The party took several days of healing, and after a lot of back-and-forth, the azers agreed to loan the party a fire elemental (which got an endure cold from Silvana) and move the party to just behind one of the walls in the gateway's entrance chamber. (The azers opened a tunnel, the party walked through it, and the rocks closed behind them.) Ganeth sent a passwall out to the chamber and the party (plus Fishfinder and the elemental) surged through, surprising the assembled ice liches and polar bear zombies. Unfortuntely, all the ice liches were able to flee the cave (including, amazingly, the one Beeel was choking, which dimdoored away before Beeel's first init).
A prolonged combat followed, featuring summoned ice toads, a cyan hulk (which provided a charge for Thorongil's shield), summoned wraiths, unsummoned wraiths, and 9th-level fighter wraiths By the end of it all, Beeel and Ganeth had lost levels (so much for teleporting out); on the villains' side, only the ice lich who'd dimdoored survived (by never coming back).
- Combat notes:
Ice liches- +1 weapon or better to hit, immune to electricity, no MR against fire attacks, turn to snow and fall apart when killed (possibly only simalcra of the "real" ice liches).
- Fighter wraiths ("rogwraiths")
- +2 weapon or better to hit, wield insubstantial two-handed swords, at least one level of specialization, inflict weapon damage (including spec. bonus) plus strength and level drains.
- Cyan hulk
- Causes slowing rather than confusion, tunnels through snow at 9" and stone at 1", can swim.
The symbol above the doorway had changed since the party's previous visit: now it was a snowflake (a hexagon with six Ys sticking out of the vertices), still with the triple diamond eye-like pattern.
The party headed in, fought some summoned scorpions, and approached the central puzzle area, but were blocked by a stoneskinned 12th level ice lich with a repulsion item. The party made some headway against it (except for Ganeth, who in a moment of player idiocy switched to the anti-stoneskin spear, which isn't magical and doesn't damage ice liches anyway -- maybe we'll claim post-ER diminished capacity ;-]) until it whipped out a little black hourglass with orange liquid and flipped it over. Thinking delayed blast fireball (ice liches can use fire magic just like everyone else, and they're so much fun in long passageways), the party scampered; since G was close to dead and needed a full move to escape the blast radius, Silvana ended up grabbing Elissa where she'd dropped (and taking a d6 for her non-Chaotic trouble). The blast did 94 points... all of which turned out to be illusory (which probably wouldn't have saved Elissa on her own, given her classic high elven mental stats). The party regrouped, but the lich was nowhere to be found.
The central chamber was 20'x20'x10', with a mural vaguely resembling a snowy landscape running along the three walls. The mural was composed of small triangular pieces threaded along tracks contoured like fingerprints, and these pieces could be slid along the tracks and flipped around to create different images. There were also dials and switches embedded in the mural; these could only be reset when mural pieces were moved out of the way.
The room also featured two unconscious people (knocked out by the illusory blast): a middle-aged man wearing a spider amulet and an old woman carrying a tentacled pouch and an iron fishhook. The party looted and bound them, and the man woke up. He turned out to be an artist from the northern continent who'd been brought down to work on the mural (Silvana thought he might have some connection to the Temple of Beauty in Marakeel; he said he wanted to leave a great sculpture as his legacy), and his life was somewhat difficult because factions opposed to his employers also had consultants who'd come in when he was gone, undo his work, and start making the mural into something else. There was also the problem that only certain moves were "allowed" when playing with the mural, and making an illegal shift resulted in a nasty electric shock (though this wouldn't bother an ice lich). Finishing the mural was his final objective; while he had some inkling about the gates, he didn't care much about the nasty places they went.
- Artist:
- "The All-Mothers are a beautiful metaphor for..."
- Beeel:
- "How are you going to finish your sculpture when you're dead?"
After some questioning, the man pointed out which lever controlled the doorway from the Icelands. It was propped in the open position by a fair number of mural pieces, which would have to be moved somewhere to allow it to fall and close the gate. Unless you've got a reduce spell handy, in which case it falls anyway and gets stuck in the new position when the spell wears off -- and as an added bonus, 282 mural pieces (including 143 small gems) slide off the ends of their tracks onto the floor, where adventuring vandals scoop them up.
