That would be most efficient. Thank you for the offer.
Samen can't quite believe his life's biggest regret was just so easily rectified. There would be more, of course. There was always more. But now the weight of the past was lifted.
A sudden horrid thought occurs to him. One of Abnaki's last sane suggestions was to kill these two. If his narrative powers were at play here, then this outcome doesn't come without a cost.
He looks at Aisling with concern.
A wink that is most certainly not a trick of the light twinkles in Aisling's eye for a moment.
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Assuming the rest of the group has the rest of the situation in hand, Gabe ignores the rest of the scene. Instead he forces himself to stare at the spot so as to not lose sight of... whatever it is he's looking at. Still utilizing his invisibility, he approaches closer to the entity. A voice from nowhere, Gabe engages with seemingly nothing, "Who are you supposed to be then?"
Everyone can hear the reply - even trapped in extradimensional space, this voice has power. Gabriel Freemind re-appears as his fragile Vanish spell is casually shaken apart.
The patchwork walls shudder at the power of these words. There is a dangerous pressure mounting in the room, like an approaching thunderstorm.
Benedetto lowers his blade... but doesn't sheathe it. He looks around for the source of the voice. "Birdsong..." He hesitates a brief moment, then decides it's best to ask. "Is there something we can do to assist you?"
Another tremor rocks the room, and small cracks appear in the walls.
Grrrr! Bad dicebot! Bad!
Aisling, the presence of a new aspect of your god leaves you breathless and distracted. You are brought to your knees by dozens of sublime chords running through your mind - the music of the heavens.
As this chorus fades, your memory of it fades as well. You feel the gaping absence of birdsong in your heart, like a missing teeth after a wasting sickness.
Benedetto is quite willing to believe that this is exactly what it appears to be... but he wants to be certain. He focuses on his sense of what is wrong, both to check and make sure this voice isn't trying to deceive the group and to see if he can identify where to strike to break this prison if that is the correct course of action.
"Just how much has been lost...?" Benedetto muses, then sees Aisling falling to his knees.
He quickly moves to the sylph's side. "What happened?"
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Gabe shields himself from the cacophony he's unwittingly unleashed. Realizing it's actually song and words, he pays attention to what they say. Looking first to Aisling who's area of expertise is supposed to be all this...stuff. Seeing he's in distress, Gabe turns instead to Samen who can usually deduce what going on in these situations. "Is she the corruption or is her being captured the corruption?"
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Thoughts for another time. Samen compartmentalizes and focuses on the problem at hand.
"I am as unfamiliar with this creature as you are Gabriel, but this circumstance is astonishingly similar to when we freed the Sunlord, is it not? Given the hooligans that were hanging about were not friendly toward her, I expect freeing her to be a net positive."
Samen considers what is now visible, trying to determine the nature of her bonds and a method of loosening them.
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Aisling gets up from his knees
"I'm fine!" You can see tears streaming from his eyes. "I'm fine." he wipes them off "So much lost. We've lost so much and we don't even know it. There are those so lost they don't even think it possible to not be lost."
He shakes his head sadly. "I feel like a feather tossed into a hurricane. Stretched, pulled, thrown this way and that without control. But after everything that happens to me, I am still a feather, thing of air, Physical yet ephemeral, seemingly delicate, but even when ruffled, wetted, and twisted, I am surpringly hard to actually break or destroy."
He takes a deep breath.
"Let's see this to the end. I just need a potion to take the edge off. It was beautiful. You cannot imagine...but we lost it for so long.
He digs out the wand of healing and offers it to Benedetto.
"Would you mind? I think two charges would suffice."
OOC: How long did we travel? Fight didn't take long, but getting here...
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Seeing Aisling isn't as incapacitated as first thought, Gabe turns his attention back to the prison. Nodding his understanding of Samen's explanation, he examines the head splitting dimensional cage once again. Wincing again, he forces his mind to ignore the incongruity and work properly . Reaching out to touch the seams where the mismatched pieces of wood and stone wall are fused together, he feels for weak spots. Retrieving some tools through which to focus his will he attempts to split these pieces apart.
Aisling joins Gabriel in tinkering, his own expertise helping with the weird cage.
[dice=Perception]1d20+5
"Just how much has been lost...?" Benedetto muses, then sees Aisling falling to his knees.
OOC: How long did we travel? Fight didn't take long, but getting here...
Seeing Aisling isn't as incapacitated as first thought, Gabe turns his attention back to the prison. Nodding his understanding of Samen's explanation, he examines the head splitting dimensional cage once again. Wincing again, he forces his mind to ignore the incongruity and work properly . Reaching out to touch the seams where the mismatched pieces of wood and stone wall are fused together, he feels for weak spots. Retrieving some tools through which to focus his will he attempts to split these pieces apart.
Gabriel, detaching your conscious mind from the task is exactly what was needed. In this liminal space between real and metaphor, waking and dream, your tools simply work as you expect them to - you peel away the dimensional incongruities as if you are easing apart pressure plates and high-tension triggers.
Whenever your hand wavers, Aisling guides you with a priest's intuition, giving subtle advice on which layer of the spatial prison to dislodge next. The surreal task of ripping apart the warped seams of reality becomes, for a few minutes, a drudgery like pulling off unwanted wall paper.
With a final ripping sound loud enough to send your ears to ringing, the cursed space around the Rook Princess is dispelled. She falls to the floor, a pale figure in a white dress, but with nary a cry the Princess turns into a tiny mote of light that lands in Aisling's hair.
Aisling, you feel a friendly (yet imperial) message to exit this room, and take the Tallmind's suggestion to teleport away.
Outside, you feel the storm begin to diminish. Is the rage of Sky's Tears finally spent and gone?
