(G275 20/05/2016 via Roll20 - AP(GM), JF, Mira)

(G275 20/05/2016 via Roll20 - AP(GM), JF, Mira)

 DAY 248 (14 Uktar)(November) continued...

It was all getting rather frantic, this insect like creature with the trident was a formidable foe.

I was badly injured and flew back to the others. I could hear Sylvia cursing repeatedly as all her healing spells fizzled, stopped by the evil works of Despayr.

I healed myself instead, with my 'Sasserine Nut', an artifact that has saved my skin on many an occasion. I couldn't see much through the clouds of poison, but I could see the zaps of lightning from my summoned arrowhawk as it attacked the creature.

I could hear Basil too, screeching in anger as one after an other his spells were resisted. If you'll remember, he was in the form of a giant dire bat, but at some point he landed and joined Drashnag in the melee, fed up that his magic was having no effect.

I was all the way back with the others, but from what I was told later, the creature saw Basil as a weaker target than Drashnag and chased him back to the floating steps again forcing the driud to take to the wing once more. He flapped off to join us at the other end of the walkway.

Drashnag, and I think Yli, it was hard to tell in the gloom and poison clouds, must have got a few good whacks on it, as well as the arrowhawk and the fiendish wasp, as the creature teleported again. It appeared right before me, Sylvia and Lavinia!

I don't know what it's plan was, but if it thought it was down at the easy end of the walkway it was mistaken. Sylvia, in her anger, let rip with a powerful Searing Light spell, but the things resistance to magic saved it once more!

It was my turn next and I didn't hold out much hope but I decided to try a Baleful Polymorph spell on the pesky thing anyway and lo and behold it landed!

I was as amazed as anyone when it turned into a toad, the trident falling to the planks with a clatter.

Lavinia poked it with her rapier, but somehow its magic was still protecting it, so with a hefty kick she punted it over the side of the bridge. It landed in the darkness some hundred feet below with a sickening splat.

Well, the fight had been long and hard and most of us were injured or sickened by the poison. Basil had used just about every spell he had during the fight and I too was running low so once again we headed back to the cave to lick our wounds and plan our next move.

The four people we had rescued were not particularly talkative so I spent my time writing up my journals and composing a long letter to my father. Just letting my thoughts run, I find it soothes me and passes the time as we rest.

Lavinia mainly lies beside me, sometimes talking, sometimes reading what I've written. I really wish she hadn't come with us now, we are in terrible danger.

Sylvia has been praying much more than usual now, I think the gloominess of this place is finally breaking through her stubborn spirit.

As for the others, well, Basil sits alone and strokes his snake. Drashnag and Shump occasionally talk of things in their own language but I think they do not really care for each other much. Falo-han always was the silent type, but from his demeanour I think he is doing fine. Yli I find hard to work out, but he too seems to be coping.

Irritator lives up to his name, he really is quite irritating. He likes to know what is going on with everyone and asks lots of questions. I'll give him the time of day but none of the others can be bothered with him. It seems funny that such a small and scruffy creature is such a powerful wizard.

Oh look now, he is talking to Rolanda and she is glancing at me as if to say, 'Help!' The poor fellow can't even get accepted into the company of a rat!

Well anyway, I shall get some rest now, these magic bedrolls are remarkably comfortable.

(G274 13/05/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP) 51

(G274 13/05/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP) 51

Kirk and Dell gave Adam a look over, but it appeared that the avatar had ceased to function. After a check on the AI core they also learned that it too had shutdown and was in a very long diagnostic cycle. It looked like the AI had been affected so much by the Preserver Tech on the planet that it had almost completely shut down.

With Adam out of action, this meant that Kirk would have to take some of the less experienced  crew members with him. To aid them in any fire fight that was likely to happen he replicated up some powerful personal shields.

At 2200 Kirk set a watch and turned in, retiring to his cabin.


DAY 131(fri)

Kirk and the crewmen he was taking with him, namely Celes, Murphy and Paterson knocked on the gate of the temple compound at 0800 and were admitted within.

'Greetings offworlders!' said Sagra as the arrived.
They wasted no time as Sagra bit them enter the temple and he lead them down into a lower room where they were met by a vulcan woman called Yuyu. She wore a golden robe and headdress.
At this point Sagra bit them farewell and Yuyu lead them through stone tunnels, down stairs and over stone bridges that went across vast bottomless chasms.

At some point the MATSE cut out and stopped working, and although they could no longer understand Yuyu she bid them to continue following her. Kirk realised that she could understand what he said but that he could no longer understand her.
The only lights they now had were from torches attached to their rifles.

Finally, after nearly an hour of subterranean travel they arrived at a set of stone door and when she opened them she motioned for Kirk and his crew to go down the stairs within. She would not follow them.

