A while later, after a long and nerve-wracking night, the people who had been under "sedation" "woke up" and explained that they had been awake through their entire surgery. Apparently, Steven's "sedative" only made them unable to move. Once she woke, Terra and I tried to deactivate the kernel of true fire, and ended up just surrounding it with another force dome. All three of them are rather weak from the experience, but otherwise will be fine after a few days. They're adepts, after all.

We dropped a stick off at the "Mangled Windling" and headed to the Earth tunnels to look for metal and true earth. We started moving into the tunnels, and got ambushed by some zombies. As we fell back towards the Fire Tunnel, I collapsed a bit of the ceiling with a poor shot to a spider, but we did manage to keep them back, even though the spiders apparently can cast spells. Terra threw the little blue fire-jewel, which the spider picked up. I put up a blue "stone" wall just as I set the kernel of true fire off.

Just as it looked as if we might be safe for a moment, giant slugs began dropping from the ceiling. They have damage-transfer, which some of the party did not expext--they took out Siersha when Donk, ignoring the shouts of the party members who had figured out the slugs trick, sliced it in half with his axe. (Thesis Note: It's not just the Archers. It's all barbarian Trolls. Maybe I can do a case study on how Trolls become more and less civilized--the Myrkridia were once Trolls, and these imbiciles might catch on if they don't get killed first.) At the same time, one of the slugs landed on me, and I could see inside. THERE'S A DWARF IN THERE! I put up another wall as Gilad threw the other fire-kernel. Terra passed out trying to heal Siersha, and suddenly my first wall started moving. The slugs were pushing the wall, but their room was still on fire, presumably hurting them. I tried to make a mirage tunnel of no-flame. It worked, but wasn't big enough. Steven poked through my second wall to peek, and found (surprise!) slugs.

The slugs used some sort of terror mind-control effect to make us run. We tried to run through the 300-year-old zombies, being controlled by some cloaked figures, but it was hard going.

Once we got past, the party argued again. (This is getting ridiculous. Not that it isn't at least partially my fault, but we need a leader, or a structure, or *something*...)

Gilad and Thwak wanted to go back towards the maze, where there is natural air, so Terra can rest. (She's been providing us air all this time.) Some of the others want to go back into the Water tunnels, and some others want to just hold up here and then go back to the Fire tunnels. Suddenly, Terra vanished, leaving her clothes behind. After a moment, we realized that her spell went way wrong and gave herself a body of air. This convinced us to go back to the maze, at least for a while.

After a short rest, we stopped at the Mangled Windling, where I found a note from K'tan. He described the technical specs needed for the drill to open the caer, explained that it must happen tonight, and that we should leave the metal in a no-mana zone so it can be safe. We took that, left a reply, and went to find some metal.