sniffles
First Post
Azlin's tale, part 10
Before we step through the portal, I call upon the Host to place a blanket of silence on my armor, since we don't know if anyone will be waiting on the other side. I lay my hand on Sten and extend the power to him, too.
I'm still smarting that I didn't even think to use the Host's power to turn aside that living whirlwind that attacked us. But I guess in a way that's a good thing. If I'd destroyed it we wouldn't have been able to open the portal.
We step through into darkness, the whole crowd of us. Now we've got four extra goblins with us, plus that little dragon Gwaenna just acquired. I hope it's not going to be a repeat of the flying critter Conshru had.
We're in a small room, full of the dust and litter of ages. No one's been here for a very long time. There are several doors out; I stand next to each for a moment to sense if there's anyone on the other side. Good thing this place has stone floors.
It's a little hard to sense with so many people standing around, now that we've got not only Dresden with us but also Gwaenna's "honor guard".
Conshru keeps asking me, 'Want to see what I can do?" I'm not sure I want to know.
There's nobody here. The other doors all lead to storerooms, empty except for a nasty-smelling pool in one of them. The doors are all swollen with age and Sten has to cut the hinges to get them open.
We must be in an outside room. There are arrow slits in the walls. Sten knocks the debris out of one and looks out. We're in some kind of tower.
The last door we try opens onto a landing. Stairs go down. There's a rotunda in the next area, overlooked by a balcony, with a fancy mosaic on the floor below. Above we can see a glass dome. It must be some kind of enchanted glass, because it's still intact though covered in ages of filth.
I'm checking more doors. It's really quiet in here. Gwaenna flies out over the rotunda. She thinks she saw something. It's infuriating her goblin guards that they can't fly with her. It's almost funny.
[sblock]
Jubilee: "I'm thinking of getting a ring of evasion. They seem to be a dime a dozen. All my goblin ninjas have one."
sniffles: "You get one when you graduate from ninja school."
[/sblock]
Gwaenna yells, "They're cockatrices!" That could be trouble. I pull on the goggles the illithid gave us. Conshru shouts his favorite word, "Fire!" and a huge blast of flames shoots down to the level below us.
[sblock]
Patv: "These are googles of what?"
Jubilee: "Goggles of gaze protection."
Zora: "No, they're googles of searching."
DH: "They (the cockatrices) are about the size of turkeys."
Jubilee: "Turkeys can't fly."
Patv: "Maybe we should tell them that so they'll fall."
[/sblock]
When Gwaenna flies down to investigate all she finds is a bunch of charred bones.
[sblock]
Jubilee: "I'm searching for their nest and squishing any eggs."
Devo: "Those are worth a lot of money!"
Jubilee: "Yeah, but I don't want them to hatch while I have them. I don't want to be stoned."
Devo: "Baby cockatrices just give you a little high."
[/sblock]
We may have made too much noise, though - someone's blowing a horn off in the distance. Or maybe it's just meal time or shift change.
Gwaenna found a way to see out. She says the tower overlooks the city and the streets are full of statues. Then she stops herself - "No, they're not statues. They're petrified people!"
Slag it, that means this place is probably swarming with medusas.
From the tower we can see two areas of interest. There's a bunch of people off toward the mountains, and to the east we can see something being built, something tall with a wooden scaffold around it. We have no idea what that could be.
We decide to go out and investigate. We creep out of the tower and start making our way carefully through the twisty streets, heading for the crowd of people we saw.
We don't get far before there's trouble. Gwaenna was right - the figures in the streets are all petrified people, and there are medusas here. Medusas riding on gorgons, for Arawai's sake!
Conshru is riding ahead and runs into it first. Oh, and while we worry about that, let's have some gargoyles show up, too! I'm standing right next to one. I thought it was a statue until it moves.
The first thing I can think to do is turn the Host's power against it. "Get back!" I shout. To my relief, it backs off.
[sblock]
Zora: "I'm going to spell and run."
Jubilee: "What are you going to spell?"
Zora: "Fireball."
[/sblock]
Curse it to Khyber - the medusa has turned Dresden to stone! And Gwaenna's not happy about having one of her guards petrified, either.
Everyone's talking excitedly. Conshru - or was it Artemis? I'm not quite sure - just roasted the medusa and her steed with a ball of fire. Glory!
