>>18164806

The doors also held their own enchantments, different though, and focused more toward resiliency- egress through these parts was obviously not expected and after an experimental rock-to-mud on the surface of one you could see why; as per your earlier suspicions there was a layer of steel beneath, probably a foot or more thick, strong enough that would stop you even if you reverted to your full and glorious form. Consequently, you held out little hope for burrowing through the rest of the area, as even trusting that it would be easier it would probably be all the more obvious to those inside that they were being invaded than if you simply strolled through the front door...and probably more insulting too.

Looking up, you note the return of a number of things to your possession- the small magic eyes you’d sent out to map the area for you an hour ago, just before birding-up. Morphing back to your human guise you extend your hand and accept them into you, filtering through their information...

...More nothing, aside from yet MORE monsters that, this time, were still alive. A couple more scorpions, a Rust Monster hiding beneath some rocky shade...all well off the beaten path, and likely spared because of it. They might even be indigenous.

Tch. Leaning back and casting your gaze skyward you ponder your problem more carefully, fixing your intellect onto it. Come on, no defence was impregnable, there had to be some way past it...even if you only had your wits and a few spells available to you. There was something you were missing- you could feel it.

Baha’s equipment? No, nothing there could help get through several feet of steel. You can’t poison metal.

...Metal!

>>18164822

Jerking up straight, you spring off the rock and jump over the cliffside, slow-falling the last few feet right next to the ranger, who’d remained stood by the entrance way for the last hour or so, staring immovably at the tracks. Your sudden presence next to her doesn’t seem to phase her concentration.

“I might have something. What kind of poisons do you have? Paralysing?”

“Yes, a couple variations, and some more...plainly lethal,” She nods, seemingly only half-listening, “...The tracks are easier to follow here, where the ground’s firmer.”

“Lovely. Will any of those work on, say...a Rust Monster?”

“Probably this one,” She murmurs, hooking a small vial from her belt and holding it well away from herself for you, “...Two sets, almost directly over each other. One going into the Hold, one coming out. Couple of days old at worst...trackable. Almost missed it, but the groove here is deeper...whatever they took in was heavier than what they took out.”

Ah. Now you see why she’s been paused there all this time; she’s been wondering which way to go. Or waiting for you to succeed or fail on entry, to make the choice for her. Taking the vial of clear liquid you fiddle with it between your fingers, at least confident you wouldn’t be wasted either way...and wondering which seemed more promising...

****

I'm in favor of simply knocking.

Mind you, no reason not to be invisible and ready to teleport out while we do. But knocking seems reasonable. Far more so than getting a rust monster to eat their large and almost certainly very-expensive door.

Regardless of result, we get information from the activity, and can use that to decide on our next course of action.

Also a rock from a great enough hight (and a dispel if needed) should be able to breach the windows with our putting ourselves in danger.

Lets do this >>18164948 then try to crash open the windows.

Fuck rust monsters.

hell yeah rust monster that wall down!

I think it would be ill-advised to do so. If for some reason the dwarves are around and on the level, they will probably object to that, and I doubt we can recompense them at this point.

Slowly, Baha seemed to pull herself away from her musings and realized that you were actually there next to her, taking a small sidestep away and readjusting her cloak.

“So, um, find anything?”

“A couple of things, a couple of ways...I found out that the doors are locked and that there’s no-one peeping on us as near as I can tell. The entranceway is warded and stuff so a straight teleport isn’t going to be doing us any favours- not that it’s a smart thing to just teleport someplace that’s unsafe.”

“We might not have an option, maybe you can dispel...” She frowns, “But, um...sorry, carry on.”

“Ah don’t worry, I doubt I can teleport us b...right,” You sigh, deciding bringing up her squeamishness wouldn’t help the options, “Other than that, I’ve got a few of other schemes. One is elaborate and involves major property damage. The other is much simpler. We knock.”

She looks at you like you imagine your mother would, had you ever seen her in a human guise.

“You...want to knock. On the fortress door.”

