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Bob sighs again and find a little pot. Using his mental powers, he sweeps the remains of the Master into a pile and scoops up the dust and puts it in the pot. Then he begins straightening shelves, those that his powers allow him to move, and picks up the books that the flung around the room.
"Master Bob. Bob be his own Master. Bob makes his own decisions." As he cleans, he repeats this sentence to himself, trying to convince himself it could be possible.
Tina wanders back inside, "Hmm, she must have added this tunnel. Good to know about. Didn't end up saving her though. That's why you should always stick to approved summoning methods. You want to be be able to control whatever it is you bring to town." She sits on a table, overlooking the scene in the room, and starts on a fresh flask. "You're right Bob. you are your own master now. I suppose we all are. I mean, look at Gorthug. He's positively chatty right now. Seriously, does anybody know what he's saying?
She looks around the room, taking in the scene before speaking quietly, "Hey, Lucian is dead. Noxious is banished, Sevren is probably worse than either of them. All of this is ours. This library? Ours. The cave? Ours. All the goblins? Ours." She points at the funnel, Whatever this thing is? Ours! She lifts off, and spins around, balls of light shooting from her fingers and surrounding her, "I'm back, baby! And nothing but clear skies overhead!
When her excitement wears off a bit, she asks, "But yeah, what is this thing? and begins investigating the funnel, and Lucian's ring.
Goldslip looks on as others examine the room, not knowing much about the value and uses of arcane items.
"The Mistress is dead. And poor Sevren..."
When Tina begins to go on about all of this now belonging to all of them, Goldslip nods along for a moment, but then wonders aloud, "But what are we going to do with it all?"
"Oh, and Gorthug has been speaking Orcish. Its his native tongue!"
Hearing his name, Gorthug looked at the others. He wondered whether more memories would come back to him now that the Wizard was dead. Like their language. It was so familiar, and yet he couldn’t understand. It was frustrating. But at the moment, there was nothing he could do about it.
Snowball follows Tina back in, not sure what else to do. After moping around for a bit, she notices something shiny.
She approaches the source of the glint with reverence.
”Did the wyrm just find a...”
"A big pile of shiny!"
Snowball says, suddenly leaping onto some of the things instead of
walking the last foot.
The best Tina can tell, the funnel helps create some sort of interplanar connection for summoning. It doesn't seem like it would work in the opposite direction.
Tina and Snowball happily find some valuable items.
You hear a clomping coming from down the hall. The red dragon, Cinder, comes squeezing around a corner and eyes the lot of you. His eyes narrow. "Where's Lucian?"
"Hi Cinder. One of Lucian's experiments failed spectacularly, at least for her. I mean, it worked, but she's dead now. But at least she figured something out. Planar Travel! I see this as an absolute win." She spreads her arms wide, and points towards the funnel.
"Anyway, did you need something from her? Now that Lucian's gone, I suppose we're free to our own devices. I don't see any reason to make big changes though. I hope you'll stick around the cave."
"Hi Cinder, it's good to see you," Goldslip says in her most pleasant, friendly voice as she looks nervously between him and Snowball.
Snowball snorts in Cinder's direction before retreating towards the entrance of the secret exit.
Cinder shakes his large, scaled head on his lithe neck and you hear a deep rumbling from his chest. "You're terribly mistaken, little thing" he growls. "I'm in charge here now, and you will all do whatever I say. Everything here belongs to me." He indicates the room and you individually with his snout.
Gorthug could hear the hostility and the arrogance, even with the language barrier. ”Time to kill a dragon?” He asked Goldslip.
Snowball looks back and forth between Cinder and the abandoned pile of shiny, thinking quickly...
