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.