Session Log 2023-03-27
Ignis led the party through the dark hallway, his path revealed with Robin's illusory lantern. Hearing a squishing noise behind him, he turned to find a pool of magebane seeping out of the cracks in the walls. Robin used her lantern to bait the slime away from the magically-infused party and leapt past it, splattering Ignis and forcing him to cut a strip off his clothes. Klaitos and Ekkels saw the pool was growing in the illusion's light and backed away.
Robin dismissed the light before the hallway was any further filled with magebane. Ignis tied his shirt around his sword-tip as a makeshift torch, cutting his fingers in the process. A spark of fire magic ignited it and illuminated the pool nearly upon him. He warded it off with the sword as Robin dug into her inventory for her cards and a vial of fireproof potion. She lit a deck aflame and scattered them into a line on the ground, holding off the magebane for the moment.
Klaitos, carrying Ekkels, climbed across the wall over the deadly ooze, but missed a handhold in the dancing shadows of Ignis's torch and Robin's warding cards. He and Ekkels landed on them, scattering them. Robin pulled a second, cheater's deck of cards from her pack and repeated the maneuver. Ignis recognized the deck with which she had conned him with the other day and reproached her for her dishonorable behavior.
The party wandered further into the tunnel and reached a barrier of taut, woven, thorny vine. Ignis, still irked by Robin's con, refused to help with his sword-torch, so she produced instead a pair of shears. She cut Klaitos an eyehole, through which he could see a dark clearing with scattered patches of glowing mushroom beyond. Faintly, he thought he heard speaking voices and gurgling noises.
The cards started to burn out behind them, and Robin realized that, without Ignis's cooperation, the magebane might soon creep back upon them. Klaitos, unwilling the wait for said cooperation, rammed recklessly through the thorny vines. The party passed into the marshy clearing, but the tearing and lashing of the vine-wall silenced whomever had been speaking. The party stuck to the shadows beyond the glowing mushroom-patch, save for Robin's illusory Ignis send forth as bait.
A noise between a gurgle and a belch announced the arrival of a gray, misshaped creature with toadlike flesh and asymmetrical lemurlike proportions. A voice in the shadows called to "Ignis", asking what brought him to a lair of the Venom Drinkers in this incredibly hard-to-find location. Robin bluffed something about an uncanny subliminal calling to help destroy civilization. The interrogator thought for a moment before deciding that "Ignis" was too likely an unwitting spy to be worth sparing, and bade the froggy creature eat him.
The thing belched and leaped forward with the force of a cannonball. Robin had the illusion fall to the ground and begin melting, but the creature began to eat the "corpse". The Venom Drinker stalked off as the toadlike creature swallowed gulps of illusory-flavored mud, periodically vomiting the inedible slop back up.
Ekkels felt himself overpowered by an indescribable familiarity, and wandered off into the darkness. Klaitos followed, and Ignis guided Robin until she was far enough away to distract herself from her illusion without drawing the creature's attention. It took a few more bites of undisguised mud before realizing its meal was over and wandering off.
Ekkels brought the group into a forest of shadowy, mold-eaten trees and stumps. He stopped before one of the more intact dead trees. Robin and Ignis scanned the area for motion before Robin summoned just enough light to make the tree out. Before the party, at Ekkel's shoulder height, were carved a set of clumsy letters:
EK + ELS