Session 23 - First he was afraid, he was petrified...

Yannick the Ox

When asked for final words... I would not have chosen "Oh look, a pair of glasses" to be among them.

Bomani is gone.  Only a statue in his likeness remains, cast low by a vile curse upon these "glasses", seeing lenses, that we found.  Or else there is power to them that he could not control... yet I feel no need to try myself against it.

We set forth to search those parts of this level of the dungeon that we felt held secrets from us.  Where Halessa had felt the wall move we put our shoulders to brutal use... straining against the force of the door-that-was.  Yet to no avail, for it resisted us.

Distracted by the statues, Paige reminds us that we haven't robbed the "wooden fighter" we met earlier.  For reasons I can't quite recall (I don't remember being Beered up at the time) we decided to place the thing in the "danger room" and activate it.  It seemed adept at evading the spikes and charged at us.

I intercepted it and held it off while Paige deactivated it again, somewhat chagrin.

Rather than risk further foolishness I smashed it's head in with an axe and we retrieved the Gem from it.

Reivigorated... I swear we didn't drink more between the two attempts... we put our shoulders to the door again and this time Bomani buys us time to recover between heaves using his crowbar.  We force the door back and back until it slams against its limits and shifts to the side... allowing us to access the chamber within.

This showed us a room with a statue, who held its fingers up to its eyes.  Sober as we are now, this could be considered a hint: the statue was unfeasibly realistic and seemed a strange thing to put up next to the table.  But we were distracted by the vague things, including the pickled cat.  I wanted the pickled cat for the mantlepiece of our hold in the village, but we fell to arguing about whether or not we had a mantlepiece at all.

I'm not making a good case for our sobriety right now, am I?

There was another room with a few bits of furnature, including a chest and a locked set of shelves.  The chest had a few bits and pieces, as well as an Amazing Ring of Power... which we discovered bestowed upon me the power to open secret doors!  Well, secret door to this pair of rooms: I hadn't managed to make it work on the other doors yet, but I'm sure it will.

Distracted again, we relied on Paige to force the lock on the cabinet and lucky for us that we did, for it revealed a dozen or so large jars with mysterious liquids in them.  I think at least some of them would have been broken had I been called upon to force the door, and that would greatly decrease the chance that I could convince the band to keep the pickled cat for our mantlepiece (when we got one).

Feeling without direction, we explored the magically-sealed doors of the kitchen!  Which proved to be a room-that-is-always-cold, leading to a room-that-is-always-very-cold.  There was some cheese there, that Bomani swears was still fresh, but I did not wish to try... we may never know if it will repeat on him.

Investigating again, we set eyes to find the door to the proposed room by the portcullis... the door was simply concealed and when found, pushing brought us out into a storeroom: some building materials, old stone and mortar, barrels and boxes and an amphora: left alone in the middle of of the room.

Bomani looked to the Amphora while we searched and he found a single gold coin... and the lenses that were his doom.

Demoralized, we selected a few of the jars and decided that we needed to speak with the wizard again.  Perhaps he would know how to restore Bomani, perhaps he would by our magic jars.  Either way, we're off to see that wizard...

Paige 11

Paige 11:
Y'see?  THIS - exactly THIS - is why I should be an all-powerful wizard(ess) with my own underground lair.  This is exactly why that should be happening and why I shouldn't be saddled with an utter lack of magical brilliance.  Because -I- figured out that the dark corridors which magically extinguished all torches and lanterns (and glowbug parts) as soon as they entered it, were all to keep the room with the stargazing ossuary nice and dark so that the planets and stars and everything else shone like bloody diamonds.  I figured that out myself.  Did the magical overlord Zod figure out that this was a great idea which would make his ossuary (still not sure if that's the right word, but Yannick insists it is) all the more impressive?  Well, did he?

No he damn well didn't.  

HIS idea for the best use of magically dark tunnels wasn't anything like as brilliant as mine.  HIS idea was to get people to wander through his little maze and find the occasional statue and fancy chair - and then to emerge into a room filled with murderous fungus.  Even if it wasn't filed with murderous fungus at the time, and even if the people back then weren't scared stiff of paralysing witch-hags clawing their way out of the darkness as they had done a week or two ago when we last stood outside the entrance to the tunnel, his idea is still nowhere near as good as mine.  If the friendly Gods and Saints want magic to be used in brilliant new interesting worthwhile ways, well, here I am.  Bestow away.
For what it's worth, I'm glad the tunnels were dark, since my hands were shaking so bad that the lantern light bouncing everywhere would've made people sick.  There is absolutely nothing enjoyable about wandering through the darkness, lit up only by weird flowers which Bomani insisted on picking and strewing on the floor in front of me - sorry, glorious leader, not even with your miraculously restored parts - while you just know that the hags had their nest in the tunnels somewhere around here.  Finding the room of fungus was almost a relief, though I didn't have time to see whether the little stash of coins still had anything left to give.
Still - positives.  We figure there are two or three secret rooms on this floor and we have a good idea where, even though there's no visible way of accessing them.  If we can write down descriptions of the statues and so on (I think Bomani and Farok can write) then the wizard back in Sunstep might have a bright idea - but that's a few days' walk away and we're so close to hidden rooms which just must be full of interesting and valuable things.  We've cleared this floor of the place of nasty creatures and dogfolk, and though we know that there's hip-high rats down the stairs that's a long way forward from our first few visits.  We've got a magical wooden man which tries to push you into disintegrating rays and spinning blades if you pull the wrong lever, which must be worth something to the right (or the wrong) person.
And by some sort of miracle, most of us who found this place a month or three ago are actually still alive.