Since the party was pretty battered and tapped out of spells, they decided to hole up in the stairway and try to get throught the night. They were attacked by seven Pandemonium Jellyfish, which don't do much damage but have paralytic poison and turn hypnotic colors. They also explode when they die, much like the baddies from the very beginning of this storyline. (The explosion damage is acid-based, and the jellyfish themselves are immune.) Based on their abilities and lack of raw damage potential, they were presumably sent in to neutralize the party in preparation for something else. They managed to hypnotize most of the party (despite sustaining several casualties) but were eventually defeated with the help of Tylerion (the movanic deva Whitemoon has assigned to the Champion of Good for desperate situations involving extraplanars).
Before being hyponotized, Ganeth rather predictably cast Det Invis to scan for the anticipated but curiously absent second wave.
Tylerion had noticed a silver cord belonging to a shator on his way in from the astral plane and was expecting that Silvana had summoned him to help fight it. The shator didn't come in, and Tylerion bestowed lots of healing during the lull. He also gave our heroes the rundown on shators:
- Tylerion:
- "A Shator is the largest of the Gehreleths, also known as Demodands. Shators are 6' tall and kind of pudgy. Their heads are kind of like a bulldog with undershot jaws and they are very strong. Sometimes they come bearing a magical weapon which they wield with (IMHO) brute strength and little skill. Uncharacteristically for demodands, shators are pretty intelligent. They can beguile, cloudkill, and so on in addition to gating in other demodands. They are immune to weapons of +2 or lower. They have tough hides which take less damage from edged weapons (-1), are pretty hefty (15HD), and have 50% MR. As if all all this were not enough, they are somewhat sneaky, hard to surprise, and immune to mental stuff. Any other questions?"
- Frankel:
- "Yep. Why haven't they taken over the planet yet?"
- Ganeth:
- "Because their visas expire too soon."
After getting somewhat healed up, the party went to the roof to see if anything was afoot. Ganeth detected a strong astral presence in the immediate area, and it waved at him in a friendly sort of way. (Ganeth waved back.) Tylerion went astral to investigate; he talked, he parried a few blows, and when he got back he said that the shator had come for Ganeth and wanted to speak with him alone. Ganeth decided he wasn't going, and both the party and the shator just sat and waited. Tylerion began to suspect that the shator was free rather than summoned, since it would have taken quite a lot of energy to summon one for as long as this one was hanging around; Tylerion himself had to leave to conserve Whitemoon's energy (since threats specifically to Ganeth are outside his purview). As Ganeth's Det Invis was running out, the shator came up, gazed at him, and disappeared. A short while later, Lessania started mumbling incoherently somewhere in the back of Ganeth's head.
The party spent a nervous but uneventful night and prepared for their assault on Dodaji in the morning (with Dodaji heckling from somewhere below throughout).
- Dodaji:
- "You think I can't hear you?"
- Frankel:
- "That's nice, Dodaji. Go back to sleep."
- Dodaji:
- "Gods never sleep, puny mortal."
- Frankel:
- "That's a nonsequitur if ever I heard one."
The combat with Dodaji was rather nasty, since he could meld in and out of stone, animate stone hands (tougher than Maximilian's Stony Grasp) and mudmen, call in a 16HD earth elemental and a stone troll, create minor illusions, fire off an earthy analogue of flame arrow, and try to bury the party under a big transmute rock to mud.
- Dodaji:
- "You're a troll-slaying ranger, right?"
- Frankel:
- "Elf-slaying."
- Dodaji:
- "Elf-slaying? Damn. Well, who's going to fight my stone troll then?"
- Frankel:
- "Er, you?"
Fortunately, Dodaji was vulnerable to +1 weapons (and so was whacked at various times by Frankel, Thor, Beeel, and Stealth), Ganeth had stocked up on air bolts and digs, and Silvana had forseen the collapsing tunnel trick and precast water walk on the party.
- Dodaji:
- "So many idiots and only one action."
- Silvana:
- "We have that problem too."
By the end, the base had been remodeled once more (I wonder what built-in mud baths do to the property value), but Dodaji was gone and the pentagrams were accessible.
The Red Mage and Jenx teleported in to one of the pentagrams that evening (not bothering to scry ahead, of course). Jenx lit some scry-shielding incense, and after some vague speculation about the shator incident, the party turned its attention to Kharnzeel, whom Silvana thinks is holed up inside the Vault. There seem to be two ways that Kharnzeel could have gotten in: astrally (the Red Mage believes the Vault may be accessible from the astral plane; pulling this off would require something akin to an astral tracker, which is vaguely related to an intellect devourer but isn't as vicious and has retractable tentacles instead of claws) or by teleport without error after somehow lifting the heptagram location from Streck's mind through his mind-shielding. (Or an unthinkably impressive Raven thief might have deactivated all of the traps and cracked the combination, but that seems like an even longer shot than the other two.) The Red Mage suggests that Kharnzeel may have something resembling Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (or his own Brass Mansion) set up as his base.
