Chumbawumba is now possessed by a snail monster deity-ghost of rainbow magic who makes him feel a little damaged. He isn't quite sure how he feels, but he wonders what makes a man so neutral nowadays?
"Well, he's about to get a growth spurt! Look how fat he is!" Dur-Dur-Dur says, pointing at the rotund goblin. Is that how goblin culture works, Dur-Dur-Dur? Do they eat massive amounts of food so that they're fully charged for puberty?
"I am big boned!" Chumbawumba shouts.
"You are right now!" Dur-Dur-Dur says.
"When you get an ethereal being, well...” Chumbawumba says, then realizes everyone around him is also possessed, so there’s not much he can say.
Dur-Dur-Dur shushes him. "Listen, when I say roll out, I don't mean to actually roll. So let's get out of this place!"
Dur-Dur-Dur proceeds to not get out of this place, and he instead returns to the room with the clock. He’s startled to see Valour’s hands groping around the area.
"Zanzibar!” Dur-Dur-Dur screams. “There’s floating hands in here. I think they got Valour!"
"Will this invisible key help?" Zanzibar says, entering the room and showing Dur-Dur-Dur absolutely nothing. "Would you like some detecting of magic?"
"Well there's this clock here," Valour says, popping out of invisibility. He points at the time, which says 7:57.
The party then contemplates waiting for the clock to hit 8:00 in case something terrible happens on the hour.
"Grandfather clocks usually chime at every hour,” Zanzibar says, being of grandfather age himself. “This dungeon, though, likes to kill us."
What catches Zanzibar’s eye, however, is the egg-shaped stone attached to the grandfather clock’s pendulum. Everyone can’t help but realize that it’s… eggy.
"Maybe we should get a new Eku!" 🌱 says. "Dragonbait, since you turned back into a male and didn't give me any eggs, get me this egg."
Dragonbait reaches for the egg, but he’s blocked by an invisible barrier over the front of the clock. No clock eggs for 🌱...
... yet...
Zanzibar and Kubazan begin to scheme. "HERE'S MY SCHEME!" Zanzibar shouts, summoning his owl familiar. "We wait for the clock to strike the hour, the owl stands at it and I see through it, and then we check it out."
Everyone backs out of the room, perfectly fine with sacrificing a fake owl in order to not sacrifice the real them. Zanzibar summons his owl, which is still probably mad that it was murdered last time, and he sits it in front of the clock. If this owl was mad before, boooy oh boy is it going to be mad again!
The clock strikes 8:00, and Zanzibar feels his owl grow weak, collapse to the ground, and die of old age in a matter of seconds. He is triggered.
"I'm really glad I was not in the room when that happened!" Zanzibar says.
"But don't you have the Ring of Winter? Doesn't it make you not die of old age?" 🌱 says.
Nobody says anything for a few seconds.
"Get in there!" Dur-Dur-Dur says, shoving Zanzibar forward.
"I'm going to go ahead and say it... this is magical... and this is some shit!" Zanzibar argues.
Zanzibar then casts detect magic all over the room, trying to obtain a sense of what nonsense is waiting in here. He detects illusion magic coming from the door over the pendulum, and he detects ancient unknown magic coming from the egg-shaped stone.
"This is an egg-shaped puzzle, so it needs a mayonnaise-shaped key!" 🌱 deduces, reaching for the alchemy jug. "I think that if it looks like an egg, and mayonnaise is made from eggs..."
"Does anyone have any keys?" Chumbawumba says.
"I have an invisible key," Zanzibar says, showing everyone nothing again.
"Moa said something in here is invisible. I bet the lock is invisible," Valour says.
"I don't really know WHAT you should do!" Unkh says to Chumbawumba, so he stays there being fat.
"Does anyone have any fairy dust?" Zanzibar says.
"YOU'RE YOUR OWN FAIRY DUST, BOY!" Kubazan shouts at Zanzibar, trying to hype him up.
