Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sdccsu3.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!68579647 From: 68579647@sdccsu3.UUCP Newsgroups: net.jokes Subject: A Long, humorous (?) adventure-type story Message-ID: <1615@sdccsu3.UUCP> Date: Sat, 3-Mar-84 20:07:01 EST Article-I.D.: sdccsu3.1615 Posted: Sat Mar 3 20:07:01 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 5-Mar-84 00:29:31 EST Organization: U.C. San Diego, Computer Center Lines: 333 Some more adventures like they are (in 7 chapters) I Okay, so we were supposed to go rescue this dwarf's father from some sort of creatures. We were in this town, and there were these wizards who were brothers, and they worshipped the norse goddess of death, called "Hel". Mouse steps up to the front door of one of these guys, and (stupidly), he goes inside when he tells the guy that he knows the dwarf called Thoron. The wizard messes up his mind so he tries to prevent his friends from reaching the place they want to go. Nobody else knows about this, of course. In a bar, Mouse pays a slob a platinum piece to go up to a party member (Pierre), and hit him over his head with his own banjo, which he was playing at the time. As the slob is walking back to his table, Winn, another party member, (who is a gnome) walks up unseen by the slob and hits him below the belt with his staff. The slob doubles over and there's a brawl. The lights is turned out for Pierre as somebody casts a spell of darkness on him. Then there is a big shadow in a 30' radius around him. Eventually, we split, and there are no scape-goats. However, one of us turns into a bear, a very bad habit he has. This leads to complications as the citizens of the city run for shelter in a nearby fort, leaving some of us to peek into the jewelry-shops and find nothing. Thoron is found two-timing his wife when she showed up quite suddenly after a long while. She walks out on him. Everyone gets settled and we left for the island. II (The unwelcoming commitee) The island we went to is called Talus, I think. We had to kill a bunch of people and we made a bad impression. The Wraith (a party member) stuck a broach on his clothing that he found on the body of the commanding weird person. When we went to a city he could not speak the language of the citizens and was put under arrest. The questioner asked, "Ok, what are you doing here?" The Wraith answered that he and friends were looking for a dwarf called Fred who had done him a big wrong, although this was a big lie. He said that because theese people hated dwarves. "Listen. If you do just one thing wrong, I'll have you in jail." Wraith assumed it was weird for people to come to this island of their own free will (like Russia) since this place was primitive. He was on probation. He told Mhoram about what he told the questioner, but unfortunately, people have a tendency to forget what the Wraith says, and that he's even saying anything at all. This is too-bad, because Mhoram is questioned by some guy, who says, "Why are you here?" And Mhoram comes up with a different story. Then the questioner says, "Have you ever heard of anyone called "Fred"? To which Mhoron (I mean Mhoram) confesses forgetfully that he "might have", but couldn't remember off-hand. "Well, this person claims that you are looking for a dwarf called Fred." "Well, my companion here is sick, and we are here to cure him by Odin's power." Thoron hid out in the forest until he was discovered by some people. He was put in prison to be burned later, when we tried to rescue him. Again unfortunately, The Wraith was not there mentally at the time, so naturally the sceme failed, and we were all in trouble with the king. He sent us thru a type of magical loop in mid-air after confiscating all our possessions except he gave Winn a staff, as he was a favorite. III Suff'rn on the Steppes On the other side, we ended up in an artic tundra, and wow, was it cold. During summertime, too. As added companions, we had some fellows whom we will call Tim and Matthias. Maybe there were some other people as well, but if so, they were of no consequence. We spent a little time looking for food and the means to light a fire but were dissapointed. Tim vanished into thin air, as it were. The Wraith discovers on his person a jewel which grows warm or hot when met with the sun's rays. His friends tell him he smuggled it. Then there were some neanderthalic people whom we befriended. They were going north, but some of us wanted to go south. Our group split up here. Mhoram, Pierre, The Wraith, and Winn went with the tribe, and Matthias, Thoron, and anybody else I forgot to mention went south. I will first tell what happened to the people who went south. They encountered some dragon-like creatures and told them, "We come in peace," and they got a lift to where Thoron's father and a bunch of dwarves were being held for some purpose which I do not know. I will get back to them later. Mhoram turned into a bear again, and this frightened the tribe people, but we stuck with them anyway. They led us to a tall range of mountains. We see a flock of birds, but Mhoram forgets that his familiar is hovering around him, bored, so we didn't get any. IV Tropical stuff, and Mua-Muas We went thru a pass into a volcanically heated valley with weird, unusual plants and, of course, a volcano. There is a large villiage of these people here. Winn starts dancing and gets rocks thrown at him, so he stops. The volcano is called Yog Sogoth (?) by these guys. A cave-girl strikes up a relationship with Mhoram although he turns her down. We suspect that the volcano is the key out here. If we can get back to the king within a year, he'll give us back our