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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1438125" data-attributes="member: 1210">The Battle for the DeleterIn the western sky, the sun touches the water’s edge and seems to perch there for a moment before starting to ease into the sea.*  The shadows lengthen; the clouds turn first orange, then pink, then purple.Horbin nervously paces in his room.  He has deep misgivings about Londo- they just met, after all- but he realizes that Angelfire’s new cohort is right.  The Deleter has to go.  It’s killing her.**  He takes a deep breath.  All he can do is wait, anyway.***In her room, Angel and Londo break from a long kiss.Her heart is all aflutter; she can’t take her eyes off him.  He’s dark and brooding and grim; his aura flares with Coilite power.  He is a champion of her deity, and one almost as powerful as she is!  Surely it is no coincidence that she has met him; surely Coila means them to be together.  They must be destined for great things.  Felenga- and more.“Let’s take a shot,” Londo rumbles softly, pulling a flask of freshly-purchased tiley*** from his belt.  Angel exclaims in pleasure as her new man shows himself possessed of exquisite taste in liquor.He pour a shot for each of them, though he hands Angel hers first (very full) and covers his with his body while he pours a much smaller one.  They toss them back.  Angel feels it burn all the way to her belly, its sharp, coppery flavor filling her sinuses.  Her head swims; she takes a stumbling step backwards and falls snoring onto the bed.Londo, eyes watering, coughs a few times, sways, then staggers out into the hall.  A few steps to Horbin’s room; then a knock, and the cleric’s door opens with alacrity.“Get ready,” mutters Londo.  “She’s passed out.”Horbin shakes his head in wonder, then follows the blackguard.  He casts a neutralize poison to sober Londo up and the two quietly enter Angelfire’s chamber.  She’s still snoring as Londo carefully lays her out face down with her arms- and the Deleter- stretched out above her head.He draws forth a sword.***Rex wakes with a start.Did he hear something?Hell, he’s tired.  Forget it.  He rolls over and tries to go back to sleep.***Orbius, writing in his journal (he must preserve what he observes, after all), hears the blood-curdling scream rip through the living area of the castle.  Immediately he casts Orbius’ mobile scry and looks in on Angelfire’s room- after all, that Londo guy doesn’t look one bit trustworthy to the Eye!“By the spectacles of Boccob!” he exclaims.What the hell is Horbin doing in there??Orbius teleports.***All down the hall with the living quarters assigned to our heroes, doors fly open as sleepy adventurers spring into action.  People are yelling; what the hell’s going on?Annoyed- it doesn’t even sound like there’s a fight- Rex nonetheless takes the opportunity to do something he’s been considering for a while, and uses a scroll of limited wish and permanency to enlarge himself.  He’s tired of Sybele and Thrush being bigger than him.***When the blade came down for the first time, there was a horrible amount of blood.  Angel came awake with a horrifying scream as her right hand is hacked mercilessly from her body.  Londo chops again, hoping to finish it all in an instant, but the Deleter seems to move the arm with an awareness all its own, jerking about and avoiding a second clean severing.  The blow catches the arm a terrific blow but doesn’t hew the hand free.“Dexter’s nadlies!” swears Horbin, and casts feeblemind on Angel.  The templar of Coila grunts in surprise as her mind basically turns to oatmeal.  She goes slack, crying and mewling in pain as blood pumps from the stump of her right hand at a prodigious rate.And then Angel’s left hand- with half the Deleter still attached- jerks around to point and Londo.  There’s a terrific ZOT as a coruscating beam of violet-hot energy arcs jaggedly through the air.  Londo cries out in surprise, but the blast misses him.He slices deeply into Angelfire’s wrist; he hears bones crack, but he doesn’t quite hew it off.  His lips are curled in a fierce sneer as he prepares to hack at the Deleter again, and then suddenly the door to the room opens!***When the Eye throws the door open he’s already moving aside; but the hallway is full of powerful adventurers who know Angel and Horbin very well and would love to help if they only knew what the hell was going on.  