Where we stand
Pandemonium continues to be a howling nightmare, and we continue to walk further into it.
What we know going in:
- Myska's minions are wolf spider crab things, gross.
- We've been following Kas, and Kas leads to Vecna.
- The pit fiend leading Lolth's army is named Candlash. He carries a flaming whip and flies his Queen's icon. Under him: driders, siege spiders, and drow.
- The battle is not confined to one front. It's at the Ruinous Citadel too. It's everywhere.
Sugar spots three flights of bats leaving the Cliffside Redoubt, heading for the Tower, the Citadel, and the Cliffs. Something over there is giving orders.
A tempting detour
Kas is most likely at the Cliffside Redoubt, which is about as far from us as anything on this plane can be. Getting there means crossing the entire battlefield, through Lolth's army and Kas's army and whatever else has crawled out of the tunnels to join in.
The Ruinous Citadel, meanwhile, is right there. Next to the roiling sea. Full of monsters. Presumably also full of treasure.
We are, at heart, simple people. We go to the Citadel.
The drop
There's a hundred and fifty feet between us and the beach. Fell takes to the air. Gnarls and Sugar get everyone moving quietly, Pass without a Trace smoothing our tracks behind us.
Jain slips.
She falls the entire way and lands hard enough to break the rock underneath her. Then she stands up, dusts herself off, and that's that. The rest of us shake our heads, and carefully climb down after her.
The citadel up close is ancient. Down here at the bottom it's mostly Myska's spider friends, but there's still some scattered combat.
The long way around
Crossing the beach takes half an hour of weaving, crouching, and waiting. We work toward the south side, where there's less activity and the ruinous sea is closest. A collapsed column gives us a way up onto the top of the structure, and we keep going along the sea side until we find something that looks like a guard post.
Fell scouts it and finds an entrance: a triangular door, shaped for something that walks on more legs than we do. There's magic on it, too.
Gnarls dispels the trap. Jain smashes the door open.
Wolf crabs
Two wolf crab demons are on the other side, thoroughly surprised, standing in webbing that covers every surface of the room. The battle outside rages on without us.
Jain and Sugar open up on one and find it stubbornly resistant to being cut. Something in the room fires off a web and catches Gnarls mid-cast, holding him fast. Fell answers with his bow, force magic tearing through the room.
Sugar gets caught by the same trick and the two of them spend an awkward moment stuck watching. The wounded spider charges her, gets as far as the booming blade still hanging in the air around it, and detonates.
The other one goes up the wall and across the ceiling to reach Sugar, where it bites and claws at someone who can't move. Gnarls shakes free enough to lock it down with Hold Monster, and Jain eviscerates it at her leisure.
The larder
Fell goes ahead to scout, listening at doors. Through one of them, faintly, a demonic voice says "shit." Some reactions are universal.
Behind another door is a larder, which on Pandemonium means a room of bodies wrapped in spider silk and hung up for later. Jain starts unwrapping one and finds a Cambion, unconscious, with a magic whip.
At which point a spider demon bursts through the door.
Gnarls has lightning reflexes and gets the wand of silence up before it can raise an alarm, which is the difference between this being a fight and this being the whole citadel coming down on us. So we have the fight, quietly, and at the end of it everything in the room that isn't us is dead.
We take the whip. Jain, predictably, mutters something about destroying evil and moves to take the Cambion's head as well, but Gnarls talks her down.
The sister
The next room is full of random battle trophies, and one drow.
It's Vae's sister. We show her the token and she recognises it immediately. She talks far too much just like her sister and is extremely ready to leave. We are extremely interested in searching everything first.
Vae's price for information was help getting her sister out of the fort, and a magic cloak she wanted from the same place. It appears those were never two separate errands because the sister is wearing their grandmother's cloak.
She also warns us about a crazy demon prison room to the north, and is very clear that it is very dangerous. Noted. Not today.
We loot the room thoroughly. Partway through, some demons wander in on us from further in, and Jain solves the problem by shoving them bodily into the space Gnarls and Sugar have made unlivable. It goes about how you'd expect.
One survives long enough to talk. He's a small, nondescript sort, clearly not built for any of this, and once he starts he does not stop. Myska, he tells us, is in the room next door. There's a spiraling presence in there. There are tubes running along the wall. And tentacles in the tubes. Tentacles eat whoever is standing nearest. Many of his friends have gone into that room and few have come back.
The map
The room the demons came from is empty now, on account of us, and it turns out they were guarding something worth guarding: a map. It's magnificent. Three-dimensional, every major location rendered, showing the combatants of the war in real time.
- Tower — a glowing red dot. No detail inside.
- Ocean — violet dots scattered across the sea. Many of them.
- Citadel — no dots at all.
- Cliffs — red dots at the lower entrance, a gold dot in the middle, a green dot at the top.
We're reading it happily until Gnarls works out what he's actually looking at. The map doesn't just show us where our enemies are. It's bidirectional. Everything it reveals to us, it has just revealed about us.
Small purple dots begin moving from the cliff toward the citadel.
Monsters: dead.
Loot: acquired.
More monsters: inbound, up the cliff, at speed.
More loot: unconfirmed, but we live in hope.
The end of all things: still pending.
Loot
- Demonic whip
- +1 Longsword x4
- +2 Longbow
- Potion of Poison x3
- Stone Giant Potion
- Lolth Banner
- Rope and climbing gear
- +1 Dagger x3
- 750 black opals, 1000 gp each
- Glyph of Warding scroll x2
- Tube, 2500 gp x2