You shrug in a ‘It’s better than digging’ kind of way, which seems to do a little less than appease her appreciation of the plan. However, after a few moments more incredulous staring she seems to fold, batting her eyes down and away, agitatedly running her fingers over the hem of her cloak again.

“Well okay, if you want. If you think it’s good. Sorry.”

Putting her odd behaviour out of mind for a moment, you turn back toward the giant gates and consider them, looking for some suitable mechanism to- ah, there, a handle by the side of it. It’s human-sized too...which you suppose makes sense, as Dwarves would likely have their own way of making themselves known to the Hold...and wouldn’t need to bloody knock. Perhaps this was installed for courteous invaders.

>>18165673

Grasping the handle and feeling a little tickled over the thought of gentlemanly wartribes, you give the knocker a couple of quick taps, translating to a couple of loud booms on the other side of the wall that resonate the dust in the air. On the other side you can hear a sharp, metallic screech, several in a row...but nothing seems to happen, and when the dust settles back down, the doors remain unopened.

Turning back to Baha, you’d offer her a ‘Well, at least we know the Dwarves can’t answer’, but she’s not even paying attention to you, instead looking severely at the door itself, trying to bore through it with her eyes. It would appear her mind was made up on which way to go.

“...Can you get in?” She asks sharply, an edge of desperation to it, “Dispel enough wards or whatever you need to teleport and open it on the other side? Maybe do your other plan? Dig?”

“Well maybe I could dispel enough, but a teleport would be risk-“

“We *need* to get in,” She insists, the ‘we’ sounding a lot like an ‘I’ before she takes the edge off herself, “Sorry, I uh...well...please? Can you get us in?”

****

>>18165762
Unpleasant, but we do need to get her in, as per contract.

But also keep her alive. Remind her not to go haring off without us, but yeah, let's levitate up to some window and break it. Then we can begin with infiltration.

Screeching sounds bad. I hope there aren't many of whatever is living here now.

Are you sure smashing the glass is the best idea? I know we might have already alerted whatever's in there with the knock, but we might alert even MORE people by smashing the glass.

Dragon Quest should not have so few replies.

>>18165800 raises an interesting point; what /was/ our contract?
I will say that we must investigate, if only for our own curiosity. Smash glass or dispelling + teleporting seems good.

>>18166042
I would like to get in there somehow. If you have a better way, feel free to offer it.

>>18166081
i think we both know what's to blame for that, not that im complaining or anything...

Elaborate Plan is a GO!

>>18166173
Who is to blame?

Remember to drop in to the IRC channel. Channel: #dragonquest; Server: IRCHighway.

“I’ll see what I can do.” You reason, turning back to the door and looking up.

The enchantment on the main door was hefty, and likely beyond your skill to negate. The ones on side-doors though were lesser, their makers probably happy with splitting them with the ones on the glass. So it seemed simple enough what you had to do, provided you could find the mechanism to open the door on the other side. However...it would mean leaving your charge outside for a span.

“You take care of yourself while I’m gone, alright?” You call out before morphing back into a bird to flap up to the closest one.

“I try...” You faintly hear in reply.

Unchanging at the top, you wonder at the wisdom over what you’re going to do...but then think what the hell and do it anyway, saving your dispels for the inner door and firing a concentrated burst of magical force at the glass just before your feet. The slightly green-tinted material seemed to fizz, the force cracking and grating fractures through the shell of the dome before, finally, the surface shattered inward with a deafening crash, shards dashing themselves on the balcony floor and rebounding, raining onto the ground just before Baha’s feet.

Jumping down with a little hop (and a satisfying crunch under your boots) you examine the inner door, trying to work out which enchantments to dispel from it. They all affected travel past it in one form or another, and there was no way for you to accurately gauge which did which...besides, you didn’t want to waste all of your mojo on just this one thing- there might be other magical traps or machines ahead you’d need to deactivate.

