Season 7, Session 4

1630, Sea Season, Stasis Week, Clayday to around Godday

Dramatis Personae

Events

The Dwarf called for Maalira and her friends, as a designated repair unit plus guards. From his Throne Room he took them through back ways and then through a big steel door which had his handprint on it. It swung towards them with a slight hiss like Air spirits. Only there was he prepared to talk, saying that there was a problem deep in the Earth, and Ernalda was wounded. Berra checked if that was by Zorak Zoran, just in case there would be an angry Babeester Gor around. Fortunately, it was not. The Mine Manager noted it could get ‘metaphysical’ and then had to explain what that meant to everyone but Oriana. Oriana understood the explanation of Ernalda being wounded as lies to children, rather than a literal wounding. Berra checked if this would be a Heroquest and the Manager said they would see it as such. T’Dwarf’s plan was to dig a tunnel to smuggle in a healer.

As they reached a lift in their journey, Berra got excited because she had heard of little sweets you sucked in tall lifts, and she asked T’Dwarf for some. X1138 was in the lift, and people greeted him happily. He was introduced to Oriana. The little yellow lozenges to suck tasted like entire lemons had been crushed into making them. Berra and Dormal experimented with them.

X1138 operated the lift, taking it down. It dropped like there was no floor beneath the floor, and everyone felt oddly lighter. Berra was ecstatic to hand out more lemon sweets.

Finally, after dropping for several minutes, the lift began to slow, which took some time. It opened to a corridor which looked dwarf-made but was barely lit. Where there should have been big round light there were only faint round auras. Dormal crept forward to go past a few, but they did not smite him. Berra called for an order that put her at the front, then Dormal, with X1138 therefore at the back. She crept forward, but after going past one light she got curious and poked where the next should be. She felt something there, and pulled it off, blinding herself as it turned out to be a leather cover over a functional light. A quick check with X1138 revealed the lights were very very difficult to damage, and so this was likely the best way of darkening the area.

The workmanship on the leather cover with its drawstring was crude but serviceable, possibly worktrollship. That aligned with a wish for darkness, but not necessarily with Ernalda being wounded. The group proceeded carefully, taking the covers off as they went, on the grounds that the trolls could see in the dark anyhow, and they could not.

Maalira found one of the cover strings still had fingernails on, and was not from a human. There was a bit of shuddering. The working idea became that a troll had done that to their trollkin to make the covers. The corridor ran straight for some time and then took a neat 90 degree turn to the left. As they approached it, Dormal suggested he could create light. Despite the horrors Berra said that was a good idea, and to everyone’s relief Dormal pulled out a wand which cast a light. Going around the corner carefully, the group saw that the world was changed somewhat. It looked more organic, and the darkened light was a closed-off eye.

Berra knocked on the eyelid to try to waken it. It opened, and she looked in, seeing many things at once through a single eye, as she had closed the others against any sudden beam of light. She saw the inside of the earth, a great darkness through which horrendous glowing horrors danced. She saw a perpetual land of beautiful sunshine and she saw the splendour of the court of Yelm. Dormal heard the harpist to the court of Yelm, although he did not see the visions Berra saw.

Dormal warned the others that Jar-eel was around. Berra could see the great white bear galloping upwards through the darkness of the earth that she saw, with a woman on its back. She had time to wonder if it was her or someone else and then the eye closed and the music stopped. After some discussion the group realised that Jar-eel was not present, and could safely be ignored, or at least avoided. They continued onto the straight if fleshy path, where eyelids now took the place of the covers that had been over the lights. Nobody tried to remove any more.

As they went around the next corner, there was an incredible sense of vertigo and compression. Berra and Dormal were both floored by it, although they were simultaneously convinced that they were ceilinged too. The others noticed that they had altered. Moriana felt of herself as a distorted reflection of a bronze mirror. She knew she was herself, but was also 4’10” and stocky with a long white beard of delicate weight. Maalira also found she was shorter and more spread out and her beard was magnificent and curly. The healer was unimpressed but phelgmatic. Oriana was terrified, having never experienced a Heroquest before.

Berra had a horrible moment of puking through her iron helmet, which was nauseating but also interesting as she had not been wearing an iron helmet before that. Maalira had white trousers and tunic with incredibly regular stitching, and Oriana was in a similar outfit, but grey and slightly shimmery. They could see Berra had iron dwarf armour on, while Dormal was in black and had a goatee that suited him like it was designed for him. Berra was, of course, the shortest of the group. She had a neatly trimmed moustache and beard as black as her hair.

