Still the 25th of Growth
While deep in a tunnel on our way to find the Shuul’s secret base, we stop to rest for the night. On my watch, a giant beetle tries to sneak into our room while everyone else is asleep — it’s seven feet long! I manage to dispatch it, and Archinemus heals me of the damage it inflicted. It was alone, or so I thought. Two more of them show up on Tharn’s watch. We now realize the folly of trying to sleep in an open alcove of this part of the Dungeon. Next time we’ll put a door between us and the denizens of this place.
26th of Growth
We take our picks and some stone-dissolving alchemical solution of Tharn’s and break through the Shuul’s bricked-up wall. Archinemus covers our work with a silence spell. Tharn scouts ahead and finds another bricked-up wall up there. We go at the new and much thicker blockage with gusto, but our silence runs out. Judging silence to be vital to our efforts, we decide to wait another day till Archinemus gets that spell back to resume our efforts. This is one well put-together wall — perhaps even dwarven stonework.
27th of Growth
We break through! We emerge on a ledge. Looking about twelve feet down, we see some sort of rails set into the floor of a long corridor. It looks brand-new. So this is how they’re transporting their materials. We follow along on the ledge toward the warehouse’s location with our skulk ally Nos scouting ahead.
He comes back to tell us of a work area up ahead with a lot of people and noise. That’s about the right location for the warehouse we were heading toward. When we are fifty feet away, we can see some of the machinery in the room. Plus there’s a great big steam engine on the rails, with a large cart hooked up behind it and loading/unloading hoists nearby. We formulate a plan.
Barbatos casts rope trick and some of us hide in the secret compartment the spell creates. Tharn is invisible and Barbatos gets the attention of a guard. He attempts to charm him with a wand but it fails, and the guard sounds the alarm. Tharn and Barbatos run up and hide in the rope trick area with us as guards come out to search. After a few minutes, the guards go back, except for one.
Plan B. Diethan lets down the rope a tad to open the window in the rope trick, and I lean out and grab the surprised guard. I yank him inside with us and pin him while Barbatos tries the charm again. And again. And again. It fails a dozen times and now the wand is worthless. We now try to question our prisoner. Unsurprisingly he is not cooperative, so we try a truth potion. This finally works.
We learn his name is Noram and that the Shuul do indeed have our skulk friend Shim. They caught him in a trap in the elevated platform room — the Shuul can detect people going through there. He’s being held in some cells or labs in the back of a big cave. Noram knows nothing about captured litorians, but he does know Doctor Feegus, whose lab is at the back of that same big cave beyond the loading dock. He says there are six other guards down there plus the captain and several constructs at work.
He adds that Doctor Feegus is a little creepy — not a large man, he shaves his head and wears goggles. He has pale skin, very red lips, and wears a long grey lab coat. Feegus created the Prajdall in his lab at the back of the big cave behind a tower. Noram says there is one iron angel here in the central structure in the big cave (a different place from the tower, apparently).
We give Diethan Noram’s clothes and weapons as a disguise. Tharn invisibly goes out and sneaks down, followed by the disguised Diethan, who is also invisible. Diethan climbs a crane and manages to drop a net onto a Shuul dwarf. Calista stuns another guard, whom I subdue. Tharn slays some guards who come charging in from a corridor to blast him with dragon rifles. Diethan continues wreaking havoc with the crane, but then a worker comes in and commands a clockwork construct to attack us! I make short work of it, and Barbatos slays a Shuul guard with magic missile. Then a boar-riding armored dwarf charges in at Archinemus! More constructs arrive and the disguised Diethan tries to command the workers to fire up the train. Thanks to a command from my magical animal-affecting longsword, the boar lies down and goes to sleep, much to the dwarf’s agitation. Archinemus and Calista finish him off. Now we’re ready to find the big cave.
