"Kämpfen und ficken!" Dal exclaims as she steps on the gremlin's head to help her dislodge her axe from its skull, producing a somewhat disturbing sucking sound. She then flicks the axe, sending some blood flying on the ground. "I f#*#in' needed..." She starts, but then stops mid-sentence as she moves around the place to pick up the peridot bead and putting it in her pouch. "Hum, this might be worth something."
With either the drawbridge or the suspended planks, Daleranna figured there would be greater chances of finding what was wrong with the place further ahead instead of above. Pointing to the poor state of the bridge, she adds. "Can you see that? Someone or something has undercut the supports, so let's not put too much weight on it... one at a time and I'll be the first to cross." She does just that, after sheathing her axe, walking slowly and paying attention to the sounds of the planks.
Following Daleranna's plan, the group moves across the bridge one at a time without any difficulties. Opening up the doors to the next room reveal piles of rotting timbers and loose stones that lie in heaps throughout this large, L-shaped hall. Clumps of moss and tangled vines spill down from gaps in the wooden ceiling above each pile of rubble. Several doors lead out to all sides, most barely clinging to their hinges and frames. Debris completely blocks a wooden stairwell that leads up to a large hole in the ceiling. Here and there, the stone walls bear the scars of fire or damage from an ancient battle.
About forty feet into the room there are three more mitflits which are gathered around a giant maggot, attempting to instruct it. When they see you approach, they turn and point to Dal as they instruct the maggot in undercommon to "Use training and attack the intruders!!! Defend Mudlickers!!!"
Lennor fixates on the closest of the mitflits as she tries to batter through its mental defenses.
Archa also casts daze on the same gremlin, then raises her shield!
Both Archa and Lennor land their spell and the mitflit is unable to comprehend their strong magic, standing stunned and near death.
The maggot "rushes" ahead slowly, moving only thirty feet in all and still leaving ground between Daleranna and itself. The three mitflits hurry behind it, ushering it forward shouting "FOR THE MUDLICKERS!"
The trek across the bridge was a harrowing experience. The sheer amount of screaming groans from the old wood made her feel worse and worse with every heavy step.
Gretta sighed with relief when she was across, only to be confronted by maggots and mudlickers "They. Call. Themselves. MUDLICKERS." she huffed out a translation as she ran toward the maggot. Her hammer ignited on mudlickers, her mighty swing raining down on the maggot's head like a comet from the night sky.
Seeing that the spell is quite effective, Archa casts daze on the closest gremlin again!
The giant maggot, Mudlicker champion-to-be, never even gets a single attack off before Gretta cuts it down.
A second mitflit is completely able to comprehend the spell cast on him, standing stunned once again.
Nelus sights in on the uninjured Gremlin, but loses his nerve again, and takes a far easier shot at the stunned one, and does a bit of folk magic to shield himself in force.
Dal's eyes roll up as she charges blindless ahead, swinging wildly.
Much like the last room, the mitflits here pose no problems for your party. Nelus drops the injured creature that Archa stunned and Daleranna charges down the last remaining creature.
With the room now clear of threats, you are able to properly look around and discover this large room has numerous exits. Two west, three north, one east and one southeast.
Of these doors, the door to the north on the far western side (straight ahead of you) is stuck and doesn't open and the door to the north on the far east (double doors) is partially blocked by rubble and timber
Dal moves around the place room, her shield high and expecting more gremlins at any moment. As she returns to the others, she points to the door to the east. "I'd rather not move too much ahead to the north and leave so many doors behind us. Since this room is L shaped, there is a good chance this door doesn't go too deep."
Daleranna goes to open the door, but Archa puts a hand on her shoulder to stop him just before he does. Inside, she catches sounds and tells her to wait. Putting their ears close to the door they can hear high-pitches squeals and shrieks of laughter within that sound remarkably like more mitflits.
"More mitflits," Archa says. "They have not proven too difficult to defeat thus far. Shall we proceed, or find another route?"
"Oh! Umm, sorry, but if you don't mind, I do think there's something else we should examine? Do you see over there in the corner where the stone doesn't align properly? That could mean something like structural stability, or it could be concealing something. Do you think we should look? If you think that's a good idea?"
Gretta looks at the mangled corpses of yet more intelligent... semi-intelligent creatures they just slaughtered. Her round face set in a sad but determined grimace.
As Nelus speaks she turns and looks at him "Um, okay. Which one?" the woman moves over to him to look where he is pointing and reaches out poke and prod the rock in question.
Nelus leads the way and points out the area that looks odd. After a moment of searching he discovers what is happening. A loose stone slides aside and causes a false door to reveal an alcove behind the wall.
The small 5'x5' alcove beyond the door has several grooves in the stone, caused by what looks like determined scraping.
"Brilliant!!" Gretta exclaims, clearly impressed. She even claps Nelus on the back, which unfortunately is like a bear hitting, well, anything. "What do you make of it?" she asks since she has no idea.
