Session 56

Fyllia Underverse explores the prison.

Two incidents are revealed. On the one hand, several prisoners were crushed by the creature that made the passage we've been following.

Fyllia finds a journal in dwarfish, it looks pretty mundane. Storm figures we might be able to return it to the family. With a helpful gesture, Fyllia uses prestidigitation to clean up the blood, but that spell takes away the ink as well. Storm is disappointed but Hali seems happy enough to acquire a new blank notebook.

On the other side of the place, Fyllia finds the bodies of the original potato lady & the other guy. Presumably, they starved to death, huddled in a corner as far away from Saga as possible. It seems likely that the blood creature only copied their form after their death.

In the center cell, a woman's body is still kneeling in a circle of dark, dried blood. We see it's Saga! She's slit her own throat with a sharpened bone, in a creepy ritual. She was clearly a worshipper of Sangrün and seems to have invoked the blood creature. Her prayer book is still lying next to her.

Fyllia finds:

3 pairs of manacles with keys, which she adds to her collection of manacles
several drab prison uniforms, ranging in size from dwarf to human
rations of jerky and ale
a few weapons not worth the encumbrance of looting them - they're good weapons in general, as all dwarvish smithing is, but still standard issue for prison guards
3 gold pieces, which captain Ezra hands over to El for the bank.

Virgil and Hali investigate Saga's prayer book, but Virgil soon tosses it aside. He feels the information about devils not having a soul is utter horse shit!He disagrees with that, he feels he's not that different from a regular human. When Storm side-eyes his red face & his horns, Virgil explains that he didn't know he was anything else than a human until he was, like, 15. We wonder what puberty must have been like for him, if it turned his skin red and made horns and wings grow in, and a tail too!

*

Fyllia sings for us : Sing us a song, you're a manacle man, sing us a song to forget the pain. It helps us recover during a short rest.

*

We start following the tunnel again. Eventually we reach a more horizontal part. El can see in the dark, Hali is second, Fyllia is in the middle, Storm follows, Virgil is next and Ezra closes our ranks.

After a while, Storm can't take the crouching anymore and holds onto Fyllia's shoulders (with the promise to not massage them) so he can bend at the waist rather than twist his head sideways. Resting his forehead against Fyllia's back is restful.

As we progress, we hear some small creatures skittering away from our torch & the light of Fyllion's crown. It looks like we're reaching a more cavernous area with a small underground spring! We catch a glimpse of smaller tunnels, as if more of those burrowing creatures live here. Virgil hangs back as much as possible, his wounds are still painful and he wants to avoid any fight.

We investigate the water. Ezra notices where the water enters the cavern, where some small creature must have dug into an underground stream. It smells clean but the water will soon flood this cavern. Fyllia asks if she can ride Storm's shoulders while he crosses the thigh-high water. Even as Storm nods in agreement, Hali offers to make us walk on water.

Suddenly we feel a rumbling under the ground. A monster with claws and chitinous plates like a praying mantis pops out in the middle of our huddle! It realized we were all standing together (for Hali's touch-based spell) & decided to attack! Just looking at it makes us feel fuzzy. Hali's spell takes effect, but Virgil is cut off from the group.

The battle starts with a surprise round:

the umberhulk bites at Ezra but misses. It does manage to claw Storm! Storm yelps in pain
El's sword warned them, so they can react. Alas, the umberhulk's gaze has a confusing effect, and El's not wearing their mask because we're underground. El fails the charisma save and they slap Hali with their blade! Hali cries out in indignation

the umberhulk attacks Ezra with mandibles, misses Fyllia and hits Storm with a NATURAL TWENTY. Storm is weak at the knees
Ezra attempts to cast a web on the creature but the gleam in the eyes of the umberhulk throws them off. In their confusion, they hit the creature with their short word for a NATURAL SIX of damage. The creature looks offended that Ezra can resist! Baaloo also leaps into action
Storm sees the large slitted eyes and the beady small eyes, and feels overwhelmed. The umberhulk just stares back at a stilled Storm
El, wised up from the previous round, looks away from the umberhulk and backs up with the words "and now you are going to die". They have to throw their El(drin)'s blasts blindly. With a hurried apology, El hits once and misses once. The umberhulk screeches in pain
Hali fails to resist the gaze and stumbles in a random direction, into the tunnel where El also took shelter
Virgil manages a DIRTY TWENTY fueled by his rage over another weird encounter! He manages to stab the umberhulk once. Next he backs away into some hole to hide! On his way sneaking away, the umberhulk hits him. Virgil warns us about the gaze
Fyllia fails to resist the gaze and scurries away in the same direction as El and Hali

the umberhulk bites at Ezra and hits, and claws at Storm twice. Only one claw hits. We see how the umberhulk looks around, planning its exit as soon as it has secured a meal
Ezra is bleeding. They close their eyes. They disengage and run on top of the water
Storm also disengages (for once). As he passes the hind paw, he kicks out and hits once, and then Storm joins Ezra on the water
El resists the gaze and uses the hex blade's curse in combination with the El(drin)'s blasts. One blast hits and singes the chitinous skin. El takes a step back. They see some more tunnels, they're just big enough to hide in, but also small enough to keep the umberhulk out
Hali looks over her shoulder and notices she's just about safe from its gaze. She activates her moonbeam! She looses a starry arrow but misses. Hali yells out a warning about keeping sufficiently far away. It would be best if someone could keep the creature from moving much
Virgil blindly throws a ray of fire with a hurried warning that we should keep out of the way. He misses completely at first, but his second wave of fire hits, with three times NATURAL SIX for damage!
Fyllia wins the stare-off and resists the gaze. Fyllia dashes around the corner and uses mantle of inspiration on Ezra, Storm and herself. We get to choose a better position! Fyllia tries to hide, but her whimpers are giving her position away

