Light Touch [ Jeff ] got the chitinous skin from one of the dead giant cockroaches and ordered it to be made into a set of greaves, vambraces and breast-plate. Unfortunately, when he was telling the dwarven smith to do this, he made groping breast motions, and thus ended up with boobs on his breast-plate. "Somewhere to store things," quipped Yeti [ Darryl ].
Having finished with Narnia, we said our goodbyes to the Good animals, and went back to the Lamp-post to return to the Shadowlands Keep world. Our main worry now was Carnilla (Recall that Carnilla was Carla's (me) evil extra-planar alter-ego clone from another copy of the Earth world, where New Zealand is a fascist state run by the Drow (ACT) ruling class. This was originally where Ah Hung [ Steven ] came from). We had assumed that the nine days quoted by the orcs would be when she would make a push into Narnia to defeat the White Witch herself, and gain power like I had from her death. Apparently, when you kill one of your extra-planar clones, you receive an augmentation of power. There was a four-to-one time dilation in Narnia compared to the Keep world, and we had spent about four days in Narnia, so this meant there was still eight days (32 Narnian days) before Carnilla would arrive. Nevertheless, we got Yeti to make Light Touch and Peg Groups [Ian] invisible. They then snuck back through the tunnel.
Sure enough, a band of twelve gnolls, very well concealed, were watching the spot where the tunnel emerged. So Light Touch & Peg waltzed invisible past them, then out into the swamp to the lizardmen's mound. It didn't take long to rustle up a platoon of lizardmen braves, and they descended upon the hapless gnolls like a wolves on the fold, and slaughtered every one.
We all came through the tunnel. Nailed to a tree near the tunnel was a strange plate with a rune on it. John Wayne [ Shane ] identified this rune as something to do with protection from extraplanar travellers. Straight away we suspected the hand of Carnilla, and thus smashed the plate into little bits. The instant we did this, Tarboy suddenly appeared (recall the totally black figure we spotted in the evil temple of the Caves of Chaos, one of the extra-planar creatures. His proper name was Nyarlathotep, but that was too much of a mouthful, so we stuck with "Tarboy"). In voice dripping with fulsome irony, he thanked us for destroying the plate and then said his aims were in line with our own. He said Carnilla had in her possession an artifact of immense power, and that she was affecting all the multi-verses with her meddling. He would help us, if we helped him - "my enemy's enemy is my friend", and all that. Wiz and I wanted nothing to do with a creature of such evil, but John Wayne, Peg Groups and Gwyffin [ guest star Richard Greenaway ] willingly accepted Tarboy's blessing. However, Tarboy still had a lasting affect, because from then on, each night I had horrendous dreams of being bound and sacrificed by Carnilla on an altar of blood. Yeti dreamed of kittens.
Back to the Keep. On the way there, it was nearing dark and we were making camp. We heard the noise of what sounded like a two-stroke engine, up in the sky. I suddenly got this strange feeling of dread and squeaked "Carnilla!" We all hunkered down, and tried to hide. The noise got louder, and then it flew overhead, then passed and faded away. It was headed roughly out over the swamp,
Back in the Lord Loofah's Keep we settled down to rest in the FAG inn. My beauty, pulchritude and macromasia had increased somewhat when the witch died. I used to attract many stares from solo males and hateful glances from women, but now the mild this irritant had turned into a deluge of attention from every man-jack in the inn. One fellow named Elric (yes, named after the fallen god) was particularly interested and hung around. So much so that he wanted to join us - he was a tea-leaf like Light Touch. So we had a vote: Carla, Peg Groups, Ah Hung, Wiz said yes. John Wayne, Yeti, and Gwyffin said no. So he could tag along.
John Wayne's Santa suit was beginning to give us worry. He had slaughtered some good creatures in cold blood, and now he was starting to radiate evil to both me and Wiz. So evil in fact, that it was only eclipsed by Tarboy. He could not take the suit off, and its fabric was physically merging with his spine and brain stem. He got himself a whip too, and started practicing using it.
We asked the Keep priest of Grism, Dogbert, to check John and the suit out. Dogbert pronounced the suit utter pure and incorruptible Good (!). John then asked the Keep wizard to also check the suit because it was a power item - but when he touched it, all the flesh was stripped from his hand, literally degloved, leaving only the bloody bones and tendons. His hysterical screams of agony could be heard long into the night as Dogbert tried fitfully to patch him up - or at least keep him alive. We are pretty sure John Wayne would have been arrested and executed for such an act if Dogbert had not intervened with his declarations of the suit's unadulterated goodness.
The target for the next trip would be the portal located in Cliffies' land - a tribe of goblins. So we left and headed there. After two uneventful days, we left the road and started to head through the trees.
We came upon an ogre-mage and two orcs priests about to slaughter a naked elf maiden who was tied to a tree stump. We made short work of them; without even breaking a sweat. The girl identified herself as Nyssa and was logically upset, but she didn't wish to travel with us, and only wanted to head home. The ogre-mage had a book Revelations of Glaaki and was using drawings from the pages in his set-up of the sacrifice. Author Glaaki was obviously completely insane, probably evil too (though the book did not radiate evil), and just looking at a page made me feel ill. John Wayne had no such moral qualms, and he gleefully took the book. On the open page, he soon spotted the very sacrifice the ogre-mage was planning, and determined that the ogre had got it completely wrong any way: "In Elder-speak, the gerund is 'disembowelling' not 'disenfranchising', stupid ogre."
As we were moving deeper in, we heard the two-stroke engine again. Elric suddenly bolted. And then suddenly there were four loud bangs in quick succession.
There was a blur and we appeared in a library, filled with musty old books. Mentoz "the Fresh-Maker" (another one of the extraplanar beings) was here in smoking jacket and slippers, sucking on a pipe. He explained that we had been hit simultaneously by four portals, obviously launched from Carnilla herself (from her two-stroke-engine-powered gyrocopter). Mentoz had intervened at the exact moment that the portal spheres were in their expansionist stage. He had fashioned this Library pocket universe and brought us here, outside of time, for the few milliseconds before the portal spheres engulfed us. Although he was forbidden to intervene, apparent doing this act was allowed - and who are we to question the motives of beings of such power? We would still have to go back into the resultant worlds where the portal spheres would take us, but at least we could have a wee chat with Mentoz first, and perhaps a snifter of brandy.
Like Tarboy, Mentoz was worried about the phenomenal power that Carnilla was wielding, and he too wanted us to stop her before she destroyed all the multiverses with her "pesky meddling". He gave us some more items: two suppositories of Regeneration, eight suppositories of Cure, two of Heal, and one for me to use in the presence of Carnilla, apparently to weaken her by proxy. Gwyffin also pick-pocketed the Fresh-Maker and got a hens-egg-sized one made of the purest of white marble.
