Fly me to the moon, not!

I guess at one point I should have mentioned that the plan here is for us to be flown to the moon to fight an aspect of Bascarone. What do I think of this? Well, let’s see... up until recently I’d lived my whole life beneath ground where no matter how large a place is, you know there’s something solid above you—if you see something twinkling up there, you know it’s attached to something. Now I’m in this crazy upworld where that’s just not true, and apparently things can just be sitting in the “heavens” without falling.

I’ve mostly coped with that by, you know, trying not to look up too often. But now you tell me that you’re going to send me to one of those things? The others seem comforted by its substantial size in the sky, but that just makes me wonder all the more how it stays up there. What if the only thing holding it there is this aspect of Bascarone, and we kill it?

Warning—the word “crazy” appears four times in the following sentence.

I’m not crazy about the idea, you must be crazy if you thought otherwise, and I suspect you’re crazy for even believing this isn’t a crazy and unnatural concept.

Okay, so the last one was gratuitous. And “thrice” would have sounded cooler than “four times.” But at least you probably get the idea that I think this whole thing is crazy, right? Everything about it. Including the fact that everyone else things this is a perfectly normal and natural thing to do. Crazy!

The caretaker’s four aspects all prepared some weird ritual circle and started chanting, when some honking big dragon swooped out of the sky and picked one up. With surprising speed Malakar ran off after them, not even pausing to see what the rest of us were doing. I mean, I don’t know if we could have kept up with him under one of Obegard’s corruptions, erm, “spells.” And Malakar was still wearing his tank armour that makes him move slower than everyone else. Something was definitely not right, but at least it was here on the ground, so it wasn’t all bad news.

We gave chase, though “chase” is perhaps being a bit kind to us since they were long gone and moving much faster than us. Let’s say we made our way along the obvious path created by Malakar in heavy armour dashing heedlessly through vegetation.

Which was fine until we reached a clearing and the path just stopped. Clearly Malakar hadn’t vanished, and his ability to hide his trail is about as effective as trying to kill someone by farting a knife out your... Yeah, never mind. Poor old Stand—even if he chosen a knife without a guard I don’t think it would have worked.

So while we pondered what had happened I began to feel uneasy, like this might be some trap. So I carefully moved over to one side just before the dragon swooped out of nowhere and breathed some cloud of something at everyone else. Man was that thing moving—it had flown in, breathed, and was gone again before we could do anything about it.

I did something similar a few more times while we milled around trying to work out how we were going to get at it. Obegard offered to curse, I mean “enchant” a couple of people with the ability to fly, but they weren’t gonna do more than hang in the air like targets for the dragon to pick off, so we elected to stay on the ground and spread out to minimise the effect of its breath.

I don’t know why it did so, but eventually it came to ground to fight and that was pretty much the end of it. No. Really. We just beat up on it and no matter how big it was, we killed it.

I’m not saying it didn’t do its share of damage, but we had some spirit that the caretakers had summoned to keep us healthy and it was mostly keeping up with the damage.

We were just starting to turn our attention back to the problem of finding Malakar when he saved us the trouble. Only it wasn’t the Malakar we’re used to. This one had what looked like the same armour, only it glowed red. And instead of a honking big two-handed sword, it had some different sword thing with teeth along the blade that looked pretty nasty.

Oh yeah, and instead of saying “Hi guys!” and casting all nice spells on us he attacked us. But like our old Malakar he’d clearly cast a bunch of spells before going into a fight.

I wasn’t actually watching much of Malakar’s fight because a couple of tentacled creatures burst out of the trees and decided to play with me. All I can say is thank goodness for my blinking new ring—or should I say my new ring of Blinking!!!!

Oh yes, their tentacles struck at me repeatedly, and some hit their mark, but many times they flew through the place I should have been as I shifted into the Ethereal Plane. Or something. Ask an egghead like Obegard if you want a technical explanation. All I know is that they missed a lot more than they should have, and a couple of my shots missed too, but I connected enough to dispatch both of them while the others were taking on Malakar.

By the time I’d done that I was pretty badly wounded, and looked around for our healer but it had apparently been killed by Malakar. Obviously his tactical sense hadn’t diminished by whatever change had occurred.

I went in to help but some spell went off and hit all of us and I pulled back again to rummage through my bags for some healing potions. (Note to self: get stronger healing potions.)

I downed one of the minor potions and was just wondering whether I needed to drink the other when Durthen cut Malakar down. So I guess the answer to that question is “no.”

As he fell the red glow faded and the weapon transformed back into a two-handed sword. It was very strange—almost as if the whole thing had been some sort of bad dream. Except this nightmare isn’t quite over because we still need to find the missing caretaker aspect, and we still need to fly to the moon and fight an aspect of a god.