Starday, Arodus 2

My last entry stated that today would be a multiple fireball day.

Definitely.

The room full of sin-spawn would have fallen nicely with fireballs and swords, but then a bunch of human fighters arrived. And they too, knew the fireball spell. This caused me less distress than my companions, and the fireballs weren’t as powerful as mine. Sabin did the dimension door thing to take out one of the spell casters, only to learn there were more humans supporting that one. While he, Avia, and Takkad were not in danger of dying, the battle was decidedly more complicated than we’d thought.

I continued fireballing the sin-spawn; the humans continued to fireball and force-missile us. Finally, between the fireballs and the fighters the last of the sin-spawn expired, but apparently many of the humans were spellcasters and not only did we continue to get fireballed, but some of them were using blur or displace or mirror image to make themselves harder to hit.

Takkad put up a blade barrier to cut off half the humans from the others. One tried to launch a fireball through it – hah, fat chance. It blew up in his and his friends’ faces.

I switched to magic missiles, as the fireballs would have harmed my companions. Takkad dropped a flamestrike, and with that, we finished off the last two.

We discovered that those behind the barrier had run to the teleport circles and left. Sedgwick had apparently created a troll, or an illusion of one, and Nolin was a bit put out that he’d rushed over to kill it when in fact, it was not a danger to us. We need a system for coummunicating our illusions to each other.

Inspecting the rooms nearby we found, basically, quarters. Each human room had a pair of bunks and a chest. Each sin-spawn room was more like a cage.

Checking over the bodies, we found, on the six humans:

[1206] 6 +1 great swords
[1207] 6 +2 mithril chain shirts

On the sin-spawn, we found

[1208] 10 +1 great axe
[1209] 10 +2 red breastplates

We were also able to locate spellbooks (for the fighter-mages, I presume): [1210] 12 spellbooks.

We decided not to let the humans get too far away, so after a quick inspection to note what rooms were around us, we went to the teleportation circles. The first group of 4 (since only 4 can fit into the circle at a time) was Takkad, Avia, Nolin, and myself, and the second was Sedgewick, Kane, Sabin, and Rigel. We prepared ourselves (mirror image, mage armor, etc) and teleported.

My first impression of the room was large, with stone walls. The room was lit, but one end of the hallway held a curtain of billowing black smoke. And in the four corners of the diamond-shaped room were the four fighters who had escaped, and all four hit us with a fireball. Even though their fireballs were not as powerful as mine, Nolin missed a jump and ended up taking a lot of damage. I was a little scorched but plenty mad, and although I was tempted to show these guys a real fireball, we needed to minimize damage to ourselves first. I quickly threw up a wall of force to isolate two of the fighters from us.

Avia was able to healed everyone a fair amount (sweet!) Following my lead, Takkad entombed another in a wall of stone – one of the hazards of standing in the corner of a stone room. And about this time, wave two of our group appeared in the teleport area.

The one remaining fighter remained defiant and claimed we weren’t ready to meet Athraxis, but Nolin, feeling less like debating and more like disemboweling, accessorized him with his sword by giving him a very large piercing. I lit a fire under him, and when he still refused to die, Nolin took off his head.

Meanwhile the two behind the wall of force were using fireballs and energy bolts to judge the shape and height of the wall.

For some reason, Kane walked over to the wall of force, stared through it, and made one of the fighters cower. I HAVE to believe there was some magic involved here. The other one managed to figure an angle over the 10 foot high wall and explode a fireball over us, singing several of us again.

That was a bad idea.

I dropped the wall of force and our fighters rushed forward, much to the surprise of the enemy. They had mirror images but Sabin, Avia, Nolin, and Sedgwick of all people, kept plucking off images. In short order, their attacks began to hit true and that was the end of those fighters.

We added three more chain shirts and great swords to our collection. Takkad released the one who had been entombed, and apparently he had needed more air. Oh well, who knew? One more chain shirt and one more great sword.

We decided to try to the other teleport circles first. We appeared in the middle of a discussion, it seems. There were some large tables some distance from us, around which were sitting some humans. I heard, “but how do we get the sin-spawn back to human?”

This looked like a perfect opportunity to use my new spell. Fire is great, but there looked to be combustible books and scrolls strewn around that we might find useful. So, chain lightning it was!

I think I stunned a few of my friends. They didn’t really know I’d been studying lightning. The lightning took out three of them before they even knew we were there. Two others were now QUITE aware we were there, and five others were hastily taking up arms.

Takkad and Nolin each took out another before they could effectively mobilize.

With my friends rushing in, however, fireball was out of the question. A flaming sphere did seem to be in order however, as the fighters closed. Another round or two and the rest of the humans were dead. in the end, we found ourselves with a total of 20 great swords and 20 mithril shirts.

It was pointed out that these humans might have had useful information, and I don’t disagree, but the hard part, as always, would be getting that information from them while they tried to kill us. And I’m pretty sure they would not have welcomed us as colleagues. So in the end, I’m positive I introduced myself properly.

There were a lot of documents and books littering the area. The three alcoves at the end of the room were full of alchemical equipment, and the middle one seemed to have a cauldron of, well, liquified flesh.

On the table we found notes outlining how to forge magical weapons. There was also notes describing what may have been the point of discussion as we entered: generations of warriors were suffering from inbreeding and one consequence of that was that they more frequently and more quickly degraded into sin-spawn, and unless they could find a way to either stop this process or find a way to take the sin-spawn back to human form, their population was doomed.

We felt our magic had been too drained to take on whatever was behind the smoke, so we agreed to go back and rest. As we left, however, there as a loud thunderclap and a wisp of smoke in the middle of the large room. A figure seemed to turn about and vanish.

On the way back, I thought about the chain lightning. Since the individual bolts can be directed much better than a fireball, it might not only be more damaging but useful in a greater number of situations. I do still have to worry about line-of-sight (lightning isn’t good at arcing around obstacles or friends) but this could be pretty cool.