At the base of the spiral stairs was another door. Kirk tried his tricorder but it was either malfunctioning or being jammed by the effects of the Preserver Tech.

Kirk opened the door and they entered a stone chamber full of dust. There was a hole in the floor and a large barrel, but he ignored these and went across to the door on the other side.

Opening this lead into another small stone chamber. There were six metallic spiders, their bodies the size of dogs, in this room and they attacked immediately. Some attacked with bladed legs while others seemed to have electrical weapons.
They were easily destroyed by the hail of bullets from the crew's assault rifles and shotguns. One did get in close though and exploded, sending shrapnel flying everywhere.

Dazed and deafened from the noise of the assault rifles they carried on. The chamber they were in had an open exit to the north that lead to a corridor and a crossroads. Kirk went to take a look and got the attention of ten more of the 'skuttlers' and a fire fight worthy of the name occurred.

The lead skuttlers ran in and attacked with their blades. The crew shot these ones up quickly but it meant they were at the mercy of the enemies further back that blasted at them with their electrical dischargers. Another charged in and exploded, injuring Celes, but not enough to take her out of action.

The crew filled the corridor with lead, taking out one skuttler after another until they were all down and the crossroads was a mass of twisted metal and spent shotgun cartridges.

After a moment to collect their senses, Kirk led on, taking the east corridor, which lead on to a T-junction. Here they were attacked by a different enemy, larger robotic entities that lumbered towards them on wheeled limbs. They were tougher than the skuttlers, but there were only two of them and after a brief shoot out down the length of the corridor they were defeated.

Kirk and his crew were still doing well though, despite being covered in dust and almost completely deafened by the gunfire. The personal shields had been a good investment.

(G273 29/04/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 50

(G273 29/04/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 50

DAY 130(tue) continued ...

By 1215 ship time the Caco was in orbit around Huroc. It was getting quite crowded on the ship with the addition of Marion and Guyus.

Seeing that there were a lot of mouths to feed and not wanting to waste dilithium on replicating food Kirk had the brain wave of harvesting the food on Huroc. While not a bad idea in and off itself, finding food on the drought and famine ridden planet would be difficult, as pointed out to him by Marion.

Kirk replicated a shotgun, ammunition and a merchant outfit for Marion and he was all set for another perilous landing on Huroc in a farming region in hope of buying some fruit and veg.

He must have been having doubts already though because when Murphy said,
'Shouldn't we be concentrating on the main mission? I mean, rather than risking everyone's lives again on stuff we can replicate anyway?'

Kirk realised this was true and after checking the water tanks (174 gallons in the 1000 gallon tank) he saw they were still a while away from dying of starvation or thirst and abandoned the enterprise.

At 1900 they were ready to land on Huroc again and Paterson took them down to the spot Kirk had chosen. She hit cliff face on the way down and landed badly, but everyone survived and the Caco only dented its shields.

Kirk loaded himself down with armour, weapons, ammunition, computer devices, gold, health packs, flares and rations, but forgot to take a torch so he and Adam stumbled about in the dark once they were clear of the ship, in the direction of the Preserver Temple. Kirk had banked on the MATSE providing visibility but it was being nullified by the Preserver Tech on the planet.
Marion came too, and Adam was there to carry the 'jammer jammer', the rest of the crew stayed with the ship.

The continued west, towards the temple and cleared the wooded area they had been travelling in. Up ahead they could see lights from fires and the sounds of people. The approached carefully but were met with a friendly welcome. The people of this region were of a vulcan/kazon mix and this was a wedding. There were caravans, a large camp fire and a crowd of about thirty people.

They were given food and drink and not long after that the father of the bride, a man called Lerda arrived and talked to them. He could speak a little vulcan and explained that they were from the city to the north and had been to the temple for blessing on the marriage and this was the after party. Lerda explained that the people of this region were mixed race outcasts and generally more accepting of strangers. He asked them a few questions but after being met with such obvious lies he smiled, nodded and let them have their secrets.

They stayed a couple of hours. As they left Adam left some rubies for the married couple, a gift that was unexpected and very lavish.

The temple was only a few hundred metres away. There was a stockade wall all around it and at the gate Kirk switched on the 'Jammer Jammer'. It seemed to work as his tricorder could now tell him that their were four lifesigns within.

Kirk knocked on the gate.
'Who's there?' came a voice from the other side.
'Travellers.'
'Wait a minute.'
The gate opened and an old man came out. The gate was shut behind him.
'Who are you?' he asked as he leaned on his staff.
'We are travellers, tourists.'
'I don't think so.'
'It's true. We have come through the desert from the west.'
'I doubt it,' said the canny old fellow pointing at their feet, 'Those boots are brand new! You look
like you all just stepped out of a salon on Redneedle Street.'
'Umm... well...'
'Admit you are offworlders. Where is your spaceship crashed?'
Before Kirk could speak Adam said, 'If you don't harm us or our device then we will not harm you.'
'Keep your threats offworlder. You may as well come in then.'

