Session 14: Into the Dark

Prompt:  Self-esteem boost!

What feature or detail about your character does your character especially like, or is particularly proud of?

·         Valon is proud of his ability to persuade or irritate people.

·         Paws takes pride in her trusting, helpful nature.

·         Harvey knows he’s good at killing people, but what give him the most satisfaction is killing people, whether they know it or not.

·         Searos is proud of his sense of survival and his ability to leave a situation better than he found it.

·         Kas is proud of the friendships she made before she turned—they’re a guiding presence for her as she tries to reclaim her memories.

The Journey So Far…

·         The party engages the tunneller with enthusiasm:  Searos lends invaluable healing support; Harvey snipes the machine’s weaponry from the shadows; Paws (almost) effortlessly dances on top of the tunneller’s back; Kas fires freezing rays while protecting her sleepy pachyderm charge; and Valon carves the equipment to pieces, despite being trapped inside of its hopper.

·         Paws extracts some valuable, if not very interesting, components from the machine:  a large, softball-sized, translucent crystal; low-light lenses from its ocular apertures; and a focusing web from its force beam.

·         Searos watches Krik and Krak above, seated at the lip of the hole he managed to not once fall into.  The foothills of the Graypeaks are quiet as he enjoys several hours of peace and relative safety.

·         The rest of the group makes a good survey of the mine system and intuits that there are, in fact, two systems connected:  the original mine as excavated by humanoid hands with the assistance of the tunneller, and caverns excavated by the tunneller, left up to its own devices, over the past thirty years.  The extent of the new system is unknown but seems vast.  The party’s expert survivalists surmise a full exploration could take days or weeks.

·         During this survey, signs of the miners’ live internment are clear:  skeletons from the tunneller’s hopper spilled out onto the cave floor post-battle and additional remains are found in cracks and crevices.

·         Harvey doubles back to the interior of the mine’s original entrance and excavates the remaining cave-in with force beads.  He gets turned around on the way back to the battle site for several hours.

·         Valon, spying a partially passable caved-in entrance to a natural chamber in the cave system, dives right in.  A panic attack ensues during which Paws, who immediately peeked in to help, narrowly misses a series of eldritch blasts from the disoriented Valon.  Valon recovers briefly but continues to struggle with his trauma in the tight space.

·         Between episodes, the tale that the chamber and its inhabitants, a dozen humanoid remains, tells comes into focus.  A group of miners clinging to survival, safe from the tunneller but doomed by a cave in, spend their final days alone, in the dark.  During their final days, one of their number scratched a missive into the wall of the cave, implicating the Zhenatrim’s rabid machinery, while another chose to fall on their own sword.

·         As Harvey wanders back to the group, his dagger glowing in the mine’s gloom, Kas, desperate to help, casts thunderwave on the remaining rubble blocking her from Paws and Valon.  As the stone vibrates, cracks, and tumbles from the force of Kas’s magic, Valon struggles with the effort to maintain his sense of time and place.