Castle Whiterock log for 23 November 2020: Just let pit fiends blow themselves up in peace

The hoboes

Ibizaber (aka Zaber) the Clever, Gorgeous, and Besotted, most beloved person in Cillamar
Garreth, strongest person in all Cillamar
Polly Daze, the incredibly cute deadly archer
Stonemaul, a dwarven cleric of Danethar
Korlos, tea-sipping wizard

Whom the hoboes murder

We slip down into a room with eight walls. We spot a bunch of potions on a table, but oddly, I'm more keen on these three tubes in one of the walls. They're big enough for a mouse, but what kind of mouse runs through these tubes? I keep looking at them and the book by them and—

"Gaseous Form," says Stonemaul. I turn and see that he's looking at the potions. He sees that I'm not looking at drinking something for once and looks at the tubes. "I think it's a transport network: you drink, you turn to gas, you go down a tube. But I'd like to make sure that the potion actually does this before taking a swig, you know?"

I agree. So I look down at the book and see its title: "Demonhold Project Comments and Observations." Inside the book in all capitals are the words "NOT FOR YOU NIMBOLTIN."

I'm not Nimboltin, but even if I were, I would keep reading on, which I do.

The book has a few entries from this guy Pelltar about making a tomb for Koborth. He was dead even then, but they were also making a tomb for Nimboltin and something  about someone named Lythe making an obelisk that lured fiends from beyond and blah blah blah. Korlos can read this stuff. There's a drink on the table with my name on it.

OK, not really my name, unless my name is now "Gaseous Form." But whatever, I'm sure it has some alcohol in it to stabilize it, so I drink it.

I do not get drunk.

I do not get high.

I turn into a cloud.

While I have never been a cloud until now, this isn't as cool as I would have thought. But I go through the middle tube into the next room. I turn my, ah, I somehow see that there are other clouds, with one being bigger and greener than the others. That must be the Garreth cloud.

We find ourselves in a cavern, and the others drift to the other side. They somehow don't see me, which means I'm still invisible. Thus, I use my invisibility to its fullest and check out the room. To the left of from where we came are three bat men, all looking to their left.

I float past the brew-swains and see a demon of some kind. Might be a balrog, might be a pit fiend; it's tall with wing and red scales, which is always some kind of demon in my book. Anyways, it's drinking like mad from the pool that is at its feet. I float down to see if it's water or vodka, but find that it's acid.

Alrighty-then.

So, I float over to the others, and then we become flesh and blood again a few minutes later.  I let them know about the big demon with the odd drinking wont, and we hatch a plan. This is a little odd: I'm the one pushing for wholesale slaughter and Garreth wants to keep one alive. Did the potion swap our brains somehow?

Korlos casts Great Haste on us. Garreth and Stonemaul rush up to them, and in the blink of an eye, Garreth takes down one bat man, beheads another, and lobs off the arm of the third. Stonemaul rushes into the other arm of the third bat demon, then chops off that arm. It passes out from the pain.

Garreth picks up the disarmed demon, drags it away, then slaps it awake. The demon says that it is a "vespertiliac" whose name is Voracious von Vespertiliac the 7th. Voracious says that its hide is like plate, its shriek cows armies, and its claws pierce steel. Now, this might bother most folks, but Garreth does all this before breakfast, and chop off the arms of whiny demons, too. Though those arms are growing back, so right now they look like little baby arms. Garreth gets the demon to say that the dungeon is lame and that it wants to go back to the Abyss. While agreeing that this place is nasty, I don't see how the Abyss is any better.

Alright, but what about the big demon?

Well, Voracious says that the big demon, which is a pit fiend, hates this plane so much that it is drinking so much acid that it's going to blow itself up. Voracious finds this truly cool and, after it tells us that the pit fiend blowing itself up won't harm the rest of the room, I agree. I fly off and tell the pit fiend to keep it up.

It then lifted its head, upset.

That might not have been such a good idea.