The Mines of the Mi-Go

The party had made their way to an icy chamber in the center of the underground complex beneath the Demon's Mouth. The Gatestone pointed to a featureless section of wall, with no apparent opening. As the party stood discussing their options and looking for secret controls, the wall suddenly shot open of its own accord. A blinding light shot forth; Mary, Brett, and the Professor were temporarily blinded.

In the room beyond were five hideous, flying, insect-like creatures, with long prehensile tails and a number of wriggling tentacles sprouting from their thorax. They had no apparent eyes or mouth, and their head was a pulsing blog covered with a mass of writhing, maggot-like antennae. Taking advantage of their surprise, they immediately launched into an attack. One shot a powerful bolt of psychic energy straight through the doorway, catching Ice, Mary, and Jerry, nearly killing Jerry with the very first shot. One telekinetically pushed Mary away from the door, while two flew out to flank the party from either side, dividing their focus.

When the party recovered from the shock of the creatures' sudden appearance, they began a counterattack. James caught two of the things in a Lightning Bolt, but Joe felt as if he had been the target of the spell. Nonetheless, he rushed forward to engage the creatures in the room, and quickly dispatched one of those James had wounded. The other proved to be much tougher; every time Joe hit it, he found himself taking damage.

Meanwhile out in the large room, Phil was facing one creature while Ice and Mary (who had been pushed back next to it) engaged the other. Chuck rushed to Jerry's side and cast a Cure Serious Wounds, then both retreated out of line of fire from the two things fighting Joe. Doreen grabbed her uncle's hand and tried to run away, but to her shock, the Professor suddenly turned and attacked her with mad fury. In a panic, she fled the room into the darkness of the chamber full of pits. She was not carrying a light. At the same time, Brett, still blinded, pulled his pistol and began firing wildly at Red. The thing in front of Ice and Mary released a blast of psychic energy that damaged Ice and Jerry, seriously injured Mary, and laid Red and Bret flat on the floor. However, Ice was able to finish it off before it could do any more damage.

Phil and Chuck concentrated their fire on the one remaining in the room while Ice and Mary rushed to Joe's aid. However, Ice quickly found himself in the same boat as Joe: every time anyone hit the thing he was fighting, he took damage as well. Joe and Ice had just realized that killing these last two creatures would probably kill them too, when Jerry stuck his head around the corner and unleashed a massive Lightning Bolt. As feared, Joe and Ice fell as well as the last two Mi-Go.

Luckily, both Joe and Ice were revivable, as were Red and Brett. Brett was no longer combative, but was still in his "happy place". Unfortunately, when Phil went to look for Doreen, she was nowhere to be found; all feared she had tumbled into one of the bottomless pits in the darkness. The Professor was inconsolable.

The room behind the door wasn’t much smaller than the other rooms on this level, but somehow it felt cramped and claustrophobic. Every surface was covered by a single, seamless expanse of impossibly smooth metal that, somehow, changed colors from white to gray to tan without any clear reason.

The walls and ceiling were covered with strange, blocky protrusions that stuck several feet out from the wall. Although these were part of the same seamless metal, they had lights blinking on their surfaces. These protrusions were irregular in shape and seemed to twist and bend at odd, almost impossible angles. Looking at them too long produced a feeling of vertigo, as though you had stepped into an Escher drawing.

The floor space was mostly open except for a single, large, roughly fifteen-foot square mass that rose from the middle of the room to a height of nearly eight feet. Unlike the odd metal that made up everything else in the room, this formation appeared to be a natural crystal, bright red and glowing with internal fire. Depending on one’s point of view, it seemed like a sculpture of a strange city skyline or a surreal and random collection of non-Euclidean building blocks topped with a central column or tower that rose several feet above the rest. The facets and shafts that made up the crystal somehow looked wrong – the angles of the facets of a single shaft appeared to add up to much more or much less than 360^o, and shafts that looked as though they should intersect with each other didn’t. The Gatestone pointed directly at this formation.

The party decided it was time to leave, and tried to explain to Red that it would be up to him to get the Professor and Brett back to the surface. To make it easier, Jerry cast a Fly spell on Red and started to explain how he could use it to carry his two surviving comrades up the shaft. Unfortunately this, on top of all the other horrors he'd witnessed, was the final straw for the poor boy's sanity. He went into hysterics, crying and curling into the fetal position. And so the happy expedition that was to have been a "summer holiday" ended: Doreen lost and presumed dead; Professor Fulcroft helpless with grief; Red crying hysterically, and Brett lost in madness.

The party had little sympathy at this point, having endured hardships enough of their own. As they entered the inner chamber, the door hissed shut behind them, locking them in. They placed the Gatestone on the central crystal structure, and pressed one of the facets of the gem. They felt the now-familiar stretching sensation, and then everything went black ...