Demons and GatesDemons and Gates DM Note: Bijou and dangerous tonight; only Allan, Zac, Rick, Lizzie and Maddie.. So the Significant Thing that may have happened to Pete and Arthur's characters suddenly wasn't there. Good job we're not taking this game very seriously then! |
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Gathered on the landing at the second floor up, the party regarded the doors while keeping a wary eye out for the unsolid woman who had drifted through and caused such havoc. Ozymandias attempted to peer through the keyhole of the door, but couldn't really see much. As he did so, Tallan, still in Wraithform, simply drifted through the wall into the room beyond.
What lay beyond made her glad she was still in Wraithform. The room, semicircular and occupying half the width of the tower, was obviously once a bunkroom for a mix of servants and guards. Now it was utter chaos, smashed furniture and possessions scattered around at random; and mixed in with them, torn and butchered fragments of human corpses. Had the vampire been in solid form, the overwhelming scent of blood would have made it hard for her to concentrate. As the others joined her, they began to search for clues.
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The corpses would have added up to around ten people, and it appeared that their deaths had not all occurred at the same time. Some had fragments of cord showing they'd been bound before being killed. Ozymandias was all for making a bonfire and burning the sad remains, but Tallan was quick to point out that there was a good chance of setting the entire tower on fire if they did. Moving on, they opened the doors into the other half of the tower.
| DM Note: This game now having junior players, the effect of succubi on normal mortals was just touched upon. (oops!). |
The room on the other side was a mirror of the first, a wrecked bunk-room spread with ripped corpses. In this case, however, there was a survivor. Sort of... A single man, probably young and once quite good-looking, was bound to a blood-smeared bed, naked, covered in minor and cruelly placed injuries, and in a state of high excitement. Attempts to communicate with him were unsuccessful, and he continued to twitch and gibber, peering around the heroes to try and see if his beloved torturess was coming back. His mind appeared to be completely gone, and Ozymandias the assassin painlessly ended his pain with a small axe.
With no warning, the ethereal form of the succubus slid through the ceiling, glanced piercingly into Baron Iraj's eyes, and carried on down through the floor. None of the others could do anything at all, but Tallan, still in Wraithform, was already rotated out of alignment with the Material plane and into the Ethereal, and able to reach her. She struck out, but the winged demoness fended the attack aside with an intricately wrought dagger, probably made of bronze. Then she was gone. Tallan's head tilted; she could feel the succubus' heartbeat still moving, into the room below. Sliding through the floor, she followed.
Meanwhile, Baron Iraj was suddenly siezed by an unaccountable conviction that he had heard the voice of a dwarvish child, screaming in pain and terror from the floor below. He was sure that it was a voice he recognized, a close family member. With an exclamation, he started out for the stairs, Ozymandias close behind him with a puzzled expression on his face. He couldn't hear anything...
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Tallan drited through the floor and into the lower level. The succubus was waiting there for her, but did not attack; instead turning her seductive nature to persuasion and attempting to forge an alliance with the vampire. "We are both predators," she purred, "we could share these mortals you accompany instead of fighting. We could share a great deal..." Tallan's vampire nature resonated to the possibilities, but something - bonds to her comrades, suspicion of the demon, simple bloody-mindedness perhaps - warned her off. "Why not leave us alone?" she suggested. "If we clear the rest of the tower, and the Forbidding comes down, you'd be free." Violenna wriggled with dark, delicious anticipation. "Mnn, to be loose on the Prime Material again, with all those mortals," she said in her luscious contralto, "I haven't had such a chance in hundreds of years. I'll give you some time. Come and find me if you feel ... lonely?" and she faded into the wall and was gone.
Halfway down the stairs to the ground floor, Iraj blinked and looked at Ozymandias. "What are we going down here for?" he asked in a puzzled voice. "Can't you hear it any more?" asked the assassin. Baron Iraj looked at him in mild concern. "Are you hearing things, Ozymandias?" he asked.
The party ascended to the next floor and Ozymandias repeated his process of peering through the keyhole. This time, he could see a bit more. A large table was visible in the midst of the room, covered in glassware, books and alchemical apparatus. Someone out of his line of sight was working on it, and he could see hands manipulating the vessels - shapely, feminine hands, but significantly larger than those of a human. Tallan could hear a single heartbeat from the room beyond, massively strong, flavoured with the harmonics she had learned to associate with demonic hearts.
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Lining his blowpipe up below the keyhole, Ozymandias waited until the hands were level, lifted it swiftly to the aperture, and blew. As a roar of outrage erupted from beyond, he dropped the pipe neatly into Iraj's hood and stepped smartly away to put his back against the wall that held the doors. A moment later, the doors few open, the one on his size smashing into the wall next to him a fingers' breadth from his face. An unseen telekinetic force siezed the paladin Bendicta and hurled her into the room to fetch up against the end of the table with a painful crunch, staring up in horror at the occupant of the room.