The old fellow was Sagra, Temple Guardian. Keeper of the Sacred Scrolls and Exalted one. The others were Gruton, a tough looking young man, Dredrick a young lad and Yelva who appeared to be an old lady that looked after the men.

Sagra led them to a small house inside the compound, then to his room in the house that held the sacred scrolls. Kirk asked about a Katric arc and on consultation of the scrolls Sagra told them that if they existed at all then they would be deep under the temple in the cavernous areas built by the Preservers.

Next Kirk gave the priest two gold bars in exchange for 'permission' to land the Caco next to the temple. It took two hours before a message eventually got through to the ship, but eventually good  old 'Crasher' Paterson arrived and took out part of the stockade wall with the nose of the ship.
'My wall!' cried Sagra.

Adam had the idea of getting the prisoners out to rebuild the wall and at gun point marched the four kazon out. Kirk went into the ship to start replicating more projectile weapons, an activity that he enjoyed. He made two more assault rifles and solid slug shells for the shotguns.

He heard a commotion outside and went out to investigate. The prisoners had all run off into the night and although Adam had shot and injured them, he had not made a pursuit. The avatar then seemed to have some sort of break down and went inside to sit beside its AI core.

Kirk followed it back inside, wondering what on Earth (or to be more accurate 'on Huroc') was going on.

(G272 22/04/2016 via Roll20 - AP(GM), JF, Mira, Guru

(G272 22/04/2016 via Roll20 - AP(GM), JF, Mira, Guru

DAY 247 (13 Uktar)(November) cont ...

Just going to get a bit of sleep now, so I'll put down a few lines before I put my head down.

I send Rolanda out at about noon to see what was left of poor Mirabella. Listening at the cave entrance, Falo-han reported that he could hear feint nibbling sounds out on the bridge.

Well, I could guess at what was going on, it was Rolanda nibbling on Mirabella's corpse, probably her eyeballs. When she got back I gave her a long lecture, along the lines of,
'Stop thinking like a rat! You've been awakened by a druid, you should start acting like it. You are part of an adventure party now, a valued member of the team. You need to treat fallen comrades with more respect.'
She seemed to take it on board, she is very intelligent after all, but I don't know - perhaps once a rat, always a rat.

We spent the rest of the day and night in the cave. It seems to be that most of the time we spend resting, while in the Plane of Shadows. We then go out, get into a fight that lasts about ten minutes, then perhaps another one, then we tidy up after it all and go back to our refuge to rest for the remainder of the day. It's not like the ballads at all, when the heros just charge in and take care of everything in a single evening, shout Huzzah! and go to the tavern.

DAY 248 (14 Uktar)(November)

And so another day began. What evil being of darkness would we slay on this fine morning? How many other members of our adventure party would die?
I remember all the fights we had when we were on the Sea Wyvern, against pirates and giant octopuses, and all the things we had to deal with on those dangerous islands on the way to Farshore. Somehow all those encounters are a fond memory now. I'd rather face a whole ship load of orcish pirates than spend another day in this hellish place.

We had no choice though, so I started by scrying the dragon and making sure it was not abroad. It wasn't, it was tampering with the weave again, so we all went to retrieve Mirabella's body.

Sylvia cast 'Speak with Dead' and established that Mirabella was more than happy to be dead so she then cast 'Gentle Repose' on the corpse and stacked her with Gurudor.

After that we moved on to the next unexplored tower which appeared to be a jail of some kind. Yli scouted ahead and spotted a mindflayer and shot it with a well placed arrow. Irritator then moved up and finished it off with some of his deadly Empowered Magic Missiles.

There were six cells in a sort of pit in this tower and they contained four people from Weyloon.
There were:

Tholwick - a male human adept
Durgen   - a male dwarf cleric of Morodin
Kareem   - a Human male paladin of tyr
Smote    - male halfling sorcerer 

They were weak and hungry and couldn't offer much advice on the region so we took them up to the dragon-proof (hopefully!) cave and let them take some weapons from the loot pile to protect themselves with.

There were three chests in the tower as well and it was a shame that Mirabella was no longer with us, as each of them was trapped. We opened them simply by letting the barbarians do the work and absorbing the damage from the ice, lighting or whatever it was that happened when you touched them. The stupid, absurd things didn't even have treasure in them so the whole enterprise turned out to be pointless! Just clothes, jars and such like.

With deep sighs all round we moved on to the next area, across yet another long rope bridge.