the umberhulk can resist most of the moonbeam. It puts its feet on the ground to track our vibrations & chooses the biggest cluster to attack. It attacks El three times with both a NATURAL TWENTY and a DIRTY TWENTY. El uses hellish rebuke as a reaction! The beast is looking worse for wear by now
Ezra chooses a new position, out of reach of the gaze but within visual range. They drop their sword and attack with their bow. Thanks to Baaloo's help, the umberhulk gets an arrow between its 4 eyes, and it's dead!

Storm thanks the captain, Hali dispels the moonbeam and Virgil comes closer too. We take a look at the umberhulk. It's clearly a burrowing creature, but it's too small to have made the tunnel we were following.

Several of us are badly wounded, should we try to find a place to rest? As we explore the burrows to take stock of our options, we see a lot of eggs and smaller creatures. They have all been eaten and crushed, as if a bigger predator swept through here. That tracks with the tunnel, which is larger than the umberhulk we just defeated... are we really safe here?

Seeing that several of her companions are too hurt to travel on, Fyllia leads by example & spreads her bedroll on the water. Before she can even lie down, the bedroll sinks and is lost. We choose one of the crevasses to hunker down.

*

WE LEVELED UP!

*

When we wake up, we see Virgil rinsing his bandages. Hali and Storm help him out with prestidigitation on the soiled cloth. Storm offers a massage, but Virgil thinks the blade was the same as El's hex blade, and anyway he knows how painful an athletic massage can be. Hali uses lesser restoration. Virgil compliments her, finally he's in the company of competent minions. Hali and Ezra ignore him, but Fyllia orders him to apologize for calling Hali a minion. Virgil grumbles that he just isn't used to friendly company: he reveals he was taken to hell at 15, and now he's 34, so manners haven't been his priority. We're all a little upset about our age gaps:

Ezra is 28 and still feels like a baby, all the more now they've pranked Jacob into paying for a 10 000 gold bag of holding
El is an edgy teenager through and through, no matter their chronological age
Fyllion is either a toddler or eternal, the only people he knows less about than himself are his parents, but one thing is sure: the whole family sounds cool
Storm has never felt older in this company, despite being the same age as Ezra, he's already retired from one career and fully into middle age for his species
Hali is confident enough that she just smiles enigmatically when we discuss our ages
Virgil is either stunted or grows up slower than any of us

The conversation peters out when Virgil repeats that he's been hunting Eluviel for several months now, and his father will kill him if he fails. And Daeis never goes back on his word, he's aspiring to become a god after all.

As we're walking, Storm asks some more questions:

50 years ago, Eluviel signed away all the souls in the holy city in exchange for immediate access to the powers of a god
several months ago, the deal came to an end (because the 50 years are up) & Eluviel has to pay up... but he's trying to cheat by constantly moving the city to a new location or a different plane
the souls go into a river of blood in hell, it's probably sentient. Feeding that many souls in one go, would earn any faction, and the person responsible, a huge promotion.

We exchange knowing looks : the river of blood, that has to be linked to Sangrün, right? If they're competing factions in hell, no wonder the Sangrün prayer book slandered devils so extensively. Also, we know why Eluviel made the deal 50 years ago: that was the battle of the Bay of Beasts... but was the cost really worth the result? A city's worth of souls for a bunch of war crimes? And if Eluviel had the power of a god these past 50 years, what has he been doing with them, beyond the battle? We're too uncomfortable to raise the subject.

*

After a while, El signals that we should keep quiet because there is light up ahead. We douse our (magical) lights and successfully sneak closer.

It's a cave with luminous mushrooms, it looks like a starry sky! El, Ezra and Storm notice that there's a lot of giant bats crawling across the ceiling between the mushrooms. A noise approaches from the other side of the canyon. With a woosh we see a small light flying closer.

Suddenly a white arrow slams into the rock next to us. It's trailing a gossamer rope. A big shape flies nearer, lampooned by lots of those arrows, trailing silky ropes. On three white moths, 3 hunters are chasing the flying shape. Their hunt is waking up the bats, so we quickly duck out of the canyon back into the tunnel.

*

A few minutes later, we notice that the tunnel ends in a dead end. Upon closer inspection, we see that the way through as been blocked by a heap of stone coffin lids and rubble. We can still see a faint blue light pulsing through some gaps.

Hali uses the scroll of stone shaping and manages to make the lids and rubble flow away. We find ourselves in a side branch of a very large crypt. There are several sarcophagi here, and a trail of destruction indicating the burrowing creature passed here as well.

There are remains of the interred people strewn around, as well as shreds and tatters of intricately woven silk brocade, that still holds a trace of magic. Further grave gifts also lie around, broken.

From the main part of the crypt, a blue magic light seems to pulsate in the lingering scent of incense.