Session XXXI - Teleport Away (2002-06-18)

Cassandra decided to spend the night at the temple. The rest of the party rented a room accross the street from Kjadbrek at an inn. Before getting into bed Gronthor noticed a shadow climbing the wall of Kjadbrek's house, and disappear through the wall. He quickly alerted Radagast and Jobrik, and after a quick spell of preotection they sprinted at Kjadbrek's house.

As the party charged in, they found a figure dressed in black, holding an ominously glowing sword, poised above the crumbled form of the Hightower official.

A long and hard battle ensued. the dreadnight of the twisted serpent (or so the symbol on the clothes seemed to indicate) had a repertoire of some nasty arcane spells, and his sword was very nasty indeed. Luckily Gronthor's grease on the sword had the intruder drop it in the beginning, which he only managed to snap while he retrieted. He jumped out of the second story window and whistled for his warhorse, and though the party followed suit he was too fast for them.

Kjadbrek was still alive, and after a quick heal was able to tell that the man was after the disc.

The party decided to keep it a secret that Kjadbrek had survived the attack, and camped in the house, exhausted. To their worry, Kjadbrek did not wake up in the morning. They took him to the temple, pretending that he was dead to the onlookers. In the temple Cassandra was able to heal him, as Kjadbrek's condition turned out to be an unnatural disease, which still could not refuse Cassandra's holy command to leave Kjadbrek's body.

The party left Kjadbrek at the safety of the temple, and hurried to the woods to meet Quintus at the teleportation room. The two day trip went without trouble.

At the teleportation room Quintus placed the disc on the pewter pedestal, at which it started spinning. The levers lifted up, and the ceiling lighted up, and there was an electric charge around the pedestal. Quintus pulled the levers down, and there was change. The pedestal vanished, or rather, the new room they found themselves in did not have a pedestal and the corridor leaving out was different. Otherwise the rooms could have been the same.

The corridor lead to large underground cavern, some 50 high. The corridor emerged in the middle of the wall, and continued on a bridge some 30 feet above the cavern floor, and the river running in the middle. The bridge was broken in the middle, and the gap was 40 feet - too much to jump over.

Cassandra had been looking strange since the teleportation. She seemed to have made a decision, and she handed the disc to Gronthor. She said the place was her destiny, and their paths would now differ. She carefully climbed down to the cavern floor, where a portal seemed to open for her and she walked through, after it was as if it had never appeared.

Quintus got the party past the broken bridge by casting levitation on everybody, and then showing each member accross.

The next obstacle was a slab of marble, obviously a door of some sort, blocking their way on the opposite side of the cavern. There was a carving of the demon, but no obvious methods of opening the "door". It didn't move at all when they tried pushing and there did not appear to be any traps. At their wits end Gronthor finally touched the marble with the disc. The marble transformed into shimmering curtains of light that shifted from red to violet through orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo. It was pretty obvious it was some kind of prismatic wall spell, and Radagast remembered that the different colors could be dispelled with the right spell. The only one he could remember though was violet, which could be dispelled simply by dispel magic spell. The party decided to dispel that color, and see what would happen. When Quintus cast the spell, the whole shimmering light wall vanished, and they were able to continue. It was becoming obvious that the wizard who had made these protections would be able to pass himself without any difficulty.

The next challenge was a room with nothing but a large cylinder reachning from the floor to the ceiling, standing in the middle, sprouting countless nasty-looking spikes. It looked really dangerous. Pondeing on the problem a little Radagast finally deciced to make a dash for it, and stepping only on the black tiles (the floor was covered with red and black tiles) crossed the room safely, and the rest of the party followed.

The next room was high, and there appeared to be at least four passageways leading out, but they were not on the floor level. Two of the passageways started 20 feet above the floor, the others even higher. The first 10 feet of the wall were covered with a mosaic tiling, and four demon motifs, Vrocks according to Quintus. When Gronthor went to the middle of the room he could smell some unpleasant incense getting stronger, and a swirling vortex of wind also getting stronger. The eyes of the demons started glowing red.

Gronthor retreated back to the corridor, and just in time as a bunch of winged demon-creatures attacked. Luckily it turned out to be just one demon with mirror images of itself. Had there been more, they would have all died. As it was, it was a close call. The demon's resistance to magic and its vicious clawing attacks made it a dangerous opponent. It even managed to infect Jobric with some kind of spores, which only seemed to go away after Jobric poured holy water on them.

Spent, the party camped for the night in the demon-room.

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