Duel:Gheneroc vs. Gevurah and Eyris

Part of the Surface Tension Arc

Location: Entry to the Underdark
Duelists: Gheneroc (Surface Allies), Gevurah, Eyris (Drow Allies)
Judges: Alvina and Calen
Stakes: If Gevurah and Eyris win, their actions drive back Gheneroc long enough for Gevurah to successfully protects the tunnel with powerful, divine magic so that it cannot be collapsed until Gevurah’s player concedes to its destruction.
        If Gheneroc wins, he collapses the tunnel and the drow are set back at least two (maybe more) months as they rebuild the tunnel. Thus, the drow military camp on the surface has lost its main supply line, and supplies during tunnel reconstruction will have to move through the surface, at greater risk and exposure. 

Entry to the Underdark

Entrance Posts

Gheneroc: The earth rumbled in darkness, foretelling the dragon that comes. While many were concerned with pushing the drow back down into the hole they had erupted from, one dragon had the ability to cut them off. He had allies in enemies of the dark elves which led him to their main supply route. Fresh soldiers, food rations, and weapons would be harder to come by. The dragon was well at home within the darkness of the earth for even here without light, he could see clearly. He tunneled and dug, after fighting his way through the rock and earth, he found it. The earth opened from the ceiling of the tunnel like a maw ready to spew the immense dragon. He landed right where he predicted – far enough away from the surface that his contribution could be made alone. The stone dragon’s hide shed some of its older, excess scales when Gheneroc landed, but his hide was so thick, this was not uncommon. The ancient one grumbled, as he would need time to summon the power needed to seal the massive tunnel. His words grumbled out as he spoke them in an ancient tongue. The earth, of course, began to obey. Some of the smaller rocks started to fall, even raining down on the bulky wingless dragon himself, but the earth would do no harm. The stone dragon watched expectantly as the drow started to clear the area, now awaiting the arrival of potential reinforcements.

Eyris: So many drow passed through the tunnels these days, varying castes marching their way towards the surface through the tunnel to the forest. It had been oh so very long since Eyris last saw a movement of this magnitude. There was clearly something afoot. He had held curiosity at bay for a fair time now, but he could not help but wonder at the events driving society these days. So it came to pass that he shadowed caravans, intent on keeping his distance, for he saw some with House insignias. He had to be wary of the nobles. So it was thus that he kept his cloak drawn about his gladitorial armor, his mark of slavery. Though he did not doubt his skill, a bare chest would do little to stop the blade of so many drow, and the enchanted armor that guarded his spine, left arm, and legs would only do so much to thwart the spells of their mages and priests. He would keep his peace, slender two-handed sword at the ready, watching with expectant gaze as he waited for something to come of this migration. He was not disappointed, though he failed to keep track of how long it took for events to unfold; while cowards fled and others heeded orders to form ranks, the former gladiator when slinking ahead, searching out the source of this seismic disturbance.

Gevurah: Gheneroc’s crash landing forces the lines of drow soldiers to burst into a frenzied firework of fear. But one drow charges against the stampede: Gevurah, on spider back, regaled in the very noble attire which Eyris avoids. She comes from the battle on the surface reeking of elf blood. Halbyrn, her giant spider, scales the wall and clings to the ceiling. Gevurah, now upside-down, guides Halbyrn over an open crate and scoops up a handful of iron dust. She takes stock of Gheneroc’s arsenal: caustic breath, acidic saliva, stone-rending claws and teeth, and an instinctive knack for terramancy. In contrast, she has a pricey education in divine combat, and the meager gifts of her race. Moments ago she also had an army, but Gheneroc dispensed with that quickly. But most importantly, she has an ambitious plan for the surface that she refuses to surrender. That determination (and stupidity) emboldens her to take on a dragon. With no hope of defeating him, she plans to dissuade him, by force if necessary, but she starts with ancient drow words. “You’re fighting for the wrong race, Gheneroc.” She steers clear of his breath, teeth, and claws then dismisses Halbyrn. Her fistful of iron dust smooths over the ground by her feet as she whispers a spell of transmutation. Dark energy carves a stone slab, not unlike a surfboard, which glows and hums with dark magic, ready to skate over quakes and stone tsunamis.

