Session 8

Alamar

We wondered around the caverns below the Derro section of the city until we found a large cavern with two multi-tiered mesas. One held a large red egg, which I immediately assumed to be a red dragon egg given my recent memorable encounter (thankfully, not a CLOSE encounter) with one. The other held a derro woman conducting some kind of ritual. She appeared to “summon” a shiny object of some kind, reacted joyfully, and made notes in a book.

I wanted that dragon egg something awful. I mean, how cool would it be to have a dragon egg all my own after I stole it and ditched the rest of these do-gooders? I figured the first step would be to get close by out of sight, so I just sprinted straight for the derro and plastered myself against the lowest wall. I got there without being noticed, but the big clanky-clanky paladin didn’t have the sense to stand still, and the wizard just kind of strolled out into the open like he didn’t have a care in the world. Of course, one of them or both of them were immediately noticed by a strange hovering eyeball. It had multiple smaller eye stalks, and some kind of tentacles on the bottom. The eye stalks had some kind of magical effect – confusion from one, wracking pain from the other. And it was telepathic, with multiple voices competing to murder us in ever more horrible ways. Luckily it didn’t notice me, just the rest of the party. While it was busy confusing them and torturing them with its eyestalks and telepathy, the derro on the plateau lined up and zapped about half the group with a lightning bolt.

That made it clear to me that the derro had to die for the rest of the party to live. And my chances of getting back to the surface without them weren’t great, even with a dragon egg. So I quickly climbed two more of the plateau walls while the floating eyeball and the derro wizard electrocuted, confused, and tortured everyone else. Neither of them laid a finger on me or even saw me until I jumped out from behind the derro’s giant obelisk (didn’t I mention that? She had a giant blank obelisk), cursed her with my daddy’s demonic powers, and swung my glaive straight for her head. She spun away from the blow, bleeding and burning. I pursued, carving her to pieces. The rest of the group was not doing well, though. Between the lightning bolts and the eyeball, Alia was bouncing up and down on Death’s trampoline, and Thea was swearing bloody murder trying to get to the eyeball. Eventually, Thea gave in to her bloodlust and helped me corner the derro. Together we took her down and stopped her spells electrocuting the rest of the party.

That still left the floating eyeball. Thea rushed to the dragon egg, following my cunning plan, and threatened the egg as a distraction. The eyeball wasn’t buying it, though, so I hit it with a solid blast of Daddy’s eldritch power after that. That was enough to put it down for good, and we managed to keep everyone alive. It was a close thing though. Some of them almost didn’t make it. I don’t really remember who, except both the pretty ones got hurt bad. Which means I saved their lives by killing the derro, right? They should be very grateful later.

Upon closer examination the shiny object proved to be a gold coin. A surface coin, magically transported here to the Underdark. This is both good and bad news; it’s information we can barter to the powers that be down below, and thus may be worth something to us, but it is also proof that whatever means the derro were using to get surface goods is very unlikely to get us back to the surface.

Oh, and Thea hit the dragon egg a couple times. I should go stop her before she breaks it open, it’s got to be more valuable intact.