"I say it would be better if we deal with the gremlins now." Dal answers Archa as she looks Gretta and Nelus inspecting the wall. "While weak and apparently not really smart, they can still cause us trouble, like warning something worse about our presence."
---
Once everyone is ready, Dal opens the door and finds the four mitflits fooling around at the bottom of a pit in the next room.
Almost the entire ceiling of this room has collapsed ,while below, the floor has crumbled into a ten-foot-deep sinkhole filled with rubble, mud, and glistening patches of fungus. Evidence of ancient damage—burn scars and acid scorch marks—decorate the walls and much of the rubble.
Archa sticks to what has been working so far, casting daze on the nearest mitflit she can see! She then raises her shield.
As seen previously, the powerful daze spell is too much for the feeble minds of the mitfit. Stunned, it stares at the ground until it's brain stops hurting.
The other three mitflits try to climb out of the pit, but only ONE of the of them manages to climb up successfully! It moves to Daleranna and strikes her with it's sword.
The other two mitflits in the pit fumble about and unable to get handholds to climb out, so they join the stunned one in shooting darts at Daleranna. Only one dart of the three lands.
"Argh, ass..." She exclaims as she is hit twice, blood flowing from her tight and shoulder. "You'll f&%#ing pay forr that!" She yells, striking at the closest pest and then raising her shield
"Oh! Well, I'm only a dabbler, so I'm probably wrong, but I believe that the shape of these carvings strongly suggests that it was the anchor for a teleportation circle. Non functional though!" He interjects, thoughts of endless hordes suddenly streaming through it making his face pale. "The silver lining's been chiseled away. That would take lots of time, and is worth a lot less than a functional circle to anyone who can use it, so probably whoever made it hasn't been here for a while."
***
"Oh!"
Nelus snatches an arrow from his quiver and sights in carefully on Daleranna's foe.
"Careful careful careful. Can't hit her, breathe, breathe, loose!"
Gretta helps crush the gremlin next Dal.
Or at least tries. Swinging a hammer into a melee behind another person is not her wisest idea. "Sorry Daleranna" she apologizes, then moves out to her side.
Archa casts daze on the nearest mitflit again!
Daleranna takes out the mitflit adjacent to her with one strike, sending it to the ground for good. Nelus's arrow sails past his melee companions and finishes off the already injured creature in the pit below. Archa's daze finally finds resistance in the creature she targets, which seems completely resistant to her mental attack! Lennor also uses daze, but targets the other mitflit with her spell. Just like the previous attempts, it is left stunned from the attack.
The injured and stunned mitflit launches another dart at Daleranna, hitting her in the chest. .
The remaining mitflit scampers up out of the pit and flees, throwing open doors as it does so, screaming in undercommon.
Dal raises her shield at the right moment, blocking the dart. She then leaps inside the sinkhole and finishes the remaining gremlin.
Archa tries to daze the fleeing gremlin.
"He's calling for help!" Gretta yells as she rushes after the one running away. She slides down the sinkhole like an avalance, then rushes up the other side.
Reacting quickly, Daleranna leaps into the pit and finishes off the mitflit before her. Meanwhile, Archa stuns the fleeing mitflit and causes it to slow just enough that Gretta catches up with it in the next room. As she pursues, she takes note that there is a seven-foot-tall skeleton dressed in armor made of gnarled roots, bones and rusted metal guarding the door to the next room.
Ignoring the skeleton, she cuts down the fleeing mitflit before it can open the door. She readies herself against an attack from the skeleton, but one never comes.
Looking around, she notices she is on a fifteen-foot stone walkway that spans a narrow stretch of swamp water, connecting the ruined keep to a large stone outbuilding. Double doors block each end of the walkway. The skeleton clenches a morningstar in one weathered hand with the weapon’s heavy, spiked tip resting on the walkway at the skeleton’s feet.
The group hurriedly climbs through the pit to catch up with Gretta, joining her in the walkway.
Dal raises her shield, catching her breath as she looks at the skeleton champion in front of them. "Is this thing an undead or just a regular skeleton?"
"It appears to be lashed together with thin strips of leather, rather than necromantic energies. If it's undead it's a very unnecessarily convincing fake. The weapon is enchanted though, so you should probably disarm it anyways, if you want."
"Can do" Gretta says, reaching out and pulling the morning star out of the skeletons grasp.
Slowly her big hand reaches out, fingers opening to grasp, eyes on the skeleton, wondering if it is going to bash her brains in.
Dal watches at the skeleton as well, until it seems it is indeed not animated at all. "Hu!? Wasn't expecting that."
"So, the gremlin was fleeing here and calling for help, right? So if this skeleton is not the help, then it probably is behind this door."
