Bug Hunt

Recap

The bulletin board had seen stranger notices. Gone to the bugs. Took Roland. But given everything N.O.D.E. had faced in the weeks since first making landfall in the Wildermarch — corrupted rivers, Shadowfell portals, psionic entities that spoke directly into the mind — a note about bugs felt almost quaint.

One unfamiliar face had appeared in camp that morning.

Mahnrag — an orc of considerable mass and considerably few words — moved through the outpost like a man who had long since stopped being impressed by anything. Grizzled, scarred, a fighter by every measure of the word. He seemed to have arrived with the specific intention of locating a drink.

Jorath, meanwhile, had been in conversation with Roland Poland — a bugkin the party had encountered only days prior, found deep in the tunnels during the creature attack on the moon corn fields. He had come back to camp with them afterward, a guest by circumstance if not entirely by choice, and had been proving surprisingly useful ever since. Roland had answers about the tunnel systems below, and more importantly, an offer: he'd lead them back down himself.

Before departing, Kouzlo and Shadow shared the messages they had received from the Feywild. Kouzlo's arrived wrapped in the Fey's characteristic courtesy — a gift of one perfect, unkindly precise answer, available at a moment of his choosing, extended in recognition of his attentiveness as a guest. The fine print was characteristically Fey: those who are granted perfect answers are seldom left entirely unclaimed. Shadow had been offered a vial of something called Grave-Favored — a sharpening of his sight near death, with the caveat that death walking close would rattle his composure in return. He poured it into the ground before the vial could dry itself. The Feywild, the message made clear, notes such things.

Mahnrag produced clove cigarettes. Jorath asked for one, with the cheery ignorance of someone who doesn't read rooms well. Mahnrag stared at him for a long moment before handing one over. Kouzlo lit it with a small prestidigitated flame — which Jorath then had to actually smoke, an experience he found deeply unpleasant. Kouzlo found this funnier than he let on. The party left a note on the bulletin board so any late arrivals could find them, and descended.

Roland led the way, narrating cheerfully as they went. "Great great grandfather dug this one," he announced at a wall of dirt indistinguishable from every other wall of dirt. He seemed proud. Nobody said anything.

Then the tunnel opened up, and nobody said anything for a different reason.

The colony sprawled before them — a full settlement carved into the cavern, buildings stacked and terraced upward along the rock walls as far as the torchlight reached. Storefronts. Foot traffic. The distant sound of commerce. It had the bones of every frontier town the party had ever passed through, transplanted underground and rebuilt by hands that had never seen the sun. Dusty. Lived-in. Improbably, unmistakably a place where people — or something like people — went about their days.

Roland, used to the awe-inspiring sight before them, led the party into a saloon.

Kouzlo paused at the threshold of festive merriment before entering, taking stock. The colony outside ran vertical — a civilization built upward as much as outward, with patrols moving in easy circuits through the space. Nothing alert. Just present. The facade of the establishment told a subtler story: the step at the entrance cracked cleanly down the middle, the doors re-hung so many times the hinges had memory, grime worked into every surface not from age but from repeated impact. This place had been fought over. More than once, and recently.

Mahnrag did not pause. He went straight to the bar, located the bartender — who bore a passing resemblance to a mosquito — and demanded his flask be filled. An amber liquid arrived, thick as honey, that burned without sweetness. Mahnrag drank without hesitation. He had effectively removed himself from the group's social obligations before they'd even found seats.

Kouzlo took a chair at Roland's table with clear sightlines to the bar - his distate for Mahnrag's first impression barely concealed. Shadow was pulled in two directions — Jorath was already distracted by the neighboring card game — and chose the table, keeping half his attention on Mahnrag and half on whatever Jorath was about to do.

Jorath sat with Roland for approximately thirty seconds before migrating to the card game.

It was at this point that the saloon doors swung open again. A second unfamiliar face appeared — Wherrin Khevos, half-orc, neatly presented, clutching books, and wearing the expression of a man who had followed directions through an underground insect colony on faith alone and was now confronting the reality of what that had led him to. He spotted the only table of non-bugs in the room, waved with some relief, and crossed toward them. Mahnrag grunted at him from the bar without turning around. The party made introductions.

