Ariza checks the doors in the room. The central door is warmer to the touch than the others. Rhun wonders if the room with the symbols might suggest more information. He has a hunch that the doors may lead to other planes. Liadan dons the glasses and looks at the symbols: they glow a little more vividly, but nothing stands out. Looking back in the current room where the statues fell, she sees nothing unusual.
Ariza checks her ring of fire resistance and feels the handle on the warmer door. She opens the door and steps back. “Remember to stop drop and roll!”, says R’eme. “That’s good avice!” calls Habistaw.
R’eme wraps some rope around Ariza for reassurance, and Fedor holds it. Liadan feels poorly from the last battle, and Ariza hands her a potion of cure moderate wounds. R’eme readies his gun. Ariza carefully opens the door.
The room opens onto a chamber with a large door on the opposite wall. Engraved on it are the three large symbols seen on the floor of the symbol room. The room is very warm, and very strong alteration magic emanates from the door.
Ariza says, “Habistaw, what do you think of this?” Habistaw looks at it and says, “I didn’t expect that!” He’s impressed … “Good masonry here.”
Liadan looks at the door with her glasses. The lower phi, the central delta, and the upper pi glow a little stronger than the other symbols. Ariza checks for traps with the door… something is clearly wrong with it — maybe a firetrap that went wrong? But she’s not sure … Liadan feels that this is probably not an entrance to the plane of fire … it just can’t be hot enough. But something is amiss. Ariza doesn’t feel she can disable it.
Rhun considers walking across the room on the symbols that Liadan saw … Ariza suggests she’d be better to do it. She crosses back and then crosses back, stepping on the three symbols. Nothing happens and Liadan sees no change.
We return to the statue room, and enter the door to the east. We find a laboratory – many beakers, test tubes, and arcane equipment. Ariza sees a fine layer of dust on everything and no traps. Liadan and Ariza step into the room and look around. R’eme looks around as well – he finds chunks of silver, lead, and steel — not much, but enough to refine for some of his bullet making. Liadan sees that it’s an all-purpose lab. There’s a little smithy, a bit of jewelry making tools, and so forth. There are no books.
To the south Ariza sees a corridor leading to another chamber. She stealthily explores and finds a storage room with vellum and other supplies – and four enormous crystals – each about three feet tall. Rhun gathers some vellum and looks for magic, finding none. We call Habistaw in — “wow! look at that!” Rhun examines the crystals and notes that they are far too large to be from this plane, but might be from the elemental plane of earth. Liadan finds no other interesting items, no books.
Heading back to the statue room, we head to the western door. Opening the door, Ariza finds a master bedroom suite with a fine layer of dust on all. There’s a bed, table, a chest of drawers, and rugs. R’eme finds that the bed is sized for a halfling or a gnome. Looking further we discover fine crystalware on a table and bottles of wine. R’eme finds the vintages are good. Appraising the wine, he finds the bottles would go for 10gp each — he pockets a bottle. The empty decanter and four crystal glasses are worth about 50gp total.
Ariza, pushes past R’eme looking for more useful things. She finds that the top drawer in the bureau is locked. She picks the lock, opening it with a click. Liadan checks for magic and looks at the bureau with glasses but finds nothing. R’eme jumps on the bed (after looking under it and finding nothing).
Ariza opens the drawer. In a fine little display case, she finds four potions: cure serious wounds, potion of restoration (lesser), and two potions of remove exhaustion – an unusual potion unfamiliar to both the wizard and cleric.
A passage leads around to more storage. There are dried goods (though all the food has gone by), pots, torches, salt. Ariza and R’eme each gather some salt. R’eme plans salt shot.
We return to the warm room with the symbol-covered door. Meriliel and Habistaw are having a discussion about the door. Habistaw: “You just have to press the buttons in the right order.” Meriliel: “You’re a jackass, you don’t know anything!” The room is large – the ceilings are higher than other rooms (except the statue room which also has a high ceiling).
