by Inzema » May 4th, 2015, 10:02 pm
8AE, 6/21
After returning to the Tomb this morning I cast a divination to find secret doorways. The magic found one behind the door in the torture chamber painting. Behind the painting was a door, and behind the door, a short hallway with another door. We opened the door at the end and discovered a four armed gargoyle which immediately attacked it. Gozek was able to absorb a full attack from the creature, but the fight became a matter of simple execution when Bones caused the creature to panic and flee, and even that was not simple with arrows flying from the ceiling at random targets. It attempted to flee deeper into the tomb, and met its end at the end of a series of doors that led to nowhere. We returned to the gargoyle's lair, where we searched for an actual way deeper in. Inzema noted a hidden door in the first door that the gargoyle had opened to flee through and abandoned, and like each other chamber in this section, it had a trap that fired arrows, so Inzema disabled that trap and we moved on through, Inzema finding the door, and I opening them. It took too long for Inzema to disable them in his opinion, so we simply rushed through as fast as we could.
This brought us to a hallway filled with paintings holding spheres of varying colors. Several detected as illusions, so we decided to start with those. The first, a gold sphere held by a naga, was an illusion that hid a crawlspace. Inzema climbed into it and crawled through while the rest of us waited. He declared it safe and we went through. The crawl space led to a room with a statue of a three armed gargoyle. We expected another fight, but this one turned out to actually be a statue instead of a gargoyle. Inzema found the fourth arm lying nearby and started waving it around while the rest of us examined the statue. I determined that the indentations that I found on the hands were of an appropriate size for large gemstones. None of us had brought any, but Inzema produced a collar that he had apparently taken from the corpse of the gargoyle we had slain. The gems were a perfect fit and numbered ten. Inzema also produced a note which he claimed to have found in a secret compartment in the collar. It looked like runic gibberish, but under the proper spell, read "Look low and high for gold, to hear a tale untold. The archway at the end, and on your way you'll wend. A."
I took three of the gems and placed them in the palm indentations of the statue. It crushed them, dumped the dust on the floor, then waited. Inzema shrugged that one off and called me an idiot, so I placed a second set of three with the same results. Inzema started calling me all sorts of things that will remain unrepeated, so I asked Gozek to restrain him. Gozek did so and I placed three more gems into the statue. Crunch, drop, reset. Inzema started changing the languages, and even Bones started to smile. I held the last gem up, showing it to Inzema. "This is what you get for not sharing." I placed the last gem into one of the indentations, the statue crushed it, and to our surprise, it spoke.
"Your sacrifice was not in vain. Look to the fourth to find your gain." I recovered the fourth arm, which dropped something invisible when I picked it up. Bones picked up the invisible item, rubbed it on his shirt, and showed a rather large diamond. He declared it a gem of true seeing. I turned to Inzema, had Gozek release him, and smiled. "Looks like your thievery from the party has rewarded us." "Stuff it!"
With the gem in hand, we had Bones do a scan of the room. He revealed and marked two doors behind spheres, two more crawlspaces, and determined that a misty arch that was at the end of the hall did not indicate any further passageway beyond it, but like the first, we did not enter to determine if it would teleport us. Inzema determined that the first revealed door was trapped and disabled it and it turned out to be nothing BUT a trap. The second door he opened. It turns out that it was also trapped, and we were all standing by to potentially enter it. Spears flew from the door, which Inzema assured me that this would have happened if the first door had been opened without disabling the trap. I managed to avoid all but one, Inzema took two, Gozek took two, and Bones took one. The spears didn't even seem to injure Gozek, or if they did, the wounds closed before I could tell. Inzema applied to each of us a charge from a wand he carried that healed slowly over time.
This left us with two tunnels and the arch. We ruled out the arch due to being uncertain how it might react to us. The tunnels were more predictable, so Inzema decided to pick the tunnel by roll of the dice. Inzema crawled into the right tunnel and called out that he had found a secret door within. We followed him in and once through the tunnel, found ourselves in a room with three chests. The first was gold, the second silver, the third oak. Inzema was already in the process of determining if they were trapped and did not find any traps on them. Two of the chests, the gold and oak, detected as magic. I was against opening the chests, but Inzema opened the gold one anyways. A dozen vipers appeared, all of them attacking Inzema. They couldn't catch him and we made quick work of them, but I still yelled at Inzema for his idiocy. He responded by opening the silver chest. Nothing happened, so he opened the silver box, disabled a trap within, and pulled out a crystal box which contained a ring within. Bones determined the ring was a Ring of Protection, an equivalent which all but Bones was already wearing and Bones did not want it.
Inzema decided that it would be better to not open the third chest and instead searched the room. He found a plug in the floor that led to another crawlspace. Inzema explored the space and said that it led to a dead end at one way and the bottom of what was clearly a pit trap on the other. Inzema said that he was able to get the pit trap to open, which let him out into the first hallway. We now have a way into the deeper areas of the Tomb without having to brave the arrow halls. We took this as a sign to camp outside for the night and resume in the morning.