At dawn, there was again light. And nothing else. No saves. No damage from staying awake all night. No healing for Lawfuls. No hosing for Chaotics. No restoration of stats or size. Just another day of damaging heat.
The party pushed on, hoping to reach the cave and have some shelter to rest in. After a while, the party saw a partially submerged cubic rock with a whilg sunning on it. As usual, the whilg was a source of strange conversation.
- Whilg:
- "You are like butterflies in the ocean."
- Silvana:
- "Over the ocean or in the ocean?"
- Whilg:
- "At the bottom of. Did you know that I was sent here as a punishment?"
- Silvana:
- "Who sent you?"
- Whilg:
- "The same fools who sent you here as a reward."
- Silvana: [somewhat facetiously]
- "It's a merit award. We were sent because we're the best."
- Ganeth:
- "And because we failed a save or two at precisely the wrong time."
- Whilg:
- "Do you want to know what happens to your best? Three, two, one... Only the orcs will speak to them now."
- Ganeth:
- "What are you being punished for?"
- Whilg:
- "I am being punished for creativity."
- Ganeth:
- "How very lawful."
- Silvana:
- "This is an interesting world. I thought it lay in shadow, but dreams and thoughts obviously squeeze through the craxks."
- Whilg:
- "Only interesting because it has strayed from the path."
- Silvana:
- "Were whilgs among the architects of this world? Representatives of the 6?"
- Whilg:
- "This was not planned. 20, 12, 8, 6, 4,...one?"
- Ganeth:
- "1?"
- Whilg: [hopping off the rock]
- "I will join you for a time. We all head into the future one step at a time."
- Silvana:
- "That's novel, to have a whilg walking with us. Aren't you supposed to disappear into a rock mysteriously and join us at a later point?"
- Whilg:
- "And what if there is no convenient rock where you are headed? If you are headed to the tower, then it makes sense for me to be there."
- Ganeth:
- "How so?"
- Whilg:
- "Unlike the Others, I'm not scared of the End."
- Silvana:
- "That's what the last entity who accompanied us implied."
- The whilg shrugs.
- Beeel:
- "What do you know about how the tower fits into this world?"
- Whilg:
- "I thought the tower was an excellent focus. It's so obvious."
Ganeth tried asking what creative element the whilg had introduced, but it regretfully declined to comment. The party trekked on, slowed considerably by their cryptic companion. After a little while, the whilg stated that it was important for the party to rest, and it knew of a convenient cave not too far away. The party was inclined to press on, but the whilg further stated that it was important for the party to have some dreams. This failed to excite the party's interest.
- Ganeth:
- "I don't normally have dreams anyway."
- Whilg:
- "Your normal dreams are frankly of little use."
Finally, the whilg said that there were going to be dangerous fish in the area ahead, and there would be trouble without the whilg's protection. The party was still inclined to get back to the tower as quickly as possible, so they left the whilg behind on another convenient cubic rock. When they looked back a bit later, the rock and the whilg were gone.
A bit later, the party entered an area where the sand's texture seemed slightly different and the dunes looked like waves in a choppy sea. The party found this disturbing, so they went around the area. This attracted another whilg, who noted that the party seemed to have gotten off course and again suggested the party seek shelter in the nearby cave. When pressed for its agenda, the whilg admitted that it wanted to party to deal with a human "guardian" in the cave that was preventing the whilgs from accessing a powerful rock formation that would be vital to the party's mission. (The whilgs claimed that they had placed the guardian, but it had gotten "overzealous". The formation also gave it some power over the whilgs, as well as sand abilities that could explain the sandy sea phenomenon.) The party still wasn't interested; the whilg said that there was nothing for the party to accomplish at the tower. The party decided that the measures creatures were taking to distract the party from the tower were becoming impressive, blew off the whilg, and kept walking. They also clued in to the power vacuum created by the illithid's demise and realized that forces who would have been happy to see the plane destroyed might now see a chance to take power for themselves instead.
About an hour from the tower, the party had an encounter with three normal scorpions and a large thin sand-colored creature that enveloped people (and transmitted some incoming damage to creatures held within). The notable developments were that the chaotic elves still had their respective insanities, and Silvana was able to charm one of the attacking scorps (who happily chewed on its buddies during and after the fight).
The party arrived at the tower to find that the send in the area was 20' higher than it had been the day before, putting the opening in the bottom tower cube at ground level and burying all of the habitats. (In retrospect, it became clear that the cave the party had arrived in was also buried, since the party should have passed by it and didn't.) There was no obvious activity from the tower, but when Yves and Stealth scouted closer, Yves saw a behir in the top part of the 80' cube, in position to lightning bolt the open doorway. Apparently the 12s were now in charge.
