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.