Teulen, Ker and Daluar spent the next couple hours scouting the halls for sh'kurdaru. What they found was promising in some ways, at least. Adult sh'kurdaru came through this area only rarely, perhaps once in half an hour at most. The downside was that they weren't part of a regular patrol, so their comings and goings would be unpredictable. If they moved quickly and quietly, they could get from the low baraderres' area to the shaft leading up to the high baraderres in about fifteen minutes. Doing this with a large crowd, however, might be difficult, and however fast the baraderres could climb, the shaft would be a bottleneck.

They scouted the surrounding passages a bit. There were multiple places where, like in the passage leading to the high baraderres, the tunnel was squeezed narrow by warm moss-trees. Everywhere where there was a hot vent, the moss-trees thrived, and there were quite a few of these vents in various places. The corridors branched here and there seemingly at random, and sometimes, rooms opened up. Some of these rooms were empty, and easily accessible. Others were sealed up with the white mesh. Teulen, Ker and Daluar didn't go far enough to find many of these rooms, but it seemed likely that there were more.

With the others behind him ready to run, Daluar made small cuts in the mesh of the two other blocked caves he found. The first one looked to be full of baraderres, like the one where Sahl and Ardith still waited. The other, the one very close to Sahl's cave, gave Daluar a shock. Inside were creatures at least fifteen feet tall, lizard-like in appearance, but that they stood on their hind legs. Enormous eyes were mounted in a way that looked artificial in its strangeness, above large mouths full of blunt teeth six inches long. The disproportionately large hands at the ends of their short arms looked designed for grabbing and squeezing, but while their hands moved fairly quickly, the rest of their massive bodies lumbered about slowly and carelessly. One of the creatures started to approach, so Daluar dropped the mesh and stepped back. He surveyed the entrance and found that, were the mesh removed entirely, the lizard creatures could escape one by one by ducking their heads.

Daluar and the two climbers went back and reported to Sahl. “So how are we going to pull this off?” Ker asked.

Sahlman looked around at the others. “Ideas anyone?”

Unfortunately, the game fell apart at this point, due to slow responses by both myself and some of the players. Alas, our readers may never know what happened to these poor adventurers! But continue on for the adventures of Ziedon, Kreemon and others! Please bear through the lower-quality writing of the earlier turns. They were written ten years ago!

Edit 1/8/2013: I invented the “played date” for this turn, because it was lost. I know it was sometime in early 2009.