[PurpleXVI]

Lorath

The large cavern filled with the eerie echoes of Lorath's chanting as he cast his spells, but nothing came swarming to cut off the noise and he was left in peace to make his lasso. Even with his magically boosted skills, it took him a few tries before he managed to wrap it around the nearest pillar.

His rope creaked alarmingly as the current grabbed him, but he managed to make his way to the first pillar. And so it went, as he made his way across, by the end of it, he had hitting the next pillar with his lasso down to a science, but his arms were also aching. Slow-moving as the river was, dragging himself along with only his skinny arms was a challenge. He also was also finding himself getting winded abnormally easily, it didn't help that he was soaked and freezing, either.

On the opposite side of the river, the corridor much resembled the one he'd come from, same width, same construction, same lack of decoration. The only noticeable difference was that a bit of the luminescent fungi grew there, which made it easier for him to find his way, but also ruined his night sight, meaning that anything that he might have seen a glint of at a distance, he wasn't going to see now.

Advancing slowly, he found that the corridor rose gently, which meant that he was finding himself a good bit lower in the water just a few tens of yards in. Now only submerged to the waist, he found the going a bit easier. Something worrying was going on, though. Intermittently he would catch faint splashes behind him, well behind him, they would always stop when he stopped to listen to them, and they seemed to keep their distance, but they didn't leave him.

Whenever he looked behind him, the glare of the fungus prevented him from seeing anything beyond a few yards behind.

Before he could get too worried, though, a passage opened up on his right, while the main corridor continued on forwards. The passage lead to a spherical room, the bottom being arranged into steps, rather than smooth, the floor of which was covered in shards of crystal. The shards seemed similar to the curved piece Lorath had found earlier. The only decoration aside from the shards was a large pillar in the center, which reached a foot or so above the water.

On the other side of the chamber, a doorway opened into another corridor, also going left to right, same as the one the elf was currently in, though it looked like the path to the right was curving, away from the chamber, in the direction down-river.


Ulik, Evon

Ulik was lulled to sleep by Evon's rhythmic puffing and the faint echoes of arcane syllables coming to him from up-river.


Bas, Balth, Anne, Tamora

Anne got about ten feet up the cliff before her first mishap. The rocks turned out to be smoother than she imagined, though this side of the cliff had been somewhat sheltered from the brief storm they'd weathered earlier, there was still a bit of water which hadn't dried up yet. Her hand slipped, her feet scrabbled for purchase and she fell. Thankfully it was a short fall and the soft ground meant she wasn't hurt, though she did have the wind knocked from her as she landed on her back.

Uninjured and having learned to be a bit more careful, Anne thought it seemed possible to give the climb another try, as she spotted a path of handholds and outcroppings that lead around the wet part.

This time her ascent was more agile and swift, she went up like a spider, her hands instantly finding places to hold where it seemed like there weren't possibly any. She got well above the tree-tops, and managed to scout out the landscape for a while. Assuming that the general line of the mountains was correct, even if they weren't entirely to scale, the group was still somewhere southwest of the route marked on the map, and even the foothills of the mountains were still several days away. If the scale wasn't completely insane, it would probably take them a half-week to get to the trail, and a week to reach the mountains.

As she was about to get down, though, her luck failed her again. She was about fifty feet off the ground when a loose rock slipped under her feet, she tried to grab a hold of something before she fell, but it was too late. Tumbling head over heels she fell towards the ground, only just managing to right herself from a fall on her head a half-second before impact.

She hit the ground feet-first with a sickening crunch and a popping sound, falling to her knees as her legs crumbled under her. It felt as though her shinbones had been slammed up into her kneecaps, and something had definitely broken in the right one. Sharp points of splintered bone were pressing against the skin of her lower leg, clearly visible from the outside, and very tangible to Anne. Almost as soon as she landed, her leg was a mix of red and purple bruise colours.

Balth didn't quite seem to know what to do as she hit the ground, either that or he was waiting for the others to take action first.

Gan had disappeared while the others had been watching Anne climb, somewhere in the distance, carried to them by the wind, they could hear the cry of an eagle.

(Anne loses 16 out of 30 HP, she has 14 Health remaining.)

[ 02-26-2007, 09:49 PM: Message edited by: PurpleXVI ]