C Series Session 4: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro

 

Doctor Pleroma hired two mercenaries to assist the Mad Bomber Roddy Applecreek and the Hundred Hand Wizard Delgal Haberkorn in their exploration of the tomb on the other side of the portal. They needed warriors, so warriors is what he brought: the Cleric Condition Killer and the Fighter La Mal, Threshers from the Grain Cult. He took care of procurement and payment as thanks for the adventurers heeding his wishes and not hiring any of the patients.

Condition Killer explained that the adventurers were welcome to any treasure they found, but they needed to turn over any monster corpses to him and his colleague for dismemberment. Receipts like ears and heads could be claimed for bounty, while other parts could be sold as magical reagents. Roddy filled them and Delgal in on what waited for them on the other side of the portal: Intellect Devourers, Gnolls, alien super-science and maybe even another portal.

As frontline fighters, the Threshers went through the portal first. After a moment on the other side, Condition Killer came back through to give the all clear. The adventurers followed him through into the tomb.

The portal room had evidence of a recent brawl. Barbed quills stuck in the walls, the severed foreleg of a huge chelicerate, and a severed segmented blue leg of a strange bug. Roddy and CK identified the quills as Manticore spines, indicating such a beast had flown into the chamber to shelter from the sun or night creatures and gotten in a fight. He looked out the cliffside entrance and instantly identified the desert beyond as Hogman's Plain. The light on the horizon was the obelisk, a big monument an adventurer cast Continual Light on to make a refuge.

La Mal picked up the bloodiron rod that Roddy cast aside during his fight with the possessed Cleric. It was twisted into the shape of a snake. Delgal stuffed it in his backpack. The first order of business was to search the apartment the false Cleric occupied. The Threshers took the lead, clearing out the bedroom and bathroom. They found treasure and an Intellect Devourer hiding in the tub, unable or unwilling to mind-blast anyone. In a second La Mal was divested of her hat and poncho, for a moment she was an enormous woman, then she was a bear mauling the brain dog.

The Rhagodessa hiding in the light fixture grabbed Delgal with the suckers on its pedipalps and scuttled out of the room, biting him as it dragged him away. Roddy threw a rock, Condition Killer called on the Goddess to keep Delgal from dying, and Delgal read from a scroll of Web to immobilize the bug. La Mal pulled him free with her bear strength, ignoring the flailing solifuge's grasping jaws. With the bug immobilized there was nothing to stop the group from pelting it to death with attacks. 

 

Delgal and Roddy bagged the loot from the apartments while La Mal devoured the spider and Condition Killer pried off the sucker-studded forelimbs. The gravity in the apartments was about 20% of normal, and the only "window" was an enchanted frame that showed a strange landscape: gardens and temples under a rock dome. The unfinished wood apartment to the east still stumped Roddy, but Delgal suggested it might be an imitation of an Elven living treehouse.

 

With the south secured, the gang went back to explore the surgery room and adjoining chambers. The heavy bloodiron door was open, leading to a swampy spawning pool with no creatures in it. Tracks in the mud indicated the room once held Intellect Devourers. CK prodded Delgal to Alertness and pointed back at the portal room. A pair of Gnolls furtively crossed the chamber and went through the portal, then emerged a moment later clutching their heads and yipping in distress. They ran off into an adjoining tunnel and the group elected to wait before pursuing them.

 

One of the resin doors leading out of the surgery was ripped open, leading to a room with black slimy blisters on the walls. One blister was torn open, a dead Half-Orc slumped on the floor. He was missing his brain and his body was half eaten, indicating postmortem scavenging. 

 

Giger

 

Delgal slashed open the only other inflated blister and a naked Half Orc fell out. She was still alive, and when she finished coughing up slime she saw the dead man, howled in anguish and began biting her own arms. Delgal cast Hold Person on her to stop her hurting herself, tried to explain the situation to her and got in an argument with the rest of the group. Condition Killer removed the paralysis affecting her and she explained the deal: she (Colette), the dead guy (Hogmasterix) and two other Half Orcs (Reno and Klaria) had been adventuring in a tomb on Hogman's Plain. They opened a door and there was a bright light. The last thing she remembered was a glowing bug with wings.

