RP:An Ominous Approach
Background
This is part 3 of the Sojourn in the Underdark story arc.
Fabulous caverns filled with terror and wonder alike offer Jolie and Kuzial a taste of adventures - or catastrophes - yet to come.
Kuzial finally tore his gaze away from the scout, who wisely remained prone on the ground. He waves away the offer of brandy with a smirk, "I did warn you, Lady Darkness." He taps the stone wall of the cavern, "It's why we are strong. The weak die. As it should be..." As she speaks of the female drow's thorny situation he cannot help but chuckle. Before he can make his salacious reply the half-dead, brain leaking undead makes his pathetic, though admirable, attempts to get up. "Do as you will, Joliette Thorne." Without wanting to see its death, the bastard thing is disgusting enough, Kuzial makes his way to the opening that leads deeper into the Underdark. "Be quick about it, though. We have been here too long... we will begin to attract every manner of foul beast. I can smell them..."
Jolie was quick about it. While it took a great deal of effort – at the toll of physical strength and of reflexes, even lycan ones – to raise and maintain a number of semi-sentients as these were, it took as much effort to raze the illusion of life from their dead bodies as it took to snuff a candle out. Jolie spoke the words that broke the magical link between the mangled orc’s body and herself, and it immediately stilled, no longer bound to her service. She even felt a little surge of refreshing vitality with one less revenant to juggle now; the others would be quicker and smarter for it. She gave the bloodied pink scarf a sad glance – so much for summer accessorisation – and ordered the ogre to take up the pack. “Wait,” she commanded, in that glottal, undervoweled language of the ancient death mages, and would stuff the baby hook-beast in the bag, half hoping it’d die en route to wherever they went next. “We go,” was all she imparted to the undead, Maladroit already on his four apelike feet and shambling gracefully toward Kuzial, his great bulletshaped, void of a head tilted in the drow’s direction like a curious puppy’s.
Kuzial waited at the next cavern's entrance as Jolie snuffs the life out of the bloody, brain-leaking corpse. Nalyr rises during the ceremony and in silent hand code requests whether he should scout again. Kuzial's replies in dry tones, "Do a better job this time." With a nod the dark elf steps forward into the shadows and soon vanishes from sight. The patron turns back to eye Maladroit. He doesn't know whether or not the familiar can understand him, but he speaks to it anyway, "You stay with us. We need your strength more than your..." Well, he had no eyes. "...scouting." He shrugs at the beast before addressing Joliette. "You walk beside me, Tenebrae. Your..." He points at Maladroit, having no real adequate name to give him, "Can follow behind us. It will be safer for you beside me." He grins a sardonic smile, "relatively, of course."
Jolie canted a brow, falling into place along Kuzial, “Oh?” she said, ingenuously, her sarcasm thick as clotted cream, “Well. It –is- a fact that in my whole life, I have rarely felt quite so….safe.” A faint sniff and a sideways look made for the dark humour that kept her buoyant in the blackest of waters. If they walked then, she walked beside him, her smaller stature leading to quicker steps, the undead trailing and… “Maladroit,” she added abruptly, “Is his name. He’s not really a gaunt, you know. That’s what he is, a hell gaunt, but it’s only his body. He’s really a goblin,” and then caught herself talking far too much for comfort, carried away by her own ineffable pride in the golemoid, and with a mind for greater caution, ceased speaking.
Kuzial leads them deeper and deeper through the twisting tunnels and cavernous openings that make up these series of caves. He nods at her words, not too worried yet about the noise, for he had scouted the rooms earlier. Though, he is glad when she stops. He replies to her in the silent hand-code of his brethren, 'Abomination, I would say, but a fine one.” A sly grin tugs at the corners of his ebon lips, before he focuses again on their lightless surroundings. She is a dangerous woman to come down here with, the thinks; distracting with her wit and those flashes of pale flesh. But such distractions, even small, are deadly in these desolate caves. So with his focus highly tuned again, he follows the faint glowing footsteps of his scout. So many dark passages break away from the path they walk; one larger than most causes Kuzial to stop and lean in to whisper to the necromancer in a voice that barely carries to her ear, though his mouth is close enough to brush against it, "Some beasts are beyond us. Beyond even a party of my brethren. Down there is haunted by a beholder. No magic will work near it, aside from its own. It will not harm us if we do not bother it."
Jolie turned to speak to the Patron, so that their faces almost touched for an instant, and instantly recalled her lesson in remaining quiet. The necromancer instead would tug the edge of his chainmail sleeve, and once she’d garnered his attention spoke in halting finger-sigils: “the dead ones cannot pass this thing,” in case they did come closer to it, in which case, if what Kuzial said was true and the creature powerful enough, her remaining three henchmen would topple.
Kuzial nods his head and replies in the same fashion, his fingers moving slowly and clearly, 'We will not walk through its caves. Just ensure your... warriors do not pass too close.'. That said, he turns and leads them further down through the black caves, taking a wide berth past the entrance to that odious beast's lair. The caves seem almost identical, and those who were not of the Underdark would find themselves lost within seconds, and dead within minutes. But following the scout their path is true. Climbing stalagmites and dagger-like stalactites’ seek to reach each other, and those that have form high colums, often covered with faintly glowing fungus. The ground flows uniformly downwards, and begins to grow smoother and smoother until they walk out of a wide opening and come across a large cavern filled with bubbling pools of various-hued liquid. Here Kuzial stops and lets Jolie take in the sight, before speaking again in the silent hand code, 'The green is acid, the blue a discharge from myconids that consumes flesh almost instantly, feeding the fungoid men. The red...' The drow stops there for a moment, before speaking in a whispered voice, "Make sure your cadaverous army doesn't touch the red liquid..." He speaks to ensure there is no confusion at all. "It is where the giant spiders lay their eggs, and though none should be close, it will attract the formidable beasts fast."
