A Tunnels and Trolls® play-by-post adventure run by khara_khang
Over and over it has happened, ever since Tasyjai handed over her flier to the Wizard: surprise, guess-work, macabre jeer of death. And after each event, there has been only momentary respite, never the opportunity to think for very long. Tasyjai counts her thoughts, waiting for the next assault. She feels sucked into a maelstrom's center, enveloped vampirously, way over her head, choking for breath. It's hardly the adventure for which she volunteered. With each revolution, new and more deadly things sweep into view, and Tasyjai's blanched and agonized face wonders what will come next. She guesses each interruption will bring less respite in which to check her resolve and bolster her willpower to survive.
In a gravelly Orc voice so low that it is barely audible (and some hear him not at all), Shipy calls, "Maybe you're right Jax, we should have some light to see what we might be missing?" Shipy feels at ease for once. There is no danger here. He is almost certain, he tells himself. Repeatedly.
Jax prefers darkness as all Orcs do, but he knows that infravision does not show the details of inanimate objects. A ring, a lens, even a stick of wood untouched can blend into the ambient and escape detection.
The adventurers stir restlessly as sounds of swaying, snugly-wrapped items echo throughout the pipe. Everyone watches the rat suspiciously as it breathes its last gasps of breath and becomes still.
Dark wavings and odd gleanings hinted that the ceiling might be occupied, but there is no doubt moments later when the Wizards cast their spells.
Upon invoking Detect Magic, Bela sees all residual magic in the effluvia-coated pipe blaze alive, viscid patches glowing like diamonds lit by a deep blue flame. He also sees the magical mist, a seething fog whose dark vapor strands entwine the group and stain anyone they touch with a bright scarlet glow, a bullseye that effectively cries out, "Bite me!" Bela tries to rub the stain off to no avail. The fog curls and weaves about him and his fellow delvers like so many coils of living black cord---an endless, skinny, ebon serpent. A hateful dusty odor is thick in his nostrils, and the malicious nature of the mist is all too apparent.
Thousands upon thousands of Kaili Sewer Spider eyes, suffused with the pipe's mixed magicks, dart from Bela to each other and then back again. The ceiling writhes as if alive, salted with dark splotches of quivering webbing, peppered with black plum-sized spiders. Were he knowledgeable of the exotic fauna that inhabit Wizard drains, he might have remembered (albeit with some chagrin) that Kaili Sewer Spiders often daub themselves with mud to mask their heat signature and that their bite contains a hallucinogenic paralytic poison which treats its victims to a horrifying trip from which they never return.
The two Orc-sized boulders near the rat each hold eight huge, deep blue eyes of supped magic. The first glimpse of the enormous crouching spiders waiting in ambush makes Bela's fingers dig painfully into his palms and almost gasp, but not from the pain: he is aware that magic permeates everything here and might grant the spiders undo resistance to offensive magic.
Cat Eyes in effect, Sweetsong beholds the same ghastly horror that Bela sees (sans the multitude of magically-lit spider orbs).
It is a moment when the whole universe seems to pause and twist askew. At the same time that Bela and Sweetsong cast their spells, Midnight creates a light source using Will-o-Wisp and almost immediately drops it down the vertical pipe. But that tiny light has a much less desirable effect: instantly, a spectral green light gleams up from the 10-foot wide pile of refuse at the bottom of the 20-foot vertical shaft. Even the vertical sides of the slime-coated shaft fluoresce brightly green. Everyone above unaided by magical sight is effectively blinded!
Note that from this point until noted otherwise by me, or until a new light is created (or the Will-o-Wisp cancelled), no one can see more than a few feet in front of them. If you look down the vertical pipe, all you can see is glow. The exception is Sweetsong; her Cat Eyes spell allows her to see regardless. Only Bela can see the magic the spiders contain.
There is a hint of all-pervading sound in the air, a mighty susurrus just below the threshold of hearing, as if an orchestra of unseen arachnids were tuning up their instruments. These sensations are as intangible as the force that draws you onward, as the light which limits your Orcish sight. Whoever comes here, comes as food. The thick webs matting the ceiling burst with the frenzied activity of more black spiders than Bela or Sweetsong ever wanted to know.
Beyond the opening of the vertical shaft, and beyond the vision of all save Sweetsong, the two giant, gaunt-bodied, mud-daubed spiders rise from the muck, standing with knees bent and feet wide-planted, holding aloft round, hairy, dirt-covered bodies.