 

Roddy explained that he already killed the bug. Delgal gave Colette his Dagger of Continual Light, La Mal gave the Half Orc her poncho. Her priorities were:

1. Kill everything else in the tomb
2. Return her friends' bones to a Holy Mountain for burial.

She put Hogmasterix' body in the room that held the Intellect Devourers and sealed the door as a precaution against further scavenging.

The final room branching off the surgery held exotic alien tools. Roddy was an engineer and Delgal was an expert in magical devices, together they identified the trinkets as 

• A hyperscalpel that never missed its target
• A surgical centipede in a jug of nutritive slurry, used for reattaching limbs
• A spiky stone of Revivification, used for reviving bodies which had been dead 5 minutes or less
• An empty brain cylinder.

They shoveled it all into their bags, intent on trying it out at the first opportunity. La Mal noticed a disposal hatch under the operating table in the main surgery room. Colette shined her flashlight-dagger into the hole, which led 50 feet down into a cone shaped room. The chamber floor was stained but curiously denuded of any edible trash or bones.

DiTerlizzi

Roddy led the adventurers back to the central shaft where he killed the Migo on the previous delve. It went up 50 feet, where a glowing green barnacle on the ceiling illuminated a platform extending from the wall and a couple holes leading to the third level of the dungeon. The green light illuminated two Gnolls, climbing up the shaft wall into one of the holes. Roddy spun up his sling and hit one with a rock, which didn't kill it but dislodged it from the rockface. It fell 100 feet and went splat on the ground floor of the dungeon, 50 feet below the adventurers. After a moment, the skull popped open and an Intellect Devourer scuttled out, disappearing in a hole in the rock to the east.

 

Intent on cutting off the Gnoll's head for the bounty, La Mal and Condition Killer descended a rope to the chamber floor. CK knelt to get the receipt while LM peered through the fissure in the chamber wall. She bellowed in rage and lurched through the gap, followed by Condition Killer. A moment later he emerged, leading the brain-spattered bear woman by the hand. The Intellect Devourer had sapped some of her intelligence, but she pounced and devoured it before it could kite her further.

Condition Killer climbed up the rope. The sound of cracking bones came from the rock fissure. Wounds sprouted from La Mal's back, skin peeling as she bellowed in pain. Four Gnolls and a Jackal rushed out of the opening to attack her. She got up the rope and was pierced by a magic javelin tossed by the leader. Condition Killer pumped healing into her. Delgal read a Scroll of Sleep and broke the Gnolls' assault, then Roddy killed two of them with a dropped hand grenade while the Threshers climbed out of the pit. The remaining hyenas fled the scene.

After a moment to rest and recover, the team cleared out the remainder of the second level of the dungeon. The last chamber was a rough excavated room full of gold nuggets, which Delgal suggested were dug up by the giant ants Roddy encountered on the day before.

 

Alexander Hollmann

 

With the second floor cleared and the first floor infested with Gnolls, the gang went up to the third floor, tossing a grappling hook up the central shaft to hook onto the platform emitting from the wall. After climbing up, they pestered the green barnacle on the ceiling. It grabbed any rocks they threw with its tentacles, examined them and dropped them down the shaft. The passage to the south led into a room shaped like a four pointed star, where smears of blue clay on the floor led to a huge machine like a spider. They threw a rock into the machine and it grabbed it out of the air, scribed it with strange sigils using the points of its limbs, then tossed the rock into a furnace on the south wall. Delgal edged around the room, out of reach of the machine, and hauled open the door of the kiln. The heat pulse burned him, but Roddy saw an Iron Flask through the open door and flames. Delgal read a Scroll of Fire Resistance and climbed into the oven to get the Flask. A conveyer of cold, living wax led out of the kiln to the east. Delgal let it carry him out of the room.