Zanzibar feels the hype, realizing that a real man makes his own fairy dust. So he reaches up and feels around the invisible barrier, eventually finding a keyhole. He puts the invisible key from the chest into the invisible keyhole with a mage hand spell, keeping his distance. The invisible door opens, exposing the egg-shaped pendulum.
Zanzibar casts detect magic on the pendulum egg again, realizing that it's super old not from any school. He then mage hands the stone and plucks it out to cast identify.
The magic within the stone feels like it’s trying to show Zanzibar something. He’s catching fleeting images of the Manzibar, his brother Pemba, and other faces dear to his heart. It’s as though this thing is trying to show him a desire. He then remembers that the tabaxi who attacked them in Omu, Bag of Nails, was after an ancient artifact called the Navel of the Moon, and that it was able to show someone the way home to his or her loved ones.
"It can show you the way home to your loved ones..." Zanzibar mutters.
"WAIT IT CAN SHOW ME WHERE MY DADDY IS!?" Dur-Dur-Dur says, then snatches the magic item from Zanzibar and walks onto the ceiling where nobody can get him. He starts shaking it like a magic 8 ball. "Where's my daddy!?"
The tomb's magic is throwing the Navel of the Moon off course, so his results are “Reply hazy, try again.”
Everyone decides to leave the room, so Dur-Dur-Dur offers to help them cross the acid pit, that's right in front of the exit, but only if they tell him a joke. He ferries everyone across one at a time as they tell their jokes, then in his own meandering simplicity, he returns back to the room even though his party members have crossed.
But there’s someone new standing over there!
"Hi, my name's Dur-Dur-Dur. Have you seen my daddy?" Dur-Dur-Dur asks the strange, bald human who is wearing robes and an iron mask. "Hey baldy! What's your name?"
"So are you responsible for all these dead minotaurs?" the masked person says.
"Yes, I'm Dur-Dur-Dur, have you seen my daddy?"
"I've been hiding for a long time. I'm glad you helped defeat these minotaurs.”
"You're welcome. That will cost you one joke."
"I don't know any jokes."
"You'd better start thinking harder!"
Several minutes pass before the masked human finally speaks, "Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon? Great food, no atmosphere."
Dur-Dur-Dur lets out a loud laugh. "HAH! What's atmosphere? Let me introduce you to the rest of the party so that they can explain the joke to me.” Dur-Dur-Dur says, then snatches up the stranger and walks him across the acid pit to the rest of the party. “Hey guys! This is my friend, Baldy McBaldface!"
"That doesn’t sound like a real name," Valour says.
"My name is Doomfist," the masked man says.
That also doesn’t sound like a real name.
The party interrogates Doomfist, finding out that he came into the dungeon about 4 days ago and got lost, which is completely baffling to everyone involved! It makes no sense. Did he obtain the puzzle cubes? Did anyone else see him come inside? Chumbawumba never saw him.
Hrm… mysterious… doppelganger on the loose... hrm...
They decide they can trust him because he's a PC. They start handing out rations to everyone, which gets Chumbawumba excited since maybe he won’t be stuck eating purple fungus anymore, but Dur-Dur-Dur doesn't want to give Chumbawumba any more food since he's gained so much weight.
The party then returns to the doors with the snakey-looking sculptures near it. They look at the doors and the description carved above, “Warm like fire, cold for the cruel, still for the dead, gruel for the ghoul.”
Doomfist lights a torch after realizing that he can’t see in the dark.
The PC’s realize that they can’t open this door. There are no handles, so does it technically count as a door? Is it more of a slab?
Valour takes out Bookmark and gets ready to dimension door to the other side of the door with Dragonbait. Chumbawumba takes out his healing gun and pulses it for temporary Hit Points to everyone just in case something terrible happens. Valour takes some extra precautions and downs some healing potions.
"I can only take one person with me. I can only use dimension door once!" Valour says. "Zanzibar you can open a window from the other side if we get stuck!"
