Ep 1211: Has anybody seen Tsedek?

Last episode had our brave band of adventurers battling mechanical tendrils that were trying to knock us off of our "walkway" and into the deadly ooze below. The walkways are actually tipped over portions of towers and roofs of buildings, so not exactly stellar choices for walking on.

After that fight Elle asks each person in the party if they are willing to dimension door with her. The way the spell works is she can port herself and one other willing person. She needed that blanket permission for our safety net to work. The safety net is if someone falls in, she dives in after them and dimension doors us both back out. The problem with that is she will take acid damage so if she's too badly injured she would not be able to do so. They are all willing to let Elle dimension door them out of the ooze if need be, and she is physically able to take the damage.

We realized after that fight that going "overland" was not a great choice as there's random gaps and not a clear path to center of town. So Itanis came up with this great plan. He created a 10' diameter stone "hamster ball" with an outer sphere that made it indestructible and weightless. Elle protested at first as she didn't like the idea of being trapped in something, but after some more discussion she agreed to do it.

So all 5 of us pile into this hamster ball and then it got weirder. Magnus summons his war horse and asks the creature to horse-kick the hamster ball as far as he could, with the plan being we'll hamster the rest of the way to the clock tower in the center of town. Now, this war horse is the size of let's say a Friesian-Draft cross. He's big. He's heavily muscled. He carries the over 300lbs of Magnus plus the 120lbs of Elle all the time. He kicked the hamster ball half way to the clock tower.

Stop laughing.

We then hamster rolled the hamster ball the rest of the way to the clock tower. Itanis then casts spider climb on four of us (Leoven has this through a cloak), and we scramble out and up the clock tower. OK, most of us, Tsedek decided to climb a palace looking building next door. So while we're up the clock tower getting a "birds eye view" and allowing Magnus time to do his locate object spell, Tsedek disappears. We do not actually know where he is at this point.

Magnus was successful in locating the object so now we have to figure out how to get to the item, as it's under the ooze in another building. While we were up the clock tower starting that discussion, out of no where came another hamster ball. We were all up in arms when she calls out to us in a semi-friendly manner. Magnus did his detect, and she did not ping as fiend or evil or any other form of "must kill" so we started conversing with her. Turns out her name is Mary and she's a warlock. She's currently trying to find her traveling partner and saw how we traveled and decided to try it herself. She did share that she thinks there are some vehicles in this other square building that may help us get under the ooze.

The other four adventurers do not know what follows:

So Tsedek decides to look through some holes in the roof of the palace looking building, and finds valuable looking items. He's an arcane rogue, his business is procurement and acquisitions. So he goes into the palace looking building and picks up one of the valuable looking items, using mage hand to retrieve it from the ooze. As soon as his skin touched the first item, he popped out of this plane.

And lands on another plane in some sort of mech-suit with levers and buttons and such. He does some investigation and figures out it's a stone on the statue that has to contact skin to activate, so he pops back to our plane. He's completely enamored of this.

Then he decides to press his luck and uses mage hand again to retrieve the other item. As soon as his hand touched that item, he was popped out to another plane and is currently in the presence of a shadow king.

And that's where we leave all five adventurers, though the main party has no idea where Tsedek is at this point.

There was much laughter at the hamster ball.