Grenthrum the Dwarf needed help exploring the dungeon. Roddy was dead, Jack was in physical therapy and nobody else was around to go through the portal with him. He went looking for some Thouls to hire, starting in the chapel of the Leper Heart. The room was deserted, but a trail of ash and slime led from the empty bucket to the Fazenda kitchen.
In the kitchen, a pair of Mutants shouted and threw salt at a dark red blob, which crawled up on the table and devoured a plate of empanadas. The blob gurgled a greeting to Grenthrum in Roddy's voice. The power of Leper Heart had resurrected his ashes. With a slime and three henchmen backing him up, Grenthrum thought he had a chance.
Downstairs in the defunct Gnomish mines, the mage Delgal Haberkorn fussed over the portal while Doctor Pleroma stood guard, ready to dissolve anything that came through. Grenthrum asked if he could hire any of the doctor's patients and was rebuffed. The Thouls were obsessed with maintaining combat readiness in case their creator Rope Trick ever came back for them. They needed to learn how to be something other than living weapons and dungeon exploration would only reverse that process.
Delgal gave the all clear. Roddy, Delgal, Eric, Gowonry and Grit stepped through the portal into the unknown.
The teleporter disgorged the adventurers in a room shaped like a four pointed star. The west passage ended in a 50 foot drop, down to the floor of a vast desert. The group explored south and found a series of apartments, shaped like an Elven treehouse but empty of occupants. The walls were strange resin painted to look like wood, and the "windows" were actually glowing images of nature scenes.
Gowonry heard something moving behind a locked door, which looked like the ones Roddy had seen in Lanthorn. He slithered under the door to take a look, blending in with the dark colored floor. On the other side, a Cleric of Mercy paced an apartment endlessly, moving unsteadily and speaking the same set of phrases in Shrine over and over, like he was practicing his diction. Roddy noted that the gravity in the room was all messed up, maybe 20% of normal. He slithered back out and reconvened with the team.
The locking mechanism on the door was on the outside, keeping the Cleric locked in. The group talked with him through the door, he identified himself as Candarli the Cleric of Mercy, cruelly kidnapped and imprisoned. Grenthrum went to let him out and Grit blocked his path. She had a really bad feeling about the Cleric and could tell he was lying about something. The adventurers put a pin in that and went back to the portal where Eric stood guard.
Eric warned them that something was approaching from the east. The group hid behind the portal, the huge energy disc hiding them from the special senses of the enormous winged crab that entered the chamber. The glowing bug scuttled up to the portal and reached through, then withdrew its claw - pitted by acid. Grenthrum attacked the creature and battle was joined. Roddy hit it with a rock and Eric slashed it with his ax. The bug flashed in every color of the rainbow, stunning the team and allowing it to drop a sinister jar and escape the way it came. The jar burst into a poisonous cloud. Roddy didn't need to breathe and Grenthrum had the ax of poison resistance, but Grit fell to the ground choking. Gowonry and Eric hauled her through the portal before they too fell victim to the fumes. The gas was heavier than air, draining slowly out of the western passage and down the cliff face.
Grenthrum's magic sword talked to him. Free of the psychic interference from the Caves of Contemplation, it could communicate telepathically. It told him if he went along with its program of killing divine spellcasters, it would grant him Truesight. The Dwarf told the sword he would think about it.
The way north was sealed with a sticky membrane. Roddy and Grenthrum figured out that there was a "hurt spot" on the iris that they could touch to open it, removing the need to tear it with their weapons. Inside was a fabrication workshop full of strange technology. Roddy's engineering background let him figure out the function: a crucible, a laser cutter and a lathe for forging and machining metal components. The presets on the alien machine described an operation where ore would be forged into a rod, then the rod inserted into a piece that was currently missing. A nearby storage room held glowing blue gold and a Gnomish minecart, filled with powdered bloodiron ore. Roddy dumped the ore into the forge and the machine melted it together into a bloodiron rod.
A sound like a thousand insect feet alerted the adventurers to danger from the south. A horde of giant driver ants, scuttling out of the passage the space lobster escaped through. Roddy rotated the laser cutter to fire the beam into the room's entrance, blasting the bugs as they came in. Grenthrum opened the passage on the other side of the room. The duo ran into a surgery lab with pulsing lights and floor channels of slime. The lobster attacked them again, commanding the slimy arms of the surgical table to grab Grenthrum and nipping at him with its pincers. Grenthrum hacked his way free and the creature retreated.