>>18166735

Looking down at your feet, you note a near-cylindrical shard of glass, thick and chunky, and give one end a tap, causing it to spin, assigning arbitrary dispels to the different points, you twirl it a couple of times this way before finally feeling satisfied and, with a quick prayer to Bahumut, focus on porting inside.

A sharp crack and you find yourself looking at a ceiling...then moving away from it some ten feet and onto the floor, landing hard on your back.

“Oof! Ow....ah.”

Well, what a success. You’re in. Looking to either side though, this wasn’t the other side of the door; instead some kind of mess hall within the complex. And messy it was, with chunks missing out of the walls and chairs over-turned...and what looked like small piles of coins just laying right in the middle of the floor spaces. What remained upright though was very nice, if sparse of people- and at least whatever happened you can see that it didn’t take anyone away mid-meal or drink...hough you imagine it would take a lot to get a Dwarf away from the latter anyway.

Well, this is wonderful. Even never having been in a Hold before, you find yourself in the one place where you’re very clear on where you are in relation to everything else:

Lost.

Now what?

>>18166783
Let's get Baha in, though ideally not tripping the same wards we ended up doing. She might not survive that, and certainly doesn't need to be subject to further beating.

Let us attempt to figure out what happened here. If we do manage to get Baha in here, make her invisible. We don't want people targeting her.

>>18164806

Might be a good idea to cast an invisibility at this point to cover ourselves since we don't know what the status is in here. Checking out the local area and the surroundings to establish where we are in the hold is next, so we can work on a way on bringing Baha into the fortress with us. At least we can "sanely" not expect traps in a mess hall, that's kinda counter productive to having a nice meal.

So why did the Dwarves see fit to leave piles of coins around their mess hall again?

>>18166974
It isn't a pile of coins, then. Something is obviously amiss here. Proceed with caution. Violence with extreme prejudice. (Baha and dwarves excepted.)

Quickly, before the noise of your landing could be investigated, you cast invisibility upon yourself, sheathing you away from sight and, hopefully, from those who would do you harm. Lying there for a few moments more, stock still and staring at the ceiling, it would seem that at least for the moment that precaution was unnecessary- there was no sight or sound of approach from anyone; your rather clumsy infiltration had, so far, succeeded.

Moving to a sitting position (oh you’d actually landed on a short table, how cushioning), you examine the room much more keenly, trying to place where you should go next alongside any dangers that might be present, as unlikely as it seemed. Hmm, three doors, a main one at front and left and right corridors; the main doors looking larger, and thus leading to more main passageways, of which the entranceway would be one...could be too obvious though, or loaded with enemies. The sides you couldn't offer a guess at beyond possibly one being a kitchen.

Shifting to get onto the floor you pause before touching a foot down, re-evaluating the main feast table that rests before you. You noted that they weren’t taken mid-meal due to how clean the plates were...but then why didn’t they put the plates away? And why did they leave such large sums money in a public area like this?

You look at the nearest one closely, judging it. Unmarked. Just solid, thin slices of gold resting together in a moderately sized pile. Remembering the trick that Baha used on the road over, you look around for something to throw at it on your own table, finding an empty tankard at hand. Giving it a quick upward ‘heft’ it lands perfectly, just on the other half of the pile facing away from you.

>>18167675

A pile which punched the cup off itself, rolled up into blob as if to deflect more, then rippled back down into a pile of coins, now rolling over each other to move toward where it thought the tankard came from.

You take in your reviewed situation with a new tightness to your lips. You were surrounded by metallic oozes. Three, now you’d shrugged that one off down the left corridor, and who knows how many others besides through the Hold. And you didn’t need Baha to tell you these weren’t exactly native, or that infestations like this just ‘happen’ to overwhelm homes and towns that have stood for millennia. Worse, your invisibility wasn’t going to help you. It was a miracle they didn’t swarm you straight from the landing- perhaps they were digesting, or simply trying to lie in wait to see if you were greedy enough to grab at them yourself. So you may have been already detected, and they were just waiting for you. Infact it seemed all too probable, with that ruckus- These weren’t impact absorbent tables afterall.

