Rowan meanwhile was mourning the death of Winter and after giving his due respects, called the party to join him in a Ceremony where he would pass his pet and companion’s essence on to the after life. He called to his goddess and prayed: “Goddess Demeter, please grant my companion Winter a safe swift journey to the Elysium. I hope she knows that for the short time I knew her, she was a great friend, fighter, and she will be missed and remembered. Please allow her to rest in peace.” The group all felt a pull of the heartstrings and Winter was left here for now, the druid comfortable that his remains would be undisturbed at this time.
The final call was made and we were going to head north and check out the bugbear area. It was already 3:30 PM and we figured we had a few hours tops to finish our exploration before needing to rest. The room beyond the north hall was maybe 40’ square, but set at a 45 degree angle to the hall, giving it a diamond appearance to us. A number of “nests” had been set up for the bugbears of old clothes, bedding, and carpets.
The place smelled.
We did find a terrier, badly hurt and muzzled. It responded poorly to the group except for Rowan and Aredhel who cleaned its wounds and calmed the dog down, eventually feeding it some of the Sorceress’ cheese. It also adopted the name “Cheddar” because of that.
But there were also odd bits of furnishings in here – two biggest interesting items were the top part of a grand desk, and a set of alchemist drawers. We split up and looked around, but it was a bag of dice in the desk that interested us. Albert got a faint “charge” from them and some exploratory rolling the 6 dice that had him get a feel for them. It was when he noted that one of them was missing that he gave them another toss and…WHAM – disappeared with a decently high roll.
W.T.F.!?!?!?!
The party ran over there, concerned and worried, calling out and Aredhel was getting very mad when someone nudged them…and Albert reappeared! To him, he felt a faint disjointing and hiccup, to everyone else he was gone at least 30 seconds. Also, the missing dice was now in the bag. Along with another. Pestle wanted us to stop messing with it and Ophelia and Albert wanted to experiment. It was the cleric taking a quick grab and drop that had HER disappear next.
This time the party did not nudge the dice, wanting to wait maybe 5 minutes or so to see if she came back on her own. To Ophelia though, she reappeared in the same room – except her friends and companions all seemed off. Like too calm. And focused. And the dog, Cheddar, was staring at Opehlia with a determination that unnerved the Cleric. They wanted her to relax and come with them. Time to leave this room. Let’s go. Opehlia was really weirded out and then the group touched the dice and she snapped back to our area.
Alright. Sort of. Opehali was traumatized and took time explaining what happened. This had us want to go there more now and face these “others”. The thought was that if Albert could investigate a bit, we might be able to learn if this had anything to do with where the demonic entities might come from.
The dice took many iterations of rolling until we got a number high enough – high enough to bring Rowan, Albert…and Pestle through!
They wanted us to stay and grew angry with us when we were making noises to leave. Eventually a sleep spell was hit on the group and the party fell asleep – but back in our world, we touched the dice and brought them back.
Ok, not enough time to know what’s what. Albert wanted 2 solid minutes there. We were unsure how it was going to work out, and Pestle and Albert were having problems relating our Aredhel with the “other” Aredhel who was much more decisive, brutal, and unforgiving. So Rowan and Albert and Aredhel went through the machinations of rolling dice again – and eventually they snapped over.
And combat ensued. Rowan was charmed by the dog Cheddar, Pestle fried Aredhel with a magic missile, killing her, and Elmo was going to beat the hell out of Albert. Rowan had a few of the dice he brought taken and it was getting hairy when we snapped back again to our world and quickly had to get Aredhel back to positive hit points. That’s it, no more investigating.
We suspected that if dice were brought to THAT side (as they were looking for), they could try to portal someone to this side of the plane. Their attitude would be diametrically opposite to how they already were. Pestle suspected the Terjon in Hommlet might be a doppelganger from the “upside down” place. Possible? Getting someone out of the room meant to Albert that the dice maybe had a limited range -30’ radius. And going that distance or more would have you most likely stuck there and unable to swap back.
We went upstairs, it was already 4:30, not wanting to risk encountering anyone else. We made our way back to the original Black Chamber and were going to make camp. Rowan took Winter’s body outside and buried the spider there, marking it subtly and making sure that he would still be left to rest.
After sleeping and waking up, we went through our stores and realized that we were very very low on food. The thought was to return to Hommlet, report to Auva only again, find some aloe and drop them with Jaroo, buy some food and them get out of town within the hour to again avoid encountering anyone that might question what we were doing or risk learning that we were getting closer to some sort of realization of what was going on at the moathouse and some citizenry here.
So we trekked back, Rowan and Ophelia getting lucky and finding 3 decent aloe plants along the way, arriving back at long last on Restmonth the 9th, about 11:30 AM.
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