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Behold My Army Of Steves

Last week, the party successfully rescued Aedan from the four massive tentacles by waiting for him to teleport back to them. Azoreas created a new wall crevice for them to take shelter in while they figured out what to do. Unfortunately, that provided only limited protection from the tentacles, which had the power to smash through rock to reach the party. That problem was readily solved by simply digging even deeper into the wall to give the party time to think.

After some consideration, the party decided on a daring and audacious plan to reach the bottom safely and find the source of the tentacles: they would dig through the rock wall outside the crevasse, allowing them to completely ignore the tentacles. With the titanic strength of Craggles and the destructive aura of Azoreas, Craggles dug through the rock like butter, and the party waited for two hours while he dug. After that time, the party joined Craggles at the base and he struck out towards the wall to see how close they were to the bottom. When he broke through the rock wall back into the main crevasse, the party saw that the mist was gone - as was Craggles. A group of tentacles grabbed him the instant he made contact with the main crevasse, and despite his incredible strength, managed to drag him down out of sight. The party immediately sprinted for the new opening and jumped bravely into the abyss.

As they lept from the opening and fell into darkness, Brand's light revealed the source of the tentacles. A solid mass of dark, rubbery flesh occupied almost the entire bottom of the crevasse. The outside of its body was ringed with hundreds of tentacles, and the inside of its body was marked by great petals, like that of a flower, interspersed with straight slits. In the air beneath the party, Craggles was being dragged downward at immense speed by a group of four tentacles. He was tearing the tentacles apart as he fell, but was unable to stop his descent. The party charged bravely downward through the air, and was greeted by new swarms of tentacles flying up at them. However, the tentacles seemed to have trouble tracking the party accurately through the air, and the party was smashed against various walls rather than being grabbed and dragged down. Along the southern edge of the crevasse, Shanky and Aedan noticed a familiar-looking magical gate1, like those the party encountered during their escape from their time as cultists.

Shanky stopped falling like a rock and ran along the wall to reach the gate, and was soon joined by most of the rest of the party. Craggles did not join, as he was busy discovering that the slits in the monster's body opened into massive spiked mouths2 and narrowly avoiding being eaten by said mouths. Just out of sight, Taethorn was being much less successful at that same task. As the party bickered over whether the gate went anywhere3, what to do about the monster, and how to rescue Craggles, Shanky solved the gate puzzle and opened the gate into a sanctum gate room4. Seeing an opportunity to escape, and tired of being scraped against spikes and slammed into walls, Craggles took a heroic leap off of one of the monster's tentacles and crash-landed into the party in front of the gate. With everyone important safe, the party fled through the portal, pursued by a horde of tentacles and the sounds of Taethorn trying desperately to survive.

The party arrived in the gate room, and immediately intimidated the meager assortment of cultists in the room. The cultists were proud servants of Demogorgon, and seemed to be surprised by the existence of the monster and unaware of the presence of devils in the crevasse. According to them, their fellow cultists were performing a massive ritual upstairs in the service of Demogorgon, and they were waiting to be summoned to play their part. Periodically, elder cultists would come to retrieve others from their sleeping quarters to join the ritual. The party decided to hide with the cultists in their sleeping quarters and rest before trying to interrupt the ritual, as they were reaching the limit of their resources. Shanky decided to hide in a side room to spy on the elder cultists when they retrieved minor cultists for the ritual.

Several hours later, a group of elder cultists came through the gate as predicted. To the party's relief, the cultists they had intimidated did not betray them, and Shanky was able to see the newcomers without interruption. However, his supernaturally acute eyes revealed that the cultists were not what they seemed. In fact, they were not cultists at all, but devils wearing the skin of cultists! After they left, he told the party about this revelation, and they realized that if they could prove to the other cultists that their leaders were devils, they would willingly help the party fight against the devils. Before sleeping, they concocted a plan to reveal the devils' true nature.

The next morning, after resting, they set up an ambush for the next wave of "elder cultists" to arrive. When the gate opened, Azoreas detonated a destructive pulse that destroyed the skin-suits the devils wore, revealing their devilish nature. The cultists were horrified, and helped the party kill the isolated devils. With the support of the cultists, the party travelled to the four sanctums that did not contain monstrous unholy rituals and recruited all of the cultists from those sanctums. When they finished, they had the support of over three hundred cultists, and they prepared their assault on the ritual itself.

When they entered the fifth sanctum, the home of the ritual, they were horrified and fatigued by the power of the dark energy emanating from the ritual. However, they were not deterred, and they started working out how to get their army of cultists to help in the fight. The ritual itself took place at the top of the narrow elevator shaft that led to the base of the Pit5, which made it impossible to simply walk all of the cultists into the ritual to disrupt it. However, with the help of Azoreas' destructive power, they created a battle plan which would enable over a hundred cultists with magical movement abilities to enter the fight simultaneously. When they were all ready, Azoreas disintegrated the ceiling above them and the party rose into the base of the Pit, accompanied by a hundred teleporting cultists. The Pit itself was empty, but hundreds of cultists lined its outside edge above the party. When the party arrived, they began cackling maniacally and shifting their forms, discarding their skin-suits and assuming their true forms. The battle had begun...

  1. Well, Shanky noticed a familiar-looking magical gate near tiny sigils on the ground corresponding to the numbers and colors of the orbs, and Aedan noticed a strange arc of stone that didn't match the general decor at all.
  2. They look like a Sarlaac pit when opened.
  3. Caused primarily by the profound stubbornness and ignorance of Azoreas.
  4. When the party escaped from the cultists several weeks ago, each of the five Sanctums in their prison area had a corresponding gate room. This looked like one of them, including colored orbs on pedestals.
  5. The Pit was the location where all of the prisoners, animals, and valuables were held last time the party was in cultist sanctums. It is warded by a powerful slow time field, but the party and all of the cultists know the ritual to pass through the field unhindered.

Stupid Awards

Brand Azoreas Craggles Aedan Taito Shanky Taethorn Everyone
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