"How is everybody? I don't see Zalamandra everywhere and Eben seems...drooly."". . ."
Her face pales. "...wait. Where'd Zalamandra go?!"". . ."
Eben points upward after the fleeing naga. "Nufuty nuh! Tate Aty un Cryin!" Then he looks around, confused (well, more confused than usual, even accounting for his current state...) "Buh! Wah Buh?" He points back up at the retreating worm. "Tate Buh uso?"
"But... didn't we take care of the phylactery already?"
I'm fine, just poisoned and half-dead." Astraden opens her eyes. "We've got bigger problems than that."
"That spell was a prismatic spray, and I think Zalamandra was shunted to another plane by it. No, she was not eaten - not yet. And no, we only destroyed an illusory phylactery." The cleric sighs, almost letting herself land on the floor before she realizes it'll trigger the worms. She walks over to Eben and presses a hand to his forehead. "Fabrika resetiranje."
Eben's gaze becomes locked on one place and much, much clearer as Astraden restores his intellect to its former (comparatively) lofty levels. "OH MY GODS that's what was wrong with me? I could see everything going on around me, I just couldn't understand why it was all so.... confusing." He wrinkles his nose. "And I think I pooped in my pants. Excuse me." He airwalks out of sight for a few moments and returns in a hastily donned spare set of clothes, spam-casting prestidigitation on a cloth bundle in his hands.
Carina groans and puts her head in her hands, letting out a long, drawn-out curse in Abyssal.
"...alright. Where haven't we looked for a phylactery yet?"
From somewhere nearby where he's discovering the difficulties of getting undressed in midair, Eben shouts:
Carina rubs her eyes. "Of course."
"Astraden, do you feel well enough to send another elemental down to look for it? Or should we wait until I can restore you to full strength first?"
"I've got no options on that front until tonight!" Astraden yells to Eben. "But yeah, I can send some more elementals in."
She air-walks over one of the rock islands and kneels in midair, panting. "Ugh, those nagas really did a number on me. Here goes."
She rattles off a spell, weaving her hand in a series of complex motions. One human-sized earth elemental appears and dives into the Sea on her guttural command. Her second spell summons smaller creatures of the same size as the one she summoned before the battle.
Eben, looking to contribute after being near-mindless for the end of the fight, follows up by summoning an elemental of his own. It seems to coalesce out of some shadows cast by the flickering lights illuminating the islands in the Sea, and looking directly at it makes a person squint and wonder what exactly they're looking at, but it is, he insists, an elemental nonetheless. He can't speak to it like Astraden can hers, but he quickly creates an illusion to do the job for him via pictogram: an image of a dark disk, like the Harbinger showed via its own thought-images in the last seconds of its life, buried under the wormy pond.
Cuetzpalli exhibits his typical fatigue after the combat, but is glad to see that everyone made it through okay (mostly). He feels a bit worried for Zalamandra, but is hopeful that things will work out. He waits while the others summon their elementals to plumb the depths.
The group hears a chorus of screams from below.
Astraden shouts back down, her voice sounding unnaturally guttural due to the spell.
After about half a minute, the group hears a loud sound from underneath. Sound doesn't travel well through worms or water, but it sounds like a Terran scream.
Astraden tries to pinpoint the region the sound is coming from.
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Astraden walks over to the spot and yells, as loud as she can.
After about twenty seconds, the human-sized earth elemental bursts from the stalagmite. The three smaller elementals do not follow.
The elemental holds in its rocky hands a large black disk the size of a man's skull. The disk is fraught with curious streaks of violet, and appears badly cracked—and it pulsates from these cracks like a heartbeat. A curious humming sound fills everyone's ears.
Farrukh's mind had thrown off mental control, attempts to send his body to other dimensions, a field of odd abjuration magic, and much, much more today.
Farrukh's brain decided it needed a break.
"Pretty..."
The odd, sonorous humming feels like a gentle massage to Carina's ears...
...but the sudden flare of heat from her cap causes Carina to snap back to reality.
"AAAAAGH!" She grabs her head with one hand and fumbles for her bombs with the other. "STOP IT! STOP IT!"
She throws a dispelling bomb at the strange disk...
The vial bounces off the disk, not even breaking, and drops into the sea of worms.
"F@!$!"
Tanith grits his teeth when the elemental breaches the surface of the worms with its prize in tow. "Gah! That's got to be it."
Eager to end the grating noise, Tanith rears back to smash the noisy thing.
Astraden winces as the sound from the disk overloads her hearing, infiltrating the magic-sensing parts of her mind and making it almost impossible to comprehend her surroundings. She forcibly tunes the sound out and shouts at her elemental.
Tanith rears back and pounds down. As he impacts the phylactery, he feels a charge of negative energy course through him.
The earth elemental goes limp, then collapses into sand. Astraden feels her summoned creature die, and as it does, the phylactery begins to fall...
While Astraden is directing the elementals, Eben heads back north and looks around trying to see if he can find any undamaged stray arrows. Then he realizes most of his missed shots either went into the sea of worms or are on the floor with the worm swarms, and quickly decides to hell with this.
At the news that the search party found something, he heads south to take a look at it and immediately gets his mind whammied AGAIN.
He shakes his head, nearly drawn in by the humming but just managing to take his mind off it.
Carina overcomes her instinctive urge to let the phylactery fall and snatches it from the air before it falls into the sea of worms.
She then drags it to shore and drops it on the floor.
"Oh nononono no...." Eben says, snatching out a hand to try and keep the phylactery out of the wormsea....
"Oh owowowow ow!" he yelps as the thing hurts him.
Tanith howls as the cursed thing bites back. "Be careful! That thing hurts."
"Watch out, the elemental's about to -" Astraden lunges for the disk, but not before Carina gets to it. "Oh, nice save."
[dice=Will]1d20+15+4-2
[dice=Action Point!]2d6
Tanith howls as the cursed thing bites back. "Be careful! That thing hurts."
The crack has widened from Tanith's punch, but before the party's eyes, it begins to narrow again. The thing has some capacity to regenerate.
Eben gets a copper coin from his pocket and begins a series of tricks that make it look like it's walking up and down the back of hand of its own accord, only to disappear and reappear on his other hand. "Hey, Farrukh! Farrukh, look at the coin, not at the rock...."
And if that doesn't work, he just hauls off and slaps the guy.
Carina hands off one extract of death ward to Tanith and the other to Farrukh once Eben wakes him up.
"Eben, do you have any arrows that could damage that thing? I can give you the same protection Carina's brewed," Astraden offers. "I'd use my rapier but . . . I'm pretty sure it only targets mobile creatures, for whatever reason. And my actual damage with it is pretty pitiful"
She also heals Tanith and Farrukh some.
"Huh? Oh, yeah, that's a nice coin I guess. What were we doing again?"
"Drink that, and smash the disk."
"On it."
Farrukh drinks the white sludge and commences smashing.
When two of his hits don't even leave a scratch, and the rest barely do, he remarks "What is this thing actually even made of?"
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Cuetzpalli tries his hand using Kelmarchen.
Tanith quaffs the extract and moves into position to smash the trinket again.