Duel

Gheneroc rumbled as he made Gevurah's shape easily against the tide. Tumbling stones kept the army at bay - who were they to challenge what might be the earth itself. The dragon's dark red eyes found the drow, but her words were nearly lost in the chaos. The stone dragon opened his maw and gave a frighteningly vicious roar which translated through the earth and stone itself. The wingless dragon refocused his attention at the priestess. The other drow, Eyris, has failed to catch Gheneroc's attention. "You threaten my interests." The dragon bellowed. "I fight not for the elves, but the dwarves." The dragon made no adverse moves toward Gevurah just yet, he bided a little more time to make sure there were no additional threats. Instead, to prepare, Gheneroc dug his forelegs into the stone. Granite started to coat the dragon's legs, and creep over his form - an additional armor to his already formidible hide. The stones under Gheneroc's influence cracked and shifted, clinging to the dragon's form - but this was only using half his potential. The dragon began murmuring and chanting, starting to reveal a rather sickening aura, foretelling of death and destruction. For now, it was raw, malevolent energy ready to be cast at a moment’s notice but did not yet have purpose. Just a few moments before black energy started seeping from the dragon’s form. Purple flaming skulls shot forth, screaming with wails of untold torment, and they would seek Gevurah. It was a fairly mundane curse, meant to paralyze the target with pure pain, drawing on innate fear as fuel for a temporary psychosis. The duration, if touched, would depend on the victim’s will. Some of the lower caste drow that lingered behind would be struck – perhaps warning Gevurah as to the spell’s effect.

A dragon. Just what he needed. Onward he pushed, careful with his footing and eyes always watching the falling stones. More than once he is forced to scramble away from certain death. But the whole time the ex-gladiator's lips are moving, mystical cadences flowing forth and taking chilled shape as the spell approaches completion. It is hardly a deadly spell, but it is one the drow has found useful time and time again in the past. Ice creeps across the floor, snaking between loosed stones and binding them to each other. Like a mason laying cement between brick, the ice steadies the shifting ground, easing Eyris' progress. But the drake has a spell of his own, one plucked straight from one of the drow's own favored schools. Again the rogue male is forced to scramble away, opting to focus on his current spell than to counter the death magic seeking to send his mind to shrieking. Always moving, always keeping his eyes upon his target, Eyris seeks the edge of Gheneroc's spell, seeks the safety of range, only to find that his spell range runs out the faster. And so he presses back forward, back into the curse's effect. Pain wracks his body. Eyris, though, will not give up. Further and further his spell's icy veins grow, following the spell blade's dictation towards the source of the failing cavern. Those stones that adhere to Gheneroc, just as those upon the floor, begin to harden with ice. Unfortunately for the former slave, the spell could not hope to hold fast a creature as great as a dragon, but, Eyris can only hope, the stones, losing the space for flexibility, could. If nothing else, the dark elf can hope it buys the time for him to enchant his blade and close ranks with the great beast.

Gevurah weaves through the falling rock on her radical stone board. The board works by continuously transmuting stone to mud then back again, so that the board clings to even the steepest of cavern walls. A high priestess pulling 360 flips and grinding up stalagmites to evade crashing boulders may look fun, but the noble isn’t enjoying herself. Her heart pounds; she feels the adrenal of survival mode. As soon as Gheneroc starts chanting, Gevurah blurts a word to summon an orb-shaped, translucent shield that buys her a few minutes protection against Gheneroc’s purple skulls. Eventually his spell will eat through her shield, but that’s eventually. She’s focused on now. Circling Gheneroc she finds Eyris. His attire communicates two important facts. He’s an arena slave, and he’s expendable. Perfect. She needs a dummy to take some hits. Her board turns towards Eyris. She beseeches Vakmatharas through prayer, as she slips a hand into her satchel to fetch a fistful of bonemeal ground from giants. When she reaches the gladiator, her hand extends to smear the bonemeal over his cheek. If she makes contact, Eyris will rapidly grow to sixteen feet tall (still dwarfed by Gheneroc’s 35-ft height), and his flesh will harden to stone. “Attack!” He’s her weapon. Gevurah’s board, unable to transmute ice, slips, and she stumbles to a halt. She flicks up the board and races on foot towards ice-free stone. Her shield protects her from small rocks, but one thigh-sized boulder plummets down hard onto her shoulder, forcing her to her knees. She sharply sucks in air and springs back up onto her feet despite the pain. Relinquishing that board spells her own death, so she risks the extra minute to snatch it up with her good arm and resumes her speedy surf.

Gheneroc, to say the least, is surprised at Gevurah's raw tenacity. It's raining stones in the tunnel, yet she still wanted to challenge Gheneroc. While the dragon was also being pelted with the boulders, they cracked and slid aside - he was well at home even during this cave-in. The ice forming between the stones was not enough to keep the dragon still. He thrashed, using his brute strength to break the ice as it formed between the joints, but it did serve as a bit of a distraction. When Gheneroc regained most of his focus, he saw Eyris change - the once small drow grew larger. Gheneroc was very familiar with such magic and knew the drow would be clumsy. The dragon roared and sought to strike before Eyris could truly get his wits about him. The dragon, rather than casting more magic, opted for a more direct approach - a cutting jab with claws extended at Eyris' center of mass. The dragon's hand could easily wrap around the giant's head but Gheneroc would settle for rending the unfortunate soul's heart and lungs. The dragon also knew he had to keep track of Gevurah - he saw her still surfing. He didn't have time for another spell, and the new giant drow might prove bothersome. The dragon inhaled as deep as his lungs would allow and when the air escaped his maw, it was accompanied by the dragon's acidic, gaseous breath. The purple jet spewed quickly, and he hoped to hit Eyris with a direct blast. Such a hit might spell doom for anything caught in its path, though the dragon was wondering what Gevurah had planned that she needed the distraction. Eyes tracked her movement, but the stone wyrm did what he does best - focus down a target until it doesn't move. Rocks that were falling were now tending toward Eyris' direction as the ceiling continued to rain. Gheneroc's goal, after all, was to bury this tunnel and cripple the drow for a finishing blow.