Silvana checked out the panels behind the newly barren section of the mural and found some silvery tentacle-like wiring running behind them. There was also a yellow gem embedded in the works; the artist grabbed it, ate a big chunk of current, and permatoasted.
The old woman (whose name was Karbuna) woke up next, and the first thing she saw was the dead artist.
- Karbuna:
- "Let's loot that guy."
- Silvana:
- "Already taken care of."
- Karbuna:
- "Where's my stuff?"
- Beeel:
- "Hey, bring my rope up with you."
Karbuna spoke Eastern Common but had never heard of Marakeel or Banzeel; in her neck of the woods Southern Common is what civilized people spoke. She was from a coastal region somewhere, and she was in the Icelands repaying a debt to the eight-tentacled sea faction. The iron fishhook was her holy symbol, and she was trying to duplicate a holy mural in her temple (showing an underwater grotto with an unearthly reef). She'd heard rumors of "fairy elves" who'd tried to steal the ice liches' treasure about a week earlier.
- Karbuna:
- "Have I been captured?"
- Silvana:
- "You've been rescued."
- Karbuna:
- "I thank you. Can I have my stuff back?"
- Thorongil:
- "It's been rescued too."
The party scooped up the puzzle pieces and headed out. Their escape was blocked by a pair of white puddings, but the party got by them with an aura of terror. A fighter wraith and three normal wraiths were waiting in the entranceway, but Silvana turned the normals and the rog decided to withdraw.
- Silvana:
- "Evil turns on itself. Now go away."
Ganeth's vandalism had set the mural to close the entrance to the gate complex in 24 hours, but there was still the problem of stopping the ice liches from going in and fixing the damage. Silvana solved it with Hurricane's rod of cancellation, which closed the doorway for a day (by which point it would be closed anyway).
Fishfinder went off to find the sea, and the party ducked back through the passwall, which closed behind them a bit later. The party spent the rest of the night hiding in a rope trick. The next day, Thorongil hulked out (cyan style) and dug a path up to the ice plain above the canyon. From there, the party (plus Karbuna) flew back to the ki-rin (using the 48" MC E version).
A day later, there was a full-scale war in progress down in the valley, with frost giants in the thick of it. The face in the western cliff was again covered by snow. Vecnar reportedly fled to another continent to wait for things to settle down. Mountain Breeze revealed (since it was "going to be common knowledge soon") that Vecnar appeared to be an undead illithid with qualifications for ice lichhood (whatever those are).
Beeel began retraining his kensai level. Meanwhile, the ki-rin examined Ganeth on their altar. They learned that the homicidal maniac persona was neither Lessania nor the chaos source; it was an astral strand that acted "like a string controlling a puppet." They also found a failsafe mechanism built into the body that would channel the chaos source and the homicidal maniac onto a particular target (guess who) if the body were knocked unconscious. When triggered, the effect is "not evil; it will be a distortion of reality" -- forcing Whitemoon to eat either the expense of interfering with a non-evil mortal or the expense of raising Silvana again.
Growing a new body in the crystal cocoon struck the ki-rin as the only viable move. Unfortunately, the failsafe would try to move to the new body -- the regrowth process is a bit like an astral free-for-all between Ganeth's spirit, all the other things grafted on to it, the active components of the old and new bodies, and whatever else finds its way into the cocoon before it's closed. (Alternatively, you could picture the sponsorship stockholders meeting to appoint a new board of directors.) The ki-rin sent Silvana and Clynthia to gather several special snows: some to work against the failsafe, others to stabilize the shape and properties of the body itself (which Mountain Breeze figures nobody else cares enough to see to -- hopefully her superiors won't be too put out by the assistance).
Clynthia ferried Thorongil and the grey elves back to the Hollerith Temple after the snow-gathering expedition, before they got in danger of catatonia. Beeel returned after he completed his self-training. Clynthia trained Ganeth back to fighter-9; he tried to self-train his mage level back but failed, and Hurricane had to tutor him through it. He also made a local star chart and found nothing in common with the skies over the Hollerith Temple. G's total time in the Icelands came out to eight weeks, but he showed no signs of tree withdrawal whatsoever.
The party never did find the intelligent moss forest, but the tunnel problem seems solved -- for now.