The Dauntless II

Pendergrast pauses for a moment, then takes a deep breath. "I will not allow you to bully me into allowing you to interfere with my archaeology again!" He then drops the tindertwig onto what he was pouring out of the sack, and it catches fire, which begins following a trail into the temple as Pendergrast draws his blunderbuss.

As soon as he drops the tindertwig the group springs into action, biting and slicing him while he blasts at the group with his gun. However, after one shot, he sprints between them into the temple, reloading as they follow and taking a heavy, burning cut from Suki as he passes that lights his clothes aflame. Before he can reload, the group falls on him again with tooth and steel, and the flames on his clothes overwhelm him, slaying him as he stuffs his blunderbuss with shot.

After stripping him of everything of value, Dorrak hoists the corpse over his shoulder and unceremoniously tosses it over the cliff. "Good riddance."

The next morning the group approaches the black totem mentioned in Nketiah's note. The group notes a smoldering campfire in the area, but seeing no actual enemies approaches the totem. Like the totems before, it reacts to their presence, and a beam of darkness streams from its eyes to strike Dorrak blind, and moments later a very Draconic Charau-Ka appears.

Figuring he'd draw the totem's fire, as it surely couldn't do much worse to him, Dorrak gradually approaches the totem, taking several strikes from the Charau-Ka's tail as he tries, as Suki, Antoinette, and the wargs continually surround the Charau-Ka, wailing on it with the assistance of a spiritual starknife from Django.

In the midst of the fight the Charau-Ka lands a set of nasty blows upon Antoinette, dropping the were-croc. [[Placeholder for Django reaction and spiritual weapon killing blow]].

WIth no other distractions, the group waits for Dorrak to knock over the totem before approaching it and together destroying the foul device.

Renali reports another pillar due east, this one indigo, and although she wasn't able to get closer than a bird's eye look without endangering herself, she did see figures standing by it.

A sinister pall seems to hang over this area of the forest. Where jungle birds, frogs, and insects once sang in an deafening cacophony, there is now only a menacing silence. Ahead, an ominous pillar topped with an indigo carving of a dragon’s head looms in the middle of a tangled clearing. Standing vigil in front of it are four frog-like humanoids, although these look nothing like the boggards. Each of their giant eyes has a low but visible indigo glow. Three carry bows while one holds a staff. The latter notices you as you come into visual range and silently raises their staff, pointing in your direction, and the others, equally silently, raise their weapons to you as the head swivels and fires a beam at Antoinette that hits the ground by her feet.

Antoinette, having turned into a crocodile when you hit the swampy area, immediately swims over while the others draw attention. The gripplis fire arrows and sling magic at you all, but they're incredibly ineffectual, as Antoinette deftly dodges the pillar's beams and knocks it down with a swipe of her tail. As it crashes to the ground and the head deactivates, the gripplis blink wildly, the purple sheen vanishing from their eyes. The caster looks at the pillar and then at you, then says something in Mwangi.

Dorrak makes an apologetic gesture, "No Mwangi," he says in Taldan with a weak smile, shaking his head to try to emphasize his point, hoping that Mwangi would be the same between the languages and 'no' might be understood.

The greenspeaker frowns, but nods. She gives a low bow, indicating for her archers to follow, then literally hops away into the trees.

As you progress far to the east, you find an area where the jungle is shockingly clear; an actual road, albeit one of upturned dirt in a passage cleared of vegetation, cuts through the jungle towards the east.

As they come upon the road, Antoinette pauses in confusion. "That's... unexpected. Perhaps we should investigate this further?"

"Agreed," Dorrak nods, and has Nova quickly check for signs of anything passing along. She soon smells kobold, boggard, and charau-ka, among many others. After she reports this, Dorrak hums, "Sounds like Cinderclaws. We definitely should."

Following the road, you come to its end as it opens to a large clearing. It's massive, which is fortunate for you as it means none of the many figures within notice you before you have a chance to duck into the treeline for cover. A large pit has been dug into the ground at the center of this clearing, coating everything nearby with yellowish mud. A rough camp has been assembled around the mine.

Circling around the camp towards the large dinosaur caged at the north end, the party is surprised when a demon drops from the canopy right in front of them, coating half the party in spores and screeching. The party is surprised again as a moment later vines burst from the spores coating Dorrak, weaving through his flesh.

As combat is joined, Django backs up to provide his usual healing support, while the rest of the group wails on the Demon as they do, the Cold Iron of Suki's Fauchard especially biting at its abyssal flesh. In the midst of the fight Suki attempts to sweep demon's feet out from under it, but it catches on the underbrush, being wrenched from her hands.

The demon, quite irritated with the sting of the cold iron, picks the fauchard back up, and stabs Suki with it, the flames bursting out to cover her as they'd done many of her enemies since she'd gotten it. The rest of the party lashes out in retaliation, and Dorrak removes the Demon's head a moment later.

The demon dead, Django kills the vines on Dorrak while the rest help pat out the flames covering Suki before they can do too much damage.

Continuing your path along the treeline, you reach the cage without further discovery. This solid-looking pen is made from thick logs lashed together with lengths of vines. Though the cage is crudely made, the sheer mass and weight of the logs gives the pen solid support. The western side of the pen is attached to a half dozen vines connected to counterweights and a wheel that, if turned, would open the entire side.

