Defenders of Daybreak

Then the cave wall in front of her lights up with a vibrant green light, and Tao realizes that the light is coming from her eyes. Tao feels her own mouth open, and the words that emerge are in the tongue of her Goddess. AWAKE, TAO. THE TEMPLE HAS BEEN DEFILED!

Wrenched from her dream, the divine agent sits straight up in bed. Other than the faint glow of magical weapons, the only illumination in the small room is the coruscating green light that still pours from Tao's eyes. Her Goddess's voice still rings in her ears, and Tao instinctively knows that the small shrine here in the Calphas' Comfortable Castle has been either destroyed or defiled. "Thank you, Goddess," she says reverently as she scrambles out of bed in a panic.

Meanwhile, Mara awakes from a sound sleep to the frantic mental neighing of her warhorse. "Luminor, what is it?" asks Mara as she sleepily sits up and swings her legs around. Her flannel nightdress with images of the sun bunches slightly as she gets to her feet.

"I'm in the stable, and there's something horrible on the other side of the door! It's coming closer, I think; it might smell me. Do I kick down the door and fight it?"

"No, not yet!" Mara looks at her armor, dismisses it as taking too long to don, and grabs her holy shield and her mace Lightbinder. "Stay put, and don't leave the room unless you have to. I'm on my way now!" She wrenches open the door to the hallway, and is caught by surprise as solid darkness flows into her room. The light from her mace is extinguished, and Mara finds that she is completely sightless. Blindly, she turns right and begins to grope her way along the corridor, heading for the less crowded back passage to the main hall.

Across the hall, Tao has grabbed her swords and opened her door as well, only to find the same complete darkness enveloping her. "Wake up, everyone!" she yells at the top of her voice, shouting the phrase that for years the group has joked will be guaranteed to wake everyone up instantly. "Evil undead Torazite babes are stealing all the beer! We're being attacked!" Then she is jostled by Mara in the darkness. "Come with me," she says as she grasps the paladin's shoulder. Tao closes her eyes, concentrates, and dimension doors the two of them into the small chapel of Galanna that Velendo has created off of the main hall.

With Tao's shouting and the faint sound of Luminor's whinnying, the other Defenders begin to wake. Galthia is the first to reach his feet, bounding up from the floor where he sleeps and scooping up the staff that lies on the overly soft bed next to him. He swivels his head and notices the thin line of darkness that creeps into the room from the crack under his door. That hardly matters, he thinks, as he remembers the year he spent blinded in order to improve his fighting reflexes. I wonder if these primes are properly trained to fight in darkness as well? Likely not. Relying on his ears and memory instead of his eyes, Galthia swings open the door and runs down the hall past his companions' rooms. He can hear many noises: Velendo grumbling as he wakes, Nolin mouthing inanities, Karthos speaking to Malachite, and dozens of dwarves stirring. More worrisome, though, is the odor he smells coming from the main dining hall. Something smells acrid, like an alchemical experiment gone awry, and a faint hissing sound reaches his ears. He hears no other sounds from the room as he rounds the corner of the hallway.

In Malachite's room, Karthos is speaking. "I sense no undead, Sir Malachite," he says with a metallic ring, "but there is something horribly evil out there. I'm not sure what; fiendish, possibly. Let's go kill it." Malachite thanks him as he draws the sword from its scabbard and heads out his door without his shield or crystal armor. Darkness immediately surrounds him, and Malachite decides to test its limits.

He begins to swing Karthos in circles over his head. The sword immediately begins to radiate sunlight and heat, and the solid darkness lessens into flickering torchlight in the area immediately around the paladin. Satisfactory, he thinks, then he turns and heads into the darkness towards the great hall. As he does, Velendo and Agar open their bedroom doors and try to look out into the hall.

Still in his room, Nolin swears as he quickly grabs his instrument and cloak. I'm going to have to have words with Velendo, he thinks to himself. I thought this place was supposed to be impregnable. Ignoring the easy joke, he reaches inside of himself to the phoenix that shares his soul. "Rides the Sun, do you sense anything?" The knowledge of great evil fills Nolin, along with the certainty that its only feet away from him on the other side of the stone wall. Nolin briefly considers blasting open the wall with his blast harp to get there without delay, but decides to go around via the hallway instead.

Tao and Mara reappear in what should be Tao's plant-filled chapel, but something is horribly wrong. The Altar Tree is completely dead and withered, seared away by something unknown. Puddles of gooey fluid cover the floor, and the air smells horrible. They still can't see due to the darkness, but both Tao and Mara can feel the puddles of fluid eating into their slippers and the bottom of their feet. "Acid," Tao says to herself, and is surprised to find that she can't even hear her voice. Silence, she thinks, and they both step out into the darkness of the main hall.

By now Galthia has rounded the corner and entered the main hall himself, his staff of disruption poised to strike. Suddenly he can't hear anything, and instincts kick in as he tries to dodge to the side. He's not fast enough. Something strikes him like a juggernaut, something horrible and slimy that breaks over him with bone-crushing force and sweeps him up off the ground. The monk desperately twists as he looks for leverage to escape, but there is none. Blind and deaf, he feels dozens of mouths beginning to gnaw at his skin, even as searing pain from some sort of acid shoots down his body. No one hears his involuntary scream.

Piratecat:

At this point, the arcane spellcasters have only had six hours of sleep, and it's about two or three hours before the divine spellcasters regain their spells. A wave of grimaces swept around the room when KidCthulhu said, "When was the last time we fought a battle without mass haste?" Tao's player asked, "You're out?" KidC replied, "Totally tapped. Not a high level spell in sight."

No one looked pleased.

Incidentally, this game starred our very own Lord Nightshade (Justin Tindel) as a guest player. Justin was visiting from Oregon, and played a wonderful alienist.

So Sagiro (who plays Velendo) thought it was really cool when I had designed the CCC map earlier that week, using nothing but Excel. When this encounter began, I pulled out the 4-page map I'd printed out to scale and taped together. "You bastard!" he said. "I was afraid you were going to do something like this." It's a good looking map at a large scale, and worked wonderfully when trying to figure out who was where.