Having made our arrangements with the foxy rakshasa, we continued
our search for the sword master and the other guy. We discovered a few more traps, but nothing
as annoying as the glyphs, and eventually concluded that we had covered
everywhere we could with the current arrangements, and that the only thing left
to do was to poke around with a room containing four glowing spheres, all radiating
conjuration magic – teleportation spheres.
I summoned up some minions and we sent them through, but they were
unable to tell us much. We also managed
to establish that one of the levers in the room alters the destinations of the
teleportation circles. Playing around
with this, another series of minions enabled us to establish that three of the spheres
sent their activators to areas of the maze we were familiar with, and the last
one sent them either too far for the minion to return to us before my control of
it faded away, or that it led somewhere the minion was destroyed.
Figuring that this was our only way forward towards our goal, we
started going through this last teleportation sphere. One at a time – a most unsatisfactory option,
leaving us terribly exposed at times.
The sphere led to an impressive room, some kind of throne room where we
found the sword master, manacled of course, and a lion-demon-woman. We killed the lion-demon-woman and released
the sword master. The sword master was
able to tell us that the other man we sought was, in fact, not in the maze at
all (a relief, given that we hadn’t found him anywhere) and so we exited the
maze and started searching again.
An illusory wall was discovered and led us to the successful
conclusion of the second part of our mission.
Behind it was a torture chamber, complete with demon torturer and our
target, stretched out on the rack and not having a very enjoyable time of
things. We killed the demon and rescued
the seneschal. Further exploration
revealed nothing apart from the mechanism for turning the gears of the maze,
giant wheels pushed around by undead elephants.
Quite an elegant solution.
We headed out of the area, expecting an ambush and our expectations
were met almost immediately by a giant reefclaw. It was big and nasty, but should have posed
little threat. Unfortunately, it was
flying which increased its effectiveness unpleasantly, but we were able to
dispatch it with relative ease, although there was some unpleasant grappling,
falling and swimming involved. We then
met up with the foxy rakshasa again and headed upstairs to take on the
boss. A bad move, I felt, but potentially
a profitable one.
It was, indeed a bad move.
The boss revealed during the fight that he had been spying on us through
four-arms’ ring, another massive blunder from four-arms in Artox’s view,
although I felt that this was a little unreasonable. The fight went poorly as the boss-man used
dust of disappearance, and massively powerful magical item of invisibility, to
really cause us grief. He knocked me out
in seconds, as him and his rakshasa allies all targeted me with lightning
bolts, and proceeded to do the nasty to the cleric, the archer and the gun
nut. Fortunately four-arms and the
warrior were able to carry those of us who were unconscious out of the manor
through a front window, and we escaped.
I suspect the foxy rakshasa was in for a tough time though. We’ll have to come back soon and sort this
guy out. He was really quite tough,
although if we can find a way to sort out the problem with his invisibility, and
perhaps ensure that everyone has the means to bypass the resistances of these
rakshasa demons - although our experiments thus far had revealed the way
through the resistance, we really need to have everyone ready to beat it, not
just a couple of people. Still, despite
our somewhat inglorious conclusion to this part of our adventures, we had, in
fact, succeeded on our mission, if not at the murder of the rakshasa boss and
his cronies.
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