MAL Ep. 41

Thanks for a fun "season finale," guys. :-)  Last game till September, at which point we will resume with a once-every-three weeks, half-online adventure through the planes to look for Khirg and get some much-needed answers about Piper and the Hounds of Chaos.

1) First, Bay determined how the combination lock on the scroll tube worked, enabling the party to solve the puzzle and read the letter from Aler's mother tucked inside. It told him how to initiate himself safely, which was no longer such useful information, and warned him never to enter a temple of Lolth, which he could probably have guessed for himself, but also gave a little more insight into the final days of her life.

2) Then the party continued on to the geomystic fields where the sibyl, and also apparently a group of the distasteful illithids, make their home. The group gave wide berth to the mana springs and tubes in this area, as well as avoiding some florid mushroom growths, and passed through without incident.

3) The party encountered a peculiar black mound which after much cautious investigation they decided to be the blackened skull of some immense abomination. Though the skull itself did not appear to be extraplanar in origin, Jon identified the oily blue liquid pooled in some of its crevices as radiating chaos energy. When Red attempted to collect a sample of the chaos fluid, she slipped and spilled some on her hand, causing her to hear the same Chthulhoid whispers in her mind that Zadkiel had experienced in the Kraken temple. Turning into a bird, Red flew up and was able to trace the source of the chaos fluid to the cavern ceiling far above, where it seemed to be leaching through the rock and slowly dripping downward.

4) Nearby, the party noticed a junction between three purplish metal tubes protruding from the earth, with a symbol of interlocking triangles at the joint. The tube did not radiate chaos energy. The PC decided to follow the tube to the left.

5) The party found a roughly hewn icon of a head with tentacles, somewhat resembling the Kraken they had encountered on the surface. Tanya was able to use magic to translate the illithid writing around the base, which literally said "Chaos will bring return." Not actually speaking the illithid language, Tanya didn't know what the significance of that could be.

6) The party found another piece of the alien pipe. Khirg tried to listen to it to see if he could hear water flowing through it. Instead, he heard a windy sound, and was unnerved by the same whispering voices that Red had heard at the giant skull.

7) Finding a rectangular building with a sliding door, the party cautiously entered, discovering two peculiar metal tables, a chest with an octopus motif, and a crystal ball on a plinth. Adriel searched the table and found some dried blood or ichor or something inside the drain holes, though the surface of the table was spotlessly clean; she also found a serrated knife and some tools, which she left. There were pipes leading from the tables into the ground, which she surmised connected with the larger pipes the party had found outside.

8) Aler and Bay tried to open the chest, but found the lock trapped with an unfamiliar mechanism that sent Bay into a psionic trance. Jon brought Bay outside and used a song of Fascination to redirect her mental loop to himself rather than the trap, which after a few minutes succeeded. Meanwhile, Aler determined that the trapped lock was a dummy and the chest actually opened from the other side. Inside was a small lavender crystal and a green potion, both of which were nonmagical. Adriel used gloves to wrap these items in cloth and put them in her pack.

9) Red, who had reluctantly entered the building to use a mage hand to help open the chest, looked at the crystal ball and made a saurian cry, at which point she saw a vision of a drow on the metal table being transformed into an illithid and became shaken, knocking some other PCs down as she fled from the house.

10) The party continued past some more mana formations into a clearing where they saw an archway with a carving of an octopus, a pool of bubbling purple liquid with another metallic tube leading to it, and a set of four twined silver pillars with a shimmering wall of blue light connecting them. The archway radiated faint magic and the blue wall radiated strong magic.

11) The party did not look at the archway. Red warily approached the pool and looked into it, which gave her a feeling of foreboding. Jon examined the pillars and blue light, which he concluded was Fey magic. He then began signing a Fey song, causing the light to part and revealing an alabaster gazebo over a brilliant green flame of mana. A fairy was sitting over the flame on a silver tripod.

12) Jon hailed the fairy, but she did not respond until the gazebo was touched, at which point she invited the party in to speak. Red did not enter at first but suddenly ran to join the others when the blue wall of magic began closing.

13) The party spoke with the sibyl, who declined to give her name ("I have transcended such bonds.") She explained that even among the Fey, there were few with the power to truly understand the intricate workings of fate, and that to look upon it would irrevocably break your minds. She can interpret it for you in a way you can understand (or not, as the case may be,) but once she does, the question will be answered and there will be no unanswering it.

14) The party asked questions of the sibyl.

JON: How can Jon save Piper: "Ah. That which matters so little, yet at the same time so much. Poor birds. You have it within your power already to save the Avatar, bard-- but not to save thy wife. Seek the lame cleric. You must take one step back to find two forward, and you can not succeed alone. Blood will call to blood, and it is the footsteps you have already taken that will decide her fate."

ZADKIEL: Were Not-Star's dreams prophecies? "There are layers of truth and untruth that are beyond your ability to understand. You have seen one… simulation. You have seen one incarnation of the future. I see the whole future.” ADRIEL: When will Chavalk and his army attack Malachi? "I would say that will happen after the dwarves seal the Dragonrift but before the Hounds of Chaos course.”

RED: Can you give us advice about dealing with the illithids? Paraphrase: This is not what one challenges the fates by asking a sibyl about.

BAY/ALER: How can Bay be freed from the control of the chaos powers within her?: "A destiny once writ cannot be unwrit, but it can be added to. You are fated to serve Xhriakw, and serve him you shall. Xhriakw is the head, and if you try to defy him you will fail. But ye manifestations of Chaos are the neck, and can turn that head from one side to the other. Seek thy fellows, and listen to the Windriders of the Sidhe."

ZADKIEL: Hana Cladd'ana's granddaughter: "It is possible to learn too much from a lesson. Be not like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but she will never sit down on a cold one anymore either.

KHIRG: How can Khirg stop the demons from taking the Bow of Herne: "Take the blinkers from your eyes, dog soldier. You may have tried one thing after another, but in truth they have all been the same thing. Think outside the box for once. It is YOU whose arm is fated to cut the web, not Herne. What one freely gives cannot be taken from him." ALER: Are Aler's parents proud of him: The sibyl really had to think about this one, eventually saying that Aler's answer lies in the past, not the future, since he is the only future his parents have now. She told him to seek answers at Khre Anjanksa. (In Abyssal that means: Elf War Butte.)

15) The sibyl then stepped down into the mana flame and disappeared. The blue magic walls dissipated, revealing that a glowing golden web matching the one from Khirg's dream had appeared in the archway and a giant tentacled brain had appeared in the purple pool. A large illithid figure was standing beside the archway with a drow, a Marilith and three smaller demons were standing in front of the archway, and a large spiky alien creature was standing by the pool with two illithids.

16) In a dramatic cutscene, Khirg thrust his golden bow at Aler, yelling "Just take it, all right!" and charged the archway, cutting through the golden web with his greataxe and disappearing in an explosion of golden light.

17) A pitched battle began, made worse by the revelation of two hiding wrath demons that attacked the PCs from the flanks when they charged the marilith and the approach of an army unit from the west (who were stymied for the first round by the shambling mounds, whose stats I'm really gonna need for the future!)

18) Due to the late hour I averted the second round of combat by having Jon move first so he could pull the escape trigger, to the slight disappointment of Adriel and Aler (who had a nonzero chance of taking down the badly injured Marilith before Jon's initiative came up), but to the overall benefit of the party (who had an even better chance of suffering one or more fatalities before that happened.) Jon successfully phased the party through the Veil to the Fey lands, where they found themselves buffeted by eerie green mana winds.

And there we broke for the night. See you in September!