The demon was nine feet tall, and half of her was almost a woman - a woman obscenely blended with a snake. From the waist down, instead of legs, she had a long, heavily muscled, snake's tail. Her humanlike torso was equipped with, not one but three pairs of arms. Two of them held glassware from the table; two held open books from which the demon had been experimenting; two had been relaxed at her sides with weapons in them, but now snapped up to the ready.
| DM Note: Technically, with Steve not here, there's no reason for Prayer still to be running. However, as was said at the time, without it they simply wouldn't have been here, and there'd be no game - so hey, it's still running. Who'da' thunk. |
Twisting, the paladin jabbed with her lance, but the demon turned the attacks aside. Ozymandias managed to stick a hand crossbow dart into her, but didn't quite manage to find a lethal angle; hastily, he ducked back around the corner. Tallan drifted through the wall to the left of the door and headed around to try and flank the demon; she wasn't sure she'd gone un-noticed but drew no hostile act. Baron Iraj and Siân launched a flurry of arrows, and the demon twisted sinuously to evade some. Not all, and her scream of fury threatened to shatter some of the glassware as the arrows sank deep. She reared up on her snaky tail, dropping the books and flasks to the floor, and snapped the fingers of three of her four free hands. In each, a tiny point of light appeared and rapidly expanded to take the shape of a different hand weapon. The final free hand she pointed at the floor between her and Benedicta and barked: "Darkness!" Instantly a sphere of utter dark 20' across enveloped both her and the paladin.
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Siân shot into the dark, but didn't think she'd hit anything. From across the room, Tallan came out of Wraithform and shot three more - incredibly, the demon deflected all three with her weapons. Then Benedicta called on the Light for aid and her Daylight spell threw back the fiend's even shadow, leaving a murky half-light sufficient for the party to see her again. Iraj and Ozymandias took full advantage and drove arrows into her from outside the door. Their triumph was short-lived, however, as she retaliated with a Fireball that burst on the landing, driving them back and incinerating Captain Davin and one of his men. The demon unleashed a rain of blows onto Bendicta, wounding her twice. Then she lifted her free hand again and cast another spell. Worryingly, nothing seemed to happen, though she grinned with evil satisfaction.
A momenet later Tallan's next three arrows bounced off the demon without penetrating her skin, and it dawned. She'd cast Stoneskin... Ozymandias' three shuriken met with a similar lack of success; his thrown vial of Blood of the Abbot poison splattered nicely on her face but didn't seem to have any particular effect. Were demons immune to poison? He wasn't sure. Iraj and Siân also watched their missiles glance harmlessly away as the demon laughed nastily. Stumbling backwards, Benedicta missed a parry and a dire mace reduced her shield-arm to a mass of bonemeal and mincemeat.
Her right arm dangling uselessly with its' shield, Bendicta stabbed desperately with the lance, but to no avail as the demon's Stoneskin deflected the attacks. Once again, five weapons curved in deadly arcs toward her and she blocked and dodged frantically, aware that if it hit her again she was finished. The demon's free hand lifted to point at Ozymandias, and a wave of emotion poured over him. Suddenly he was filled with a red rage at Baron Iraj and an insensate desire to pound him to jelly. Then his self-control reasserted itself and he realized; he felt like that all the time anyway. Why should it matter now?
Arrows, bolts and shuriken ricocheted in all directions as the demon continued to bear down on Benedicta. Then, without warning, one of Tallan's arrows sank into her shoulder and released a spurt of black blood. The vampire grinned toothily - and shot twice more. The arrows sank ito the demon's head and she collapsed, thrashing and coiling for an apalling time before she died.
Recovering, the party looked around at the room they now stood in. The workbench was largely intact, though several of the glass vessels had been smashed by deflected missiles. Shelves on the wallls contained more books, including several spellbooks. The two dropped books that the marilith had been reading were works on trans-dimensional travel. As they looked back towards the door, Tallan realized that there was an arch of alien-looking metal near the doors - she had missed passing through it by inches when she walked through the wall. It contained a green, glowing mist, and the party was pretty sure that this was the Fistula. Ozymandias pulled a blanket from his pack and threw it over it, more to stop it worrying him than from any hope that it might alter its' dangers. Then he settled to brew more poisons, rather nettled by the failure of his attempt to poison the marilith.
Rousing from her pain, Bendicta the paladin became aware that Tallan the vampire was attempting to use her domination abilities to urge the surviving man-at-arms from Rigsworth to go through the Fistula to explore the other side. He was quite happy with the idea at first, but the paladin's influence restored his judgement and he changed his mind. Annoyed, Tallan then tried to convince Benedicta that, if turned to a vampire, her pain would vanish and her smashed arm would heal. Firmly, she refused. This triggered a general argument about what to do with the Fistula, which culminated in Siân volunteering to go through and scout.
Realizing she was serious, the party let Iraj attach a rope to her waist and belay it to a solid object, after which she stepped through. The rope went tight - and then fell slack. Tallan could no longer hear her heartbeat at all...
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Siân felt a wave of cold transformation pass across her as she passed through the Fistula, and then she was standing in almost total darkness. The walls and ceiling of the place she was in were low, constructed of heavy blocks of stone smeared with something green. Orange sigils and runes of eye-aching complexity were graven everywhere, and all pulsed lighter and darker in the same rythmn.
Glancing around, she could see three shadowy forms, all large, all demonic. As she saw them, all three started to move rapidly towards her. The nearest unfolded ridiculously tiny bat-wings and took off, heading straight for her. Ahead of it it pushed an aura of magica Fear and Siân's nerve broke instantly. Blindly, she turned and fled.
Blind luck saved her. Away from the fear was at the same time towards the Fistula, and her flight took her back through the gateway. As she emerged, Ozymandias threw the blanket back over the arch, obviously deluded enough to think that this would quiet the thing like a caged budgie.
A moment later the blanket was ripped to shreds as a monstrous demon exploded out of the Fistula, snarling and slashing with it's terrible talons....
Session Date: 22nd Mar 2016