excerpt 27

It’s been a long time since I wrote but logistics make for crappy storytelling so who cares that I ran out of ink, or that poisoned demon blood apparently turns pages completely black a day later. Here we are back in business and that’s all that matters.

To resolve our cliffhanger, Splug did *not* convince Arranis to put out his burning bits by peeing on them. But once those bits of his were no longer burning Oakley did convince him to try wrapping the flame-spurting bowl with a demonskin and trying again. The suggestion was successful in that Arranis did pry the topaz eyes out of the statue. However the fire burned right through the demonskin so Arranis had to caper about while on fire again.
.
We bent our efforts to toppling the Baphomet statue, Splug to painting a raven queen symbol on things, and we successfully established that the far door opened onto the room with the corrupted black pool. It was then suggested that we had strayed from our mission, and by more than just Oakley. Little of our recent accomplishments could be said to have furthered any of:

– the cleansing of Dragonroost
– the scouting of the fortress for Lord Padraig
– the locating of the missing eladrin princess with the unfortunate name
– the locating of Lord Markelhay’s ancestral sword.

We went back to the first room, to the huge double doors there and to the unresolved clanking noises that we had once heard behind them. Splug and Neil investigated the doors. Neil sniffed the keyhole and then licked the keyhole, accidentally licking Splug who was listening at the keyhole. An unperturbed although perhaps slightly hastened Splug opened the door stealthily just a crack. The view that met him was of the back of a kobold. The room beyond the kobold proved to be full of armored kobolds, kobolds in robes, gold and treasure, and more kobolds polishing gold and treasure. And a sleeping dragon, very large and very red. We all whispered for a while at the door.

Oakley: “How many kobolds?”
Splug: “More than ten”
Oakley: “Can you count to more than ten?”
Splug: “No. Only ten fingers.” <waggles fingers>

Neil used his ability to detect vulnerabilities on the dragon, thus did we learn again that it was asleep.

Besides that we could also see a second set of double doors, barricaded, and we could see a tunnel that was actively being expanded by kobolds with picks and shovels. Curiously the tunnel already looked plenty big enough for the dragon so why expand it – was a clever thought that did not occur to us until the next day. Instead we pondered various plans of how to solve the room, each of which led in its own creative way to our certain demise.

After a while Oakley wandered off and picked his way up a rubble-strewn staircase that was nearby. Klajdu and Splug followed. As did the rest of us once we noticed they were gone. Above it proved to be an old barracks, mostly ruined and with some bodies from a fairly recent battle. 3 dead beasties were of particular interest. Two of them were carrion crawlers and one was a “Bullet” – a sharkish looking thing that apparently burrows through the ground. We investigated a bit more to the west and found a campfire whose ashes were still warm. The bootprints and footprints looked like that of another party of adventurers. We were perplexed.

Oakley: “Are we the B Team?”

After finding nothing of value we camped for the night. I’m sure it was a safe place to camp. Within a hundred yards of a dead creature with teeth like a shark that comes up out of the ground with no warning. I mean clearly other people had camped here and either they had come to no harm or they had been eaten whole while they slept. Either way, a nearly painless night awaited.

The next morning we decided to head over to the main temple and get back on track a bit. Specifically,

Neil: “Lets get this Oakley guy satisfied cause he’s been a bit of a bitch lately.”

Oakley was on the whole gratified and began to regale us with tales of the temple at the center of the abbey complex, how it had a huge statue of a platinum Bahamut in dragon form, and statues of Pelor, Kord, Moradin, Erathis, Ioun, blah blah blah.

We reach the thus-vaunted temple and listen at the door. Splug is the only one who hears anything but what he claims to have heard is a faint rustle of wings like from an enormous pigeon and a deranged baby cooing.

Neil: “Hello! Angel Demon Baby!”
Splug: “Not Angel Dragon Baby?”

<Splug makes a brief but compelling case for dragons over demons. >

Shazia: “On the other hand, every time there *could* be a demon, there *has* been a demon.”
Splug: “That makes sense”

Neil then says “Guys I’m getting some really good vibes from this place” as he opens the door and strides in. We follow. The temple is indeed pretty impressive. There are many statues of gods all surrounding a towering statue of Bahamut. However the central statue of Bahamut has him in human form not dragon form.

Splug: “Oakley doesn’t know shit.”
Oakley: “Ah. The years and the drink take their toll.”

