Episode 56: Li'l Bonkers Gets in the Mix

Somewhere in the depths of the temple, Tiamat was sleeping...

Well, not totally sleeping. Having been slain in avatar form, Captain Bonkers was now back in the blue neck of Tiamat, and he did not feel good. As his consciousness tried to come to terms with his physicalness, he decided that the process of being slain out-of-body and telepulted into the Dragon Queen's form was not a pleasant one.

He also wondered how many times it would be allowed to happen.

As the obdurate, stinging wasps of feeling slowly returned to the dragon's seven limbs, Bonkers noticed two things. One was that his bulk was laid out on a large disc of stone - one that seemed to be slowly rotating under a dull amber light. The distant wall seemed to be moving past at a crawl, and various glyphs of warding gave the sense of some serious protective magics.

The other thing he noticed was that somewhere, not to far away, one Hells of a melee appeared to be going on...

Li'l Bonkers, the animated-then-emasculated stone dwarf guardian of the temple had had enough in the way of paradigm-shifting events for one day. His sense of time may have been fuzzy, but he was pretty sure it had been eons since anything like this had happened to him. It was far more usual for a party of intruders to accidentally animate him and then die at his hands (or as would occasionally would happen when other party members tried to help, the hands of his magically-summoned twins) than it was to be so thoroughly humiliated like this.

For not only had he been whittled down to half his height by a rather surprising obsidian-laced sandstorm (who were these intruders, anyway?) but he was now being compelled by the meanest, largest, reddest one to skitter down the hall on his stumpy femurs and attack his old friends in the Dragon Guard.

Looking to make a big impression on his new employers, Li'l Bonkers headed towards the six heavily-armored, lasgun-toting Draconoids and... slipped. His velocity took him (not for the last time that night) into the heart of his adversaries, and while he took down four of the six, Koresh leapt into the chaos and coconutted the remaining two, causing their helmets to short-circuit and arc with strange, blue light.

Dolorous then flew in, and while she managed to deal some acidic breath damage on the two sparking 'noids, she also learned just how ouchy the lasguns could be as she was shout out of the air by a recumbent Draco.

What followed was a combination of slapstick, vaudeville and Baldur's Gate as Captain Bonkers returned to the fray and The Jade Scarab drew the attention of Snow Yellow.

(The most humorous passage of play involved Li'l Bonkers feeling out the metal door just before it was blown open, with the result being that he was hurtled along at great speed towards The Enigma, who couldn't quite evade the dwarven missile and took Massive Dwarven Damage to the tune of -8 hit points and a sucking chest wound. LB then extricated himself, charged Snow Yellow, and (owing to another horrible die roll) found himself lodged in her Hammerspace and groping about for some loot.

In other news, the Jade Scarab weilded the Shiv of Healing on The Enigma and steadfastly failed to kill him.

Wo0t.

Episode 55: Of Pistachios and Kings

It finally worked.

The Shiv of Healing, crafted from the blue crystal that was harvested from the disintegrated hallway deep within Chang Kai Eel's fortress during what had to be one of the Weirder Sessions (granted, there have been many... how do you begin to rank them?) of the entire campaign, finally saved a life.

The corpulent sack of flesh that was Captain Bonkers rose and thanked the Gods that he'd been spared. He'd been saved from an ignominious death at the hands of Inglorious Gravity, and longed to fight and pillage and maim and burn and kill once more.

(15 minutes later. I shit you not.)

With a click, the secret door locked behind the Captain and Stonehenge, and a vile green gas filled the hallway. While Stonehenge melded with the hallway to escape the poison, Captain Bonkers decided he'd had just about enough of living on this goddamned planet and inhaled deeply the miasmic vapours that would certainly bring him to his inevitable doom.

Outside the chamber, Koresh was busy trying to reduce to slag the statues in the temple foyer. His barrage of superheated steam had not only reduced a third of the statues to rubble, but had vaporized the poisonous coating of said statue, creating a Sinkhole of Lethality in the foyer, just outside the Hallway of Imminent Peril, where the Captain was throwing his last hit points away like a drunken, giggling septagenarian throwing her last few nickels into a sordid slot machine.

With his last bit of dying psychic energy, Bonkers reached out and connected with The Enigma, and with his last bit of will managed to whisper in the faintest of breaths: "Need help. (Just you)." Responding quickly to his fallen comrade, The Enigma raced into the Sinkhole, threw open the door, just managed to reach the Captain, throw his foot into the closing trap door, and pull him out of the hallway... before he died.

The Jade Scarab managed to race into the Sinkhole, fail a saving throw, and take 36 points of damage.

Dolorous, it must be said, watched most of the goings on with a detached wisdom that can only come from nearly dying once too many times.

Perhaps the others will learn.