Episode 23 - "Rock-a-hula, Grim-lock-a-hula!"

Sword of Air

Episode XXIII

Rock-a-hula, Grim-lock-a-hula!

The crazed tree-creature bellows in Lightstrike’s face and smashes its bough-like arm into the earth in front of him, causing the ground to tremble and worms to dive for cover.
“Er, hello! I’m Lightstrike. Pleased to mee–”
The nimble Rogue vaults backwards behind a nearby tree as the Treant swings at him again, fortunately stumbling a little with its own lethal momentum and missing him by inches.
Mherren steps up, his hand poised upon the pommel of Pyron, but even he hesitates before this huge, maddened entity. Instead of drawing his great-sword, he throws the flask of Blue Aloe to Lightstrike and winks at him as though to say: you know what to do. Lightstrike nods grimly.
Meanwhile, Zimlok throws down a card from his deck of illusions and an illusory Fire Giant springs up from the soil, towering even over the Treant and swinging a great, fiery axe in its direction. The tree hesitates for a moment at the sight of the enormous flaming axe, and Haji Baba takes her opportunity to run up to the Wereleopard and mutter a few arcane words as she touches him lightly on the shoulder. Lightstrike feels a sudden stickiness upon the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, and he scampers up the tree like a squirrel.
Suspicious there might be something nearby controlling the Treant, for he knows them to ordinarily be peaceful Elf-friends and gentle giants of the forest, Zimlok advances and casts detect magic, but can find nothing except for his own illusion spell in the immediate vicinity. He curses, but then a fire burns in his beady, birdy eyes as an idea comes to him. He incants another spell and points his feathered fingers at the creature before him, whose visage is a momentary mask of puzzlement before it collapses to its knees and becomes wracked with fits of hideous laughter.
Lightstrike seizes his moment and leaps upon the Treant’s head, dousing it with Blue Aloe. It works! The ugly gashes in its bark that are oozing a putrid yellow sap instantly dry up and seal, and the strange fungal growths wither and fall away like dust. The daredevil Rogue swings down acrobatically, catching himself by one clawed hand on the Treant’s gnarled chin and hurling the remainder of the flask into its mouth.
Almost immediately a lustre returns to the creature’s eyes. As Lightstrike drops lightly to the floor, it shakes its great branch-laden head, blinks slowly, and focuses upon the four heroes before it. (Cool teamwork, guys – a masterclass in heroic exploits! – DM.)
“Wh–, what happened to me?” it says in Elvish, with a slow, booming voice. “Who are you?”
“We’re a fellowship of heroes, out to save the world from some terrible blight and searching for our missing friend, Elovyn Sorrowsong,” says Lightstrike. “We’ve come from Qualimor, where we saved the Queen from an assassin and found her favour. Who are you?”
“I’m, er, I’m…”
The Treant thinks for a moment as his clouded wits return to him. “I’m Longroot. Longroot Oakroot. I’m one of the Guardians of the Forest.”
“Can we call you Rooty?” asks Lightstrike.
“Erm. Well, yes. I suppose you probably can,” replies the talking tree, looking a little puzzled again.
“You looked like you had some kind of… infection,” says Mherren. “Do you remember anything?”
“Yes, I… it’s coming back to me now,” Longroot replies ponderously. “I was doing my usual patrol of the Galentaur, which takes me North of here near the border with the bowl of the Great Swamp. I recall seeing some strange beasts – things I’ve never seen before. Newts with too many legs; frogs with too many eyes; and there were great clouds of mosquitoes – far more than usual. I think I got bitten badly. Something foul in their saliva, I think. Or maybe there was something bad in the water that I took up through my roots. A bad case of yellowsap. It’s the bane of us Onodrim. Addles our minds… as you saw. I’m sorry. Did I hurt any of you?”
“No, we’re too cool and epic to worry about a silly old tree,” says Lightstrike, secretly thankful those great arms never connected with his skull, and Longroot looks relieved, or possibly slightly offended. It’s difficult to tell what trees are thinking.
“Have you seen anything else, Rooty?” inquires Haji Baba.
“Yes. Any Mind Flayers?” chips in Lightstrike.
“Mind Flayers? I don’t know what they are,” says Longroot.
“They’re like tall men with purple octopus heads, and they control people’s minds,” explains the Rogue.
“No. Nothing like that, I’m afraid – or rather, I’m relieved – to say. I saw a woman with horns and a tail. She was heading North-East, towards the Dragon Coast. She looked upset – I think. And I saw another woman – an Elf. She tied her horse to one of my trees, left all her luggage except for a large satchel, and walked towards the ravine, just a few miles from here. She looked a little dazed, and she was talking to someone, although I couldn’t see anyone else there. Something like: Arden? Is that really you? And she disappeared over the edge. When I looked down, she’d gone.”
“That sounds like Elovyn!” exclaims Mherren.
“And the other… could it be Šati?” wonders Lightstrike.
“Could you help us down there?” asks Zimlok.
“Yes, of course. I’d be honoured to help friends of the Elf-queen.”
And he carries the companions a few miles North and West, following the edge of the rift, with their horses following loyally. Well, Mabel looks a bit peeved, but then again she always does.
“Here we are!” he booms, and from the lip of the ravine he unfurls his roots and sends them down to the canyon floor. The four comrades shimmy down, and then Zimlok shimmies straight back up again when he thinks to leave a dangling rope and grapple at the top so they don’t become stranded. He secures two ropes together with one of his famously reliable double half-hitch sheepshank bowlines (never before tested, but almost certainly excellent).
“Don’t worry about your horses,” says Longroot. “I’ll look after them for you.” He hands Zimlok their panniers of provisions.
“Thank you,” says the Wizard. “And please send word to the Queen. Tell them where we’ve gone and ask them to send help.”
