The party decided to ride out from the Hollerith Library for a day, to get a sense of what had moved into the area, before using the cloudship for the rest of the trip to the mountain dwarves. After riding for about four hours, they spotted a group of nine orcs and one ogre, all poking the grass with their spears as if they were searching for something. Some of the orcs panicked and opened fire with their crossbows, but the party tried some diplomacy (at least to keep their summoned mounts alive).
- Ganeth: [orcish]
- "Hi there, and welcome to the lands of the Temple of Hollerith. Unfortunately, we're not actual Holleriths ourselves, which is why we're going to kill you if you don't start explaining yourselves real fast."
- Thighcrusher:
- "I don't see any temple around."
- Ganeth:
- "I don't see any caves either. What's your point?"
The ogre chimed in, told the orcs they were going to talk, and came forward to parley with G. The ogre said they weren't bothering anyone and didn't want to fight; when G asked what they were doing, he said they were looking for invisible magic worms that let you cast spells when you eat them.
- Ogre: [still speaking orcish]
- "Dwarves coming, making war on orcs now humans gone. We needing magic for dwarf fighting. Talking to magic wizard for helpings. He giving us some instructions for gathering magics making us powerful. You elf. Have magic -- you eat worms?"
- Ganeth:
- "No, I read books. What does the wizard get out of helping you?"
- Ogre:
- "Not like dwarves. Like elves."
The wizard called itself Nightmaster and used magical means to come and go. The ogre was unsure of the wizard's race, since it always wore a mask, "black like night with many small stars. No eyes, nose, mouth." The wizard had become good friends with the orc chief, and this group (including the chief's son, who'd once attacked the wizard and was a mage himself) had been told to head west and not come back without some worms.
Ganeth figured the invisible worms were bogus and they'd just been sent off to get the chief's son off Nightmaster's back. (At the time he thought they might have been sent this way to get killed by adventurers or Westerners, thus being off Nightmaster's back permanently, but Silvana and Beeel rightly pointed out that there were surer ways of getting that accomplished.) The son got really pissed off and started speaking directly to the party in fluent Western Common, which worried the ogre since he didn't speak the language and was losing track of what was going on.
- Orc:
- "Free our tribe from Nightmaster and I will reward you richly."
- Silvana:
- "We will not help you for money. However, if you allow us to quest yourself, the chieftain and the shaman into promising not to attack this area, we might consider it."
- Orc:
- "Indeed, we may optionally draw up some pacts of mutual non-aggression, trade treaties and the like. Under my leadership, our tribe shall blossom forth into the modern age."
- Silvana:
- "Sorry, we don't put much stock in treaties."
Silvana and Ganeth had a quiet conference and were basically confused about the well-spoken orc (Silvana thought he had an Auramkil tinge about him), the parleying ogre, the invisible worms. Silvana told the orcs they could keep looking for worms if they gave up their weapons, or else they could be escorted back to the Hollerith Temple. The orc opted for the temple, "where we can discuss the mission in a more civilized setting."
- Ogre: [orcish]
- "What talkings going on?"
- Ganeth:
- "Looks like we're all heading west for a while."
- Ogre:
- "Find worms?"
- Ganeth:
- "There might be some worms around...though maybe not the ones you expect."
The party disarmed the orcs, and they all headed back west. The head orc said he'd picked up Western Common during his time in Silverton, when he studied under Xaxol, "an exacting master" who "has remained true to his orcish heritage." The elves in the party knew that Xaxol had left the plane before Khambeer, roughly sixteen years earlier, but it was interesting that the orc had heard the name.
Silvana found a normal worm and started talking to it. The worm got very frightened, but Silvana learned that there were "special" worms in the area that wanted to control humans.
The orc was interested in Lorcan's bagpipe, since he played the flute himself. He took one out and was about to start playing when Silvana told him he'd die after the first note. Lorcan put up a detect magic, the flute showed, and Silvana (not knowing Lorcan's finding) asked him for it.