Jolie assured him with a dip of her head, and strode abreast of the drow in absolute silence a while, or behind when the company was forced to a single file through the occasional, much narrower path. She took in the sights as they wandered those labyrinthine, lethal passages, seeming relaxed enough to be out on a mid-summer stroll in a park, but actually untensing on purpose so that all her senses remained in a kind of peripherally-oriented awareness, taking in bothy many details of the environment and keeping watching for any further sudden motion from one of the countless, shadowy recesses they passed. Upon reaching the cavern with the colourful pools, she could not help taking a slightly longer pause to gaze upon them – such loveliness, she thought again, reminded of the brilliant hues of certain, toxic surface beasts. She could not help, either, a little gasp of delight at the mention of fungus-men, whom she’d only read about in some nearly illegible texts in the Black Library, and were she not already the wiser for the nature of the beings down here would have begged Kuzial to meet one. As it was, she merely smiled at their existence in general, eyeing the red pool – she was, on the contrary, all too familiar with those damned spiders, and wondered if this was where the chitterling went on its long absences to the world below in search of it favoured food. She made sure to veer the undead in a wide berth around all of the rocky grails containing liquids, speaking briefly with her hands: “I understand better since this day why the dark elves are filled with pride regarding their home.” And fear, too - but neglected to mention it for courtesy's sake.
Kuzial replies again to Jolie in the hand signals of his homeland; a vivid reminder to him of her resourcefulness and thus potential usefulness. 'Also, I would hope, why we're filled with contempt for the 'dangers',' he waggles his left thumb as he motions the word, imparting his disdain for it, 'the surface dwellers think they face. There is a reason my race is so formidable. You are one of very few who gets to truly understand.' He would flash her a brief, tense smile before they continue on their way. Without really being conscious of the motion, Kuzial draws the dagger given to him by Joliette. He does not assume a fighting stance, but his every motion shows he is highly alert for danger. There has been no sound, no movement to see, but something about the caves has prickled his sensitive skin and he is more wary than ever. His steps are silent as their pace slows, for he is getting close to the limit of how far he has descended into these caves, and he knows from rumors that the vicious, pernicious mind flayers live close. And that, more than anything, is a battle he does not wish to fight.
Jolie returned the smile, a simple and genuine expression of gratitude, her masks of guile falling for a moment; perhaps it was simply the severity of the place that ironically made her more comfortable to let her facades slip. Yet, the expression faded as once more the gloom and impending sense of peril overwhelmed the necromancer, and had she deigned to break her vow regarding taking wolven shape again, her hackles would be spiny with wary aggression and her flanks shivering for the aura of death here, where the rock caves had begun to resemble hideously melted versions of themselves. Possibly of volcanic origin, these lower caves were bizarre twists of smooth rock almost turned in knots upon the walls, glassy underfoot so that she was glad of her soft-rubber soles and the grip they offered. Rising where stalacmites were in previous sections, here were great, bunched fists and ribbony eels poking out of the slippery floor as though some insane and massive potter had fired its worst nightmares into sculptures, and these they would have to walk around, some of them hollowed out and radiating a sense of utter malevolence, though no fell beast lunged out of any as the company made wide berth around them. All except for Maladroit, whose smooth, ghastly head was fearlessly inserted into several fissures so that the gaunt could bestow its eerie and incomprehensible attentions upon whatever lurked within. Jolie did not dislike the Underdark one bit, and it had indeed crossed her mind that it were pity she was not born a drow, or that the dark elves were so extremely xenophobic, as she would rather have liked to visit it a great deal more often than she thought was presently wise. But this place was hideous on every level, and even to one whose stomach was as hardy as hers, the lady Tenebrae, who slept with death under pillow for comfort, it was utterly alien and wholly inhospitable. The duegar blade was drawn – forged in the mysterious dark-dwarven manner, it made no normal sound of steel but that eerie, tangible thrum again. It wanted to taste life, she knew. But what kind of life, here, in the nether reaches of hell on Lythridel? She had the most awful and unwavering sense that they were all very soon to find out.
The tangible sense of malignant oppression was rife within the twisted caves, and from the moment Kuzial entered his body became even more tense. He can feel in the stagnant air the looming danger. The vaguely sentient desire of the grotesquely beautiful cavern to claim the life of these mortals foolish enough to enter its deathly lair. The lines of the place challenge the patron's sanity; as if nothing here was natural, an alien landscape deep within the heart of the beast. Crimson eyes flash around, taking note of the shadows and Maladroit's oblivious, almost child-like curiosity. The drow had the feeling he would stick his head into one, and have the entire thing devoured by a horrible lurking monster. But such a thought didn't upset the dark elf, beyond the implications that their army would be down one formidable member. But bait is ever needed when hunting these dark caves. As he turns back he notices something that causes him to flash his free hand up and make a fist, the sign for rangers and scouts alike to halt. His hand then flashes through a few ominous words as his eyes search the impenetrable darkness, 'Nalyr's footsteps... are gone.'