possessions. The locals seem to think the volcano is some god with monsters and such, and they advise against us going there. We do anyway, after we imbibed of some herbal soup during the middle of the night. Taking a trail up the side of the volcano, we find an altar and some strange garbage, like a mace. The floor crumbles around somebody as someone touches it. A trap. Later we also get a bow. It was reached by sending Mhoram's familiar to get it, since it was tied to the ceiling over a pit. The Wraith wades thru a pond of warm water with a rope tied around his waist. As he reaches the middle of it, it opens up and he plummets about 200 feet into a small lake. So does Mhoram and Pierre and Winn eventually. Mhoram gets bitten by some sharks in the lake, but everybody else is fine. Pierre thinks that as he falls, maybe he'll fall head-first with his fists in constant fighting motion, so as to land on a shark and kill it, but thinks better of it and falls normally. We are now in an underground place. There is a waterfall coming from a cave and a tunnel. Mhoram's familiar flaps off down the tunnel to check it out and comes back in hurry. He is being followed by some chanting red humanoid figures saying "Mua Mua Mua Mua Mua Mua Moi (etc.)". We run up a path by the waterfall's edge which the Wraith cleverly discovers ("There's a path here!", he shouts through his sopping wet black velvet mask [actually, it is not known is he was wearing this getup at any time, as it is very impractical.]) Everyone scaled the path, but Mhoram gets in trouble with the creatures called Mua-Muas, which shall be easiest to remember since that is all they say. One grabs hit ankle and he beats it off with the new mace. Everyone beats feet uphill and into a tunnel which the stream flows thru. "Mua", says a big Mua-Mua who thrust its head up to tunnel-level. The stream ran from a crack in the wall, the tunnel itself curved until it opened into an appearantly large room. "You fool! You'll be eaten by the mua mua muas!", Winn cried after someone. Up ahead, a side passage revealed itself, and they all rushed into it. They could still hear the sounds of their pursuers not far behind them. However, they all halted abruptly at a frustrating sight: before them was a two feet broad span of marble crossing to the far side of this new room, whose real floor was concealed in the darkness beyond the marble slopes on both side of the bridge. There were very gusty winds. Pierre started to run across to the door on the opposite side, but was almost instantly buffeted off the marble. The sound of him sliding and screaming in wolfslangish continued for a few seconds, but very soon the noise of the wind overpowered all other indistinct sounds. A group of mua-muas appeared in the arch behind everyone, and so Winn and Mhoram took the plunge and slid off down the side which Pierre had fallen down. The Wraith thought he might be able to run across the chamber, but the powerful winds knocked him off opposite the side which everyone else had fallen. Although he was un-injured, the top of the ridge was thirty feet up, and there was no way for him to climb up the steep enbankment. However, there was (luckily) an archway in front of him, so he sped off into the darkness and fell into a pit which was about twenty feet in diameter. He fell for a while, but by spreading himself out on a horizontal plane, he enabled himself to fall slower. Actually, though, the only thing which kept him from falling extremely fast was that there was a fantasically strong gale blowing up out of the depths. The exact same thing had happened to the other people, save that they were on the opposite side. When Warth finally reached the bottom, he landed with a soft thud, but in no way was he hurt besides a few bruises. The wind had, impossibly, stopped at the bottom of the giant shaft, and no amount of arguing can change the fact that the gale sprung out of the thin-air (which was pretty thin, or had been, considering the altitude at which Warth had been before he had fallen down a collasping lake and two other pits, the shaft not included). This new room was lit by torches which had little unrecognizable stanzas written into them. The air was filled with a lot of black smoke which made his eyes water. There were some steps leading up at the nether end of this chamber, so he trudged up them, so much the action-packed character he was. He saw the other people before they saw him, so he said in a loud voice, "Boo! I am the wraith of the Wraith!" Everybody was together again, for now. "Maybe we should go look around on the top of the hill," Winn suggested. They had gone down a deep shaft with a very strong gale blowing an had stepped out of a smoke filled room. Afterwords, they had seen an ominous sign reading, "WELCOME TO HADES", and had beat feet, trying to escape from a multitude of mua-muas. Everybody agreed to go up, but they were instantly spotted by a group of twenty or so mua-muas in the sulferous valley below. A battle ensued since nobody could get away fast enough, in which Mhohoram had been badly injured by some acidic substance the blobs secreted. Meanwhile, Winn Dexter, the sickly gnome, had beaten the mua-muas with an ordinary tree branch. Eventually the group found a bronze plaque which they determined was a map, since it had lines (trails), with weird symbols (points of interest) dotted here-and-there. They jogged up one of the rocky trails and saw, against some grey mountains, a tall, thin castle with black turrents and walls. "Do you want to go over there?" asked Winn. "Are you kidding!?", Pierre admonished. "That place must be a mua-mua warehouse, a mua-mua factory! It'll be