Danger Gang Turquoise Arrive at the Fortress of Nora

The journey has taken them eleven days.

After resupplying in town and confirming from the locals that the place is abandoned, the party makes its way up the winding road leading to the fortress, which they can see from a distance has been built in to the living rock of the mountain. Tall grass grows on either side of the steep trail, thick enough to hide a leopard which quietly stalks the group. Liten perceives the cat approaching and fires an arrow in its general direction. So discovered, the creature flees into the distance. The group continues on.

They soon arrive at the outskirts of the stronghold and see an entrance leading into the mountain and another into the courtyard. After some consideration, they decide to head inside directly. Presentinus casts find traps as a precaution. Not ten feet inside the passage the spell registers a pit, hidden beneath a patina of leaves. Heavy rocks are piled on the debris until it gives way to a recently dug hole, about ten feet in depth, the bottom of which is lined with sharpened stakes. While Lugurix sizes up how far he would have to jump in order to clear it, Signy takes care to spike a rope on the near side of the pit, allowing Liten to climb down and up the other side, spiking another rope to ascend. The party takes the trap as evidence that the fortress is likely inhabited and decide to backtrack to the courtyard to ensure that nothing sneaks up behind them.

The courtyard, thoroughly overgrown, offers several more entrances into the mountain, as well as access to the high defensive wall surrounding it. Lugurix and Signy bound up the stairs and begin to make their way around the parapets, when two fiery creatures suddenly fly across the mountain crest. They do not appear pleased. Liten identifies them as Fire Mephits.

“Hey, what’s your damage?” the bard calls out.

“We live here, you jackasses!”

With that, a “heated” fight ensues. Naum and Abner run into combat from opposite sides of the wall, while Abner leaps from crenellation to crenellation swinging his polearm. Signy is blasted with flame, Liten fires off a number of magic missiles. The mephits inflict far more damage than they receive, and one manages to cast heat metal. In short order, the fighters’ armor begins to heat up, magic which Presentinus is unable to dispel. Lugurix and Signy quickly doff their now scalding hot armor, while Naum seems strangely reluctant to do so for some reason. Fortunately, when a mephit is felled, his cohort panics and flies off into the distance. Unsatisfied, Liten looses a well-aimed arrow which strikes the creature’s flank and knocks it into a freefall, causing the winged monster to spiral uncontrollably into the ground below.

The glowing armor is cooled with water, and steam sprays off Naum, who steadfastly refuses to strip. Presuntinus heals some wounds and the party presses on, retracing their steps across the pit and further into the fortress. Far ahead, Liten can hear the distinct sounds of…giggling?

They have not gone very far before something surprising happens. Two metal gates drop from the ceiling, and it is only thanks to Signy’s superior dexterity that she is able to leap backwards and prevent the party from being cut into three parts rather than merely two. No sooner have the portcullises fallen than a number of small, filthy humanoids round the far corner, some running, some riding in a howdah atop a trained leopard. The diminutive men are covered in rags, armed with crude (but adorable) little bows and arrows, and immediately start firing through the metal slats at the party trapped within.

“These guys are Mites,” reports Liten, who knows more than one might expect from a sot.

Naum, standing in the back ranks, is immediately hit in the back as a flanking group of creatures takes up a firing position from in the shadows behind the party. Tricky little devils!

Signy, not to be outdone, wrests the portcullis before her back into the ceiling, and Lugurix charges forward to inflict as much pain as he can on the attacking feline. Naum quickly engages the archers who draw teeny swords, but quickly find themselves with a much more dangerous foe than they bargained for. The first gate lifted, Signy spins and lifts the second one as well, surprising Abner in particular who gave her rather poor odds for doing it twice in a row. The battle is then joined in earnest, and the leopard soon falls, along with a number of the small men. The rest flee in a panic.

Seizing the initiative, the party chases them through the complex, running too quickly to map, through halls and up a steep stairway into a large room that clearly served as town for the mites. The routed mites call out for a mass evacuation, and the women and children, shrieking and stumbling over themselves, careen into holes in the far wall and escape.

