mmmmmm



Ok, so!



...which is, in fact, a Beholder. They send the rogue ahead, because it is tradition in all games that rogues do stuff that involves rolling a d20 and dying if you rolled lower than 8. The beholder, first hearing Alenka, then seeing Alenka peeking over the edge, immediately uses a readied action to land a nice charm. Alenka is ordered to not mention her new Beholder buddy, and to go fetch the rest of the group. Which, she does. The battle is on! The beholder quickly moves to try to keep different players at different arcs, disintegrating a wall to get a better aim. Then, just before things get GOOD, the beholder forgets what is going on. And its very identity. All that is certain, is that a pixie with a shit eating grin is warning him to hold off some forces down the mountain. The pixie is dead sexy, and gets a good bonus on his die roll, and off the beholder floats.

The beholder WOULD have been pretty great for those lesser blue magic fellows, but nooooooooooo.


Exploring the snow, the group finds a staff with a very powerful tura gem. Heading down the hole, the group finds a room with a desk, some sitting rugs, and several doors. They also find hidden doors, because they spend a long time searching. Alenka fails to find several traps, with moderately amusing results. One of the walls is hot, and exploration of the desk contents yields the discovery that Rim-Thul likely has some fire elemental allies- the PCs jump to the obvious conclusion (well, it would have been less obvious later in the night, with more rum ingested), and explore the other doors first. One is a hidden door with a locked chest and a very magical rapier inside. Alenka immediately sweet-talks the group into inserting the most powerful Tura gem available into it, and begins imagining poking holes in bad things. One door leads to a hallway- a gnome, listening at the door, breaks into a run. Keichi catches him, but the gnome is far too strong to be grappled. Jumping clear into a massive underground cavern, a great wyrm green dragon rises: clearly he and the PCs are prevented from attacking each other based on the border. The green dragon attempts to ascertain Rim-Thul's fate, and more importantly, the fate of the boxes that could be used to control or disable the metallic dragons. Eventually he realizes that the PCs aren't just opposed to his cause, they are somewhat aware of it, and any further interaction isn't in his best interest, and he leaves.

One hidden door contains corpses, prepared and ready to go as haste-zombies. Instead of an undead gank squad, the PCs put torch to the bodies instead. Pity!

A different door contains some absolutely lovely pixie mobile homes. Rigby moves right in! However, his allies eventually yank him out and destroy them all. How rude!

Finally, the group is prepared and ready to fight a room full of fire stuff.


... to be continued

The room is very large, and is composed entirely of firebats- like ordinary bats, except made of fire, and from the elemental plane of fire, and without normal bat parts, and constantly burning. These are not like ordinary bats! However, Monty, Morgrim's familiar, can, in fact, speak with them, because they have "bat" in their name. The bats are stupid by human standard, genius by bat standards, and perfectly ordinarily intelligent by fire elemental standards. They explain that they were brought here from the Fire Source, and that they have to attack anyone that comes in the room. They don't seem to have any genuine concern for their own fate, and explain that when destroyed they will find themselves in the Fire Forge, where they will be reformed, and it will take awhile for them to migrate outwards (they try to explain this time, and it seems over a human lifetime)- but they have no conception of inconvenience, apparently. The group decides that since the bats can't be reasoned with, as they are summoned creatures given an order, it is time to send them to their forge-whatever.

The group flits about with line of sight, eventually killing many of the bats (which sends them back to their home plane). Once they are victorious, they pile into the room... at which point one of the walls is revealed as an illusion. What follows is a fight with a fire wizard from Umbra (Relthraroof- I may have told you differently, because I geniously left his fucking character sheet at home) and his subservient fire elementals. He demands that the PCs surrender, and also asks where Rim-Thul is. Apparently, everyone loves this guy. Morgrim, cleverly having prepared Mass Resist Elements, proceeds to resist fire in a massive fashion, turning 50 hit point fireballs into 30 hit point babies (reflex for 5). Rigby begins moving towards Reltharoof, who resists most of his onslaught. Relthraroof eventually lands a telling dispel, finally opening up the party to the ravages of...

Wait no

Wait

Morgrim just casts the spell again, and once more the group is merrily frolicking around a bunch of fire.

Eventually Rigby lands a glitterdust on Reltharoof, who, seeing a losing battle, retreats (making his earlier demand of surrender at least a little ironic). The retreat closes the portal, and leaves the group mostly empty handed. The remaining bats wait in line to be splattered by anything except for the rapier, which at this point the elementals have noticed removes them from reality entirely, a fate they seek to avoid.

