As everyone prepares to fire their first barrage, Caiten casts Stoke the Heart on Yasami and Catalina.
He fires off an arrow of his own at the pillar.
Yasami opts for a bow to strike at the pillar. "Not sure if this will do anything." she shrugs, nocks and pulls. "On three?" she asks.
"THREE!" and releases the arrow at the pillar, aiming for a gem if visible.
Lisi casts Guidance on himself and then produces a small ball of flame.
"Um, I can try that again..." he says sheepishly.
The group prepares and then unleashes bullets, arrows, and fire at the pillar. Catalina's bullet almost misses, but at the last moment she almost wills it to change its course, and it breaks off pieces of the pillar. Yasami's arrow also connects. But both Catalina and Yasami observe that the total impact on the pillar is less than they expected. Caiten's arrow and Lisi's fire fail to penetrate the pillar's defensive shell.
ROUND ONE INITIATIVE
30 the things in the water
24 pillar
19 Yasami
18 Catalina
17 Oren
12 voidworms, Caiten
11 Lisi
As the group attacks the pillar, you are surprised to see two heads poke out of the, murky pool at the bottom of the pit. They look towards the pillar, and then look around and spot the party at the edge of the pit. To your surprise, they launch into the air — the mechanism of flight unclear — and move 30 feet towards you. They look like 12 foot long thick salamanders, with wide heads, powerful tails, and tentacles tipped with snapping jaws in place of rear legs.
Next, the violet dragon headed pillar rotates, smoke coming out of its mouth, and it fires a violet colored beam at Caiten. The beam barely misses due to the cover provided by the edge of the pit.
Yasami watches a violet ray blow past the cliffside next to Caiten, and winces. "Everyone take a step back." she raises her hands to form a barrier between the cliff and the rest of the party. "Deal with the worms first. No need to be turned to stone or whatever by one of those beams."
She then steps back from the cliff and nocks an arrow to fire at the first worm that appears in sight. Once or twice.
For a total of 24 (2x7 + 10)
Seeing the flying creatures come over, Oren flies into a rage, takes a deep breath, and lets out a great cone of flame aimed at the creatures in the sky!
DC23 Reflex Save to take half of fire damage!
Catalina nods at Yasami, noticing that her initial shot didn't hurt the pillar as much as she had anticipated. Must be tougher... The thaumaturge thinks, huffing an annoyed sigh. She takes a step away from the edge to give herself a bit of cover from the rays, and focuses her attention on the strange flying creatures ahead of her, shuffling through her mental files to remember what they might be and what she can use to exploit their weaknesses.
For the moment at least, the void worms just continue to float around the pillar.
Caiten and Lisi can act and I will resolve all the attacks at once.
Oren: only one is in range of your breath, so I’ll just apply it to that one unless you tell me different. Also, you’re still at the edge of the pit.
Yasami: These things flying at you are not the worms but something much bigger and more aggressive. And I’m going to assume you stride last because you can’t target them with your bow unless you’re at the edge.
Catalina: I’ll try to remember about the recall DCs. That’s a success. You recognize that these, like the worms, are proteans, creatures spawned within the Maelstrom and guardians of disorder. As creatures of chaos, they have a weakness to lawful damage. You believe these particular creatures are called naunets — they are pugnacious and beastial and disinclined to diplomacy.
"They're like the vrocks!" Catalina announces, frowning deeply at the one nearest her. "Hit them with goodness." The angelkin pulls a white feather from her esoterica pouch and holds it to her pistol for a moment, imbuing it with softly glowing Good resonance, and fires off a shot at the protean beasts.
Yasami strikes the naunet in front twice with her arrows, . The first seems to have significant effect, but the damage from the second seems to be nullified by the strange creature's subtly changing form. Yasami then steps back from the edge.
Oren sends a cone of flame towards the first naunet, which manages to deftly avoid the full force of the blast but still seems affected by the flames ().
Catalina gets off a very effective shot at the naunet, attuning her weapon to exploit their vulnerability to axiomatic energy.
Lisi again channels the primal forces all around to produce a small ball of fire in his palm that he sends towards the closest naunet, which now has a well-scorched head.
He then heeds Yasami's suggestion to step back from the edge.
Caiten steps back from the ledge and out of view of the pillar. He sustains his spells on both Catalina and Yasami for the moment. "We might as well fight just the chaos beasts without interference from the pillar."
ROUND TWO INITIATIVE
group one: the naunets and the pillar
group two: the party and the voidworms
The first naunet, undaunted by the significant injuries the party has inflicted, approaches Oren and stretches out its neck and tries to bite the barbarian, but its teeth just barely fail to penetrate Oren's armor. The creature then lashes out with its strange tentacle, connecting for
The second naunet flies up and reaches out to try to bite Catalina; up close, she can see (as can Oren) that the creature's form is constantly shifting in subtle ways, although the overall form of a monstrous mutated salamander is constant. It sinks in with its sharp teeth for
The pillar fires a violet beam at Oren and strikes him squarely in the chest.