"Let's think with our fucking noggins, boys!" Chumbawumba says, looking at the riddle on the door. "Oh, it's blood! Cold blooded, warm blood for like fire. ‘Still for the dead’ is zombies. Gruel for the ghoul!"
"I did just get the charm of ghoul and that makes me eat people," 🌱 says.
"Whose got blood?" Valour says.
They all look at Chumbawumba’s sweet, fat, succulent 23 Constitution score.
"Maybe you have to put your arm in the serpents mount and let them bite you?" Chumbawumba says, then pricks his hand and smears some blood on the door. As he does, he sees that the snakes have dried blood on their faces and tubes in the back of their throats.
Chumbawumba cuts his arm for a bit more damage and lets the blood drip down the serpent’s mouth. After a few seconds, he hears slurping noises of several ghastly creatures echoing from the serpent mouth, and the door in front of them rises into the ceiling.
The next room is a macabre throne room, the entrance being on a balcony level. Beneath them and on the walls are crude paintings depicting several people dying in the Tomb of the Nine Gods: Argus disintegrating into a pile of ash, Armand stuck dead with a beholder ray, and a human noble being stomped by four-armed gargoyles.
The painters of such horrors are three undead, silent, mouth- and eye-stitched artists hobbling around with clay pots of paint and brushes. They’re currently painting over a scene of Bravus Boulderborn being devoured by the locusts in I’jin’s tomb.
Dominating the center of the balcony is a throne scattered with small, humanoid skulls. An iron scepter rests in its cushion, and monstrous, horned skull rests on top of it. Six statues of warriors bearing spears and wearing hornet masks rest in alcoves along the balcony.
"I can confirm you that we ain’t looking for many more of my friends now because that was him in that picture," Chumbawumba says, pointing at a painting of his captain being pummeled by the four-armed gargoyles.
Valour uses divine sense, detecting nothing from the statues, but the blind artists radiate undead energy, and there's something big and dead under the floor as well.
They start to scope things out.
"That's Karagos!” Papazotl whispers to 🌱, referring to the giant minotaur skull. “He was the great minotaur champion of Omu!"
Valour decides to attack a blind artist because it's creepy as shit. "I'm putting them out of their misery! They have tortured existences," he says. "Just look at them, they look terrible!"
Everyone argues with him, saying they're not hurting anyone.
"This feels ritualistic, so I don't want them to continue," Valour says.
"I think it's good luck!" 🌱 says.
"Good luck!?" Valour says.
"Everyone whose picture is on here is dead, everyone who isn't is not dead, so we're all good!" Chumbawumba agrees.
Valour draws his sword and swings at the blind artist, hurting it terribly. As he does so, the ground in the center of the floor bursts open as a zombie t-rex ruptures upward!
But as of now, zombie t-rexes are this party’s specialty!
Dragonbait draws and shoots his bow into the undead beast as 🌱 casts chill touch. Valour meets the creature toe-to-toe and carves into it with the Holy Avenger, blasting it for extra radiant damage with a divine smite.
Doomfist slides down the wall of the balcony all badass-like and leaps at the tyrannosaurus, clobbering it in the face with his club and then punching it so hard with his way of the open hand that the t-rex falls to the ground in a stupefying heap.
"Well, what do we have here?" Dur-Dur-Dur says, stepping up to the prone t-rex and cleaving its skull in half with his axe, silencing the monster forever.
"It's dead!?" Zanzibar shouts.
"Yes!" Valour says.
"I didn't even get to participate!" Zanzibar fumes.
"Doomfist walked in and said, 'sit your assasaurus down!'" Valour laughs.
Doomfist steps up to the throne and eyes the iron scepter on the seat cushion. He picks it up, noting that it has an adamantium head on it and can be swung like a mace. 🌱 identifies the scepter and points out that it is nonmagical.
"We got to find it's twin. That's what the riddle says?" Zanzibar recounts Acererak’s warning. "Is this a decoy mace?"
"This one was guarded by a t-rex," Valour says.
Everyone kills the rest of the blind artists. 🌱 panics and pockets one of their brushes, placing it into his bag of weird shit with everything else.
