diary

[cellio]

September 22 (Sunday)

Last night another slime monster came out of the hole. Good thing we were keeping a watch.

Today we went back in and were attacked by "slime weasels" -- giant ones, like the one that attacked us in Duvik's Pass. One of them sunk its jaws (or whatever passes for jaws) into Kyle and hurt him pretty badly. While we were fighting, Prolix started to talk to them. I had no idea he could do that. He managed to persuade one of them (he called it "Wilberforce") to go away, but the one that attacked Kyle wouldn't stop so we had to kill it. He also asked Wilberforce how they got turned into slime, and (according to Prolix) they were ordinary giant weasels until they drank from a stream farther into these caves.

So we headed in the direction we thought the stream was in, and we met more of the slime-men. One of them had two heads. I burned away a lot of the slime with a couple of those balls of fire, and Turok and the others also did damage. We were pretty worn out after that, though, so we headed back to the tavern before finding the stream.

Yesterday when we fought that spider we found a body (well, skeleton) in the web afterwards. It was a rat-kin, and it was carrying a scroll case. Tobin said the mark on the case was their tribal symbol, so after we cleaned up from fighting the slime-men, Tobin and Liandra and I went to find the rat queen. It's her property and not ours, after all. Not that this was an easy decision; Prolix was adamant that we found it and it's ours now. I feared that this would come to blows. Fortunately, I had some missiles left if it came to that.

Liandra did most of the talking, and Tobin acted as a translator. It seemed like Tobin and the rat-queen spent a lot more time talking than what their translated words would imply. I guess the rat-kin language is pretty verbose. No wonder Brion has been having trouble with it. He says the ancient language of Pelor is terse by comparison to ours, and here we have something that ours is terse compared to. Well, either that or Tobin and the queen were having a conversation of their own...

The rat queen said this is her scroll, but she agreed to let Prolix borrow it to copy the spells on it. Turok thinks that the rat-kin raided someone and stole the scroll, and the slime-men are a result of that. This does make some amount of sense, though it would make more sense if we'd ever seen a sentient, let alone literate, slime-man. Maybe the slime-men are somebody's servants. (Gee, I want to conjure up servants out of thin air, which is much tidier. I wonder if I can.)

We asked the rat queen about the slime-men. She said that they showed up a few at a time, and if they killed one the next day they'd get two more. They didn't really know how to fight them, which is why they ran away. The attacks started the day they moved to these caves. She didn't say where they moved from.

Prolix and I have been doing some more experiments with the flare-stone the rat queen gave us. (Ironically, he wanted to return it to her and the rest of us said no.) We knew that it enhances a flare and that light cast on it causes it to shine very bright. It also glows very bright if we place the torch of Pelor next to it. What we didn't know before is that dancing lights cause it to go wild and that it increases the distance on a color spray a bit. Neat.

Prolix has been experimenting with the slime and the hard cores again. We now know that slime makes more slime but the cores alone do not. We think the cores are either by-products of the sliming process or eggs. Which doesn't tell us how to make it stop.

I'm really getting sick of slime. So is Hrolf, who has had to be very careful in his hunting the last few days. I don't want him to even touch this stuff, let alone eat it! He seems to agree; he hasn't asked me to let him zap them at all, and at other times he's been eager to help in that way.

He's also been continuing to teach me about how flying works, which would be handy to know (not just for the bat puppets). It might be easier if I could actually grow wings and fly with him. Prolix has been trying this and is pretty awkward about it, but he doesn't have a teacher.

diary

[cellio]

September 23 (Monday)

This is very, very wrong. The world is warped in some way -- something is moving bits of it around, or something like that. It's not just that the gnome is insane. (Are all gnomes crazy, I wonder?)

Maybe I can make this make more sense if I try to write it down in order. Or maybe not, but I have time so I'll give it a try.

We went back in today. (There was another attacker last night, but Turok killed it.) We found more slime-men (some giants), and more of them were mutated in various ways -- extra arms or legs, extra heads, etc. Some of these had cores that seemed to be two lumps stuck together. I think I understand how the slime-men reproduce now; they split off more slime-men. We knew then that we were going to have to kill all of them; if we miss even one it will just start a new colony or something. And we had to find that stream.

We fought a bunch of these in a large room with lots of exits, and while we were recovering we saw a large mass of slime slithering down one of those corridors toward us. I attacked it with flame balls and those seemed to do a lot of damage, but it still made it into the room. Turok hit it with his sword and it split into two slimes. Oops. Eventually we killed them.

Another of the corridors led to a huge pool of slime. Every now and then it made a "glug" noise, and we saw shapes moving in the pool. Incipient slime monsters, I think. Great. Just what I needed to brighten my day. At least I didn't eat before we went in, thank Pelor. It was really, really disgusting. We tried to destroy it, first by burning it with magic fire and then later by getting every barrel of oil we could find in Jehan's tavern and pouring that on and lighting it. All of this made an awful stench and the cavern itself seemed to scream, but we were only making small dents in it. How could the gnome have not heard or smelled this?

There were still some passages we hadn't explored, so we decided to investigate while we thought about how to destroy the pool of slime. And that's how we found the crazy gnome who caused all this trouble in the first place.

