Mandraiv's Diary 18

Sorry, but I really don't remember all of the details about the layout or the impact of the symbol  spells.  I think this is something approaching right though.

Unfortunately, before we were prepared the next day, the fungal skeletons returned, oozing out of the ground at some ridiculous hour of the morning.  Apparently they’d been regenerating overnight.  Fortunately, they were not fully recovered from the beating we handed them earlier, and this time they were much easier to defeat.  The dwarf then immediately lit a torch and proceeded to burn their remains to a fine, powdery ash.  That should stop them coming back.  We then settled back to sleep until the cleric was ready, and we all had our poisons taken care of, and until the cleric had some spells again in order to continue.  

We finally moved on, and found that the labyrinth entrance room led down to a pool of water with a pier and barge, and a couple of rooms.  There was a bedroom with little of note in it apart from a couple of sculptures, and a huge room, a temple, that contained a man with a cobra’s head and a couple of massive snakes.  Good old four-arms managed to once again talk us into a fight, and we were able to easily take out the snakes, but the snake headed man was another matter.  Fortunately, I summoned a couple of lantern archons to help us during the fight, and they recognised the beast for a rakshasa, some type of evil outsider.  They have to be evil – this one fought us.  Unfortunately, that was about all that the stupid little balls of light knew.  But we had discovered for ourselves that the thing was very difficult to hit, hard to grapple, and nigh-on impervious to damage.  We’ll need to come up with some way to harm these things, as there are bound to be more of them – silver didn’t work.  Hopefully blessing some weapons, and maybe trying cold iron or something will do the trick.

After defeating the rakshasa and his minions, we searched thoroughly.  I established that the pool did, in fact lead to open water through the use of a couple of water elementals, and presumably the wall at the end of the cavern is an illusion – there isn’t much point to a boat in a cave with only underwater access to the outside.  Although maybe there is a way through at low tide.  We were also able to discover a secret door which led to an unbelievably long (maybe even 100’), winding passage leading into the labyrinth proper.

The passage ended in a room where we found one of these magical labyrinth levers the man upstairs told us about.  Pulling it resulted in a feeling of rotation, and the opening to this room changing from leading back the way we came to a new room.  

Unfortunately, this room was magically trapped, a symbol of pain spell.  Pretty much all of us writhed on the floor in agony for a minute or two, then the feeling went away.  I handled it manfully, of course, although it was amusing to hear mutterings of “puny human” from four-arms through gritted teeth as he apparently cursed his own nature as the cause of his discomfort.  This room also contained a couple of doors and a pool of crystal clear water.  After I established that the pool wasn’t magical, the warrior immediately helped himself to a drink.  Within moments he went pale, at which point the cleric established that the water was poisonous.  Apparently suffering no ill effects regardless, he sensibly decided that one taste was enough.

The first door led into a room with three chests, apparently complete with traps, or at least the first one was.  After struggling with things like poison and poison gas, we got to the third chest.  This one wasn’t trapped, but did contain a small, poisonous snake.  Bit of a theme going here, but fortunately we also managed to retrieve a few restorative potions from it.  

This room contained nothing but another symbol. A sleep symbol.  This time, as four-arms muttered about the various puny qualities of humanity I was inclined to agree, as a little elf blood is all one needs to be rendered immune to such afflictions.  Regardless, as long as we are finding these symbols only in empty rooms, they are much less of a threat than if they were in populated sections of this unpleasant place. 

We also found another pool of crystal clear water.  Not poisonous this time, although the warrior was sensible enough to wait for the verdict this time before drinking.  This pool, it seems, may actually be helpful to us – the waters have a powerful healing effect, although attempts to remove the water in canteens and such resulted in it reverting to a dirty, almost muddy state with no helpful properties at all.  As well as healing waters, we discovered a couple more symbols.  The symbol of stunning was amusing, with the warrior triggering it and then standing around with glazed eyes for a minute or two, and then the next symbol had him running for his life.  Must have looked like some kind of bug.

Having explored all available options, we moved to trigger another laby-lever, and then all manner of things went wrong as another symbol went off, this one causing insanity in a couple of us.  That was irritating enough, but was made significantly worse when four-arms attempted to disable the trap and caused it to go off again.  This time, almost everyone was affected.  

The result of four-arms bungling was a suddenly dangerous situation.  With most of the group suddenly dangerous, and only four-arms and myself free to act normally, we needed to disable everyone fast.  Preferably without killing them.  In the end we managed it, although it was a very disturbing time with people like the warrior, the gun nut and even the ugly chick at various times coming within infinitesimally small margins of attacking me.  This was remarkably unpleasant, but a few summoned minions were able, in the end, to provide sufficient targets for my more sanitally challenged companions.  Hopefully the healing pool will be a powerful enough magic to restore sanity to these nut-cases.  Hopefully a little time resting on his home plane will be enough to restore sense to Artox too.  And I hope we’ve seen the last of these symbol spells.  They are really getting old.  Especially with what I know of some of the most dangerous of them.  I haven’t told everyone else about my concerns regarding say a symbol of death – I’m worried that some may become unmanned by the thought and decide that we don’t need to rescue the sword master after all.  Although come to think of it, I can’t really remember why we need to myself, and the man with evidence against the queen is only relevant if we don’t want to use force to usurp her, so maybe we really should just leave.  On the other hand, it is another opportunity for me to show my leadership of this band of misfits, and maybe reduce their petty bickering and denials over my position with them.