2023/03/07: Fungicide Part 3 Report
General Summary
Knight, Ril, Ba'alzamon, Eldrin, Union, Zaran, Sith
For both irony and safety, Ril put the comatose archer into temporal stasis, and Knight stuck her in his internal inventory.
Zaran reappeared from wherever he'd briefly vanished to. He had no idea where he'd gone; as far as he knew, time had just skipped forward. The party filled him in on the end of the fight. When Zaran said Knight looked rather sprightly for a dead guy, Knight informed him that Ril was a wonderful, wonderful person and he was glad to have her with him. The party chatted about time shenanigans as they prepared to set out again.
Suddenly, a wash of odd color briefly spread over the room. Reddish drips of strange energy began falling from the ceiling and collecting into six pools around the room. Three pillars of white-purple energy swirled into existence, wisps of flame flickering around them. And finally a giant, fiery blue wraith-like being about 60 feet across phased through the wall and floated towards the party.
The wraith charged, and the pools of liquid formed into red slimes.
Knight evaluated whether the wraith elemental was physical enough to be hit, and decided his artifact sword was up to the task. He dashed in, tore a chunk out of it, and dodged away to the side, hoping to either dodge its charge or draw it away from the others.
The oozes made their own entrances. Durrian dodged out of the way, but a second fiery ooze landed solidly on Zaran's head. Another flailed at Ril. Zaran responded by tearing the ooze hat to pieces with his claws. Ril kept away from hers and buffed the party, speeding up and protecting the fighters and making every other attack on the others miss. Durrian dodged away from his oozes, grabbed another from near Zaran, tossed it back at the other two, and then punched them full of holes. As he did, he took the opportunity to throw a second spear at one of the fire pillars, spinning it in a helicopter-like fashion. It appeared to actually do damage.
The fire wraith chomped down on Knight, but compared to the damage from the assassins, this was nothing. He responded with a time-enhanced flurry of attacks, shredding it to pieces just as it tried to reform nearby. Durrian and Zaran took the remaining oozes apart in their own barrages of spearpoints and claws.
Sith suddenly reappeared, having been displaced just like Zaran.
Ril tried to summon a dimensional box around one of the fire pillars to contain it, but as soon as the box started to form, the pillar shattered. At the same time, with her magic eye, Ril saw the Old One's avatar walking slowly through the wall towards the group. She promptly shared this with the rest of the team via the group mind.
Sith didn't have anything to do about that for the moment, so he charged the nearest fire pillar with his giant sword. As he got close, wisps of flame reached out from the pillar and tried to grab hold of him. His strength and resistances proved too great for them, however; he pushed through without issue and battered the pillar into pieces. (And made it fall over, get doused with water, levitate, and then shrink and wink out of existence. And he blinked himself back to the party, because wild magic.) Durrian followed up by smashing a second pillar.
The surviving purple pillar glowed brightly and then swept a laser beam across the room, smashing anyone it touched. The fortress of gears Ril had cast protected Durrian and Zaran, and the rest of the party was able to avoid more than glancing hits, but it was still a powerful strike.
Then the avatar mage stepped through the wall.
The mage gleefully muttered that it was "meal time" and the room shifted around the party; in a matter of moments, it became the same room they had seen when scrying on the mage before.
The battle that followed was lengthy by Renedge standards. Ril released the demon lord Tazarak the Fatesealer who had been trapped in her eye, forcing him to do one favor (fighting the avatar) in return; the avatar launched a barrage of potions, weapons, and other objects that disabled Tazarak's magic and defenses. Durrian went on the offensive; the avatar simply phased out of the way. Sith cast a wild zone and wild strike to force all spells and charged items to wild surge; the avatar's abilities proved to not be magic. The avatar, blinded by Zaran's light grenade, threw barrages of more than forty projectiles in the party's general direction; Durrian and a quad-wielding Knight deflected every last one.
In the midst of all this, thanks to a wild surge, Ril managed to accidentally open a gate to the Abyss, through which came another demon lord. Fortunately, Korsuchs the Mad proved perfectly willing to take Durrian's bet that he couldn't "blow up that turtle", and when the avatar (which had recently been polymorphed into a tortle) proved annoyingly dodgy, the demon lord took it as a personal challenge and fully committed.
The first stage of the fight finally ended when Sith caught the avatar in a fireball too large and powerful to escape. Galesh discarded the burning body of the mage, a fresh humanoid form breaking out of the charred shell like a moth from a cocoon.
The next stage saw the avatar freely depositing targets into a maze effect and swapping the environment of the arena from one hostile atmosphere to the next. He did little damage, but he seemed nigh-invulnerable in turn. However, Durrian and Sith discovered that while the avatar was immune to both magic and standard physical attacks, physical strikes targeted at specific parts of the avatar's body had a chance of breaking through. Durrian took off the avatar's head, Knight destroyed both arms and one leg, Tazarak lopped off the other, and then Durrian buried his spear in the body's chest. As each part had been removed, it had been replaced by an invulnerable eye-covered tentacle, but with this last blow, the pieces all faded away.
