Visiting the Demogorgon Palace
We divine about hacking the Demogorgon's palace then going home and heading off to India.
Pillared palace made of fear, trapped behind a crystal sphere ... see ... not yet be ... better ... along perimeter ... Draw no breath ... not crystal walls, crystal death ... Bit of fur ... amber ... test mettle ... lord of ghosts, king Vettle Turn your powers on you, ally pig, scale ... big Not treasure tempts adventurers to come, but beautiful, shiny scripted knowledge from a guy who scored his crotch in college
Send your feeb and sissy-mama Unto the temple of Gautama: And to the other places send All those whose lives you wish to end! For death, undeath, and transformation, May prove to be their only ration. Here where the nagas dwelt before They suffered through their civil war And almost had the sad distinction Of repetition of extinction, They left it all a giant trap, So all div. spells will find is crap. Light may be hard to come by here Unless some of their gems appear; And deadly spikes left from their tails Are a poor substitute for scales. But at each center, at each heart, You’ll find what you'd need would you start Your quest. Four objects there will be, Appearing once a century, Appearing simultaneous: I hope they’re taken just by us. Some say the ruined temple, ——, Has been to evil like a M——. So whose feet last tread these halls? Whose? Not Juiblex’, but “the king of ooze†[?] And those who serve the one he serves. Star-ceiling starred the queen of curves— See her shimmy, see her shake, Avenge or honor her, the snake Genetrix, she was rather nice. While in the realm of sacrifice, Among the ruins and the riches, One of the Circle of the Liches Lives (if you can call this living). I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!
Sonam. Harald, Quiteria, Dawa and Ruber ride some phantom steeds till we are near the palace (about 2 days) then Leila scries on us and teleports to a nice snow platform we build. We see a big, transparent dome, covered with lovely awnings and parapets. There is a glass boat tethered nearby. The ground surrounding the dome is covered with bodies, some ancient and some fairly recent. We sneak around and Dawa tracks and examines the bodies. He finds a scroll case, some weird slick shoes, two weird and gross potions and assorted other adventuring gear on the two freshest corpses. One of them looks Tibetan and the other, of ambiguous gender, looks Indian. They apparently died by falling from a great height. Dawa brings the scroll case back and we examine it more closely. It is trapped but we manage to get it open safely. Inside are a scroll of magic writing and a smaller, trapped, scroll case. Our monk guide puts the thieves to shame by disarming this trap and we extract a scroll written mainly in lovely, shiny chinesese, with a note in greek. The note says
Authenticated/Double checked, you are one digit too many. Gamma Alpha Delta.
Quiteria speaks with the dead Tibetan guy, who turns out to be Chinese. He is from Dong-Jing, far to the east. They were assaulted by ghosts and thrown high in the air, then died falling to earth. He had no particular business here, but passed by while on a mission. His guide (many curses ensue) led him here. He has never seen the internal scroll he carried, the external one has spells to help him out (Change Self and Improved Dimension Door) but he couldn't get it out in time.
This seems to be all the knowledge God promised, but we decide to walk around the perimeter just in case. We find a shattered crystalline sphere with some frighteningly octopodal footprints inside. Quiteria breaks off a bit of the sphere for later examination while Dawa tracks, but the octopus seems to have left a long time ago. We continue around until we come upon a little shiny pig, who squeals loudly, summoning a bunch of nasty monsters and demons. Harald lightning bolts the castle wall to no effect and we teleport away.
In our hurry Leila misses her teleport somewhat, and we find ourselves in the basement of the monastery with a rather nasty snake creature. At least it's nice and dark down here...