It sounds like the party is getting out of hand downstairs. I'm hearing a lot of breaking glass and off-key singing. (I think gnomes, like the short whistles we sometimes use -- Toby called them garklines -- must be automatically out of tune with each other.) I should go investigate and continue this later. It's getting a little hard to concentrate anyway.

diary

[cellio]

September 24 (Tuesday)

That was some party. Turok and Kyle were really, really drunk. Yes, the wine was very very good, but that doesn't mean you have to guzzle. Oh well. I'm glad that Liandra and I didn't drink very much, at least. That gave us four to keep watch, if you count Hrolf and Slade which of course I do. And there were no monsters, for once. I guess Prolix wasn't too drunk either, though it was kind of hard to tell. Where was I? Crazy gnomes -- right.

We explored one of the passages from that large room, and very suddenly the construction changed. These had been (apparently) natural tunnels and caves up to this point, and suddenly the corridor changed to planned construction -- stone blocks and mortar, squared off, level floor, and everything. Like that one set of rooms back in the rat-kin space that was different from everything else. And after a few feet, the corridor ended. But there was a wooden panel. No handle or hinges, but obviously there was something behind it. Something with lots of magic, according to our wand.

We tried to open the "door" and we heard some mumbling from the other side. A spellcaster, specifically. As the "door" moved aside noisily (so much for stealth), Turok shouted that we meant no harm. We were apparently standing in the back of a closet; there was another (open) door a couple feet in front of us, and truly massive quantities of junk that came tumbling out at us.

We caught a glimpse of the spellcaster, and it was a gnome. So Prolix started talking to him, sometimes in a language we could understand and sometimes not. The other gnome turned invisible, but Prolix followed him anyway. He was trying to haggle for spells! Here we are in the middle of slime central and Prolix wants to trade spells with this guy. Not only that, but he criticized the other gnome's lab. Yeah, it was sloppy, but you don't irritate the guy you're trying to negotiate with. I thought everyone knew that. So eventually Nithelin (as we later learned his name to be) tried to slip away while invisible, but Liandra tackled him and Prolix charmed him.

Nithelin is a lunatic. He might be a brilliant lunatic; I can't tell. He's been doing spell research, particularly transmutation, and he has found ways to "enlarge" things. So he took some cheese and made more cheese from it. He made the rat-kin; they were ordinary rats until he started tampering with them. And he made the slime, though he didn't mean to (and didn't believe he had, but we showed it to him and I think he realizes his error now).

He did a lot of raving about how no one appreciates his brilliance. He also kept talking about the "great upheaval". Apparently, he had been secluded in a tower doing research, and some priests would leave food and supplies for him every day and he never went out, but then the deliveries stopped. We pointed out to him that he is not in a tower; he's under ground. Eventually he showed us around his living quarters a bit, and outside his front door there is a bit of corridor (like where we came in) and then it just ends in a wall of rock. The whole area of man-made construction forms a circle. A circle that doesn't belong here, and that must have been magically moved. The "upheaval" he talked about wasn't an earthquake like he thought; it was the physical transportation of him and his surroundings to this hunk of underground. What the heck caused that? And has it happened more than once? It sure looks like it's happened twice just in Shepford, and if dragons have suddenly appeared in Stross then maybe it happened there.

I don't know if Nithelin caused all of that or he just got caught up in it, but if we can manage it Prolix and I should scour his library to try to understand what he's been working on, just in case. Meanwhile, I understand now why the rat-kin have been so vague about some things; they were "born" in Nithelin's lab and escaped. (Looting some of his stuff -- we recognized the mark on that scroll case on other items in his lab.) They don't really have a history, and they probably had never seen daylight at all until we encountered them. This will surely have theological implications for Brion.

So anyway, we took Nithelin on a not-entirely-cooperative tour of the slime-infested areas. He doesn't know how to counteract the slime pond; he never got that far in his research. He became a little more cooperative after that, though, and joined us when we returned to the tavern. And he had some magic crackers that he somehow used to turn Jehan's wine into very good wine.

We offered to take Nithelin to Covanion, where he could do much better research (more wizards, supplies, etc) than he can do here. He seemed agreeable, but last night he tried to sneak out. (Turok and Slade slept in front of his door, so they stopped him.) I don't really care if he goes to Covanion or somewhere else, so long as he goes far away from Shepford. He's caused quite enough damage here already.

September 24, addendum

This afternoon we went back in to try to clean up more of the slime pool. (No more creatures, fortunately.) While we were looking at it Liandra said it looked like a wound, and that led to someone suggesting that we heal it rather than burning away at it. (We've already cauterized it, I guess.) That sounded like kind of a goofy idea, but it actually worked! That's really weird. We'll need to spend another day or two doing this; we ran out of spells before we ran out of slime. But there's a lot less of it than there was.

We had a lot of free time today (no more monsters, ran out of healing), so I've been practicing magic again. Brion and I talked a few days ago about being able to conjure up servants, and I find I can now do it, sort of. They're stupid and not very strong, and I have to supervise them at least somewhat, but I can do it. I set one to cleaning up the tavern's main room after the mess the party made last night. I couldn't teach it to cook, though.

And I think I know how to grow wings -- and other things too; I found myself growing a tail without really trying, earlier. Hrolf is excited about this; I think he imagines that this is the first step toward teaching me to hunt for my dinner.