Rescue Party

The minotaur goat monster resists all my spells, but between Remy’s shooting, Klyce turning into a giant ape, and some other folk getting through with their spells, we manage to put him down. Klyce rips the shard out of his forehead. When Nat puts the two shards together, they vibrate, but don’t quite match each other. The new on gives the same visions as the first, but the ones we have found no longer appear. The glacier still does, though, which is upsetting.

Then everyone gets obsessed with the hole the monster came out of. It’s covered in mucus and there’s a pool of it in the bottom. So gross! Nat climbs down on a rope. The liquid rusts her crowbar immediately, and burns her hand. I insist Klyce pull her back up immediately before she jumps in. So, instead, she sends an arcane eye down and moves it around until she finds something, then goes down to grab it. As soon as she’s up, I teleport everyone back home before she can go back down again.

Upon arrival, the guys look at what she found, and discover it’s a stone so soaked in the acid that it now can absorb acid damage to the user. We take a rest and I try to send to Locke in the morning. Still no response. Nat tries scrying on them while the rest of us discuss if we should go find them or go find the last known shard first. She is able to find them under the glacier down south. The whole cave is full of viscous tarry muck. In a small circular chamber, she can see Shelly suspended, encased in yellow/black hard mucus.

Well, that seems bad enough, we’ve got to get down there as soon as possible. They aren’t dead, but who knows for how long. So, we head out to the shops and get cold weather gear and food for the journey. Nat has scryed, so she can teleport us down, but from there, we don’t know how long or how cold it will be.

We head down and are immediately assaulted by sleet, hail, cold and wet. I toss up some weather control to put the worse away from us. Nat pulls out the mirror bits and leads us on, down into a steep crevice to the bottom. It is covered in an oily layer that burns my staff end. Klyce reminds us we have climbing gear and boot spikes, so we put those on and keep following our path.

The ice closes over our heads, and folk throw up their lights. We trek for hours down these icy, oily caves. Until it finally opened up into a small cave coated on every surface with this acidic oil. It’s thicker here, and seems to be flowing back up the way we came.

Then eight goopy, black masses drop from the ceiling and begin attacking us, melting off Nat’s clothes again. I manage a thunderstep away from the one attacking me. But my lighting again is useless, and I can’t manage to cast anything offensive. I do manage some healing spells for folk. Klyce manages to finish off the last one, and we hurry out of there.

Into a much bigger cavern with some worked steps and a dias. We are looking over a full on river of sludge this time. It’s a bit warmer down this far, and Nat says it looks familiar.

Labyrinth Adventures

We decided to head to the Labyrinth Desert next, and flew over on the creepy bird for four and a half days before landing at the base of the foothills. I tried to contact Hank each night, but he never replied. Philomena hasn’t heard from them either. Well, I guess we’re going to have to go rescue them soon.

Okay, so big labyrinth and then a plateau above it. It’s a lot bigger than I thought. Miles and miles of both foothills and mountain. Where do we go? Nat pulls out the shard we had collected below the waterfalls to see if it leads her. After a few minutes, she starts heading for a path. We all fall in and follow her into the maze. After only a few minutes, the familiar sensation washes over us as magic is dampened.

We head deeper and deeper, and the high walls soon punge us into darkness. We light up torches and spells and keep pushing. Into an open area where six paths converge. In the center are six worn statues of large predatory cats whose eyes and claws are inlaid with red jasper. In the center is a star-shaped stone. The statues face each path, and are not magical in and of themselves. Klyce heads into the center of the circle and this time I can understand them, too.

It was a lot, but something like: One path becomes six becomes one. Each man takes the path alone. All men live alone and die alone.

Okay, six paths, who is staying here? We discuss for a short moment, Remy thinks he should stay because he doesn’t have a god. But we decide to draw straws instead, and Dalish gets the short one and stays. The rest of us head down the paths.

My path is slightly winding, and there’s some grumbling of the stone as I walk for about ten minutes with no side passages. Finally, there is a dead end with a much nicer jaguar statue. This one has clearly been preserved by magic. Its eyes light up and a circle appears around me as I approach. The voice speaks out again. Wait for the others to finish. So, I wait, for quite a while. I start poking the statue a bit, but stay in my circle until finally, the voice spoke again. The paths have been walked, let the hunt begin.

The eyes and the circle dim and go out. Turning around, the path behind me has changed. I have to get back to the group, if there’s a hunt, they’re going to need me. So, I start running back down the paths, looking for the way back to the star. I run smack into a massive hairy creature standing on two feet with iron horns and the face of a goat. It clubs me, knocking me back a few feet away. I thunderstepped my way further back and ran. A couple footsteps followed, but then they were gone.

I don’t look back. I run and run and run. Until I eventually run into Remy. He looks even worse than I do, so I heal the both of us up a little bit, and we move on, looking for the others. We run into Klyce who has his sword out and looking eager to fight that horrible thing. I heal the guys up a bit more. But it doesn’t want to attack a group, it seems. We wander for a while longer until we finally find our way back to the center, where Nat, Gerhard, and Maribeth are waiting. Gerhardt immediately starts patching everyone up, but as we move closer to the broken center, the statues’ eyes light up.

The voice chimes in again: The trial is complete, the hunter becomes the hunted.

The monster arrives in the center, looks around angrily. Then he seems to realize what has happened, and fear flickers across his face. Then he almost sighs with resignation, takes in a breath and grows bigger, beginning to glow red like the statues.