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"Um... are you really really sure?"
Jek takes a deep gulp and charges what he dearly hopes is a visage masquerading as Conor.
He takes a gentle turn mid-charge to wind up next to Nik.
Conor keeps staring around, trying to see through these illusions folks were talking about.
The gear spirit's precise instructions on who to target at first appears to mislead the party as Jek runs his lance through Connor's center mass right where is left lung should be. Jek is horrified at first but then the room shifts back to the temple from before. Unfortunately it was not the source of the body swapping as now there appears to be two copies of Helios.
The Helios next to Jek and Nik fires on his doppelganger, it dissolves to ash as a couple of arrows pierce it.
The final remaining visage says in a raspy scream, "Kill them!"
Lunk slips through the portal, hand ready to quick-draw living steel! (…if the portal doesn’t slow him down.)
Lunk and Savi get stuck going with the flow in the corridor, not able to see what is happening ahead of them.
“Baaah, not again!” Savi bemoans the slowness of the local warp pipes. “Well, at least un-shrink yourself before this thing pops us out the other side.”
Nik, hoping that he's still safely invisible, continues concentrating.
Conor attepts to fight off the voices in his head, but the whispers are just too strong for his depleted willpower.
Helios finally eliminates the disturbing creature taking his appearance. He wipes the sweat from his brow and hears a raspy scream: "Kill them!"
"Wtf?" he thinks, and quickly shoots at the image.
"Go to Hell!"
With his vision unobscured Helios' arrows both tear into the remaining visage.
Glimmerhoof tries again to throw a javelin
Jek squints and looks at each person in the room in turn.
"Rinika, who is it this time? Is it the statue?"
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An invisible Nik shouts "The illusion magic is gone, Jek! It just evaporated and I can't find it anywhere!"
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Connor floats over to the remaining visage and destroys it with one swipe of his acid dripping blade. After waiting a few seconds to see if anymore of the hallucination inducing undead show themselves, none appear.
Its then that Lunk and Savi appear.
You are deposited not into an empty spherical chamber but a long and narrow roughly rectangular one. It appears to be a temple of some sorts, while you’re unclear which faith it belongs to it is dark and sinister. Shelves set into the walls hold rows of skulls, and the scrollwork around the shelves depicts loathsome images of fiends and undead.
At one end of the temple hangs a gigantic iron bell engraved with crudely made scenes and pictures depicting death and undeath. It is 8ft in diameter and has no clapper within it. At the other stands a 15ft tall stone idol of a ram-headed humanoid, its muscular arms outstretched. The stone is black, though threads of greenish mineral weave their way throughout.
"Cuddles"
Near the bell is a small black explosion, a concentration of energy about 5ft in diameter. The nimbus of black turns towards you, showing two grey, lifeless orbs that give the impression of eyes. Bolts of cold, hungry energy writhe outward like pseudopods or whips. You feel something within you drawn to this strange thing, like iron filings to a powerful lodestone.
"Solid hit! Nice work Conor!"
Jek looks over at the new arrival and raises an eyebrow. "More illusions?"
The pallid aasimar next to the lance-wielding Braiar has gray eyes. He is wearing goggles with jewel lenses; beige pants and a brown shirt both with unidentifiable but similar stains on them; and an ample brown cloak. He has a quiver on his back and a loaded heavy darkwood crossbow in his hands, as well as a pair of moderately sized books hanging from his belt near a sheathed dagger.
"They haven't screamed 'kill them' yet, so I'm not too sure." Nik replies, while looking at the newcomers suspiciously.
"Where did you guys come from? And whaddya want?"
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Lunk is wearing a white disco suit with a paisley dress shirt, collar up. The shirt matches the fabric lining the ‘cuff’ of his bell-bottomed slacks, from which platform shoes protrude. At his hip, tucked into his belt—which is basically a friendship bracelet for the waist—is a curved scabbard. The half-elf’s left thumb rests on the tsuba (crossguard, basically) of his katana.
His right hand is free. He puts up two fingers, forming a V.
If that’s a code, it seems to be immediately understood by the six-inch-tall muscle-chick on top of his head.
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The red-headed fairy is clad in a bikini and her muscles are huge… or would be, if she were not so diminutive. Her hands are gripping the hilt of a fairy-sized katana thrust in the half-elf’s topknot.
She snaps her fingers, dispelling her illusory clothing. Her actual clothing is a pair of sleeves over her forearms and a leafy dress.
She makes intros. “This is Lunk, son of Super Fiery Marco, famous tradesman and red mage from our world! And I’m Savi, daughter of Sax, BFF of Lunk’s mom, Samanthus Aran-Polo.