Jax hesitates, blind. From the darkness beyond something twangs, not unlike a loosed arrow, and strikes him solid in the leg. Suddenly, Jax is jerked off his feet and he finds himself being swiftly dragged forward! The vertical shaft arrives sooner than he would have expected; Jax free-falls upside down, reaches the end of whatever line is stuck to his leg, then bounces up again, then down, then back up a little less than last time, and you get the picture. During the process, his scimitar flips free and clangs somewhere down below.
A second twang and Tasyjai is caught around the leg with the same sticky substance and is pulled her off her feet just like Jax. She scoots quickly across the horizontal pipe but misses the narrower vertical shaft opening. She's off into the darkness, to where the rat lies in death. The thirty-foot drag happens almost instantly (like the snap of a rubber band). As if on cue, thousands of plum-sized spiders began raining on everyone within the pipe.
What do you do?
This is bad. Why did they move so close before deciding on a plan? Bela can ponder these things as he acts; such is the spirit in the Elfin line from which he descends that gives him undying long life yet instantaneous swiftness. His is a life simultaneously in two worlds, one of flesh and the other of spirit. So he sees his enemy with his magical sight, and curses Jax's reliance upon heat vision. As fascinating as it may be, anything in the sewer is likely to be accustomed to living without light. But perhaps it in an Orc's nature to avoid light and in an Elf's to be drawn to it.
Jax is out of the way and Taysyjai, too. Straight ahead are two large enemies. Above and around them are too many small ones. He casts a spell that brings both more light and an attack on the other creatures. Aiming up at the flammable silken nets with their swarming feeders, Bela launches a great bolt of flame.
Blasting Power costs 8 on level 3, but Bela is level 4, so it costs him 7. If I recall, it is 4 dice (1 die per level) plus combat adds. Bela's adds are +14 melee and +25 for ranged weapons. It is a shock value spell like TTYF.
Jax's head spins as blood rushes to it. Above he hears much rustlings and scurryings, but the newly phosphorescent shaft walls (courtesy of Midnight) limit his vision to a few feet in the visible spectrum until an impressive flash of flame sets the main pipe ablaze. And then it is all too clear what they face.
"Frak!"
He winces, one part from racial aversion to light (a reflex mostly rendered ineffective by the Uruk-Hai, or---say it isn't so!---Human impurities in his Draconian lineage, which have, through the generations eliminated in Jax the usual Orcish sensitivity to light), and two parts from the embarrassment of being caught off guard and disarmed.
The detached and analytical Haroouugh part of his brain labors to rationalize recent events. How could they not have seen the spiders? But of course, it makes sense that a predator in the dark would evolve defenses against the dark-adapted vision of its prey. He should've realized that; is he really fated to eat crow pie on his every delve?
The more familiar part of his brain has its own realization: he cannot do much good bouncing upside down from his foot---the same one he lost in his first ill-fated mission ("I got better!") [cf. Agents of Lerotra'hh --ed.]. So Jax whips out the bagh nakh at his belt and tries to cut himself loose, while he looks around the bottom tunnel (necessarily in the visible wavelengths thanks to the Will-o-Wisp and the conflagration above) for any other surprises.
The flash from Bela's spell does much to illuminate the area; Midnight notices the teeming hordes on the roof of the pipe. "They may be covered in mud to hide from our eyes but that same mud will also hamper them, especially when baked rock-hard. Get down!" With that, she casts her own Blasting Power at the roof. This should hopefully slow them down enough for us to aid Jax and Tasyjai.
Tasyjai screams as she feels the web whip around her leg and drag her suddenly forward. Her scream turns into a loud grunt as she falls on her butt and is slightly stunned. Silently cursing herself for switching weapons, she promptly drops her bow and arrow and is then blinded by spellfire. Cursing loudly in Elven, she covers her eyes with her left arm, reaches for her dagger with her right hand and blindly attempts to cut her leg free from the web rope which has entangled her feet.
Sweetsong casts Zap at the large spider on the right. Then she pulls out her knife, yells, "Spiders everywhere!" and starts attacking any little spiders that come near her. "I hate spiders," she mutters as she attacks the little spiders.
Although the rat is officially dead, thousands of equally horrible spiders remain, many of which are already dropping from their sheltered perches into the pipe (and onto you). Horror is everywhere. And that's not even counting the two big spiders hanging back and roping in Jax and Tasyjai!
Bela's reaction to the crippling, crawling arachnid horror comes first. Tapping into his mystic reservoir, the Elf creates a kremm conduit and expertly transforms magic to reality, with devastating results: a supercharged bright explosion of light and deafening sound that temporarily blinds everyone except Jax, who hangs upside down like a monkey from a vine. Overhead, the entire meshed canopy ignites into a blistering arachnid inferno. [Shipy takes 1 CN hit, Bela and Midnight take 2 CN hits and Sweetsong takes 3 CN hits from spider bites. Jax and Tasyjai take none.]
