Daemons
Nik's voice cuts through the strange silence of the place just before Rinika dips her tail in "Can anyone cast Bless on it?"
Rinika shrugs, sitting on the side of the cauldron. She looks at Lunk and his rubber chicken and grins, licks her lips.
*Plop*
Rinika's tail plops into the cauldron, the end desiccated from brief coverage from her spot.
From behind you, you hear, softly at first, moaning, whining, and screaming coming from the cauldron. No one else seems to notice this. You are filled with terror as the trapped souls overwhelm your senses.
After you recover you hear a near constant low murmur of someone trying to talk to you, almost as if someone was talking from behind a thick wall. You are unable to understand them.
"What in the nine Hells ... Oh you just did that." Conor groans and rubs his face, waiting to see the results.
Rinika's smug grin snaps shut as her eyes go wide and all her fur and hair stands on end. The soul soup splashes as her tail stick straight out, and her spot starts to careen about her with even more frenetically. She lets out an ear-splitting yowl of fear and bolts from the room.
(Shortly?) After the Catgirl leaves line of sight of the horrifying cauldron, she enters the room where Jek, Savi, and Nik are.
"What was that?" Nik asks, surprised.
The people in this chamber catch the tail end of a terrified yowl before Rinika sort of calms down. Her eyes frantically dart around the room and she keeps turning around and looking over her shoulders as if something's following her. Almost like she's chasing her own tail.
"Can you guys tell what that voice is saying?"
Nik glares at Savi, suspecting the fairy of playing pranks on the Queen of the Dustmen Rinika
Savi sees the glare, but when she makes eye contact, she looks innocent.
She then uses her Sleeves of Many Garments to change her outfit to a sailor suit complete with kerchief and hat, and she Prestidigitates a swirly rainbow lollipop in her hand to look even more innocent.
Lunk floats out and casts Prestidigitation. He makes a white oval with a triangular protrusion. On the oval are the words,
VOICE?
WHAT VOICE?
Lunk holds up the oval sign over his head so the triangle part points to himself.
"It's like it's coming from..." She looks around the walls of the current chamber, then back at the portal to the last chamber, and then she frantically starts examining the tip of her tail.
She looks at the others with wide, pleading eyes. "You don't hear it?"
Savi flings the fake lollipop over her shoulder. It whistles through the air, and when it shatters into rainbow smithereens, it sounds like a stack of dishes dropped onto a champagne flute pyramid.
The expression on her face is humorlessly unfazed and sincere when she hovers in front of Rinika.
“I really don’t hear it. I do slapstick, puppet shows, and feel-good pranks—like earlier when the mister blood was cleaned off of you—that was me.
“But I don’t do cruel jokes. And I wouldn’t violate your trust. I really can’t hear whatever it is you’re hearing. Is it at the tip of your tail? If you want me to, I can try to listen.”
Conor floats out to check on Rinika, "Everything OK? You ... you?"
Then to the remainder of the group, "We just leaving this thing then? Where to next?"
Eyes still wide, she tries to sum things up. "My tail, it...uhm, it accidentally went into the soup. And then it was like a bite, or almost...something grabbed on. And then it was like all these screams, and..." She looks around a bit more. "And now there's a voice, and it's not...it's still there, but it's far away."
Lunk signs to Savi:
Savi nods, and wills a sign to appear.
Number of Days Without
a Soup-Related Accident:
Savi shakes her head as she crosses out the number on her board, replacing it with a zero.
Rinika seems to calm down slightly, but her spot is still zooming around with renewed energy, and he ears and eyes twitch a lot more than usual. A canny observer might even put together that her ears seem to almost track her spot, although she doesn't seem to realize this.
"I'll be...I think...I think I'm okay. But...let's get out of here. Soon. Nik, did you figure out how to let the souls out of the pot?"
"I think he said Bless would do. Anyone know what will happen when we let them out? Is this something we do as we leave?"
Jek thinks a bit. "I wonder how long they've been in there."
Savi of course doesn’t know, but replies anyway.
“I can’t imagine an eternity as soul soup. I’d like to think your blessing will make them better off—like, a regular afterlife.”
For emphasis, she uses her Sleeves of Many Garments to change her outfit to an angelic white robe. It comes with a halo and fluffy white gossamer wings that cover her regular wings, so now Savi is floating (without the use of wings) like everybody else. She changes her glow to gold, since the halo doesn’t glow.
"Hopefully they'll just kinda .... go away to their final rest of whatever.". Turning to dancing light and light bot 2.0 Auntie Glimmerhoof he asks, "Can you bless this thing?"
Glimmerhoof casts bless!
The cauldron cracks and the spirits within fly free, no longer confined.
Jek feels something banging from within one of his barrels. Something moans, "eeeh eee ouuu"
Nik lets out a short groan.
"I should just disassemble all of those and get it over with. Conor, you like chopping things, want to chop that zombie up really quick? I'll open, you chop."
Conor grins, "Sure, been a second since I chopped something to bits.".
He then prepares to assist Nik in the disassembly process.
