Journal of Rollo Lavius 2

Entry #272 - The Floating Steps

(G272 22/04/2016 via Roll20 - AP(GM), JF, Mira, Guru

DAY 247 (13 Uktar)(November) cont ...

Just going to get a bit of sleep now, so I'll put down a few lines before I put my head down. I send Rolanda out at about noon to see what was left of poor Mirabella. Listening at the cave entrance, Falo-han reported that he could hear feint nibbling sounds out on the bridge.

Well, I could guess at what was going on, it was Rolanda nibbling on Mirabella's corpse, probably her eyeballs. When she got back I gave her a long lecture, along the lines of,

'Stop thinking like a rat! You've been awakened by a druid, you should start acting like it. You are part of an adventure party now, a valued member of the team. You need to treat fallen comrades with more respect.'

She seemed to take it on board, she is very intelligent after all, but I don't know - perhaps once a rat, always a rat.

We spent the rest of the day and night in the cave. It seems to be that most of the time we spend resting, while in the Plane of Shadows. We then go out, get into a fight that lasts about ten minutes, then perhaps another one, then we tidy up after it all and go back to our refuge to rest for the remainder of the day. It's not like the ballads at all, when the heros just charge in and take care of everything in a single evening, shout Huzzah! and go to the tavern.

DAY 248 (14 Uktar)(November)

And so another day began. What evil being of darkness would we slay on this fine morning? How many other members of our adventure party would die?

I remember all the fights we had when we were on the Sea Wyvern, against pirates and giant octopuses, and all the things we had to deal with on those dangerous islands on the way to Farshore. Somehow all those encounters are a fond memory now. I'd rather face a whole ship load of orcish pirates than spend another day in this hellish place.

We had no choice though, so I started by scrying the dragon and making sure it was not abroad. It wasn't, it was tampering with the weave again, so we all went to retrieve Mirabella's body.

Sylvia cast 'Speak with Dead' and established that Mirabella was more than happy to be dead so she then cast 'Gentle Repose' on the corpse and stacked her with Gurudor.

After that we moved on to the next unexplored tower which appeared to be a jail of some kind. Yli scouted ahead and spotted a mindflayer and shot it with a well placed arrow. Irritator then moved up and finished it off with some of his deadly Empowered Magic Missiles.

There were six cells in a sort of pit in this tower and they contained four people from Weyloon.

There were:

Tholwick - a male human adept

Durgen - a male dwarf cleric of Morodin

Kareem - a Human male paladin of tyr

Smote - male halfling sorcerer

They were weak and hungry and couldn't offer much advice on the region so we took them up to the dragon-proof (hopefully!) cave and let them take some weapons from the loot pile to protect themselves with.

There were three chests in the tower as well and it was a shame that Mirabella was no longer with us, as each of them was trapped. We opened them simply by letting the barbarians do the work and absorbing the damage from the ice, lighting or whatever it was that happened when you touched them. The stupid, absurd things didn't even have treasure in them so the whole enterprise turned out to be pointless! Just clothes, jars and such like.

With deep sighs all round we moved on to the next area, across yet another long rope bridge.

This place, honestly, who constructs places like this? I picture some ancient, helmet clad liche like creature unrolling a parchment and showing it to his architect then saying,

'Yes, I thought I'd have giant floating steps going down about one hundred feet to the bathroom here. Nothing says "evil" like plummeting to your death when you are in a rush to get to the toilet does it?'

Well, we didn't know what was at the bottom of this stairwell of giant floating steps but we decided to investigate them anyway. At the 70ft mark, on the other side of the stair pit there was some sort of insectoid creature that cast yellowish green poison clouds at us.

Me and Basil were immune to this sort of thing but it made the others really ill.

We unleashed everything at it, magic missiles, flame strikes and lots of arrows but it seemed to be pretty tough.

I turned into a giant owl and Basil turned into a dire bat and we winged over to it and pecked at it a bit, but the creature just whacked at us with a trident.

I turned the step it was standing on into pebbles with a Stone Shape spell and it plummeted to the ground. I thought that was the fight over, but the strange creature teleported to where the others were standing and started casting those poison clouds again.

This thing, whatever it was, was much tougher than the mindflayer. Yli moved in with his bow. Irritator cast more Magic Missiles but they seemed to have little affect.

I flew across as the others retreated from the clouds of poison. This was starting to get interesting...