Tina stares down at the dragon looming in the doorway. A long moment passes. Eventually Tina blinks, shrugs, and takes a swig. "Okay. fine by me." She begins ticking off her fingers, "Now I've been living and dying in this cave since long before you were born, so I know a thing or two about this kind of transition. Since this is all yours now I'm assuming you'll want to keep it. First, you'll probably want to start by giving something to the goblins to distract them, otherwise, they'll be in here real quick, and loot this place down to the floorboards (I still never got that nice cape back). Nethys knows where they'll put it all, or even worse, what they'll do this it. After that you'll need to finish up the defenses against adventuring parties. Once people start to suspect that Lucian's dead, you'll get all sorts up in here trying to loot this place. That happened all the other times I've died here. Then you'll probably want to let the folks down in Trogsdale know what's going on. They're used to this sort of thing, but it's good to give them a heads up anyway. After a few years, you should probably get some breathing room, but I'll say, this isn't all that great of a hoard, for the amount of work that you're going to have to go through to keep it.
Tina takes another long swig. "On the other hand, I bet there's a map in this mess of some new, clean cave where you could setup a den, not have to worry about people knowing where you are, and have some time to grow your hoard."
Xeria looks on in astonishment at what's going on thinking, "Who would be so stupid to mess with evil extraplanar things?" Shortly, she gets her answer when Lucien dies. After the shadow thing that is Severn has left, not looking overly surprised at what happened, she'll comment, "Well, that was a hell of a thing." She mugs a big smile then notices no one else either noticed or cared. She grumbles a little but is quickly distracted by shiny objects and starts to dig through the remains of the lab.
As she hears the dragon lumber its way into the room and start to speak, she'll stand up from the lab remains with a big shiny ring that used to be on Lucien's finger but that she is now wearing as a particularly gaudy and ill-fitting belt. She'll twist a little back and forth looking at herself in a fragment of mirror she holds in one hand, "Ah, the height of fashion. Very chic."
After the exchange between Tina and the dragon, she'll add, "Oh, yes, many problems with this place. First, the upkeep in goblin chow alone is crazy expensive. The zombies need to be properly rotated and oiled periodically. The front gate is completely undefended and needs to be secured. Bears, adventurers, telepathic oozes, and haunted dolls have already wandered in and I've only been here a short while. As soon as the news gets out, this place will be crawling with looters. And when they hear a dragon is here, well, whoa betcha will they come running."
Really getting into it now, "Now, seems to me that a dragon of your prodigious magnificence needs someplace larger to inhabit. This place is already too small for you. Look how you have to demean yourself squeezing and wiggling through the passages already. This place isn't good enough for you! And with the hordes of looters and dragon slayers about to descend on this place, you'll want room to maneuver so they can't come at you from a side passage or someplace you can't fit."
Looking in horror as if she just thought of something awful, "I can just see it now, your large corpse rotting, wedged in a passage too small to fit through with a dragon slayer's sword stuck in your side from an even smaller passage you couldn't defend against. Your scales pried off to make armor for the dragon slayer, your blood drained for the amusement of some hack magician, your teeth all pulled and sold on necklaces to ward off evil spirits, your eyes sitting in laboratory pickling jars, and your head mounted on the wall in some seedy bar."
Now with concern in her voice, "Boss, you can't do this to yourself! You need to go find some place worthy of you. Someplace with room to grow. If you stick around here, you'll be constantly reminded of the humiliations Lucien heaped on you. No matter how long you stay here you will always be reminded that this place was your prison. You'll look in a room and remember the terrible things Lucien said and did to you. You will always be haunted by those memories. You'll be depressed forever!"
Then, as if remembering something, "And that horrible thing that so easily dispatched Lucien and ate the soul of Sevren, I could swear I remember it saying that it would soon be back to deal with the rest of us and claim this place for its own." She nods her head up and down very earnestly as she's saying that.
Piedmontina and Xeria make good arguments but are unlucky to be dealing with a particularly stubborn, egotistical dragon. Cinder chuckles and shakes his massive head. "No no no... I'll run this place and change it how I want. You will all work for me or get roasted. And you'll help fill in the little tunnels and widen others. And you..." he jerks his head at Tina "can take care of the zombies."
While rooting around in the lab's remains and casting Detect Magic all over the place, she finds what appears to be a magical rag bunched up in a corner. When she unwads it, it's a wrinkled and dusty old cloak that might have been used to mop up alchemical spills at some point based on the extensive and multi-hued stains.
