Session 5-30-09

Maia 19, 23 CR -- The Demonweb Pits, 66th Layer of the Abyss:

After getting the weakened Altaer back on his feet and revived from death's door, the heroes continue their perilous exploration of Lolth's Demonweb, searching for the priestess Lissondra's sanctum.   Acacia pauses to search around in the dark, which to her whisper-gnome eyesight is yet as bright as day.  She soon finds a prize hidden in the rubble: a small silver cube icon, which she hands over to Ayotunde and Altaer for inspection.  The two of them determine that the cube is a portal key to a planar door somewhere within the Demonweb, and not a teleportation key to the dais in the entry room.  Ayo believes they may find more such keys -- portal keys and teleportation keys -- and that the portal keys lead to captured material worlds ensnared by Lolth and incorporated into the demonweb, while the teleportation keys allow movement within and around the Demonweb itself.

The priestess of Shandae leads her companions deeper into the maze of webbed corridors, following her vision of the ghostly green footprints given off by her find the path enchantment.  Cardinal direction is difficult to determine in Lolth's domain, but the companions press on, trusting the spell to show them the fastest route to Lissondra.  After a short walk, the corridor widens and opens up to a passage that seems to have partially been torn apart by powerful forces, as though the walls of the Demonweb buckled under some enormous strain.  The floor is crumpled and uneven, and a part of the ceiling is missing.  As the party moves ahead, Acacia's keen eyes detect a swarming flurry of movement up above, and she warns the others to be ready for combat.  At that moment, an unarmed male drow appears from the shadows.  "Why do you pass through the Blacklight Rookery, Mistress?  The Pact is not due to begin for some time," he says to Altaer (who is in the guise of Sildra Mraz, drow priestess).  "That is not your concern, male," relplies Sildra, but the male drow seems unimpressed with that answer.  He wails in a high-pitched keen and the fluttering above him in the ceiling comes to life. 

Half a dozen sporebats -- spongy fungi with one large, lidless orange eye each, and wicked claws -- flap down to engage the party, and battle is joined.  Rockbounder leaps forward and ends the drow sorcerer's life with a single blow, cutting his body in half with a sweeping cut as he charges.  The sporebats swarm down into the heroes' ranks, but they make short work of the flying fungi between Altaer's fiery bursts and the combined strength of Jack, Kaelin and Acacia.  Rockbounder leaps back into the fray to support his friends as well.  Jack cuts a sporebat to pieces with a hideous blow, causing the strange beast to burst into a powdery residue as it dies.  Soon all the 'bats are motionless and quite dead, with the remainder of the colony huddling in its ceiling lair.  Acacia climbs up to search the ceiling, choking on the necrotic vapors that smell of bloated, wet death.  She manages to dislodge a valuable prize: a clutch of sporebat seeds worth 5,000 gold pieces on the open market.  Further, before the party moves ahead they discover another portal key, this one on the body of the drow bat-keeper.  It is an icon of an etched red tree, which Acacia places in her satchel along with the others.  The rookery has five branching passages (including the one from which the party came), and Ayo's spell indicates the one dead ahead is the correct path.

The twisting path through the corridors eventually leads the party to another wide-open room, this one heavily choked with webbing and having four branching passages.  Jack's ability to see the unseen reveals that three large phase spiders are lurking in the ethereal plane, waiting for victims to pass through the area.  As the party pauses, the spiders seem to sense their presence and move into ambush positions, so without a better option they move ahead to draw out their eight-legged foes.  A fast melee ensues, with the phase spiders moving in and out of the ethereal plane for hit-and-run attacks while the party keeps together and coordinates their strikes, readying for the spiders to briefly appear in the material world (if indeed Lolth's domain can be described as such).  Thanks to their morning meal (a heroes' feast prepared by Ayotunde as usual), the venomous bites of the spiders, though painful, are not nearly as dangerous as they otherwise would be.  Poison immunity is indeed a valuable commodity in the Demonweb.  The spiders switch tactics, using a dispelling bite to try and disable the heroes' magical protections, but their attempts prove fruitless. The spiders are soon defeated, and a thorough search of their lair turns up nothing valuable.  The party moves ahead.

Now the second hour of their journey in the 66th layer of the Abyss draws to a close.  Not far ahead is an open space with two corridors suspended over the clinging darkness, below which the clinging necrotic vapors of the Pits can be seen.  A pair of tunnels are intertwined here, with one hanging just above the other, and a gaping 15' x 15' hole has been chewed in the floor of the upper tunnel, connecting the the two passages.  The webs quiver and shake as the party approaches, and three huge, Lolth-touched spiders of the Abyss crawl out from hiding, intent on taking the heroes down into the pits for a quick meal!  These spiders are as large as the one the Gaians once faced in the Slaughtergarde Temple during their early adventuring days, but far more viscious.  Yet again, their venom proves worthless against the party's enchantments, and their soft bellies are soon laid open by the party's steel and magic. Acacia takes down the last spider with authority, testing out her bow Thaas while sniping with ghost strike from the ethereal plane.