As it was now, only the rightmost corridor left a clear ‘run’ out of the area, though they’d doubtless pursue, and the main door required you to get past two of the three remaining...of course, you could always dragon up, but it would be a tight fit- this hall wasn’t worth the name, and certainly not a main one.

****

>>18167748
Is there a reason we can't just fly along the ceiling? I wouldn't have thought oozes could jump or anything. Or we could just run around, they don't seem to be particularly fast either.

Fly to the celling and breath weapon till the oozes are not a problem any more.

>>18167877

So far as I know, they can climb walls, which sucks for indoor levitating. Pretty sure we could outrun them though, I just hope none of the doors are locked so we don't get slowed down.

Do oozes eat each other, or just pile up into one BIG ooze?

>>18167748
Actually, is there a reason we can't just revert to dragonform? It seems we could totally lay the smack-down on oozes if we were a freakin' dragon. And if Baha is still stuck outside, she wouldn't see any of it.

>>18168076
Size, mainly. We could try, but WG made it clear that our size is rather mammoth, especially in comparison to the current hall.

>>18168115
Freakin' dwarves. Oh well.

The alternatives seem to be 'attempt to magically destroy everything' or 'run'. I vote 'run'. Please, Baha, take care of yourself.

>>18168268
Specifying 'Run down open corridor'.

>>18167748
I'd think we'd be able to outrun a couple of oozes. let me know if I'm wrong, but if we can, my suggestion is to run.

Whichever way you sliced it, there wasn’t much time for a decision to be made. Looking around the room, you try to size it up to your normal scale, whether it was better to make a run for it or risk a transformation- you’d be able to deal with them easily if you could bring your ice breath to bear, but equally it would be childsplay for one of them to leech onto you and start dissolving flesh away.

Before a proper, reasonable choice could be made, the nearest one forces your hand, rolling towards you and rearing up, nearly catching you roll off and it slams down, smashing the table in half. Thinking fast you grab one of the table legs to help heave it over, jumping up to elbow-slam the ooze between the two wedges of oak, jellied matter splattering everywhere even as the reflexive punch-back shoots you clear across the room along with the table, well over one of the other oozes and into the corner between the main and right corridors, a controlled tumble absorbing most of the impact before you hit the wall.

Glancing right you roll again as another ooze balloons up to engulf you; bringing your glaive to bear on it on standing you manage to slice a clean chunk out of it before it could regather all its overstretched mass. Being ooze though it didn’t care, and along with the others it continued to relentlessly flow toward you, wedging you between it and another one by the entrance to the rightmost corridor on your left.

>>18169181

“To hell with it!” You shout and blast the one nearest the exit with the most powerful ice spell you know before delivering a sweeping smash with the flat of your glaive as you pass by, dashing it to pieces as you punt the door down to the next room, throwing it shut behind you. Turning sharply you skid onto your hands and knees, hurriedly casting to mould the stone floors and walls up around the doorway so there’d be no hint of a gap for them to melt through in pursuance

A minute (and a little stabbing) later you rest against the side of the wall, breathing a sigh of relief. Thank goodness you studied up transmutation. Looking down the hallway, you see that it just gets dimmer and darker as you go down, the torches having burnt out to nothing...but with no dangers currently in sight. You feel a little pang of regret for not trying for the main door, as it likely would have led you down a hallway big enough for you- this...well, you’d need to lose the wings and you wouldn’t be able to turn around, but...well, maybe it’d work, if you really had to.

At a guess, you’d say this was just a long serving passage, leading out to other domestic areas along branches either side...a larder, maybe eventually a mushroom farm, given the slight damp you taste in the air. Likely not the way to any gate controls, but better than where you were previously given its lack of 'trying to immediately kill you'.

Chafing that you’d already used your stone-messing skills to both test the front door and stop from being killed, you straighten yourself up and decide how to go on, mentally checklisting what you had available, and quite thankful you’d brushed up on your evocation and conjuration too- you always knew those schools’d be handy in the world of adventure...