She goes to its collar and as she brings it to her neck it shrinks down to comfortably fit her. She snaps her fingers and her body is surrounded by a glowing set of transparent armor. She snaps her fingers again and nothing happens until she says, "Up Slave!" whereupon an invisible force lifts her into the air. She reclines and orders, "Take me to my demesne! Away from this riff raff!"
As the force carries her off with her newly acquired grotty cloak and gaudy ring-cum-belt, she'll blow kisses to everyone, "Good night my loyal subjects!"
"Slave, remind me to have you build me a sedan chair." she giggles as it takes her away.
Goldslip looks at Lucian's ashes and then at Cinder. Cinder is not nearly so terrifying as whatever that being was that destroyed Lucian, but he's still likely to kill her if he puts his mind to it. From one master to another...
She inclines her head to the red dragon. "What is your command, Master Cinder?"
Cinder growls again and smoke pours out of his nostrils. "Right now, my orders are that all of the valuables be piled here. In my room." He gestures toward the middle of Lucian's study. "Including that magic cloak."
Snowball flys past Cinder to get behind him, forgetting that she can't really sneak up on a fellow dragon.
Xeria stops and looks agog at the red dragon for a moment, then says, "Anything you want boss." She goes over to where the alchemical rags are and takes it off.
When she has it pocketed she says, "There you go boss, back with the rags where it belongs."
Grumbling a bit she picks up a scrap of one of the rags and throws it over her shoulders, "Better than nothing, I guess."
Not being able to understand what was being said, Gorthug wandered off. Nobody seemed to be speaking *to* him, as far as he could tell. And besides, he was curious to see what was in the cave system.
Cinder ignores the white dragon until she blasts him with icy breath. Then he turns in a rage and unleashes his own breath on her!
A cloud of fire knocks the white dragon out of the air and she falls lifeless to the ground.
Cinder turns to the rest of you. "You have chosen much better than this one. Leave me for now."
Cinder growls "Leave that one to her own devices... She chose poorly..."
Gorthug walked off. The large angry dragon was eating the small, no-as-angry dragon. Which was too bad, as the small one might have become useful if it managed to get bigger. But for whatever reason it tried to show its dominance, and the large one enforced it’s control. Much like orcish society, the leader was the strongest.
"Very well, sir", Tina says while genuflecting to the dragon who just scorched what could be called a friend. As she flies over Snowball's body, "Might I remove this pest from you? I've some experiments I would like to perform, and this seems a good opportunity.
Snowball collapses before even getting a chance to say mean things at Cinder while retreating, but doesn't quite die from the roasting.
Cinder doesn't buy Piedmontina's lie for one minute. "No!" he barks sharply. "Leave her there!"
Cindy, appalled and confused with all that has just occurred, simply sits in the corner motionless and lifeless while she thinks. Mommy...there's no more Mommy. What am I going to do? I don't even have my own children yet. No family. These friends are almost like family but I'm not sure...
No! Snowball!!! That thing might have killed Snowball! Sit quietly, Cindy. Don't move. Quiet. Maybe it will go away....
Cinder sees Cindy and sniffs her, making her feel the heat from his nostrils. Then he shrugs "Got broken in the fight. Maybe she'll leave later..." He turns his back toward the tunnel and begins scraping metal coins into a pile in the corner.
Snowball...I have to help Snowball, she's part of my family now...
Cindy continues to sit quietly, waiting to see if Snowball will recover, looking for an opportunity for them to run into one of the tiny tunnels that would be too small for Cinder.
Once again stirring from unconsciousness while singed, Snowball wonders if it was all a dream. "Ma'am?" she says weakly as she gets up.
Looking around she sees Cinder.
Oh flaming s+*&.
Snowball cowers as she addresses her new master.
"S- sorry Cinder. You take shiny! Snowball give all shiny! Snowball be good. Snowball no use ice.
...Snowball move Cindy?" She adds, hesitantly.
Cindy carefully watches Cinder to see how he reacts to Snowball.