I can feel the connection with the gargoyle - I can command it and it has to obey me! Praise the Host. I think to it, "Keep a watch and warn us if you see medusas coming toward us. Don't tell the others you've seen us.". I like this.
[sblock]
sniffles: "What should I tell it to do?"
Zora: "You could ask it if it has any good ideas of what you should tell it to do."
DH: "Here's the user manual."
[/sblock]
But Conshru says the gorgons can smell us. And one gargoyle won't keep us safe from all the others flying overhead. There's nothing for it but to leave Dresden and the goblin guard behind. We'll have to try to come back for them later.
Artemis says, "Get closer. I'll make us invisible, but if you get too far apart you'll be visible again." We can all still see each other. We must look ridiculous, the whole crowd of us creeping along on one another's heels - or we would if anyone could see us.
We pause, and Artemis calls up another spell to cloak us even further, so the gorgons won't be able to smell us and we leave no tracks. He's clever, that human.
There's an open square up ahead. That's where the crowd we saw is located. It's a bunch of gnolls, apparently standing guard over some excavation. Xil's been a gnoll the whole time, so he creeps off and pretends he belongs there to check out the area.
When he returns he says they've got a signal gong. "We need to take that out first," says Artemis. "I'll silence it." Ready for a fight, we get closer so he can center his spell on the gong.
Most of the gnolls don't even notice when it gets unnaturally quiet around them. We're going to try to draw the rest to us so Conshru can roast them.
It worked! They're coming this way. I don't even need to fight. Gwaenna and Conshru are taking care of most of them. The last gnoll breaks and runs, but Conshru burns him to a crisp.
[sblock]
sniffles: "He was slightly browned before but now he's toast."
Jubilee: "He's a blackened chicken gnoll."
[/sblock]
But all the fire has drawn the gargoyles. We don't have time to move the bodies. There's a rope hanging down in the pit. Artemis climbs down. Sten follows. So do I.
It's some kind of tomb. The open chamber has writings all over the walls. Gwaenna is fascinated. But there's a spell on the door. A mouth opens and addresses Artemis by name! "If you're here, I can only assume you've avoided my patrols. Welcome, Artemis. I hope you find what you're looking for, but alas, you're going to be too late. I've left you a nice surprise. Hopefully we will never meet again.'
Blast him to Khyber, it's that damned Cannith artificer who's working with the Karrnathi. Artemis mutters, "Damn, I hate him."
I have a funny feeling. "There's something else in here," I tell my friends. "Where?" they ask. But I can't tell where - only that there are four creatures in here that aren't with us.
There are four crates in the tomb. They're breaking apart! Some kind of creatures inside. One of them hits Artemis with a limb.
Artemis stumbles back out of the chamber, his belt falling around his feet. The buckle has disintegrated. His boots are flopping around his ankles, their buckles also gone.
I jump to the doorway and pray to Onatar, "Let me shape this stone!" The stone flows under my hands, covering the doorway. I can hear the creatures scrabbling against the other side. I hope they're not strong - that wall I made isn't very thick.
Sten cuts a narrow hole in my wall with his arm blade and starts shooting the creatures. Gwaenna and Conshru take turns firing through the opening too. It doesn't take them long to kill the monsters.
But now there are things at the edge of the pit above us - probably gargoyles. My new gargoyle friend can't do anything against so many. Someone's yelling down at us - the voice sounds familiar. It's that artificer again. I'd like to give him a taste of my hammer.
Artemis tries to make a deal with him, to swap him the stone for our freedom. The other artificer just laughs when Artemis says the stone is in a Kundarak vault in Sharn.. "You've probably got it in your pocket. I'll come back in a few days when you've all suffocated and go through your pockets myself," he sneers.
He still thinks he's got us trapped. He's got the gargoyles lowering a heavy cover over the pit. He's expecting us to suffocate down here - ha!
[sblock]
sniffles: "I so want to be here in a few days when he comes back to check and we're not here! Sten doesn't breathe - he could stay behind and use autohypnosis to memorize the expression on that guy's face."
[/sblock]
But the last laugh is ours. Artemis just created a door in the wall of the pit! We'll wait until the cover is set in place, and then calmly walk through the door and back into Artemis's subterranean lair beneath Sharn.
Blast it, I don't have any way to bring that gargoyle with me! Almost everyone else has some kind of creature to help them. It would have been fun, having a gargoyle at my beck and call. I wonder if I can tell it to come to me and it will fly to Sharn?