The skeleton collapses as Gretta retrieves the weapon, proving that it was nothing more than a poor attempt at a deterrent.
Daleranna and Gretta simultaneously open their doors, looking for whatever help the mitflit was intending to find.
Splintered framing in the ceiling and floor hint that thin wooden walls once divided this stone building’s interior. With those walls demolished, only a single, large chamber remains. Rubble, swamp vegetation, and mud pile in heaps like foul nests, while a larger stack of rubble, sticks, and bones looks almost, but not quite, like a throne. A flattened mound of sand with a few dozen bits of wood and stone stuck into it covers the floor before the throne.
In the room two mitflits are off to one side, seemingly being berated by a third mitflit who sits upon the throne with a crown on his head. On the other side of the room a giant solifugids stands nearby.
When the doors open, the mitflit on the throne speaks out in the common tongue. "What is this?! Heroes?!" Standing, he imperiously demands "Why have heroes come to bother me before I have attacked Otari?!"
"Is that what you were planning?" Lennor asks, bemused. "As it happens, we did not know you were here at all. Bad luck for you."
”But there is no need for things to devolve further,” Archa says soothingly. ”We are all friends here, aren’t we?”
Her tail undulates in a hypnotic pattern and her words drip with honey.
The notion these things would attack the city makes her want to both laugh at the utter ridiculousness of the plan and growl at them endangering where she has decided to live.
Archa saves her deciding on which reaction to pick with her weaving tail, and enough signs of magic that the martial wizardess knows something is up.
Instead she makes sure she is close enough to the cleric to crush anyone if it goes wrong.
"They were going to attack? Was Wrin right about all this then?!"
Probably there was no connection to the mage who had once claimed this tower, but Nelus still found himself fixated on the crowned miflit, looking for any possible connection to the greater threat the defunct portal implied.
"Oh! Oh that looks nasty Daleranna. Give me just one moment." Nelus quickly mixes and shakes something up before passing it over to her to drink down. "This might sting a little, but I think the taste should be better now."
His Royal Highness sways back and forth as he stares at Archa's tail, lured by the hypnotic pattern. "Yes. We are friends here. You are friends to Boss Skrawng and his Mudlickers."
Boss Skrawng looks at his "army" and tells them to stand down and that you are trusted friends. The two mitflits give their king a strange look, but listen to him and lower their weapons.
Boss Skrawng explains that he and the Mudlickers used to live in a dungeon level beneath Gauntlight Keep, but that a bunch of “mushroom-eyed people” chased them up here many nights ago. He promises you a big pile of shiny gems if they go downstairs, kill them all, and defeat their king. He describes the king as a "Magic priest mushroom-eyed guy who can hurt your brain just by looking at you."
"Now we Mudlickers live here. Plotting demise of Otari. Staying away from haunted rooms. Glowing ghosts. Avoiding bogeys. Oh. And avoid swamp dragon that lives under boat house."
"Umm," Nelus raises his hand to be called on, "What would it take for you not to plot the demise of Otari?"
Dal coughs after drinking the elixir. "Gods, I wonder what does it taste without shaking..." She says, as she inspects her superficial wounds slowly closing. "Thanks, anyway Nelus."
"We could certainly take down this magic priest. To make things easier, how about you help us draw a map about this dungeon you once lived, as well as all the haunted rooms, and so on?" Dal asks, smilling.
Boss Skrawng ponders Nelus's question before shrugging his shoulders, "I know it's only a matter of time before Otari challenges my rule in this domain. Perhaps if you could convince them that I am the rightful ruler of Mudlicker Keep, I would not be forced destroy their town with my massive army, crushing them to many small pieces with lots of pain, showing them our true might."
To Daleranna, the Mudlicker king nods. "Of course. Is reasonable."
He moves to the sandpit before the throne and uses his trident to erase what clearly looks like a mockup of Otari and begins to formulate crude drawings of the keep. He makes two maps for you, the first is the current floor as he knows it and the second is the floor below he used to reside on.
Gretta leans over the king, pointing out parts from the front room that he got wrong. "It's more like the size of my hand, like this." she laid it down to show.
Dalleranna looks at the drawn map. "Hum... and where are the stairs leading down? Or passage, or whatever?" She asks the boss. "Do any of you have something to draw the map?" She turns to the others.
"Suuur-No" Gretta starts to agree but after padding herself and shuffling in pockets she has to admit she forgot writing implements.
The mitflit looks at Gretta's corrections and considers her suggestion. "If you say so. We can go ask the Mudlicker guards out there. Did you see them?" he inquires about the mitflit "army" you slaughtered on your way here.
"Stairs down. Two ways. One in Swamp Dragon lair. Under boathouse. Other here." He uses his trident to point to an area between "STAY OUT" and "Skorpion". "Stairs down to mushroom people here."
Boss Skrawng looks confused "What? I just draw map here in sand? Why do you want me to draw it again?"