As Oren gasps from the unexpected impact of the beam, he glances towards the pillars and sees the voidworms continue to serenely float around it.
The whole party is up!
Yasami sees the creatures ascending from the pit and lashing at her friends. "Oren! Get away from the edge!" she shouts as the beam barely misses the big man.
With the bow in hand, she tries to gain the attention of one of the flying... whatever that is. She pulls out an arrow, does a quick pirouette, and does a 360-no-scope aiming for the wounded creature. Then fires another arrow immediately afterwards.
Oren grunts at the bite, but he shakes off the naunet's stupefying powers.
And while the beam catches him by surprise, his resolve holds firm and he resists whatever it was going to try and do to him. His enemy now in range, Oren steps up and takes a swing at the Naunet! "My turn."
After giving the Naunet a nasty headache, Oren strides back, hopefully out of the totem's range and closer to his friends.
Catalina yelps at the bite, hissing sharply between her teeth before quickly reloading her pistol and firing off another shot at the naunet closest to her.
Catalina reloads again a bit more carefully this time, then fires off a second shot at the naunet in front of her.
Caiten looks at the positioning of the two flying creatures. "No way to hit both without being back at the ledge again." He hustles over to the mentioned spot, already preparing the incantations and gathering of energy as he moves. When he gets in position, he finishes his casting and carefully aims a beam of dark energy to hit both of the creatures.
Lisi extends an arm.
"Burn. Everything must burn."
He taps Yasami for Guidance.
"We have to destroy that damnable pillar," he says to her.
Yasami executes an impressive shot with her bow that, while it fails to capture the naunet's lingering attention, results in a devastating strike that penetrates the creature's shifting form to cause damage deep within.
Oren's resolve is tested both by the naunet's hard thwack with its tentacle and the violet beam that struck him directly in the chest. The barbarian's single-minded focus serves him well, but the beam attack still leaves him unsteady ().
Oren steps up to the naunet and smashes it in its head with the maul. That naunet is now significantly bloodied by the series of brutal attacks. Oren, however, is too unsteadied to retreat from the edge.
Catalina fires at the naunet in front of her, scoring one solid hit . That was the first damage taken by that naunet, and it roars fiercely, although its roar has an unnatural tone and wavering quality.
Caiten runs to the edge and sends a dark beam of negative energy at both creatures. The first one appears to shake off any effect, but the second shudders as the beam passes through it ().
Lisi sends forth a ball of fire that explodes over the pit, engulfing the naunets. The first naunet succumbs to the fire and falls into the pit with an enormous thud. The second also fails to avoid the full blast, scorching the side of its body on the side of the explosion .
The voidworms continue to float around the pillar.
ROUND THREE INITIATIVE
group one: the naunets and the pillar
group two: the party and the voidworms
The remaining naunet seems to hardly notice the demise of its companion. It lashes out at Catalina with its long tail but barely fails to connect. It tries again and succeeds, slamming Catalina () and then grabbing her with the tail ().
The pillar fires a violet beam at Caiten, but the beam is way off mark, possibly affected by some lingering smoke from the explosion.
The whole party is up!
Oren shakes off the wooziness from the last blast to run up to the second Naunet and strike it full force with Foehammer!
Remembering and interpreting what Catalina announced, Caiten considers his spell selection. "Like the Vrocks, but different. Order to combat Chaos."
He follows up the previous energy beam with another one, then removes himself from the ledge of the mine again.
As the flying thing takes a hold of Catalina, Yasami counters with a swift arrow...
... that flies WAY off target, barely missing the aasimar.
"Never mind." she mutters to herself and runs up to the tentacled threat.
"Hey, you... slimy... thing..." she spins in a circle inviting the creature to a little feet-shuffle.
"Dance-off, pinke!” and in a mesmerising motion of poses and twirls, she retreats back away from the cliff.
Oren charges the remaining naunet and brings his maul down on its head with a mighty blow that splatters the creature's head into the ground. The thing is dead, and Catalina feels the tail around her go slack.
Catalina and Lisi can still post actions.
No naunets remain. The pillar and worms are still below.
Seeing the second Naunet go down to Oren, Caiten casts Stoke the Heart on himself and fires off an arrow at the pillar before retreating from the edge.
Catalina tries to dodge the naunet and fails, yelping as the naunet's tail squeezes around her. In the same instant, Oren's hammer connects with the naunet and sends the being of chaos to its maker. The thaumaturge throws Oren a grateful look before moving to the edge of the pit to try to shoot at the nearest voidworm.
The thaumaturge again takes things a little more carefully with her reload and fires off another shot at the nearest voidworm.
