A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

Eleventh Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC

With one last look at the worn statues and the now forever empty hall, the six of you ascend once more the way you had come into the most recently inhabited sections of the ruins. Though you had been tempted to try to translocate directly from here onto some other place on the lower levels, the risk of getting turned around and lost is too great according to Vrath. The tunnels grow ever more maze-like the deeper down one goes, part intentional obfuscation of invaders, part age old cycle of decay and reconstruction. One can all too easily turn the corner of a tunnel that had at one point been used as a mushroom farm only to find an intact crypt filled with the hungry dead, or a sinkhole exhaling poisoned air.

Thus your path takes you through the central spiral into what should have been the cleared second level of the ruins, expecting to find at most more chambers hidden too cunningly for the previous expedition to find. Instead, no sooner had you stepped past the sagging arch that leads onto the stairway that you and Vee hear a strange sound almost at the same time, a sort of bubbling hiss.

"Careful," you warn even as you burn off yet more slime with a thought and a surge of conjured flame.

Ser Richard takes the words to mean he should take the lead, shield hovering a foot in front of him, sword already in hand. "Fuck!" you hear him curse, though more startled than worried, not to mention the fact that if battle were at hand you were more likely to hear nothing but Oathkeeper's bloody work.

Still, one can hardly blame him for the surprise. The lower hall is tarred in the black liquid dripping off every stone in the chamber, from the uneven ceiling, propped up after a collapse and sagging in one corner, to the cracked marble tiles than may have once been a mosaic. It is among these cracks that strange cylindrical... beings crawl, if even that term applies. Formed of yet more bubbling slime, though emerald green rather than black, the creatures seem to at least have a clear mouth and tail, though as you watch one of them seems to decide to invert the two around in an instant.


Unfortunately the reason the creature feels the need for such an abrupt transformation is so that it may rise to hiss threateningly at you alongside its brethren, trying to protect the carpet of ooze they are on perhaps. That would imply remarkable planning from something without a brain.

"You might wish to try slightly hotter flames, Your Grace," Malarys suggests.

"Some kind of symbiosis, maybe an overmind," you hear Lya muse aloud at the same time. "I think we should capture one while we have the chance," she continues. "Larger specimens might be harder to acquire..." She does have a point, the largest of the serpents is a little longer than five feet with the smallest barely a few inches long, more worm than snake almost.

"They don't seem hostile, just territorial," Dany points out. "Maybe they belong down here..."

"Never seen such things," Vrath interjects, sounding wary, but also intrigued. It takes you a moment to realize that the assassin is interested in acquiring new toxins and poisons for his blades.

What do you do?

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OOC: Really short, but such is the nature of running encounter tables.