Chapter 5: Renewed Resolve

Sometimes, being able to say, "I told you so," is the last thing you want. After throughly looting the treasure room, we tried the door across the hall. At this point, most of my personal spells had either been cast, or had been dispelled by the drow earlier that day. A few others had insisted that we continue forth. Upon opening the door, we were surprised by an invisible drow cleric, who summoned unholy energy to strike us. A few moments later, another spell, this time cast by a wizard, struck our party, seriously wounding everyone. Just as we thought that it could not get worse, the cleric overturned a large table in the middle of the room, revealing a large amorphous blob that slithered out toward us.

We tried to regroup, heal, and hopefully regain the upper hand, so we fought a retreating battle back toward the stairs. It didn't take long before the cleric or wizard summoned a foul devil from the lower planes to join the fight against us. Aeriana said that she could whisk us into the room where the spellcasters where, and hopefully we'd be able to take them out, away from their minions. She did that, casting a Dimensional Door that transported her, Janne, and myself into the room. At this point, we finally saw the true nature of our enemy. There wasn't a wizard and a cleric in the room, instead the cleric had a strange and disgusting conjoined twin growing from her neck!

Janne and I moved in to attack, but the time we took in getting in the room allowed her and her twin to cast a number of protective spells on themselves. Not only were we facing a half dozen mirror copies of them, but they also had powerful protective spells, so that we couldn't even hurt them even if we had picked the right one. I was about to call for a retreat, when Aeriana informed me that she didn't have an exit strategy. I really should have asked her what her plan for getting out was before going in. Suffice to say, things did not go well. The cleric cast a powerful necromantic spell and touched Janne, reducing him to a dessicated husk. The wizard followed up with a powerful lightning spell that nearly blasted me into bits. Aeriana cast a spell and blinked right through the floor, down to safely. I wanted to grab Janne and get out of there, but I realized that I could not do so without leaving myself open to attack, and at that point, even a magic missile could have felled me, so I had no choice but to retreat alone.

The others were waiting downstairs, and since Damien could not take all of us, we bid Igbot good luck as he promised that he'd hide out in the stables and await our return. We appeared back in the Dwarven city, and paid a hefty sum of gold to have Janne resurrected. Fortunately, the amount of treasure we looted from the Drow was more than enough to have that done, and still have a good amount left over to divvy amongst the party. After resting and re-equipping, we returned to the Drow fortress to take our revenge...