Aporeu chronicles Issue 78: Trials of the Tinkerer

Stories from the adventurers

This week

Phase spiders and the wisdom of knowing what you allies can and can't do.

Trials of the Tinkerer by Sahrot Al

[Editor's note: So, I heard that one of the Kobolds from the Guild left for Apethorn. Then another one shows up. We're never getting rid of them, are we?]
Hi everybody. I heard people like reading how missions went, so I'm writing down my version of events. Hope you'll enjoy!
Anyway, for my first mission, I'm gonna be doing some tinkering. I'm even gonna be going through that Gate thing! Sounds exciting. I walk up to the board where I signed up for the mission, because... Well, I have no idea where I should go. Luckily, Ranra the spider-woman and Iain the distracted Human join me before I have a chance to get bored. Then we're joined by a Gnome man with a wizard who's... quite rude. He starts poking me with his cane, asking if I can protect him. I show him my noble art of exploding things. And in doing so wake up the last member of our group for this mission. Barruk, the big Minotaur with half his left arm missing. I bet he got too close to a machine, or it was blown off because of a bomb. I still got all my digits, because I'm a smart Kobold that knows to treat explosives with respect!
Ranra said I should stick close if it's my first mission. So that's what I do. We go into Lornan's office. And I ask him if the window's alright now. Apparently, I fixed his window perfectly! That's always good to hear. Gives me confidence that I can help this Tinkerer fix his stuff, too. Oh right, the mission. We have to go meet up with a blue lady, go through the Gate, and help out getting some supplies for their side. Which apparently has a faulty powersource. Malfunctioning machinery?! It's like this mission is PERFECT for me to go on! If it weren't for the supplies being somewhat unwilling, I probably could've done this one by myself.
After he explains and shoos us out of his office (He's a very busy man, you know), we meet up with the blue lady outside the Guild Hall. She seems a bit shy. Totally forgot to ask her name, since she gives us all a silver circlet that apparently helps with going through the Gate to their side. And you just know I was checking that thing out to see how it works. Spoilers: I have no idea. There weren't any moving bits to it. I put the dang thing on anyway, since she seemed pretty insistent about us wearing them.
As we step through the Gate, it hurts like heck. I could've sworn I even saw myself for a moment, like I was not myself. If that makes sense. Didn't get a chance to figure it out, because I was through the Gate and throwing up my dinner on the other side before I knew it. If it weren't for some of the others commenting that that's not what normally happens, I would NEVER step foot through that thing again.
On the other side, there's a blue guy with a weird accent cleaning up the mess we're making as we come out on this end. Tulli Derdha or something. Once I'm feeling a bit better, I go to check out the faulty machinery we're here to fix. And realize that they have been patching it with the wrong kinds of components. And they're burning through their core by using the wrong kind of fuel. Rookie mistake, really. Kinda amazing they've been managing to keep it working as long as it has.
He talks about how he needs "Phase Spider" bits to fix it. Glad to hear he knows what's wrong with it, at least. Then Ranra tells us that she turns into a big Steeder in fights, and asks us not to hurt her. Which is a reasonable request. We get an explanation about what Phase Spiders are. Apparently, they're big, blue, and can disappear from sight. Cheaters.
We get a map with a route to get to the 'Spider Caverns', a request to bring back 2 Phase Spiders with their bodies as intact as we can get them. And a Ranra that seems excited to get going, because caverns. Can't say I blame her. Anywhere that isn't cursed by the sun is a good place in my book. So, we set off on our trek to these caverns. It's dark out, so Barruk puts a sort of leash on Iain, who is apparently the only one that can't see anything in the dark. That's gonna bite us in the tail, I just know it.
