Interlude I - Liar Liar Pants on Fire
After leaving Delphi, we landed in a river, with small stone and chunks of land in it, that we were warned not to touch. Jay stuck his head underwater to talk to fish, and for some reason (my hand), couldn't get his head back above water, and passed out. We carefully got out of the water, under Chappell's supervision, and went to a meadow where we stayed for a couple days to rest, or do other things. I practiced with my weapons, since I knew that I'd need to be as good as possible when the time came to fight the balrog. During this time, the elf went off to have private conversations with people, and helped me practice my dream control, including practicing telekinesis on actual objects near me. Once everything was taken care of there, we all gathered at the river, and the elf led us to the right rock, which was the portal to our next location.
Chappell had informed us that we now had all the items we needed, and that we now needed to visit someone to get more information, and/or clarify that which we already knew (clarify? Ha!)
We were transported to the set of Masterpiece Theatre. It was a drawing room/library kind of place, with a high backed chair, walls lined with books, and a fire (in a fireplace). There was a Mediterranean looking man in the chair, whom the C-man (C-elf?) said was Anthony, the man to see. He told us that Anthony knew everything there was to know, but always lied. Anthony took umbrage at this statement, claiming that there were some things that he did not know, and that he sometimes told the truth. So now we have a suspected liar telling us that someone else is a liar, who not to believe? Anyway, Chappell had to leave, but told us that when we were done, we could tell Anthony to get rid of us and we'd be sent back.
It's not worth recalling every last scrap of conversation, since a lot of it isn't very interesting, and mostly proves how stupid we are sometimes. We asked a great deal of carefully worded questions so that we could easily reverse his answer and figure out the "truth." Some of the things we found out were:
There is a great crisis involving the end of the world, that Fabio is working to avert, with our help. We have collected specific items, each of which is to be used in a specific way, at a specific time.
The end will come as the oracle prophesied.
Not all of us may live through this.
My vision of fighting the Balrog was probably more metaphorical than a representation of how things were to actually be.
Chimon was more with us than against us.
Tom and the elf killed the evil leaper that attacked some of the group at Oxford. He found them as we expected, by noticing Chappell's use of magic to transport people.
Jon should not have messed with the demon imp that was attracted to Gegi (who seems to attract a lot of creatures of darkness.)
Jon caught the imp while it was talking to Gegi, and in the process, we found out that its name was Baggum, and the name of the demon that had possessed Gegi was Dagon. It was mostly harmless, and after trying to make deals with it for information and immunity from demon attack, we let it go its way, and we went ours.
That's about the extent of the useful things we learned. The last thing we learned was that this guy was crazy, and he became very upset and started yelling at us. Then the walls of the room disappeared, and some sort of zombie-knights started coming after us, with intent to cause severe bodily harm to affect us in a metabolically negative way. At this point, I started to get interested in some further questions, but Jon decided he should use the bug-out amulet, and we all gathered around while Jon said the magic words, dropped the amulet, and we went poof into a blank white room (without black curtains.)
We told the elf what had happened and what we had learned, and he said that he was afraid that know-it-all Anthony might go looney on us. He also told us that the demon imp was there because of the curse on Tony, so that when he died, his soul could be taken straight to hell.
At this point, Fabio took people away for private conversations. We overheard some of the conversation with Gegi, in which it turned out that demons took a great interest in her, and had given her some kind of comm device. Chappell had also offered her great power and wealth if she killed all of us. She said no, and he claimed that, ha ha, it was just a test (yeah, sure), and she passed (yeah, sure). He also took Charlie, Jon, and Jay away to talk to them.
When my turn came, we phased out to another white room, and spent a few subjective weeks there so I could practice the dream control skills that I'd been working on at his request since the whole adventure began. It turned out that in my sleep, I'd developed into a pretty crappy telekinetic.
And so ends the first phase of our grand and glorious venture.