With the Pazazu ship and its cargo of oil gone, the impending efreet invasion started to look a lot less scary to most djinn...
- Aswan:
- "Then we can just relax and have fun. The Caliph will throw a big feast for you. Maybe you will want to get some new clothes?"
- Ganeth: [glancing at his tunic and armor]
- "Black and blue seems appropriate, somehow."
...but the Vizier is a more cautious soul (or whatever) and summoned the party for a debriefing. (Technically, it was a celebratory get-together, but the lack of food, drink, or other guests seemed to dampen any semblance of a festive mood.) According to the Vizier, the Pazazu gate had reappeared on the Elemental Plane of Ice, which probably doesn't do them a lot of good. Jenx had not surfaced; Silvana guessed that if Jenx were captured, he'd volunteer to loot the gems from the djinn city, then abscond with the gems and try to bargain with both sides.
The Vizier's sources had indicated that the Demonfire priest (not that anyone knows what "Demonfire" actually means) was a human from the same Prime as the party but could come up with little else. However, there was word of a small band of efreet already in the Cloudlands, led by an efreet named Hrageez with whom the Vizier seemed quite familiar. The party's next mission was to capture Hrageez so the Vizier could question him and present him to the Caliph at the upcoming festival. To facilitate this, the party was provided with a brass bottle that could entrap an efreet (provided it's subdued first; if it's knocked out through conventional application of damage, the item is only 50% effective) and the Glowing Coal of Alaka, which efreet tend to find quite desirable.
- Vizier:
- "Be warned that the efreet will try to steal it back. That is, they will try to steal it."
And something bad might happen if an efreet got its hands on it, just to make life interesting. The Vizier also provided a pair of hounds ("djinn dogs") that knew Hrageez's scent and could track him through the Cloudlands.
Of course, with the Pazazu gate on the Plane of Ice and Kharnzeel's gate somewhere in free fall, the party is also going to have to find a way out of Cloudlands at some point. The djinn have a gate back to the Prime, to a locale sometimes visited by couatl, but it's perhaps not the most useful of destinations.
- Silvana:
- "Where does the portal lead?"
- Vizier:
- "Back to your world, of course."
- Silvana:
- "Yes, but where on our world?"
- Vizier:
- "Onto a cloud, naturally."
- Silvana:
- "So is there a temple or something on the cloud?"
- Vizier:
- "The cloud is not normally inhabited. It is not as solid as these clouds."
- Beeel:
- "Will we fall through?"
- Vizier:
- "I suppose you will fall, yes."
But on the bright side, it might pass over where the party wants to go. Way, way over.
So after a spot of healing, the non-equine party members fired up the carpets and headed out with the djinn dogs. (Djinn dogs look like large translucent hounds who bark, jump around, accidentally knock over furniture with their tails, and lick kensai who pet them. Their saliva feels like alcohol and evaporates quickly. And they're probably telepathic; they bark in much the way Tweet says, "Tweet.") Their first encounter was with three dive-bombing aaracroka; Silvana held one, the second dove to rescue the first one when it started falling, and the third, which showed up on Detect Evil, went gaseous after being shot by Stealth and Cambra. Silvana released the held aaracokra, but before the party could swoop down on the gaseous aaracokra-imitating efreet, two invisible urd-imitating efreet entered the fray. A few rounds later, all three efreet were toast.
The party flew on, and in ten minutes they were approaching Hrageez's base, a cloud island shaped a lot like a floating brazier. The first wave of defenders featured seven imp-like demons with various fire-based powers (fireball, wall of fire, flame arrow, burning hands, Melf's minute meteors, possibly more) and a pair of winged fire elemental-types (two-fisted pummelers); after the party crashed through the demons' cylinder of fire (flames facing inward, naturally) and started beating up on them (while taking damage from the wall every round), Hrageez showed up with another impish being called Demondrak.
- Hrageez:
- "Do you surrender, mortals?"