swarming with mua-muas!" They took another trail and saw a canyon strewn with geysers and vapours. Nobody wanted to go down there, so they tried another trail and saw a lot of hills that were pointy in the extremist degree. Although these hills were only about fifty feet in diameter (they were round) in the largest size at the base, they all narrowed down to a seeming pin-point at their tops. They were all in clusters, and except that it would be impossible for such a formation of giant-sized rocks to exist, you might say they were monolithic stalagmites. These were in a huge cluster, with the smallest ones around the perimeter and the giant-sized ones near the center. They saw some more mua-muas and ducked inside the cluster, but one of the blob-like figures came close to where they were hiding. "Mua? Mua? Mua!", it said excitedly at seeing them. Th1ey all had run again, this time pursued by about fifty mua-muas of four feet in hight. As they neared a group of greek-type pillars, the mua-muas halted reluctantly. Some of them stretched forth a drooping arm and growled "muaaa!", which gave Mhohoram an urge to turn around and run back, but he kept on running towards the pillars where everyone observed an old man wearing purple robes. "And what can I do for you?" he asked politely "We want to get out of here!" Pierre blurted. "Yeah, take us out! Can you do that?" asked Winn. "I can take you anywhere in the multiverse," the man said. "But what can you do for me in return?" "We don't have anything to offer...", Mhoram said under his breath. "You can give me knowledge," the man suggested. "Tell me something I don't already know." "Did you know that there are a lot of mua-muas out there?" Pierre asked. "Yes, I already knew that," the man stated. "Well, did you know that there's a black castle in the distance?" asked Winn. "Yes, I already knew that." "Who lives there?" Asked Mhoram. "Why, the lord of the province." the man answered. "Well, did you know that there is a city in which there is an unjust ruler?" "That's nothing," the man said. "Hey," Pierre whispered to his companions. "This guy is going to say, "I already knew that," to everything we say." "Well, let's keep on trying." "Did you know that there are some neanderthals who live in a valley and drink a weird herbal soup?" ask Winn. "No, I did not," the man said, and tapped him with a staff he was carrying. He began to glow and fade. The man explained that he was being sent on his way. { Pierre mentioned that it would be too bad to have to do all this over again, in which case he would tell the old man, "There are some flies on that hill over there." } Actually, I forget what he really said, although he made it. "I battled the clone of a monstrous demon in a mountain," Mhoram stated. "Did you kill it?" the man asked. "Yes." "Was it as tough as that fifteen feet tall red, glowing mua-mua over there?" "I...Don't know." "Why don't you run over there and find out?" "I can't! I'm too weak! I don't have anything to fight it with!" "Very well," the wizened old man sighed. "I don't want you to strain your brain any longer," he said, and tapped him with his staff, causing him to glow bluely. { Before that, though, Mhoram's familiar was able to answer a question, as was the Wraith, o' course. } To conserve energy, since there was already an existing account of what transpired in the mua-mua caves, (most of it, anyway), it was not written over again. You have just read the existing account. A lot of it was updated and most of it is new. V Meanwhile, back to Matthias and Thoron They fought a big battle with some robed and hooded creatures with no visages. A lot of dwarves died, but about four were liberated from slavery, or whatever was going to happen to them. This was on a ship. They then went back to the castle, where everyone else was. VI Lost and Found The king was surprised (I'd suppose) to see us. He then lamely said that all the treasures in his armory were stolen, and this seems to include our stuff. Like our weapons. A note was left to us, which we were to follow the advise of, to find our things again. Pierre asked a guard what happened, and the guard said he saw a "devil (demon?) - dog" stop him from doing anything about the theft. The pile of junk dissapeared, perhaps. We set sail for where-ever the guy is, that made the note. VII The sailing part A new character is here with us at this time, and we shall call him Charley, or Charles. He is loud-mouthed and tells people to shut up. A good thing about him is that he can change into different forms of creatures which can do a lot of damage. We encounter a haunted vessal, and it's going to ram us. Winn waves his wound of wounder (wand of wonder?) at the ship, and the sails turn to stone, collapsing. We fight a skeletal crew, and the Wraith has a sword which likes to kill things which are already dead, so great. We loot it and burn it. The incident is really a profitable one except that more than half our sailors died. Later, there's a sea-monster which is greedy and wants some treasure or food, but we give it some stuff and also say, later on we'll come back and give you some more stuff. "ok," he says. There is a small island spotted. We assume this is the right place. In the future, there are so-many plots and sub-plots that everyone will wish he'd just let the looney have their items and go down to the nearest bar to start a fight or something. We row out to the island in a row-boat, telling the people to wait for us in the galley... If you want to post hateful or admonishing letters, please do so on the appropiate newsgroup, as I don't read net.jokes very often due to the caliber of jokes. (or you can send hate-mail)