This place, honestly, who constructs places like this? I picture some ancient, helmet clad liche like creature unrolling a parchment and showing it to his architect then saying,
'Yes, I thought I'd have giant floating steps going down about one hundred feet to the bathroom here. Nothing says "evil" like plummeting to your death when you are in a rush to get to the toilet does it?'

Well, we didn't know what was at the bottom of this stairwell of giant floating steps but we decided to investigate them anyway. At the 70ft mark, on the other side of the stair pit there was some sort of insectoid creature that cast yellowish green poison clouds at us.
Me and Basil were immune to this sort of thing but it made the others really ill. We unleashed everything at it, magic missiles, flame strikes and lots of arrows but it seemed to be pretty tough.
I turned into a giant owl and Basil turned into a dire bat and we winged over to it and pecked at it a bit, but the creature just whacked at us with a trident.
I turned the step it was standing on into pebbles with a Stone Shape spell and it plummeted to the ground. I thought that was the fight over, but the strange creature teleported to where the others were standing and started casting those poison clouds again.

This thing, whatever it was, was much tougher than the mindflayer. Yli moved in with his bow. Irritator cast more Magic Missiles but they seemed to have little affect.

I flew across as the others retreated from the clouds of poison. This was starting to get interesting...

(G271 15/04/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 49

(G271 15/04/2016 via Roll20 - JF(GM), AP, MI) 49

DAY 131(wed)

Back at Jerradek, the day before, the vulcan high commanders had continued their interrogation  of James Adam.

The questions were along the lines of;
'Where are you from?'
'Who built you?'
'What do you know about Warp Theory?'
'How to make an atomic bomb?'

Adam gave as evasive and meaningless answers as he dared, but it was apparent that it would not be long before the vulcans started using more forceful methods.

In the morning of the next day he made contact with the Caco and informed them that he would be taken to the interrogation hall at noon. If there was going to be an escape attempt made, then this would be the best time, as it was higher up in the keep.

He would have to wait to see if his information had got through to the Caco. The interference from the Preserver jammers prevented any further communication.

The six guards that waited outside his cell took him to the hall, where the high command waited with
a group of jailers, vulcan bruisers and Marion and Guyus whom had been captured when they had been sent away by Kirk.

The high command today consisted of two men and a woman. The older of the males ordered a jailer to grab hold of Marion. He then said, 'I doubt torturing you would do any good, but answer me this, do you feel compassion?'
Adam, either genuinely confused or attempting humour replied, 'Am I to be shown a vulcan mating ritual?'
Either way the vulcan didn't understand and said, 'We need you to be a bit more cooperative. Now... how do you make an atomic bomb?'
As it happened, Adam did not currently know anything about building atomic bombs as he had assigned all his skill sub-routines to combat. He did, however, give a very long and digressing lecture on basic chemistry and physics.

The vulcans began to take notes, but after three hours Adam was running out of things to tell them and was wondering if he should just give up and shut down, that rescue was not on its way after all.
He began to repeat himself, much to the irritation of the vulcans.
Their leader was about to say something when suddenly the glass in the high windows shattered and grenades started bouncing down off the balcony and into the hall.
The grenades exploded, flash bangs and smoke, that blinded, deafened and confused most of the people in the hall.
The six guards were out of action for half a minute or so, which gave Adam enough time to get to the balcony. He had been blinded by the flashbangs, but was still able to evade the guards. Meanwhile, Kirk discharged more grenades into the hall then jumped down and ran over to where the vulcans and the prisoners were gathered and wrestled Guyus from his captor.
Marion tried to escape but was knocked unconscious. Kirk fought off the jailer, picked her up and headed for the balcony as fast as he could.
By this time the guards had recovered and they started to fire on the escaping prisoners with their muskets.
The Caco was right up against the windows with its cargo bay doors open. Celes stood on the windowsill and lowered a cargo net. Kirk held onto the net with one hand and Marion with the other. During this time Dell reported that the tower opposite the hall had moved its cannons around and it looked like the gunners were ready to fire. Kirk ordered Dell to fire on the tower but to try and do minimal damage. Unfortunately the Numiri phaser cannons on the Caco did not have a 'minimal damage'
setting and the top of the tower was totally destroyed in a single blast.
'Never mind, let's just go!' yelled Kirk.
Marion would have been terrified, had she been awake, as she dangled from Kirk's arm, while he in turn dangled from the net.
One of the jailers, a brave sort of fellow, leapt onto the Caco as they pulled away, but was quickly dealt with by Dell and Murphy, who then helped Kirk and Marion up into the cargo bay. The Caco turned and using its thrusters, headed out of the city and into the desert. They then landed and kicked the jailer out,
'The city is twenty miles that way!' said Kirk as he waved the vulcan goodbye.