A26

As the party (Dominic, Fick, Ignatius, Jack, and Nemo with Drusila and Yarol) struggled to deal with the question of what to do about the ARCHIE-1 and the rest of their troubles, Dominic traveled to Mechanus to seek an audience with his goddess. In a city of lights and technology, he met Automita, the Machine Goddess. She was enigmatic about ARCHIE-1 and what she wished Dominic to do. All Dominic learned was that Automita would be saddened if ARCHIE-1 was destroyed. After words, Dominic returned to Zandran to speak with the Patriarch. He tried to convince him to send ARCHIE-1 away because the godling�s creative abilities were vastly greater than mere mortals. At the same time as these events, Ignatius went to meet the Dark Master. In the center of a dark castle, Ignatius tried to smooth things over with the embittered Lothar Noctus. The meeting was short and, as far as Lothar was concerned, meaningless.
     Finally after days of discussion, they decided to visit a legendary sage and learn more about ARCHIE. This sage, called the Great Sage was renowned for his knowledge and his dislike of visitors. He dwelled beneath a tower shaped mass of basalt blocks in southern Prya. After defeating the symbol of fear on the door, the party went down into a maze of slanting featureless passages. They battled medusa archers and enraged ochre jellies which grabbed and nearly devoured Fick.
     Finally they reached a maze of interconnected passages. While searching for traps they discovered the entire level was a massive pressure plate. When depressed this plate revealed magic runes, which created dust, more as the weight increased. The party found itself in a maze rapidly filling with dust and the way back sealed over. As they raced through the dust they were attacked by undead nagas who unleashed powerful spells upon them, petrifying Dominic. Running away at full speed they just barely avoided a dusty death by suffocation. But Dominic was still petrified, and they had to teleport to get help. This is when they discovered the warping effect of the stones about them. Ignatius�s teleport was altered and the party discovered itself thousands of miles above the world�s surface in the freezing air of space.
     After some successful teleports afterwards, the party with a less stony Dominic returned to the sage�s dungeon. They soon reached a more furnished level, with many broken bits of wood. As they neared a dead end, the ground opened up beneath Fick and a blast of wind blew the fliers away. As Jack investigated the pit with his boots of climbing, a well-placed beholder almost caused him to fall into the pit and into the steel fan at the bottom. After a failed plan to bomb the monster (it was disintegrated), Dominic noticed the ground below him becoming hollow. He headed down as the creature tunneled under the rest of the party. While Jack�s attempts to stop the fan were ultimately unsuccessful, Dominic simply dropped his fiendish dire ape into the blades and stopped it. The ape meanwhile swore revenge.
     The beholder soon reached Ignatius and the others along with its mirror of life trapping. While the sorcerer and his cohort fled. Yarol leapt upon the beast and Fick closed. Yarol soon fell prey to its charm eye and Fick was sent fleeing in terror. While Yarol carried the mirror to the others, Jack attacked and so fell into the creatures trap. The now petrified Jack was used as a weapon against the survivors before the sheer number of spells defeated it.
     As the party recovered from its ordeal, Fick ran ending up a in strange place where space seemed to curve back upon itself, and horrible monsters bounded from place to place. Before leaving, he decided to break open a bright green chest to see what was inside. As the green slime began to dissolve him he hurriedly scraped it off himself. An inch from death the maimed halfling dragged himself back to camp.
     When the party pushed forward again, they fought powerful ape like beasts and humanoids with strange stretching limbs before finally finishing the dungeon. Fick managed to inject one monster with green slime while Ignatius made friends out of others. But the door to the Great Sage was nowhere to be found. There where false doors a plenty but no secret passages. Finally they determined that the only way on was through an ethereal passage. They pushed on to the Great Sage�

The Great Sage