Into the Forbidden Fortress

General Summary

The Reunion

It was a few days after the party's stay in Acknyt that nearly everyone caught up with each other. Brute had the most memorable entrance. The hulking figure of a man crouched in a small, barely-adrift canoe made people along the docks stop and murmur in surprise. Then laughter broke out as they saw Brute barely manage to dock his canoe at the quay without it sinking. Alatsar, chipper as ever, tagged along on Brute's shoulder.
"Thanks, mate!" he said as he gingerly stepped onto the dock. Brute grunted and then secured his basket of fruit a little more securely over his other shoulder. He had picked the fruit especially for Humphrey.
Between the inn and the market, Alatsar and Brute found Tala, Shanna, and Colonel Blaster. Vincent, the visibly challenged member of the party, was also introduced. Teju, in bird form, had landed on Alatsar's shoulder and guided him to everyone. The group spent the morning shopping for new armor and supplies.

The Forbidden Fortress

The Forbidden Fortress earned its name. From the deck of Gretta's ship, The Ravager, they could see lava fields covering any possible path to the gates of their destination. Once Gretta gave orders for the ship to dock, she and the party went ashore. At the start of the lava fields, Gretta pulled out a peculiar device. She fiddled with its buttons and wires then flipped a switch. Within a minute, bridges emerged from anchors in the ground and provided a safe path across the lava. The group was amazed.
Once at the gates, Gretta addressed them.
"I'm going to stay outside the fortress - no way I'm going in. I'll keep the bridges open for you so you have a way across if anything happens."
Shanna didn't trust Gretta. She used all her powers of perception to detect any falsehood. Gretta appeared to be telling the truth! Satisfied, Shanna turned her attention to the building.
The structure itself appeared to be made of old, weathered stone. A high entryway guarded by an erratically rising and falling iron gate stopped them from going any further. Alatsar examined it and with one blast of his powers, bent the metal inward. Forced out of shape, the gate could move no more. The party easily passed through.
In the next room, they found old stone walls and piles of rubble littering the ground. The air was musty. An undisturbed layer of dust carpeted the floor. To their right, the party saw a large pile of rubble. After some deliberation, Tala used telekinesis to move the rubble aside.
In the next room, time literally stuttered. A person took two steps forward and found themselves three steps back. Time looped again and again like a nonsensical trap. It took every individual's intellect powers to break free of it.
Colonel Blaster (and Vincent) weren't so fortunate. The Colonel was stuck in a time loop, unable to even move. Alatsar broke into the timestream again and managed to carry the Colonel out of it. But that wasn't the only danger.
As everyone scrambled to the wide hallway to their left, they heard the rumbling of a large stone coming straight for them. Brute stood his ground and stopped the mighty stone in its track then broke it apart into dust with his bare hands.
The room following had a layer of goo and slime secreted across the floor. Rather than try to cross it, Brute offered to throw people across the room, one by one, to the other side of the slimy surface and into the next doorway. Everyone but Shanna agreed. She made her own way across. Teju was able to climb across the stone on her own, but she stayed behind to help Brute make a bridge across the goo with old rubble.
But as Brute tried to cross down the next hallway, he tripped a trap! A twenty foot long hole opened suddenly, revealing a watery pit of Ebons swimming hungrily in circles for food. Brute fell in but wasn't scared. He managed to get a decent blow on an Ebon before the group managed to haul him back up to to the hallway.
Brute offered to throw people across, once again. And once again, everyone agreed except Shanna. She tried to use wind powers to fly across but failed. Screaming, she fell into the pit below. Alatsar expertly maneuvered his bar of iron so she could grab it and get back up to the hallway.
In the near final room, there was an odd arch. As each party member passed through (except Vincent), a dead body materialized at their feet upon entry. It was a clone version of them, dead, with no equipment. Everyone shivered but ignored the weird effect.
Teju sensed something in this room that she had sensed in the last one. She had run a perception check and found out that a creature lurked in the corner. In fact, it was responsible for the weird effects they found in each of the rooms. The cybernetic serpent, at least twenty feet long, had fled when Teju first spotted it. She had kept her discovery to herself.
The room they had just entered was the largest yet. It was easily eighty feet long. There were two ancient doors on the left side of the room and a raised platform at the far end. Teju spotted the creature, glowing faintly blue, making itself smaller and smaller in the shadows in the northwest corner.
Tala used a cypher to find hidden things across the complex. She became aware of the creature in the shadows. With a cry, she pointed it out. Colonel Blaster pulled out his weapons and charged at the beast! Teju lept in front of him.
"Stop! Let me talk to it," she cried. Teju, only a thirteen year old, was very brave to stand up to a madman. Colonel Blaster reluctantly lowered his blades and stepped a few paces away.
Teju tried to use words with the creature, called a Glauxim. It communicated back with a series of scenes in her head. She felt as if she was in a dream state.
The first scene was of a smaller Glauxim slithering away from a raging fire in a forest. Teju sensed loneliness and guessed right: it was the last of its kind.
The second scene was of the Glauxim being found by Oxlim. Some sort of deal must have been made, for the next scene showed the Glauxim controlling each of the rooms. Teju got the sense that they were the first group of explorers to have survived the fortress to date. She gulped as she looked at the uneven gaps in the floor where chasms once opened to swallow people whole.
Meanwhile, Brute used a cypher to examine the rest of the room. He broke down the ancient doors to reveal cyphers and artifacts inside. He also used the last of the artifact's power to find a staircase below the raised platform. Teju was able to find a hidden lever to access it. Once it seemed the Glauxim wouldn't attack them, everyone descended the staircase into darkness.
The room below, now lit by traveler's glowglobes and fire, was full of glittering shins, shining jewels, and odd bits of cyphers and machinery. In another corner of the room was a silver button. Teju threw a rock at it, activating a hologram.
"You have successfully opened the three waypoints. None of my brothers will war with you. Seek the center."
The hologram disappeared.
In spite of the party's warnings, Alatsar gathered up bits of metal from the treasure pile. The rest of the group left it alone, figuring it belonged to Oxlyn. But how had he got it there in the first place? The Glauxim revealed a hidden passageway that led straight outside.
Gretta was very surprised when everyone tumbled out of the hidden entrance hidden behind the trees. She was equally amazed that they had survived the entire route. Still, she shrugged and suggested they all come back to the ship and go to Acknyt. She would explain things on the way.
But before they could leave, Alatsar spotted a gnarled tree near the large entryway that hadn't been there before. Colonel Blaster, itching for a fight, eagerly inspected it. It was the fight he had been looking for. An Encephalon burst out, scattering carnage-dealing butterflies in all directions!
But before the Encephalon was able to do any damage, Brute had an ingenious idea. He took some water from the Island of Storms out of his pack and sprinkled some on his hand. Within a few seconds, he was ten times larger! He nearly killed the Encephalon with one blow! Colonel Blaster finished it off with a flick of his blades. Then he harvested the meat and decided to bring some back to town.
Alatsar was quite tipsy at this point. He wanted to put the Encephalon in a bottle but realized there was no physical way it could fit. Still, he tapped Humphrey's bottle (whom he had retrieved from Shanna) slyly. He still had a plan up his sleeve.
With the danger dealt with, the party sailed with Gretta to Acknyt. Once there, they immediately met with Oxlyn aboard his ship, The Artful Dodger.
"I'll pay you five hundred shins apiece if you keep my secret," he told them all, "I'm also very grateful for you getting rid of the ghost of my great-great-great... you get the point. Me granny. May she rest in peace."
Alatsar had stuck granny's bottle in a cannon and shot her off to the horizon on the way back. No one had minded. Gretta encouraged it. The tipsy explorer wasn't quite off the hook though.
"I understand you stole some of my treasure," Oxlyn informed Alatsar. "You'll be in the brig for two days."
As Alatsar argued laborously, Oxlyn's patience grew thin.
"Three days."
Alatsar agreed, though he realized he could break through the iron bars easily.
In three days, the party would leave for the Slavering Falls. They had no idea yet that the fog layer around the archipelago had dissipated. Or that a sunken fortress had risen up from the center of the island.
But they would soon find out. As would the entire archipelago.

Report Date

22 Mar 2021