Session 2: Never Trust an Elevator
General Summary
The party managed to escape the trapped elevator, but only managed to retrieve about half of the gems they saw on the floor.
Shaken but only lightly injured, they decided to check out the other rooms.
The Yellow corridor was empty save for the yellow lantern, but the Indigo room had an elevator stuck halfway up. After tooling around with the sarcophagus-arrow, it collapsed downward. Scarcely had that sound faded when the unmistakeable buzz and skitter of a huge mass of insects began to swell from the hole where the elevator had been.
The party had time to ready some attacks, and did great damage to the swarm before it overcame their melee fighters, Sigvurd and Lins, who were occupied with a disgusting aberration that appeared with the insects: six metallic legs sticking out from a rotten eye. It cut them up a bit, but in the end the party disposed of slasher and bugs both, leaving them free to investigate the elevator shaft. They saw the elevator crashed 20 feet down in a heap of rubble, illuminated by the broken lantern above it.
At that point, Lins and Sigvurd both, who had explored some ruins before, noticed that it was odd that a torch, which usually lasts only an hour, should be burning so brightly when the place was so long abandoned. Vin proposed that it might be a magical Everburning torch, and Sigvurd grabbed it out of the lantern to take forward.
Being equipped with pitons and rope, the gang had no trouble climbing down the elevator shaft, though Lins slipped and bonked her head a bit.
At the bottom, they landed in the terminus of a hallway encircled by statues of the same seven-foot-tall, bald figures they had seen in the art room earlier. Many of them had been melted or destroyed by the bugs’ corrosive saliva. Sigvurd heard water, and they decided to investigate, ignoring the two branching chambers and continuing down the corridor to a flight of stairs.
The room at the bottom of those stairs was flooded with water, and, ever cautious, Vin asked for 10 minutes to cast Detect Magic on it. She picked up an aura of Conjuration throughout, putting the group on alert, and as they moved forward, Lins was able to notice something strange and nearly invisible circling them in the water.
She pointed it out to the party, and Vin reflected that water elementals are especially chaotic, and have a predilection toward turning themselves into massive whirlpools to throw their enemies into disorder. The warning came just in time for Sigvurd and Nemara to retreat toward the exit, but not before Sigvurd was overwhelmed by the elemental, putting out the Everburning Torch and leaving the humans Vin and Lins in darkness and caught in the vortex it created thereafter.
Lins braced her feet and tried to reach the calls of her companions who were beyond the vortex’s reach, but the current and echo of the room confused her movement, and she ended up nearing a different doorway. After that, all was chaos. Nemara and Sigvurd attacked the elemental from safety until Sigvurd, unable to resist close combat, waded in and lost his feet momentarily while the warlock cast her spells from afar and threw a line to try and guide her friends to safety.
But the tide of battle turned when Vin cast a dim light over the room and Sigvurd got his feet. The barbarian landed a mighty blow, his greataxe tearing through the elemental’s form and shrieking back to its home plane in a glorious explosion.
But the conflict had not been easy, and the party was wounded. They retreated back to the lantern room and passed a rest under the watchful eye of Vin’s familiar, who changed from a hawk to a bat for the task.
They awoke refreshed, and realized there was only one remaining direction they had not tried for the sarcophagus arrow. Upon pointing it toward the yellow lantern, a third elevator arose, opening its door with a pleasant ding~
The party, of course, gave it a thorough inspection before deciding that it might not be a trap.
They wanted to see if there was any loot the water elemental might have been guarding, however, and so returned to the water room. They opened the eastern door first, and found themselves four foot deep in decayed-poo-water, as the door had been closing off an ancient privy. Vin wondered if someone might have hidden something in there, and dared to reach into the disgusting goo. She did find a scroll in a sealed case, but her backpack might smell like crap until she can clean in properly. Vin was beginning to regret not learning Prestidigitation.
retreating from the foul stuff, they found two rooms attached to the water room. The first had a corpse with a backpack on. On closer inspection, they found the backpack contained the red lantern, and that the corpse was wearing red leather armour emblazoned with an eight-pointed star. It also wore a shortsword, but as no one in the party preferred that weapon, they left it. They also noticed the corpse has been chewed.
Upon returning to the water room, Sigvrud sensed movement from another creature in the water. Peeking around a pillar, he saw a ghoul, and attacked it straightaway. The party annihilated the miserable undead before its horrible black claws could even get in range. When they inspected it, they found a ring on its finger with a sizeable ruby on it, also carved with an eight-pointed star. The room it had just left had a decent amount of pocket change in its cubbies.
Leaving the room victorious and high on their level-up, the party decided to be thorough and explore the two remaining rooms before trying out the yellow elevator.
They didn’t venture far into the south room before Vin and Lins felt very sleepy. Vin, recognizing an enchantment when she felt one, stated between yawns that the room was bad and immediately retreated to the hallway to cast Detect Magic.
While she worked her ritual, the party investigated the last remaining room in this area. It had some sort of basin from which overflowed a chalky orange paste that was overrun with insects like those they had fought before. A huge waxy shape took up the majority of one corner, and the gang surmised that it formed the insects’ hive.
They waited for the wizard to finish her ritual and pronounce the other room strongly enchanted before Sigvurd smacked his greataxe into the hive and the insects coalesced into two swarms and overran the barbarian.
Nemara had readied a bonfire, but hesitated when she saw the bugs sharing space with her party member. Sigvurd insisted he could survive the damage, and encouraged her to cast it.
The bonfire burned off the insects but left the swarming hive remaining. It also dried off Sigvurd’s clothes, which had been wet from the water room. This effect gave the barbarian an idea, and he immediately lit himself aflame and charged into the hive, a veritable human torch of bug-killing. Most inspiring!
The force and heat splattered the hive and incinerated most of the weird orange stuff, revealing two corpses. One with some healing potions and the other with a magical pearl, both wearing the red armour with an eight-pointed star. Vin began to realize a pattern, and thought about where she had seen the symbol before. She recognized it as the insignia of the Seekers, a group of unscrupulous archeologists and pseudohistorians.
They also found a mummified hand with a magic ring on it.
The gang split up the loot as they moved toward the yellow elevator and, on entering it, began to descend.
Rewards Granted
- Small gems x 12
- Everburning Torch x 1 (Claimed by Sigvurd)
- An Elaborate Red Lantern
- Ring with Seeker symbol (Claimed by Vin)
- Coins
- Scroll of Spare the Dying (Claimed by Vin)
- Healing Potions x4 (Distributed evenly among the party)
- Pearl of Power x1 (Claimed by Nemara)
- Ring of Feather Falling x 1 (Claimed by Lins)