The Storm Tower

Trying to find the source of the undead infestation that was blocking their path across the Crown of the World, the party had stumbled upon a long, black road that led them to an incredibly tall hexagonal tower jutting up out of a lake of vile black slush at the foot of the Alabastrine Peaks. The tower was taller than any building they’d ever seen before, easily 300’ tall, and seemed to be made of the same black, seamless stone as the road they’d followed. Whatever lost race had constructed it must have rivaled the power of the fabled Thassilonians of yore.

A crackling ball of blue energy floated above the top of the tower, and above that raging white storm clouds formed a vast spiral. It suddenly dawned on them that the storm that had dogged their steps for weeks seemed to have its epicenter directly above the Storm Tower. Bella thought she could make out some small windows at the very top of the tower, but no one else’s eyes were sharp enough to see anything.

“So … why do we think it’s a good idea to go in there?” a small voice asked. Everyone turned to look at Bella, shocked that she, of all people, would have a sudden attack of reason. They reiterated their reasons: figure out what was behind the undead blocking their path, try to understand why the shaman Tunuak back in Iqualiat seemed to have been obsessed with this tower, learn if there was some connection between the strange monoliths they’d encountered and this tower and its raging storm. Bella listened, biting her lip and trying to hide her trembling. In the end, she gave up arguing, but hung back nonetheless – she had a very bad feeling about this.

Sawyer remounted his Phantom Steed, and led the way towards the far end of the causeway leading to the tower’s entrance. Before he had gone ten feet, his mount suddenly disappeared, sending him tumbling to the ground. Marie rushed to his side to make sure he was OK. As she did, she felt a sudden chill wash over her. She had experienced the warmth that came from entering a consecrated temple of Desna; this was the exact opposite. She knew that this was Unhallowed ground. As the rest of the party advanced, they also felt the chill of crossing some invisible line, and the benefits from the Prayer spell Marie had cast earlier were dispelled. Apprehensive, they moved ahead.

One last gap in the causeway separated them from the enormous hexagonal opening in the side of the tower. Inside, they could see a faint blue light illuminating the center of the tower, and spilling out to provide dim illumination of the area ahead of them. Expecting the worst, Sandoval cast Good Hope on the party. Holding one end of a rope, Shinjiro easily leapt the 10’ wide gap, followed by Nicki and Sawyer. As the others prepared to cross, they took a quick look around. The ceiling towered 100’ above them, almost lost in the darkness. Drifts of snow were piled along the walls of trapezoidal entryway in which they stood, dimly lit by the faint blue glow from the center, while large dark rooms opened off to either side. Surprisingly, the wind was still howling, blowing out of the building rather than in from outside.

As they took in their surroundings, the drifts of snow suddenly shifted, and figures suddenly rose from their hiding places beneath the snow. Their pale flesh was rotting and putrid, their bodies skeletal in places, and ice and frost clung to their hair; their eye sockets glowed with blue-white light. One arose right next to Nicki, and swung at him with icy claws, but the young sorcerer dodged the blow with a yelp of fear and surprise. He stepped back, and cast a Flaming Sphere that began burning his attacker.

Frost Wight

The battle was short but intense. Bella, still reluctant to enter the Storm Tower, stood on the causeway and peppered the frost wights with arrows. The others had no compunctions about engaging. Zhustin and Marie teleported across, and Marie immediately opened a Channel to Desna to wash the wights with a wave of positive energy. She could tell that the Unhallow effect was inhibiting her ability to tap the power of her goddess, but the undead attackers were injured nonetheless. Sawyer and Shinjiro advanced and engaged the wights. Sawyer found himself surrounded by three of them, but seemed unconcerned as he flashed Suishen into the fray. Shinjiro pounded them with fists and feet, but their bodies were so intensely cold that he also took damage for every blow he landed. Sandoval leaped the gap and immediately sank his echoblade into one of the wights, while Zhustin used Disrupt Undead. Nicki kept backing away, pulling his Flaming Sphere along to harry the wight pursuing him.  The wights’ attacks were clumsy, and none were able to connect. Marie did another Channel Positive Energy, Nicki fired off a volley of Magic Missiles, and suddenly it was quiet, all the frost wights lying truly dead on the floor.

Nicki’s Flaming Sphere still burned, and he sent it into the room to the left to use it to illuminate the room better. Initially it looked like this room was also drifted with snow, but upon closer examination, he could see that what looked like snow were actually clumps of small white mushrooms growing along the walls and out of the few small snowdrifts in the corners. Following his belief that anything unknown should be burned on general principles, Nicki directed his sphere around the room, gleefully blackening the small fungi as long as it lasted.

Sawyer, meanwhile, had noticed a small glittering panel mounted on the wall near the central room, and he moved to examine it more closely. It was made from a collection of crystals of various shapes and sizes, arranged in no apparent pattern. Some of them glowed with a very faint light in pale, pastel colors. He touched the panel, and could tell that the crystals could move, but his attempts at pressing, pulling, and twisting them did nothing.

