home again

Home sweet home.... This time with some water!

So, after spending a little vacation in the woods, I came back to find that the lizardmen and the rest of the party had a scuffle and we had again turned some of the stone support around the spring into mud, allowing water to start flowing again. It was still very low, but when we got back to Seawell, at least they had some water.

The lizardmen have been very active recently. They did a big attack on Abel and have started raids on the human towns. It seems that they have become more hostile recently... almost as if there has been a big change in leadership.... I wonder what could have happened. Really though, that was the least of our worries. We need to have an island to come home to before we worry about the lizardmen. So, we went to go see Mervyl Jr. I stopped by an old friend's house before we skipped town. He's a little bit paranoid.... he wouldn't let us open the door, and then Edmund didn't help the situation by being his normal, shiney, happy self. We finally slipped the note from Miranda underneath the door, to come back the next day. After that, we decided to go check out a cave that I had spotted. Edmund absolutely completely refused to come with us, which was fine with me, sometimes he can get a bit grating.

The caves were bone dry and there was no sign of the centipedes which they encountered the last time they entered the caves. It was a pretty long tunnel, and it finally sloped down to the river gorge. At the end of the tunnel, we encountered some creatures called creepers, things with long nasty tentacle hands which almost killed me. Next time, I'm not going first. Since we wouldn't have much of a chance in the future, we decided to go explore another cave which was right across the other side of the river. Very interesting, I wonder if the cave existed before the river, since there is no other way it could be so conveniently split in two. We encountered some sort of elemental, which then splashed the party with acid. I stayed behind and managed to stay alive and unscathed. After pulling back the corpses we decided it would be more prudent to come back more prepared next time and at full strength. We returned to camp, Edmund rolled his eyes at our adventures, and went to bed. The next morning we prepared and entered the cave. We weren't aware, but Mervyl Jr was scrying us and saw us prepare for the big battle. Battles work a lot better if there is something there to battle. Having grown up here, I really wonder how his family could afford to send him to a fancy wizarding school on the main islands, Roara isn't exactly rich. When we returned to the lighthouse, he let us in.

Mervyl was finally willing to talk to us about the planes, and we found out that where the bessie had crashed, there was a sort of planar exchange point, with water flowing around them. He also thinks that Roara's spring is supplied with a conveniently placed portal, a long time ago -- might be the same type of people who built the ruins on bellatoon. We decided to go visit Red, and Mervyl has teleportation abilities, hopefully which will place us on the island, not in the middle of the ocean. Hopefully Red knows about these things.

A huge mystery is still why the boundaries of the planes are disintegrating. Is it time, is it on purpose? Was our plane created by someone or something? How big is it?

fire down below

We completed the trip back to Seawell where things still looked tense. People could see there was some water in the river but it would still be quite a while before there was enough for them to drink and water their crops.

There wasn’t much reason to stick around here so we slept the night to recuperate and then headed off to the lighthouse to talk with Mervil. It took us a day or two to get there and when we did Mervil wouldn’t open the door. We slipped Miranda’s letter under the door and he told us to return the next day. I decided to set camp and wait but the othershad some obsession with the centipede cave and set off to clean it out.

It was late that night by the time the returned, which was somewhat surprising—I didn’t really expect them to have much trouble burning out the nest, and with the lack of water I wasn’t sure that the nest would still be there anyway.

However it didn’t look like centipede bites all over them. Kat looked okay, but most of the others seemed to have nasty burns. It turned out that they had made their way through the centipede caves to the chasm with only a minor skirmish with some chokers. However they could see another cave on the other side that contained a large shallow water pool and they’d been hit by some sort of elemental which had almost killed Glyn and Valkor.

They were out for vengeance and I figured it might provide some more clues about the problem we were really trying to solve so I went with them. Whatever it was they’d fought was gone though and we spent hours finding nothing but more flooded underground caverns. The spells we’d cast were long gone and they actually showed some sense and gave up the pursuit and we returned to the lighthouse.

Mervil actually let us in this time and we spoke to him about the problems that were occurring. He had some interesting information, such that the island’s water source emits from a portal which seems somewhat too convenient to be accidental. The suggestion is that many hundreds of years ago someone modified the islands to make them more habitable.

Are the problems we face now just the expected deterioration of the magical tampering done so long ago?

He was interested to hear about the ruins on Bellatune but even more interested to hear about Red the humbug. He wants to go and consult with everyone’s favourite guru, and will be able to transport us to the island magically.

What magic does this Red person exude that everybody thinks he knows something??? I’m not sure I can stand another pointless trip to Red’s mountain and between that and the obsession with wanton destruction I think perhaps it’s time I went my own way to find out what’s going on.

what lurks beneath

After we finished off the elemental we were largely wasted, as we rested someone spied some lizardmen approaching on the other side of the river bed. Kat talked with them and apparently they were asserting their territorial rights and demanded we drop our weapons.

I don’t know what Kat said to them but they became pretty agitated, at which point Kat disappeared into cover, presumably to circle around behind them.

I opened fire but these guys were ready to fight and were magically boosted, while we had pretty much selected and expended our magical arsenal to combat the elemental.

It was clear we wouldn’t win by trading bow fire across the river—they were doing much more damage than we were. So I dropped my bow and ran across to the other side. It was a stupid thing for me to do personally, but was effective for evening the odds. I didn’t see the end of the fight after being surrounded by them but clearly we won because when I regained consciousness the scales were all taken care of.

