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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1407396" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #11: The Lizard Men and the Duck - Episode 5 of 5When we’ve all sheathed our weapons, Miriel hurries to Paks’ side. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she inquires with genuine concern.“I’m not injured,” Paks answers, “But I feel very weak. It’s tough to hold up my shield.”As Miriel checks Paks over, Telryn nods. “That’s how I’ve felt since our first battle with the stirges,” he tells her. “There’s nothing I can do for her,” Miriel says, standing up and helping the warrior to her feet. She turns to the others. “What was in the room?”Chuck walks into the room and looks around, with Hands of Fire following him. On the floor is the rubble of broken furniture which appears common to this area. Leaning against the west wall is a desiccated human corpse. After our brush with undead on the surface, Hands of Fire bashes it with a club and knocks its head off, lest it animate behind us. Chuck searches the corpse and finds a pouch with coins in it. The purse contains 5 gold pieces, 11 silver pieces, and a topaz. The currency is unfamiliar, with a double-headed eagle on it. He also finds some tools, apparently thieves’ tools, and two scroll cases. He searches through the rest of the room cursorily, but doesn’t find anything. In the main room, Goldpetal sends the rats through the second door. Nothing attacks them, so Paks steps in behind them. She sees a matching square room, with a lot more ruined furniture. “There’s nothing here,” she calls. “Do we want to search the rooms thoroughly?” “Yeah,” Chuck calls back, and nobody objects. Miriel lights a torch and stays in the larger room. Goldpetal lets the rats go, and walks along the perimeter wall, examining the stones to search for hidden doors. Chuck, Hands of Fire and Telryn thoroughly search the room where the stirges were. Telryn finds a rose-quartz prism in the mud near the body. He quickly casts detect magic on it, and discover that it has a magical aura. Further study reveals that the magic is an abjuration, but he can’t tell what it might do.Stone and Paks search the third room, and Paks finds an old gold candlestick.  Miriel pokes around in the main room. She doesn’t find anything useful, but does notice that there is a shallow pool of standing water in the southern end of the room. It doesn’t look deep enough even to wet the tops of our boots, if we step in it, but it is deep enough that a slight stream drips down the staircase in the southeast corner of the room.  When we are done searching, we gather at the top of the staircase. “I’ll lead this time,” Chuck suggests. “Paks, you stay near the back with Stone.” The young Vigilant cautiously steps through the pool of water to the staircase. He examines the ground for tracks, but the staircase doesn’t seem to have been disturbed in many years. “Be careful,” he cautions the others. “It’s wet and covered in lichen – it’ll be very slippery.”He works his way cautiously down the staircase, with Hands of Fire and Novalia behind him. The stairs are slippery, but taking care to plant their feet, they make it down the stairs quietly. At the bottom of the stairs, Chuck finds a room similar to the main room above. It is somewhat larger, perhaps fifty feet long, but seems to occupy the space directly underneath. Like the room above, there are also two doors in the east wall of this room. They are intact and closed. A staircase leads further down from the northwest corner of the room. The water dripping down the stairs forms a pool at the southeast corner, at the bottom of the staircase.Chuck steps into the pool. The water comes up to his ankles, and he is glad that his boots come up most of the length of his calf. His feet stay dry as he splashes through the water to the dry land nearer the center of the room. Looking around, he can see the remains of rotted banners on the walls. On one wall are the remains of what must once have been a great tapestry, but he doubts it would be worth anything to anyone after centuries of decay. He checks the ground again, looking for tracks, but the lichens growing on the stone floor have not been disturbed in many years. He motions for the rest of us to follow him, and moves to the door nearest the stairs we came down. Hands of Fire follows him, and Novalia steps past them both to guard the down staircase and the second door. Stone and Goldpetal stay at the foot of the up staircase, while Miriel stations herself in the center of the room, where she can move quickly to assist anyone. Chuck attempts to open the first door, but it is stuck fast. He strains against it, trying to pull it open, but to no avail. “A little help, here?” he whispers. Hands of Fire and Paks come to assist, with Telryn standing behind them, ready to cast a spell if need be. All three pull together, but it still refuses to budge. “We need Stone,” Paks says. The half-orc dutifully comes to lend a hand, but he is still suffering from the effects of his near-death and miraculous recovery, and the door resists our every effort.