Heedless of losses, the giant ants pushed past the laser and rushed through the workshop. The adventurers raced after the bug and almost fell into an enormous shaft. The bug flew toward the ceiling fifty feet up, out of reach of everything but Roddy's rocks. Roddy spat a rock out of his gelatinous membrane and killed the flying crustacean, sending it tumbling down almost a hundred feet to the floor of the shaft below.
With the ants approaching fast, Grenthrum secured a grappling hook, stuffed Roddy in a bucket for transport and repelled down to the chamber floor. Roddy looked for something on the space lobster's glowing corpse that would let him control the ants. The wave of angry formicids parted around the bug's body, uninterested in coming near it and sparing the adventurers. They surged toward a fissure in the wall and joined battle with an unknown force on the other side, which yipped like dogs. A giant fly with humanoid characteristics flew out of the crack and into the shaft.
The Fly Demon spoke to the adventurers. He was delighted by the death of the lobster, and suggested they continue the conversation upstairs. As they climbed the rope back up to the second level, they saw the Demon grab something off the smashed corpse.
Upstairs the Fly Demon made the adventurers an offer: information on what the bug was doing, in exchange for Grenthrum's magic ax. He wanted to give up his talking sword but the Demon wasn't interested. The Dwarf gave up the ax and the Demon explained the score: The Migo was kidnapping people and replacing their brains with Intellect Devourers. There was a portal on the third floor of the dungeon that went... somewhere. The Migo controlled the Devourers using the Bloodiron. It controlled the Demon using a magic ring from the Ancient Empire. The Demon showed them the ring, then swallowed it.
The Demon offered to turn Roddy back into a Halfling, in exchange for half his life energy. Roddy agreed and the Demon snatched him up. It slobbered digestive acid all over the slime and moulded him into a humanoid shape. Roddy was restored to life, but felt diminished, half as experienced as before.
With no more trades to make, the Demon left. He didn't really care about what was behind the third floor portal, or what happened to the inhabitants of the first floor. Grenthrum peered down into the shaft and saw a pack of Gnolls devouring the Migo and the dead ants. Uninterested in lowering themselves down to be eaten, they opted to finish the rest of the second floor. Grenthrum's talking sword told him to go kill the Cleric in the apartments.
The alien surgery room had a huge ominous bloodiron door covered with locking mechanisms. It was easy to open but the adventurers decided against it. Grenthrum's magic sword suggested killing the Cleric in the room to the south, and that the Truesight it provided would really come in handy. Roddy picked up the newly forged bloodiron rod from the work room on the way down.
The adventurers unlocked the door and let the Cleric of Mercy out. The magic sword let Grenthrum see the Intellect Devourer hiding inside the Cleric's skull. The Dwarf told him to wait, closed the door and conferred with Roddy. The possessed Cleric realized he'd been made, opened the door and attacked them. Grenthrum survived the first Finger of Death but went down to the Second. Roddy tanked a Fear spell but was driven back when the decerebrated Cleric enchanted his mace. He fled back to the workshop, dropping his Bloodiron rod when the Cleric cast Sticks to Snakes on it and it almost bit him. Without the rod's protection, the Intellect Devourer used its powers to drain some of Roddy's intelligence. But not enough to stop him overcharging the industrial laser and blasting it to atoms. He quickly dragged Grenthrum's body back through the portal to the mine beneath the Fazenda.
Roddy was briefly burned by Doctor Pleroma's slimy membrane - the doctor had extended himself to cover the entire manifold as a precaution against anything scary coming through. The Green Slime withdrew and allowed Roddy to drag the Dwarf's corpse out. He debriefed the Doctor on exactly what happened on the other side, including the Migo's plan. The Doctor warned him to tell no one about the demon control ring, there were a lot of people who would gladly torture or kill him for a lead on one of those. He also agreed to put out a want-ad for mercenaries to help the adventurers, who were outgunned and outnumbered by the horrors on the other side of the portal.
Grenthrum lay on a metal slab in a red hot room. Above him, a Dwarf with an enormous right arm, comically oversized for his body. The Hammerer raised his weapon to punish the slaver and stopped short of striking him, distracted by something. Some force which had claimed ownership of his soul. Grenthrum woke on the floor of the Leper Heart chapel, resurrected in the body of a very hairy Orc.
He saw things differently after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment