Luthiel's Diary 9
General Summary
Ugh, trying to get a decent meditation sesh in this place is IMPOSSIBLE. If it even is nighttime - seriously, how does anyone know what time it is down here? It's always the same creepy dimness. Which I guess is why there's always some kind of noise in the streets outside. I miss Seedra's magic mansion SO much - at least it was quiet there, or quiet most of the time.
Anyway, we finally decided to drag ourselves out of bed and join the others to see if we could find some kind of vaguely edible breakfast. We found them all already in the bar - Gertrude even looked like she'd already had a couple of glasses of wine. For breakfast? Mushrooms and lizard steak. Served by the RUDEST and most unfriendly Orc waiter EVER. Although, I guess I haven't actually met any orc waiters before. I just hope any others I do meet are less of a jerk than he was. Seedra got pulled aside by Maloria, the owner of the Succubus' Teat (eww, right?), and got told that the big fighter wasn't allowed to wear his full armor 'cause he's not a drow, and she had to make him take it off before she got in trouble. Seedra had no problem telling him, obvs.
Then the conversation turned to buying some armor for the fighter and the Half-orc, since they couldn't wear their own. Gertrude also wanted to enchant her shield (even though she's not even allowed to use it here, as Seedra pointed out, kinda smugly). While all this was going on, along with a debate about where and how to rent an apartment or house (seriously?), Gertrude suddenly announced that we needed to head west and rescue some of her friends. When Seedra questioned her, she admitted her "friends" were Kuo-Toa, and the message had come from the Sea-Mother. Seriously?
Despite this super urgent mission, apparently Gertrude ALSO wanted to upgrade her shield and catch the midday gladiator fight in the main square. It's like, all the different gods possessing her are giving her totally conflicting ideas, and her own brain isn't exactly doing a great job of putting them all together into a normal plan.
We totally ignored her crazier ideas and decided to go west to help her rescue her fishy friends before she, like, twitched herself into a total meltdown. It meant we didn't have much time for shopping (major sigh), but we did manage to get some, like, slave-quality armor for the fighter and the half-orc. While we were doing that, we found a bunch of random magic items in the half-orc's pockets that he wasn't even using and had totally forgotten about, so I totally called dibs on a couple of them to go with the magic flute and dagger Seedra gave me, and the magic sword I took off that drow captain we killed.
We headed west through the city, which got more residential and also WAY more spidery, with giant cobwebs covering the tops of the houses and stretching across the streets way up high. The road opened up into this big square with this ziggurat-looking building in the middle with a statue of this creepy half-drow, half-spider lady on top. We figured this had to be the temple of Lolth and decided to give it a VERY wide path, hoping the Kuo-Toa were west of the temple, not in it. It seems like the divine guidance Gertrude's getting is, like, super unreliable. To the west is the demon quarter, according to the maps the slaves drew for us, but the roads in that direction just turned into this maze of alleys and dead ends. Totally desperate, we sent the halfling (invisible thanks to one of my spells, duh) to climb up one of the buildings to see if he could see the way from the rooftops. But as he was easing his way over the gutter, he came face-to-face with a GIANT spider! Looking around carefully, he saw that the rooftops were COVERED in giant spiders - this was totally their part of the city, and definitely NOT ours. Ewww.
While he was trying to decide whether to try and sneak across their webs (obviously one of the dumbest ideas we've had lately), we got distracted at ground level by this HUGE winged demon just strutting down the street like he owned the place. We called the halfling back down and started following the demon. It went all through these alleys, and then it just stopped and grabbed this human slave who was walking by, ripped him in half, and then, like, MESSILY took a bite out of one half before just tossing it away. SO GROSS. It kept going and came to the entrance of this narrow alley with two braziers burning with this creepy green fire on either side. The demon squeezed blood from the ripped-up corpse in his hands into each fire, which was just the MOST disgusting thing EVER, and they turned red for a second while he did it. Then the demon went into the alleyway before the fires turned green again. We figured we'd found the entrance to the demon quarter. Double ewww.
We were wondering if we should try and follow, and if so, how, but it seemed way easier to just get Gertrude to ask her new "mistress" for a little more info about where on EARTH we were supposed to be going. Gertrude totally went white at the suggestion and mumbled something about not wanting to bother the Sea-Mother any more than she had to, but she agreed to ask her OTHER deity if he had any info. Why he puts up with all her craziness, I have NO idea. Anyway, he revealed that her fishy friends were no longer to the west of us. Which, like, seriously narrowed down the possibilities in a totally worrying way. So she asked the obvious next question, and he confirmed that YES, they were in the great temple of Lolth. Great.
For some totally insane reason, we decided to keep helping Gertrude when the obvious thing to do would have been to pretend we were stuck in traffic and couldn't reach the Kuo-Toa in time. So back to the temple we went, and Seedra did a spell so we all looked like Dark-kin now, at least to anyone who couldn't see through illusions. We confidently walked across the plaza and up the big steps into the temple, totally not daring to look and see if people were staring at us.
Inside was this big hall, which Seedra all confidently called a "narthex." At one end was this altar to Lolth; at the other was this totally trashed altar that we figured had once been for Grazz't, since Selusa had said they used to share this temple before they had a major falling out. It totally reminded us of that archway we found back at the big guard post, where one side was a statue of Lolth and the other was this statue totally covered in fungus. We figured that had probably been Grazz't too.
A doorway on the wall near the trashed altar opened into this room totally covered in cobwebs, which looked SO uninviting, so we just strutted down the main hallway (which Seedra called a "nave" - how does she know so much about temple architecture?!) until we got to this room at the far end. In the middle of it was this big pool of orange liquid, and the back wall was this super realistic picture of stars swirling into a vortex that was, like, really creepy and hypnotic. But then we saw these two HUGE staircases leading off the hallway right before the room. One went down, and the other went up, but both of them were guarded by these enormous spiders! Seedra totally gulped and said her super vision thing showed her they weren't actually spiders at all, but these weird female demons with rope-like arms. Gertrude just walked right up to the one on the stairs going down, saying the prisoners were probably in the dungeons, but it totally bared its fangs at her! Until she remembered that diamond spider brooch we took from that dark-kin priestess in the Kuo-Toa shrine. When the spider/demon saw it, it totally backed off and let her go down the stairs, but when we tried to follow, it blocked our way! So Gertrude just went off on her own, looking for the prisoners down these hallways with totally gross murals of spiders and ickiness, and ickiness with spiders, I think. She was actually doing pretty well until the halfling, being all Gertrude-like impulsive, decided to sneak invisibly down the stairs to help her. The spiders, being demons, were SO not fooled by the invisibility for even a second, and they all swarmed out to attack us! Turns out there were actually two on each side. The fight started, and more of these demon things just kept appearing, even as we were killing them! And when I say "we," I mostly mean "I," 'cause I totally wiped one out and sent it back to the abyss with this super powerful blow where I put in, like, ALL my rage at the darkness and love for the light of the forests. Totally rocked at blowing it apart, so much so that one of them possessed the fighter and tried to make him fight me! Except his brain couldn't handle trying to fight me at the same time as wanting to, like, hump me, so he just totally froze up. Gertrude came back and started throwing beams of light around, and then this even BIGGER spider with the body of a male drow came up the nave! And then Griff put this wall of force across the hallway to separate us from the big spider-drow, but he got me on the wrong side of it! At least I was away from the fighter. And then one of the spider-demons in mist form totally enveloped me and poisoned me, so now I can't move, and I think things might be about to go REALLY badly for me again. Ugh.
Report Date
09 Apr 2025
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