The party takes a breather and starts gathering stones which they pile in front of the holes to blockade the mites out (in?) and search the room in earnest. It becomes rapidly apparent that the small creatures had used coins as building materials (perhaps a poor choice for them, in retrospect) and our adventurers clean them out of house and home, literally. They also find (along with many miniature items of furniture and similarly sized tableware) a crude stone amulet on a rope. For lack of anything else to do with it, Lugurix puts it on.

The party rests so that Presentinus can pray for additional healing. Time passes.

Suddenly an enormous spider scuttles into the room, biting Signy and poisoning her soundly. The remaining fighters (and Abner) are able to beat it down without too much difficulty, but the damage has been done. Fortunately, the party’s next rest session continues uninterrupted. Presentinus lays on hands, and the party so strengthened continues on.

In another room the party finds a largish room with rusted pulleys fastened to the stone ceiling and numerous scuff marks on the floor. The cleric suddenly realizes where they must be.

“Eumenes kept the horses here. He had them hoisted by pulleys and made to run, so they wouldn’t get out of shape…” Indeed, a discarded horseshoe indicates this theory is likely correct, but the room is otherwise bare.

At the end of a hallway, rough-hewn steps descend into the darkness. The party finds itself in a corridor with exits to the left and right, and another tunnel which jags slightly straight ahead. Following this tunnel, the party continues to walk down stairs until they find themselves in a strange little room.

In the far left corner a hole opens like a gaping maw in the ground, to the far right, where the corner of the room should be, a perfect sphere has been hollowed out, with four ornately carved columns connecting the ceiling to the floor. Fearing some monster will leap from the hole, the party decides to first investigate the pillars more closely. Liten is unable to recognize the style of carving, remarking only that no dwarf would ever make such a thing so well does it seemed shaped from the living rock.

Without warning, a strange long-limbed humanoid swings around a pillar and into the light of their glowing stones. He grasps some sort of mattock with his lengthy fingers, and snarls when he sees the stone amulet around Lugurix’s neck.

“You’re with them, aren’t you!” He shouts in Greek and swings wildly, missing Lugurix with his pick-ax. The manqué king lands a more accurate blow, wounding him.

“Whoa, whoa! Hold on. Wait just a minute.” Presentinus manages to calm the two combatants, and the strange creature explains his predicament. He is a native of the elemental plane of earth who came here to admire the architecture (lovely, isn’t it?). In order to prevent himself from becoming “stuck” while he is vacationing on the prime material plane, he had an amulet allowing him to travel with ease. As he was taking in a particularly exquisite speleal feature of the dungeon, one of those infernal mites nicked it right off him. He was rooted to a 60 foot spot for decades. The mites would return to taunt him on occasion, but there was nothing he could do about it. He wiled away the years, carving ever more intricate columns, waiting patiently for rescue.

“In your language, I guess you would call me Peter. Pleased to meetcha. Maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement here? For I can make the very stones talk and tell you all you want to know about this place!”

Presentinus rubs his hands together.

“Like maybe tell us if there are any veins of gold or gemeralds in the walls?”

“Sure!”

The party huddles. An amulet of free action would always be useful, but the information this strange little man could provide them with is simply too good to pass up. Plus, it would kind of suck to leave some poor guy stuck on a 60 foot leash for all of eternity. Lugurix hands it over to him and Peter nearly weeps as his freaky hands close around it. He spends a joyous few minutes checking out the other corners of the room, but true to his word, he closes his eyes and channels the stones.

“Ok, first things first – where can we find the richest deposits within your walls!” Presentinus seems to be interested in only one thing.

The stones reply with a gravelly voice (yok yok yok).

“There’s really nothing to mine around here. Long, long ago people would drop sacrifices down that hole in the corner – sacrifices of the most precious metal of all.”

“GOLD?!”

“No. Iron ore.”

The cleric snorts derisively and mutters to himself.

“Fine, fine. Then what is the history of this place? Start at the very beginning.”