Qizz (sees) Kallik is unhappy, and (helps) Kallik to (stay) with the rest of the group.
Benedetto watches this all warily. "So maybe we should expect something like this on the other side?" he muses aloud.
After a moment he shrugs slightly. "One way or another, we'll be finding out shortly."
He is, you might note, still holding his sword. Just in case.
"She is grateful and suggests we are done here. We should teleport away." Aisling translates the message feeling both uncomfortable at the closeness and diminished apparent power, and honoured by the attention of the demi-goddess.
He hopes this is just a temporary arrangement until she can regain her strength. His dishelved hair will make a good nest.
Hearing Aisling's suggestion, Tallmind Theta interprets it as a call to action. After all, they are used to a society where, by definition, the assent of one is the assent of many.
The will of a Tallmind, once turned toward a task, is absolute. Tallmind Theta wills it to be so.
-there is zero transition time and now
-you are in a large wooden chamber, roots dangling from the ceiling. Upon a large staircase that dominates the far part of the room, you see oread warriors, fighting...bones. Oread bones, animated by some fell magic.
The warriors seem disgusted and angry at their task, and many seem to hold their punches, as if reluctant to destroy these unliving puppets.
<+4 to find traps><+3 to avoid surprise>
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As Gabriel's essence is pulled from one location to another, his insides decide they want to be his outsides. "VOLCING SUN PEOPLE!!" *hurk* "At least this one doesn't burn..."
Looking between the moving bones and the phantom next to them and seeing enough similarities so feel sad.
Most of the crew is too nauseated to take much stick of your surroundings, but Qizzlvutz is utterly unfazed, and takes a sharp look around.
From Oread mythology, these are Oathless -- oreads that volunteered to become eternal Greywoods that protected the living from Dark, but these weaklings broke their vows and quit their vigil.
Now, they steal strength and vitality from the living, to go back to the material plane.
[ooc]takes 50% from any attack and any magic that is not "ghost touch"
strong regeneration, only negated by divine + fire (both at once)
gains speed as they feed, but relatively weak HP wise
Samen does his best to shake off the summoning sickness and assess the situation.
"These are Oread boogeymen. We need ghost touch magic to hurt them and divine fire to keep them down."
Benedetto's rapier bursts into flame. "Divine fire I can do," he states.
He races into the melee, aiming to stop one of the creatures trying to attack one of the staggering oreads.
[dice=init]1d20+1
[dice=Fort]1d2+8+4
[dice=Perception]1d20+12
[dice=Know religion]1d20+24
"Hehe, boogie.." giggling and spouting little balls of brown gas then reaching back to touch Kallik who grows in size
Benedetto's fiery sword cleaves the wooden skeleton in two, and it falls to the ground. The remains turns to ashes. (removed)
(map is also at the TOP in the campaign description)
The carven faces of the oathbreakers are primitive things, with slashes for mouths and crosses for eyes. They come at you with unnerving quickness, wooden bones clacking against each other as they spread out.
The first group, eager and fast, goes after Qizzlvutz. You hear strained breathing sounds from behind the carved masks, a wet sniffing sound.
One of the oathbreakers grabs Qizz, gnarled bark bruising his fungal flesh with the strength of its grip. Worse still, its claws dig into your arms; you can feel tiny thorny roots worming their way under your skin. You feel a sudden way of dizziness as your very strength is stolen from you.
Benedetto is attacked for the threat he represents - though the others attacked Qizzlvutz out of some kind of hunger, they also seem to have a vague cunning to their actions as well.
You are able to find off two of the attackers with your sword, but the third gets past your guard, and its claws get past your armor. You feel stinging thorns growing into your skin, and an awful lethargy washes over you.
Samen calls out to the more distant monks in Oread. "Courage, brothers! Divine aid from mortal hands is here to put these faithless wretches to rest. Form up on the one with the sword, his weapons are effective!"
Meanwhile, Samen will move slightly closer and blast the three that attacked Qizz with a sunbeam.
Benedetto grits his teeth against the sensation of lethargy and pain as he tries to stab the one that's grabbed him.
"If you're too weak from their attacks, fall back! The rest of you, if you can interrupt their attacks, we can supply the flames!" he calls out to the oreads.
An angry, hollow-cheeked Kallik appears near Qizz, now magnified to twice her regular height, gory details and bleeding eyes all too visible now.
She swings her axe and easily knocks one of the creatures to pieces. The sundered pieces, however, still retain an unholy vitality (was not slain by holy/fire, so will regenerate next round. Marked as BLACK triangle)
Samen's sunbeam is effective, burning away their wooden shells and revealing the hollowness beneath.
The larger oathbreaker, having recently fed, survives the attack, though its carapace is smoking from the heat of Samen's magic.
Bright blue bubbles stream from their mouth and they grab their arm. Looking around panicked. "No fire."
Reaching into their bag and pulling out at little bronze figurine that swells into griffon under Qizz. Clinging to the strange creature that takes flight.
[ooc]I think that is my action to activate the figurine. But Qizz is upwards for the moment.[/ooc
Aisling looks between casters and the undead surrounding the paladin and defending the soldiers there. While he may not have spells as such, he can do something no one else can. If he can pull it off.
Taking out holy water and one of the alchemist flasks, he judges the distance and timing very carefully. He would prefer hitting beyond Benedetto where there are two monsters, but there are monks to consider, thus he targets the one between him and Benedetto trusting that Kallik can take care of the one closest to them.
Both flasks arc over the distance and
- touch attack, hopefully hits even with range penalty :), but splash means at least some damage will be fire
- touch attack, hopefully hits even with range penalty :)