“Let’s try the other door,” Chuck suggests. The same group moves to the second door.Before attempting to open it, Chuck leans an ear to the door, to listen against it. He doesn’t hear anything, and shakes his head to indicate that to the others. He pulls at this one, and though it offers a brief resistance, he manages to pull this one open. He steps into another square room, the same size as those upstairs, twenty feet on a side. It looks like it might have been a library, with lots of broken chairs. There’s a large bookcase against the eastern wall, and the young Vigilant smiles as he considers Telryn’s reaction to that find. There is a door in the southern wall. Some of the books are in the bookcase, but others have been tossed around the room; some of them are on the floor in the mud. “What’s in it?” Telryn asks, from the main room.“A bunch of books and stuff!” Chuck calls back softly. “Come on in!”“We should have the scholars look at that,” Miriel suggests. “Come out, and watch our backs.” With a quick bit of direction from the priestess, we adjust our roles. Hands of Fire and Paks guard the staircase up. Chuck and Stone guard the staircase down. Our scholarly party members, Miriel, Goldpetal, Novalia, and Telryn light some extra torches, and go in to look at the books. Telryn enters the room first, carrying one of the torches. As he moves towards the corner of the room, he feels very cold. Goldpetal is standing right behind him, and notices that the young mage is starting to shiver. As Telryn approaches the bookcase with the torch, the elf sees a mold which was on the bookshelf spread before his very eyes, covering more of the wall and bookshelf. “Ow!” Telryn gasps, as a burst of cold air gives him a small freezer burn. Goldpetal is similarly affected. They both back away, back to the door. Telryn warns the others “Stay away from that mold. I think it might be activated by the heat.”Miriel asks, “Goldpetal, do you knows what this mold is?”“I’ve never seen it before,” he says, “But I’ve heard stories of ‘brown mold,’ which is pretty common underground. Heat sources make it grow, cold sources make it shrink.”Miriel and Telryn, who have torches, leave the room, and Novalia follows. Goldpetal stays. “I can see without the torch,” he says. “I’ll look around.”“Be careful,” Miriel cautions. As she and the others return to the larger room, Paks asks “What happened?” “It was cold,” Telryn says, and explains about the mold. When he’s finished, he calls to the elf, “Goldpetal, bring out any books which are not next to the mold. I’m going to study a cold spell.”  Telryn sits in the center of the main room and opens his spell books. As he studies to learn to cast the spell ray of frost, several of us re-enter the library. If we move carefully, keeping the torches away from the mold, we’re able to slip through the library to the door on its south wall without making the mold grow. Chuck, Goldpetal, Hands of Fire, and Paks step to the door, while Miriel watches the mold. Stone and Novalia remain behind to guard Telryn.Chuck listens at the door, but he doesn’t hear anything from the space beyond. He tries to open the door, but, like the first door on this level, it won’t budge. “Somebody else try,” he says, stepping back to make room.Goldpetal steps forward and puts his shoulder to it. The slight, small elf gives a quick heave, and the door creaks open. Chuck looks completely surprised, assessing the elf’s build with his mouth agape. Looking through the door, Goldpetal sees a large hall, with a big wooden table in the center. As he carefully moves into the room, his eyes take in other details which suggest that this was once the great hall of this tower complex. He notes a lot of old banners, a pair of swords crossed on the wall, a large fireplace, and a pair of mighty double-barred doors on the east wall. A door on the west wall is clearly the stuck door from the main hall.Goldpetal moves slowly along the wall of the room, and Chuck follows him into the room. The watchful eyes of the pair notice a sizeable pool of water in the southeast corner, and mud seeping in under the great double doors. Paks steps to the doorway, where she can survey the room.Chuck examines the puddle from afar. “I don’t like the looks of that water,” he tells Goldpetal. The elf, when he pays closer attention to it, notices what Chuck has spotted – the water has a weird sheen to it, and it ripples strangely. The room is still, and there have been no ripples in the previous pools of water. Chuck picks up a broken chair. Before Goldpetal can say anything, he throws it at the water. The pool moves, and a large pseudopod reaches out of it. It catches the chair in mid-air, and holds onto it. A shimmering clear ooze slimes out of the water towards them. Goldpetal shouts a word of command, and summons a swarm of bats which attack the ooze. Chuck draws his bow, and shoots an arrow at the ooze. The arrow hits it, sticks in the ooze for a moment, and then begins to dissolve. Paks quickly backs out into the library, where she tells the other members of the party, “We’ve found some sort of clear ooze. It moves, and I think its acid.” “Not good,” says Stone, from the main room. Telryn looks up from his studies, and hands Novalia a flask. “Try this,” he says. Seeing the blank look on her face, he adds, “Its alchemist’s fire.” He returns to his studies and Novalia hands the vial to Paks. Miriel moves to the door between the hall and the library, where she can watch both the mold, and the clear ooze.The ooze moves slowly towards the party – it does not move fast enough to catch even a walking human. The first pseudopod has returned into the body of the ooze, which is working on digesting the remnants of the chair. The bats dive to attack it. Another pseudopod forms out of the ooze and swats at the bats. One is trapped within it, and begins to dissolve as well. The rest of the bats follow the slime, which is oozing under the table.Chuck pulls out a vial of acid and throws it at the ooze. The vial bursts right in the center of it, but the strange creature doesn’t seem to care. Paks moves back into the doorway, and throws the vial of alchemist’s fire at it. The flammable liquid bursts near the front of the slimy beast, ignites briefly, but is quickly extinguished.Hands of Fire says something in a commanding tone of voice, but none of us understand. His interpreter, several rooms away, does not hear. The lizard man, in frustration, grabs the table, and tries to shift it. He runs out of time, as the ooze seeps towards his feet. A pseudopod swipes towards him, and he leaps back out of the way just in time.Everyone backs away from it, staying near the walls of the room. Chuck shoots two more arrows at the ooze, hitting it twice more. Like the first arrow, these two arrows dissolve. However, the ooze stops moving and squishes to the floor, looking like any ordinary puddle of water. Chuck throws another chair at it, but nothing happens. “I think its dead,” he says.Chuck picks up another chair, and throws this at the larger pool of water in the corner. Again, nothing happens. The pool appears to be about a foot deep. “What was that thing?” asks Paks, with disgust in her voice.“I have no idea,” Goldpetal answers. “Chuck?”“Who cares, as long as it’s dead?”The danger has passed, and we return to a standing watch. Stone, Paks, Novalia, and Hands of Fire remain in the main room of the level, keeping two pairs of eyes on each staircase. Telryn continues to study, Miriel keeps an eye on the brown mold, and Chuck and Goldpetal search the hall thoroughly. They do not find anything useful. The wall hangings are all too old to be of value, the swords on the wall have rusted, and a search of the fireplace reveals nothing. They examine the walls and fireplace for hidden doors, but find nothing out of the ordinary. As though by unspoken agreement, they ignore the great double doors with mud seeping through them – remembering that the doors are about twenty feet below the surface of the lake, neither of them is foolish enough to contemplate opening them.When Telryn finishes studying, he moves in to attack the brown mold. It is very anticlimactic: he casts the simplest cold cantrip, a ray of frost, at it, and the mold shrivels up and flakes off. Goldpetal, Miriel, and Telryn go in to look at books, while Chuck inspects the bookcases for secret doors. Several minutes pass in silent search, broken only by occasional noises from the readers.“Hey guys,” Chuck calls excitedly, “It looks like the section where the mold was hides a secret door. If I move this book…”“Don’t!” Telryn interjects sharply. “Let us finish here, first.” Chuck steps away from his discovery, and waits impatiently while the others read.Goldpetal finds that one book is a treatise on the old Leadan empire, which Telryn says covered this whole continent at one time. Telryn finds a useful reference book on gems. Paging through it, he figures that if someone spent a week reading it, they could learn to appraise gems. Nothing else looks useful, and many of the books are damaged beyond legibility due to the damp conditions.When they have finished, Chuck asks plaintively, “Now can we look behind the secret door?” Without even waiting for an answer, he pulls on the false book he discovered. A section of the bookcase shifts back and slides sideways, revealing a dark room beyond.Chuck draws his