And then the room shifted, and the adventurers and demons found themselves in a place of blackish flesh, studded with eyeballs.
As Zaran, Union, and the time elemental Chronos rushed to apply the ascension crystal to the fleshy floor, disintegrating eyebeams flashed out from the many eyes. All were dodged, some by the skin of their teeth. Time went odd for a moment; Sith and Ril clearly remembered Sith being disintegrated and absorbed into the being of this monster, but at the same time Sith's teleport contingency went off and the monster was being disintegrated as well, with Sith waking up as a soul back in his tower with Chaz-Achk-Thuum. But then he was back in the flesh-room, intact, having been just bumped out of the way of the beam by Knight's wing.
Then the ritual went off. Back in New Hallownest, a huge amount of energy poured through the ritual circle. The circle was burned an inch into the stone it was drawn on, and even the mithril foci were melting. A giant mystic hum lasted for several seconds as power was redirected into another plane of existence. A vast amount of energy was channeled directly through Ba'alzamon's neural pathways, wiping out his remaining memorized spells but, fortunately, letting him retain the ability to spellcast. Meanwhile, on the targeting front, Eldrin watched the unfolding of one of the most beautiful explosions he'd seen in his life.
The planet-sized body of the Old One was struck by a planetary scale dimensional superlaser. Whatever the reddish beam of light was made from, it made the alien flesh ignite, then explode, and then whatever was hit by the explosion exploded, and on and on from there. The detonating flesh became fuel for further explosions. Eldrin's only remaining concern as he watched was that he was pretty sure the adventuring party was inside the thing when it went off.
The party inside, as the explosions raged past them and battered at their coruscating shields, found themselves experiencing the distinct smell of cinnamon.
As the last of the explosions faded, the strike team and the demon lords found themselves floating in an odd, empty place. Sith and Ril mentally controlled the chaos of the realm to give the group a floor to stand on. As they wondered what to do next and looked around in hopes that the lost party might be in there as well, they found that whatever objects were left were slowly floating towards the group. These pieces, they discovered, were artifact-tier items that had been absorbed by the Old One over millennia and had survived its detonation. Aside from this windfall and a disgusting rug that was all that was left of Galesh's corpse, nothing remained.
After going through the loot, all of it unfamiliar, they realized that this was in some ways a good sign; if nothing else of the lost party had survived, Rodger's ring would. That it wasn't in the pile meant that Rodger, at least, hadn't been caught.
The party transported to Castle Fallingstar via one of Ril's items, which served to get Durrian back to his home. The rest of the party returned to New Hallownest to check in. Scrying revealed that Rodger's party had survived intact, and just about when Galesh died, they had popped out in a cavern to the northwest of Darkhome. Apparently they had spent the last few weeks slowly retreating away from Galesh's territory in another dimension inside Rodger's shield boxes. Fortunately, whatever dimensional shenanigans were involved, the retreat had taken less time from the perspective of that party than it had from the outside world. Still, they had been traveling outside any plane of existence for some time, kept safe only by Rodger's mind; he professed to Knight that he had a serious headache and could use some tea, a quiet place, some time with his apprentices, and maybe a game night. Knight, after checking that the apprentices had survived the invasion of the city, said that could be arranged.
As for the city, it had suffered in the meantime, but while architectural damage was serious, fatalities were relatively light. The walls and Ba'alzamon's myriad summons had held their own against the half-dozen drow and formian adventuring parties that had invaded while the city's high-level defenders were away. The only civilian deaths had been two dozen of the death phase spiders, all of whom were in a state to be resurrected or reincarnated. And as long as the citizens were alive, New Hallownest could be rebuilt.
The invading adventuring parties, for their part, had mostly escaped intact. One party had been wiped out, while another had tangled with Ba'alzamon's super-trolls and at least two of the drow in that party had died and been left. Apparently these groups had learned that the city's usual heavy hitters were absent, and had decided to take advantage of that.
Rewards Granted
XP: 3
Items:
amethyst horse statue
giant brass apple
dagger
hand axe
complete dart set
wand
rags
stone, 3 foot tall, greenish
bronze shortsword
neutral-colored poncho
twisted black idol shortsword
glowy stone
obsidian trapazoid
silver scroll case
gooey throw rug
large Rock with titan rune
small rock with titan rune
green snake ring
blue and white large shield
black stone staff
golden chest
silver serpent coin
delicate peach tree slippers
Missions/Quests Completed
Destroy the fungal Old One, Galesh.
Character(s) interacted with
Galesh, Chronos, Tazarak the Fatesealer, Korsuchs the Mad, Rodger Silverton, Ngel Sfet, Sunderfury Ironspire, the Hollow Knight, Scyka, God Tamer, Calabad the Adventurer
Sith
Union
Zaran
Knight of Darkhome
Eldrin Stormseeker
Aetheril
Ba'alzamon Dreamender
Report Date
07 Mar 2023
Primary Location
Secondary Location
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