Chapter 19: Beetles are from the devil

General Summary

After the great gollum fight, we sent Alfred, in Snake's body, forward through the tunnel in the corner of the room that had been dug out of the room. Alfred and I were small enough to walk through it, but Snake, in Alfred's body, and Hemlock were too tall, so they started crawling through behind us and then the gnome reappeared and was very confused why we were crawling through a tunnel.
The new room was covered in moss and had a floating ball of water, we could see fish swimming in the middle of it. Alfred ran forward and grabbed a fish from the floor to eat, rather messily. However, the noise from his snack was quickly hidden by the noise of the stick that broke under my foot.
I wouldn't have thought with all the moss there would be any sticks that would so noisily break, but there it was. As the loud crack died away beetles came out of the floor and attacked us. 
Hemlock, Alfred, and I were all attacked by swarms of beetles. Some are large, and some were small with numbers on their side. I cried out in pain as Hemlock shouted he needed room. I heard Snake shouting in the tunnel behind me to Clank yelled back at him asking why he should move.
Meanwhile, the beetles continued to attack me. I threw a bomb at them, Alfred tried to hit the swarm of them, but his daggers were ineffective against them. The beetles overwhelmed me and I went down.
I woke up hearing the sound of Hemlock shouting a healing spell. I staggered up and threw a bomb at the swarm attacking him. Clank came around the corner and cast a thunder spell hitting the swarm and Hemlock who was a giant snake.
I yelled back at him, "The snake is Hemlock, he's on our side."
I don't know if the gnome heard me, but Alfred hurried over and hit the large beetle. I threw another bomb at the swarm, but it exploded in midair. Hemlock hit it and did damage to the swarm, destroying the final beetles.
"I recommend we go find a location where we can safely rest," I said. "We're all in pretty terrible shape. Let's find a room we can hole up in for a little bit then continue searching."
We headed back towards the direction of the stables but instead headed down the hallway towards a sealed room. Alfred examined the door and shouted back at us, "There's some kind of ward on it." I pushed my way through and examined the door, and found the stray bit of magic to disarm it. Then Alfred finished picking the lock and we went in.

A short rest

We rested in the room, but slowly the air got thinner and harder to breathe, but finally we, and by we, I mean I, did not feel like I was about to die. We pulled the door open, and started to explore the room. The sarcophagi held a cleric in chainmail. The chainmail appears to be fairly normal, but the Warhammer was magical. Alfred picked it up and broke one of the jars with the hammer to "see what would happen."
You know what happened? The entire room smelled like perfume and a lot of very expensive perfume was wasted.  At this point I specifically said, "I'm backing out before you examine anything else. Snake did as well.
Clank opened a jar and something burst out, picking him up and throwing him at Alfred and Hemlock.
Snake threw his hammer into the room and ran further back. Hemlock teleported away. I peeked around Snake's shoulder and threw a ray of frost spell at the air elemental, but it did very little damage.
Not to self, do not use cold damage on air elementals, they are probably mostly immune to it.
Clank disappeared and the air elemental did a bunch of damage to Alfred.  Snake ran in and hit the elemental as Alfred tried to hit it but missed. Hemlock healed himself and I threw another spell at the elemental, that did significantly more damage.
Clank reappeared and hit the elemental again, then disappeared again. Snake hit the elemental and Hemlock threw another spell again, and the air elemental dissipated.
Hemlock healed everyone as we were all rather in sad shape, and this was no place to safely heal.

In search of a place to sleep for the night

"So, why don't we just go back upstairs and leave this place?" Clank asked.
"We need to fix a problem, did you meet a strange person near a river? Have you recently changed bodies?" Alfred asked.
"Well, I do have this voice in my head that won't shut up sometimes, that's kind of annoying," Clank answered. "Do you know how to get rid of voices in your head?"
We snuck across the moss-covered floor, there were a few moments when we saw the moss stir slightly, but the beetles did not come back.
On the other side of the moss-room is a small room with a fountain of clear bubbling water. In the bottom of it lay a large bronze fishhook. Snake fished it out, and the dwarven carvings on it made him long for his former dwarven life and he attempted to convince anyone to carry it. No one particularly had the strength or inclination to do so, so he carried it along.
The room exited into a cross-passage, to our right was a room with a door sealed with silver and covered in scary faces. I disarmed the ward on the door and snake picked the lock. The room held three sarcophagi with silver coverings and demonic looking faces on top of them, I convinced everyone we probably wanted to leave that room alone until we had a chance to rest and recover health and energy for spells.
The room down the other hallway had been forced open from the outside. The coffin in the middle with a bronze lid held a much rusted suit of armor, a skull, a pelvis bone, and some random bones. The tin coffin on the left was nailed shut with silver nails, and the copper coffin on the right had a nautical theme on top of it.
"We should probably leave the scary coffin alone, any coffin that needs to be nailed shut is all sorts of scary," I said. However Clankey Clank decided this was the coffin he wanted to get into. Inside of it, the entire coffin was covered in holy symbols, garlic, and was filled with salt. Inside of it lay a dwarven cleric, her body ridiculously well-preserved.
My mind flashed back to the undead we had fought, and I start panicking and call for everyone to just close the coffin, let's leave it alone before that thing comes back to life.
"Wait," Alfred said, "We can stake it," and he started sharpening one of his torches into a stake.
"Oh, we can drop a couple of my holy bombs in there," I said. And as I start putting together some bombs, Alfred has finished sharpening his stake and he's using the hammer from the last room to pound that stake through her dead body!
And she never moves. She never wakes up. Once the stake is through her body, Snake peeled her mouth open to reveal perfectly normal teeth, and Clank looks for any sign of vampire bites, and there are none.
"Guys," Snake said, "This coffin should be deeper than it is," he poked around in the box and found a hidden compartment. He pulled out a wand, a magic crossbow, and a magical belt. We returned the body to the coffin, and nailed it shut again.
Meanwhile, we opened the copper coffin and found a suit of magical scalemail that did not mess with his stealth and gave him the ability to swim.
"I think, since the vampire coffin wasn't scary, we could probably safely check out those demon coffins," Snake said.
I'm not sure I agree with him, but given how everything else has gone, he might be correct.
I suggested leaving the

Report Date

24 Feb 2024