Tonight was Blue Rose. Everybody into the pool! Here's last time.
Our heroes descend into the depths, and into the ravine searching for info or clues on the evil black mold that threatens their reefs. They find two caverns, on opposite sides of the ravine, and pick one to investigate.
Adad goes first, perhaps foolishly. He finds a smaller sub-chamber with a bunch of mold on the south side. He hugs the north side, since staying away from the mold seems wise, and feels teeth sink into his shoulder. He lurches around and sees eels - they look like morays, but they're much bigger than usual, nearly 10 feet long!
Adad sends out a psychic beacon for his friends, and they coming swimming in after him. Makala strikes with her trident and wounds ones, while Gali charges at the one biting Adad and chomps its tail. It lets go, and Adad punches it in the side of the head, killing it. Greeni tries to cast a spell to close one of the eels' jaws, but that doesn't work, so she just puts one to sleep. It takes some doing, and the remaining eel chews on Gali pretty good, but they do manage to kill it.
The heroes investigate the mold a bit more. It seems to be moving, almost hungrily. Adad grabs a rock and prods at the mold, and the mold grabs the rock and eats it. The characters blink a bit.
Greeni squeezes through a small opening at the other end of the room and winds up in a chamber with branching pathways. There's also a pile of rocks, apparently from a cave-in. She pokes at them a little, but they're too heavy for her to move without help.
Meanwhile, Adad, always a bit more curious than cautious, punches the mold, focusing his Arcane Strike. If the mold is magical in nature, maybe a magic punch will damage it? It kind of works - the mold moves like it's got a mind and then closes around Adad's fist. He casts Body Control and rejects the mold before it eats him, but this stuff is a lot more dangerous - and aware - than the characters thought.
When Adad punches the mold, the area quakes, just a little. It seems to emanate from the pile of boulders, so they decide to check the other pathways first. One leads down a long hallway and back into the ravine, which is nice because it means they don't have to squeeze through that narrow pathway. The other leads to a small chamber with a huge blob of mold (Greeni sees this and backs out slowly).
The only way is forward, so Makala and Adad (as the only two with thumbs) get to work and start moving boulders. They eventually get enough shifted that Greeni can squeeze through, and on the other side she finds more mold, and a room with a huge, living something. It seems to be breathing, but she can't see well enough to check and she isn't going to get closer. She retreats back to the others, and they move a few more rocks, just enough that Adad can use Body Control to make himself flexible enough to squeeze in.
The being the room appears to be a sea dragon. It's curled up and asleep, but definitely alive. Adad casts a spell and makes psychic contact, and finds that it is hungry. Adad thinks about the mold, trying to see the dragon's opinion on it, and this just makes it hungrier. It's definitely gonna eat that mold.
The characters surface and talk this through. The dragon eating the mold would be great, except that their reef is covered in the stuff. Makala swims back to Ray'fin and asks some of the elders if they've heard of a mold-eating dragon, and there are indeed legends of a catastrophe about 150 years ago. Evidently a dragon surfaced from the deeps and laid waste to the village, utterly destroying it. This is apparently primed to happen again.
The characters figure they don't have much chance of battling the sea dragon (and they don't really want to kill it - it's just hungry, after all, not evil). Instead, they decide to focus on a two-pronged approach: cleanse the reef so that the dragon won't be tempted to coming up into the shallower waters, and try to create a trail of mold to lead it where they want it to go. They find Teali, who's still panicky and sleep deprived, and Greeni, after trying to tell him the plan, casts Sleep to help the poor guy rest.
They tuck him somewhere safe and get to work.
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