>>5399294>>5399316>>5399318At first, your elven guides seem untroubled by the disturbances, such that your hardly register them as such. It begins with brief pauses, during which the Drow furtively whisper amongst themselves, then seem to abruptly reorient and change directions.
“Cave-ins and earthquakes sometimes shift and change the paths,” Jazkarmel explains, seemingly untroubled.
Her demeanour remains just as relaxed when the first few oozes appear. They are black, slime mould-like blobs of protoplasmic gelatin, moving with sluglike locomotion towards you. One manages to drop from the ceiling and to splatter upon one a ranger’s jumping spider companion, paralyzing and encasing it; the ambushing slime-being is skewered and stomped, but the spider is written off as a lost cause—dead upon impact, as its handler sadly notes.
“Slimes are venomous,” the elf explains. “Paralyze, cause hallucinations… Many effects, none good.”
Relatively unarmoured as you are, you make note to avoid direct contact, even as the Novice Fleshweaver muses over the useful extraction of such properties—and, with a certain grim glee, speculates upon the knowledge she could glean from treating you if you were to be thus affected.
You sense a change in the elves as the journey continues, though. You begin to pay closer attention at each waypoint where they stop, picking up harshly-hissed words of disorientation and disagreement. You are no experienced explorer of the unknown yourself, but you have now traversed the underdark’s routs enough times to tell that something is wrong—that your journey is taking longer than expected, provisions are running low, and that your guides are losing confidence with their mental maps. Normally, you might chalk this up to mammalian incompetence, but you can’t imagine the Drow have survived this long, in such a harsh environment, if they are easily misled and waylaid on a familiar route through their own lands…
“And there’s something WRONG about the stone here,” the Trhoat-singer intimates darkly, during one rest-stop.
The Novice sniffs dismissively, but Olu asks him to elaborate, and the beardless dwarf-bard does, as best he can.
“I’m not sure,” he says, “but we dwarves NOW rock and stone… Its formation, its natural patterns… How it eroades, grows, shifts, schisms. This place… Feels WRONG, like it’s been… I don’t know. Warped. Broken, reformed, moulded… Like a child playing with clay.”
The ooze attacks grow more and more frequent, claiming first the lives of more bugs, and then a Drow scout, who leaves your immediate company to relieve himself and never returns; his fellows find his corpse, mostly-digested, meat rendered into yet more slimes. They slay them efficiently, but even the component globules still seem to wobble and writhe in a way that uncannily resembles continued life. You morbidly wonder if they have merely helped the odd organisms to reproduce by fission.
