Ep 1304: Energies, fiends, and does that tiefling have wings?!

OK, summer shenanigans has kept us off our game. Vacations, families, meetings, things have just been weird all summer. Hopefully we'll return to our normal schedule now?

When last we left Tsedek asked for some time to try to find his long lost brother, and proceeded to cast scry. Only ... it went awry. Scry allows the castor to see in their mind's eye what they're looking in on. Think fly on the wall. It is not visible to bystanders. What actually happened is a growing swirling purple mass of energy. It spiraled out to surround us in about a 50' area.

Tsedek is kneeling in the center, concentrating hard on his "scry". He is not bothered by the swirling energies. The rest of us though are being drawn towards the center of the energy. Leoven has used his cloak of arachnid to kinda brace himself, Itanis is in front of him. They're on the let's call it North side of Tsedek. On the South side of Tsedek we have Magnus, who at one point started getting dragged towards the center of the swirling energies, so he just planted himself like a linebacker. Elle and her quiet sidekick Gearbox are holding their own behind Magnus.

As we're standing there figuring out what's going on, Itanis casts wall of force. The idea being to keep us from getting sucked in. Unfortunately the spell became a glowing ball of energy with a tail being dragged into the center of the force ... and Itanis started sliding towards the center. Leoven did attempt to grab at Itanis but failed. Next thing we knew, they both got sucked in.

So Magnus goes barreling in. Paladins can be a smidge protective sometimes. Elle, cursing like mad in dwarvish, follows him in ...

... and we find ourselves in our original positions. Gearbox is still OK behind Elle. Only now, super imposed over the kneeling Tsedek is a very fuzzy image of a tiefling. It's hard to tell, it's almost like looking through very frosted glass, but he seems to have a similar build to Tsedek but the dude has wings (which is not normal in tiefling world ... horns, tails yes, wings no).

And out pops two fiends. One is white, one is black, right in front of Tsedek still kneeling in the center. Tsedek continues concentrating on his spell shouting "Must go deeper!"

Magnus was like yes! Fiends! Must kill them! and steps right up to the fiends to bring the hammer of death upon them. Solid painful hit too. The fiend who was not hit flinched. Leoven promptly goes into machine gun mode, doing even more pain to the fiends.

The fiends promptly made a 15' area pitch black, even our dark vision isn't working. Elle was like huh, ok, fireball right where she last saw everyone as she didn't hear anyone move (she did of course exclude Tsedek, Magnus, herself, gearbox, and Itanis from the damage ... Leoven was just out of range). One fiend drops dead at this point. Itanis then whips out his caltrops of doom and gets 9 solid hits, dropping the second fiend dead.

With Tsedek's wanting to "go deeper", and it's difficult to resist the pull of the energies, the entire party went through again. Elle was last, she's still muttering about rude things under her breath in dwarvish.

On the other side of this portal we find ourselves back in our original positions. Tsedek in the center, Itanis and Leoven on the north side of Tsedek, Magnus and Elle/Gearbox on the south side of Tsedek.

The "fuzziness" around this strange tiefling is clearing up, it's now a lightly frosted glass. He is standing superimposed over the kneeling Tsedek and the similarities are clearly now. And the strange tiefling really does have wings and appears to have an angel over his shoulder.

By the way, throughout this whole weirdness, Magnus is not getting any sense of "bad things" and in fact the strange tiefling seems to be a good guy to Magnus.

But, as before, two fiends pop out. This pair are both green. Still just as creepy, and right in front of Tsedek again. Itanis flings his caltrops at one of the fiends, then follows it up with a scorching ray wand. The fire damage does not do damage however. Leoven releases arrows at the same fiend that Itanis hit, and then Elle follows up with a centered fireball again. The fiends did take damage from her fireball as she is a Fire Adept.

All this chaos around Tsedek he almost failed his concentration check on the "scry", causing the swirling energies around us to kind of shudder. Magnus then goes on full smack down mode on the one fiend everyone's been targeting ... hitting it for painful amounts of damage but the creature is still alive.

The seriously hurt fiend takes a swipe at Magnus, doing a little damage. The not as hurt fiend decided it didn't like the fact that the little elf could hurt him with his fire so marched right up to her and took a couple of swipes, missing. Magnus did attempt a swipe at the one who walked towards to Elle but missed.

And that's where we left this fight! More next week! Hopefully ...