A Guide to Doors, Red Demonoids, Conga Lines, and Freeze Golems Thus Far
As with all stories, I will start at the beginning of the occurences.
Back during Fall, Captain Orion was holding a fight practice in one of the militia’s buildings. A well-sized group had gathered for the evening’s practice, but during a moment when Orion stepped out in search of something since forgotten, a strange door rimmed in a glowing blue light opened, with a “scientist” and a healer stepping out to greet us. They asked us for our help, which we of course accepted, and ushered us through this door before going into the full explanation.
See the doors, according to both their explanation and the help my fellow travelers gave me in understanding this, act as these “portal” things that can send people between “dimensions” and worlds and the like. I for one could not follow along with these things very well and am working on looking into stories to learn more about these, but what was more important was the waypoints. Waypoints, as I can best recall, are these places of power that are often found and kept safe by the rangers of the group this scientist and healer are with. When it comes to both waypoints and the people who deal with these waypoints and doors, things can become corrupted, causing them to lose hope in a more tangible method than normal. Sometimes, through defeating these red demon-like creatures that often would try to take over the waypoints, sources of hope would be dropped, which could in theory be used on people and waypoints that had lost hope.
In this particular case, the scientist and healer needed our help to free a waypoint. The healer aided us in navigating through portals and surviving the onslaught of the red demonoids, though - as I personally was dead when it occurred - I found out after one narrow escape that the healer had been left behind at one door, leaving her to barely escape and be quite frustrated when she did. We also commonly found ourselves in a few similar “hallways” where this “janitor” seemed to frequent, as though in an infinite loop of cleaning these hallways. We ran into the janitor again in a later instance, but this particular one ended in the success of our group as some of our fellow travelers who were skilled in puzzles were able to solve multiple to free the waypoint. We were returned to the Chimeron militia building as if in the same moment we had left, oddly enough.
It was not long until each of us were asked for again. Having frustrated the healer, the scientist alone was there to greet us. She explained to us how this time, unlike previously, the problem her rangers had faced was not with a waypoint but rather with an “Object of Power”, or “OOP”. It at the moment seemed to have some problems with shooting lightning bolts, which we immediately confirmed as we went through a door to deal with the problem. With part of the group trying to solve the corruption puzzle and the part protecting these people, we eventually solved a puzzle that ultimately caused the OOP to head off.
Side note found by a friend: Do not touch any strange circular items, no matter how it attempts to convince you to do so. This friend who of course did so was trapped in a case of doing the entire lightning bolt room over again, a process that took hours to complete.
In pursuit of the OOP through a hallway, we found ourselves in a different yet even more peculiar situation. Music rang through the room as a “conga line” that repeatedly split off to attack us traveled through the room. Any part that we defeated would simply be revived to rejoin this conga line, causing us to realize that the only way to defeat this conga line was through killing each part’s soul, a process that took a long time as we constantly had to try to outpace the revival tricks of the OOP. It again retreated through a few hallways, leading us through yet another increasingly strange room that seemed to change before our eyes. This took a while to pass through as some friends were more… frazzled by these changes than others, requiring one to even be knocked out and dragged along to manage to escape the room.
We ended up at a crossroads following these two rooms, three pathways that were easily navigated with a “Find the Path” spell. We found ourselves within a room where red demonoids swarmed behind a barrier, with the OOP in the center of the mess. Through much hard work and the janitor coming in to inform us that he had a way to cleanse the OOP with aid of the sources of hope we had been collecting, we managed to steal the OOP for just long enough to turn its red glow into that of blue yet again. With a last minute cantrip used to identify the newly cleansed OOP, we learned that it could be charged with a pool spell to be infinitely used, which we agreed to discuss next time we reconvened.
During our most recent excursion through the doors, after charging the OOP with Repair Armor we found ourselves to be stuck primarily within just one massive room. The scientist and multiple of her rangers had been trapped throughout the room, including a few that were trapped by these odd golems that to us appeared to freeze people, though even should their eyes be open these people afterwards seemed to have no recollection of what occurred specifically while they were frozen - I was frozen once or twice myself, hence why I am aware of this. We found that, should the OOP be held in a circle, all those within the circle were either unfrozen or remained unaffected by these golems. Through making use of this while others managed to solve puzzles, we managed to free the scientist and the rangers. This, of course, caused us to become very confused when seemingly suddenly the rangers turned on us, affected by the red lights. Every time we cut them down, unless they were impaled they consistently returned to a circle of red energy, which when crossed by one of our fellow travelers caused them to be affected by the energy in a similar manner to the rangers. Despite our best efforts, we could not find a way to deal with this evil, hardly managing to make it out with all of our non-affected travelers alive.
I, for one, look forward to our next excursion in hopes that we can find more ways to bring hope into these dark places and thwart any that continue to seep hope out of good people. As my people say, act with wisdom, but act.
Editor's Note: Thursday Night Questing is a series of mini events for newbies. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/smas-tnq/home.