Elemental Escargot

On the way up the stairs to the tower, Shenron disappeared*. IC, we had no idea what had happened to him, though the speculation was that he had probably been teleported somewhere by the wizard. The rest of us made it up the stairs and into a room with a magic symbol in the center flanked by two staircases up to higher levels. The symbol was glowing, and an arcana check told us that it was connected to the four elements. Allonar was being extra cautious, and planning to climb over railings to avoid the symbol. Horgta was impatient and just pushed him into the symbol (OOC explanation: "Shenron isn't here, so someone has to act rashly"). This summoned four elemental snails: red for fire, blue for water, white for air and green for earth. They didn't do that much damage, partly because Allonar multiclassed as a shaman when he leveled up and his spirit-guide stayed in close to draw fire, but they were very difficult to hit. Also, they left slime trails which we couldn't cross without taking damage, and that they could suck back in and regain hit points if necessary.

While this fight was going on, Heian was trying to pick the lock on a door leading out of this room to... somewhere. After his first successful pick, his next attempt resulted in a lightning attack from the door, so Dovra went over to help with the Arcana aspect of the lock. I can't remember if it took 3 and 3 or 2 and 2 thievery/arcana attempts at it to get it open, but we did get it open, and found Phoenix Darksoul/Blue Cheese's private room, complete with alchemical kitchen. He was not there, and from the looks of things, leaving wasn't his idea. The room was a shredded mess: papers and broken glass everywhere, along with an icky brown substance trailing across most of the room. There was a trap door at one corner from which disturbing beastly noises emanated. As there wasn't anything immediately useful to the fight, Heian and I left the mess and headed back to work on the snails.

We finally took all of the elemental snails out, and then the bodies were drawn back into the circle and reconstituted into a Death Snail. This thing has an aura that makes you want to stay close to it, and does an attack on anything not close to it to make you want to get closer. Luckily, Allonar has a rather powerful radiant attack, and it was vulnerable to radiant damage.

Dovra, muttering to herself about the death-snail-aura, went back to the lab to search it. There were quite a few goodies, and some puzzles that we'll have to look at next week. She also leveled up during the fight, and the setup couldn't have been better. I'm having her multi-class as a cleric to get a heal-spell, and I needed an IC reason for her to do so, as it doesn't obviously fit with her established character. I'd already planned for her to have a fit about all the killing, and how she's killed more things since becoming Not Evil than ever she did when she was Evil, but the death-snail-aura was the perfect thing for sending her over the edge in this direction. More on that after it plays out in-game.

*Oops. Forgot to add in this sidenote. Shenron's OOC counterpart had a conflict, so he went on his own private adventure earlier in the day. Apparently he ran into four copies of himself (two of which eventually turned evil), several dinosaurs, and enough gold to make himself sick. Literally. He completely filled the bag of holding, his backpack, and his stomach with gold. It was both amusing and unpleasant when he showed up with gold leaking out of his backpack and, well, himself. On the plus side, he did share. I'm sure Dovra was fastidious enough to avoid the predigested bits. Even after paying Allonar back for his share in her cloak, she's got 1000 gp.