Approaching the cage cautiously, Antoinette attempts to get the attention of the dinosaur inside. Though at first it seems apprehensive and defensive, she manages to get close to the cage. She gently offers it some jungle leaves from the trees the group had been moving through. "Easy there. We are not here to hurt you."

The mokole-mbembe whips her tail threateningly at first, indicating her uncertainty, but Antoinette's soft tone of voice and offering of food settle her down enough that she's able to feed the beast.

Antoinette grabs some more leaves and begins to open the cage. Once she has opened it she tries to coax the mokole-mbembe over to her with the plants.

Faced with the choice between delicious leafy greens and vengeance, the mokele-mbembe chooses vengeance. She charges into the camp with a roar, the party quick to follow on her heels, and the charau-ka and boggards of the camp respond in kind, rushing to meet the dinosaur when they see her angry form rushing at them. Before the full engagement can happen, though, Dorrak and Nova are ambushed and kept tangled up by a trio of spiders who leap from the massive pile of mud near the dinosaur's pen. Further muddying the matter up, as they pass by the hut on the east end, the door opens, and an irate black-scaled kobold carrying a staff storms out. "What the devil is going-oh shit." Suki and Antoinette rush to try to quickly shut her down, but she steps further back into the house to launch a fireball at the party, and they're forced to disengage from her to protect Django from a furious charau-ka assaulting him from behind as it climbs out of the pit. The other charau-ka and boggards busy themselves with the mokele-mbembe, who tramples through many of them leaving boggard corpses in her wake, but ultimately she is slain by the swarm of bodies assaulting her. The large target downed, the monkeys charge at Antoinette, who in her haste also exposed herself to a dragon pillar at the bottom of the pit, though its violet eye beams fail to hit her. Heavily injured, she and Django fall back to regroup with Suki and Dorrak, and the four make their stand against the monkeys once the spiders are dead, finally felling them before easily clearing up their much weaker boggard allies. In the middle of the mix, two of the rank and file boggard warriors fail to climb out of the pit with their brothers and are forced to run slowly around the pathway up it. As the fight winds down and is clearly going in the Dauntless's favor, Hezle drops a noxious smoke bomb and vanishes, and once the last boggard in the mix dies, she emerges from beneath a table and points her staff casually in the distance and fires one last fireball at the two stragglers, who are instantly incinerated. The camp is now nearly empty, save for a small group of charau-ka and boggards lying unconscious on mats at the south end, and the kobold, who raises her hands in a gesture of peace.

"Hezle requests parley," she says calmly, dropping the staff on the ground.

Antoinette approaches cautiously. ”And why should we leave you alive?”

"Hezle was the foreman here, but she was not so willingly or of her own accord," Hezle says. "She and her tribe were forced to work here under pain of death. As chief, Hezle was made foreman, but was never truly in charge. After her tribe got sick and fled in the night, the Cinderclaws kept her under close watch, so she could not follow them. With the Cinderclaws here dead, Hezle will be able to flee, find the other Thornscales and find a new home, far away from these mad dragon cultists. She is sorry for attacking you, but until the tide of battle turned, she did not want to risk being executed as a traitor. In exchange for her life, and as an apology, she will tell you whatever you want to know about the mine, and gift you her favorite staff of fire as a bonus."

Dorrak sheathes his sword and nods seriously. "Then it seems you were as much a victim in this as anyone. We're here to destroy the pillar down there. Can you tell us what it does?"

Antoinette sighs. ”No enmity lasts between us. We’ll clean up here,” she says.

She continues walking past the kobold and over to the fallen dinosaur. She begins examining and collecting some blood from it. ”You did good, girl.”

"Have you ever seen these reptiles or worms do anything?" Dorrak asks, brow furrowed.

Hezle shakes her head. "They just lurk there. Menacingly."

As Hezle departs, the group rests up and heals. After patching up, the group begins working on an idea Antoinette has. They cut down one of the trees in the area and roll it at the totem in the mine without being exposed to its blast. As the totem goes down, two proteans climb up from the pool in the mine chasm and begin attacking. They open with a volley of acid arrows before one manages to grab Antoinette near the edge. Suki knocks it down as the other protean teleports in. The group surrounds it and quickly dispatches it while Suki continues to fight the one she knocked down. With one of the proteans dead, the group is able to collapse on the remaining one and kill it.

As they explore the area, the group finds a building with sick boggards and charau-ka laid out on beds, who Django quickly recongnizes as having the symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

Dorrak listens and stares at them stretched out, frowning. "So if we just leave them, that condemns them to a slow and painful death. As far as I'm concerned, a mercy kill is better than that. So our options are to attempt to provide them some aid, or to swiftly end their lives. The former feels kinder, but it's possible that they then use that mercy to go and kill an innocent, which makes that death our responsibility. Killing them removes that possibility, but it's killing someone sick and defenseless, and denies them any possibility of being something better." He groans, slowly thinking through his code, muttering under his breath about 'evildoers' and 'honour' for a moment. "We should kill them," he decides, looking to the others for input but readying his blade.