- Thorongil:
- "Who are you calling mortal?"
Demondrak's big attack was a black conical breath weapon that made its victims go berserk (+1 to hit, +3 to damage, +5 hit points) and unleash their rage on targets of Demondrak's choice. As the bloodbath got underway, Hrageez captured Beeel for later questioning with a 1st edition-style sepia snake sigil (cast from a ring, zero activation time), and then captured the Glowing Coal (actually a gem) for good measure. But everything worked out eventually: Demondrak got sent home by a dispel evil, the berserk compulsions faded (though not before Thorongil had knocked Cambra unconscious), Hrageez didn't manage to hit anyone with the beam he fired from the Coal (and he took some sort of trap damage himself from the attempt), and the party successfully looted the SSS ring between applying large quantities of non-subdual damage to Hrageez and getting lucky on their attempt to stuff him into the bottle.
The sigil around Beeel wore off after a turn, and the party took a quick look around the flying brazier. They looked long enough to note two invisible efreet guarding the top of the bowl and decided that since they were already pretty severely pounded, they'd pass on that particular batch of xp (especially since the djinn dogs could probably lead people back to the cloud later).
On the way back to the djinn city, the party encountered 20 aaracokra in battle formation looking for whoever was going around casting holds on people in midair. After the party parried the first six javelins, the aaracokra decided to parley and landed en masse on the carpets; Cambra detected one of them (not one of the leader-types) as evil.
- Rahul:
- "Many of the aaracokra are poking and prodding at the adventurers in great curiosity. They love armor and shiny items. An aaracokra on G's carpet is marvelling at his scale mail."
- Gita:
- "Is that the evil one?"
- Rahul:
- "No, the evil one is standing behind Cambra."
Cambra dislodged the disguised efreet and its normal compatriots by shaking her carpet; meanwhile, Silvana tried explaining (with the dubious assistance of Whitemoon's translator) that there were shapeshifters around impersonating aaracokra and urds. When that proved relatively unconvincing, she went for the universal language and healed a wounded aaracokra (who didn't especially want to be healed, but a Champion's gotta do what a Champion's gotta do).
- Redbeak:
- "I'll just get hurt again. It's not like I can't take the pain."
- Aaracokra second:
- "Redbeak loves to show off his wounds -- they are so rare."
So the leader decided he believed the tale, and the aaracokra headed off to fight urds (with the efreet still among them). The party made it back to the city and turned Hrageez and the Coal over to the Vizier, who informed our heroes that Demondrak is basically a demon lord who's very down on her luck, power- and follower-wise, though some mortals back home are rumored to pray to her for strength in battle (perhaps the Fungols?). She used to have her own demi-plane, but some mortal adventurers gave her the boot, so it's not clear what plane she just got dispelled to. The Vizier also wanted to know if the fire imps spoke, though he didn't say why.
The Vizier decided that the djinn could handle things from that point, so the party healed up, enjoyed the banquet (where the tale of their recent exploits impressed a number of djinn), and worked out the details of their coming rewards (custom air items that should be ready in about a month).
During the banquet, the Vizier and the Caliph quietly extracted more information about the efreet plans from Hragreez. There are two efreet among the aaracokra; one is in the background as a normal warrior, and the other is in the role of a hero with powerful "fire items". The eventual target of the efreet operations is the Efreet Caliph, and they're getting assistance from the Pazuzu followers and allied mortals, who had imprisoned Demondrak and given her to the efreet to help balance the general hosedness of their fire-based abilities in the Cloudlands. Hrageez doesn't know where the mortals are, though he thinks they have a ship somewhere; he also believes that the rebel efreet leader and the Demonfire priest are close friends. He's also had some dealings with Kharnzeel, whom he describes as a "lowlife traitorous mortal whose heart deserves to be ripped out and eaten by Demondrak" (who gets temporary powers from eating the hearts of powerful mortals).