Roland, with most of the table's attention, laid out the stakes. The colony had been under sustained attack from something wilder than themselves — not civilized bugs, but creatures closer to the beasts of the forest. Two breeds: the Ankegs, claws and acid, brutally direct; and a smaller species that hunted the colonists like assassins, quiet and precise. If the colony fell, those creatures would pour upward through the tunnels. The moon corn fields. The camp. Everything N.O.D.E. had spent weeks building. Roland wasn't asking for heroes, exactly. He was making sure everyone understood what was at stake. He mentioned a contact who might get them through the guarded entrance to the eastern tunnels. Kouzlo pressed him on the differences between the colony bugs and the enemy. Roland gestured at the room around them, then at Kouzlo himself — there was as much difference between these colonists and the creatures below as between an elf and a wolf. Same world. Entirely different nature.

At the card table, things were going predictably sideways.

The bugs were playing something resembling Texas Hold 'Em on cards made from chitin scraps and old bits of material. Jorath sat down, made himself comfortable, mentioned Roland's name — and one of the pill bugs spat on the floor. The hand played out. Most folded. Jorath had a pair of eights, which was enough. He reached for the pot. The remaining opponent grabbed his hand and stared.

Jorath attempted, telepathically, to explain that he was there to help, that Roland had vouched for him, that they were all on the same side. The bug heard the intrusion in his head, accused Jorath of being a demon, and opened to brawl.

What followed was brief and chaotic. Shadow lifted the instigator off the floor and suggested, with icy calm, that he reconsider. He kept swinging anyway, just with his feet in the air. One bug landed a solid blow on Jorath. Mahnrag, at the bar, turned just in time to see it happen. He picked up a stool and threw it across the room without a word, clipping the attacker. Kouzlo prestidigitated a shower of sparks across the room as a universal signal that it was time to leave. Shadow grabbed a pill bug and hurled it as an improvised distraction, then hauled Jorath toward the door over his vocal protests.

A goliath beetle emerged from the back. The bartender asked it to restore order. Mahnrag planted his feet, turned to face the goliath, and simply stared. The goliath considered this, then walked around him. The bartender refilled Mahnrag's flask. Mahnrag left at his own pace, stepping out into the street as if nothing of note had occurred.

Outside, a praying mantis in an outback hat called out to Roland. He was chewing the stub of a cigar, carrying daggers, wearing the particular expression of someone who finds soft-skinned visitors more trouble than they're worth. Buck Carapis. He could get them through the eastern tunnels.

Wherrin turned to Shadow with a series of sincere questions: Is it always like this? This is the first other civilization we've encountered? we were just fighting, have you actually decided to help them?

Shadow's answer was reasonable: a bar brawl doesn't make enemies. You can fight a brother.

Buck described the enemy bugs: small, flight-capable, producing acidic secretions, showing no signs of intelligence or language. Nothing that talked. Nothing that negotiated. Then Roland and Buck launched into a loud, convincing argument with each other — a performance for the guards posted at the tunnel entrance. Shadow announced, with complete conviction, that Buck was about to murder Roland. One guard abandoned his post to intervene. Wherrin quietly cast Suggestion on the second. Behind them, as the party slipped through the door, Buck and Roland would remain to manage the aftermath. Jorath noted, not without sympathy, that Buck was probably headed for jail.

The eastern tunnels were different from the colony's well-worn paths. The warmth that had softened the air below gave way to something closer and heavier. Torches no longer appeared on the walls and the darkness grew thicker. Sound folded back on itself strangely, echoing in ways that made distance hard to judge. Jorath, as the only member of the party with previous bug experience attempted to meticulously track the wild beasts through the caves

Mahnrag walked through like he'd been planning to use that tunnel all along. By sheer dumb luck his random choices happened to take him right along the same path Jorath was tracking

Kouzlo quietly cast mage armor on himself, then on Wherrin, then on Jorath. Wherrin placed an alarm in the tunnel behind them. Shadow ran to catch up to Mahnrag, who was casually strolling away at pace. While the wizards took their time down the dark tunnels, shadow attempted to slow Mahnrag to avoid the party from fracturing further.