Checking for secret doors, they find a strange passage indeed- a cavern that begins constructed of the same substance as the rest of the room, but then turns into roughly unhewn rock for a bit, and then eventually a special kind of stone that is slick and shiny... and that eventually reveals itself as opening up into some strange kind of "cavern", with no visible ceiling or floor. Many of the bricks hover in place, as firm as when they were laid despite not having any support. Time seems to flow at different rates depending, as while Rigby has no issue flying over to the nicely built upraised magical portal device, but morgrim, failing a dexterity based skill, ends up falling. There is a rope, which takes forever to go taut, and it takes hours to pull him up. The group decides to avoid fucking with the portal device, after finding that it is apparently but one of many based on the inscription.

Climbing out of Rim-Thul's Love Cave, they head back down the mountain. They wait in the frost giant's makeshift home-cave, and hear a big crash coming from inside the mountain itself.

Once back in Icicle, they find their drunkenmage and secure transport back to Emerald. In Emerald, they find out that most of the powerful mages are out of town on campaign- and heading towards Dulal, to aid the cause and defend Arcata from the Voriphans. On their way out of the tower, they bump into Orchid- allied with a shrouded Fentallen (Voriphan evil sorcerer), the ex-Zemnian wizard Trethar, a Kuromeran monk named Lue Feng, and an entirely honest and plain woman of no particular extraordinary talents or secrets, Margaret Smith. They agree to meet at a bar later, to make their fight more stereotypical, but instead they just chill out and drink and talk.

They sell their loot- since Rim-Thul had several paintings thought lost to the world, all by famous historical painter Yelsa Mishka (one of a girl, one of a nautical scene, a famous one entitled "Strings of a Ball", supposedly inspired by heroes of the day at an actual Ball, and one a painting of a world with an odd horizon, entitled "Retreat of the Voriphans, supposedly inspired by a dream), the party decides to find out how much these are worth. The answer is, quite a fucking lot, and the party spends a bit of time shopping around. While Grand Duke Ravalis is known to be interested, and the museum is certainly offering quite a bit, they entertain competing offers from the Grand Duke of the eastern provinces, a rotund man who makes a generous offer and then leaves them to their thoughts.

The party, discussing in the inn what to do, comes to the conclusion to definitely sell to the archcurator, over the loud objections of Rigby Greedman. Orchid comes by to flirt with Lithonian, the only male member of the party she didn't do so with before- Srelindel likely having something to do with that- but on their nice walk outside, he decides to not persue that path. He does, however, find some interesting things out about the stars, such as how to compare them to the dream Latukefu granted him, showing him the location of Rim-Thul's hideout (in the Teryeal Expanse). It is fair to say that Ash is a lousy date. Orchid will probably Twitter about it later.

Stealby Twigman, seizing the initiative (and more importantly, the 100k gold worth of paintings), tears off in the night, without explanation or remorse. Since no one had a readied action to pants him, he makes it out the window, and is quickly over at the museum. There he bargains with the archcurator, talking him up substantially. Meanwhile, the rest of the group heads over to the Grand Duke's place to head him off- but he wasn't there. They then head over to the museum. Once Rigby Conman has made the deal, he looks around, the faint odor of cinnamon having come to him in a rush, but sees nothing. At this point the group has caught up to him, and Alenka also looks around, and sees a black-clad figure on a roof two buildings down- but the flick of a cloak, and she forgets it quite readily.

Rigembezzleby Twigman then reports how much he got in the deal, leaving out only a small detail (aka, about 20k gold of the price he reached). He then split the remaining amount with the rest of the party, and slept the wonderful sleep that honest pixies sleep.

The group votes and decides that rather than join Orchid and her dubiously evil party, that they should instead take their dubiously good party over to Proditial Region of Caelum, to gain power and... well, likely something bad is going on there too. Library research reveales it is to the east, off the coast of Queris. Since that's a STUPID distance away, they decide to enlist the services of a powerful wizard, and spend quite a sum of gold in the process- though they do get to say hello to their friends in the caravan, to which they teleport to before finding someone capable of casting greater teleport.

Once arriving in Queris, their guide points them at the Golden Pony inn, forgetting COMPLETELY how he should have recommended the Green Horse inn, and mentions that they are used to serving Arcatans there, and bids them good luck.

EDIT: Fixed what Ash saw in his dream (the hideout of Rim-Thul, and the fact that he is half Voriphan, half Arcatan).

Lolz. Is there a spell to permanently rename Rigby? Buz that would be AWESOME.

Rigby's Sneeeky Hand

And honestly, once I had Rigembezzleby, the rest needed to exist as a setup.

I had means, motive, and opportunity. I have seen those crime shows, and I know that if I have those three things then I have to do it. If I don't, there terrorists win.

When my dad was last in Denver, he suggested watching CSI Miami, and so we did. The plot, written by California liberal, was that some white supremacists were beating up on Cubans. We were cracking up most of the time, because a white supremacist (especially the stereotypical ones portrayed) would be less out of place in subsaharan Africa than in Miami. Hell, at least those fictional Nigerian princes speak *some* English. I bet they probably had a sunset over the Atlantic in a later show or something.