Enola Yarn – blogpost 47

After a short walk, we enter a room and see the humanoid in the sirloin eating a piece of moldy bread. This must be Acrturias’ last assistant… 

“Hello. We’re here, Arcturia sent us,” says Farryn. He approaches but doesn’t get any response from the man. 

“What does your sword see, Valentine?” he whispers after a minute waving his hand in front of the man’s face. “Apart from myself, I mean…” he adds casually.

“He doesn’t see anything interesting, he sees a half-naked human in a sirloin.” Valentine answers. 

The human is just staring at the wall and isn’t responding at all. We also see the acid pools a couple of meters further. Calyx wants to take a sample, so I help him to get the liquid into the vial with my mage hand cantrip. As Calyx takes the vial from the spectral hand in the air, he smells it, and deems it ‘slime’. He cannot deduce if it serves any function at all. 

Farryn is done trying to talk to the human, but I still try to figure out what happened to him. As I approach the man and come closer to him than before, I see that nobody’s home inside his head. His mind is shattered, due to a spell called feeble mind. The spell leaves its victims soulless, without personality: just an empty shell. It is horrible to see. I’ve only read about it a couple of times, but seeing it, is something else. I also know how to save this man: we need to cast heal or greater restoration. I know Calyx feels his powers have been reduced for the day, so I suggest coming back tomorrow or a couple of days after.

We find a door next to the pools and know the drow was behind it. I don’t think we should enter, but Farryn wants to. “We’ve done nothing wrong, we can walk in there,” he says. 

“That’s SO naïve of you, Farryn.” I say disappointedly. 

“Can’t we kill them?” he asks.

“Well, no.”

“I can scout!” offers Calyx, transforming into a tiny spider. He crawls underneath the door and leaves us to wait for him.

We wait a while, and then – when we don’t hear anything from the other side of the door, decide to go in anyways. The room is empty, apart from the spider jumping up and down on a table in the middle of the room. I walk towards spider-Calyx – it wants to show us something. He points to a compartment: it’s empty. Maybe the drow and demon found what they were looking for? Next to the compartment, I see a decomposing head of a Mind Flayer on the desk. First I thought it was fake, but now I’m standing next to it and can smell it, I regretted my decision to approach the desk in the first place. On the other side of the room, there are two statues of ogres polymorphing into giant Mosquitoes. They’re quite big, and it looks a bit too realistic: maybe they’re petrified, or stone shape was used?

Calyx transforms back into his normal form and tells us the drow and demon got a scroll and a tiara from the compartment he showed me. He thinks they went to level 15 through maybe some secret passage in the wall. Hearing this, Smokey drops everything he’s doing and runs in the direction Calyx pointed at. I’m thinking the last key might be with the Rakshasa. The creature seems to be a prisoner, but it can be hidden somewhere inside its room. Smokey returns and hears me suggesting searching the Rakshasas’ room and interrupts: “They are NOT to be trusted.”

“Okay, how in the hell are we going to find the last key then?”

We walk further and find a room we’ve not been to yet, avoiding the Rakshasa. Farryn joins a bit later and informs us the last key is a ‘Y’. Apparently, he quickly talked to the Rakshasa. We’re standing in front of a door with a lightning bolt on it. This is the room where the weapon is! We hear a soft zooming noise and go inside.

All the walls are curved, showing a round room, completely lined with Mithrill. There are seven plates, six of them with a keyhole, and one with a lever. Furthermore, we all see lights and niches next to every key, creating little corners in the round room. Valentine walks into one of the niches and feels there is no magic at all in that spot. The niches are anti-magical fields. That’s odd… “Guys… Can’t we ask the Rakshahsa for the key?”

“No, we’re not going to do that, I’ll try to make one first,” says Farryn.

“Okay, but you’ll have to do that without magic,” says Valentine.

Farryn tries to break off some Mithrill from the wall, but his tools ricochet from the metal. Something is wrong here. The anti-magic field is broken near the key Farry is close to: the light just went out. He mends the Mitrhil and tries out a key. He puts the ‘V’ in the keyhole – it ticks when he turns it. He tries it with the ‘U’ as well but sees the difference in lights near the anti-magic field. The ‘V’ light stayed out, and the ‘U’ stayed on. He wants to turn back the key, but cannot do it – the keys are STUCK.