"Lick the paint!" Valour says.
"No! I'm not going to lick the magic dead paint!" 🌱 says.
The party decides to give the Mace of Terror to Doomfist since he likes to swing clubs and stuff at bad guys. Also it belonged to his previous PC so... it kind of works out.
They search some of the statues, and Zanzibar finds a slightly open door behind the statue he’s investigating. "I have picked the best statue! Mine has a secret door!" he says.
"But did you kill a giant t-rex?" Dur-Dur-Dur says.
"We all killed it together!" Zanzibar says. "I was about to do something really cool. I was about to summon a giant fist of magical punching!"
"We HAVE a fist of magical punching," 🌱 says.
"Yeah, I brought it to the fight," Dur-Dur-Dur agrees, pointing at Doomfist.
They open the secret door and find a miraculously painted tomb. A basalt coffin rests in the center, a gold cockroach jewelry box resting on top of it. A golden sun with a smiling face dangles from a gold chain in the ceiling.
"I have found an interesting thing. Everybody come in," Zanzibar says. He sees a name etched in common on the basalt sarcophagus’ lid, NAPAKA.
"Nangnang who is Napaka?" Dur-Dur-Dur says.
"Napaka? She was the last queen of Omu!" Nangnang says back.
Zanzibar casts detect magic, receiving traces of evocation auras on the smiling sun and the cockroach jewelry box.
"I think that because it's a sun, it's a blinding effect," Valour says as he steps in and faces the wall like in the Blair Witch Project, giving Zanzibar an aura boost.
They decide instead that mage hand is the best hand, so they all sneak out of the creepy tomb room and let Zanzibar poke around with mage hand. Specifically, he pokes the smiling sun.
That sun does NOT like being poked!
The smiley face becomes a mildly ill-tempered face, and the whole room elevates in temperature like a convection oven for a few rounds before returning to normal. Zanzibar summons another mage hand, this time using it to open the cockroack-topped jewelry box. Within is an alligator-shaped jade key and a necklace of fireballs with eight beads hanging from it!
"Well, I can already cast fireball, so somebody else should take that," Zanzibar says, bringing the jewelry box out to the rest of the party.
"Well, I can't attune to anything else," Valour says, holding the necklace. "Oh, you don't have to attune to this!"
"Well, I'm usually the center target of the fireball anyways, so I should wear it," Dur-Dur-Dur says, reaching for the necklace.
"If we are giving out superlatives to our group, you are the one most likely to kill us," Valour says to Dur-Dur-Dur in a way that is in no way foreshadowing the end of this writeup.
They have a contest of strength to see who gets to wear it, and Valour wins the arm-wrestling contest, donning the necklace of fireballs as his prize. Oh yeah, the necklace is cursed!
The necklace explodes in a burst of flame as all beads detonate at the same time, fully engulfing everyone in a flaming inferno, dropping Valour and Chumbawumba to 0 Hit Points and almost burning them completely to a crisp.
🌱 runs around and shoves goodberries into their mouths to stabilize them. Everyone is very upset that this event happened, but it’s time to move on. They’ve successfully triggered the trap in this room, so it’s time to enjoy the spoils!
"Did we open up the sarcophagus?" Dur-Dur-Dur says.
"Hold on hold on!" Valour says, trying to find his bearings.
Doomfist somersaults into the room, sneaks around the edges, then karate chops open the lid of the sarcophagus. Inside is a regal noblewoman dressed in a funeral shroud and a gold-painted hornet mask: Queen Napaka. She clutches an iron scepter with an adamantium head in her left hand.
With a job well done, Doomfist walks out of the room.
Zanzibar steps in and identifies the scepter in the woman’s hand, realizing that it’s a very specific artifact meant to destroy a dangerous construct named after her.
"The first iron scepter I picked up was unremarkable, should I drop it and pick this one up?" Doomfist says.
"Is this an Indiana Jones thing?" Zanzibar says, considering switching out the scepters.
