Did I mention shedding light? Followed an Eerie Glow to another one of those floor sigil things, only without the ooze. This one seemed a lot more on. Or something. Room next door had some stuff - Stuff stuff, art and gems, which I haven't gotten a good look at yet. Room next next door had some other stuff entirely, namely two of those Choker things. One got a really nasty grip on my neck, but they were soon dispatched and Kanton did *something* and my neck sorta just went back to normal over the next couple minutes.So one of the stuff things turned out to be really magic, this little statuette thing with a symbol kinda like the floor symbols with a little jewel in one of the spots, and a word on it that meant gate-key. And when we got it near the floor thing it got really active. It put up a big streaky-glowy column of light and then sort of twisted around so we were looking *through* at Somewhere Else, another room like the one we were in, only it could have been anywhere. Then Kanton gets this gleam in his eye, like he's sharpening his axe with talc, or in general terms is about to be a total fucking idiot, and steps forward onto the gate. I tried to tackle him but nothing has momentum like idiocy. Cedar went and dove through after him and the gate-thing shut and turned off just like that. We decided to wait a minute and see if they came back, and they did - from down the hall. Turns out it had taken them to the other room with the first floor-thing we had seen. Go figure.
Wanted to figure out more about how it worked so there was much waving it around. The gate "opened" again onto some distinctly *not* the other room places... like with red grass. Then it sort of twisted around down like a tunnel and stretched out the floor sigil. That didn't seem so good, but it quickly got worse as something big with way too many arms came through. Cedar said it came from where the halflings, uh, delwin, live, called it something like a "tall mouth". It was just all arms and nasty talk - kept insulting people's mothers. Made the mistake of mentioning mine, so I gave it a good stunning punch, enabling Barg to finish it off. Never insult a dwarf's mother.
Had rather had enough after that but there was concern about leaving the floor thing stretched out of shape. Instead of fixing it, we managed to break it completely, twisting it beyond recognition as it sort of snapped in this wave of light that knocked Cedar back to the wall. He was out for a while and when he came to he said he'd had a vision of all these different places connected by light and hoodoo voices and stuff. Freaky.
(con't in following entry)