There are more guards here, but Shuul-Diethan confuses them and Calista distracts one. A well-timed charge takes care of them. Continuing on to another room, Diethan runs afoul of an armored construct that gases him. We all gang up on it and turn it into slag. We wake up Diethan, then try the door the construct was guarding. In here there’s a pool with a great tower of shafts and a seam in the ceiling above. This seems to be the elevated platform we heard about. Diethan pretends to be the guard’s relief and takes him out. With his dying action the guard cranks the alarm klaxon. We leave hurriedly.
Through the door out of here, we descend some stairs amid a mechanical thrumming sound and an intermittent crackling. We emerge onto a ledge in a big cave. More gas lamps light up the cavern here. Copper pipes run through the place. We see a number of other ledges and two great stalagmites stretching to the ceiling, connected by catwalks. We’re very far from the ground. The place is hundreds of feet across. What have we gotten ourselves into?
“Was that an alarm?” We hear voices behind us as we survey the cave. Nos takes off to scout ahead, and we run toward the tower, trying to be quiet but headed to the back of the cave, where we believe the labs/prisons to be.
Barbatos magically opens the door to the tower and Tharn and I rush in to battle a Shuul warrior and a Shuul knight plus two awful armored constructs with blades and arm cannons. A figure on the roof drops acid on Calista but, undaunted, she rushes in to heal the dying Tharn. Disguised as a Shuul knight, Barbatos summons an elemental up on the roof next to the acid mage. Almost knocked out from transferring Tharn’s wounds, Calista webs up the stairway to stymie reinforcements. A robed and veiled chaos mage enters with a Shuul guard and instructs him, “Kill — no, subdue the litorian.” I fend off her mind control attempts. Meanwhile, the reinforcements hack at the webbing. “We’re coming, Sir Corloss!” they cry, but by now their commander is dead. Archinemus takes out the last construct and Tharn savages the mage (what was a chaos mage doing with the order-loving Shuul, anyway?). The halfling acid mage from the roof, having taken care of the elemental, arrives to zap us with his wand. “Where are my people?” Tharn demands. The little wizard is surprised. “You know about the litorians?” he stammers. “I didn’t do anything to your friends. Feegus has them in his lab!” I manage to grab the little guy and demand, “Take us there now!” But he squirms away, yelling over his shoulder, “Feegus’ lab is in the back of the cave, beneath the tower! Don’t worry about me!”
Nos returns and directs us to a machinery room that generates power to this place and harbors a prisoner. Then the guys down below start to break through the web, so we dash from the tower onto a catwalk and Barbatos arcane locks the door behind us. No sooner do we arrive on the catwalk than we’re attacked by riders on flying metallic bugs. And from across the cave, some dwarves are shooting cannons at us!
We make it across the catwalk to the machinery room Nos described. We emerge onto another catwalk high up off the floor. All around us are cables and spinning cylinders, pistons, and whirring clockwork mechanisms. This, as we learn, is the Generator Room. I’m in awe. Suspended a few feet above the catwalk is a transparent cube filled with a swirling bluish gas. “Release the creature or die!” says Tharn to the worker in this place. “Okay, if you’ll let me live,” the worker replies. “But I’m not exactly sure what will happen.” He pulls a lever, and lightning bursts from the cube. The creature isn’t in the lightning. The creature IS the lightning!
“Destor be praised!” shouts Barbatos, referring to the lightning lord whose temple we passed through on our way here. Archinemus urges the freed creature to go out and expend its wrath on the Shuul. It starts sucking up electrical power from the spinning cylinders, draining them. Did this generator siphon the energy from the lightning creature to power this base?
Before we can figure it out, two more Shuul approach, whom Diethan parries. “They’ve released Destor’s Minion!” one cries. The minion starts sending arcs of energy at our enemies and Barbatos shoots them with his wand of cold. While the minion is draining the cylinders, Archinemus grabs a lightning-bolt shaped rod from the cube. Suddenly, the minion of Destor is pulled into the rod, which now pulses with energy in Archinemus’ hand. “Everything is going to be all right,” Archinemus says calmly. “Now let’s get out of here. We’ve got some friends to save.”
We can hardly argue with that.
