From: Doug (gryphon4101_at_comcast.net)
Date: Thu Dec 04 2003 - 03:01:14 GMT
Berryblood turns away from Astran and Lyra. "I am sorry. It is your own fate you carry. May the passions protect you, and may you not have to suffer some horrible fate. Let us quickly see if these creatures have anything of value and then depart."
Those that are in better health make an effort to quickly search the bodies, finding that the ghouls were the only ones to carry anything of value. A mere 40 silver pieces is what you find. Berryblood waves away his portion of it, leaving the rest of you to split it up as you wish. Only 4 silver pieces each if you were to separate it. 4 silver pieces for having risked your lives. Hopefully this venture would prove more rewarding.
Illyana and Astran slowly get up, getting used to the aches and pains that are upon them. Slowly, they become able to walk and keep a steady pace with everyone else. The rest of you walk along though the rain and the dark, keeping your weapons drawn and keeping up your guard. You walk quietly, but every now and then the lightning strikes bright with the thunder hitting at the same time and most if not all of you find it hard not to be startled. Even Berryblood seems to at least twitch a bit at the crashing sounds.
Berryblood leads you down to the southwest. As a group, you travel quickly from building to building, making sure to take cover slowly as soon as you reach each one. Berryblood warns you all to be very quiet when approaching each building, as you do not know what you might disturb.
You do not have much time to take in all that is around you. You do notice how the roads seem to twist and turn, obviously the reason for its name. You also notice that in stark contrast to other areas of Parlainth, which suffered widespread destruction, the Twists resembles a ghost town. You see that most of the buildings are intact, as though its inhabitants abandoned it to the mushrooms and mosses mere hours ago and may soon return to reclaim their homes and businesses.
You manage to make it by several buildings without running into anything more, and apparently without anything seeing or detecting your presence. You can tell that you are deep within the Twists. The thought of a few of you returning back to Haven now seems unreasonable, as your safety is unsure with small numbers traveling from the heart of the Twists.
At the 7th building, Berryblood raises his hand up as if to stop each of you from preparing to run to another building. "The road from where we are twists as the others do, encircling around to make travel easy. A small ways from here is a smaller road like those we have seen, which in other areas leads to the entrance of a building. This particular small road leads to nothing. It is an open area that looks like a building should be there. Inside this building we are at, there is a secret tunnel that leads underground to that area where no house is. What we will find is a 2 floor basement, with stairs leading from the top floor up as if going to an above ground portion of the building. The stairs run directly into a slab of concrete, which apparently has the soil above that. It is not for certain, as I have not dug through the ground to find the concrete, but that is my assessment.
"We are likely not to encounter anything upon entering the building, but you should still be on guard. This building seems to have been a shop of some sort, but nothing remains except the passage. Let's go in."
With that, Berryblood gets out his light quartz and enters the building, slowly opening the door. You see that this building is of a fairly large size, especially for a shop. Stairs lead from the middle of the building up to a 2nd floor where it seems that other items used to be kept. The second floor has a large enough walkway, wrapping itself along the outer edge of the pentagon shaped building and overlooking the main floor. It seems as though this building has long been cleaned of anything valuable.
You feel grateful to finally be out of the rain, although you feel a more nervous chill run down your spine being inside this building than when you were outside in the Twists. You can almost feel the terror that the inhabitants must have felt when they were attacked. You can see the shop owner at his table, selling a rich noble something to hang in his home when both hear screams loud enough to be heard from the other side of the city. They run in terror outside, see the mass destruction that is happening, and quickly the noble runs away. The shop owner sees the noble get snatched up by one of the large, disgusting creatures and the noble screams in agonizing pain. Seeing this, the shop owner looks around trying to find a place he can hide. He hides behind his counter, waiting, praying. Then he screams, and you hear a laugh. An evil, disgusting laugh, like one you have never heard before.
The image fades away and you are left wondering if you just had a vision, or were just imagining what might have happened back during the Scourge of Parlainth. It may have just been your imagination, but you think that the laugh you heard was a little too real to have come from anything you could ever imagine.
As you try to figure what is going on in your head, Berryblood's voice interrupts your thoughts, "There are torches here, but we might draw attention to ourselves if we light them." He puts the quartz in the middle of the room, illuminating the building well enough for you to see, but hopefully not enough for someone or something to know that you are here. "Let's rest up a bit before we continue. There were traps the last time I went through the tunnel, and some may not have been sprung yet. I also have reason to believe that the tunnel may be possibly connected with the catacombs, even though it seems to be a direct tunnel. The Southern Catacombs that lay beneath the Twists are unknown to me. I'd hate to accidentally find out what inhabits the catacombs unprepared." With that, Berryblood takes off his pack and sets it up against the wall. He places his two-handed sword on the ground, and sits down next to it, breathing a sigh of relief. "Take only what time is needed. Once you are all ready, we will go. The tunnel lies underneath some floorboards and behind a storage rack against the north wall. That is where we are headed next."
<Moves please>
<Please let me know who all wants to make a recovery test at this time. At this point, only about half-an-hour has passed since combat. You will obviously need to wait another half-hour before any recovery tests are made, so if any are planning on recovering before continuing, please play up the role-playing at this point. I will interrupt where needed, if needed. If any need to rearrange spells, please let me know at this time as well. Also, I will probably need posts in by 10:00 PM MST or so Friday night if I am to do Saturday's post. The reason for this is because my Internet will not be up and running until the 12th, and so I will have to stop at my parent's house Friday night to check e-mail. I could try to stop by Saturday morning, but since I can't guarantee that would happen it's better to just have the posts in by Friday night instead. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully I'll be able to do normal posts by next Saturday (13th). Thanks. >
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Thu Dec 04 2003 - 04:47:06 GMT