With the floating creature down, Yasami runs to the edge of the pit and fires at the totem. Then retreats back a few feet to not be in the fire zone.
"I know you're not chilren, but... Don't get hit?”
"Can someone conjure a shield? Oren, maybe you can drag a naunet or two. Let me slow the pillar down for a bit."
Lisi casts Solid Fog, trapping the pillar and worms in a thick blanket of cottony mist.
Caiten and Yasami's arrows bounce off the pillar. Yasami felt her aim was true, but it appears the pillar is made of very hard wood.
Catalina's shot causes one voidworm to utterly explode and the second leaves another of the worms in shambles. Apparently, these are much less tough creatures than the naunets.
Lisi then blankets the area in fog, and you can only see the remaining worms and the pillar in outline.
As the combat proceeds, and the heavy fog slows things down, Caiten's calculating mind assesses the situation. He observes that the pillar seems to only stun, and that the voidworms pose only a minimal threat. It occurs to him that, rather than destroying the pillar from afar, this may present a relatively low risk opportunity to examine the pillar while it still functions to determine whether there are other ways to disable or disarm the pillars short of blowing them to pieces.
Caiten moves back to the ledge for another shot and takes a look. "Arrows do not appear to be effective. We will need to go down there. But it also appears that these smaller floating worms are not much of a threat." He looks over to Oren. "What do you think? Can we make it down there with the pillar still shooting at us?"
"We could, yes. The pillar itself only stunned me a little with its beam. Compared to the others we've encountered, this one isn't a threat at all."
"Oren, I can drop the fog if you want, or you can struggle through it and break the pillar--let me know," says Lisi. "I'm glad this one is weaker, for whatever reason."
"Might as well drop the fog. It would make this process go a lot faster."
Lisi nods and drops the fog when Oren is ready. "It has a nice texture, sort of like wool, for future reference," he says, meaning to be helpful.
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"...far better than spiderwebs, I promise."
Feeling some degree of reassurance, the party makes their way down to the bottom of the pit, to engage with the pillar more directly and effectively. It is a long and tedious process, because the slippery path circles the whole pit to reach the bottom. The worms leave the party alone during the descent, but the pillar regularly targets a member of the group, seemingly at random. Lisi and Catalina are struck during the descent, and they reflect that it must be Oren's hardiness that led him to suggest the pillar was relatively harmless -- the violet beams absolutely knock them for a loop, although without causing physical harm. Lisi has to spend almost 15 seconds catching his breath, which would have felt like a long time if the group had been engaged in combat with the naunets or other cultists.
Once at the bottom, the party is able to quickly reach the pillar. Although some are stunned during the ensuing attacks on the pillar, Oren is able to inflict more substantial damage with his maul. The remaining three voidworms bite and tail slash the party, but mostly fail to draw blood and fail to inflict any really significant wounds when they do connect.
The other party members swat away the annoying worms and take the opportunity to try to figure out if there are other ways to disable the pillar. After several heavy blows from Oren's maul, the pillar cracks and ceases to function. But it occurs to the group that it should also be possible to disable these pillars by knocking them over , defacing the magical runes on the pillar , or dispelling the pillar's magic.
The scene quiet once again, the party finds itself in a dismal, soaked, muddy pit with mining implements scattered about, some half buried in the aggressively encroaching mud. You notice that the bodies of the naunets and voidworms have dissolved into slightly shimmering dust. The dust seems to have some lingering chaotic energy but otherwise appears unremarkable. Catalina seems to recall learning that the corpses of proteans cannot survive on the material plane, given how unstable their forms are even with lifeforce holding them together.
Looking into the pool of muddy water, which seems shallow and then gradually deeper, there appear to be some shiny nuggets stuck in the mud and peeking out of the water about 7 feet into the pond.
"Well, someone should go investigate that," says Lisi, clapping Oren on the shoulder. "Someone who's hale, and hearty, a strong swimmer..."
Lisi rubs his chin. "Do you suppose that each pillar is associated with a different plane of existence? Stunning and confusion for the Maelstrom...petrification for the...Plane of Earth?"
"I'll go check things out from above," Sulee says as she launches from the ground and spreads her feathered cloak out into functioning wings. She skims over the surface of the water by about four or five feet, peering into the murky depths as best as she can.
Sulee sees three fairly sizable gold nuggets sticking out of the water. Further out in the pool, she sees a floating dead body. It looks like the savaged corpse of a charau-ka, although it is dressed a bit differently than the other charau-ka you encountered -- in particular it appears to have more primitive jewelry and perhaps fetishes hanging around its neck.
Watching Sulee do her thing, Yasami takes a while to react to Lisi's theory.
"I'm no expert on this, but - the drakes we met a few days ago... Which plane does acid link to?"