Fire is not so good for spiders, for they tend to sizzle in cute little purple-blue flames of death: first they draw their hairy legs in, then their eyes bulge, next they contort themselves in several variations of agony, and lastly, their cooked innards pop through their cephalothoraxes and abdomens in a shower of green mucus gore. Although the fire considerably diminishes the available number of spiders, they are still coming at you. In fact, they seem to be redoubling their efforts, streaming down the walls towards your warm Orc bodies in mass quantities.
Purple-blue flames hungrily leap from web to web as the conflagration flows quickly along the pipe ceiling. With the intense heat, traces of flammable gasses within the flame-charged pipe ignite, spiking the fiery hue with a mixture of violet, velvet black and ermine white. Like a pack of hunting hounds unleashed, the flames race away along invisible twisting strands of gas, sinuously writhing and inexorably returning back towards the group as if directed.
Midnight thinks of casting Blasting Power too, but it is impossible to aim a spell while blind and slapping off biting spiders.
Sweetsong faces the same problem: she is effectively blinded by the sudden burst of light so she cannot target a spell. She raises her arm to shield her burning eyes, while dropping spiders land on her and scurry for unprotected skin to bite. She feels like a captive butterfly struggling to escape. She realizes that she must act now; if she waits too long for her sight to return, or is bitten too many times, she will not be able to gather the necessary strength to escape. And in all the chaos, the opportunity to attack may never come. Her life hinges on her next move. Sweetsong's throat burns, her heart pounds within her ribs, her lungs struggle for air. A stinging, numbing poison from all the spider bites starts seeping through her limbs.
Bela, Midnight and Sweetsong have several options:
The single cord of web holds Jax suspended upside down beyond the vertical shaft and in the center of the horizontal shaft below it. With unexplained timing, the threads of the strand snap and unravel just as Jax considers cutting the line, and just as Bela's fireball explodes in the upper pipe. Jax falls unceremoniously into the large pile of debris below him.
Meanwhile above, Tasyjai is reeled in as the catch of the day. Two dozen different analogies could be concocted to describe Tasyjai as bait. Humbled by her own scream, she blindly slashes her dagger in a figure eight. The lower loop of her swipe nicks the floor; the upper loop, the web strand, severing it instantly.
Feeling the tension in the web rope slacken, but too blinded to confirm it, Tasyjai attempts to get to her feet. However, instantly the two huge spiders are upon her. It is an utterly horrible feeling to sense, but not see, the efficient approach of two huge spiders closing in for the kill. Two lightning-fast needles thrust forward deep into Tasyjai's arm, unleashing paralytic poisons into her bloodstream. Suddenly nerveless, the fingers at the end of the injected arm go slack, and her dagger drops free. [Tasyjai takes 3 CN hits and is poisoned. Her dagger, bow and arrow remain where they were dropped.]
Shipy runs forward in pain, his Orcish hair smoking from the heat of Bela's spell. With dumb luck he stumbles awkwardly into Tasyjai. He grabs her from behind, anxiously wrapping his arms around her and pulling her backwards away from the huge spiders as burning gasses hiss and snake their way towards them.
"You can't have her for supper. Tas is ours!" Shipy shouts, unknowingly right in Tasyjai's ear. He doesn't see that Tasyjai is bleeding green from two trivial wounds in her arm. In fact he can't see anything as he backs away, stumbles and falls with Tasyjai down the vertical shaft and into the debris pile below, missing Jax by inches. Tasyjai lands on top of Shipy, knocking the wind out of him.
What do you do?
"Go down the pipe! Follow Jax!" The results of his spell are more extreme than he hoped, and now the flames are a bigger problem than the raining, biting spiders. "Tasyjai, don't give up!" he says, then steps forward to drop down the pipe. He knows he can do nothing for her, but he has hope that she can handle herself.
Jax said the drop was about 20 scale feet, so he readies himself for a hard landing. He has noticed that his weight has scaled down with his size, so hopefully he will have less momentum when he hits the bottom. He will deal with the spiders hitching a ride when he lands.
Before he can cut himself loose, Jax drops like a Rodan turd into the pile of debris. Barely has he jumped to his feet and scanned the area (seeing nothing obviously dangerous in visible spectrum---infravision is ruled out by the tunnel phosphorescence and Midnight's still-glowing pebble, which landed in a half-eggshell) than do Shipy and Tasyjai fall down the pipe with a stereo "Oof!", narrowly missing him.