Before we step through the portal, I call upon the Host to place a blanket of silence on my armor, since we don't know if anyone will be waiting on the other side. I lay my hand on Sten and extend the power to him, too.
I'm still smarting that I didn't even think to use the Host's power to turn aside that living whirlwind that attacked us. But I guess in a way that's a good thing. If I'd destroyed it we wouldn't have been able to open the portal.
We step through into darkness, the whole crowd of us. Now we've got four extra goblins with us, plus that little dragon Gwaenna just acquired. I hope it's not going to be a repeat of the flying critter Conshru had.
We're in a small room, full of the dust and litter of ages. No one's been here for a very long time. There are several doors out; I stand next to each for a moment to sense if there's anyone on the other side. Good thing this place has stone floors.
It's a little hard to sense with so many people standing around, now that we've got not only Dresden with us but also Gwaenna's "honor guard".
Conshru keeps asking me, 'Want to see what I can do?" I'm not sure I want to know.
There's nobody here. The other doors all lead to storerooms, empty except for a nasty-smelling pool in one of them. The doors are all swollen with age and Sten has to cut the hinges to get them open.
We must be in an outside room. There are arrow slits in the walls. Sten knocks the debris out of one and looks out. We're in some kind of tower.
The last door we try opens onto a landing. Stairs go down. There's a rotunda in the next area, overlooked by a balcony, with a fancy mosaic on the floor below. Above we can see a glass dome. It must be some kind of enchanted glass, because it's still intact though covered in ages of filth.
I'm checking more doors. It's really quiet in here. Gwaenna flies out over the rotunda. She thinks she saw something. It's infuriating her goblin guards that they can't fly with her. It's almost funny.
[sblock]
Jubilee: "I'm thinking of getting a ring of evasion. They seem to be a dime a dozen. All my goblin ninjas have one."
sniffles: "You get one when you graduate from ninja school."
[/sblock]
Gwaenna yells, "They're cockatrices!" That could be trouble. I pull on the goggles the illithid gave us. Conshru shouts his favorite word, "Fire!" and a huge blast of flames shoots down to the level below us.
[sblock]
Patv: "These are googles of what?"
Jubilee: "Goggles of gaze protection."
Zora: "No, they're googles of searching."
DH: "They (the cockatrices) are about the size of turkeys."
Jubilee: "Turkeys can't fly."
Patv: "Maybe we should tell them that so they'll fall."
[/sblock]
When Gwaenna flies down to investigate all she finds is a bunch of charred bones.
[sblock]
Jubilee: "I'm searching for their nest and squishing any eggs."
Devo: "Those are worth a lot of money!"
Jubilee: "Yeah, but I don't want them to hatch while I have them. I don't want to be stoned."
Devo: "Baby cockatrices just give you a little high."
[/sblock]
We may have made too much noise, though - someone's blowing a horn off in the distance. Or maybe it's just meal time or shift change.
Gwaenna found a way to see out. She says the tower overlooks the city and the streets are full of statues. Then she stops herself - "No, they're not statues. They're petrified people!"
Slag it, that means this place is probably swarming with medusas.
From the tower we can see two areas of interest. There's a bunch of people off toward the mountains, and to the east we can see something being built, something tall with a wooden scaffold around it. We have no idea what that could be.
We decide to go out and investigate. We creep out of the tower and start making our way carefully through the twisty streets, heading for the crowd of people we saw.
We don't get far before there's trouble. Gwaenna was right - the figures in the streets are all petrified people, and there are medusas here. Medusas riding on gorgons, for Arawai's sake!
Conshru is riding ahead and runs into it first. Oh, and while we worry about that, let's have some gargoyles show up, too! I'm standing right next to one. I thought it was a statue until it moves.
The first thing I can think to do is turn the Host's power against it. "Get back!" I shout. To my relief, it backs off.
[sblock]
Zora: "I'm going to spell and run."
Jubilee: "What are you going to spell?"
Zora: "Fireball."
[/sblock]
Curse it to Khyber - the medusa has turned Dresden to stone! And Gwaenna's not happy about having one of her guards petrified, either.
Everyone's talking excitedly. Conshru - or was it Artemis? I'm not quite sure - just roasted the medusa and her steed with a ball of fire. Glory!
