Rolled 5 (1d13)
>>5308124“We will stay together until we know the path is safe, and the eggs are secure,” you decide. “on the route back, we will split up… If it is feasible.”
“A wise decision,” the Translator says, breathing an obvious sigh of relief.
“Off of the old maps…” The Catrographer murmurs, but then flips through a few sheets of bellum and parchment, and produces one of his charcoal sticks. “…But a chance to make more!”
You look to the fire-lizards, and use your mental communion to transmit a message beyond language: “Find the heat at the centre of the mountain.” It is a command they well understand, as it is close to their heart, built into their very biology. Two of the bolder kobolds, Agno and Regne, attempt to mount them; they quickly abandon this plan, discovering both the limits of even a draconically-influenced fire-lizard’s tolerance, and their personal heat tolerances. This whimsy is abandoned, and the lot of you proceed on foot, guided by the slowly-crawling, swaying forms of the salamander-like fire-lizards as they return from whence they came, through a great cleft in the stone which leaves the pick-axe hewn tunnels and artificially-expanded caverns behind for a more naturalistic realm, deeper into the darkness and lit only by the dim orange glow of your feral guides.
“Egg-chamber was not warm, but not warm-warm, not for lizards,” Hapo warns. “They will get close, but not right perfect there. We will need to… Explore.”
“So be it,” you say. “It will still take a great deal of time off of our journey.
In the hours which follow, you take in the scarce, but fascinating, local wildlife. There are bat-like creatures, but eyeless, like a local equivalent to the cave-drakes of your home. There are no glowworms, but there are bio-luminescent, yellow beetles (“fire-bugs”, you’re told), which the fire-LIZARDS lap up like delicacies. They, in turn, feed on a strange, hard-and-dry lichen which grows near the scant sources of moisture. Your waterskins sustain you where a dearth of underground streams or pools leaves you wanting. It is not at all like the damper, colder caverns to which you are accustomed, and the red-grey stone makes the otherwise-familiar underground atmosphere uncanny and alien.
You must be kilometers underground when it happens—an attack, a reminder that this is no gentle stroll through exotic Subterra Incognita. The form it take sis unexpected, though: a sudden blur, a wet sound, and a mass like an enormous, thick pink tentacle!