The burly Orc drags them out from under the vertical pipe in case the others follow suit. He also rakes any spiders off them that he sees. Shipy is doubled over, winded. Tasyjai lies on a giant feather of some sort; she cradles her arm and shivers with pain. Her admirably ugly Orcish features are blanched. He shudders at the thought of what must've bit her.
"Shipy! Uh, Tas is going into shock! She could really use a miracle about now."
Soon enough, Bela drops. "Oh frak! My sword," Jax points a stubby finger at Bela. "Watch you don't slice a foot!" But Bela doesn't appear to be seeing all that well as he gets up. Of course: the flash blinded them!
Jax rushes over to offer him a hand and escorts him to where Shipy and Tasyjai lie. If he spots his scimitar, he grabs it on the way. "Over here. Hold my arm. Midnight? Sweetsong?"
Feeling her dagger cut the web strand, she starts to pull her legs under her to get up, but then freezes when she feels the ominous weight of something very unfriendly right before her. She gasps in surprise as she is bitten. The fiery pain almost immediately turns into ice cold water running down to her fingertips and numbing her entire arm. The poisons have an effect on her will to live. So this is it. This is how I die.
Her thoughts of doom are disrupted when she is jostled and Orc-handled from behind by Shipy. Then she's falling down, down. For a split moment, it's almost as if she is floating, in a dream. Landing on top of Shipy, Tasyjai lies there stunned until Jax drags her safely to the side.
"Shipy! Uh, Tas is going into shock! She could really use a miracle about now."
"No, not a miracle," she states through gritted teeth, "just a spell." Tasyjai casts Too-Bad-Toxin on herself.
Sweetsong blindly falls down the pipe and hopes to get away from who knows how many burning and exploding spiders. She thinks that watching this from a distance would have been preferable.
Jumping down a narrow pipe might be hazardous, but jumping down same pipe while blind (where can I find a pair of shades?) is down right dangerous at the best of times, not to mention what will happen to the people down below if Midnight lands on them. But throwing caution to the wind, she jumps down anyway with a cry of, "Watch out belowwwwwww!"
The previous moment you were prepared to fight spiders, but now you find yourselves down the shaft and within a much larger sewer pipe. Your adrenaline pumps as your accomplices drop like discarded rubbish from the shaft opening in the pipe ceiling.
The pipe below holds an exacerbated phosphorescent glow from Midnight's still-glowing pebble. This section of pipe is 20 scale feet wide and half as many more tall, and has a rectangular cross section, unlike the circular pipe above. It slopes down westwards and a stream of murky water flows along the south wall. Below the down-pipe from which you have fallen lies a 10-foot high pile of refuse containing 3 huge egg shells, 4 small egg shells, 2 nut shell halves the size of small two-seater boats, a football-sized amethyst, a red Orc-sized blob of cherry bubble gum, a huge hairball, an eyelash, twelve broken walnut shells, a bone comb with a few teeth missing, a piece of soft moldable wax, 9 six-foot long (javelin-sized) toothpicks, one candle stub, a 12-foot length of string (rope), a 10-foot wooden spatula, and a golden brown cockatrice feather clearly labeled as such by a huge (4 feet long) piece of parchment tied to it with string. Lots of other useless odds and ends fill the pile.
Jax looks up with his black eyes, twin holes in a curtain, and waits for the last two delvers to fall. A fog-induced memory flickers through his mind like a lotus dream. The images vividly illuminate his thoughts, then like a lightning flash they are gone. He is not sure he wishes to recall them. There is something in his close-guarded innermost core that almost makes him laugh, as if doing so could reduce the horror, disillusionment and death to a mere jest. There is much wisdom to be gained by the unraveling of this something.
For an instant, Tasyjai freezes like a rabbit before a serpent, convinced that immobility will save her even as her arm burns as if aflame. She knows now what Orcs mean when they speak of the smell of blood. Her poisoned red blood bleeds faintly green, and carries an overpowering tang, like crushed ants, like a pickled melon gone bad, like an apothecary's acid that tickles the nostrils and makes one hold one's breath. She feels the numbness setting in, the onset of the shock Jax's warrior instincts recognized.
Instinctively, Tasyjai summons a miasma of pure magic. She gabbles the arcane incantations for Too-Bad Toxin just in time---a split second longer, and she would have lost the ability to think straight. It takes her a moment to realize that the magic has actually worked, but soon, her nerveless fingers and numbing arm return to normal, though the fang wound still exists. Tasyjai struggles to stand up and forces a belated smile. From which reservoir this willpower springs, she has no inkling, but she is glad for it.
