Roberts
Reunited with their boats, flush with the treasure of the massacred giants and concerned about dragon-Aldrich's considerable lead, the Gamblers met with Alice and Captain Leadcutter and planned their next move. They had five giant bats and six giant woodpeckers to carry them into the High Plain. Besides the Gamblers they decided to take Alice, two low level Grain Clerics, the Shambling Mound full of ANFO, a Scarecrow and a spare bomb. They'd ride the flying animals while the Hsigo scouted the area around the party. Roddy prepared a handful of grenades and distributed them to the Hsigo so they could bombard targets from the air.
Encanta stared into the middle distance. The Gamblers thought she was having an absence seizure. Then she snapped her head forward and spoke in a voice they didn't recognize. The Gamblers owed a debt service payment on their cool ship. There was a little matter of 100,000 SP pending.
The Gamblers recognized this phenomena. The financial concern to whom they owed repayment had sold the debt to the Repo Men, an adventurers' guild like Iron Cup or Potion Addict. They used long range possession to enforce repayment even when debtors journeyed to the furthest realms. Datura negotiated the Repo Man down from 10K to 3,000 silver pieces, which she paid out of her own pocket. The Halfling pressed her face to the stone block they used as a table and slurped up the coins, which never made it down her throat into her stomach. Then she snapped back into her own body. Why did her mouth taste like sand?
The Gamblers took off and flew south, toward the shield volcano and the unknown crypt within. By nightfall they reached the cliff that marked the transition to the High Plain. The endless dead reacted to their presence, some crawling or loping along and some falling off the ledge to smash on the rocky terrain below. The High Plain was a sea of dunes and the endless dead moved like a sea on top of the sea, stirred by the nonexistent wind.
The sea disappeared. The bowl of stars and the two moons floating inside cast no light. There was no light and no space to move. Enormous pressure. Something wet. A headache. Then hunger. The pinpricks of light returned, but only because the dreaming minds of the beings outside the confining space were translated into light for the benefit of the dreamers who had no psychic powers of their own. The hunger provoked a sensation like the tingling of the salivary glands in the back of the jaw across the entire body. The feeling of the light growing closer.
Datura alone was liberated from this dark space. She stood in the Glen. Twenty one shades stood with her and shielded her mind. She felt a stab of guilt. Momentary regret for departing the path of Flower and Beast and Tree and the old religion of the Men of the Forest. If by funerary cannibalism she carried the shades of the departed Elves with her then she was forced to wonder what other parts of the old religion were true. What she gave up when she went to play in the Sun. But if they were here with her then perhaps it wasn't gone at all.
The Gamblers snapped out of the microsleep and returned to the Plain. The bats spoke to Jack. After eight hours of flight they were tired. Dawn was fast approaching and the Gamblers circled west toward the only patch of green in the carpet of orange and brown and red. Something shined to the east. A structure that disappeared over the horizon as they descended.
It was a tamarisk grove. Hardy salt cedars that needed a bare minimum of water. A low shield wall of rock stopped the ergs from swallowing them. The names of explorers were cut into the branches, going back to before the time of the Monarchy.
The woodpeckers were agitated. A pair of trolls burst out of the treeline. The birds descended on them in a swarm. The Gamblers realized the danger. The trolls were easy enough to kill but if even one of the birds died they'd have to start leaving equipment behind. Then people. They piled on with weapons and called on their Gods to protect the stupid birds and, though the Grain Clerics sustained injuries, dismembered and burned the monstrous duo. The Hsigo apologized profusely for missing the hidden monsters. It was their job to scout and they wouldn't fail again. The trolls had a hoard of dungeon treasure, dug up from beneath the trees.
By day the woodpeckers roosted in the trees and rested. The bats dangled from the trees and rested. The adventurers carved their names into a tree. The Hsigo scouts circled overhead and called out an approaching contact. A third Troll clad in a dust covered cloak and hat. He tried to conceal himself, realized he'd been spotted and, with no chance of escape, stood his ground. Jack asked what his business was at the grove of shade. The Troll responded that he was meeting friends, but if Jack brought giant woodpeckers he'd sooner be on his way. Jack told him he wouldn't kill him because he seemed smarter than the other two Trolls. Troll three asked why that mattered. If the Gamblers' ambition was to kill every fool on the Plain, they'd be there forever. The Troll wandered off into the desert and the Gamblers didn't pursue him.