By the time Kouzlo and the others arrived at the chamber's entrance, the situation had already found Mahnrag and Shadow without them. The room opened ahead — wide, dimly lit by the soft organic glow of dozens of eggs arranged across the floor — and an assassin bug had already dropped silently from the ceiling behind Mahnrag and slashed. His aberrant tattoo flared, hardening his defenses before he'd fully registered the attack. Ankegs were closing in from the edges of the room.

Mahnrag taunted the assassin bug and hit it with a blow that produced a sound like something important breaking. Shadow moved in alongside him. An Ankeg spewed acid. Mahnrag caught the edge of it and didn't flinch. The assassin bug tried to inject something into him. He shrugged it off the way a man shoos a fly.

The wizards arrived to find a two-person brawl already underway against four separate enemies.

Wherrin assessed the room and cast Minor Illusion on a cluster of eggs, conjuring the convincing appearance of fire. A nearby Ankeg rushed over and beat them to extinguish the flames — destroying the eggs in the process. Jorath called down Selune's Viper, gaining some protection and poisoning an Ankeg. Then Shadow heard it: a swarm-sound rising from a cave hole in the chamber floor, low and growing. Wherrin's alarm pinged simultaneously. Something was approaching from behind them as well, soon they'd be battling on multiple fronts.

Kouzlo misty-stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down into the dark. He cast fireball into the abyss. As the inferno descended, reflections in dozens of insectoid eyes shown back. The explosion connected with something enormous far below and a shriek echoed up through the rock - dust and gravel falling back down. An Ankeg seized Shadow and began dragging him toward the hole. Kouzlo hit it twice, freeing him, then continued his barrage on the ascending swarm. As fireballs and chromatic orbs exploded, rock crumbled collapsed. The hole began to close. Shadow punched his former grappler, stunned it, adding it to the falling debris on their incoming enemies.

Wherrin decided this was the opportune time to alert his compatriots that he had no combat magic - he'd only be able to support the team with practical illusions and incantations. To that effect, he conjured the illusion of a solid cave wall over the entrance through which the party entered. The deep hum of beating wings approached quickly from behind them then stopped. While a swarm had arrived, it sat at what it perceived as the end of a tunnel. As quickly as the swarm arrived, it left.

Jorath and Mahnrag cleared the remaining creatures in the room. Kouzlo sent his last meteors and an orb of booming thunder energy into the hole, shaking stones loose and sealing it entirely. Shadow killed the last Ankeg. Mahnrag faced the final assassin bug - with a menacing roar he took hold of one of the foe's arms and ripped it off with a gruesome crack and a terrible scream. Turning the spear-like appendage around he drove it into the hole from whence it came, a quiet settling in the space as the last of the echoes tired themselves out and lay still.

Jorath pocketed one of the unhatched eggs — for study. The rest of the brood was incinerated.

Toward the back of the chamber, a second entrance led to an unsettling secret. Down here in the depths, barely visible through the dark, a castle.

It sat at the center of a structure the party had only recently begun to understand — the slow-dawning geometry of cult activity scattered across the Wildermarch, a constellation of sites that N.O.D.E. had been stumbling through for weeks. They were too close to see the shape of it clearly, but they could feel the pull of it. Activity moved around the distant structure, indistinct but unmistakable. Everyone understood without saying it: that was cult business, and they were not equipped for it today.

Jorath cast Shatter on the rear tunnel, collapsing the secondary entrance behind them. The party made their way back up toward the surface through a previously hidden exit — a crop of trees roughly a mile out — and emerged into open air. Camp was a straightforward walk from there.

They had a sealed hole that probably held. A fortress to plan for. Two bugkins waiting at camp with knowledge of the tunnels below. And somewhere in Jorath's pack, an unidentified egg from a species they were only beginning to understand.

The Wildermarch, as ever, had yielded one answer and raised three more.