Timeline: 25 AQB back to several months before 0 AQB, Days 1-7
Ketyl’s POV
We travelled to meet Orin and went back in time. We arrived near the Northern Kingdom, and headed towards a lit town. They let us in once they recognized Korbin.
We had a week until the meeting, so we decided to sell off some of the treasure we had accrued and I even got a chance to play for an audience again. It’s honestly just not as fun playing for the same people who just roll their eyes every time you pick up your instrument.
After each doing our own thing for a few days, we met up and learned that Korbin had bought a ton of explosives as a plan to ambush Moldark before the meeting even began. While initially annoyed that Korbin hadn’t seemed to understand the concept of a recon mission, we decided to tweak his plan slightly. Knowing that the Lich relied on True Sight to see through illusion, we hid the explosives under a small layer of gold coins in several standard chests.
If anybody asked what was in the chests, we could honestly respond with gold, thus not triggering Louis’ astounding ability of insight into lies.
As we were led deep into the Underdark, we saw seemingly bottomless chasms of darkness while being pulled in some form of carriage by giant spiders.
Once we arrived, Lyc revealed herself to not be Ziggy and we told Louis that Ziggy had asked us to come in his place to see what the deal was. I got a good look at our enemies for the first time: Morael, the lich, was a skeleton covered in the finest of robes and accessories; Moldark, the vampire, surprisingly lithe compared to the horrendous slob I had seen in Shao Khan’s throne room; and Louis Arizona, the fallen angel, who truly put to shame all description of an angel’s beauty.
And above all of us, a truly colossal worm (practically the size of a town from the looks of it) suspended by several chains as Drow bled it to be used for Slurnbase and some other drug.
Louis wasn’t happy that we crashed his party, but went on with his spiel, revealing that pretty much everything that went wrong with the future started here. This worm was in fact a restrained demon lord that Louis had been draining for a long time and using it to fuel the barbarians fighting the Northern Empire and his own drug trade. And he had now found a way to make the drug even more powerful and planned to use it on the highest bidder as an attempt to gain allies and to kill Shao Khan. Further, this demon worm was also the source of all the zombie worms that Morael had collected. But we also learned that anybody who consumed this “Super-Slurn” and the worms were weak to consecrated salt.
During this talk, Korbin set up the gold explosives strategically around the room. Kronk volunteered to be the one to take the super-drug so that Moldark couldn’t have it and Louis agreed under the condition that Kronk sign a magical contract forcing him to kill Shao Khan.
We discussed the contract for a few minutes before returning to Louis with plans to worry about the “killing Shao Khan” part later. But Louis had already started hooking up Moldark to the machine, complaining that we took too long to decide.
So, Plan B (and really what I wanted in the first place), we managed to take the villains by complete surprise, exploding the cave around us and teleporting out simultaneously. Just before we disappeared, I saw Moldark transform to a cloud of mist, meaning my plan had worked.
As we appeared in Silotown, I was fairly certain that we had not killed the demon lord, Louis and certainly not Morael. But hopefully we had at least delayed their plans for a little while. If the explosion triggered a cave collapse, it would take a while to dig out that demon worm.
So my teleportation to Silotown had two major purposes: one, have an actual guaranteed place to escape an exploding cave; and two, we’d need allies who already have a vested interest in getting rid of Morael’s influence and preventing Moldark’s ascension to the throne. Plus we’d need a hell of a lot of consecrated salt water and who better to go to than the Church of Ashava?