After walking along the road for a bit, following that map we got, we come to a ruined town. There's just rubble left. Kinda hard to tell it was ever a town, really. I suppress my curiosity to find out what ruined this town so completely. Probably something boring like 'time', anyway. And head on into the 'Spider Caverns' beyond it.
When we get inside, Steeder-Ranra disappears from our view. Probably because we figure it's best to not have any torches lit right now. Yeah, it's dumb, and we fix that shortly, don't worry. Whiltin does some magic to talk to our Steeder scout. It's apparently a lotta webs to the left, and movement to the right. That's at the fork we're coming up on, by the way. So, we go right, because movement means creatures, right? We sorta stumble as we try to be sneaky, but get better after a little bit. Not too much, but better.
We come to a 'room' of sorts, and there's a big blue spider in there, so we get our fight on. Or try to, anyway. Iain stumbles and falls on his face because it's too dark for him to see. And the big blue spider nopes out after I toss a bomb in its face. We manage to get through the fight well enough, but the blue one is gone. Ranra used a big, flaming sword. That was pretty cool.
But, we figured out that Iain absolutely NEEDS light to be of any use. So, I give him a torch and he lights it up with some magic. Now he won't be useless.
When a spider comes to scout us, Whiltin scares it off. And we go after it. And we get to another 'room', with even more spiders. Just great. This time, the fight goes a bit better. Barruk chucks that torch ahead so Iain can at least see something, and I make a rock and a blue spider lights up with a glitter bomb. Of course, the blue spider disappears like the cheater it is after we hit it. I blow up some small spiders, and I make a big spider's head pop with an unstable bomb. Very glad I got that thing away from me, because it looked like a really bad headache before its head popped off. I feel kinda tapped out after that unstable thing. Haven't felt like that in a while. This Adventuring thing is pretty tiring, I guess. But, we make it through the whole ordeal without anybody going down, so I count that as a win. Even if Steeder-Ranra is looking pretty hurt. Then she turns back and she looks fine. That's pretty impressive magic. We do take a break to let everyone catch their breath for a bit. And figure that if we're gonna take these blue spiders out, we gotta focus our firepower on one at a time to bring it down before it decides to nope on out.
After about an hour, we head down the tunnel I went into. Apparently I'm lucky, because we come across a big room with a bunch of spiders, and 3 blue ones. Including 2 that already look a bit hurt. Finally something goes right for once! Steeder-Ranra jumps ahead to bite at one, and I start lobbing my bombs. We kinda underestimated the amount of spiders there, because Ranra and I get webbed up. That's not good. And then one of the big ones comes up to me and bites me. Well, it tries to bite me a bunch, but my small size helps me avoid some of the hits. Which is good.
After Ranra stops being a Steeder for a bit, and uses a glitter bomb as well (though I didn't see her toss one...), things start going our way. The big spider next to me nopes off to hide somewhere, I blow up the webbing that's keeping me tied up without hurting myself (I knew I was resistant!), and we finish up all the spiders. Including the 3 blue ones. Whiltin does some magic that conjures up a big disk to put the 3 blue ones on, so we don't have to carry them ourselves. That's a pretty neat trick. I may need to look into something like that. Regardless, we manage to bring all 3 of them back to Tulli.

