Shifty Orcs and Their Schemes

10 Dravago, 994 YK

Well, we're sitting in a ruined tower after a long day. I volunteer for second shift lookout. Once I start my shift, I notice two dogs come up to Adam Smasher. They are huge Shadow Mastiffs. I immediately think of that sneaky orc Vorp? no, Norm? Vorg! He comes out of the darkness and checks out Adam. I overhear him say "hmm, looks like this one is active." Very suspicious.

They move off out of sight, so I decide to follow them. I don't bother waking up Donaar because he's as stealthy as an earthquake and he can sleep while I investigate. I follow the orc and his puppies around the bend of the tower wall and suddenly they disappear. I track his footprints to the wall and they seem to continue into it. Not being the bravest of halflings against 2 dogs bigger than me and an orc literally 4 times my size, I decide to go back to camp and finish my watch.

Waking Donaar up, I tell him about Vorg and his dogs. He assures me he will not draw attention to himself and proceeds to patrol for his shift. I fall asleep to the thud of his feet pacing around.

In the morning, we tell the others about Vorg and we all decide to investigate this hidey hole. Looking at the wall, someone tries to touch the wall and finds that it is illusionary. We find a short set of steps and a door at the bottom. I inspect it for traps and notice there is something magical about it. Knowing nothing about magic, I defer to Rex and Wabnuc. Wabnuc waves his wrenches at it and proclaims its clear of magical traps, so I get down to picking the lock. I think an 8-year-old could pick it, it came unlocked so easy. We open the door and find an underground facility with valves and pipes and windows too high for me to see out of. Girl, aren't they all?

Inside the windowed room, the tall folks say there are 2... no 4 floating balls about the size of a head zooming around. Someone smashes the window near us and we immediately get attacked by the floating heads. They actually look like that but have 4 eyeballs on the end of antennae on their head. Kind of like a snail's eyestalks. Well, call me crazy, but the eyes cast magic spells! After a brief fight, we manage to kill them all. Wabnuc cuts some of the eyestalks off mumbling something about making a weapon with them. Are all magic-users a little bit nuts?

Klaus looks at some of the chambers in the room and finds a lot of the local leaders in there. The chambers are hooked to a gizmo in the center of the room that appears to be sucking all the memories out of them. Wabnuc comes up with a conspiracy theory that shifters are taking over the town and sucking the memories of the townsfolk to release them somewhere else with complete amnesia. How the orc is involved I don't know. Wabnuc and Rex also decide to take the memory sucker block (calling it a construct heart)—whatever... crazy mages.

There is a magically locked door at the back of the room that holds some guard golems and a decayed-looking adult beholder! I want no part of that monster. It can disintegrate you with one look! Rex flipped his mind and is attacking the door relentlessly. We can't seem to break him of it, so the group decides to head out before someone comes back looking at all the damage we did in the room. Rex finally catches up to us looking like he has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. No one wants to heal him, though. Even Swim Shady didn't want to!

We make it back to Klaus' camp and park Adam back against the tree as we found him. The camp looks like a tornado went through it...Klaus looked like this happens all the time and blamed it on some local Grungs. We decide to head to the Faerie Dragon for some help on getting another red Khyber shard. I take second watch again and fall quickly asleep until I am woken for my shift. Nothing unusual to report, and I sleep until morning after my shift ends.