- Orc:
- "Do I have your word that I will get it back?"
- Silvana:
- "If it isn't magical or evil, we'll give it back."
- Orc:
- "So you're only going to keep it if it's valuable? That makes you a thief!"
- Silvana:
- "I don't equate `evil' with `valuable'. Do you?"
- Lorcan: [elvish]
- "But you stole it in the first place."
- Orc: [w.c.]
- "It was rightfully acquired loot!
- Ganeth applauds.
- Orc: [a bit sheepishly]
- "Languages are a hobby of mine."
The orc handed over the flute, which he said was a flute of wonder. Ganeth asked him a few questions about his training; among other responses, the orc said that Mon Sum I was a lame spell (okay) and that Xaxol only taught dispel magic to his best students (not okay -- the real Xaxol was an alteration specialist who could never learn or teach dispel magic).
Night fell, and the orc seemed a little dismayed at the prospect of marching through the night. (The other orcs were happy enough, though.) The ogre suddenly stopped, saying he didn't want to go to the temple. Ganeth tried coaxing a reason out of him, but the ogre just said he wasn't going, though he was willing to compromise by heading north instead of east or west.
The orc decided this meant they were camping there for the night, so he started putting down his bedroll. Beeel, suspecting there might be something hidden inside it, picked it back up.
- Orc:
- "You steal my crossbow, you steal my flute. Now you want to steal my used bedroll? Are you guys totally desperate?"
- Ganeth:
- "Orcish sweat is an aphrodisiac...didn't you know?"
Lorcan noted that the ogre showed up on his detect magic (along with the orc's flute, boots, and dagger). Ganeth tried getting some of the orcs to move away from the ogre, but most of them didn't budge. Lots of people started spells: Ganeth put up DI and saw that the ogre had an astral link, Stealth dropped a dispel magic on the area but only nailed effects from 6th-level casters or worse, Silvana cast weakness on the ogre, and Beeel put up a bless. The ogre decided he needed to sleep to get more strength and lay down.
- Lorcan:
- "What do you know about the ogre, anyway?"
- Orc:
- "He's from out East. Pretty placid for an ogre. I've never seem him attack anybody. But he looks really mean, which works for us."
- Lorcan:
- "Where did you find him?"
- Orc:
- "I met him in the wilderness. He followed me home. I was hoping to see him do something for a change. Guess that's not going to happen."
- Ogre: [orcish]
- "Shut up. I'm trying to get some sleep."
A few seconds later, Ganeth saw the astral link disappear, and Pepper noticed blood pooling under the ogre's head. Frankel rolled the ogre over, and it looked like the side of his head had been eaten away by some sort of acid. There was a small hole in the ground where something wormlike had burrowed away.
The ogre was past saving, so the party marched the rest of the orcs to the Hollerith Temple and turned them over to Rogtubbins.
- Lorcan:
- "Tell me, have you ever heard of Wom?"
- Orc:
- "Wom? The name sounds familiar. Wasn't he a wizard at the school?"
Rogtubbins arrived on the scene (armed with an odd-looking sickle-sword and an equally odd punching dagger), and the orc tried to make a good impression.
- Orc:
- "Greetings, Lord. I am the Wizard Lintel, associate of Lorcan."
- Beeel:
- "What he means is that he knows Lorcan's name."
- Lintel:
- "I was a student of the renowned Xaxol, from whom I learned many wondrous magics."
- Ganeth:
- "Including magics from schools Xaxol never had access too, so I think we can assign a low probability to that particular fable."
- Lintel:
- "You presume to know much about Xaxol for one who was never his student. Xaxol was a master of magic -- how dare you insult my master and say that he never had `access' to certain magics!"
- Ganeth:
- "You could say I am Xaxol, in a manner of speaking, but that's a long story."
- Lintel:
- "Really? Well, this was a different Xaxol then."
- Ganeth:
- "Well, in that case I can't say I'm terribly impressed."