Still following the footprints of Ayotunde's find the path visions, the companions press on, annotating their mysterious map of the Demonwebs as best they can.  They soon come to an area where the tunnel shreds into weblike strands, and the passage ahead crumbes until it abruptly ends.  They stand on a ledge that looks down into a web-filled void choked with clinging vapor, smelling of sickly-sweet old blood and venomous corruption.  Ten feet in front of the party, spinning lazily in space and suspended by a few thin strands of webbing above, is part of what must have once been the connecting tunnel.  Its surface is now covered in thin webbing and small spider eggs, but below the surface Acacia spots thousands of tiny, bloated red arachnids: bloodsilk spider swarms.  The gnome also sees a telltale glint by the light of Ayo's spear - a shining icon of a white metal hammer trapped in webs at one edge of the spinning bridge.  Ayo's spell indicates that they must cross this spinning bridge to reach their destination. 

Jack summons an ally of nature, a whirling air elemental, which deftly picks up the white hammer icon and drops it in his hands.  As the corridor spins, the spider swarms follow the elemental's path, shooting out thousand of needle-thin strands of hooked webbing that embed themselves in the adventurers' flesh and drain their blood.  The crafty swarms use the spinning momentum to pull themselves across the span onto the bodies of Rockbounder, Jack and the others!  However, Altaer is prepared to counter with a fiery burst, and he blasts the strands to bits with his arcane fire.  The sorcerer sends a roaring fireball into the heart of the spinning corridor, catching the webs aflame and sending the entire structure tumbling into the depths of the Demonweb.  After Kaelin and Jack help to cut down the few swarms that survived, Altaer casts his wall of force across the 120' wide span of the room, easily reaching the other side and allowing their journey to continue.

As their third hour in the Demonwebs draws to a close, Ayo's divine sense of the proper path grows stronger, indicating their objective is drawing closer.  Again the weblike corridors widen and open up into an enclosed, dome-like room, this one inhabited by a large and organized posting of female and male drow, three drider slaves, and lurking ethereal phase spiders.  Knowing he will have to try bluffing his way past such a large force, Altaer readies his voice of the dragon spell.  Ayo's vision indicates that this room contains a concealed door behind an intricate mesh of flexible weblike metal, disguised as part of the normal web-walls of the place, and it is through that door the party must pass. 

All in all, there are over a dozen guardians here, led by a darkly beautiful drow with liquid black eyes wielding a wicked barbed whip of flexible black metal.  She and her cohorts peer at the six heroes, who are still disguised as drow, ogre, and goblin respectively.  Several long, tense moments pass as the whip priestess looks into Altaer's (Sildra Mraz's) eyes.  "Ah, Lady Mraz," she says at last in a mocking tone, "you bring this rabble to appease the Spider Queen?  What unworthy sacrifices they shall make.  And you have arrived unfashionably early, as well.  The gathering time for the Pact has yet to be announced, and yet here you are, trying to prop up the failing fortunes of House Mraz."  The whip priestess then giggles, a most disconcerting sound that nearly causes Acacia (disguised as an abyssal goblin) to shrink back into her wrappings and hide against her friend Rockbounder.  The priestess' expression is unreadable, and none of the heroes can tell if she and her servants can see through their veil enchantment or not.

"All know that House Mraz has fallen out of favor with the Goddess, but I have little reason to prevent your passing... you do, of course, know the way?"  Ayo receives a flash of insight from her find the path spell, indicating she must insert her hand into the twisted metal-webbing and activate the door to bypass it.  Altaer, thinking quickly on his feet, orders her to the doorway.  "Open it, male!"  Ayo steps over to the concealed doorway and inserts "his" hand into the intricate structure, turning and twisting small levers.  She feels a sharp sting as a hidden needle injects some poison into her veins, but the blessing of heroes' feast renders her as immune as any drow would be.  With an impossibly complex motion, the metalline web-door draws back in a thousand strands of flexible metal, leading to a dark corridor beyond.  The whip priestess smirks at "Sildra," mocking her again.  "By all means, continue your journey, Lady Mraz," she says.  "Perhaps when the Pact is concluded, I will have the honor of adding your blood to the sacrifice pool myself.  House Mraz is weak and fading, and has no part to play in the coming conflict.  Be on your way!"

