Douena moves forward into the room, shaking her holy symbol vigorously to get its attention, then presents it once more. As the song of Desna is just as muted as it was previously, she shakes her head sadly at Lorenz. "We're really going to have to sit down and figure out what Desna has against you, Lorenz."
"Maybe it's because we're underground?" Mahjik wonders.
Douena seems loath to let go of her 'It's all Lorenz's fault' theory. "Maybe," she muses reluctantly. "I've never really been underground before, except in the basement of my brother-in-law's inn."
Keeping a careful eye on the terrible beast nearest to him, Lorenz calls back, "Actually, it's not like my luck is any worse down here than it is aboveground."
He fervently hopes those words won't be his last.
The creatures cry out in pain as the channelled energy washes over them. Once again, however, it only has minimal effect.
#3 backs up slightly and strikes at Makoa again, while #2 continues attacking Mahjik.
#2 comes nowhere near striking Mahjik, who simply dodges from side to side. #3, however, manages to slash Makoa's shoulder then sink its teeth into his arm. Once the teeth are in place, it pulls back, trying to knock Makoa over with it. Makoa manages to maintain his footing, but the creature does tear away a chunk of flesh, which it hungrily swallows. As it does so, a few of its wounds close over.
Pezock moves up towards #2 and tries again to punch.
He stumbles slightly and misses again.
Next Up: Lorenz, Mahjik, Makoa, Douena, Festrogs, Pezock.
Lorenz wants to jump back into the fray again but decides caution would be the better part of valor in this case. Instead he removes the potion he'd just received a few minutes before and quaffed it.
A blob of acid shoots from Urza's hand and goes right between #3 and #2, coming close to neither of them.
Lorenz wants to jump back into the fray again but decides caution would be the better part of valor in this case. Instead he removes the potion he'd just received a few minutes before and quaffed it.
Lorenz pulls out a potion a quaffs down the contents. Instantly, the gashes on his shoulders and his other wounds begin to close over.
Next Up: Makoa, Douena, Festrogs, Pezock, Urza, Lorenz.
Mahjik carries his rotational momentum from the first festrog and keeps on spinning, his fists marking an arc in the air that threaten to smack both of the remaining creatures across the face.
I'm sorry for holding up the game. No excuse, just got busy this weekend.
Makoa, take this so they won't squirt on you." Urza holds out his light mace for his friend to take.
Mahjik misses #2, but whirls around and lands his fist right in the centre of #3's chest. Several of the creature's ribs snap as Mahjik almost punches a hole right in the chest. The undead beast stumbles a moment and then falls over.
Next Up: Makoa, Douena, Festrog, Pezock, Urza, Lorenz, Mahjik.
Makoa takes the mace offered by Urza, then steps up and swings at the remaining creature.
The mace slams into the side of the creatures head, flattening part of the skull. The creature growls and does not go down.
Next Up: Festrog, Pezock, Urza, Lorenz, Mahjik, Makoa.
Douena looks at her wooden butterfly but decides to conserve her resources, especially if the layer of earth above her is weakening her channel from Desna. Instead, she steps up and reaches out to touch Pezock encouragingly. "Come on, Pezock. You can do it!"
As Douena gives some luck to Pezock, the last of the monsters lashes out desperately at Mahjik.
The beast bites at Mahjik's arm, but only gets a weak grip. When it yanks back, Mahjik has no trouble staying on his feet, and it only rips away the tiniest bit of flesh. Nonetheless, as it swallows, its smashed face reshapes to normal. It then backs away a bit .
"You're not going anywhere!" Pezock calls after it and steps forward to attack .
Pezock's fist lands right in the stomach of the beast.
Next Up: Lorenz, Mahjik, Makoa, Douena, Festrog, Pezock.
Rubbing his arm where some teeth marks left scratches, "Well. You have done well young monster - but our battle ends here." Throwing his fist wide he lures the monster into a deceptive dodge, where unexpectedly his other fist extends in a vicious arc to tear at the creature's throat.
Urza aims a Disrupt Undead at the ghoul like monster.
Disrupt Undead
R Touch, -4 fire into melee
to hit damage
Feeling much better now with the healing potion sending its warm energies through his body, Lorenz steps into the cavern proper. Seeing the final creature remaining, he carefully moves into position and swings his flail at its head with both hands.
"This is for almost ripping my heart out, you monster!"
A beam shoots out from Urza's hand, but goes straight over the creature's head.
Lorenz then moves in, slipping past Mahjik, his flail raised. He brings it down, inflicting a heavy blow across the side of the creature's head.
Mahjik slips past Makoa and around Lorenz, then strikes at the monster. Unfortunately, the creature twists away at just the right moment.
