S11E14 - A Paladin Kiss for the Chain Devil

The heroes start in front of the mimic’s corpse, now an inert, empty treasure chest. Soto pushes it halfway through the portal on the far side of the room, then tries to pull it back but it doesn’t budge. The bloodstains on the floor suggest creatures have been coming through from the other side and feeding the mimic by accident. That does not make the portal more inviting and the heroes decide it’s too risky.

Nemo scouts one of the corridors while the rest of the party stays behind.

The dungeon grows hotter and redder with every turn. Eventually he reaches a room that feels like a magma waterpark, a temple, and a torture chamber all at once. Devil bones are pinned to the walls and scattered across the floor. Chains cover everything.

At the far end, through what looks like the temple entrance, he sees the same barren world the party glimpsed during the fight with the devils.

As Nemo takes this in, the chains spring at him but they miss. A fiendish voice chuckles and says, in Infernal, “Funny.” Until that moment, Nemo did not know he could understand Infernal. Then he spots a detailed map on the wall and cannot resist rushing to it. The map, labele “Avernus,” shows the barren world outside.

Meanwhile Soto arrives in the room as backup and gets attacked by some of the chains. The feminine devilish voice keeps talking to Nemo and casually reveals that a lich version of Gray passed by a few days ago. He went into Avernus to free Tiamat, goddess of the chromatic dragons, from her prison on this hell plane.

Nemo shares that he is also trying to mess Asmodeus up for his own reasons. The voice is delighted. She tells him to invite his friends into the room; she will ask one thing of them, then let them go.

As she says this, another chain finally catches Nemo and suspends him upside down over the magma pool. Sweating and increasingly nervous, Nemo uses his currently active psionic link to invite the rest of the party into the room.

Meanwhile, Ike is eager to leave this place as soon as possible. He turns invisible and steps into the portal, squeezing past the mimic’s body wedged halfway through it. He finds himself back in the barren world he briefly visited the other day: suffocating heat, bright orange sky. This stretch, at least, has no armies of devils and demons tearing each other apart. It also has no piña coladas. Feeling lonely, Ike crosses back through the portal and returns to the dungeon.

When Ike returns, the rest of the party is gone, following Nemo’s invitation.

In the chain room, the devilish voice reveals herself: a grotesque, mummy-like monster wrapped in chains called Nabulozan. Still speaking Infernal, she tells Nemo that she has a very fulfilling life torturing everyone who enters the room. Even so, she has not tasted a kiss in centuries. She wants one from Brand.

Very reluctantly, and under pressure from his friends, the paladin gives the Freddy Krueger-faced fiend an acceptable French kiss. Nabulozan then lets them leave, partly because Nemo has promised to return and help Gray free Tiamat just to piss off Asmodeus. She will deeply enjoy that.

Nemo asks her how to get out, and she tells him to go back through the portal they came in through, which should still be up. They go back to the top level and after a couple of attempts, first throwing Ike and then Nemo, they find the exit and get back to the chapel and to Skeldharbor.

The heroes arrive at the inn, rent three beds for a good price after lying to the innkeeper that Nemo is so short because he’s a kid, and that Ike is his puppet, and go to sleep.

The next morning, after a barnacle chowder breakfast, the party visits Sister Helka, the bodybuilding assassin nun who sent them to find little Lenny. They share what they learned. Lenny, gesticulating, confirms the part he can confirm: he was shocked by the “make me a lich” ritual Gray seems to have performed at the chapel. Then the heroes haggle for a bigger reward. Sister Helka refuses. The only extra money she offers them is 30gp for demolishing the abandoned chapel and closing the portal.

The party refuses. That is too little money for too much work, and besides, the portal should close by itself in a few days and, hopefully, nothing comes out of it until then.

The party then goes to talk to Paco and the rest of the crew who still need a day and a half of repairs before leaving, just enough to leave before Sister Helka receives the mail she expects from Sister Gloria back in Ironwound. With some spare time, Ike proposes to chill out, but the rest of the party wants more money and goes to talk with the fishermen.

The fishermen tell them someone has been stealing fish, fishing equipment, and barrels of fish oil for weeks. Their boats are being damaged too, always at night. They are angry, but afraid to get close to the likely hideout: the Coldwater Caves, a walk away from town. They offer the heroes 350gp to fix the problem. The heroes accept, and the fishermen lend them a boat to get to the caves.

When the heroes reach the entrance to the huge caves, Ike jumps into the water and starts swimming into the entrance. He expects to see XV-7 and his friends. Soto follows him climbing easily over the rocky cliff and moving faster than Ike can swim with his little hands.

As they approach the cave, they hear warforged voices singing songs like “Around the World” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

Inside the cave, Ike approaches the shore while Soto tries to climb the tall rocky archway over the entrance. Soto fails and falls into the water, attracting the attention of two warforged. Soto dives away from the cave and Ike goes into “still puppet” mode. The warforged spot him, grab him, and start playing with him. When their game is about to turn into “let’s dismember it to see what it’s made of,” Ike starts talking, terrifying the stoned warforged. Ike learns this is not XV-7’s gang. This Severance Protocol cell is led by Brine-9, who hates XV-7.

The warforged invite Ike to snort what they have been snorting for weeks. Ike wants to try it, but suggests liquefying it so he can soak it in instead. The warforged think that’s a cool idea and do exactly that. Through a misunderstanding, though, Ike is forced to snort the liquid blue substance and starts feeling funny in the head, in the chest, well, everywhere.

Then Brine-9 arrives. Even less coherent than his minions, he explains that they drifted away from their original Severance Protocol mandate of harassing humans, dwarves, and elves, and instead they started working for a white dragon they met in the Ice Kingdoms. The dragon sent them to this coast to search for clues about something called the Wyrmspine, which would help a certain group of dragons fix the world. Then they got distracted again. They found an arcane stone that pulsated with energy and they hooked it to their stolen ship, making it really, really fast, but also causing mineral accretions to grow on it. When converted into powder, those accretions make them feel very good. The mechanism they built around the arcane stone does need a lot of fish oil to work. But luckily fishing villages around here have a lot of it.

While this is all going on, Soto climbs to the top of the archway and gets a clear view of the gigantic cave: