Looting and the Gargoyle
“Good lord,” Thrush remarks. “Look at all that.”
The heroes have piled the demilich’s hoard together and cast a
detect magic on it; and there’s a lot of loot to be had- nearly a hundred gems!- and it will take a while to identify it all properly. Drelvin sticks it in his
bag of holding for future research and division. Speaking only of magic, the hoard holds a dozen potions, six scrolls, a black iron ring set with a cat’s eye, a thin iron rod about 2 ½ feet long graven with closed fists, a staff of black, fire-hardened oak with an efreet painted in red and yellow, circling the staff’s length like a serpent, a pair of fine boots of fuzzy dark blue velvet with a lightning bolt along the outside edge of each, a red-and-black cloak with a spider web motif on it, a fine black leather top hat, three swords and a small-sized longspear.
“Whew,” Drelvin says. “It almost makes it worth it.” He chuckles. Patyn glances sharply his way, but the archer is busy loading up coins into his bag- there must be 50,000 gp value in coin alone here!
“Now what?” wonders Ulla.
“We could get the hell out of here,” Thrush suggests.
“No!” Patyn barks. “We will lose all the progress we’ve made! To have to fight our way through a phalanx of prepared demons and undead- well, I doubt whether it will be so easy a second time, since they are prepared for us. We should rest here, if anything, and continue.”
“Are you crazy?” Drelvin interjects. “That skull could be back any time. I don’t want to fight it again!”
“But we
must,” Patyn answers. “If we don’t go to it, it will surely seek us out and destroy us.”
“Just like everybody else,” Sybele comments. “Just what we need, yet another ultra-powerful enemy.”
“Why doesn’t Horbin
true resurrect them, and then we can move on?”
“Takes time and spells,” Horbin says. “Also, I don’t have fifty grand in diamonds for each of them. Not for any of them, really.”
“I beg to differ,” Drelvin says, digging in his bag for diamonds from the hoard.
***
Rex opens his eyes. For a few moments he doesn’t do anything else, but then he slowly gets to his feet. He seems quiet and subdued. After a few moments of introspection, he asks, “What happened?”
The others tell him the tale and he looks at Patyn with a new respect- and a sense of horror. The hunter of the dead’s skin is pale, his hair has faded to an off-white color, even his clothes and weapons look like they’ve been rendered into black and white. Though Patyn seems to have weathered the soul-sucking attempts without permanent harm, it was clearly a very near thing.
“Well, we can’t trump or teleport out of here anyway,” Sybele is saying. “So we have to find a physical exit.”
“Why don’t we just backtrack our steps?” Thrush suggests, then immediately answers himself. “Oh yeah, the arch of mists. It teleported us. Crap.”
“We should wait for the demilich,” Patyn insists.
“I think we should find a way out of here,” Thrush mutters.
The party debates for a while, but finally Patyn relents when he realizes that he’s the only one who wants to wait for the demilich’s return. So, after taking a few moments to check their weapons, make sure all their armor straps are tight and ensure that their spell components are in the proper pockets, our heroes cautiously venture back towards the upper levels of the tomb, towards the hall of circles, reasoning that there are many possibilities in that area. “Besides,” Drelvin smirks, “maybe I’ll find a secret door.”
Prophetic words, it seems; for the elven archer- aided by his magical gem- does indeed find a secret door in that hall. “We elves,” he crows to much rolling of eyes, “are good at this.”
Behind the secret door is a small cubicle, a quick search of which turns up another secret door. In their confidence, our heroes lose some of their hard-learned caution; and as Thrush opens the door another of the damned spring-loaded hammers smashes into him. With a curse the warrior steps past the trap into another cubicle.
“How much you want to bet we do that over and over?” Thrush grumbles.
Indeed, a search turns up another secret door. This time Rex opens it and nimbly dodge the hammer. Behind the trap is yet another of the small cubicle rooms. The process repeats itself five more times before a tense Thrush opens a secret door to a larger room. This one holds what for an instant our heroes take to be a twin statue to the three-armed gargoyle statue they already found, but one with all four arms still intact.
Then it moves, springing with a roar at them, and the battle is on. It slashes Patyn badly with a claw, spinning to face Thrush as the fighter roars and rushes to meet it, and his greatsword slices out several times, cutting the thing across its chest, upper right arm and side, dealing humungous amounts of damage**. Blood fountains everywhere and the monstrosity throws back its head in a terrible howl of pain. Then the two are a blur of blows and counters.
The drooling Angelfire raises the Deleter (or does it raise itself?) and fires a crackling beam of inexplicable energy at the gargoyle but it goes wide. Perhaps her faltering intellect is to blame; perhaps the Deleter is not accustomed to aiming itself. Who can say? For now, all we really know is that the beam misses.
It doesn’t matter. Drelvin plugs the monster with arrow after arrow, breaking its shoulder. Patyn shakes off the effects of the gargoyle’s terrific blow to strike it back, and Thrush hews at it heroically. It is a final arrow from Drelvin that finishes the beast, and our heroes stand over the body triumphantly.
“That was cake,” Thrush comments.*** “Now what?”
A few moments discussion reveals just how depleted of spells and resources the heroes are. They settle in to rest, even with Lester antsy about Felenga returning. “We can’t just keep going,” Drelvin argues. “Most of us are pretty badly beaten up, we don’t have any real healing left- I know you’re
geased, but we have to rest.”
So they do, clearing the blood and body party of the gargoyle and securing the two exits before settling in to sleep.
*For the record, the following is a partial list of the powerful groups and individuals with beefs with our heroes: the courts of Law, the half-dragon dragon they fought a while back, the Bile Lords, the Supreme Admiral of the Forinthian Navy, Felenga, the remaining Princes of Elemental Evil, Ferranifer and her Black Academy, Old Man Rhumy (a rakshasa sorcerer/legendary figure in Elven mythology), multiple empowered simulacra of some really, really powerful wizards and sorcerers... there’s prolly more, but I can’t think of them.
**99 points of damage in three hits. Ouch. Told ya Thrush is scary.
***This was a CR 20 encounter. Jeez.
Next Time: Our heroes debate some more and find another clue!
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