“I shall,” says Longroot, his weathered face cracking into a fond smile. “Fare thee well, brave travellers, and thank you all for curing my sickness. I hope you find your friend.”
Zimlok nods solemnly and shins down to meet his friends. When he looks up, Longroot has gone. The Fellowship find themselves in a narrow cleft nearly a hundred feet below the forest floor. It is gloomy down here, and a sullen brook gurgles over scattered stones and the occasional scattered animal bone. Lightstrike spots a strange-looking frog flopping across the stream. It has tentacles where its forelimbs should be, and a single eye upon a stalk. Revolted by this aberration of Nature, Haji Baba instinctively catches it and brutally guts it, as her friends gape at her in shock.
Disregarding, she uses her Druidic magic to talk to a scraggly, sorry-looking plant that protrudes from between some nearby rocks, and asks it if it has seen anyone pass this way in recent days. The plant struggles to count days, being a plant, and is more concerned with looking for the sun and praying for rain than mammal-watching, but it does confirm that it has seen “some big greyskins, and some little grey-skins, too,” going to and fro from a large cave in the North wall.
Cautiously, the friends go to investigate. They find a spacious, natural cave that recedes far back into the wall of the ravine. The cave is decorated with various faded, crude paintings of herd-beasts being hunted by humanoids with bows and arrows. Amongst these paintings Lightstrike finds a drawing of a winged, long-necked lizard that reminds Zimlok of the despicable Dragons he so loathes, which appear to have vanished from Yore except for their lesser kin, the Wyverns and Drakes, but who still terrorise his homeland in Tian Xia on the other side of the world. There are pictures of horned creatures like devils or demons, that look to be fleeing from the fearsome lizard.
Exploring further, Lightstrike finds a huge painting of a toad or frog. It covers the entire back wall of the cave, its great tongue lolling out and its bulbous eyes watching all who enter. Mherren contemplates these cave drawings with all the newfound erudition his headband of intellect provides him, and presently he forthrightly concludes that these paintings are at least five thousand, and possibly even as much as ten thousand, years old.
“I’d say they date back to the times of the Immortal Pharoah,” he pontificates, although when pressed it becomes clear that he has precious little idea who the Immortal Pharoah was or what he did. Still, the Immortal Pharoah lived long before the Age of Magic, way back in the Khorian Era, in the days of Old Nuria, thousands of years before the feudal kingdoms of Yore and the time of the forging of the Sword of Air. It would appear that these paintings are very, very old indeed.
The ever-curious Lightstrike finds a hole at the back of the cave, half-hidden behind a boulder. Upon its jagged rim is caught a single white thread. He signals to the others to approach, and they all peer squint-eyed into the dark hole.
A dank, dripping tunnel seems to lead deep into the wall of the ravine, large enough for even Mherren to walk through at full height so long as he remembers to duck for the occasional stalactite. Occasional sprinklings of earth crumble from the roof of the passage.
“We should light a torch,” says Lightstrike.
“No. Cast your light spell, Lightbringer,” contradicts Haji Baba. (Zimlok suspects he might detect a small degree of sarcasm in her tone, but he dismisses it as paranoia.)
“That would just light us up as targets,” counters Zimlok. “We should rely on our darkvision instead.”
“But Grimlocks are blind. It doesn’t matter if we’re lit,” argues Mherren. “We can’t see so well with darkvision alone.”
“Come on, let’s just go!” whines Lightstrike. Patience has never been his forté.
But to the frustration of the impulsive Rogue, a good hour of heated discussion follows, covering everything from mind-control prevention measures, to sensible marching orders, to the hygiene levels or lack thereof of Mherren’s socks.
Mherren himself puts the time to good use, however, intoning the complex ritual that summons Viper the Quasit from the writhing form of the pet snake he carries so unnervingly about his neck.
The snake transforms, and the Warlock sends his demonic imp familiar into the tunnel to investigate, his pupils rolling back to reveal the whites of his eyes as he looks through Viper’s sight.
Viper, wearing the ring of pass without trace and cloaked by invisibility, navigates the inky passageway with a brazen confidence in his own superhuman stealth. So confident is he, in fact, that he variously cha-cha-chahs, rhumbas, and hulas his way down the tunnel, until, after about a hundred yards or so, it opens up into a large cave filled with boulders, stalagmites and a fetid sump of cavewater. He stops gyrating for a moment to chuckle to himself as he spies the four superblycamouflaged Grimlocks flattened against the rocks in the middle of the cavern. They appear to be lookouts (or listenouts, or smellouts, perhaps, being Grimlocks), but they obviously have no inkling of the Quasit’s presence.
Viper continues hula-ing to another tunnel leading out of the cavern, pausing for a moment to wiggle his hips outrageously at the four impervious Grimlocks as he passes. This passage leads upwards, constricting and steepening as it goes until it becomes a narrow chimney at whose top can be glimpsed a faint sliver of daylight. “No good,” he rasps to himself, and returns to the cavern, where the Grimlocks are still hiding, and he hulas flagrantly past them to a second exit that gradually declines deeper underground. This passage is wide, and shows a waterline as though it might be prone to flash flooding. The floor is shingly and loose, but the sneaky demon pads along with barely a sound.
Once Viper has followed the tunnel for a few hundred yards, and determined there are no other creatures around, Mherren recalls him and the four adventurers proceed into the darkness. They meet with the imp, benefitting from the magic of the ring of pass without trace, and silently draw their knives as they creep like shadows behind the oblivious Grimlocks…