going to hell

After a little preparation Mervil cast his spell and we were transported back to Belatune. It was probably fortunate for Miranda that he had used her as a target—when we arrived she was beset by infernal creatures.

Most of them were small flying imps that were difficult to come to grips with but a few well-placed arrows took care of most of them. There was a larger devil of some sort but once we started closing in on him and the imps started dying he vanished.

Miranda came with us to speak to Red and when we finally found him it looked like he’d been in some sort of fight as well. He continued to provide little useful information and we managed to get him to confess that this trip to retrieve his pouch from hell wasn’t a test—it turns out that it’s some sort of item he needs to be able to do anything.

We discussed the portals in the ruins and he provided a wealth of useful information. Like “there’s some sort of pattern to the portals” and “I can’t recall which portal it is, but I’m sure you’ll work it out” and “it’s one of these two command words to activate the correct portal, but I can’t recall which; or where the portal the other word activates will take you”.

He also failed to provide any information where in this plane of hell we might find his pouch. I somehow doubt he’s been everywhere on the plane, yet not even a hint like “stay away from the brass citadel”.

Thanks Red!

We made our way to the ruins and Valkor attempted to divine as much as possible about the portals. We spent the whole day at it and then withdrew to camp. In the middle of the night some hideous creature stumbled into the camp. We scrambled from our beds to attack it which turned out to be a challenge, as it was immune to many of the spells we cast at it, but eventually we brought it down. There was a brief discussion about moving camp but it seemed the creature had little or no volition so the chance of something else showing up seemed extremely small.

So of course we were disturbed again not long thereafter by a big honking devil. We were trying to work out whether to fight or run when it spoke to us in Common. Apparently it had sent the other thing in to see how tough we were and now wanted to make a deal. And that always works so well for the humans.

He said he had the contents of Red’s pouch and knew where the pouch itself was. Since it was a rival that held the pouch he was willing to give us some information in order to embarrass him, and would then give us what he had if we were successful in retrieving the pouch. Now Red had also refused to tell us anything much about the pouch (other than that it holds something) so it was hard to evaluate what the devil was saying but Valkor was confident that devils don’t lie so we should be good to go.

But then he wanted to write a contract. Hahahahaha. You tell us that devils are truthful, but then you want to challenge him to a battle of wits by trying to bind him to his word in writing. I’m glad we talked him out of that one...

He sketched out a map and we copied it, gave us instructions for finding his agent once we had the pouch, and then he was gone.

The next day we returned to the ruins and with the knowledge Valkor had gained the day before we went through to the first plane of hell. We started to follow the path the devil had sketched out but before long we saw some devils in the distance heading straight for us. We moved off in the opposite direction fast enough to open some space but hopefully not fast enough to attract their interest and then we cut across at an angle to get back on our path.

Wasn’t exactly the most effective plan—a bunch of devils appeared out of nowhere in front of us and things didn’t look good for us.