All but Aeryx's arrow make their mark. The wizard howls out more arcane incantations and looses another few arcane blasts as he takes a quick step back. This time, he focuses them entirely on the hard-hitting elf.
Menedemus eyes will widen as the dwarf wizard flings the Magic Missiles at Steave "Watch out!"
A second after, a rage-filled Menedemus will lock his gaze on the dwarf and dash to him. Clutching tight on his greatsword, he will attack the dwarf with an horizontal slash.
"Surrender, dwarf! We don't have to be enemies." Steave offers. Then two-handed shield bashes.
Aleister finds the dwarf to be a more evasive target then the previous enemy's. He leaves Steave to attempt to talk the Mage out of his aggression.
Leander stows away his bow and draws his sword as he moves around the Dwarf. What was this place? First giant vermin, then flying leather sacks and now an insane Dwarf. As if demons weren't crazy enough on their own!
Menedemus's strike is enough to make the wizard fall, the words, "Never surrender to you self-righteous pansies," on the egde of his lips as he begins bleeding out.
His camp is in better condition than the one you found earlier, but just barely; he's not been torn apart by vermin, after all. A large pile of Darkmantle bones lie off to the side of his ratty bedroll and several days of rations; preserved fruit, dried meat, and some moldy cheese. A chipped, 6-inch tall marbel statuette of a humanoid throwing a spear sits comfortably to the side, along with a spellbook containing Detect Secret Doors, Fog Cloud, Grease, Invisibility, Resist Energy, Shocking Grasp, and Silent Image.
On the dwarf, should you choose to choose to loot him, you'll find a dagger (his arcane bond), potions of Cure Light Wounds and Invisibility,scrolls of Shocking Grasp and Resist Energy, a light crossbow, ten bolts, and a Cloak of Resistance +1.
His half of the cavern narrows inward, and a short distance away you can see a steady, fairly steep slope ahead, likely only way to continue onward.
Steave looks over the dwarf trying to determine who he is describing what he finds to the blind elf. After determining the statue is not magical, he stows it away in the nice found backpack.
"Aleister, do you want to carry the spellbook and scrolls? You're the only one who can use them, right?"
"Does anyone need a crossbow?" Steave asks setting it aside with the bolts.
"We need some healing. Lisandra, can you you heal us, so we don't use the potions, yet?"
"Gladly." Aleister says before grabbing the Spellbook and Scrolls.
"The Crossbow will likely do better than me throwing acid at things but if someone else could put it to better use I'd rather not lug it around."
"Aeryx, why don't you take the cloak? You're the first of us. Aleister, go ahead and take the crossbow and bolts. Don't hear any other takers." Steave stows the statue, food, and potions and nods to Aeryx, "Let's go."
Leander puts away his blade as the Dwarf drops, "That's what you get for living down here, you go mad. Lets make out way up, where the madness is outside our heads." With that he moves up the slope, careful not to alert anything that might be there.
Menedemus smiles at Aeryx's excitement for the cloak.
He must be really strong, to be able to get so excited in a situation as dire as this
Looking around the camp Menedemus will wonder at the group "How much time do you think the dwarf lived under here? Maybe there really was a Dwarven community under Kenabres, and some unspeakable thing happened to them, but what?"Menedemus will sigh "This place is getting more and more confusing as we go on...".
As they're about to move up the slope, Menedemus will offer his help at the civilians "Aravashniel, Miss Anevia, Lord Gwerm, do you need help climbing?"
"I'll be fine," Anevia says, "Although a little slow."
"My hands still work fine," the wizard snaps, almost regretting the implication.
"I haven't become that old and rusty, my boy," Horgus says, the addressing of him as "lord" enough to keep his belligerence at bay.
"Let's hope the worst of it has passed." Aleister says before climbing the slope.
The slope is more time than it is trouble, especially given the slow pace of the blinded and lame companions who take quite some time to scale the sixty feet of steep incline, but eventually you make it, and are able to proceed again. The tunnel continues on for thirty minutes of narrow, slow walking, until it opens into a large cavern, roughtly seventy feet across. Cylindrical rock formations along the walls arch up to make a domelike chamber, but the walls and floor are riddled with cracks. At the center of the cave, a stone tower that may have once reached the fifhty-foot-high cieling has collapsed on its side.
As you come in, you hear commotion, and a short distance away, you can seee two humanoid figures trying to dig carefully through rubble.
Leander moves in with Aeryx though he lets birdy do the talking. The careful digging more or less gave them away as not complete idiots, for why would they dig carefully if they were? There had to be something precious in there.
As Aeryx draws closer, his keen eyes see that while humanoid in shape, they are most certainly not humans. One is a hunchbacked woman, face warped by tumours, who begins to make noises that come out as unintelligible, while the other is a tall,. thin man with a face that melds the features of an attractive elven man and a lizard, with the horns of a goat, and fingers that end in dull, spadelike talons. Seeing the approach of several strangers, they tense up, and the man raspily speaks in clear and eloquent, albeit oddly accented common, "If your intentions are ill, we ask you to move on and leave us in peace. If they are good, then perhaps you can help. As you can see, misfortune has befallen us."
The strange creatures have cleared away enough rubble that only one large rock remains, someone trapped beneath it, groaning in pain.
Without a second thought, Menedemus rushes to help the trapped humanoid "Could you give me a hand with that boulder, please?" he will ask to the party.