"Dont drop it. It's adamantium," Valour says.
Zanzibar picks up the scepter from the sarcophagus, and as he does so, Queen Napaka’s mouth jolts open, jaw breaking. The corpse exhales a necrotic, black gas that fills the room and causes Zanzibar to collapse at 0 Hit Points.
When the dust settles, Chumbawumba goes in and casts cure wounds on Zanzibar to bring him back.
"Well... no risk no reward!" Zanzibar says, picking the scepter back up and walking out the tomb—NOPE! Remember that gold sun? Well now it’s face is just a sneer of a raging pisser, and it launches fiery sunbeams at Zanzibar and Chumbawumba, striking both of the poor bastards and dropping them down to 0 Hit Points.
"You should know to never disturb the dead," Doomfist says.
🌱 casts healing spirit, conjuring one of his fairy nightmares that shoves healing eggs into the mouths of his fallen comrades until they wake up. When Zanzibar hobbles to his feet, he casts detect magic on the sun, seeing that it’s now inert.
They decide it's time to take a short rest and redistribute some magic items because this room is a complete disaster.
While camping out, Dur-Dur-Dur is upset that everyone else gets to touch stuff and cause disasters to happen, so he goes up to the skull of Karagos on the throne and grabs it, which causes him to be cursed with the Rage of Karagos.
You see, the Rage of Karagos causes the afflicted to gain 50 temporary Hit Points and try to kill the closest person they can see with melee attacks. The only way to end the curse is to drop the afflicted to 0 Hit Points. Dur-Dur-Dur is an orc barbarian. Melee attacks and lots of Hit Points are his specialty, and the closest person to him is none other than the already beaten-to-shit Zanzibar!
"Wait, Dragonbait and I are the same distance away from him!" Zanzibar says.
Dur-Dur-Dur doesn’t care, and he charges towards Zanzibar, swinging his Durminator weapon. Zanzibar casts shield to block the attacks.
🌱 casts blindness on Dur-Dur-Dur, blinding him.
"I once made 🌱 promise that if you and I were to fight, he would take my side!" Zanzibar shouts at the barbarian.
Dragonbait fires several arrows into Dur-Dur-Dur while Zanzibar then shouts, “This is the shittest room ever!”
Valour casts compelled duel on the barbarian to keep his blind butt away from the other compatriots, then throws a flask of oil on the ground to trip him up. Zanzibar misty steps away, running to the rest of his party members.
Chumbawumba manages to crit a firebolt for 4d10+2d8 damage on the orc, so Dur-Dur-Dur walks to where he heard the shot come from. He steps around the oil slick since he can walk on walls, which causes Zanzibar to be kind of afraid. He then stands in the middle of Zanzibar, Chumbawumba, and Valour…
Dur-Dur-Dur swings twice at Zanzibar, missing both times. 🌱 and Dragonbait use chill touches and sharp arrows to hurt his HP even more, then Doomfist steps up and clobbers him with his club, then punches him straight in the face. After much more striking, shooting, screaming, and teleporting-away-ing, Dur-Dur-Dur clobbers Chumbawumba for 19 damage, but the spherical bastard is so full of HP that he barely notices.
Eventually, Dragonbait fires an arrow into Dur-Dur-Dur’s ass, which is his weak spot just like with Achilles, though I doubt he was held by the butt cheek when dipped into the River Styx or anything. 🌱 stuffs a goodberry into Dur-Dur-Dur’s mouth, waking him back up.
"Guys I had the craziest dream! I was fighting all of you!" Dur-Dur-Dur says, waking up for like the 11th time in this dungeon.
"Why are you like this?" Doomfist says.
"You're one to talk, Mr. Go-Into-The-Room-And-Just-Open-The-Sarcophagus!" Dur-Dur-Dur says.
"Yeah, and nothing happened," Doomfist says, triggering Dur-Dur-Dur’s grung happenstance. "Don't fuck with dead people,” he then says in the tomb full of dead people that they’ve fucked with.