Journal of Rollo Lavius 1

Entry #63 - Gnomes in Love

(G63 - OR 18/09/09)

DAY 113 cont...

The usual chaos ensued. I sometimes wish we had an effective leader onboard. I have no desire to fill that role though and I suppose everyone else feels the same way. As a result our tactics against an angry giant octopus seems to be get everyone on the deck and get grabbed until the beast has someone in nearly every arm. Then the remainder of the crew, by the simple expedient of the beast having no more limbs to attack with, kill the beast!

I was merely on hand to heal those that had been grabbed - who were Moth, Solomon, Lirith and Shlump.

Shifty had already done the most damage with two well placed crossbow bolts in its eye and it was finished off by Eriss and Falah. As it slipped back over the side, Shifty hacked off a couple of its tentacles, presumably to bolster the ships food supplies.

Moth had been pinned to the mast and was almost dead by the time the creature was killed and the fall would have surely done him in. Luckily I was nearby and was able to catch him. I say catch - what I mean is I was there to provide a soft landing!

His half dead body on top of me, I looked over to where Solomon lay and heard his last gasp of life leave his body, but I pulled him back from the brink by reaching out from under Moth and using a 'Cure Light Wounds' spell. By then Nobby was there to help me with her more powerful healing magic.

The rest of the night was uneventful.

At dawn I arranged a meeting between the Wyverns and the Blue Nixie and we decided to start sailing through the night. To make up time and perhaps not get attacked by sea creatures while anchored.

Good sailing today.

DAY 114

We sailed all through the day and all through the night.

The night shift crew are : Solomon, Rollo, Nobby, Shifty, Eriss, Kelech and Falah.

DAY 115

Sailed all through the night and day again.

~

As an aside, I have been spending time going over the charts and working with Urol doing our navigational calculations and such. We are following the Nixie, but it seems sensible to carry out our own navigation just incase the Nixie goes wrong or we loose them in the dark.

It seems to be going well so far anyway, and Urol is a very clever soul and interesting to talk to once you cut through his prattle.

I have to say, he knows more about nature than me, puts me to shame in fact! I spend half our time together picking his brains about the local flora and fauna, although he does seem to be fixated on beetles and insects. I do not mind such creatures at all, but I must confess to being more drawn to the larger members of the animal kingdom.

Urol is happy to swap information with me though, his knowledge of beetles in return for my knowledge of Nobby! The ship treats his desire for our erstwhile cleric as a joke and I admit I did, and still do to a certain extent. But having talked to him, I can see that his desire is genuine and sweet in some odd gnomish way.

I suppose I know Nobby as well as anyone on board the ship, since me, her and Shifty are the Pie Shop Three as it were and joint owners of the Wyvern. Still, Nobby is not exactly difficult to get to know, its just that I would say we are on slightly different wave lengths. I would go as far to say I get on better with Eriss since we seem to share a common bond in some things and I am always teasing her. Eriss can be quite crude sometimes too, and by comparison I would say Nobby can be a bit prim.

Nobby also spends all her free time asleep. Don't get me wrong, Nobby is a good friend and ally, but when it comes to guessing what would unlock the key to her heart I don't really have much to give Urol in the way of advice. Everything I say about her though, he seems to take as a godly decree and stores away every fact I reveal about her like a precious gem.

Besides I am hardly the best person to be giving advice on women, but he seems to consider me a bit of a lothario since I (apparently) have a lady friend on both ships!

~

DAY 116

Smoke was reported rising from the hills in the morning. Perhaps a forest fire?

Later...

Me and the rest of the night shift were awoken when we reached Fort Greenock. We were meant to be taking on supplies here, but it appeared to be in ruins and had been for several months.

I took a flight over the ruins and then reported back to the ship. I had seen a lot of large spiders webs in the broken down walls of the fort.

It was decided an away team would be put together consisting of me, Moth, Nobby, Shifty, Eriss and Shlump.

Once on land, we approached the nearest stone guard tower and Moth and Shifty went on ahead as scouts who went on through the tall elephant grass.

They were soon set upon by goblins and their dire rat pets. I took to the air and watched the battle.

Eriss and Shifty took on a group of the creatures while Moth and Mr B took on another. Nobby took a while to reach Moth and join him.

It was not a long battle and with me providing a couple of lightning bolts from the sky to pick off a runner we had then all dispatched in under a minute.

The others went into the tower and reported finding a bit of treasure and while they searched through that I flew on over the main fort building to look over the webs. Shifty shouted over to me,

'Drop rat corpses on the webs! See what comes out!'

Seeing the sense in this I grabbed up a rat body in my talons and then swooping high over the fort dropped it on one of the webs.

A large spider scuttled out.

I repeated this process a few more times and when my lightning bolts were about to expire I thought I may as well use them up. Crack! I electrified one of the spiders. Zap! I got another.

Some of them fired off webbing at me, but as I was well over a 100ft in the air at that time the strands fell well short of their mark.

More creatures began to emerge from the ruins and I swooped down again to wash out a portion of the fort with a Rogue Wave.

I had the satisfaction of seeing a very large spider being washed up against a wall, injured but still alive.

Warming to my task, and perhaps a bit rashly, I thought I would bomb the place with summoned small fire elementals. This required me going lower though and as I passed quickly down amongst the ruins I was tagged by some webbing and pulled closer to the ground.

I struggled though, with the webbing around my talons and tail, beating my wings frantically. I didn't want to land amongst whatever was down there.

The fire elementals had been summoned successfully though and proceeded to seek out the enemy. I saw two ettercaps and the very large spider.

The spider fired off another strand of webbing at me and I responded with a Flaming Sphere. The fire elementals seemed to do quite a lot of damage to the ettercaps, but they are not very big, no bigger than a gnome, and all but one of the three was soon extinguished.

Luckily though, by the time I had been pulled down to the ground I had summoned three crocodiles and they made very short work indeed of the already injured enemy.

Moth came over to see what was going on and seeing the carcasses got me (back in human form) to cut out their venom sacs for his poisons. I duly did so and when we had a look around the fort our attention was draw to a grating in the floor...