The conveyer almost carried Delgal out through another disc shaped portal, he hopped off just in time to avoid being shunted to an unknown destination. The flask spoke to him, the being inside was condemned to bake tiles. If freed it would do Delgal's bidding before disappearing. Delgal went through a slimy airlock out of the portal chamber, and got the drop on a Manticore and the remaining Gnoll who climbed the shaft earlier. He told the thing in the flask to burn the monsters and tossed it out of the airlock. The Efreet Fedallah laughed as he incinerated the two monsters and the Intellect Devourers possessing them, before shooting out of the chamber in a gush of fire.

Delgal ran back up the conveyer to the now-empty kiln and gathered his party. They went back through the portal room and airlock to the room with the charred remains of the Gnoll and Manticore. There was a pool of carbonized black sludge with a puddle of silvery metal slag. A nearby tunnel led to a spiral passage completely unlike the angular geometric shapes that dominated the other Migo architecture. At the end of the tunnel was a shrine with a plain wax mask and a shiny black ruby. Delgal prodded the ruby and the Threshers shouted a warning from their position at the mouth of the spiral. The duo rushed back and found the pool of carbonized slime attempting to ooze out and envelop them. It was unable to achieve much of anything after the Efreet burned it, so they took the ruby and mask without incident. 

 

Delgal donned the mask, and was struck for a moment by jamais vu, forgetting where he was. Roddy slapped the mask off his face. The religiously adroit Condition Killer identified the mask as a depiction of the eponymous Wax Mask, one of the three creators of the universe, who sacrificed himself to grant intellect to the living matter that Horned Mother fashioned from the corpse of Has No Thoughts. It was rare for anyone to worship Wax Mask, since he'd been dead since before the first intelligent life arose in the universe.

 

The last chamber on the third floor was full of brain cylinders. Colette, who had slipped away at some point during the Gnoll fight on the first level, stood at a table in the center of the room. She had one of the cylinders plugged into a machine and was talking to the brain inside. She explained the situation to the adventurers: Hogmasterix, Reno and Klaria were inside the jars. Reno and Klaria's bodies were most likely devoured by the Gnolls, their bones turned into handicrafts somewhere on the first floor.

Delgal pulled another cylinder off the shelf, one with a holy symbol of Mercy attached to the side with a spiral shaped smear of wax. He plugged it into the machine and got a stream of blistering invective for his trouble. The brain inside, Candarli the Cleric of Mercy, was pissed at the monsters who kidnapped him. Delgal and Roddy explained the situation, and Candarli realized what had happened: the Migo had kidnapped him from the Rock Dome, the God of Mercy's holy site on Great Moon. They had implanted his body with an Intellect Devourer as part of a plot to infiltrate the site. Roddy killed it but there was no telling how many people had already been replaced, or what they were planning. The false Candarli had even been able to cast spells using the real Cleric's power, courtesy of the spiral seal and holy symbol stuck to the can.

Since his body was destroyed by a superlaser, Delgal offered to make Candarli a new body back at the Fazenda using the power of Leper Heart. Candarli's God was a jealous one and wouldn't allow him to be resurrected by another deity. But that wasn't the real issue, his life was unimportant compared to the fate of the Rock Dome. He asked the adventurers to take his brain along for the rest of the adventure.

That left the brains of the Half Orcs. It was hypothetically possible to restore their bodies via Leper Heart, but they weren't interested in getting new ones. Their bones were still down there on the first level of the dungeon, and they needed to be delivered to a Holy Mountain ossuary. Colette asked for a moment alone to talk to her friends.

After a few minutes of deliberation, she came out of the chamber covered in preservative slime and pieces of brain. The Threshers used the downtime to pull the skull, wings and scorpion tail off the burnt skeletal manticore.

Sculpted by Julie Guthrie, painted by Metalchaos

 

With two out of three levels cleared, treasure pocketed and their renewable resources dwindling, the adventurers, Threshers and Colette went back through the portal to the Fazenda and planned their next move.