Well, I´ve gone and gotten myself in a pickle this time. It was one thing to hear about saving the world and quite another to go about doing it. Even though we´re with a paladin of Estereal, I think we´re in big trouble. I guess all I can to is try my best and hope everything goes well. Or at least not too badly.
After killing the gray philospher and freeing Wolfram, we found a LOT of treasure. More money than I´ve ever seen in one place-- silver, gold, and platinum-- jewelry-- and magic! I know real adventurers find stuff like this all the time, but it was still exciting for me. The was a magic sword, a silver dagger, a magic pumice stone... Canliss let me have some gold bracelets I liked, and a magic ring that was supposed to protect me. Just like Canliss, thinking of other people... I also took the silver dagger, just in case we ran into something magical. It´s hard to believe that this little dagger would work against something that Last Laugh couldn´t hit...
And then, we went a ways off and camped and rested. We were all wounded pretty bad. I felt weak as a pup after surviving the exlpoding philosopher, and the place where I was hit with Wolfram´s staff felt funny. I felt it with my hand, and parts of my skin came off. Eyugh! I asked someone to look at it, and they said it looked like it was rotting... Pretty scary, but Nikita cast a spell on it that made it all better.
After a day or so of resting, we continued on through the desert of despair to Longbridge. Our food was in pretty short supply, and I was really hungry by the time we saw the first farmhouses.
They looked deserted, so we sent Canliss on to the town to meet us while we checked things out. Nikita said that the people that lived in the farm left because bad things were happening there. Karea tried knocking at the door, but no one answered. I decided to go in, to search for clues, and maybe if the people had left anything behind. Food maybe.
All of a sudden, this crazy cat jumped on me and started clawing and biting me. I´d never been so surprised-- not even when the trees and bushes started attacking us in the elf grove. Nikita calmed it down and got it off me (Nikita is pretty useful to have around!)
After a bit of searching the house, it was clear that everyone was gone. They took pretty much everything with them, except for some canned peaches. Which were very tasty, and that we´re going to pay for whenever we meet up with that family again.
Did you know that the enterance to Longbridge is a long bridge? I guess that´s how the town got it´s name. Or maybe they built the bridge afterwards. But we were all happy to get back into a town and find that the town inn was open. Unlike most of the other buildings. Longbridge is pretty empty when the firestorm festival isn´t going on-- especially when peversions of nature keep happening.
So, more or less, we spent the next month in Longbridge. It was nice to get regular, home-cooked meals again, and not constantly be going off into cursed deserts that no one returns from. Nikita was happy that she finally got some clothes that fit her better than my shirt. Jvenikka was happy because the river that the long bridge was over was the most water she´d seen in weeks.
I was very happy because when the priest of Azkal finally returned to open up Azkal´s shrine, I got to worship with him. You never know how much you miss a thing until you can´t do it. I mean, I know that whenever one fights one is honoring Azkal, but I felt a lot closer to Azkal fighting with His priest than when I was hacking up not-dead. Besides, I realized we were pretty close to the time when we were going to save the world and I wanted to make sure Azkal´s blessing went with me. Even though we have a paladin of Estereal, I feel much safer knowing Azkal will be watching out for me too.
After talking to the innkeeper, we found out the gates we were looking for were on the top of firestorm peak-- right where the firestorm would be. Or nearly. So we took up a picnic lunch to go check it out. There was fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs, and butter sandwiches, and pickles, and cake, and a skin of ginger beer. unfortunately, there wasn´t enough for breakfast the next day...
The gates were there, set in the side of the mountain. They were twenty feet high and made of gray glass that looked like steel, or steel that looked like glass. And there were words carved all over it-- Nikita said they were the words to a spell that would close the gates. I hope we don´t have to close the gates in a hurry-- there were a LOT of words written on the gates.
Fortunately, we could see that the gates were BELOW the burnt place where the firestorm would happen. The inkeeper said that the firestorm and the gates opening happen at the same time. And, well, we´ve been in the middle of a brush fire before, but this would be a whole MOUNTAIN on fire. Which would be bad. But we´ll be near enough to watch, which will be good. To think everyone else will have to watch it from town...
