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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1269611" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #2: The Tower. Episode 9Finally, Chuck hears Stone knocking from below the trap door. Chuck pushes the rock away, and opens the trap door, reuniting the party. He comes down, and joins Fergus in searching the room with all the cots. They find nothing. Miriel looks around to see who is most injured. Though we were all burned by the sorceress’ spell, during the fight, it looks like she and Saraya are the worst hurt. Miriel prays for healing for both herself and Saraya, and then suggests that we need to rest to regain spell strength. The others set up a watch rotation and rest in the tower. Paks spends a few hours thoroughly searching all of the rooms below, but finds nothing. When we are all awake and ready for more adventure, we decide to explore the area where the bandit said that there were ghouls.  Before we go, Chuck checks the bonds of the prisoners again, making sure they are secure. The spell casting woman is still unconscious. The prisoners are napping. Paks, Stone, and the rest of the party go down to the room beneath the tower. We are ready to go through the large stone slab. Chuck and Goldpetal stand watch, with bows drawn and ready, with Chuck up in the tower, and Goldpetal at the foot of the ladder. The strongest members of the company, Stone, Fergus, and Paks, remove the rocks piled against the slab blocking the door. When the last one is removed, we all draw weapons and make ready while Stone tries to pull the slab off of the door. Paks stands ready to pitch in a torch, but Stone can’t quite shift the slab alone. Paks hands the torch to Goldpetal, and lends her strength to Stone’s efforts. The stone slab falls with a resounding crash, which echoes off the hard rock walls of the confined space. A ten foot wide staircase descends into the blackness before us. Goldpetal quickly tosses the torch down into the darkness. The torch lands on the floor below. In its flickering light, we can see that the staircase that goes down for twenty feet. Beyond that, it is a hallway, perhaps thirty feet long, with doors along the right and left. One of the doors on the left is broken and hangs slightly ajar. Paks steps to the top of the staircase, sword drawn. She descends slowly, and we all follow her. Chuck climbs down to the room beneath the tower, and closes the wooden door to the eastern corridor. He listens from the tower room, leaving a lit torch in the room under the trap door. Paks reaches Goldpetal’s torch, and picks it up. She tosses it through the broken door on the left. It weakly illuminates a large mausoleum, perhaps thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. There are four large columns, evenly distributed towards the corners of the room. All around the outside walls, every ten feet or so, she can see crypt-like openings. The room smells old and musty. Miriel looks around Paks and through the door; she sees nothing. Stone listens at the other door, but hears nothing. Saraya steps to Paks’ side.Together, Paks and Saraya step into the first room. As they cross the threshold, four bipedal monsters jump out. They may have been human, once, but are now foul beasts with clawed hands. The smell of death and decay that roils off of them is sickening, and both Paks and Saraya are nauseated, overcome by the stench. “Ghouls!” Fergus yells. Quickest to react, he steps between the two women and lays about him with his great-sword. He hits one ghoul and slices it nearly in half, and it falls to the ground, still twitching. With a spectacular follow-through, he steps forward and hits the next, a solid two-handed blow. It, too, falls, returning from undead to wholly dead. Miriel pulls out her symbol of Madriel. Holding it high above her head, she steps to the doorway and yells, “In the name of Madriel, be gone, foul beasts!” Though she has read about turning undead creatures, her first attempt to do so has no discernable effect. Stone runs past the three ineffective women, to attack the ghoul furthest into the room. It bites him as he runs past. Stone punches it in the head, but a punch which would have stunned a man seems only to have angered it. It attacks him with teeth and claws, scoring him with one talon. Though the wound appears to be only a scratch, the half-orc gives a strangled cry, and stiffens up like a board. He falls to the ground, either dead or paralyzed. The second ghoul attacks Paks, leaping over her shield to reach her neck and shoulder. Wounded by its bite and claw, she collapses in the same manner. Saraya staggers back, to vomit at the foot of the stairs. Goldpetal yells something in elvish, and runs into the room slashing at the wounded ghoul with his scimitar. He also wounds it but cannot kill it. Fergus pushes Paks out of the way, and she falls back through the door and onto the floor. He swings at the wounded ghoul, but his sword arcs too high, and misses. “Chuck!” he hollers, and Chuck begins running down the stairs to join the fight. “Madriel, help us!” Miriel pleads, with her holy symbol before her. This time she manages to turn both undead. They flee in mindless terror, running straight past Fergus and Goldpetal. Goldpetal cuts the wounded one down with his scimitar, and it dies at his feet. Fergus swings wildly at the other, but misses. He hits himself in the leg with his own sword. It’s a big wound, gushing blood, and he falls down. His sword skitters across the floor, coming to rest against the left wall. Fergus lies unconscious and bleeding on the floor. With the last ghoul cowering in a corner, Goldpetal and Miriel stop to heal Fergus, as Chuck enters the room.  Goldpetal staunches the bleeding, and Miriel prays to Madriel to heal Fergus back to consciousness. While she does that, Goldpetal checks Paks and Stone, and calls out, “They’re still breathing, just paralyzed.”Chuck advances into the room after the ghoul, shooting an arrow. His shot misses, but seems to have driven the fear from the ghoul. It turns about to face us, and begins advancing towards us. Goldpetal steps to his right, to sling a bullet at the ghoul. Though he hits, it seems to have little effect, other than to annoy the ghoul further. Fergus, his leg healed, climbs to his feet. Miriel holds her holy symbol aloft, and tries to turn the ghoul again. “Be gone, in the name of Madriel,” she shouts, but again she fails. The ghoul lumbers up to Chuck and attacks. It hits with a claw and bites him in the shoulder, and he collapses, unconscious, with two serious bleeding wounds. Goldpetal fumbles with the sling, tripping over some trash on the floor, which causes him to fall and drop the sling. Fergus runs to the left wall, and picks up his sword. The ghoul reaches him before he has the sword ready.“Madriel’s light!” shouts Miriel. A soft divine light shines from her holy symbol, and the ghoul freezes in the act of attacking Fergus. She manages to turn the ghoul a second time, and it retreats from her to the furthest corner of the room. Goldpetal gets up. “Don’t attack it,” Miriel cautions. “Wait until we are all ready.”Paks, her paralyzation worn off, gets up and enters the room. Miriel heals Chuck, who stands up, and Stone is also standing up, shrugging off the effects of his paralyzation. Together, we all advance on the ghoul, with swords drawn. The ghoul squeezes as far into the corner as it can get. Fergus, in the lead, reaches the ghoul first. He hits it with his sword, and it turns to fight. The ghoul leaps on him, getting inside the reach of his lengthy sword. It bites him in the chest, and knocks him unconscious. As he falls, it rends him with its claws. Yelling a battle cry in elvish, Goldpetal swings mightily at the ghoul with his scimitar, cutting its head clean off.  Fergus is gushing blood. Paks drops to her knees to bandage Fergus, stabilizing him momentarily, though he is still bleeding. “Miriel!” she calls.“I can’t,” Miriel responds. “I’ve no strength left for a healing.”“Cradle his head,” Stone tells Paks, pulling out a potion of healing. He holds Fergus’ nose pinched closed with his thumb and forefinger, and pours the potion down Fergus' throat. Fergus’ sputters and coughs as he swallows the potion, but his wounds begin to close as he wakes up.</blockquote>

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