****

>>18169213
Invisibility again, and exploration. Ideally we can catch whoever is summoning all this bullshit with their metaphorical pants down.

Hmm. So, where do we want to head out of chaps? Provided we don't get accosted in the dark. Do we dragon up here or what?

It'd be nice to know our spells too, but I guess that'd be partially up to us anyway right?

>>18169213
We should probably find a way to let Baha in, before something bad happens to her. Or something bad happens to us, because she's not here to stop it.

>>18169375
I think we're roughly ~10th level in power, but I'd rather not pin down our abilities. The quest is too clunky for wizard-style preparation, and I feel that socerer-style set spell-listss would be limiting.

I don't think we can revert here, either. I vote for continuing onwards and exploring. Baha is at least somewhat competent, and ideally capable of remaining stealthy. We'll get back around to let her in and deal with oozes eventually.

I think that if we intend to continue our activities in humanoid form (which seems pretty reasonable,) we should come up with some sort of equipment list to allow us to deal with things without having to resort to 'dragon' at the drop of a hat.

Ideally, some manner of items that are reusable, so that we don't have to spend too much of our precious dragonhoards maintaining it.

Deciding to turn invisible again you advance forward down the corridor, keeping an eye out for an exit onto brighter roads. Every door you come across though has been sabotaged in some way, the stonework above it collapsed downwards to block exit. Whether this was done to limit exits or limit points of attack you can’t say, but you dislike the connotations of both. The ground here, too, bared more hallmarks of what must have actually happened out in the mess hall and beyond, stains on the floor marking what must have been battlewounds, but belonging to who or delivered from what you couldn’t say. Idly, you wonder if you should summon something to keep you company, or scout out the area ahead of you...but you wouldn’t want to reveal your presence in so obvious a manner.

Every now and then you pass by things under the arches of the corridor, but nothing that shed any more light on what had transpired- a table, a stool, some pools of water on the side. Your suspicions raised by the ‘coins’ earlier, you wished you could poke every item you come across with your glaive...but so far, it likely wasn’t worth the risk to check. That it would give you away in a place you couldn’t afford to.

This does not ease the sense that something is following you though. Or that something else is just ahead, waiting for you to reach the end of the corridor.

>>18170764

As it turns out though, that end would never come. One of the side-doors had not been collapsed down very well- only a minor bit of rubble along the bottom- enough to make opening the door feasible. More like ‘wrenching’ than opening, but not an insurmountable obstacle like the others. This may have been an oversight, you consider, or an intentional ploy to leave an alternate escape-route leading from the tunnel...but it was the same to you either way: An exit.

Pushing the rocks and beams out of the way, you slide your glaive down the side of the door edge and lever it, snapping it open just far enough to see what was out on the other side. Maybe a soldier barracks, or a shop leading to the main-street. It’s certainly on the right side of the tunnel for it to branch onto the...

...

...You take a step back and crouch, covering your mouth.

A dwarven abode was on the otherside. Belonged to an elderly couple by the look of it, with family heirlooms up high on the wall to keep out of idle, young hands. And there would have been many, from the toys and cradles around the area. What passed for dwarven playpens. What passed for a Dwarven nursery. Where parents working along the places of this tunnel would drop off their youngest in the care of an elder. A safe place.

With a pile of coins in the middle of it.


****

>>18170805
Well, shit.

Summon something to distract it; summoning won't break our invisibility, and we can keep running. We really need to find something to explain what the fuck happened here.

>>18170805
Leave. Quietly. Ideally our invisibility worked. If it didn't, we're pretty screwed.

Can we put down a ward, to see if we are being followed/what's following us?

>>18170805
>>18170764
Close the door behind us and keep moving the hell on. If anything, start praying for Bahamut to grant mercy to whoever did this for we will not.

WE CAN TAKE IT GUYS.

>>18171046
Fine, fine, try to take it, but keep an eye out. We probably ARE being followed, possibly by all those other oozes.