A woman’s croaking voice from far overheard calls: “All faithful of Bahamut come to worship”
We see them after a moment- 2 flying harpies wearing tattered priests vestments. One has holy symbols entangled in her hair. The other is in white robes that are spattered with blood and that end a bit prematurely in a jagged bloody cut.

Neil: “Greetings! Beauties! we would like to dedicate a great treasure beneath us, guarded by a couple kobolds!”
Harpy: “What need do the faithful have of treasure?”

For no reason that I can think of, I then said in Abyssal “Oh take those silly clothes off and get down here” which made neither myself nor the party very popular with our flying friends and in fact they tried to kill us. One started singing a bizarre nutzo version of a hymn to Bahamut.

Oakley: “I care not for this remix.”

The other started up with a delightfully strident impression of a deranged screaming baby.
Neil frowned in concentration for a moment and then again in frustration as he revealed to us that the two harpies had no vulnerabilities that he could detect.
As we joined the two harpies in battle three Angels of Valor suddenly revealed themselves and they, er, attacked us too. Which was disturbing to say the least, not least to our friend Oakley the damn paladin. The angels did seem a bit “off”, but they’re still clearly angels.

The battle was frenetic, complicated and most of all loud.

At one point Splug mockingly said “What’s it, gonna sing at me again?”, right before a harpy gave a deadly screech that nearly killed him.

—————————–

I don’t really want to chronicle the killing of the angels so I wont. It was, as Splug said at the time, a bummer. It even overshadowed the killing of the harpies which was quite glorious, with one of them being cut in half by Klajdu’s flaming hammer as it exploded.

Anyway, we clean up a bit, we have some brandy, we peer into the mysterious pool of water, we search the room. Splug finds a card in the Bahamut statue – it seems to be from the same deck as Neil’s Fool card except that this new card depicts a Sun. During the battle in fact an image of the sun had appeared on the ground but since a further accounting would lead back to the angel-killing, lets leave it there.

Neil reminds us of that vision he’d had and told us that it had occurred in this very hall. In case memory fails or previous entries of this journal are consigned to oblivion, this is the vision where the paladin kneeled in front of a Bahamut statue, drew a card from a deck, looked at it and then recoiled in horror as chaos broke out in the room around him. On the retelling thereof, Oakley offers that the paladin in the vision might well have been the famous paladin Havarr.

We settle in while Oakley purifies the temple. Except that he doesn’t. After much hemming and hawing, Oakley in fact says that he cannot purify the temple because he lacks certain artifacts he had rather optimistically expected to be here. A Brazier of Silver Fire, a Chalice of the Dragon ,and a Bowl of Eos’ Blood. As Splug starts to give him a piece of his mind Neil says “I no longer want to live with your pointless bickering” and jumps into the pool of water. He emerges a bit later still alive and claiming to have picked up a powerful sense of clarity. Splug of course then jumps into the same pool but picks up only some mild frostbite in his toes and some extra ranting and raving.

Splug: “This is good shit! This is the crystal blue persuasion
they’ve been talking about!”

Unsure of whether I’m taking a tonic or a weapon, I fill an empty flask with the mysterious water. Further into the temple we find stairs that lead down. After Neil darts back briefly saying he’d forgotten to get a harpy eyeball, we descend in relative quiet and as we do we can hear faint chanting up ahead. It is a hymn to Bahamut.

Neil: “I have a good feeling about this”
Shazia: “Is food involved in this good feeling?”
Neil: “its just a generally good feeling but if I had to think of a food it would be apples.”

I go on to explain that Neil’s visions of food have historically tended to precede parts where demonic things try to kill us.

Downstairs we come upon a group of 7 armored humans surrounding an altar. Worshipping at it even. There are four coffins one of which is open. They have little nameplates of which I can see two. Torin and Selfgar. The open coffin contains the remains of a knight. The people are chanting as we come in. Later it comes out that Neil and Splug (but not Oakley) realized that this priest or paladin had made a weird error with the Bahamut scripture. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

One of our new friends is a bit more ornately dressed and armored than the others and he identifies himself as Havarr.

Havarr: “Come travellers! Kneel and worship with us”

Oakland strides forward.
Oakley: “Are you true worshippers of Bahamut?”

These knights seem uneasy and have weapons close to hand.

Arranis: “how long have you been here?”

Oakley: “Were you not aware of the harpies upstairs?”

But it’s then that things take their normal left turn into
not-completely-reasonable.

Splug brazenly steals the skull from the open coffin, somehow without being detected.
Neil turns and says “This one is the guy that was in the vision that I had that was *not* a flashback”.
And Ezmerelda begins to flirt with Havarr.

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