Makoa then shifts about to get into position to strike again. As he does so, the creature slashes at him.
The creature manages to scrape a gash across Makoa's arm just as he gets into position and swings the mace.
The creature twists aside at just the last moment.
Next Up: Festrog, Pezock, Urza, Lorenz, Mahjik, Makoa
Seeing the last undead creature refusing to fall, despite the others' best efforts, Douena decides to risk calling on Desna again. She runs up behind Pezock and thrusts her butterfly in between Lorenz and the tengu. "Come on, Desna," she pleads. "It's not just Lorenz hurt; there's an undead thing down here that needs to be reminded it's supposed to lie down and be still!"
Try again
Disrupt Undead
R Touch, -4 fire into melee
to hit damage
As the song of Desna spreads out across the cavern, the last remaining festrog begins to shake. It lets out a whimper and then collapses as wounds on the rest of the party heal over.
"Ha!" Pezock yells. "Back to death with you, beast!"
Lorenz lowers his flail, breathing hard. "What in the God's names were those? I feared I was about to meet Pharasma!"
"Wise man would harken onto wisdom." Mahjik, apparently, agrees with Lorenz.
Lorenz lowers his flail, breathing hard. "What in the God's names were those? I feared I was about to meet Pharasma!"
"Festrogs," Douena answers, cautiously approaching one of the downed creatures. "They're undead things that run on all fours and are really fast. Under the skin," she points a finger, "they have pockets of filthy pus that spread diseases. If you cut them with a blade or poke them with anything sharp, the pus spews out all over you. Jask told me about them. Apparently," she goes on, "if they eat some of you, it heals them. He didn't tell me that."
"Well, they will bother us no more!" Pezock declares. "We vanquished them just as we vanquished the cannibals and as we will do to any others that may be hiding down here!"
Douena goes to retrieve her glowing bit of bone. "That's why I like you, Pezock," she tells him. "You're so positive!" She tosses the bone down to the curve in the next passageway to make sure nothing is sneaking up on them that way.
Urza takes the time to hit all of the downed festrogs with Disrupt Undead. He then searches the area, casting Detect Magic to aid him.
Perception:
Looking a little sheepish, Lorenz turns to Makoa. "Would you mind taking the lead for a while, Makoa? I, uh, could use a break."
Lorenz gathers up his scimitar and places it and the flail on his belt, unstraps his shield and takes his bow in hand, fitting an arrow carefully into place.
"Okay, I'm ready."
"Keep the mace for a while, Makoa. You might need it again soon."
Douena tosses the lit stone down the next passage. It, too, is sloped slightly downwards. The stone hits the wall at the next curve and rolls around the corner, just out of sight. Its light is still visible, however.
Meanwhile, Urza begins searching the cavern. His spell does not detect anything magical in the cavern (other than objects already in the party's possession, such as Lorenz's new sword and Pezock's sword); however, as he's glancing in each of the little alcoves, he notices a strip of leather lying on the floor of the northeast one. There appears to be writing on it. The writing is in blood and reads as follows:
I am Captain Alizandru Kovack, betrayer of my crew and destroyer of the good ship Jenivere. Hell would be a welcome escape from what hideous unlife looms before me, but it is no less a punishment than I deserve. That I was enslaved mind and body to a serpentine demon who wore a Varisian’s skin does not pardon me. It is my weakness that led the Jenivere, her crew, and her passengers to their doom. That Ieana has abandoned me here is nothing more than the fate I deserve. I do not beg forgiveness, but I despair that she lives still, and that she seeks something dire on this forsaken isle—-she seemed particularly interested in Red Mountain. If you read this and you be a kind soul, seek out what I have become and destroy me, and then seek out Ieana and slay her as well. And to those whose lives I have helped destroy, I can only apologize from this, my dark cradle and darker grave.
"Ah. You don't suppose one of those festrogs is what remains of the captain?" Mahjik goes to examine the bodies again.
"Ah. You don't suppose one of those festrogs is what remains of the captain?" Mahjik goes to examine the bodies again.
None of the festrogs resemble Captain Kovack. If he was one of these three, then the transformation to undeath made him completely unrecognizable.
Lorenz listens to the Captain's words with a touch of fear and a growing sense of sorrow.
"How horrible," he says softly, looking reluctantly at one of the festrog corpses. "That she was able to make him do all those things, only to be turned into one of these monsters?" He shudders.
Lorenz turns to look off into the darkness. "I really want to find Ieana now. She needs to pay for what she did."
"Oh," Douena gasps softly in dismay as the note is read aloud. "She could at least have killed him while he was still under her spell; it should have been easy enough to do. To abandon him down here with time to think about what he'd done ... and what was going to be done to him...." She shakes her head, clearly upset.