>>18171210
That's not at all encouraging. Retreat. Figure out where they are coming from.

Closing the door quietly, you rubble it over and speedily carry on, knowing the ooze only has a limited sense of perception and it wouldn’t pursue out of a certain range. After that, you decide of deploying a little ‘flak’ behind you, just so you can be to anything following, should they feel peckish or violent- a few beetles to tail you. Beyond this meagre effort you didn’t stir much or pay your surroundings any mind as you continued. The scene you’d witnessed had left you cold, and you continue to feel so until you reach the end of the corridor, with whatever feeling of ‘following’ that had dogged you being crushed under a weight of muted, but growing, indignation. You’d only glimpsed at a little of this place, and already you were getting angry.

Taking a chilled breath, you brace yourself and approached the main door at the end of the corridor. Or at least, you would, if there were one. Instead it was a dead end. Flat, smooth stone marking the end of the journey. For some reason that didn’t sit right with you (the aesthetic was off) so you probe a little more, passing your hand over it to...hmm.

Standing back, you re-judge. Ah, this was different. Magic’d barred the way here. Very cunningly done too, very cunning...you can barely notice it even now, and even then that might be because you disrupted it some with your own innate and active magic. Protective magic...some illusions. A spell type that’d be unusual for a dwarf, certainly- if it were them, most wouldn’t think to look for it.

Reaching forward again you dispel, and find the door actually six feet to your left- and with a tingly zap to it, at the touch. Some other kind of protection.

>>18172418

Looking down, you note you’ve also scuffed over some designs on the floor- a magic circle, which you’ve now marred. Put here, half in a doorway would make it defensive...so made by those who would *need* defence.

Finally.

Working faster you murmur to dispel the rest and swiftly step into the room, not caring to peep through a door crack beforehand. If there were enemies then you’d just blast them apart, but there was any chance of someone living, then you needed to......Frown. At the mass of books surrounding you. Which was odd, considering the location was definitely not a bookstore.

This was definitely a kitchen, and a large one at that, but the worktops had been instead been piled up with books. Not many, but enough to filled a few bookshelves worth. You can’t read dwarvern runes; you never had the patience to learn, but over the years one picks up a few things and you know that the near-uniform size and markings on the side correspond to dwarvern accountings of the years. So...history books?

Passing by another shelf, you...

...Finally notice the man collapsed in the chair.

>>18172418

*****

Aaaand we'll call it here tonight. Sorry I spent so long over this last one. As ever, put up what to do or your plans and we'll see what we can do for the next opener, which'll be at the usual time, 2300 GMT, Friday.

Hope you enjoyed being attacked and chased!

****

Finally, someone who...well, A BODY!!

We found a good place here...doesn't get us close to Baha, but I'm sure it's important.

Lovely.
A kindly interrogation is in order, and provided this man proves harmless, we should attempt to assist him. If he's responsible for the oozes, he's got a lot of questions to answer, and/or a lot of pain to endure.

Thread archived. Don't forget to vote.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/18164806/
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Dragon

Ask him questions.

Assuming he seems friendly or in mortal danger, assist/heal/save him as we can.

If he's hostile, subdue and restrain him.
If he's suspicious, keep an eye on him and his hands, possibly subdue and restrain him.

If he seems innocent, we're willing to answer questions with technical truths. (We're a mercenary, escorting an envoy. We had to split up. We're from a nearby city (Umbaya, if pressed,), and trying to ascertain what's going on.

We mean well.


We need to know what happened here.

Well, according to WG in chat, he's unconscious and half dead from dehydration. So I think doing what we can to keep him alive comes before anything else.

Any ideas for coming up with some water?

>>18172883
Idea from the chat: either summon something cold related, or use some other form of magic to make it cold enough to condense water vapor out of the air. That should give us at least a little water for the guy.

>>18172963
Magic up some cup/tankard, magic up some water, and maybe the guy will survive to magic up some answers.