Late in the day the group got their kit together and woke up the animals. They thought about visiting the shiny structure they saw earlier but Alice convinced them to continue south toward their objective. They had impressed on her the necessity of ambushing Aldrich in the dungeon when he was at his weakest and she was going to keep them on task. By dusk the shield volcano was in view. The slope was shallow but from the air they could see how large it really was.
An adobe watchtower marked the spot where the high level adventurers said the nightmare dungeon would be. Ogres in brightly colored landsknecht outfits spotted the flying adventurers and their skirmish screen of winged war monkeys. The troopers raised the alarm and fired their huge smoothbore muskets at the invaders. Four Hsigo fell, the survivors bombarded the position with Roddy's grenades and slew the entire squad of mercenaries.
The watchtower sat over a spiral ramp down into the dungeon. The room below was flooded twelve feet deep, domed and decorated with statues. The statues were a later addition to the room, as was the demolished mantis village on the big ramp. The rooms were large. The monkeys scouted ahead. The Gamblers mounted their flying monsters and went in after them. The walls were made of hard green stone and covered in ugly plants. They looked a bit like the ones Roddy saw aboard the alien satellite. The twelve feet of water covering the floor drained so slowly it was almost imperceptible.
One of the Hsigo scouts died to a horrible elephant-crab thing that Roddy identified as a Malfyr. With everyone flying at ceiling height the monster couldn't reach thirty feet up to catch them. It waded under them and stood waiting, questing trunk upraised. Roddy and Jack kept the woodpeckers from attacking it in a frenzy, concerned that their mounts would be immediately slain. They decided to pull back and fight it on the big spiral ramp, where they could stand on solid ground and not worry about their rides out of the dungeon being killed. The monster fell under the concentrated attacks of the Gamblers and their apemen, aided by Roddy's admonishment that the thing could only be harmed by magic weapons. He identified the pressurized goo offgassing out of the corpse as a lethal poison. Datura swallowed her Potion of Enlarge Person and grew tall enough to wade in the water without being submerged. Roddy took the flask and bottled the poison.
Then came the tide pools. A room full of water with holes in the floor. Roddy and Jack spotted Otyughs in the pits, garbage eating tentacle monsters. The beasts' limbs weren't long enough to reach the flying members of the party, but Datura was on foot.
DiTerlizzi
The Hsigo reported a contact from the corridors beyond. A Cherenkov slime rolled into the room, bubbling and hissing under eleven feet of water. A boatload of small insect people followed it on the surface. Roddy identified the bugs as Zibblers, dungeon gardeners who maintained the gross ecology of the flooded tomb. The slime rolled into one of the pits and boiled the Otyugh inside alive, making space for the Zibblers to pass through so they could dive to the underwater floor of the chamber and begin repairs on the conduits Datura squashed with her giant feet. They told the Gamblers to stop breaking shit, and to get rid of those dragons swanning around the place.
Datura nodded and attacked one of the surviving Otyughs to clear a path for herself. The psychic monster sent her a vision of a huge winged squid boring through a clay jar to eat the thing sleeping inside. The Elf no-sold the monster's diseases and dispatched the psychic detritovore. She asked the Zibblers what the thing in the vision was. They told her she was about to find out. Death awakened the sleeper.
The wall of the chamber burst open, sending a wave and a cloud of masonry dust into the room. Behind it was a pair of Blue Dragons, a boatload of warriors, a weird looking alien, a Dwarf cleric, and a Star Spawn. The monster was wrapped in chains and cables for transport, and in rupturing those had also blown a hole in the wall. Without the radiation from the Cherenkov slime to block the psychic pulse from its death, Datura's killing of the Otyugh in close proximity to the abomination woke it up.
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