Overview

Five days to go to the Suns Blessing festival.

After battling dire wolves and the one-handed demon, a hike through the difficult terrain was performed to the very center of the black area. There, a pond of black water and four druidic stones were waiting in silence. The black matter in the pond was leaking over, dripping to all directions, like creating black veins around the surrounding forest.

Green interludes

Then, something green appeared, three meters above the pond. It slowly grew bigger. It had claws. Dulcimer, Lestra and Onni started to shoot bolts on it.

Slowly, the matter grew, revealing another clawed hand and feet. Finally, the whole creature became visible, after which the slow falling turned to ordinary falling and the body of the creature smashed in the black water.

With relatively big arms, the actual creature was pretty small. The pond was very shallow, leaving most of the corpse visible.

Soon, another demon dropped, in slow motion. It was also killed with bolts before fully emerging.

Headless acrobatics

After some basic physics tests, Onni and Dulcimer teamed up as a humanoid pyramid, with Onni on top. Keeping his shield up, Onni ascended into the area. For observers, it looked like Onni's upper body disappeared.

For Onni, the sensation was very colourful, noisy and fast-moving. He found himself in an illusionary fountain, in a fairytale twilight village, surrounded by gnomes. The gnomes were gathering around him, but they were speaking so fast Onni had a hard time to catch any of the words they were saying.

Sitting on top of Dulcimers shoulders, Onni crouched down to inform the others what has he seen. They decided to switch roles with the warforged.

Living machine from the engineer's dream

When Dulcimer got up, the area around the fountain was empty, but got soon populated by amazed gnomes. He managed to signal Onni where to move, so that nee could climb up from the fountain. The villagers made no effort to stop nee doing that, and once Dulcimer got nee head off from the falling area, the gnomes sped down so that communication was possible.

After initial moments of surprise the gnomes started to help other heroes to climb up. Meanwhile, conversation between Dulcimer and the town secretary Marky Pifanadomp, surrounded by tens of interested villages, was going on.

First off, they were very happy to get visitors. They had had human visitors in past (How long ago? They couldn't tell.), but a living machine guest was beyond their imagination. Are you really real? individuals from the village came to ask all the time. Lestras appearance got them also extra exited, although they were very happy and generous towards all of the new acquaintancies.

Portal magicks went wrong

In past, the gnomes had learned about cosmology, distant lands, the planes and portal magic from travellers. For travelling, they were not interested at all, in case it would mean to leave their village. But they were very hungry for knowledge, to know about distant places.

Nix was busy discussing cartography with chief executive Hans-Helmut Pillowrock and his students. With the blessing of mayor Gundula Goggelnheim, in exchange against some of Nix's maps, the heroes were allowed to pick up "an item of magicks" from the treasury, one for each.

But the portal magic. About a year ago, they had an incident with when testing out portal magic, that was just before the black mountain of foggy matter appeared above the market square. It was triangular shape, pointing down, as if it would be a funnel to another plane of existence. It started to leak demons. It didn't stop. What can we do? Lets open another portal, to a distant place that is safe for these kind of creatures.

Later, someone figured out, was it the town secretary, that we should create a slow-falling area between the drop zone, to be able to study the demons in detail while they area slowy descending. Then, someone figured out, it surely was the mayor herself, that they should start the practice of systematically insulting each and every demon while it is falling.

And so, the university of insults was found. "The kids are making great progress", mayor explains. "We are so proud!"

The law, the excitement

What to do? Heroes tried to explain the damage caused to the woods of Oalian. This was taken in seriously, and everyone started to think, what could we do. "Should we move the destination of the lower portal?" someone asked. "Let's have a vote!", someone else shouted.

And so, all gnomes started to cheer and run around. They gathered to vote, but when the counting was done, unfortunately it turned out to be an unsuccessful act: "Everyone didn't vote in the same way". "What can we do?" "Let's have the fate decide!"

And so, all gnomes started to cheer and they ran to another official building. This one had an arena, where a complex mathematical problem was presented. A baby gnome was set to solve it. Arena was full of spectators, all cheering and totally focusing on the problem.

No one paid attention to heroes, who figured out the solution and with Lestra sneaking close, gave a helping hand with a bit of arcane magic.

You can stay as long as you want, but not after you intimidate with your narrow-minded (boring) ideas

"Sure, will place the destination portal on the same plane where demons are originating from. Piece of cake!" However, Nix cartography and the knowledge of the official maps and planes office were not in match. Long story short, Dulcimer couldn't talk sense to the engineers. When discussing about the whereabouts of the destination portal and the whole process of the double-portal thing, the conversation lead to an argument, were the guests were seem to be too much of a trouble and were pushed back to the place they came from.

But before that, a party was held, in which some of the heroes were taking part by sleeping or meditating and others by proper village traditions.

NPC's met

• mayor Gundula Goggelnheim
• town secretary Marky Pifanadomp
• chief executive Hans-Helmut Pillowrock

Items of interest

• one gnomish item of magicks from the twilight towns vault, free of choice

Level up, to 4th level.