- Lintel:
- "Maybe you'll be more impressed after our mage duel, then. By insulting my honor, you insult my master, and hence my school. On behalf of the School of Magic I..."
- Lorcan: [whispering]
- "I would be very careful what you say from now on."
- Lintel:
- "...oh...err...never mind. Carry on."
(For those who weren't with us in 1992, Xaxol was a collective entity, and an imprint taken from G's personality was one of his constituents.)
During his adventures on the southern continent, Rogtubbins had come across something called a Brain Leech that burrows from people's mouths into their brains and makes them into something like a zombie.
Silvana suggested that Tubbins house Lintel in the East Wing (where spies from Auramkil get to stay), the orcs found themselves occupants of the keep's cellar, and the party went to bed, hoping to get a little further the following day.
The party tried riding a day out again, and this time they only encountered some jackals. They camped for the night, nothing attacked them, and in the morning they took off on the cloudship.
Three hours into the trip, the party spotted an uncloaked githyanki saucer off to the north, crusing from west to east and blasting away at something below. Silvana turned the ship toward the action, and a few minutes later they found that the githyanki were pestering an eol, a bunch of githzerai children (well, we assumed they were githzerai rather than garden variety halflings), and some floating eyeballs (who were all hiding under the eol to take advantage of its magic resistance).
The customary big fight followed. First prize for cruelest maneuver went to the eol, which leapt into the air and landed (with all its feet) on another githyanki (on the ground over Beeel grabbed it and overwhelmed its levitation limit), demonstrated a THAC0 of 4, did 10d6 of bone crushing, and happily belched when it was all over. Second prize went to Lorcan, who coaxed a bright pink stun beam from the monocle, turned off his victim's levitation harness, and watched how a githyanki splatters from 360'. Lorcan also invaded the ship, pulled a hungry mauve tentacle with three eyestalks out of a bag of beans, and almost got trapped inside when the surviving githyanki decided it was time to leave.
Final tally: The githyanki killed one eyeball. The party took out the six githyanki outside the ship and the gunner inside, and Thorongil damaged the saucer's main gun.
New info about githyanki weapons: the main gun on the ship does 10d6 (save for half) and a pistol that looks like a lemon with a spout squirts acid. The eyeballs were able to cast a hypnotic suggestion that people should protect them; Beeel got a +1 on his save, Frankel got a -2, and Zenig's was flat. They also knew gaze reflect and enlarge (which they cast on Frankel and Beeel, and later the Whitemoon translator).
When the post-battle healing started, the eol mooed loudly and nudged people (if something that large can be said to "nudge" anything), expressing quite clearly that it wanted some too. It got what it wanted, and it showed its gratitude with about 25 pounds of eol pasture pie (probably magical and quite useful, but the party had no good way of transporting it).
Silvana summoned the Whitemoon translator, and the basic situation was that the chaos contingent was lost and wanted to go home. The githzerai were following the eol, which was looking for someplace to lay its eggs; the eol was keeping the githzerai and eyeballs safe so its kids would have people to play with when they hatched. The eol asked where it could find a rainbow, saying that was the way home. Silvana gave it a rainbow scarf, which it happily ate. Then Lorcan offered it a potion of rainbow hues, and it got very happy.
- Eol:
- "Oh you are a very kind and generous fnurg. You may have a whisker."
Lorcan took the whisker, the eol guzzled the potion, and Beeel looked away because he just didn't want to see stuff like the eol's eyes glowing in rainbow patterns and its body getting covered in rainbow stripes. The eol focused its attention and created a gate. The githzerai children ran through. The eyeballs floated through. The eol squatted, laid a pair of eggs, and jumped through. Ganeth chucked one of the eggs through the gate before it closed; Beeel tried to toss the other one but missed the gate, and the egg went bouncing off down the hill (just like a superball).
After the enlarges wore off, the party boarded the cloudship again, and the rest of the trip to the dwarven caverns was uneventful.