“What we want is Lunk’s dad’s hat. Or… wanted. There was this glowy-eyed guy who lost love, and thought murdering Lunk and I would get his girlfriend to come back. So Lunk was like, ‘ya think ya can take me? Well, go ahead on.’ Only what the Lovelost guy didn’t lose was his posse. So we fled and ended up here.”
Savi looks around at all the giants, eyes stopping at the smallest giant of all!
Her jaw drops. “Wowwww… you’re even taller than my mom. I’m Savi.” Awkward pause. “I already said my name. And my mom’s. Ha, ha, heh, huh? Ummmm… But I’ll bet you have a name too, so we have that in common! What’s your name? Are you a warrior-fairy too? You look so strong!”
Conor growls in satisfaction as he delivers acid laced justice to the vision that dared to try to dominate his mind.
Looking back at Jek he flashes a smile at his compliment, then whirls as the rest of the group notices the newcomers.
"What in the ever loving nine hells are ... you?" Conor stammers as he takes in the managerie that made up the new pair, even as he works his great sword up and into a guard position, unsure if more fighting was about to break out.
Onlookers see a young man, handsome face prematurely aged by hard living and sun exposure, his short beard and close cropped brown hair already salted with gray hairs. Yet, a confident smile creased his face as he looked around the tavern with smiling blue eyes.
His garb was mercenary regulation, battered yet maintained plate over worn chain and leather, a broadsword hanging from one hip, spiked mace hanging from the other, unadorned bascinet hanging from his belt alongside sliver spiked gauntlets. A careful observer might notice that under the dents and scratches and repaired rents on the breastplate and the battered shield hanging from his pack was a quite faded emblem of a sylized gauntlet.
Savi gives the even-bigger fairy an I’ll-get-back-to-you smile, then replies to the prematurely-aged-but-objectively-handsome man.
“Oh, fudging A. Did you miss my entire introduction? I don’t want you to miss out, but if I repeat myself, everyone who heard it the first time will be bored.” She whispers no less loudly than she normally talks, “And I’m trying to make a good impression on the very tall fairy, so I gotta not be boring.”
She wills some ambient music and speaks rhythmically—mostly because it’s hard to will ambient music while talking at the same time.
Hailing from
The First Worl
…duh
Is the Hero of Tim
Who saved his girl
…or trie
…duh
He actually saved Tim
To impress Princess Celda
…of Celda Castle
But it was actually Tim
Who married Princess Celda
…because Tim’s an asshoIe
The ambient music stops. The fairy looks very embarrassed. Her luminous skin flushes so red, she literally lights up the walls (and anything and anyone within 20 feet of her) with a red hue.
“Wow, that was a lotta effort for my lamest intro ever. I didn’t even use Lunk’s name, did I? Oh… how about you guys introduce yourselves? Maybe with a demonstration, I can get this right.”
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As Savi tries way too hard, Lunk snaps his fingers. His outfit remains the same except for a white sticker on his lapel with a red border.
On the border are white letters.
HELLO
my name is
And in sloppy black handwritten letters on the white part:
LUNK
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Appearing as if from nowhere beside the two newcomers and eyeing them with considerable suspicion is a catfolk girl. She's quite young, scrawny, and dressed in a motley assortment of finery thrown together with absolutely no regard for style. A thick, oversized wool peacoat festooned with pockets tops a very fine burgundy silk kimono left untied atop a waistcoat and glimmering green chain shirt. It's all tied together with a large gold pendant in goblin script, a silver pocketwatch slipped into the peacoat, a sword in a lacquered scabbard on her back, a half-dozen different types of scarves, and a red dragonscale hair comb slipped into the enormous mane of dark curls that bounce atop her head. A thin layer of dark fur coats the rest of her, but it is quickly interrupted. A large, creeping patch of death and decay zooms across her face. Her fur becomes patchy and the skin tightens against bone, opening in places to reveal stringy muscle and discolored bones underneath. Just as quickly as it appears, the dead spot drifts off again under her many layers and again looks like a perfectly healthy catfolk, only to be interrupted again as the dead spot careens about her flesh, pinballing from place to place.
Having taken in the introductions, she gets to the point.
"So what are you doing here? Were you trapped here? Or imprisoned, perhaps?"
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Holey skin… smile nicely at the cat girl.
Savi smiles nicely at the cat girl and tries not to follow the rot-hole. She makes eye contact.
If I’m lucky, I’ll blink at the exact time it crosses her fa—nope. Not lucky.
“Accident.” Savi nods. She smiles. She finishes her one-word reply. “…ally.” Vigorous nod and smile and not-looking at the hole and not thinking about the hole and not thinking about not-thinking-about-the-hole.
She elaborates, “I was helping Lunk clean his pipe. Then… here.” But wait, there’s more. “…we are!”
There isn’t more.
Savi just hovers and smiles and nods and I can see her brain!!