“Hey Bella – come check this out,” he called. Bella, the lure of possible gemstones finally overcoming her fear, jumped across and examined the panel. Using her knowledge of locks and mechanisms, she thought she could discern a pattern to the panel. She pushed and prodded the crystals, and suddenly the floor of the central hexagonal room was covered with blue light. It pulsed for a moment, then suddenly rose out of sight up the shaft. As it did, the winds, which had been howling incessantly down the shaft, were suddenly cut off. The quiet lasted for less than a minute, and then the wind came roaring back.

Curious, Bella stepped into the central room and looked up. The sight made her so dizzy she almost lost her balance. The central core of the tower formed a shaft that ascended the full 300’ of the tower’s height. At the top, a crackling blue sphere of energy hung in the air, its light spilling down the shaft to provide the dim illumination at the bottom. About 100’ up, she could make out an opening in the front half of the shaft, and it looked like there was another opening another hundred feet above that.

Nicki had wandered over to examine the panel. He was using his arcane insights rather than Bella’s mechanical ones, but he was also able to discern its workings. Once again the blue platform of force appeared and began to ascend. This time, Nicki and Bella both stuck their heads into the shaft to see where it went. It ascended quickly for 100 feet, then stopped and hung there motionless for some seconds before disappearing.

It seemed they had discovered an elevator to the next level of the tower. Sawyer immediately proposed going up alone to check out what was there, reasoning that Suishen’s Air Walk power would prevent him from plummeting to his death should the platform disappear. Shinjiro volunteered to go with him, and the two strode into the central core, ready to ride the elevator to parts unknown.

Before Nicki could activate the panel, cooler heads prevailed. It was decided that separating the party was probably a Bad Idea, and that it would be better if they all went up together. Everyone but Nicki took their places in the central core. Nicki cast Invisibility on himself (better safe than sorry), then twiddled with the control panel. The blue platform appeared, and he jumped through the doorway just before it began to ascend.

They rose quickly, ears popping from the sudden change in altitude. To their surprise, the air grew much warmer as they rose. The platform jerked to a stop. Before them was a broad room, open in the front two-thirds of the tower. Also before them was the reason that this room was so much warmer than the arctic surroundings. A huge, centipede-like creature reared up and let out a hiss like steam escaping a boiler. The chitinous armor plates on its back glowed with furnace-like heat. It was a Remorhaz, and a big one at that, and it was not happy to see them.

Remorhaz

Nicki, knowing when he was overmatched, turned and ran, ducking around the nearest corner to hide (and secure in the knowledge that his Invisibility would prevent anyone from knowing his cowardice). Sandoval leaped off the platform, unsure how long it would persist, and began singing, while Zhustin blasted the remorhaz with a Ray of Enfeeblement. Bella, adrenaline flowing, forgot all her earlier reservations. She pulled out her war spear and charged the huge beast. She hit, but when she pulled out the spear its head was glowing cherry red and the shaft was smoldering. She could feel the heat coming off the thing in waves, and suddenly began wondering if getting this close had really been such a good idea. Her heels were right at the edge of the platform, and if it disappeared there would be nothing behind her but a hundred foot drop.

She needn’t have worried. The possibility of falling 100 feet was the least of her problems. With a lightning fast lunge, the remorhaz seized her in its mouth. It shook her like a dog shakes a rat while she struggled in vain to escape, then it flipped her up, and with a sudden gulp, she disappeared down its gullet.

The rest of the group stared in shock as they watched the creature swallow their friend, then erupted into violent action. Shinjiro charged and battered at the thing, but it was like punching a blast furnace; he injured it, but injured himself far worse in the process. Sawyer also charged, hacking away with Suishen. With every blow, the sword glowed hotter, until even the normally stoic ancestral sword began to complain.

“Do you have to keep doing this? It’s like I’m being forged all over again!”

“Would you prefer I switch to a different weapon?” Sawyer countered.

That caused Suishen to sputter indignantly. “Do you dare insult my honor by suggesting I am afraid to fight? Just hit it somewhere cooler!”

“There ISN’T anywhere cooler!”

While Sawyer and his sword argued, the rest of the party did what they could to battle the remorhaz. Sandoval hit it with a Sound Burst then followed up with Glitterdust, which blinded the creature. Zhustin blasted it with a volley of Enhanced Magic Missiles. Marie, cursing herself for not doing this earlier, activated her Aura of Freedom’s Call, so that no one else could be grabbed in its maw.

Bella, in the belly of the beast, was literally broiling to death in the pressure cooker that was the thing’s digestive system. She knew she had to try to cut her way out, and if she didn’t succeed on her first try, she probably wouldn’t survive long enough for a second. Reaching into her Handy Haversack, she pulled out what she hoped would be her salvation: the Greater Magical Beast Slaying Arrow that she’d found back at Ravenscraeg. Gripping it with both hands, she thrust forward and hoped for the best.

