Searching for the Spider

A strange cloud is dashing around the stalagmites and screeches into a cave entrance. We descend to the bottom of the cave and decide to give it a wide berth.

Through trusting in our intuition we find a sealed mediation chamber containing a webbed Dee-Wee-Sing who is some kind of humanoid rodent and who seems to be using the webbing to support their mediation.

Yarold enters the mediating monk’s dreamscape and brings them back to the waking world. The whole thing seemed to happen in less than a minute for those of who remained in the real world. Apparently Yarold helped the monk with their trauma about having to feed and cloth their family and there was a desert and a mechanical suit of armour.

Dee-Wee-Sing explained that the cloud is a webbed roach and that it is likely that the webbing was created by a webbing spirit released from Three Eye Spider’s dead form which doesn’t sound promising.

We start looking for the body of the ambassador and as we do so we pass through a library where we rummage through a few books on the way. Ye Sing is delighted to find the secrets of a spell than can turn cloth into fire. This will definitely not cause problems later.

However elsewhere in a scroll there is a mention of a leech that can impersonate people and when it does so it excretes a jelly. At mention of this Gogrun seizes the scroll and demands that the group return to the temple compound to confront the Deer Master who is clearly in fact a Leech Master.

Dee-Wee-Sing insists on finding Three-Eyed Spider and the rest of us think that this is a more sensible objective. The apprentice monk shows us how to enter the ambassador’s lodging without having to climb and sure enough the ambassador is a dried husk of a shell. However, disquietingly their spirit is still present and speaks to us and Dee-Wee-Sing.

It seems that the ambassador has meditated themselves to death and its lingering ghostly presence wishes us to discretely request a new ambassador without telling anyone about how he truly died. Ye Sing wonders how such subterfuge is meant to work but diplomacy is the assemblage of deceit for mutual benefit.

The spirit is tethered to its body so before we leave we set fire to it and the webbed chamber and free Three-Eyed Spider to journey to the next life, hopefully they will have learned something from this episode.