Liadan approaches the door. She asks Habistaw, “Any final thoughts?” They agree that the symbols need to be activated in some sort of order. He and Meriliel have not touched them. After some discussion, Liadan decides to try the letters in alphabetical order. Ariza says she’d just start pushing them if she could reach them. Liadan tries touching them with her staff and her mage hand and nothing happens. She touches them with her hand instead. Delta – Phi – Pi. Nothing happens. She then touches the Phi first – and it lights up through her glasses. She touches the Delta – it lights up …. and she touches Delta — and it lights up! The door pops and SLAMS OPEN.
Liadan is knocked back ten feet and falls prone. Out bursts a large, angry creature of fire!
BATTLE
The creature attacks Rhun and smashes him back, lighting him on fire. Rhun screams in pain dropping to one knee. Liadan, now on the floor, sees that this is a fire elemental – living flame. R’eme runs to Liadan to try and help her get back up. He guards her, preparing covering fire. Ariza throws a vial of liquid ice at it with all her might but the vial only splashes nearby, angering the monster.
Liadan rises from the ground, and Rem’e shoots at the creature to cover Liadan’s rise. It’s impossible to tell if the creature was distracted or hurt by the shot. Liadan pours a magic missile into the creature, searing raw magic into it. Rhun drops and rolls to the wall, managing to extinguish the fire.
Moriliel conjures a lemur that rises from the floor to do battle with the creature, and Habistaw channels some magic missiles into it.
The creature draws a flaming sword and strikes a powerful blow against Ariza. She bursts into flame, but it does no harm to her thanks to the ring. R’eme adminsters a healing potion to Rhun helping him immensely. Ariza throws another ice vial at the monster but misses again! Liadan channels more magic missiles into the beast. Rhun stands and channels healing energy. Habistaw throws more magic missiles, and Moriliel begins to sing, raising our confidence in the hopes that we strike true. Fedor pushes his way forward to strike the beast, catching on fire along the way, and strikes the creature hard.
The elemental hits Rhun again, damaging him but Rhun avoids catching on fire. R’eme shoots, and Ariza throws her liquid ice again, and Liadan casts force missile; Rhun channels again. Fedor stops, drops, and rolls but unfortunately remains on fire. The lemur attacks and hits – but it’s hard to tell if it has any effect.
The creature strikes at R’eme but misses. It also smites the lemur which breaks in two and vanishes.
R’eme shoots the creature … and if it’s possible, the elemental’s flames seem to grow dimmer. Ariza throws ice and hits …barely; Liadan strikes but misses; Rhun runs to help Fedor, but gets struck by the creature and lights on fire again! Magic missiles pour from (we assume) Habistaw and at last the creature dissipates.
Fedor manages to put himself out; Rhun burns – putting him out is hard, but after several tries, he manages to resist passing out with a final channel and then is extinguished with all the help of the party. Moriliel cures Fedor and then asks Rhun if she can heal him. He nods … and she cures him completely with a flash of powerful magic. Rhun looks at her in amazement and thanks her.
We return to the bedchamber and take a long rest. Ariza drinks the potion of lesser restoration. In the morning, Rhun prays and attempts to restore Ariza further. We discuss what the door holds behind it. The party saw only a barren landscape. We wonder if Sherine might not in fact be dead; we also wonder if there are other combinations to the portal.
We head back to the portal door. Liadan sees the same three symbols lit up. We decide to touch the same symbols, and the door opens. In front of us is a rocky, flat landscape reaching as far as the eye can see. In the distance there are some stony hills and there is a dim, sunset glow off to the left, perhaps beyond what might be mountains far, far away. The sky seems to be a strange shifting, swirling mass of patterns. Rhun looks up and is reminded of the bubble metaphor from Paso Lao, and recognizes what must be the astral plane occasionally shifting and moving with what must be only rock. We are inside the bubble. It is big.