The party next turned its attention to Karzen-Ben's habitat, which fortunately had a panel in its barely-accessible top face. Attempts to activate the panels were made; Thorongil scored a critical success and was rewarded with soft machinery sounds, but the panel refused to open. Silvana set to work and disengaged the latching mechanisms, Beeel got the habitat dwellers to push on the panel from below, Yves wedged a lance into the crack this created, Ganeth looped some rope around the edge of the panel, and the horses dragged it far enough to allow people to go in and out.
The habitat people were very happy the party had returned; they had indeed received their Proof, along with new archive information and a bunch of dreams (the last courtesy of whilgs, no doubt). The prophecy claimed that the habitat dwellers had proven themselves the "Chosen Ones", and it was imperative that they leave the face, which would soon by overcome by turmoil and be generally less lawful. In particular, the best and brightest were to go to the other faces and set the same process in motion in the other lands. "Only when all is reduced to Chaos can Law be truly restored. The shortest way to lands lies from within. All must move as one." The dream gave an amendment: "Since the inner paths are blocked, you must take long roads." In the dream, they were advised to choose another land and start walking to it, prevailing over the many forces that would try to stop them.
The habitat dwellers had a bit of trouble deceiphering the records (which were in an ancient dialect of Western Common) about the dials in the spherical chamber below the chamber, but when Ganeth told them their configuration, all became clear. Each dial corresponds to a world; to travel to that world, recreate the original configuration of dials, but with that world in place of the plane of departure. (All proper configurations look exactly the same, provided the target world is seen as the "top" dial.) Once that's done, turning the target dial 360 degrees completes the configuration process; the passageways surrounding the target dial lead to four different locations on the target world, while the other four lead to "punishment" (presumably the Void). If the dials are misconfigured, all roads lead to punishment.
- Two-year-old "expert":
- "You guys think you're really smart, huh?"
- Beeel:
- "No, but we're good at killing stuff."
The dwellers had also discovered which faces corresponded to the various dials. With the desert land at the top, the four walls corresponded toThe bottom dial was also thought to lead to punishment.
- Land of Walls/Mazes, complete with maze-dwellers.
- Land of Brethren, with gusty winds, mountainous terrain, deadly falls, and orcs.
- Land of Liquid (possibly acid), where complex currents move floating islands about.
- something about earth or rock, home of the spike stones.
By this point, it was becoming abundantly clear that the whilgs were trying to keep the party away from something in the tower, so the party naturally decided that retaking it was imperative.
After much deliberation, the party decided to have Ganeth cast haste and fly spells on Thorongil and Beeel, who would then go in and beat the behir to a bloody pulp; Thorongil, calculating expected damage potential and the like, even volunteered to eat the lightning bolt. (Thor also pulled the +1 bastard sword thread for the fight.) The haste spell fizzled, but the fly spells were successfully cast, and the rogs flew in. The behir tried to be clever and hid behind the pillar, trying to spring around a corner and get surprise, but its plan failed, and the combatants engaged.
As the fighters headed in, Yves snuck onto the grillwork to fire off some arrows at the behir. As he did, a tentacle grabbed his ankle from below and tried to pull him down; he and Silvana soon found themselves in combat with the creature. Stealth placed an Evard's along the pillar, further damaging the behir. Ganeth arrived and noticed that there was 10' of sand in the bottom of the cube, leaving 10' of space between the sand and the grillwork; he lowered himself down and saw four pedipalps (ten-legged critters with two tentacles, making them 12s) moving around the bottom of the grillwork, attacking people above them. Before he could engage them, he was confronted with a humanoid sand elemental with a pair of punching attacks.
All these enemies were eventually defeated, and the falling behir, whose tail was held by the Evard's, took out a section of the grillwork during its exit. Ganeth gleefully set his jellybean to work on its corpse, curing his depression over losing the opportunity to dine on Frankel's converted carcass.
Frepper returned to the habitat to bring the inhabitants over to the tower, where they were set to work digging out the four lower passageways. The rest of the party (except for Thorongil) finally got to sleep, but they all had rather unusual dreams.
The next day, the diggers got down far enough to see that the lower panels were still open, and the passageways were filled with sand. So they started clearing those out. As one of the tunnelers neared the end of the passage, the end of the pole they'd been digging with disappeared. The pole looked to have been eaten away rather than sheared off, making the most likely suspect a dun pudding (which would blend with the sand covering it). Stealth sent an unseen servant down the passageway to probe; it got smacked by the a pesudopod and disappeared. Whether it was a normal-sized pudding toward the top of the chamber (Beeel's hope) or a giant 10' radius sphere of pudding (Ganeth's fear) was unclear, but since it didn't move out to investigate the possible food source disturbing it, it seemed likely to be posessed by something else's spirit, set there to block access to the dials and the places they lead.
Several party members went to sleep, hoping to figure out a way to deal with the pudding in the morning. Once again, there were dreams.
Silvana woke the other sleeping party members, and none of them ever slept on Dustplane again.