…and now, I can’t.
Lunk signs three hand gestures to Savi: the ‘German three,’ a fist with thumb to index, and thumb-to-index with pinky-ring-middle tightly together.
He would show the blueprint of the green pipe that was polluting the environment, but it was folded into a compartment in his dad’s red hat which is lost forever. So he casts Prestidigitation to clarify that, despite obvious gutter humor, the fairy is being literal.
Prestidigitation doesn’t make an accurate blueprint. It looks like math paper with a crayon drawing: a blue stick figure with a red cap accompanied by a blue dot with four wings. They are entering a green pipe. Brown, gray and black scribbles with pencil stink lines are coming from the pipe.
Lunk then adjusts his Sleeves of Many Garments, and his disco suit becomes a green shirt with overalls and a janitor’s cap with the letter L on it. The scabbard for his katana is now yellow and labeled ‘MOP,’ but it is still very clearly a sheathed katana with no mop-like features at all.
Conor grunts (or is that a small groan?) at the antics of the pair, but eventually smiles and offers. "Name's Conor.". He doesn't go too far into introductions or even trusting this new pair considering the illusion inducing mind controlling things they just finished killing.
"Proper introductions when we get back to civilization over a pint, eh?"
"Hrm. Well, we're looking for someone or something that's been imprisoned here for a long time. Solving a mystery and all that."
She idly spins around a gruesome-looking bone parasol that she's carrying, the canopy comprised of sheets of flowing blood folded shut against the shaft.
"I'm Rinika. We can help you get out of here if you help us find what we're looking for."
"Yeah, if these two were the prisoner, that would be too easy, wouldn't it?" Nik comments.
"Shall we go together to checkout that shaft of light?" He suggests.
"Oh, and call me Nik. That's Jek, Helios, Cuddles, Auntie Glimmerhoof, and... Bedu?" Nik adds, pointing to each of the others in turn.
"And..." He looks around for a moment, apparently confused, and then smacks his forehead.
"And Skellington and Zombington aren't here. See any shamblers on your way here?"
“Bedu, pleasure to meet you………” Savi just smiles at the big fairy. Then minding the half-a-dozen, she adds “all.
“A pint sounds great. A shaft of light sounds… like the thing one checks out prior to the pint. Yes, we can help find these prisoners, Rinika.”
In reply to the shambler question, Lunk shakes his head no.
"Hi, I'm Helios."
Helios waves and smiles.
"Are you by chance trapped here for a long time?"
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Savi thinks on the question. She doesn’t have a joke to deflect the question with.
So she doesn’t joke.
“Earlier in this very hour, we were on our own world. I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know if this means we’re trapped. But I do know that life on the First World is a trap for Lunk. And…” She smiles at Bedu, then faces Helios as she continues to talk. “…this is the first time in my life I’ve seen another fairy, besides my mom of course.
“I love my mom, but she’d understand I’d rather go forward instead of back.”
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Rinika floats back over towards the portal she had come back through, intent on investigating the light. Normally she'd be pretty chatty, but...
"Can we hurry this up? I still hate this place. Its all icky."
Reposted description of 10
A singular shaft of dark blue light cuts through the center of this cylindrical room. The stony walls of the chamber have been completely covered in carvings of faces of all sorts, so that the entire room is filled with leering, weeping, laughing, staring images.
The visages trapped here with Nik's tentacles are no where to be seen.
Rinika floats into the light.
Lunk floats in with the others.
Savi attempts to glow yellow to light the area a color brighter and warmer than blue. She heard a word called ‘visages’ before, so the faces on the wall kinda freak her out.
As Rinika touches the shaft of light the intensity begins to wane, but as it does a dark shape appears before you; a shriveled husk of an inhuman figure. It shudders and shakes feebly, with flesh that looks like it might once have rippled with muscles now hanging loosely upon weak bones. You think this creature once stood over 10 feet tall, but now it stooped body barely reaches 7 feet.
"I am Glyphimhor," the figure says quietly, "master of Tcian Sumere. Do not be deceived by my appearance." It raises a clawed hand, rotting flesh dripping like syrup with each motion, "I am still foremost among the servants of the master. I also know the ancient magic of Pelion that he wields. My words can also slay." Its voice intensifies, as does the light in its eyes. "Bow down before me, worms!"
Savi detects evil.
"Pelion? The dusty place?" Nik asks, not registering his request that they all bow.
Rinika floats back from the newly occupied column of light. She whispers to the party, "Pelion...that dusty place in Arborea? How mysterious."
Louder, and directly to the corpse dude, she asks, "Can you teach that magic?"
Lunk moves his hand in a deft but subtle move, intent on snatching Savi into his hands before the creepy melty guy mace notice of his itty-bitty friend.