S09E20 - Fionghan and the Shipwreck Horror

The heroes start the episode inside the Heart of Ubtao, deciding what to do next after killing Valindra’s undead minions. While they’re talking, one of the zombies comes back alive and bites Ellie. Horrified, they realize the rest of the undead are also starting to move, so they quickly grab their corpses and throw them off the cave and into the jungle, eighty meters below.

At the same time, Sophi flies down to where Salida is tending to Falkor’s wounds, helps her wake the wolf up with love and more practical first-aid, and then the elf flies back up to help the team decide what to do next.

Eventually, Carnivore and Avilos head off towards the faraway mountains, right away and under the rain, to look for flying dinosaurs and reach Omu faster. The rest of the party stay and take a short rest. As they start resting, Salida and Falkor enter the cave, and Salida explains that a group of undead had started attacking them. Sophi expresses surprise and scuttles away.

An hour later, the group decides to chase after the two adrenaline-seekers, catching up with them a few hours later. They discuss again where to go, and they find a compromise whereby they will all fly together towards Omu but at an angle to try to reach the nearest mountains while they still have wings and not drop the “let’s get some pterodactyl rides” idea.

Hours later, the party sets up camp at dusk under Avilos’s not-so-tiny hut. Nothing perturbs our heroes’ rest except for a macaque monkey confused with the magical opaque sphere.

Early the next morning, happy to still have their wings, the heroes take up flight. A couple of hours later, they reach an out-of-this-world shipwreck with floating glass and other extraordinary special effects. Through the shipwreck, they see an old man being dragged across the floor by a large shadow-like beast. A moment later, they disappear through a rift suspended in the air.

Despite Sophi’s attempts to keep the group from getting side-tracked, our heroes decide no innocent people will be left unrescued in their presence, and they follow the old man and the horror through the rift. On the other side, they find themselves in a very strange rock cave with a huge obsidian obelisk in the depressed center. The obelisk is surrounded by a small pond of a raw color with the consistency of lava and from which claws, hands, and tentacles sprout. Small streams of that same substance start at the pond and flow upwards through the rock and towards the semi-translucent walls of crystals. Every few seconds, the obelisk vibrates, sending shockwaves that cause psychedelic eruptions of color on the walls.

The heroes don’t waste time and attack the large horror lurking in the cave. Carnivore and Falkor approach the beast face to face while the rest uses their bows and ranged attacks. After a couple of rounds, the creature grabs Carnivore with its claws and nearly takes him unconscious in one round. During his next turn, Carnivore tries to pull the monster down into the magic pond, but the monster holds its ground on the steep cave slope where they stand. Avilos helps his dwarf friend by casting Fireball at the monster, pushing both it and Carnivore into the pond. On contact with the colorful magma, Carnivore screams and falls unconscious.

Meanwhile, Chos goes to the other side of the cave where the old man fell after entering the cave, and he finds out he’s Fionghan, the elder druid that Ellie came to Na Pali in search of. Fionghan looks partially blind, extremely confused, and paranoid, so they leave the chit-chat for later.

Back to where the action is, Ellie speeds toward the pond, grabs the dying Carnivore a moment before dying permanently, and brings him to Chos, who, a round later, heals him. The rest of the party continues peppering the monster until it soon stops moving and gets sucked by the color magma.

With a moment to breathe, the heroes find a second way in and out of the cave, a portal at the other end of a set of stairs that lead from the obelisk up to the north wall. Carnivore goes through it, notices he can’t breathe, and goes back into the cave, where he sees the rest of the party fighting the increasingly hard magnetic pull of the obelisk.

The heroes then try to reach the portal they used to get into the cave, which poses the challenge that it’s flying unpredictably through the cave, reacting to the different frequencies at which the obelisk resonates. Sophi tries to snatch the portal with her rope but fails. Salida pays close attention and realizes the key is the pitch of the sound reaching the portal, and the heroes come up with the idea of trying out different songs. Avilos, always happy to sing, tries Come On with a Barry White deep, low voice. The portal speeds up. He then sings Loving You with his best impression of Minnie Riperton’s high-pitched voice, and the portal slows down enough for everyone to reach it and get out of the cave.

Back in their world and the shipwreck, the heroes find themselves surrounded by blue mist, too late to avoid breathing it in. Being pragmatic as usual, they don’t try to escape it anymore and instead loot the crash site. After exploring a few rooms, it becomes obvious that the tentacle motifs, the regal decoration, and, hardest to ignore of all, a picture of Mao and her sister, point to this being Mao’s sister ship. Luckily, the sister isn’t around and the party doesn’t have to tell her that Mao is dead.