Somewhat rattled by the quality of the previous encounter, and yet uncertain whether their true identities were ascertained, the six friends leave the whip priestess and her minions behind and move ahead down the darkening corridor.  Soon even Acacia and Jack's darkvision becomes dim and blurry, and a sense of disorientation begins to overwhelm each of them.  Strange smells assault the heroes' senses -- cooking spices from Gaia, the wet blood-bloated scent of the clinging vapor, the scent of deep natural places, and a lingering odor of sickly sweet roses.  Ayotunde and Altaer compare notes with Jack, each of them using their knowledge of the planes to try and determine the nature of this strange corridor.  It is as though they now stand in a place between worlds, where the walls of the planes themselves have buckled and merged together.  Altaer recognizes a familiar feeling, not unlike the odd time-compression he experiences when inside the Hourglass Cavern at his estate on Gaia, the Forge.  "Is it a node of dreamstuff?"  he asks no one in particular.  "Where are we?"  After much discussion, the three planar scholars determine to the best of their ability that they stand within a multi-plane rift in the fabric of reality, probably caused by the Convergence itself.  The dark dimensional rift seems to contain elements of prime material Gaia's Underlands (the realm of the Gaian drow, as well as many crawling aberrations of the Queen of Nightmares) the Demonweb itself, and the Far Realm of Chaal-Nathra, as well as nearby coterminus pathways to the Plane of Shadow and the wild of the Faerie realms -- know to Gaians as the Dreamlands.  Unlike the rest of the Demonweb, Ayo senses, this strange rift would allow egress from the Abyss via plane shift and similar magics. 

Standing within the utter blackness, Jack says a silent prayer to, of all beings, the Queen of Nightmares, mother of aberrations.  "We are here trying to repair the Threefold Sundering, unknowable Lady," he prays, "and if you are moved to render your assistance, I would gratefully accept it."  Throughout his more recent journeys, Jack has been attempting to communicate with both of the other aspects of Irindix -- the Dark Huntress and the Queen of Nightmares.  He senses no response to his prayer, but completes it nonetheless.  It has likely been long centuries since the Queen of Nightmares has listened to such prayers from a Gaian surfacer, and if she feel's Jack's intentions to communicate, she does not indicate as such.

Lacking a prepared plane shift spell for the day, and also not having completed their objective, the party wanders somewhat aimlessly forward, pushing through the thick and utter blackness of the strange planar rift.  Time seems to alternately slow and speed up, and Acacia clutches her strange garnet to her breast as she sees a million crawling green worms leaping out from the darkness.  The vision passes and the heroes move through the outer edge of the rift, returning to the weblike corridors of the Demonweb.  The strange rift seems to ripple as they pass through it, causing a weak dispel magic effect to engulf the heroes, stripping off a few of their protective enchantments.

Up ahead they see a contingent of six male drow guards and a drow captain posted around a teleportation dais.  Ayo indicates that her find the path spell suggests either using the dais to teleport or else pressing straight ahead.  Still under the effects of veil, "Sildra Mraz" (Altaer) steps up to address the captain, who looks at her suspiciously.  "You, male.  We shall be brief; we have business beyond this post."  The captain pauses for only a moment.  "You came from back there, Priestess?" he asks, gesturing towards the corridor behind the party which contains the strange planar rift.  "Indeed," responds Sildra authoritatively. As the captain bows his assent, seemingly totally submissive, Altaer, in female drow form, decides to push his luck. "This fool," (gesturing toward Rockbounder in troll form) "has lost the teleportation key I entrusted to him.  Give me yours, male!"  The captain's face twists in anger and surprise.  "That... is not possible.  Guards, attack!"  The drow vanguard and assassins to his left and right move forward, weapons drawn.  The captain inhales a massive breath of Abyssal air and speaks a word of the Dark Speech -- a sound of utter evil and blasphemy -- staggering Altaer and inflicting him with a curse of unluck.  Despite their many battles in the Demonweb already this day, the party is more than prepared to deal with a few drow minions, and the battle goes quickly.  Jack and Acacia flank the captain while Rockbounder goes to work on the drow vanguard, and Altaer burns down the drow assassins with his scorching rays after cutting off their escape route (as well as direct access to the teleportation dais) with a wall of force.  Even Ayotunde gets a few rare spear-cuts in on the drow, wielding her flaming longspear with precision and speed.

The patrol captain falls last, cursing as the heroes cut him down.  Acacia discovers an iron pyramid teleportation key in a satchel on his body, but as she concludes her search, the dais beyond Altaer's wall of force glows briefly with a grey corona of energy and the priestess Lissondra appears within its circle, alongside her ever-present bodyguard, the tiefling Bon Amejdoss.  The two parties look at one another, and a flicker of recognition passes across Lissondra's face as she prepares to speak.  The heroes seem to have found their first objective.

Demonweb Teleportation Keys acquired: iron pyramid

Demonweb Portal Keys acquired: small silver cube, etched red tree, white metal hammer

The Threefold Sundering