Where in the World is Cui?
Boats get back home, only to discover Haizea is gone and Mamun is back in charge. We scry and find her dead on the banks of the Nile with the crown, orb and scepter. A sub party goes off to rescue her and return successfully, having had no levels drained by undead Haizea. Yay! No one else puts on the crown, orb and scepter, no matter how shiny they are.
Harald, Quiteria, Ruber, Akim and Thora go off to find a harmonious stone to cure our various nasty curses. We first head off to the steppes. The steppe people's leader (with whom we have no common language) invites us to go hunting together. He warns us about the cattle of the Cui, and makes us promise not to start the horn of Tengri if it stops. He tells us Cui is no longer here, but that we should go south, past the Roof of the World, all the way down. He's heard Cui is looking to chump out Jayavarmin.
We teleport to Jayavarmin's palace, where we meet his brother in law Divacara. After some brief misunderstandings we make friends, and he shows us the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. We warn them that Cui is after the king. We also learn that Princess Tyrith was kidnapped from here by a different nasty genie and in need of rescuing. After further investigation we learn that the king saw a beautiful temple in a dream. He tried to reproduce it but every time it was destroyed by random catastrophes. A demon lady told him to stop trying, as it would anger Cui. He made an awesome not at all Faustian bargain by which he put off further catastrophes by 1000 years, but his construction efforts continue to be thwarted. He offers to not execute us if we will put a stop to this, which sounds like a fine deal to us.
Indurpura is on the salt sea, east of here. It is the capital city of the Cham. The temple of Cui is about 70 miles from there.
While we are there we try to get some info on Indian monsters. Naga left India years ago, most of them went East, but less East than we are now. There was a king Dutabaum who married a Naga. He was king of Burma, ask around there. Rakshassa go to Taprbain. Turtle maybe Indian Ocean, between India and Arab lands. Priests of Colin Theta might know. In Taperbing, or palae of Dragon King north near china might have info near mouth of Lo Yang river.
They don't like Dr Lao - he rules with an iron fist and crushes all opposition. Also he's not really Buddhist.
Next we teleport to the Temple of Harmony. It is very hot. Our local guide, Ynavi is some sort of epileptic priestess. Mamun and Akim sneak around. Mamun finds a gold fetus on guard. We eventually sneak in and face a large 3 headed elephant, which we fight then enslave, after removing one of its heads.
We next come across what looks like a monkey gym, and meet a pale lady dressed in black, who identifies herself as the lady of the house. We bicker about whether or not it is polite to sneak into someone's house, behead their elephants and generally make a mess, and she challenges one of us to face her finger. Harald rises to the challenge, makes his saving throw, and the lady tells us we may speak to the master, but we have to clear the dungeon first.
We fight assorted snakes, snake librarians, giants, stegosauruses and other nasties. We meet a lady, Varwijiwud who wants 'the creuse'. She joins our party for now. Ynavi tells us her main reason for coming here is to get the twin swords of Fan-Wen, to maybe give to her King, when he's ready.
After a few more mishaps we find our way to the Sounding Stone. We whack it, and it gives off a loud, harmonious sound. Everyone feels their curses lift except Harald, who made his saving throw against harmony. After some deliberation we sound it again, which causes Harald to begin dancing uncontrollably. Our attempts to remove this effect fail, but he his able to operate normally as long as he wears a dead golden fetus around his neck, so we continue on.
We search the library and find some scrolls in Sanskrit. We fight a gold baby and some lizard mutants and come to a room full of tough-looking snakes. Harald feeds them some conjured pigs and we make friends. They tell us there is another stair up, behind the Forbidden Door. That sounds like just our sort of thing, so we get directions and head off. Some sort of were-rat tries to escape with us, but we send him back to his serpentine masters.
Eventually we find the door, remove all the traps, unlock it, and face a giant six-armed skeleton. He's pretty tough but we make our way past and eventually find Cui, along with the Dark Consort - the woman we met before. They are in a very windy room full of treasure chests. They ask us to get rid of a cloth that generates sea foam and monsters in the next room. We find it, disintegrate it, and return. Our prize is that we get to pick one mystery box out of 5, then either learn what it does or keep it. Whee! The first box we pick is empty, looks like someone (V?) stole the Kris it contained. We get to try again and get the Sacred Gong of Secadulima. When struck it will either summon a whirlwind to sweep up all those around you, or sends you to an unbreakable sleep and makes you dream about how to fix your karma so you can get the whirlwind next time.
Harald and Quiteria take a quick side trip into a magic box, on the heels of our friendly thief. We end up in terrible magic disintegration upside-down land, where gravity is reversed and every sound you make generates a terrible cacophony of echos. We get out of there and sound the pretty gong instead, so Harald can dream about his karma.
Harald's dream goes something like this:
8 india sacred places - someone takes some water and some earth out of each place. Takes it to the mountains, to an obelisk, strangely shaped. 8 things buried there,under the obelisk. Twogs(?) come to harass the obelisk.
We rest and divine to see if it will give us any more hints about how to lift Harald's curse.
Dont bug dragon long - but gan get quests, depends on reaction roll himalayas shrine cures curses Now punished Saint called el lama gone, saves dharma and itself, also guts out, stained yeti hands
We decide to head off to the Himalayas and see if this makes more sense when we get there. Cui tells us if Jayadanavi puts a statue of a gold dragon with one claw in his temple then he'll stop knocking it down. We later send him a Dream to that effect, with some additional instructions for a statue of an awesomely heroic odd-eyed elf.