The rocks speak:

“8400 years ago, the ghost of a woman passed through the solid stone. Her name was Noria, and she wore a long, white dress.

“10 years later, more women passed through, carving the rock slightly. They were younger, worked harder, and were soaking wet. They carved upwards, from below.

“2700 years ago, the place was renovated for use by people calling themselves the Hati (“Hittites,” says Abner knowingly, remembering the dungeon in Ephesus). They lived and worshipped here, making sacrifices of iron ore that I described to you earlier.

“2300 years ago an enormous battle took place here, between the Hati and an army of tailed men, with neither side clearly victorious. For some reason, the tailed men called it the year 1884.

“For 1000 years afterwards, there was very little significant activity of any kind.

“1300 years ago an army was billeted here for about a year. Men investigated the hole in the corner there, but were actually looking for a well that stands nearby. At the end of that year a man attached two barrels to ropes and dangled them down the hole. Shortly thereafter all the men left.

“1000 years ago, a king named Archelaus was nosing around here. He wrote a treatise on geology called On Stones, so he’s rather popular with us rocks. He was not here long, and these halls have stood vacant ever since.

“Well, with the exception of the mites, who moved in a hundred years ago, and the Pech, who has been here for around sixty years.”

“And that’s about it. Until you guys showed up, that is.”

The party thanks the stones and verifies by looking down the hole that, yes, there were two ropes, now rotted clean through, dangling into the darkness below. A light stone reveals that the remains of one barrel are smashed below, but the other is nowhere to be seen. They bid Peter farewell, and backtrack slightly, intending to explore the entirety of this level before descending any further in the dungeon.

Nearby, the party does indeed find a well, which Abner determines to be hundreds of feet down after dropping a stone into it and waiting for the splash. Down another hallway they find several cobwebby rooms (one with fresh webs that might well have been the home for the giant spider who attacked during second watch), and five silver pieces from the Alexandrian era.

The party retraces its steps to the hole and rests briefly, preparing to face the unknown within the pit. They spike a rope and clamber down about 20 feet. It seems the smashed barrel contained a sheaf of papers, but the years have eaten it down to scraps. Presentinus curses their poor luck, and with Lugurix taking point, they creep along the floor which slopes slightly, to the west. They enter a room where an epic fight has indeed taken place. The ground is littered with the bones of hundreds of humanoids, some with tails, some without. To one side of a doorway stands an apparently metal statue of a man-faced cow, opposite what was no doubt it’s mate, now smashed. Sifting through the bones reveals nothing of interest until someone gets too close to the statue… which springs to life and begins attacking!

A brief battle ensues while the party whales on the clunky metal statue and dodges it’s hard metal hoofs. Signy discovers the hard way that the surface of the statue is magnetic, and her sword is wrenched out of her hands. The magic on this guardian is old, however, and the statue soon succumbs to the strength of the party’s onslaught. Signy retrieves her sword, and Presentinus is once again disappointed when he discovers that the shards of the fallen idol are no longer magnetic. They press onward

They come to a four way intersection, with rooms leading off north and south. Still no sign of the barrel! They enter the room to the north and find even more densely packed bones. Presentinus carefully picks his way among them, certain that they are going to suddenly rise of their own volition and start attacking. He finds a small pouch made of an exquisite purple material. Expecting to find jewels within, he opens it and immediately comes to grief.

Four dark clumps of oily hair streak out of the bag, growing and reforming into hideous apes! They continue to age magically, however, and in the blink of an eye become dessicated parodies of their bodies in life, hungering instead for brains in everlasting un-death! The cleric is frozen in terror, as the beasts begin tearing the adventurers apart.

The undead apes easily overpower the unprepared adventurers, going on to ravage the unconscious forms of one or two members who fall in combat. In the nick of time, Presentinus comes to his senses and turns them with the power of the Lord. Spared death at the jaws of 2300 year old magic apes, the party makes a hasty retreat up the rope and rests without incident for quite some time in the room where they freed Peter.