While Gevurah was doing her board tricks and Gheneroc was breaking free of the ice, Eyris was struggling to keep his footing from two fronts. The dragon's necromantic skulls still tore at the gladiator's wits, and the sudden change in size sent the drow's head spinning even further. It would have certainly left him wide open to Gheneroc's attack, quickly dispatching the former slave from the world of the living, save that he fell to his knee, using his sword for support. That sword is all that saved him from disembowelment, the flat pressed between himself and those wicked claws, the force of the blow sending the spell blade sideways. The blow was enough to rouse Eyris' warrior instincts, snapping him out of the haze. Up he rose as boulders crashed off his hardened skin. More than once the boulders jarred him, causing him to keep his weight planted firmly on one braced foot or the other, his progress toward the dragon hindered. But he kept his sword between him and the dragon, and when there was just enough of a break between stones pelting him, he made his move. With a shout he lunged forward, a straightforward thrust of his weapon leading the way. At the last moment, the drow pulled his blade back, one hand slapping a sigil on the pommel of his weapon. Magics burst to life along the blade, sinister energies to sap away life force. Back in the sword went, an upward slash instead of the earlier thrust, the weapon's edge seeking to leave its mark upon Gheneroc's breast. Sure, trying to cut a dragon with a sword was normally a bad idea. But this sword was duergar-made (because what slave would be given a drow weapon?), and if there's one thing the duergar knew how to work, it was adamantine ore.

Gevurah never thought she’d be relieved to see a slave survive her antics. Not that she values Eyris’s life, but she does value her own above all else, and his survival buys her time. Time to live up to her illustrious bloodline, an additional stress weighing down upon her shoulders — one of which throbs as the tendons and muscles inflame and squeeze into the tiny crevices in her rotator cuff. Shoulder and tunnel both have a finite amount of space. Soon there will be nowhere to escape to, and sooner still her shield will give out. At most, the priestess can force the beast to retreat. But how? Then she sees it, wedged in Gheneroc’s stoney scales: shards of ice, fractured and rendered ineffective by the dragon’s brute strength, but persistently clingy. Time for some basic chemistry. Gevurah swallows hard and gathers what courage remains and dives for Gheneroc’s flank. She combines two prayer-spells as only a High Priestess can, to design a new spell with two effects. Her hand balls a fistful of salt from her regent satchel. She then blows into her fist as if blowing a dart. The salt flies from her hand at arrow-speed, and fans a meter wide, aimed at Gheneroc’s ice-speckled scales. If the salt lands its mark, it would stick to the wet ice, then seep through a magical push (spell effect #1) into every nook and cranny in Gheneroc’s hide. Salt, naturally acidic, corrodes stone slowly over time, but Vakmatharas’s divine power heightens and accelerates that erosion (spell effect #2). It’s unlikely to threaten life or limb, but the pain should irk enough, and penetrate deep enough, that the dragon would be hard-pressed not to search for a large body of water to rinse himself of the irritant. (word

Gheneroc reveled as his breath attack struck Eyris through the cascade of stone, his caustic breath was sure to leave a rather nasty mark. But what he did not expect was the lunge the giant made. He sensed the magicks activated and the thrust he took in the meat of his shoulder which he rotated, deflecting most of the force outward. While damage to his looser scales and a decent chunk of his "rock armor", the dragon would not bleed. The slash, however was interrupted by Gheneroc's forearm and while the magic seemed to loosely interact with the stone dragon by mere proximity, his scales shielded him from the full potential of the blow. Rocks were shaved off as the blade skitted against his tough hide. He had lost track of Gevurah until he smelled the familiar stench of salt mixed with water. While the salt started to erode Gheneroc's rock armor with amazing efficiency, it had difficulty with his plate-like scales. Yet despite all this, the stone dragon showed no sign of wavering. But an answer must be given to the priestess! His beady red eyes started to assess the damage he had caused to the tunnel. Gheneroc inhaled deeply again - his previous breath attack had not filled the cavern enough which made a very brief opening before noxious, acidic fumes blasted forth from the dragon's maw once more. He hoped to seal their doom.

Winner: Gevurah and Eyris (Drow Allies)