Maalira managed to help Berra take the helmet off, and Berra poured water into it, much to X1138’s horror. Berra saw the dwarf preparing to cut off his beard as if to make a rag for her, and she stopped him and used a bit of her padding, arguing that he should not lose part of himself. He was confused about the potential loss of combat effectiveness, but lent her some oil and did not question further.

Maalira noted that the flesh down the new corridor was less healthy. It was like the red spears that go up towards the heart, and was the sort of thing that was caused by animal bites, human bites, dirty splinters… It was evidence of an infection.

Dormal heard a strange wffff and then a thump, and put together that it had to be a sling. He shouted for everyone to get down, so Berra immediately ran towards danger¹And passed POWx5 and DEXx5, so was both very Dwarfy and also able to keep her feet.. She experienced the corridor as scree-covered but navigable, and saw her enemy as a huge Mistress Race troll. She attacked without hesitation, hitting the troll hard. The others saw her running along a rather more intestinal corridor, and some of them found it much harder to keep their footing.

Repair Unit Maalira saw Iron Unit Berra attacking a figure who had fallen. By a miracle, a white butterfly landed on Maalira’s forehead and stamped its foot, bringing her abruptly back to herself. She shouted at Berra to stop, which with Dormal’s help Berra took as an instruction, although she did not understand it. Oriana, up close to Maalira, could see she had a Fertility Rune like two stylised butterfly wings on her forehead, as a white scar. She determinedly told herself that it was nothing at all that could not be explained rationally. To those pulled out of the Heroquest, or not fully in it – Maalira and Dormal – the foe was obviously a tiny broken trollkin.

Maalira summoned a healing spirit that turned out to be the butterfly, which tore itself away from her forehead and landed on the trollkin, mending the hurts including the amputated leg.

Berra reverted to previous instructions and marched on, while X1138 asked Maalira for further instructions. Dormal pointed out that Berra was marching on and Maalira commanded her to stop.

Oriana took some time to prepare herself and then used proximity to speak to the trollkin’s mind, as they lacked a common language. The trollkin revealed that its master had found a new den, and it had been defending the area. It remembered being one of a mistress race crew who came there with Xanth the Magnificent, son of Karg, and also remembered its master leading it and other trollkin into a cave. It promised to pay Xiola Umbar its healing price, and offered over a bolg, either as its own full value, or as a down payment. It was a single bolg.

The group tried to work out how long the trolls had been in the area; five sleeptimes was probably a little under a week, which fitted with the estimated time according to X1138. There was also the matter that they had been there for thousands of years and Ernalda was wounded in the God Time. Oriana had a flash of understanding, experiencing Yelm entering the Underworld from the point of view of the trollkin Heroquesting as a Mistress Race troll. She was confused and terrified by the whole experience.

It was hard to say how far away the trollkin’s master was or how many were with him. The prisoner knew there was him, 6 other trollkin of whom 2 were sacrificed for food and leather, and 1 troll, but he also knows that it was 6 mistress race trolls that came here, including himself.

They moved on. At the next X1138 warned that things might get strange, with various effects on the morale of others. Dormal paused to ask what kind of unit he was, and after a surprisngly long time in which X1138 either searched memory banks or found the answer in the god-time, he replied that Dormal was a lead dwarf. Oriana was Quicksilver, and the repair unit and iron caste were easy.

They were now moving forward through an entirely fleshy squelchy place which looked very wrong. Dormal could see how a particular green oil that was used for kidney stabs would do this. Berra recalled how wounds turned bad after battle. Maalira knew without having to look that there was a bad infection.

From a little way in front of them, about at the end of the last line of the square they had made, they heard a road, and then a shout in Tradetalk, “WHO INVADES MY DEN!”

Dormal and Maalira tried to calm things down and negotiate, while Berra threatened the troll with violence. Diplomacy won, and the troll was prepared to talk, but did not want to leave. Dormal cast /Lie/, persuading it and the other trollkin that they were in a place where the rock would start to glow if they ate too much of it. He even persuaded them that light would burst out of them if they had eaten a lot, leading to trolls vomiting up half-digested rock.

The group accompanied the trolls out of the tunnel they had used to get in, which emerged east of Snakepipe Hollow. They took the ‘patients’ to Alda Chur and explained the problem to the White Ladies there. As everyone who heard it had believed the lie, this caused some confusion, but Maalira finally worked out enough to ask them to continue treatment and then release the trolls in the name of peace. At the hospital Dormal made sure that he told the story of how he heroically got people not killed.

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  And passed POWx5 and DEXx5, so was both very Dwarfy and also able to keep her feet.