Looking at the pool and the metal content, she seems in thought. She starts putting down the top layers of her clothing. She kneels next to her weapons and belongings nearby and looks into the pool again. Then pulls out a length of rope, and ties it around her ribcage. She hands the other end to Oren. "If anything seems fishy, pull me out."
"Steel wins battles, gold wins wars." she mutters to nobody in particular, takes a breath, and slowly lowers herself into the pool, feet first.
When they make it down into the pit, Catalina finds a place to sit just for a moment to catch her breath. The aasimar hadn't been hurt like this in quite some time. Going to have to get used to it, I guess...
She watches Oren take down the pillar with mild interest--pure force certainly had its place over precision strikes and drawn-out planning.
After the pillar is down, Catalina attempts to gather some of the shimmering dust left by the beasts of chaos, hoping to have something resonant for enemies that might be weak to such a thing later.
At Yasami's question about the planes, Catalina takes a moment to try to recall anything she knows about the planes and their elemental denizens.
Yasami, you have no trouble wading out to get the gold nuggets and then swimming out to pull in the corpse, although the water is sludgy and smells bad, as does the corpse, of course. Oren carefully holds the rope but his help is not needed, other than to ease bringing the corpse to land.
Yasami retrieves three gold nuggets, . The dead body appears to be a charau-ka shaman, judging from its fetishes and holy prayer beads that it clutches to its chest -- an item Caiten readily recognizes.
Regarding the musings regarding the pillars and the planes, none of the group thinks there appear to be obvious connections between the other pillars and different planes, and there is nothing obvious about this pillar that connects it to the plane of chaos. For example, although the pillars the group has discovered so far have different magical runes that seem to correspond to different effects, none of the pillars you have encountered had runes that appeared to have planar connotations.
Catalina, in conversation with the others, muses that perhaps for some reason this particular pillar wore thin the boundaries between the Material Plane and the Maelstrom (the chaotic neutral plane). But she suspects it has more to do with random chance or the location of the pillar, rather than a direct product of the runes. Lisi mentions that it is his understanding that particular locations in nature have correspondences to the First World, and perhaps there is some similar phenomena where certain locations have thinner boundaries to particular planes, kind of like planar ley lines. But that is all speculation.
Sulee flies back and watches with mostly disinterest as the gold and the corpse is fetched from the pond.
When Caiten picks up the prayer beads to inspect them, she comments primly, "Caiten, put those down. That's cheating. It's bad enough that you use Divine Lance and Spiritual Weapon. If you want to use those beads too, you might as well just become a Cleric."
Yasami dives into the pool and reemerges several times, producing a nugget of gold after every attempt, and then pulls out the corpse.
She finally gets out, and tries to dry her face with her clothes on instinct. With the clothes that are also soaked.
"Oh, Lady, that is just rancid..." she heaves a little. "I'm gonna need a waterfall or a -HEAVY- rain to wash this off. Ugh..."
"I can help with the clothing a bit tomorrow morning," Caiten mentions to Yasami. "For today, if there is nothing more to do here, we should gather the elephants and wargs and begin the journey to the elephant keeper village. We have an appointment with Renali to keep."
Yasami nods towards, Caiten, then raises a finger. "What of Belmazog? We will let her find this place and prepare for a potential follow up attack? And what about her prisoners?"
She looks around for Hezle. "Are we on a timetable with this fortress attack?"
"I don't think there is a particular timetable to attack the fortress. As I mentioned, Belmazog and/or her reinforcements might come to investigate the situation at the mine as soon as today, but it could be longer. I think she will be furious to see what happened here, but I don't think she has the resources or talent to get the mine operating again." With the reference to talent, Hezle gestures at herself.
"Belmazog will probably dig in at the fortress, but I'm not sure how much she can do to add to her defenses, or repair the pillars, if you don't wait too long to attack. I don't know what her ultimate plan is, but I don't think it will be a problem if you wait a week or two. Of course, you need time to destroy the remaining pillars first. She might try to increase the defenses at some of the pillars -- especially those near here and the fortress -- but I don't have the impression there is very much she can do without a lot more time to get more help."
"And, of course, Belmazog does not know what your plans are or how much you know. She probably thinks I would run off rather than betray her, but she doesn't realize that I actually care about getting my kin out of these Ekujae lands alive."
"Let's track down the other pillars after we return to Renali. Belmazog will grow complacent or anxious, or hungry, holed up, and we don't need to worry about her."
"Yasami...I'm sure I can find you a clean source of water around here--without any arsenic. That's in standing water of a certain depth. Running water should be fine."
He looks back at the mine. "Were that it within my power to cover this entire scar on the earth. Golarion would be better for it."
Lisitsei frowns at Hezle's last words.
"Kin, if they have not betrayed you, are of the utmost importance. Perhaps Belmazog has removed herself so far from kinship that she doesn't think of anyone in that way. That's unnerving, but good to know. She may sacrifice others to protect herself."