Orhan 4 Day 41 TE 6065

We get to a pair of gates. Fire and Darkness. Fire leads to heat and anger, Darkness leads to Despair.

Alynna, Kyrik and Salah choose Fire. Haeraan, Imre, and Oathar choose Darkness.

Haeraan, Imre and Oathar head into gate of darkness. Within, they find a path winding off into the dark. The first landmark they come to is a lone tree, gnarled and doomed, with one lone vulture eyeing them from its branch. They begin to head down the path. The vulture takes flight, and slowly circles our heroes. It is eventually joined by several other dark forms. All slowly circling, waiting... watching.

After a while, Oathar sits down to mull over his life. Haeraan starts telling Imre to leave us behind. Imre must carry the ball without us.

Eventually, Imre Masters Haeraan. He orders him to carry Oathar out, but a couple of failed strength rolls later, they are splatted on the ground together. They stumble down the road and then one of the vultures starts to attack. We fight it.

Then Oathar insults Rianne and Eissa to get Haeraan and Imre to chase them out. Imre doesn't fall for it, but Haeraan chases him around. Imre does see Oathar getting chased by Haeraan and follows trying to save him. There's a whole lot of bouncing off of Haeraan, and Oathar continuing to hobble away after Haeraan breaks his ankle.

Just before his death stroke, Imre casts forget on Haeraan, who forgets about the insults, and lo, it is done.

Elsewhere, Alynna, Kyrik, and Salah head down the path of fire. It heads down a lava flood plain. They start trudging down the path.

It's hot. Very, very hot. Shimmering air, noxious fumes bubble up from the lava. Heat, and hotness, that's what they've got.

Sadly, the heat starts getting to Alynna making her irritable. When Kyrik starts taking pictures of the area, she slaps him. Salah similarly explodes at Kyrik. They start arguing, but it's clear that it will escalate to violence at any minute. Some fast apologizing by Kyrik diffuses the situation and they head on.

Then they come to a fork with signs pointing in two directions. Kyrik asks Salah which way to go, and Salah thinks they should split up just so he can get rid of these fools. An argument breaks out at the fork. Eventually they split up. Salah and Alynna go one way and badmouth Kyrik. Kyrik goes the other way, and then stealths around to shadow them quietly.

After a while, Alynna and Salah emerge from the gate to fine Oathar, Imre, and Haeraan. "We left Kyrik behind; he was pissing us off." After a while, Kyrik emerges from the gate as well. Huh.

Whew.

So we prepare ourselves for the maze of despair. We find the doors. There are three torches outside. We march in. All other light sources go out. The first of the three torches is lit. We find we can't climb any of the walls and begin our brute force search.

We find in the maze a hatch right under blink. It goes down down down. The opening mechanism appears to be non-local. Deciding we don't want to go infinitely down, we proceed. Blinky follows us.

We get a descent map with holes in them.

After a bit, the first torch starts sputtering. As soon as it goes out, Oathar light the second one. But as soon as the first torch goes out there's a giant "Bong!" and the floor starts feeling unsteady. Then we start hearing the sound of a giant boulder rolling around the halls. We start running around into unmapped areas looking for the exit.

We run around avoiding balls. They roll over us some times when Alynna is leading, and Haeraan leads us around for a bit and we are missed by balls. Well, mostly. We run around and run around and the balls are mostly avoided.

Then the second torch dies, and we hear another bong as we light the third torch. We start hearing sounds of creepy crawling things emenating from the holes, but as we run towards the sound, it goes silent and we hear it get louder behind us. Haeraan leads us through the maze. We get to the serious juncture point, and find that one way is to the exit, and one way is not. Salah guesses. Imre maps, and Oathar calculated. Salah and Imre think it is right. Oathar thinks it's left. We go right. We start heading down that corridor but suddenly, Haeraan gets a really bad feeling. We backtrack and start heading down the left branch.

We take it and Imre starts leading us around. We leap for the exit just as the torch goes out and the horrible whatevers attack. But we do make it.

We get to a tunnel. There's some sort of fanfare at the other side and the roar of a crowd. As we get to the end, the gate opens and there are sands of an arena before us.

It's an empty colluseum outside, but there's ghostly shapes in the stands of people cheering. The other tunnel at the end of the colluseum comes out and prepares to attack us with it's glowing eyes, and maw, etc.

Haeraan and Alynna get hasted and charge the gaping maw. The leap towards the maw trying to dodge any teeth of spikes on the way in.

From the inside, they attack! Well, Alynna attacks. Haeraan gets sick. Eventually Alynna punches her way out the side and needs to run around to the mouth to get in again. Kyrik taunts it from outside, Imre and Oathar and Salah run around outside. Then Haeraan shoots his way out.

Alynna gets back in; she tries to shoot it in the brain on teh way in, but it doesn't seem to have one. Haeraan gets back in past Alynna. They start fighting from within again.

Fight fight fight, we fight the giant worm! Alynna and Haeraan start taking acid crits as their protective coating wears off. Finally, Alynna shoots it with a blaster pistol in the heart. The worm is dead!

As we exit the arena (after cleaning up), we exit to a golden pyramid. We stick our keys into the pyramid. The four faces of the pyramid opens up. Inside is a set of glowing golden spheres. We each take one. It's warm and glowing. The spheres each will do ONE of the following:

• 1) Get rid of a corruption point.
• 2) Gain 3 fate points.
• 3) Fix a single mistake.

We can each decide someting different if we want. Haeraan, Alynna, Imre, and Kyrik all get rid of corruption. Oathar strongly considers making himself a loremaster again by fixing the mistake that lead to his downfall.

We unlock the golden gate, and head up a tunnel and come out of a cave... A couple of women at the oasis at the cave starts screaming! They came from the cave!!!