Sweetsong grunts as she hits the pile of junk. Midnight feels the pain as she hits seconds later. The two Orcish women, once sculpted works of ageless Elfin beauty with pointed ears and honeyed skin, now face each other as Orcs, both barely suppressing a look of relief at their escape. As if on cue, the upper pipe explodes thunderously with fire, although no fire makes it all the way down the connecting shaft. The remaining spiders pose little threat and scurry off once they are brushed aside. Both Midnight and Sweetsong climb down off the pile rather ungracefully in their Orcish bodies, to stand on solid ground with the others.
Once Tasyjai rolls off him, Shipy gingerly touches his scorched hair. He waves his arms about with monkey impatience, betraying a futile search for a snappy James Bondish quip. In the end he relents and just gives Bela, his tallish comrade-in-arms, a good scowling (as only an Orc can). Wow, that was fun! No wonder Jax likes to scowl!
"Well Wizard, you didn't remember that hair burns, did you?" he asks Bela in a somewhat surly mood. Shipy wonders one more time exactly what he is doing down here, standing in this dark, dank sewer. He could be in upper Khazan right now, sitting somewhere soft with a drink in hand, haggling with traders and counting gold. Instead he is here, readying himself to face who knows what.
Bela looks with surprise at his companion, but then again he is not surprised; the Hobbit's universe did tend to be Shipy-centric. The Elf tries not to look at Shipy's new punkish fire-induced hairstyle. He stands there, his foreign eyes nevertheless sparkling and luminescing with Elvish mirth, and makes a slight Orcish onomatopoeic sound.
What do you do?
Sweetsong checks her injuries. If they are not serious, she picks up three javelin-sized toothpicks and the football-sized amethyst, if no one else wants the gem.
"Can we rest a few minutes before the next fight?" she says, looking down both ends of the pipe for trouble and hoping there isn't any.
Examining one of the toothpicks, Bela decides it is worth a try, but not with his reduced Kremm. "I am a bit tapped out right now; would one of you be willing to try turning this into a Wizard staff?"
"That sounds like an idea." Midnight picks up four toothpicks. She keeps one for a javelin and casts Hocus Pocus on the rest. Then she hands two of the three newly enchanted staffs to Bela and Sweetsong.
Feeling the effects of the poison dissipate, Tasyjai breathes a small sigh of relief though her smile. She turns her attention to the minor wound still on her arm. After a moment, she reaches into her pack to retrieve a vial of healing. Uncorking it, she promptly swigs down half of the vial. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she holds the vial out. "Anyone else need a quick fix?" she offers. If anyone does, she hands them the vial; if not, she recorks the vial and returns it to her pack.
Making her way over to Shipy, who is still pouting about his burned hair, she offers, "I think it suits you, Shipy. It was past time for a new look." She grins and places a rough Orcish hand on his shoulder. "I just want to thank you for taking me off the main course up there."
"Can we rest a few minutes before the next fight?"
"We probably should not rest long. The clock is ticking, afterall. Remember, 'One night's work.' That means we should probably decide our next move quickly."
Echoes of his previous daymare still ricochet about his (mostly empty) skull, but fortunately they are ephemeral. Nevertheless, they leave behind a residual somatic sensation akin to a gnawing emptiness in the gut. Jax stifles a laugh at the absurdity of the images. Like he could ever find himself stained with the blood of so many innocents! Preposterous! But he cannot shake the stubborn thought-nugget that, yes, it could theoretically happen.
"Snap out of it, GrappleJax, it's not all that bad, really. I mean, I could think of worse fates than breaking Tasyjai's fall."
The (true) Orc jerks his head in Shipy's direction, halfway. "I was thinking," he lies, "that we should stick with light. Down here it seems that some formidable predators have adapted to HotVision™."
"Well Wizard, you didn't remember that hair burns, did you?"
Jax turns to Bela, not exactly surprised that the Wizard pulled them through again. "Not to mention sewer gas. But nice, Bela. Kudos for style."
"Can we rest a few minutes before the next fight?"
"We probably should not rest long.... That means we should probably decide our next move quickly."
"Sounds good to me," Jax grunts, getting up again. As he plucks a few large eggshell pieces that have stuck to the viscous goop that slowly dries all over him, he notices Sweetsong's hefty gem. "I recommend we follow the stream down, but while we decide, would one of you magicians like to go through this junk to search for the lens or any other magical trinkets Khang might've lost?"
He picks up a handful of the soft wax, looks it over and kneads it, then stuffs a few pounds' worth into his pack. When Shipy stares, he grumbles back, "Might come in handy to pack the lens---hey, what's this?" Jax notices the parchment attached to the feather, and tries to read it.
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