The soil was thick and rich with organic material, and what he had originally taken to be stick, cones or pebbles in the soil were in fact bones, hundreds of them. The ground was littered with them including a series of phalanges sticking up out of the earth where the hand of some previous unfortunate had been buried to nourish the trees.
“We’re leaving. Now!” Clueless jumped up from where he was sitting and gave a worried look at the mounds of earth that surrounded each of the trees in the forest whose purpose and origin he knew all too well.
“What?” Florian asked as the others gave worried glances at the bladesinger’s sudden change in attitude and expression.
“Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. This place was designed as a deathtrap.”
Clueless pointed to the bones scattered within the soil of the forest and then without comment made for the exit door at the far end of the cavern. The others noticed with obvious discontent and quickly followed as fast as they were able.
“The trees were hoping that we were going to be more fertilizer.” The half fey said while they proceeded up the passage and left the cold chill of the wood behind them.
“Evil trees?” Nisha asked with a weird expression.
Clueless shook his head, “No, just pragmatic. There’s no real ecology down here, so whatever poor berks died down here in the past ended up getting buried for mulch in there to keep the forest alive; creepy but practical. Whoever made this place though…”
Ahead of them again the passage branched and they took the left fork. Several hundred feet later it ended abruptly at a set of polished wooden doors. Muffled sounds of laughter and revelry could be heard through them. Confused glances were exchanged.
Nisha flicked her tail side to side and mused, “And now is when Jeremo pops out and goes, ‘Haha! It was aaaallll a joke! Hehehe!’ ?
“Oh if only…” Clueless said with a hopeful grin.
“I’d kill him.” Toras stated with a chuckle.
“Remind me never to play any jokes on Toras from now on.” Nisha whispered to Fyrehowl.
“You just don’t take jokes that well.” Florian said to the fighter. “Lighten up some.”
“Oh I’d laugh at it yes. But I’d also be hacking him apart at the same time. Jokes don’t include rats trying to fry my brain like a cracked egg.” Toras said with a firm smile as he opened the doors.
Beyond the doors was no dungeon, no passage, no trapped chambers of death and dismemberment. Beyond the doors was a massive grand ballroom decorated in an antique style that would have put to shame the chamber that Jeremo had held his own party within.
“What the hell?” Florian said as she looked at the figures within.
Nearly a hundred semi translucent people cavorted across the floor. Dancing in joyous revelry to put a Bacchanal to shame, they were dressed in rich but ancient and outdated clothing, easily centuries or more out of fashion for Sigil’s elite. They danced in rapture to the sounds of a translucent orchestra and they seemed to be aware of the entrance of guests.
One of the translucent figures broke away from the dance and approached the group with a radiant expression. She twirled one and inhaled deeply from exhaustion as she strode up to Clueless.
“More guests for the Jester’s high revelry. Welcome, all of you are welcome. The players are struck, the cups are a’high and we’ll not stop till the moon is broken ‘neath the bends.”
Clueless smiled back at the woman who seemed to be some manner of aasimar. Her accent was old and her version of Sigil’s cant was equally antique. Still, there was something about her that struck the half-fey as attractive.
“Greetings m’lady. I would be pleased.”
Fyrehowl protested as the bladesinger took the woman’s hand and began to dance with her to the tune of the translucent players. Other dancers called out to them to join in the dance but they resisted as best they could.
“This isn’t right, whatever it is.” Fyrehowl said in muted tones to the others. “We need to get Clueless out of there and leave. This doesn’t feel right at all.”
Clueless smiled at the woman as he took her hand and began to dance with her. Still, as much as he was enjoying himself he wasn’t sure why he did so so readily. It was as if he was watching himself laugh and chuckle and enjoy himself without actually being a part of it. And then he began to notice himself starting to fade into the consistency of the other dancers.
The half-fey winced and tried to divorce himself from the sounds of the music, the laughter of his dance partner, and the shuffle of his feat to the spectral players. It was beguiling and it was seductive, but it wasn’t right. As he fought the effects of the dancers around him he became aware of the shouts of warning from his companions and then the trance was broken.
“No! Come dance with us! Dance with us forever!”
Clueless ignored the woman and stumbled back to his fellows as they made for the door on the other side of the spectral revelers. Clueless was nearly transparent but as they closed the door behind themselves and shut out the sounds of the music and laughter, he slowly regained his consistency.
“You alright?” Florian asked Clueless.
“Just too many weird things happening down here. I don’t like this place anymore.” He said as he shook with a cold feeling.
“Heh. I could have told you that an hour ago.” Skalliska said with a frown.
The air grew warmer as they left behind the spectral dancers and their grand high revelry while Clueless regained his color and healthy pallor. They continued and eventually the passage branched into several other directions that they took at random. Very quickly they noticed that the quality of the stone was becoming more and more elaborate and the passages wider at the same time. Fyrehowl was also glancing over her shoulder at the oddest moments.
“What is it?” Clueless asked her.
“Just the weirdest sensation that something is following us…” The cipher replied.
Clueless shrugged as they turned another corner, and then he saw it. A tiny robed figure that turned its hooded face in their direction for a split second before it vanished around the bend in the passage. It was the same thing that he had seen in the memories of the trees.
“What in the bloody hell was that?” Florian said as she held up her holy symbol, thinking it a wraith or specter of some manner.
Clueless was about to explain what he had seen in the visions from the trees, but then he saw it again as it peered out from an intersecting corridor at them. Where its hand should have been on the wall, there was only its heavy sleeve and a mass of wriggling tentacles. The half-fey coughed, startled by the thing’s appearance and paled as it then walked, almost slithered, with unnatural speed across the corridor to vanish out of sight.
“Run. Run now.”
***
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