I can feel the connection with the gargoyle - I can command it and it has to obey me! Praise the Host. I think to it, "Keep a watch and warn us if you see medusas coming toward us. Don't tell the others you've seen us.". I like this.
[sblock]
sniffles: "What should I tell it to do?"
Zora: "You could ask it if it has any good ideas of what you should tell it to do."
DH: "Here's the user manual."
[/sblock]
But Conshru says the gorgons can smell us. And one gargoyle won't keep us safe from all the others flying overhead. There's nothing for it but to leave Dresden and the goblin guard behind. We'll have to try to come back for them later.
Artemis says, "Get closer. I'll make us invisible, but if you get too far apart you'll be visible again." We can all still see each other. We must look ridiculous, the whole crowd of us creeping along on one another's heels - or we would if anyone could see us.
We pause, and Artemis calls up another spell to cloak us even further, so the gorgons won't be able to smell us and we leave no tracks. He's clever, that human.
There's an open square up ahead. That's where the crowd we saw is located. It's a bunch of gnolls, apparently standing guard over some excavation. Xil's been a gnoll the whole time, so he creeps off and pretends he belongs there to check out the area.
When he returns he says they've got a signal gong. "We need to take that out first," says Artemis. "I'll silence it." Ready for a fight, we get closer so he can center his spell on the gong.
Most of the gnolls don't even notice when it gets unnaturally quiet around them. We're going to try to draw the rest to us so Conshru can roast them.
It worked! They're coming this way. I don't even need to fight. Gwaenna and Conshru are taking care of most of them. The last gnoll breaks and runs, but Conshru burns him to a crisp.
[sblock]
sniffles: "He was slightly browned before but now he's toast."
Jubilee: "He's a blackened chicken gnoll."
[/sblock]
But all the fire has drawn the gargoyles. We don't have time to move the bodies. There's a rope hanging down in the pit. Artemis climbs down. Sten follows. So do I.
It's some kind of tomb. The open chamber has writings all over the walls. Gwaenna is fascinated. But there's a spell on the door. A mouth opens and addresses Artemis by name! "If you're here, I can only assume you've avoided my patrols. Welcome, Artemis. I hope you find what you're looking for, but alas, you're going to be too late. I've left you a nice surprise. Hopefully we will never meet again.'
Blast him to Khyber, it's that damned Cannith artificer who's working with the Karrnathi. Artemis mutters, "Damn, I hate him."
I have a funny feeling. "There's something else in here," I tell my friends. "Where?" they ask. But I can't tell where - only that there are four creatures in here that aren't with us.
There are four crates in the tomb. They're breaking apart! Some kind of creatures inside. One of them hits Artemis with a limb.
Artemis stumbles back out of the chamber, his belt falling around his feet. The buckle has disintegrated. His boots are flopping around his ankles, their buckles also gone.
I jump to the doorway and pray to Onatar, "Let me shape this stone!" The stone flows under my hands, covering the doorway. I can hear the creatures scrabbling against the other side. I hope they're not strong - that wall I made isn't very thick.
Sten cuts a narrow hole in my wall with his arm blade and starts shooting the creatures. Gwaenna and Conshru take turns firing through the opening too. It doesn't take them long to kill the monsters.
But now there are things at the edge of the pit above us - probably gargoyles. My new gargoyle friend can't do anything against so many. Someone's yelling down at us - the voice sounds familiar. It's that artificer again. I'd like to give him a taste of my hammer.
Artemis tries to make a deal with him, to swap him the stone for our freedom. The other artificer just laughs when Artemis says the stone is in a Kundarak vault in Sharn.. "You've probably got it in your pocket. I'll come back in a few days when you've all suffocated and go through your pockets myself," he sneers.
He still thinks he's got us trapped. He's got the gargoyles lowering a heavy cover over the pit. He's expecting us to suffocate down here - ha!
[sblock]
sniffles: "I so want to be here in a few days when he comes back to check and we're not here! Sten doesn't breathe - he could stay behind and use autohypnosis to memorize the expression on that guy's face."
[/sblock]
But the last laugh is ours. Artemis just created a door in the wall of the pit! We'll wait until the cover is set in place, and then calmly walk through the door and back into Artemis's subterranean lair beneath Sharn.
Blast it, I don't have any way to bring that gargoyle with me! Almost everyone else has some kind of creature to help them. It would have been fun, having a gargoyle at my beck and call. I wonder if I can tell it to come to me and it will fly to Sharn?
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