We spy no tracks or trails on the ground before us, only generally rocky terrain. Looking at the door from the other side, we see a flat wall of stone. Around us there are no animals, birds, bugs … it’s entirely barren.
We head back to the bedroom to rest so that Rhun can gather spells more conducive to traveling in this strange world, such as status and create water. The following day, we walk through the portal, leaving Habistaw, Fedor, and Moriliel behind to the guard the door.
We head toward the closest landmark we see: the hills straight ahead. R’eme loads his musket. It takes us about 20 minutes to get to the hills which are about a mile away. Liadan looks through her glasses but sees nothing unusual. We climb up the hill to higher ground. Off in the distance we see what might be a body of water.
Ariza hears a small scuttling sounds; looking down and away we see scorpion-looking creatures the size of german shepherds. One of them looks up at us. We stay still and unthreatening and look at them. Rhun recognizes the creatures as crysmals … something he’s read of but doesn’t know much about. Three of them dot the landscape before us. Liadan knows they primarily reproduce by collecting gems and assembling them into baby crysmals. From this distance we cannot see how many gems the creatures contain, however.
We leave the creatures alone and head towards the water. R’eme makes a trail of little bits of bread as we go.
After a two hour walk, we approach the large body of water – perhaps a large lake – that reaches to the horizon. Judging by how far we’ve walked, we see a couple of miles of shore reaching out to each side. Also out in front of us, where the water meets the shore, there’s a marsh where weeds a growing. Ariza sees no signs of wildlife. The water in the distance is fairly serene – some small waves, but it’s not choppy.
We seek out the least marshy part of the water which is off to our right, and we head closer to the water. Ariza considers collecting a sample of water. Rhun looks at the water for evidence of elemental activity or other planer information. If there are water elementals, he knows they would be really difficult to see. R’eme looks at the geography but can’t glean much. Nor can Liadan.
Ariza takes a sample of the water. The water is pure – the purest water we’ve seen; purer than a spring. The plants are simple – no flowering plants.
We go around the marsh and head toward the mountains. As we approach, off to the right, perhaps a half-mile away, we see a pale whitish glow in a couple of places. We walk toward the lights. As we get closer, we see that the light is emanating from a large crystal sitting on an iron tripod, similar to those we saw in the laboratory. In the distance is another crystal sits on another tripod. Beyond that, a dot in the distance, we see what might be a house.
We walk toward the house, and as we get closer we see that it is actually a tower. Trees dot the landscape and even grass, gardens, and attractive landscaping surrounds the tower. As we approach, a female halfling steps forward from the tower.
R’eme says “hail and well met” in halfling dialect. She replies in some amazement, “hail and well met… who the hell are you???” “You wouldn’t happen to be Sherine?” “I would indeed.” R’eme says to the rest of us in common, “guess who this is?”
Ariza tells Sherine about our work with her nephew and about the glasses. Liadan says, “uh well, I was using them…”. Sherine says she’s been here a while, and R’eme reaches out with the bottle of wine and says, “I brought you this; I suppose you’d be missing it?” She says, “Hey, that’s my wine!”
Ariza asks “do you want to leave with us? we have the door open”. Sherine says, “I’m not sure I can leave – I have work to do here.” R’eme introduces us all formally. She introduces herself as Sherine Blueheart, “and this is bowser…” – and a large stone golem rises from the ground.
As Sherine walks closer, we can see she’s somewhat old. She approaches Liadan, and says, “Let me see the glasses. Hm. Those are mine. Where did you get those?” Liadan says, “From your nephew, Lanadac.” “Well, you can keep them. Why did you help my nephew?” We explain what we did. She says she’s never had guests here, and since we helped her nephew, she invites us in. Liadan and Rhun speak of how we’ve specifically sought her out, concerned for her well-being. She noticeably relaxes, with kind words for followers of Sarenrae as we walk towards Sherine’s tower for tea.