Soldi, day 89 of Summer, 552.

I was unable to attend the second trip, on Soldi, day 68 of Summer, 552. Accounts I have heard sounded very interesting and promising. Much mapping into Cave 4 was done by Thuja on a final suicide run.

The Pitch Assault Group gathered for the third time today. 23 exiles were in attendance.

Today, we breezed through Hatred Hollow, Dred Passage and the Orga Barricade in Dredwood to reach the Pitch Cavern in less than 50 minutes.

Thanks to surprisingly light resistance and a good mechanism for luring webbers or rush-killing non-webbers in the narrow passages, we advanced strongly right through Caves 1, 2, 3, and 4.

We finally crossed a bridge in the 4th cavern, leading to a dark walled section that was clearly not a natural cave.

We stopped there to make a group sketch before plunging onward into the total unknown ...

In the Southwest corner of cave 4, we entered the new fifth section, which turned out to be a small room with finished rock walls and braziers flanking the entry on the North side, with a curious green stone set into the floor to the Southeast. This looks similar to the Mystic Strange Stone and the Champion Earth Minerals.

Thorough searching by 130-lesson pthafinders (Elenis and myself) turned up no obvious paths. Two torches suspiciously adorn the East wall, and the Northeast corner opens onto the stream, but one cannot enter either.

Purgatory pendants and Ethereal stones function normally here, in contrast to many of the other caverns here. It is not quite a safe area.

A most curious apparent dead-end to these caverns!

On taking our leave back through the caverns, we ran into serious trouble in Cave 3 with the group spread out to thin (slower rear-guard scanning for paths, front advancing on what appeared to be a lone web-thrower) when we ran into several Crimson and Pitch noids in front and a Crimson spawn to the rear too. The more Westerly group retreated behind a quickly erected wall, but when the more Easterly group came back with chained fallens and cut a hole in the wall, several Crimsons entered and overran the few, wounded fighters who were up.

Several healers and Natas (the lone fighter left up) were able to retreat West to Cave 4 again, and Natas gathered several fallens back to a fort they built near the bridge, but the remaining healers were unable to rod web-slingers that appeared from both the West and the East as well as raise the fallens to actually kill any more Arachnoids. Finally, two Pitch Arachnoids followed someone after a chain run and made their way into the fort from the open North along the stream, and quickly felled everyone left standing. Mass depart followed.

All-in-all, an excellent trip. We made it all the way to the apparent end of the cave system and have pretty complete maps now. The cavern walls all along the way were not checked very carefully for paths, since we moved along rather quickly on the way in and the slower reviewing we planned for the return trip got interrupted.

We were inside the last room just before dawn, for what it's worth. It has a mystical look about it, so a good illusion breaker really needs to peer at it sometime.

The one curious thing was that while in Cave 3, when we killed one particular Crimson Arachnoid, Natas picked up a "Skein of Silk" that it dropped.

No clear use for it yet, but very intriguing. Do all Crimson's have a chance to do this, or only ones deeper into these caves? I've certainly never heard tell of this item before. What could it be used for? Bow-strings?

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