📰 A Friend in Need

Jodelle searches the Renaer-wrecked frame and arms herself with a makeshift club, as Flynnhorn and Vinnie beat at the approaching corrosive ooze.

Patience lands some heavy and devastating blows on the ooze. His sword smokes and the small room fills with the acid stink of hydrogen and metal salts.

It's difficult to know if animated faeces feels pain, but it seems to be becoming somewhat less animated as it languidly lashes out at Vinnie.

With a mighty blow, Vinnie beats animating life force from the ooze.

There's now a corrosive blobby puddle in the doorway, but at least it's stopped moving.

Patience makes some progress. There's a hall at the end of a long corridor ahead. Threadbare curtains hang on the east wall of a hall, in the middle of which a muscular half-orc in dingy robes stands with his foot on the chest of a male human with wavy red-blond hair. Fire burns around the orc’s clenched fist and his victim cries and squirms helplessly beneath him. Patience recognises the victim as Volo's drinking buddy - Floon Blagmaar.

Seated on a raised platform to the south is a nightmarish figure wearing black robes. It has large white eyes and rubbery purple skin, with four tentacles encircling its inhuman mouth. It cradles and gently caresses what looks like a disembodied brain with feet.