"Don't worry, we'll get you out of there as soon as possible" he will say to whoever is under the rock, while he tries to move it.
Seeing someone trapped beneath the rock, Steave stows his shield and strides up to the rock. "There's someone under there, everyone put a shoulder to the rock. We can move this together. On the count of three. One... Two... Three, push!"
ALeister puts all his strength into moving the rock.
Leander simply moved in and stood by, ready to help whoever was stuck underneath get out while the others moved the rock out of place. He didn't have the raw muscles to move rocks anyway, let alone the fact that he wouldn't be able to lift it as high as the others.
With your combined strength, you slowly manage to push the boulder off. Crouched in a very narrow hole beneath the boulder sits another of the misshapen humanoids, shaking scared and battered by small falling rocks, but not visibly injured enough to need aid.
"I thank you for you for my kindness," says the eloquent man. The tumoured woman behind her makes some unintelligible noise. "Dyra does as well, though it may be difficult for you to understand her. I am Lann, and the friend you helped me save is Crel." He reaches his hand down into the hole to help his friend up.
"You have my thanks as well," Crel says, groaning as he gets up and onto even footing, trying to push off much of the cave dust from his clothes.
Horgus moves away, making small, disgusted noises but mostly keeping to himself. Anevia regards them curiously. Aravashniel listens curiously, as if trying to piece together details from one of his many theories and making assumptions that his lack of vision robs him of evidence of.
"How did you come to be down here? Aside from a mad dwarf we've seen few from the surface, and you do not look organized enough to belong to that group."
"The mad Dwarf is dead. He attacked us and we took him out." Leander's voice was somewhat sad, though it wasn't quite clear if it was the sad situation of the man that was under the boulder or the Dwarf's death that was the cause of it.
"There was a cave in, a collapse of the square above. We fell through and are now trying to make our way to the surface, see what help we can lend up there." He sighed, then looked the one named Lann straight in the eye, "The demons did this. The how isn't clear, but we know they did. We saw it."
Steave approaches each of the newcomers to greet them and shake their hands if they accept making an effort to demonstrate that he doesn't care what they look like. "Well met, I'm Steave," he says and then introduces everyone in the party.
"We have two severely injured companions and are looking for a route back to the surface. Can you help us?" He identifies Anevia and Aravashniel with nods before asking his question.
"I am Menedemus. Pleased to meet you" he will introduce himself with a little bow.
As Leander mentions the surface, Menedemus's says "Yes, we have to get to the surface as soon as possible. The demons are probably still there, and we have to help the survivors!"
"My name is Aleister." the mage introduces himself with a nod. He allows the others to explain their current predicament without interruption.
"Demons? Over Kenabres?" Lann turns to his companions, looking very grave, and sighs. "We can indeed help you to the surface, Steave, but the way is past my village, which I was to offer to bring you to anyway, as our chieftain is likely to want you rewarded for saving Crell. But now... it's likely he will wish to hear about this, as well. We are called 'mongrelmen', by those on the surface, and yes, we live here. I will leave all explanations to our chieftain, who is a much wiser and knowledgeable man than I." He assumes the frontmost position and begins to lead you to his village.
The chaos up top has left much of the cave system in ruins, even this far away from where you fell through the torn-asunder earth. As you move onward, it troubles Crell, who finds the swiftest way to his village closed off. He says there is another way, but that it will take longer and run a few risks.
Crell leads you for nigh on an hour through the tunnels, it looks like it's about to open up a short distance forward. "Be careful," he says, putting his hand forward. "I forgot this was along the path. This cavern is the den of a creature we call the "spore cougher. It can send up a noxious, deadly fume into the air, so be careful."
"Nothing's going to be easy for us today, huh?" Aleister says out loud. Asking no one in particular.
"Aravashniel, do you know anything about a creature they call the "spore cougher" that can send up a noxious, deadly fume into the air? Can we breathe through a cloth to protect us?" Steave asks the blind elf while following the mongrelmen.
Menedemus will ready his Greatsword and try to see if he can spot something alive up ahead.
"So what do we do? We try to sneak past it?"
Menedemus can see the faint auras of recent death in the cavern, and nothing left living. Aeryx's questions prove without need to be answered as his keen eyes spot the "spore cougher", a human-sized plant monster with a great many tendrils, lying dead amidst two humanoid bodies.
Piety stares wearily into the darkness, on edge against something else that could threaten her new found comrades. "Who knew there was a whole world like this under Kenabres... and all of it trying to kill us! It's a marvel these mongrel men are still alive."
"Anybody see this death plant?" Aleister asks looking around the cavern.
Leander looked into the dark tunnel before him. He wasn't quite sure what he was to see but he'd figure it out. "Is it a plant or a mushroom?"
"Is it the dead thing over there, next to the humans?" Leander points at a location down the tunnel with a dead monster and two dead humans.
"There it is. Looks dead. Menedemus, are those two humanoids dead, too? Careful everyone. Could be a trap." Steave readies his shield for an ambush.
Menedemus will grip on his Greatsword "Yes, they are. I can sense that they were alive not too long ago."
Maybe we could have saved them... if only we were faster...
Menedemus will be about to crack his whip-like tail to relieve some stress, but stops himself a second before, knowing that it would have caught the creature attention.
"Somebody shoot it and make sure it's dead." Aleister says.