Clearing the Monster Cave

On Wednesday, Lauthok asked us to accompany him to the place known as the Monster Cave, reason being is that when the party was first there, they didn't have time to fully explore it. Lucy and I joined, and so the three of us set out! We kept to the drylands as much as we could, closer to the shoreline, and arrived there in a fairly quick manner. As we approached, the very same purple blinking light hit my eye that i had seen previously to the east of Shaman's Fall, next to that awfully large seashell protrusion (where we found the spelljammer!). The source was another floating oily orb, this one on the surface, with suspiciously circling swamp water around it. I had the probably reckless idea of hitting it with just a splash of magical acid, and sure enough it started some sort of a magical reaction, which resulted in two monsters emerging from the orb. Now, there are things that i've seen, many others that i have not, but not only were they stuff i haven't even heard of, these fall into the subcategory of things that i wish i'd never see again (not exclusive categories). They were basically swirling masses of flesh, decorated with multiple humanlike faces groaning hungrily. They tried to mess with our heads, and the water around them kept solidifying, almost encapsulating Lauthok. Out of the blue, one of them spit some blinding smudge in my face from way over there! When i could finally open my eyes, i saw Lucy blowing one of them away with a huge force of wind, but she had somehow *changed* in the meantime, and she was, um, more like a he. Evidently, the creatures dissolve when they get too far from the orb, so Lucian quickly dispatched the other one with a skillful dodge from Lauthok, and i was present too. With the creatures now absent, the orb followed them into nothingness. We should probably do the same to the other two orbs we have found. The goliath's blade absorbed something from the orb's defeat, but this surprised him as much as it surprised us.(edited)

Finally, we were ready to delve! The Monster Cave was loud with the sound of slurping, coming from a couple of Giant Snail scavengers just inside. They looked tame, and fortunately, we weren't corpses to attract their attention, so we could get past them without conflict. The second, bigger chamber was filled with the same snails, minding their business, decorating the walls with oval snail eggs (i thought it looked pretty, the others somehow didn't share my enthusiasm). We carefully proceeded to find absolutely nothing of interest. Back in the first chamber, there is a waterfall, so naturally, we climbed up and found an alcove with a goblin lying dead in the source pool of the waterfall. He couldn't have been dead for more than a week. While Lauthok and I inspected him, unbeknownst to us, Lucy found herself being pinned and suffocated by a rubbery creature affectionately called "Choker" that reached out of the cave wall through a tiny crack. She created a thunderous burst as well as some sort of necrotic effect (it was weird, i never felt so... hollow before, if that makes sense), killing the thousands of insects that inhabited that area in the process. The carcass of the choker was remarkably light, Lauthok put it away into a bag of holding. The goblin had two items of note: 1. An iron bracelet 2. A weathered tablet containing a text neither of us understood. Looks like goblin language (Ghukliak?)

There was one place that was still unexplored... the drain hole of the waterfall. It was quite a lot wider than what a waterfall of these proportions would carve out, so we swung a torch down there to see what's what. Only after tying together all 150 feet of rope we collectively had did we actually see that there's some sort of road right below. Lauthok was the brave one, climbing down first, while the two of us held guard over the sturdy bone that we used to tie the rope to. I should have thought about this, but i didn't, so now we had a giant snail very interested in adding this particular bone to his collection. The big guy fortunately arrived to his destination just in time, but we wanted to go down too, so we had to tie the rope to a stalagmite, and that added even more of a drop at the end of the climb. The "road" was actually the top of a straight metal pipe disappearing into the dark to the north and to the south, in a huge tunnel that we saw no wall of, whatsoever. The pipe runs in the middle of a huge body of still water, and it is (was?) maintained by some people, evident from the many metal plates nailed into it as repairs. To the south, we found a brass (or was it copper? Something metallic) boat anchored to the pipe, probably belonging to someone who's also responsible for the maintenance. At this point, the racket of something closing in from the north alerted us. The sound came from *within* the pipe. We kept very still, it came very close, but then it stopped, and after a short while, it headed back, so we continued on a little relieved. After about an hour of fast walking, we reached one end of the tunnel. It was the sea, bordered by the Cliffs of Disappointment to the west, with Geistholm somewhere in the distance. We made note of the tunnel entrance being about 200 feet above sea level. The pipe carries black sludge, it seemed like regular waste water, but i didn't jump down to examine it up close.(edited)

The three of us really wanted to see more of the tunnel, so we started jogging back to the north. We passed the rope, and jogged for about another hour, but all we saw was a huge, at least 20 feet long something in the water far away (a sea serpent? Could it be one? I'm pretty sure i saw its eyes), the north end was not nearly in sight. It was getting late, so we were forced to abandon the exploration, hurried back to the rope, and through Lauthok's determination (i don't know what kind of magic he controls, but it helped me climb better in seconds than my physical education teacher back at the monastery managed in four years), we climbed out of the hole without a problem. We arrived at the steps just in time to see the familiar green eyes glow in the dark