magical dagger, which provides a shimmering, blue-tinged light. He steps into the dark room, holding his glowing dagger aloft. He discovers a study, covered in dust. It looks as though nothing has been disturbed within since the tower fell. A desk, a chair, and a small chest are the only furniture in the room.Paks and Telryn enter the room as well. It is crowded, as the room is only about five feet wide and ten feet long. Paks examines the chest for traps. She doesn’t find any. She draws her short sword, which she keeps sheathed at her belt in case her longsword breaks, and tries to jimmy the lock. Afraid of breaking the blade of her sword, she can’t push with too much force, and she thinks the sword will break before the chest does. Telryn pulls out the thieves’ tools and tries to open the chest, but he can’t make any sense of the lock picks. While they worry at the chest, Chuck examines the desk. He searches it thoroughly, but doesn’t find anything too useful. It looks as though the occupant just stepped out for a moment – there are ancient sheets of parchment, which crumble at his touch, and an inkwell filled with dry black ink. Everything is covered in a fine dust.The chest involves everyone. Goldpetal slashes at it with his scimitar, but that only nicks the blade. Hands of Fire tries to pry it open, but fails, so he bashes at the lock with his club, but it still refuses to yield. Chuck tries to pick it up, thinking it might break if he dropped it, but it’s too heavy. Stone tries to pry it open with his bare hands, but concedes that it is beyond his strength. He cannot pick it up, either.Finally, Telryn pours his flask of acid into the lock. Hands of Fire pries at it, and breaks it open at last. He kicks the lid open. Inside the chest, we find a big sack, a little pouch, a folded cloak, and a gold duck statue. Hands of Fire uses the short sword to try to pick up the sack; it rips open and some coins spill out. He picks up the little pouch and dumps it out onto the table; six garnets spill out. Stone and Chuck reach for the duck, which Chuck touches first. He grabs it, holds it to his chest for a moment, and then furtively puts it in his bag. Goldpetal pulls the cloak out, and immediately recognizes it as the work of the High Elves, the ancestors of his race. Their cloaks are legendary for giving camouflage, especially in woodlands areas. He looks at his homespun clothes, worn through from our travails through the swamp, and smiles at the thought of replacing them. Hands of Fire tips the chest over and spills out the gold coins. Goldpetal calls out “Miriel, why don’t you come in and detect magic, here.”Miriel enters the room, and casts detect magic from the corner of the room, where she can use it on everything in the room. The spell lets her see magical auras, and finds that there is something magic in Goldpetal’s pack, and also something in Chuck’s pack. Telryn has a lot of magic on him. She gets a weird feeling from Chuck, as if he himself is enchanted. “The gold is fine,” she tells everyone. As Chuck moves past her, out of the room, she pulls Goldpetal aside. “I think Chuck might be enchanted,” she tells him. “Keep an eye on him.” Goldpetal follows Chuck into the main room. Stone examines the coins, and notes that they have a wheel stamped on them. They do not match any coins which the half-orc has seen before.Miriel goes to find Telryn. “I think Chuck might be enchanted,” she says. “I got a weird feeling from him when I cast detect magic. I don’t know what to do.”“I don’t know, either,” the mage says. “I think it might have been that duck he picked up.”Miriel finds Chuck, in the hall where we killed the ooze, and tells him, “I think the duck might be enchanted.”“Yeah, it’s my duck!” he says, looking at her as though she were crazy. “Now I can swim, fly, and talk to ducks.” She looks at him blankly, and he concludes, “But not when you’re looking at me.” “Is it a curse?” Paks asks from the doorway.“No, no, its magic!” Chuck says, whirling to face her. Goldpetal, behind his back, catches Paks’ eye and nods his head yes.Everyone looks doubtful of Chuck’s assertion, but there doesn’t seem to be much we can do. Though we’ve all heard of magical curses, and the counter-magic to remove them, none of us have learned such a spell. Paks, ever the conciliator, suggests, “Shall we open the double doors?”“No,” Telryn says quickly. “We’re under the water level, and look at the mud seeping in.”“We might let in half the lake,” Miriel says, in agreement. “Let’s go down the next staircase.”Stone starts to lug the sack of coins into the main room, but Telryn tells him, “No, just leave it in the study. We can pick it up on our way back out.” We close the secret door, and gather in the hall. The dark opening of the staircase awaits us.</blockquote>

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