DCC DotSK: Act 1-3

Without Aldric’s direct request, still Dufgal understands that his lowest status places him in the position of greatest risk. He has understood that this is what others have always done to him. He winces at the familiar resentment, but picks up the shield and carries it to the circular chamber of death. At least with these three, he has choice and will be appreciated for his actions.

I'm not keen to go there either, my dear Dufgal. But, what choice do we have? We have come here for a spear, and so we must find it.

He puts down his shield and attempts to cast a fucking spell.

"Perhaps I can convince Pelagia to make us more mighty, in order to meet the danger below."Ah, for fuck's sake!"

Aldric staggers mid-gesture, his half-formed incantation dying on his lips. Instead of unleashing a spell, he collapses to his knees, then curls into a trembling ball. An instant later, his mind is wrenched into the dark abyss of the sea, and he rocks back and forth on the cold floor of the partially collapsed chamber. He stays there, shuddering and lost for a full ten minutes, the sound of waves slowly restoring calm within him until he is able to rise once more.

Tyravasiel observes Aldric's penance with an uncomfortable expression and the darkness of pine in his eyes. The elf looks as if he's watching the performance of a particularly strange and off-putting tumbler, and wondering if he should say something about it to others in the audience.

After a few minutes, he clears his throat.

"Ah.. whenever you've finished... swaying, holy father, we must attend to our exploration."

The Pelagian priest mentioned that they're in search of a spear. Could that be the original to the decoration on the Wolf-Spear's wall?

"There is scarcely a less receptive deity on this plane than Aldric’s Pelagia. Justicia has done more for us, and we cast her cleric off of a cliff." she says.

Another moment of watching Aldric’s theatrics:

"A last resort, of course, but perhaps Pelagia might be similarly dealt with?" she says with a wry smile on her face!

Toss the cleric and the sea bitch may reward them…

Aldric eventually comes out of his seizures and rises, mouth agape. "All us mortals are just worms on the hook to the gods, but none more so than the Bitch Queen." he moans, dusting his robes off from the room. "At least my friends did not desert me. Anyway, I've squirmed for her, and it's done. My thanks for not abandoning me to the snakes."

As the explorers gather themselves up and make their way back to the main corridor, Aldric feels it. Pelagia's senses have abandoned him. And at the same time, Dufgal watches as his torch sputters and gutters -- then goes out, plunging the group into utter blackness.

"You were writhing so much in her divine service that they might have mistaken you for one of their own." Anora says of the snakes!

Anora fetches up a torch, and calls out to Dufgal.

"Light this one on the embers!"

Dufgal lights Anora’s torch.
"Hold it behind me if you would. This here shield is awful hefty."
And then he proceeds into the circular chamber.

With a new torch lit, Ty and Dufgal lead the way towards the lower, semi-circular chamber they spied in the west. It takes scant moments for them to reach it. The worn stone steps descend into a circular cave walled by tall stone slabs inscribed with dark runes. In the center of the chamber is a collection of stones topped by a slab resembling a table or altar. Atop the slab is the skull of an enormous bear. The runes on the wall slabs are carved in the likeness of massive cave bears, and of warriors donning the skulls and pelts of those bears. Both bears and bear-warriors are shown triumphantly battling dozens of foes.

The stench is strong in this room. Of rancid flesh, or perhaps more accurately, rotten fish or putrefying eel?

Not wanting to risk his neck unnecessarily, Dufgal speaks up, quietly, "Uh, no spear here. No hound neither."

Wrinkling his nose at the smell-- mere animal rot, with none of the piquancy that his own people sometimes employ in their more deliberately offensive perfumes-- Ty contemplates the great skull. Clearly the Hirotians' brutal ancestors meant it to be some sort of artifact. Perhaps it would be of interest to the dark lady who dogs his steps through the human lands?

But what tale would he tell of it? That the barbarian kings of old fancied themselves as strong as bears, and so killed some primitive beast, and positioned its fleshless skull in their barrow to flatter their own ghosts? And how would he move through Hirot with such a large and gruesome thing tucked under his arm? There would be questions, and the mayflies would not thank him for robbing their dead of such a trophy.

Having first considered the altar, Tyravasiel then looks to the ceiling above them. By torchlight, he searches for any holes or openings like unto the crawlspace they found in the antechamber. That discovery has put them on notice that there are more ways around this barrow than the corridors.

Moving quietly into the room, Ty ponders the altar-table structure that dominates the center of the spherical chamber for a moment. It is constructed in a way that might mean it is hollow -- that the top of it might lift off or even hinge open. But when he roams the room, investigating the walls and the ceiling, looking for crawlspaces or cracks or any kind of opening... his eyes eventually make a discovery that would be startlingly were not all elves dead inside.

Halfway up the wall, someone or something else stares back at him from the shadowy back of the chamber.

It takes Ty all of two heartbeats to realized that there are actually two of the things, and that they are detaching from the wall and coming down. Tyravasiel-Llir calls out or otherwise signals a warning as the two creatures unfold and climb down. Grey-skinned and sickly looking, the two reeking humanoids come forward, hissing through their broken, yellowed teeth. Garbed in dull rags, their drooping flesh is wet, loose, putrefied -- and their hands long-nailed and so bony as to be skeletal.

But whatever they are, they are snapping hungrily and almost soundlessly surging forward to attack!

---

ROUND 1
Init Order: PCs TBD, Tomb Denizens

Seeing Ty alarmed somehow really unsettled Dufgal. It’s as if he assumed that elves were unflappable. He shrinks himself such that only his eyes are visible over the edge of the bronze shield.