Enola Yarn – blogpost 46

To start off: Valentine is still a giant Ape. This is not an insult, but just a fact. She polymorphed into an Ape to fight the fire giants. Now the fight is over, she has picked me up and put me on her shoulder.

We investigate the dead fire giants but find nothing. A couple of Hobgoblins enter, but immediately recoil because they see the giant ape. Nice, the last thing we needed was another fight.

We decide that we want to find the other keys. So, in our quest for the keys, we start exploring. We find a room filled with loot, however, everything is broken. Adjacent to this room, we find Emberosas’ construct.
Valentine puts me on the ground and starts smashing the colossal iron thing to pieces until she hurts herself on a piece of iron. I pet her arm: ‘There, there…”
Valentine returns to her normal form, she wants to inspect the clicks Smokey heard from the tomb.
She uses her ghostly gaze and starts to look through solid objects and walls. She cannot find out what caused the clicks, but… “I FOUND A KEY!” she shouts triumphantly. It is in the room adjacent to the one with the beholder-tapestry.
Farryn (riding Grond) dashes to the room, with Calyx on his heels. Smokey also runs after them.

When Valentine and I catch up to everyone, we see Farryn and Calyx open a crystal door, and in Farryns’ hand a key with the letter ‘J’. Inside the room with the crystal door, there are two buttons: ‘tiny’, and ‘big’.
Valentine and I see all three of them are very interested in interacting with the buttons. “How bad will this turn out to be?” asks Valentine, laughing.
“Super wrong,” I respond.
“Wanna bet?”
“Sure,”
“10 gold pieces.”
Calyx, Farryn, and Smokey push the first button. Then, we see them all shrink in size! After some playing, fiery teleportations get to the buttons because some of them are tiny, the result is that Smokey is small, Farryn medium, and Grond large. Calyx stepped out before his size was further meddled with. Okay, so we have 4 keys now, ‘V’, ‘F’, ‘J’, and ‘H’. Two more to go.

We start to investigate some more. We find a brown boot in the middle of a room. Smokey runs towards it to try it on and be ‘puss in boots. However, he pulls his paw immediately out of the boot. He is stung by something in the boot! He kicks the boot and a scorpion crawls out. Ew! I hit it with a firebolt.
“Oh, no no! It’s just a tiny thingy, don’t kill it!” says Calyx.
Then, the scorpion starts to grow instead of smoldering. It transforms into an Umber Hulk.
“Yeah,” I think. “Don’t believe everything you see, Calyx…”
With a lot of confusion during the fight, we kill the Umber Hulk fairly quickly. We take a short rest after, during which, Farryn checks if the key is INSIDE the Umber Hulk. Interesting figure, Farryn.

After some walking, we find a couple of rooms next to each other, connected by a hallway with creatures.
It kind of looks like a prison with cells. Might the creatures in the rooms be prisoners? We open a door and find a Deep Gnome eating rocks.
“Hello friend, how are you?” asks Calyx.
“Oh, I’m so hungry… I need to eat.” says the Deep Gnome, continuing to eat rocks. It is not normal that a Gnome is eating rocks. How odd.
“What is your name?”

“Guffaw.”
Calyx offers Guffaw a berry.
“Ugh. No, YUK! I don’t want it.”
Calyx tries a couple of things to get the Gnome to eat his berry but nothing works. He even tried to conjure an illusion to make the berry look like a pebble. If this is a polymorph like we’ve seen on this level – caused by the glyphs, what can this be? I share this info with Valentine, who immediately dispells the magic. The Gnome starts coughing and spits out two diamonds. He hands the diamonds to Farryn and says: “Thanks, y’all. Now I can finally stop eating stones.”.
“Why do you think you wanted to eat stones so badly?”
“Last thing I remember is some fairy flew in front of me.”
“Um. Wait. Did that fairy look undead?”
“Yeah. It was blue and skeleton-like.”
Calyx nods and looks meaningfully at us. I reckon he thinks that is Arcturia. He gives Guffaw a berry, who takes it thankfully. We say our goodbyes and find the next room.

We find a dead body at a desk. It is a bit gruesome because there are holes in the back of the humanoid. It seems the person died from magic missiles to the back. However, we find another key (‘U’) inside the desk! We only have one key left to find.

In another room, we find a skull on a desk. It is a human skull, but that doesn’t withhold Valentine to grab it and start using it as a puppet: “Hi Enola! How are you?”
Farryn helps me investigate the desk, and Smokey even uses his wand of secrets, but nothing is revealed or found.

We’ve scouted all rooms, and find a junction with two Hobgoblins on guard. We see a portal with a keystone of an open book. We recognize it as the portal that was in the Wizard Academy: we could see the Hobgoblins on guard from there. The Hobgoblins explain that to the right, we find an Ogre, and to the left, we’ll find a pool of slime and Arcturias’ last assistant.

We decide to visit the Ogre first. It is a Carrion Ogre and it’s super disgusting: it is a carrion crawler and an ogre stitched together. There are body parts scattered all around the floor, and we try to search for some loot or maybe a key, but we activate a glyph. Valentine transforms into a gelatinous cube and swallows Smokey. Luckily, after a brief fight, without interference from the carrion ogre, Valentine is herself again.

Then, Farryn asks the QUESTION OF THE DAY: “Could the key be inside the Carrion Ogre?”
I don’t want to find out, actually.