Cinder eyes Snowball carefully. "Your tougher than you look but it seems you have learned a lesson and fate decrees you live another day. Take the doll and get out of my sight!"
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Bob sends a telepathic message to all in the vicinity but not Cinder.
"This no good! Cinder Master be very mean! Mean mean mean! No good master. Meet at Launch Bob's dirt mound! Watch out for door, Launch Bob thinks it is loyal to Cinder."
Launch Bob heads to the entrance of the cave and hopes the others heard and understand.
Cindy, seeing Snowball is safe and hearing the good Sir Bob of Launch's message, immediately gets up and toddles away towards her lair (located conveniently right next to his dirt mound) to collect up her belongings and figure out what to do.
"Very well, Master Cinder. If you need me, I'll be in the crystal room.". Tina heads back to her space, muttering along the way, "Take care of the zombies... Bah. That's entire point of zombies. They don't need taken care of, now do they? It's a one time investment, solid economic sense, unlike those stupid thieving goblins. Be better to just turn them all into little skeletons."
After she's out of sight of the dragon, she sends a to the rest of the group, "Let's all meet up in the crystal room. Quietly."
Cindy continues to walk slowly through the caves, lost in thought. "Tina says crystal room, Launch-Bob says entrance. Mommy is gone. Which one is better? Tina is more like Mommy, but Launch-Bob is more like me. Do I want a new Mommy, or do I want a brother? The entrance is closer to the forest, and the other nice lady that whispers to me about the bears is in the forest. Is she maybe my new Mommy? Goldslip is nice to me...I wonder which one Goldslip is going to listen to...Tina Mommy or Launch-Bob brother or Green Lady Mommy?
She just continues to walk slowly towards the entrance as she ponders the implication of a temporarily Mommy-less existence.
Snowball heads off to
the crystal chamber, trying to bring Cindy with her.
After she arrives, she asks "Where Bob?"
Goldslip responds to Launch Bob's telepathic invitation, "I'm on my way!
Shortly afterward she hears Tina's whispered message and replies "But I'm already on my way to Launch Bob's dirt mound for a meeting!"
Tina tops off her flasks from the bowl she filled earlier, and hears Goldslips's response. "The dirt mound? How do I know which mound is Bob's? Bah. I'll just follow you, since you seem to know what Bob's talking about."
Xeria is seriously shaken seeing Snowball reduced to a burnt, ashen heap. But heartened seeing her start to heal. The diminutive fairy immediately slips out of the workshop.
She'll join the rest at the mud hill, "That dragon is seriously powerful, what are we going to do?"
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Bob is happy that the crew he has come to know and like answers his call to meet at the dirt mound by the cave entrance. A random goblin shows up too but Bob throws dirt in its face until it decides to go somewhere else.
"Dont know that guy and don't like him. Can't trust. But you here now, rest of you are friends. You knew Launch Bob way back so long ago when Launch Bob was Hat Bob. The good old days. The days when Master was not dust and dragon did not boss us around. Xeria friend, we get rid of dragon, we do. Launch Bob thinks that team must write him a very mean note saying that we do not like him as Master and he must leave."
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Cindy quietly sits and listens as she puts together a small doll from the sticks she has been gathering and clothes it with some leather scraps. As Launch Bob's plan enters her head she perks up and looks at the group.
"Do you think it would work? That would be much easier than having to try and make him leave." She starts to gather up random scraps of paper from the odds and ends she is always collecting and grabs a bit of charcoal. She begins to mark on the paper excitedly until ... "Um... can anyone help? I don't know how to write..."
"I appreciate everyone's enthusiasm, but what is so bad about having Cinder run things? It will be some small changes, but I don't expect too much to be different than when Lucian had power over the cave. We could just wait and see what happens."
Xeria goes to pet Bob absent-mindedly, thinking of the dragon, "Yes Bob, I'm your friend. Not mean red dragons." but realizes in time she's about to touch a puddle of acid and stops.
"The problem is that he'll want all of the treasure. And unlike our resident miser he won't be placated by distributions of dubious pecuniary desirability." she increases the number of syllables towards the end to hopefully throw Snowball off the scent.