Last time, the crew was trying to find the engine room of the enormous dreadnought Necromancer, in order to restore power to the warship. After a short walk, the crew managed to find one of the enormous bulkheads which led to the engineering compartment. Nearly a foot thick and sheathed in ice which was over half that, the crew had to confer for a while on just how to get through this obstacle. During this time, Eldon returned from the ship, with a stowaway named Heian Galendodel in tow. Eventually, Archanus decided to try to blow the ice off with some well-placed detpaste.
Unfortunately, the detpaste was anything but well-placed – Archanus spread too much on top of the door and blew a hole in the ceiling, weakening the floor above and bending the door inward so that it would no longer raise as it was meant to. When Gaspar tried to puncture the door with several powerful blows, he knocked the door out but also managed to collapse the floor above him onto himself. Archanus pulled him out, and the crew decided to find another way into engineering.
Returning to Chrysalis for a short rest, they next decided to fly around and find another entry point on the other side of the dreadnought. Marcus found a place which he calculated to be exactly opposite of their previous entry point, but unfortunately, the hull was solid there. Gasco fixed this problem, however, by placing a single grain of francium on the outer hull and having Chrysalis blast it, melting the ice around it and setting it off. The resulting blast blew a hole bigger than Chrysalis in the hull of the dreadnought (and in the walls of engineering), and the crew were able to enter the engineering compartment easily.
After spending a few hours trying in vain to get the ancient ship to respond, Marcus concluded that the dreadnought’s generators were simply too old to work any longer and that further trying was pointless. On his advice, the crew decided to proceed on directly to the bridge, though Gasco, Kelextra, Kenzi and Chrysalis decided to make a brief side trip to the science area, looking for any weapons or devices they might be able to use. After searching the area, Gasco found a pair of odd magical objects, a ring and a rod, and Kelextra found something which she hid from everyone else. They proceeded to join the others at the bridge.
The rest of the crew was busy trying to open the bulkhead separating them from the bridge. Eventually, Archanus tried his detpaste again, and this time was far more accurate, opening a hole in the bulkhead just large enough for a person to enter. The crew quickly moved onto the bridge, and were stunned to find it was a vast room nearly two stories tall, and dozens of yards across. Around the room, an army of skeletons stood at their former workstations, and in the center of the huge bridge an enormous throne-like chair stood, raised above the floor on a pedastal.
The skeletons attacked quickly, and the crew were hard-pressed to fight them off. Eldon and Gasco were badly wounded, but with the help of Kenzi and Ashimar’s magic, the skeletons were eventually defeated. After Gaspar destroyed the throne with a burst of fire from his gun, the figure who had been sitting in the throne strode down to the crew below, congratulating them on defeating his skeletons.
It was a lich, the undead remains of the necromancer Terdeth Kyynn, and the crew attacked him immediately. First, Kelextra drew a strange, gun-like object from her pack and loaded an odd-looking shell into it, firing it at the necromancer. Instead of a bullet or laser, the spell magic missile shot out at the lich, and the magic-users realized that Kelextra held a fabled Caster Gun, an ancient device which combined technology and magic. Several of the other crew members tried to shoot the lich, most of them doing little damage, but Kenzi and Ashimar had enough magic left to cause some effective damage to the necromancer. Gasco tried to attack the lich with the rod she had just found, only to discover that it was a very strange item – when she struck him with it, it caused grass to grow on the floor of the bridge.
Gasco regretted coming close enough to strike him, though, when the necromancer gave her a terrible illness with a touch. Gaspar managed to use his holy powers to relieve her of this, however, and the battle continued. After the two sorcerers managed to wound him more, as well as some of those using ranged weapons, Kelextra decided to pull out her best weapon – she put in a shell and told everyone to run for it. As the crew scattered for the bulkhead, she fired the shell directly at the necromancer – and, to the amazement of all watching, the shell burst into hundreds of burning projectiles which rained from the ceiling. The necromancer was incinerated, and the group cautiously crept out again to search the bridge for the Sphere of Destiny.
After a few minutes of searching, it was Gasco who found the Sphere. After holding her breath, she reached out to pick up the Sphere as everyone watched – and everyone was suddenly transported to a strange, brightly-lit place.
TO BE CONTINUED...