Who gets all excited and starts rambling about what he can do with the bits. Then his... daughter, I guess? The blue lady that we met on our side, that gave us the circlets. She says he needs some rest before he gets started on fixing the thing. I take a bit of time to leave him detailed instructions on how to fix his broken machine. And Whiltin puts some kinda magic on my instructions, telling Tulli to use them. So hopefully, next time someone comes through, it doesn't hurt like a [expletive].
We also get some money from the nice blue lady before we go back through the Gate. Funnily enough, it doesn't do that hurty thing it did the first time. If it's like this normally, it's not so bad. Maybe I judged this Gate thing too harshly.
Written by: Sahrot Al.

---

Trials of the Tinkerer by Iain

Blaire told me it was a good idea to write stories for the chronicle, because you get a reward for it. So this is my shot at getting a reward.
Like always I’m just reading a book and get distracted by someone who tells me what to do. As always I say I don’t know what they want from me and after trying to continue reading, I follow this dwarven woman to the quest board. I hate dwarfs, luckily I’m very good in hiding my face in a book and not showing any emotions. Anyway, we get to the quest board and there we find another kobold. This place seems to be infested with that filth. Luckily I’m very good in hiding my face in a book and not mentioning it to anyone. Soon we are joined by a gnome and a minotaur. So we are with 5 different races and apparently we should not keep track of each other’s weaknesses. At least, they did not think about mine.
After we’re all together we go to Lornan's office. He has a lot to do with these quests, so it would seem. He sends us out of the guildhall where a female, race unknown, is waiting for us. She wants us to help her father with a bad working gate or something. Before I know it, we’re at the gate and entering, but she wants me to put on a sort of crown or something which somehow was conjured up in my hand while I was reading my book about the waste. It is quite interesting actually. It contains all sorts of information about clans of goblins and orcs living in there. Too bad it is a few years old, but did you know that there was once a warchief who brought all the clans together and attacked Pigeons? The number of deaths in that fight were unbelievable high. [Editor's note: We did cut out about three pages of information in this attack because it is not of any importance on this mission report]
Anyway, where was I? Ahh, yes. We entered the gate and I immediately remembered this world. I had been here before, fighting the apple demon. I knew we had to be careful in this place and so I mentioned this to my fellow quest members. The tinkerer was his happy self again and told us what to do. We had to go and find some kind of blue phase spiders. They were needed to fix the gate or something. Because I had some previous experience with this world I asked a lot of questions about these phase spiders, but didn't get a lot of clear answers. The tinkerer told us he read about them in a book, so he had my attention and I send him searching for the book, which he couldn’t find. This man is even more chaotic than Kenzie and Blaire put together. I saw a lot of books, so I asked for another one and he brought me a book about cogs and ratios. I did not get a good read about that before and I decided to start it immediately. [Editor's note: Again we cut two pages of information about cogs and ratios, because they are not important to the mission report]
Anyway, where was I? Ahh, yes. We got a map from the tinkerer on where to find the phase spiders and we left for their cave. We set out and soon after starting travel, I noticed a problem. It was getting dark. This should normally not be a problem, but the group wanted to travel as unnoticed as possible, so they forbade me to make a light to read my book. We traveled on and my mind got distracted by all kinds of information I heard and saw, but I will not mention that here. After some time we found the cave mentioned by the tinkerer and went inside. I immediately stopped. I saw nothing. Not as normal, when I’m reading. I can follow my companions while reading, but now I could not even see them. And, mostly infuriating, they still held on to their wish to travel unnoticed, so I did not get any light. To guide me, they bound a rope around my waist and practically pulled me through the cave. And they wondered why I wasn’t any stealthy. I heard the dwarf lady had turned into a steeder, which is an underground spider and the gnome was talking to her somehow. She had seen movement and wanted us to come closer before moving in. So we went in.
The moment when we were close enough for us to initiate a fight, the rope which was bound to me was released and I found myself stranded. Knowing we were close to a fight, I decided to find my own way forward by touch. But the ground was a bit less even at the entrance of the open space and I fell down, after some stones dropped on my head, which broke my silence. At that moment, the fight started and luckily I saw a bomb being shot towards a spider. It hit and exploded, which gave me a brief moment of seeing a blue spider. The next move I made was firing at the location I saw the spider, but it was already gone. After a few more moments suddenly the dwarf was standing in the middle of the open cave, holding a fiery sword, so I knew I had to get there. She had a source of light and that was the only thing that mattered at that moment. Unfortunately, I did not notice a small spider, which bit me the moment I moved past it.
After the fight I again complained about the lack of light and my inability to see in the dark. The gnome and kobold told me to just light a torch and so I did. I was sent to the back of the line, holding my torch, so the light was as far away as possible from possible creatures up front. Before the next fight I gave the torch to the Minotaur who said he would throw it in the middle of the battle, but he tripped just before throwing it and it landed only halfway across the room. I saw a few spiders because of that and decided to just start firing at one, until suddenly a few of them lit up by a spell and I hit one with my witch bolt, lightning spell which keeps zapping my enemy every few seconds. It tried to get away from me, but I managed to sustain the arc just barely. It soon succumbed from the lighting. After this fight we took a short rest to get back some of our powers and without warning the minotaur picked me up and put me over his shoulder when we left, so I complained loudly and he put me down, after which I walked with the group.
It didn’t take long before we found another room with spiders. It was full of spiders and we fought our way inside. The dwarf and the kobold got restricted by their webs before we killed them all, also killing three of the phasing spiders, which we took with us. The tinkerer was extremely happy with our mission success and although he was very tired, he wanted to start working on the gate. We came back through the gate, which didn’t give any bad effects and that was our mission.

---

On the next issue:

Lathanders Lament