Beyond the difficulty involved in simply finding and defeating Kharnzeel, there's another complication involved in killing him: Subator, Kharnzeel's bodyguard, happens to be Jenx's brother, and his life force is bound to Kharnzeel's through a magical necklace. (The necklace, worn by Kharnzeel, has a hollow ruby containing a drop of Subator's blood.) Apparently Subator went insane after traveling to Banzeel and interacting extensively with the insanity priests, changing from your basic kenku to...(In actuality, Subator probably became lawful before becoming a kensai.) Subator also controls the various black birds the party has been encountering, which he can capture and bring in from an alternate dimension called the Cloudlands ("a place where everything is bigger"). Jenx also warns that big black birds like the maître d' are usually found as mated pairs.
- Ganeth:
- "An insane double-sai chaotic kenku kensai?"
- Jenx:
- "It's not that funny."
- Ganeth:
- "No, but it alliterates."
Just to further complicate Jenx's family tree, his sister was the one who figured out how to contact the karfu in the first place. She disappeared several years ago. Jenx has said that Subator is not responsible for the karfu that have appeared in the West, but he hasn't said who is.
So while the party hopes to prevent Kharnzeel from driving chunks of the West insane (and pulling off whatever else he has in mind), they're now also hoping to rescue Subator in the process. (Jenx thinks that Subator's insanity might be reversible, since kenku can undergo some sort of penance to atone for their pasts, but Silvana isn't sure that Subator would be happy about being cured, since he might lose his kensai abilities in the process.) What they're going to do is a good question; whether they can do it before Delrina and Axiz put together a workable plan that kills both Kharnzeel and Subator is another (though the sneaky sisters first have to retrieve Axiz's items from the stoneshape Silvana dumped them in).
The Chaotic Duo reported that the Spiders seem to have allied with a large group of orcs that are now inhabiting Silverton. Frankel believes that a human named Tiger (a minor bandit from Rogtymark's keep) is working with the orcs ("I'll explain later..."), though Silvana is unsure of how he would have gotten to Silverton. (Perhaps a connection to the orogs who were planning to attack the westernmost keeps from the Banditlands during the war?) The Red Mage also knows someone named Tiger, but this one's an Eastern cambion.
Jenx was unable to learn anything about the orcs, though there are thousands of them and they're having some kind of festival, so he's hoping to take the party on a scouting mission to Silverton to learn more about this development before the demonic tree goes into play. (This also happens to give the party something to do that doesn't involve getting his brother killed, of course.) Insane as this sounds, there's actually a vague plan for pulling this off without calling hordes of phase spiders and vats of orange gas down on the party's head: Using various combinations of disguise, invisibility, and polymorph, the party poses as orcs (relying on G's intimate knowledge of Orcish in all its crudity) and garners info on what the hordes are up to. This still involves some risk that the spiders will be able to detect Ganeth or Silvana anyway...
- Jenx:
- "I think that we should break up into two teams then: Myself and Beeel (or anyone who the spiders don't know about), and the ones that the spiders know and care about with backup."
- Ganeth:
- "The Hosed and the Screwed?"
The split-up-and-take-more-damage plan was eventually vetoed; at this point the party intends to teleport into the Pit (an inn in Silverton's Drawn and Quarter), go into orc mode, and work its way out, gathering information as it goes. In case of trouble, possible retreats are to Sunrise (which has a booming mercenary population of several thousand thanks to the coming war and therefore has too many mortals for the biggest extraplanar goons to come blazing through with impunity) and Vlurshollow (which is hopefully still warded against evil extraplanars). And if all else fails, there's also the Red Mage's Brass Mansion (though the local efreet may be less than thrilled to have Ganeth in their midst after he defeated one during Silvana's first Challenge).
- Red Mage:
- "We might need some impromptu lessons in orc etiquette."
- Silvana:
- "How to give the finger correctly?"
The Red Mage and Jenx camped out inside the Brass Mansion, leaving the door open in case Kharnzeel sent something really nasty the party's way during the night. It turned out the only event of the evening took place inside Ganeth's mind: He had a dream for perhaps the third time since his trip to the drow plane more than fifteen years ago. He doesn't remember much about the dream except that it involved being in combat. He woke rather exhausted (though still able to memorize spells) and with 10 more points of damage than he went to sleep with; he also found a blood-red whetstone clutched in his hand.
In the morning, Silvana cast detect charm on Ganeth and got a negative reading. The DoH and following night passed uneventfully.