The day before the gates were scheduled to open, we hiked up so we could camp outside the gates and be ready. The last bit we had to clamber up onto a ledge, and while Canliss and I were helping people up, a GIANT BEAR came out of the woods and attacked Nikita and Rhavin. It was the biggest bear I´d ever seen, and it took a big bite of Rhavin and then reached over to attack Nikita.
This was no time to think-- A giant bear had Rhavin in it´s paws and was going after Nikita. She wouldn´t even be a mouthful! I lept down off the ledge and furiously attacked the bear. I could see Canliss´s missiles streaking around me and Karea´s lightning flashed and the bear died with a awful bellow. I suppose since we were waiting for the gates to open and let evil out upon the world, we´d be a little more ready for things like rabid bears to attack us, but I still couldn´t really get myself to believe we were about to do it. I started getting nervous about how we really were about to save the world and we were going to have to start doing it TONIGHT, when the gates opened, and we couldn´t stop until it was all saved. And the world is a pretty big place.
That night, exactly at midnight, the gates opened. I hadn´t been sleeping well, so I was all ready to wake up and start saving the world. I´m sure it would have been better to save the world on a good night´s sleep and a hearty breakfast, but life isn´t always fair.
We started in. It was like the mountain was glass, and the tunnel behind the gates had been burned out of it. It was smooth like marble. Jvennika cast a spell so she could see traps, and she said the whole floor was trapped. Saving the world was going to be a little more difficult than we had thought.
We lit a lantern, and moved forward a little, and saw that the tunnel was blocked by a spikey wall that ended five feet from the ceiling. How were we going to get to the wall, let alone climb it without ripping ourselves to shreds?
Nikita cast a spell that made us think that there was a bridge going over the trapped floor and over the spiked wall. Boy, she is so smart! I wish I could do things like that. Unfortunately, both Jvennika and Karea´s puppy, Ulfie, couldn´t believe in the bridge, so we had to carry them. Jvennika rode piggyback on me, and Karea carried Ulfie.
Canliss had turned into a bat and was scouting ahead (but not too far ahead), and he saw these big shapes behing the spikey wall (which, the closer we got, the spikier it looked). As we neared the edge of the wall, and I was ducking down to pass through the space between the ceiling and the top of the wall, we saw these giants coming for us, with big knives on sticks!
Nikita said she could hold the bridge unless she fell unconscious, so on we went. I started forward to clear a path with Last Laugh (which was hard, with Jvennika on my back, but I´m pretty good), Rhavin moved forward, and Karea ran down to the bottom of the bridge to drop Ulfie off. Which would be about the time when Nikita got hit by one of the giants and her bridge disappeared.
All of a sudden, I was falling, with Jvennika on my back. Somehow, I managed to miss the spikey wall and land more or less on my feet, with Jvennika on top of me. Much better than the other way around, I think. I was able to land swinging, and was able to get through several of the giants pretty quickly. They were big, but they weren´t very tough.
Nikita cast a spell that made them have to take off their armor, and we went through them pretty quckly after that. I could hear booming sounds coming from another set of spiked walls in the distance, where Canliss was taking care of some more giants. He was able to cast spells at them and still keep away from their weapons. Dosn´t seem like much fun to me...
When things had calmed down, we set our minds to figure out how to get Nikita and Rhavin down from the spiky wall, and Karea and Ulfie over it. Poor Nikita was all cut up from the spike, and Rhavin didn´t look so good either. Karea got the good idea to cast an ice wall against the spikey wall, and Rhavin was able to pull her and Ulfie up with a rope. Then it was just a matter of jumping down.
At around the same time, Jvennika saw that the whole floor in here was trapped. So we kept trying to figure out what it was and how to get aorund it. Karea used her sword to see invisible things, and saw that the floor where she was was covered in invisible spikey things. Once she gathered them up, she was able to walk on the floor. We tried gathering them up on our side, even though we couldn´t see them (Rhavin said they were ´caltrops´), and got enough out of the way so we wouldn´t step on them. Someone noticed that there was sticky stuff on the caltrops, which Nikita found out was poison from cave scorpions. I´m sure glad none of us stepped on one of those caltrops!
We all got back together to camp in a corner of the room. Some of the giants that Canliss was fighting shrunk down really small and ran away out this tiny door. I hope they don´t come back. I wonder what you call a giant that´s shrunk down? A little giant? I just hope they don´t bring any of their buddies back here when we´re trying to sleep.

love,

Ester