Waterday, Wealsun 5, 592 CY, continued

Ironically, the fact that Pockets gave me the Sword of Pelor to carry facilitated his survival today.

We went down the steps that Fafnir found into the first of several connected underground rooms. Pockets elected to sneak ahead without me, insisting that he didn’t need his own “personal cleric” to survive. Aramil must have been worried, as he had Pockets carry Jacob so he could send back “toad signals” if he needed us to find him quickly. A few short hallways later we caught up to him in a room filled with stone statues of orcs in various poses, a torch burning in each corner, with a table holding the remains of a very old meal. The fact that the orc statues looked so lifelike, coupled with the expressions on their carved faces, led us to believe that they had started out as real orcs and were somehow turned to stone. Pockets started around the room laying them down, in case they came back to life, he didn’t want them attacking us immediately.

The room also had two doors. While Ghelt and Fafnir studied one that had what must have been protective wards written on it, Pockets opened another door, with Aramil looking over his shoulder. Pockets promptly turned to stone, providing the necessary clue as to what had happened to the previous occupants. Aramil shouted to us— thankfully I didn’t catch the eye of the snake-bodied Medusa as she shot us with arrows, though I felt a chill when her gaze passed over me. A few well-placed hits with a ranged attack (including a fireball from Fafnir and a flame strike from me) and she fell over dead. Aramil was trying to figure out how to get his poor toad out of Pockets’ now-stone pocket, and Fafnir lamented the lost of the treasure in the room beyond the medusa’s corpse. He managed to salvage one large melted gob of gold and platinum coins, in addition to the weapons and one scroll found on the snaky corpse.

As for Pockets, well, I think Aramil was going to try and fit him into a bag of holding until we could find a way to turn him back to flesh and fix the damage he sustained from the fireball, but I realized we had an opportunity to give back the Sword of Pelor and save Pockets at the same time. With the unanimous agreement of the rest of the party (sans Pockets, who obviously couldn’t vote), I summoned the avoral Yasmin to us, presented him with the sword, and explained our situation. He picked up Pockets and disappeared, returning momentarily with a slightly-dazed Pockets, fixed as good as new. Yasmin then took the sword and departed.

Pockets seemed none the worse for wear; in fact, he didn’t seem to recall much, including how Yasmin had saved him. I wanted to discuss it with him in detail, but we still had a lot of searching to do.

We finished up on the first floor, finding another group of stone orcs in their bunk room (and 6 trunks full of really stinky clothing), a storage room filled with useless goods, and sadly, a stone elf in a dungeon cell. We really fretted over how to deal with that, but we are not really equipped to carry him or change him back to flesh.

We went down a staircase we’d found beyond a warded door in the medusa’s room, and found ourselves in a very large chamber guarded by two stone minotaurs. Pockets was checking the room for traps, but of course, his ability to hide in plain sight makes it impossible to follow him. Aramil gave up looking for him and decided to cross the cavernous room alone. He made it halfway across before we heard a “click” where he’d stepped. A gate came down, cutting Fafnir off from us, as he had not yet left the stairwell we’d walked down. Almost instantly, the stone minotaurs began to move forward to attack! One seemed very easy to hit (and as it turned out, this one actually wasn’t moving— it just had an illusion cast on it), but the other resisted all of our attacks. Magic had very little effect on it, and arrows and weapons bounced right off of it. Ghelt waded in to attack it with her frost sword, but it hit her so hard she actually fell. I dragged her to relative safety while Aramil tried hitting it with Ghelt’s dropped sword, with no better success. We tried to scramble to the stairs, as Fafnir had disintegrated the gate. Pockets saved the day by dropping several bags of marbles on the floor— we were able to get passed them, but the golem actually lost its footing and fell, leaving us enough time to get past, up the steps, and to close the warded door again. Everyone is quite bruised and battered— after healing the party, we’ll need to rest a while before trying that room again.