Session 16

Quick summary: Massive and lengthy fight with hordes of white furry savages, who climbed up scaling ladders to reach Our Heroes, made even more massive and lengthy by Vallana's ill-advised transformation of one of the huge four-armed ogres into an unstoppable death machine not entirely dissimilar to herself. Our heroes triumph eventually, not least thanks to Pandora's Pratfall spell, but not before Justin and Barsh are each smashed into a deep coma. Since both of them had had all the healing they could take for the day, the party hid in amongst the fungus troughs on the far side of the cavern in the hopes of remaining undisturbed long enough for them to wake up.

NOTE: just before the fight, Justin had remarked that he would look after the women. Since the only people left standing at the end of the fight were the women, it may be some time before they let him forget that.

Session 17

Having fought off the hordes of hairy savages and frightened off the lemur-like slaves, the party settled down to rest and recuperate. Discussion ensued as to the best and quickest way of getting to the Heart — the only directional certainty they had from Tallis' erratic divinations was "down". Barsh noticed that although a lot of water was falling into the cavern, and therefore into the lake, the level of the lake didn't rise: therefore the water must be going somewhere. By a strange and circuitous leap of what, for want of a better word, I'll call logic, he deduced that the best way to get to "down" would be to swim "down" through the exits that must exist at the bottom of the lake. It was pointed out that most of the party had to breathe fairly regularly, and besides on further investigation the water appeared to be teeming with small white wriggly fish-like creatures that, for some reason, everybody assumed would be voraciously carnivorous. Experiments with corpses left over from the battle proved that, sure enough, they were voraciously carnivorous.

Nevertheless, more to humour Barsh than anything else, the party agreed to investigate the depths of the lake. Pandora turned a pile of fungus into a sturdy rowboat and a rock into a fairy-sized glass diving bell, and Tallis rowed out on to the lake with Barsh and Pandora, leaving Justin holding a rope in case they showed any signs of being sucked into a sneaky stealth-whirlpool. Pandora climbed into her diving bell, and Barsh let her down into the water. Then everything turned to custard.

Tallis took it into her head to start hacking into the bottom of the boat with her sword, sending splinters in all directions and rapidly opening a gaping hole, into which flowed both water and snappy bitey-fish. Barsh, occupied by holding on to Pandora's chain, could do little but squawk an alarm; fortunately Justin had the presence of mind not to try to pull the boat in hand-over-hand, but simply ran pell-mell away from the edge of the pool, dragging the boat behind. They reached the shore just before the boat foundered, but Pandora's glass diving bell smashed against the rocky wall and she had to swim for her life. Tallis, closely followed by Barsh, suddenly realised that the creature before them was not Justin at all, but some evil and dastardly creature that had done away with him and assumed his form. Bravely they attacked the villainous imposter, and equally bravely Justin fought them off with the flat of his sword. Fortunately for everyone, Justin's proved to be the superior mettle in battle, and he managed to club both of his comrades into unconsciousness. Then, feeling unusually hot and sweaty after this exercise, he decided that what he really wanted to do to cool off was to go for a pleasant swim in snappy-bitey-fish-infested waters, and began to divest himself of his armour.

Before he could manage to commit suicide, Tallis came to consciousness, no longer under the mental control of the two Mind-flayers standing in the mouth of the passage on the far side of the cavern. She alerted Justin to their presence (the sequence of events here is a bit hazy in my memory, sorry), and He tore off across the cavern at full speed to cut both of the monstrosities down in a virtuoso display of brutality before either they or their bodyguard could react. Then the outraged bodyguard leaped on him with extreme prejudice.