Sharky had also fared poorly and while we patched ourselves up I noticed that two of the lizards were still alive. I would have been happy to finish them off but the others wanted to take them back to Seawell for interrogation. I thought it was a dangerous thing to do since I figure all this is a result of us helping that shaman out but it wasn’t the time to challenge the others, so off to Seawell we went.

We got back there okay only to find that the situation on the island had really deteriorated. The scales had become very aggressive in the last little while (pretty much since we’d helped that shaman, as I’d suspected) and were monopolising the water supply. Someone was going to have to go back to the river source and try to restore the river on this side of the island and I knew that when they said “someone” they meant us.

We headed back towards the river source and Stimpy changed himself to a bird to fly around and scout the area. He saw scouting parties all over the place, but nothing too close to us. We figured we had a good chance of avoiding them and reaching the source.

We were mostly correct but we did have an encounter with a couple of them. We took one down but the other ran for help and we had to give chase. Stimpy changed himself to a black bear and was able to close the fastest, and he took the scout down. Their patrols were sparse enough that having hit one we were unlikely to see another and indeed we reached the river source without further incident.

Valkor inspected the portal closely but was unable to determine much more than we already knew. That left us with the backup plan of trying to destroy the mound on the side facing Seawell to restore the water flow. Stimpy worked away at the mud and stone with his magic and was able to let a decent flow out, though the water source basically shoots straight up and the portal is a horizontal tear directly above it so there is still a lot that just vanishes into the water plane. There’s no guarantee another elemental won’t find his way through but I guess that at least it will have trouble messing up the water flow if it just hovers around the portal.

We headed off immediately and headed back towards Seawell by the most direct route. We left the immediate vicinity of the river and were heading through some forest when something erupted from the ground beneath me. I don’t even know how to describe this thing—it wasn’t anything I’d seen before. It had a hard chitinous shell and sharp mandibles. What was this—some sort of giant underground land shrimp?

The others were coming to help me fight it when another one broke through and attacked Stimpy. The one attacking me tried to pull me down its hole but I managed to brace myself and it was left exposed where we could easily finish it off.

Stimpy was less lucky. His pulled him into the hole and he was left hanging onto the lip for grim death as it was pulling him from below where we couldn’t attack it. Fortunately for him Valkor had summoned a creature and used another spell to exchange Stimpy and the summoned creature, then slicked the sides of the hole so the attacking thing lost its grip. We heard a satisfying crunch as both critters hit the bottom of an apparently very deep hole with Valkor’s summoned creature on top. We shone a light down the hole and there was nothing moving but we decided to move on quickly in case there were more in the area.

Valkor

Valkor:
"...Now where was I? Ah, yes. So right after yelling that and angering the Lizardfolk, Kat slinked back into the shadows and disappeared. Edmund didn't seem fazed, and followed the insule by shooting an arrow at one of the Lizardman. Suffice to say, that's when hostilities broke out. Those Lizardfolk were quite a bit tougher than your average ones, and it was a hard fought battle. Edmund and Glynn were knocked unconscious, and I think an arrow caught my arm in that battle. I was still in better shape than the others though, especially the Lizardfolk."

"Two of the lizardfolk were still alive, and we figured that there could be some sort of reward for bringing them back to town. It was slow going dragging the two along. Those lizard folk were heavy, though I let the rest of them do all the heavy lifting. We got back to Seawell with no further encounters with the Lizardfolk. However, we did learn some dire news: it appeared that since the time we left for Bellatune, the Lizardfolk have been far more active and aggressive (probably because of the new leader we installed). They had cut off a large portion of the water supply to Seawell, and even with the water elemental gone, they still couldn't get enough water to survive on. We decided that we had to go back to the spring, and either close the portal or do the same thing that Ren had originally done to get water to Able."

"Ren volunteered to first take the form of a bird and scout out the area. When he returned, he informed us that there were a good number of Lizardfolk there, though most of them appeared to be scattered along the mountainside. We went back to the spring at the top of the mountain, careful not to alert the entire lizardmen tribe. We were largely successful in our task. A few lizardmen tried to run off to warn the others, but Ren changed into a black bear, and ran them down down with frightening speed."

"I tried to analyze the portal that was diverting the flow of the river, however, I just couldn't figure how how to close it. We had to settle on the backup plan. Ren cast a few spells that reshaped the opening, and a few monents later, a steady stream of water was flowing toward Seawell. At this point, we decided that at least for the time being, our task was done. We headed back down the mountain side without any more Lizardfolk encounters."

"However, later that evening, as we were walking in the forest, a large...Creature of some sort appeared to burrow up from under the ground. It looked like it had a tough carapace and large mandibles. It struck quickly, cutting a gash in Edmund. Ren and Glynn moved forward to attack, when second one suddenly appeared and struck Ren, grasping him in its mandibles. Fortunately, these beasts were not as tough as they appeared, and Edmund managed to quickly finish one off. The other one attempted to drag Ren back into the tunnel it just came out of, but luckily, Ren was able to grab ahold of a large branch, and keep himself from being pulled down. I cast a spell that swapped Ren and a creature I summoned, and followed it up by slicking the sides of the tunnel with a thick coat of grease. To my satisfaction, the creature tumbled back into the tunnel, and I heard a loud crunch as it hit the bottom of its tunnel. We peered over the edge, and noted that whatever it was, the fall crushed it."