Orbius, of course, has already figured it out, with his vast intellect.  Bartholomew of Cassis has too. He observes as Horbin casts hold person and Angelfire freezes in place, then starts in wonder as the Deleter jerks her arm about with such force that it breaks bones against the magic of the holding!  Patyn is rushing into the room, striking a blow at the Deleter with his sun blade; and he deals another devastating wound to the arm. It just won’t let go.ZOT!  Another blast fires off, narrowly missing Horbin the Holy as it cascades past his shoulder and blasts the wall.  Then Londo lands another incredible blow to the arm, a grievous wound that almost takes the appendage off at last; but it’s hanging by a combination of a few flaps of skin and some filaments the Deleter seems to have extruded just for this purpose.Orbius fires a puncture.  The spell isn’t possible to aim closely, but it has tremendous power and will blow a hole in just about anything.  And, through sheer dumb luck, the blast takes Angelfire in the left arm and shoots her remaining hand off.Horbin scoops both hands up carefully and puts them in his bag of holding.  “We should make sure to dispose of these properly,” he remarks, then casts a heal on Angelfire, which- among other things- takes care of the feeblemind.  He follows this up with a pair of regenerates.  “Get out,” Londo tells everyone.“I can heal her more,” Horbin says.  “Maybe she needs-“”Get.  Out.”Watching from his room, Bartholomew surreptitiously casts phantasmal thief.  After he sends it off, he closes the door for a moment while he quickly summons Barzoul, a vrock known to him.  Counting on the party to remain distracted enough not to find the vrock in time, he commands Barzoul to remain silent and quiescent until otherwise ordered.  And he waits for the phantasmal thief to deliver its cargo.Everyone leaves the room.  Londo shuts the door behind them.  In the hallway, the party discusses what to do with the Deleter.“We need to get rid of it,” says Horbin firmly.“What is it?” asks Sir Maxwell.  “It’s bad news,” says Patyn.  “It’s an artifact- not evil, but chaotic.”“We needed it to bring our big enemy down to a level where we have a chance against him; but we’ve done that.  I don’t know if it’s worth the trouble anymore.”  Horbin frowns.  “We should dispose of it somehow.”“We might need it again,” Orbius muses.“Look at the trouble it’s caused!  We need to hide it away or something, or at least make sure that it’s safely away.  And we need to make sure that Angel can’t get at it- I’m afraid there may be repercussions from this little incident.”Orbius looks uneasy.***Fraemlyn is steamed.  Just... ooh!  Steamed!  A demon!  How dare he summon a demon here- the stink is almost impossible to remove!Watching from a hidden crack in the wall, Fraemlyn determines to cause whatever trouble he can.  He sees the thaumaturge hand the gloves to the demon and sees the demon teleport away, doing its master’s bidding.  Well, as Bartholomew coolly exits his room for the hallway, one thing’s for sure.  You don’t piss off the house fairies if you have something to hide.Fraemlyn resolves to tattle.*Cydra- the campaign world- takes place on the inside surface of a gigantic air bubble in an infinite ocean.  The sun orbits the island of Forinthia; night is when it plunges into the sea and goes beneath.  The heat of this passage is what helps the sea’s life thrive so strongly beneath the ecliptic.**I believe that at this point Angelfire had about 12 negative levels she couldn’t get rid of.  Each time she fired a blast from the Deleter she gained 1d4!  At progressively deeper and deeper thresholds, she’d lose some as other effects took over.***An extremely potent liquor with mildly hallucinogenic properties, distilled in part from the heart’s blood of a dragon.  This makes it extremely rare, as in my campaign there were very few dragons in the world until a few game years ago and the infamous Hatching Caves adventure (which were really the big setup for the Great War of Ethics that’s taking place in the background).  A sip of tiley is enough to get an average human so drunk that they vomit or pass out; it is extremely unlikely that one could take a shot and still stand.Next Time: When Horbin looks in his bag of holding in about six seconds, what happens??</blockquote>

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