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.