In which our heroes ...
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!!!
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