Outside, the remorhaz writhed in sudden agony as a spray of scalding hot digestive juices erupted from its abdomen, followed by Bella’s limp body, the blackened stump of the arrow still clutched in her fists. The remorhaz’s corpse continued to whip back and forth in its death throes for a moment, and then fell still. Marie rushed forward and spent several minutes delivering healing to Bella and Shinjiro. As the rest of the group examined the remorhaz’s body, they made a chilling discovery: the three-fingered hand of the demon-lord Sithhud had been etched into the plates of its back with acid.

While everyone else had been fighting the remorhaz, Nicki, cowering in the corner, had made a discovery of his own. The wall where he hid had a doorway, a hexagonal portal closed with triangular metal plates. There were also two more of the crystal control panels on the wall. One, near the central shaft, looked similar to the one that summoned the elevator down below, but the other, near the hexagonal portal, was more complex. Nicki fiddled with it futilely for some time before he stumbled on the correct combination. With a hiss, the six triangular sections of the door retracted into the walls, revealing a brightly lit room. A bewildering array of crystals and metallic tracery were embedded in the walls of this chamber. A low humming noise filled the air, and the crystals flashed with incomprehensible colored lights at irregular intervals.

A half-dozen small creatures scuttled about the room. They looked like crystalline scorpions, and they seemed to be engaged in inscrutable tasks. They would push, pull, twist or sometimes just crouch over various crystals, but whether there was purpose to their actions or not was impossible to tell. They took no notice of the opening door, and since Nicki was still invisible, they didn’t notice him, either.

Crysmal

As he’d shown downstairs, Nicki had one guiding principle in his life: if you don’t know what it is, set it on fire. Staying true to his beliefs, he fired a pair of Scorching Rays at the nearest crysmal. The flames splashed harmlessly off its crystalline skin, but the spell did accomplish two things: it made Nicki visible, and it made the crysmals take notice. He felt wave after wave of psychic assaults wash over his consciousness. He managed to protect his mind against them, but they made him invoke the corollary to his guiding principle: if it doesn’t burn, run away from it. As he fled, he cast a Flaming Sphere to block the doorway, using his Elemental Spell ability to transform its flames into acid. “That should hold them,” he thought smugly.

Hearing Nicki’s shriek and seeing him fleeing a previously unsuspected room, the rest of the party collectively rolled their eyes and began converging to see what hornet’s nest Nicki had stirred up this time. Sawyer began singing, and Marie, hearing Nicki shrieking something about “mental attacks”, reactivated her Freedom’s Call, to protect people from attempts at mind control. Zhustin, seeing the small crystal scorpions scurrying about the room, Summoned a rhinoceros inside the room. The lumbering beast charged, but missed the small crysmal. Then, with none of the crysmals even touching it, it began to bellow with pain, and sank slowly to the floor, blood running from its ears. Simultaneously, two of the creatures disappeared from inside the room and reappeared on the opposite side of the shaft, in the same room with the party. Looked like Nicki’s acid sphere wasn’t going to be much of a hindrance after all.

Nicki, having learned from his past mistake (well, at least one of them), hit one of the newcomers with a pair of Scorching Rays of acid. This time, the creature seemed hurt, and Sandoval finished it off by charging in with his echoblade (although the blade seemed to glance off its crystalline surface). However, at that moment, his song cut off. He was still singing – he could feel his vocal chords vibrating, and could hear his song through the bones of his skull – but as the sound left his lips it became muffled. Every other sound was clear as ever; only his song was affected. Luckily, by this time his Harmonizing Echoblade had taken up the song on its own and so, for a time at least, the party would continue to be inspired.

Zhustin moved to the doorway, and hit one with an Acid Dart. As he did, he felt an all-out assault on his neural pathways. It felt as if his brain were about to explode inside his skull, and he gripped his head in pain. Nicki moved his Acid Sphere to engulf the one Zhustin had just hit, and then created a second Acid Sphere to threaten another. Zhustin, still reeling, threw a Thunderstone into the room, hoping the crysmals would be vulnerable to sonic attacks.

Another crysmal popped out of the crystal room and into the larger room. Sandoval and Marie converged on it, Marie bashing away with her mace while Sandoval continued to try to find purchase with his echoblade. Shinjiro and Bella teamed up on the other crysmal in the main room, and it shattered into shards under their combined attacks.

There were still three crysmals inside the mysterious room full of crystals, and there was at last one more floor still above this one (and most of the ground floor was still unexplored). What further dangers would the Storm Tower hold?

The party earned 2,114 XP for the night, putting them at 69,312 XP with 75,000 required for level 9. We’ll be back at Leo’s again next week.