For once, she is in complete agreement with Lorenz. "Horrid old bat. Er, snake-thing, I guess. I hope," she says firmly to Lorenz, "your squeamishness about hitting a girl won't affect you if we find Ieana."
"That is another debt to her account."
"Debt, wizard?" Pezock says. "There is no need to track her debt. She has already earned death and she shall receive it."
He turns to Makoa. "You! Big Teeth! Lead the way so that we can destroy more of these abominations and find this Ee-ay-ee--this serpent woman!"
"Just in case," Douena puts in before they enter the next tunnel. She moves over to the dead undead with her butterfly and wishes them a quick journey to the next realm and mercy where it is warranted. "I never preached a funeral at all before I came to this island," she says brightly. "Now I've said lots and lots of them."
You set off down the next corridor, making your way carefully around the bend. Some distance past the turn, the passage opens onto a ledge in another cavern. Makoa can see that the ledge winds along the wall of the cavern, gradually moving down to the floor 10 feet below. At the bottom, in the centre of the cavern is a pool of stagnant water. Several other passages exit from this cavern. Two on the east side exit directly off this ledge. Two more on the west side, exit off their own separate ledges, each about ten feet further up.
When Makoa stops, Douena slips up past Lorenz and Mahjik to see what's going on. "Too many ways to go," she says, "and I don't trust that pool. Back up a minute, Makoa." She lies down flat on the rock ledge so her eyes can just peek over and drops her lighted bone over the edge down into the pond, holding another bone fragment ready, should the light go out. She wants to see how deep the water is, if she can see anything moving within it, and mostly if something is going to burst out of it if it is disturbed.
Mahjik grins, hard to see in the fall of the light, but he creeps up to Douena after noting how she got distracted with the way the waves splash about the pool after she dropped the one bone fragment in. "Wise man suggests a pair of eyes can be supplemented by another."
"I'm not afraid of fighting women. It's the old ladies that make my skin crawl. There's something scary about all those wrinkles and that white hair and weird squinting eyes. The thought of stabbing into that wrinkly, bony body...ugh!" He shivers.
Lorenz eyes the dark pool of water distrustfully. "This place just keeps getting creepier."
He looks at the other openings and the strange ledges, starting at every sound.
The light bone drops down into the pool with a soft splash. Its glow, a little distorted, continues to light the cavern as it sinks to the bottom. After only a couple seconds, it touches the bottom, still providing enough light to reach the ledge where Douena and Mahjik are watching. You estimate that the pool is around 10 feet deep, maybe a bit more or a bit less.
Douena watches the bone sink to the bottom of the pond and waits a long moment to see if anything else will happen. When it doesn't, she turns to Mahjik and shrugs. "Makoa," she asks, hopping to her feet, "can you tell if any of these tunnels has been more recently traveled than any of the others?" If more light is needed, she will dismiss the spell on the bone in the water and light up a new one for the trackers to carry.
Makoa and Pezock make their way along the ledge, checking for signs of passage. There are able to find signs that there has been a lot of passage through this area in all directions, most of it going between the north and southeast passages, with a little going through the east passage. Very little has gone down to the pool. They are unable to observe the two western exits, but can tell that nothing seems to have climbed up or down from them. They are unable to tell anything more specific.
Lorenz frowns. "Do we want to go where everything has gone or where the tracks are fewer? What would Ieana have done, I wonder? Would she have gone somewhere everyone else goes or somewhere more quiet?"
"Let's take the road most traveled."
Douena shakes her head dubiously. "I don't know," she admits. "Which way is the Red Mountain from here?" she appeals to the more Survival-minded party members, having completely lost track of which way is which once underground. "We know that's where she ended up."
"East," Pezock replies. "You think she travelled all the way there through underground caves? Interesting. I hadn't thought of that. Such is the route of a coward unwilling to face the world's judgement."
He turns and points dramatically at Mahjik. "You would be most versed with this villain's tactics. Do you think she went east?"
"Oh. Oh yes certainly, she went east. That's where the all the excitement has been recently, and she's apparently at the center of excitement a lot," Mahjik muses. "Though I don't think she'd brave these underground caverns to get east. With who-knows-what dangers lurk, especially not if there is a possibility in getting lost and picking the wrong tunnels. She's already shown that she could cross all of the island to get to this village in the first place. The top holds nothing to fear for her, but down here is just danger. Her magic, too, as far as I can tell, is based on enchantment and illusion - neither of which would be all that relevant down here." His hand sweeps towards the passages, "There can be any number of interesting things down there, but I doubt it would be our serpent woman."
"No matter," Pezock declares. "The evil that is down here must be destroyed too. Onwards!"