T<\/span><\/p>\n he farther in we go, the more I see the echoes of a long-lost grandeur. I hesitate to describe anything the Five Storms have touched as magnificent, but this place has the feel of a once-great hall deep into its decay. How long were they held prisoner here? Hundreds of years? Thousands? That is a lot of time to excavate. The rubble in the hall suggests there was a collapse at some point. How much more was there? Are we just scratching the surface?<\/span><\/p>\n What did they do here? Did they entertain visitors? The kami said they were forbidden from leaving, but it was a prison with no guards save for the complicated rules that kept the oni from leaving. There was nothing stopping outsiders from coming and going as they pleased. You could build an empire that way.<\/span><\/p>\n It really begs the question, \u201cwhy so lax?\u201d Was it assumed the oni would just sit in here and rot for all of eternity? Clearly they had other plans. Whoever devised this arrangement was afflicted with a startling lack of imagination. And Minkai is paying the price.<\/span><\/p>\n Whatever this place once was it\u2019s more mausoleum now; a crumbling monument to another time. It\u2019s dark, dank and depressing. Even the oni that remain are depressing. The guardian of this checkpoint, as he called it, was as decrepit as the hall itself, though at least he was reasonably aware of the pathetic nature of his role. There was this moment when I was invisible, hovering just close enough to see him when he called out to us in the darkness. Qatana, for her part, managed a very credible impression of Ichirou\u2019s voice and insisted on passing through. He tried to talk \u201cIchirou\u201d out of this decision, reminding him what had happened the last time he\u2019d visited his sisters. When \u201cIchirou\u201d insisted on going anyway, he buried his head in his hands and just shook it sadly.<\/span><\/p>\n Can you imagine? Proud samurai Oni of the Five Storms, reduced to <\/span>babysitting<\/span><\/i>. Such tales of glory and fortune he must have had.<\/span><\/p>\n Wretched though he was, he was in our way. And he was mounted on a gorgon because <\/span>of course<\/span><\/i> he was, which also made him dangerous. We went for a reprise of yesterday\u2019s trick: Qatana cast her spell, I walled them off behind a barrier of ice (because <\/span>they can\u2019t fly<\/span><\/i>), and we let them beat each other to death while we took pot shots with arrows, spells, and bombs. I was in the air so I had the best view.<\/span><\/p>\n His living quarters were the height of elegance: a lice-infested bed and a living, wall-to-wall carpet of beetles. I swear I am not making that last one up. What was even keeping them there? This place keeps challenging my notion of \u201cthe worst thing I have ever seen\u201d. Repeatedly. It is not supposed to be a competition.<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of \u201cworst thing I have ever seen\u201d, the decor in this hall includes an image of a hobgoblin nursing two snakes. Just in case there was any doubt about that.<\/span><\/p>\n O<\/span><\/p>\n ne down, one to go: we found the bonsai tree, discarded and forgotten in a dark storage room that is leading the race to dilapidation. Like everything else here the tree is barely clinging to life, probably from days or weeks without sunlight. If it wasn\u2019t for the water leaking through the walls and ceiling it probably would have withered and died.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet again, I am left wondering what the plan was here. Why bring a plant\u2014one which quite obviously needs sunlight to live\u2014to a place completely steeped in darkness? How were they planning on keeping it alive? The only light in here is in the fire pit, and even if that were sufficient it\u2019s two stories up. The would-be gardener was obviously not thinking this one through.<\/span><\/p>\n Now that the tree is safely in our possession maybe we can afford to be more indiscriminate in our methods. (OK, fine, we were hardly careful up in the pagoda. But there were no hobgoblins there, and no hobgoblins meant no tree. It was solid logic, and as it happens, we were right.)\u00a0 Or maybe not. Yuka\u2019s memories suggest Munasukaru gets personally involved when it comes to her prisoners, and that means there may be some down below. I\u2019m guessing we\u2019ll have to do this the hard way.<\/span><\/p>\n I probably should have thought of that sooner, <\/span>before<\/span><\/i> I sent a cloud of poisonous gas down that hallway. Fortunately, there was nothing important there. It was just a few hobgoblins, a hill giant, and these bizarre lizard things that were far more dangerous than anything else we\u2019ve come across. There was also a pile of hobgoblin bones, which makes me think the lizards weren\u2019t part of the original plan. They reminded me of that thing that attacked us up in the arctic: blind, vicious, and able to tear into us with huge blasts of sound. Except, like everything else down here, they couldn\u2019t fly. So maybe they <\/span>were<\/span><\/i> part of the original plan after all.<\/span><\/p>\n Gods, it\u2019s been a long day. I am <\/span>spent<\/span><\/i>. Qatana looks exhausted. Dasi\u2019s voice sounds like it\u2019s going out. We even lost Zosi\u2019s puppets: they tried to walk across the bottom of the lake and something\u2014we never saw what, but it was something <\/span>big<\/span><\/i>\u2014obliterated them. They are <\/span>utterly gone<\/span><\/i>; there aren\u2019t even any remains! I shudder to think what must be in that murky water that\u2019s capable of (I assume) swallowing them whole. The pool is closed until further notice.<\/span><\/p>\n This underscores how unprepared we\u2019ve been for water. We\u2019ve mostly avoided it so far but it\u2019s been a consistent theme and I wonder if our current tactics will hold. At the end of that hallway, where the lizards were, water pours in through cracks in the cavern walls and flows down the steps into a drain at its base. Which means we will have water to contend with down below, too. What if there\u2019s something in the water that we have to confront?<\/span><\/p>\n The good news is that we have a few hours to figure this out as we are going to shelter in this hall for the rest of the day while we recover. Is this safe? Not really. Is there someplace safer? Not really. Not unless we want to leave and come back, which seems particularly unwise. If anything tries to come up from below, or descend from above, we need to be here for it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pharast 28 (The Penance, Early Afternoon) T he farther in we go, the more I see the echoes of a long-lost grandeur. I hesitate to describe anything the Five Storms have touched as magnificent, but this place has the feel of a once-great hall deep into its decay. How long were they held prisoner here? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-3660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-kali"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3660"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5713,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660\/revisions\/5713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Pharast 28 (The Penance, Mid-Afternoon)<\/h3>\n