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Conor hacks apart Nik's collection of corpses even though they give token resistance. The corpses are decayed but you can see the fear in their eyes as they are chopped apart anew. The spirits don't leave the bodies and hands still grasp, eyes still look about, and toes still wiggle. But at least they're more manageable.
Dispelling the illusory outfit, Savi looks on at the clingy bits. “Ohhh, why do they—? C’mon, guys. Those bodies are…”
She points to what she thinks is a wisp flying to Heaven.
“See how happy they are?” She then asks Glimmerhoof, “Is this one of those things where you gotta bless twice? Like with sneezes, where you can say ‘bless you’ to a group, but of a bunch of people from a different group also sneeze in unison, you gotta bless them separately.”
She’s not sure if there has ever been a moment in the history of sneezing where an entire group of people sneezed at once, never mind two groups.
Savi rehearses in her head how this might somehow get Auntie Glimmerhoof’s tall, rainbow-clad fairy to talk to her. I just don’t understand things like sneezing… and sapphic romance. Maybe if I had someone to explain one or both of these things? (Pause for eyelash-batting.)
Savi says none of this aloud.
Helios is about to say he can't bless until tomorrow, then Auntie does. And then all is full of souls, and everybody's sneezing, and... wait, no...
"Uh... I hate this place. Let's go?"
Rinika notes how unusual it is to see fear in a zombie's eyes and presses against the wall, trying her best not to look like a newly-possessed undead body.
She looks over at Helios with big scared eyes and nods her agreement.
You appear the the entrance to this cylindrical room, which is at least 30ft above the surface of the floor (with the ceiling rising about at high above). An uncountable number of bones, desiccated and brittle, rise up from the floor in a tremendous heap in the middle of the chamber, reaching almost the level of the entrance. On the top of the pile, where the flattened stack forms a small platform, sits what appears to be a dirty glass container about 5ft tall. Much of the container is covered in a crusty film, though within you can see a deep green fluid. Solid or semisolid chunks of disgusting organic matter are suspended in the muck.
A narrow black bridge joins where you now stand with the top of the pile of bones. The pull of gravity here makes you realize that unlike most areas of this strange fortress, this room has a definite "down." The Need for the bridge is clear.
Nik casts Detect Magic again, hoping to see nothing terrifying this time.
The container is magical. After studying it for a few seconds Nik determines its a minor enchantment used to preserve the fluid it contains.
Savi detects faint evil coming from the goo.
Savi’s aura becomes red.
“I shoulda said before, but I can detect evil auras. I’m detecting one right now, though not nearly as powerful as the melty guy’s.
“If you see my skin glow red, it means I’m detecting evil—the brighter the red, the eviller the detection.”
"That's disgusting. How curious are we this time?"
Jek keeps his distance from the narrow bridge.
"I say we keep moving, this has all kinds of disaster written all over it." Conor grumbles.
Rinika starts to grin, then frowns, then settles into an awkward amalgamation of the two. Then she looks to Nik and proposes, "So we should let the souls out of this one too?"
Then she gets out her crossbow and shoots it.
And she looks around wide-eyed as the bolt deflects off with a *tink.*
“Bobby and I can help, Rinika!”
Savi quick-draws Bobby from Lunk’s hair. She raises the diminutive katana overhead.
“YAAARRRRR!!”
Her strike is agile, yet powerful!
With the preserving container destroyed the goo vaporizes into a noxious cloud that eats at your lungs. You start to cough up blood.
Lunk gags. If he wasn’t mute, he would swear as well.
“I immediately re-KACK!! …this.”
Rinika does her best to hold her breath and exits the room.
Savi follows Lunk and Rinika outta here.
Conor holds his breath when the gas starts spewing and floats out of the room.
When clear, he gasps and growls "Can we stop messing with the death traps yet?"
Utterly aghast at the destruction of a thing he wanted to steal, Nik can't help but stare slack jawed as the poison cloud reaches him.
Coughing, he exits the room as quickly as he can.
After getting a (low) dose of fresh(er) air in the next room, Nik scolds Rinika and Savi.
"What the hells! Don't just break everything! I wanted that... whatever it was..."
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Rinika looks at Nik with confused petulance. "Didn't it have souls that needed free too?"
Nik pauses for a moment before waving his hands and 'explaining' "Uh- I didn't see any? The souls in the soup were really obvious. Those were just... poisonous organs... or something..."
Nik scowls "anyway, if there were souls in there, then we could've set 'em free afterwards. After I-"
Looking away he adds "Er- after I had a closer look to make sure."
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Savi is disappointed.
She lands and stands next to Rinika, looking extra pathetic as she stands only ankle high. She looks up at the giants towering over her like, well… everybody.
“Sorry,” she starts. She brushes a foot across the ground, kicking a pebble like it’s a soccer ball. But it doesn’t go very far because it’s even more like a rock. She goes on, “I was just trying to help. And make a funny noise. Glass breaking sounds… funny.
“But not when the whole room inhales a preserved ghost fart.” She says bitterly, “That case should have been labeled.”
The apology is sincere, though overacted.
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Jek resists the urge to vomit as he makes a quick exit.
"Ugh... we finally found something worse than the barrel..."