Gradi, day 68 of Autumn, 553

Twenty-six exiles ventured into the Foothills today. These included Rincewind as the teleporting Mystic, and 3 Bloodbladers.

The Pitch caverns lived up to their name on this trip, as never before. We saw a incredible number of Pitch Arachnoids today, literally several dozen, as well as a few rarer Albino Noids. The entire group got a workout, and the Bloodbladers earned their keep today. Even PC1 was loaded with Pitch Arachnoids, and it took a second lure run into PC2 after a hasty retreat to get it clear enough for the grup to enter safely. Very very slowly, we advanced deeper, and eventually reached PC5. The pressure was relentless, and it seemed we would never reach this goal, let alone go further.

At last we set up for the teleport to PC6, with all our fingers crossed hoping that PC6 could not possible be very bad on a day when everything else was very bad.

We didn't get so lucky. There were several Pitch Arachnoids in the Landing Zone, and although the running and wall building went fine, there was too much activity in the landing Zone to ever really get stabilized. Even one loose Pitch Arachnoid can quickly annihilate the group when we are all scattered, and what was worse, we had decided to teleport the Bloodbladers at full health. By the time they were ready to fight, too many others were already fallen. Finally, Natas openned an Ethereal Portal and a few exiles escaped to the Ethereal plane on foot or on a chain (like me), but Natas' Stone broke in the usage and no one else had another to open a second Portal to Purgatory. Pretty quickly, everyone in the EP fell too.

After the PC6 fallens departed, they put in an effort to retrieve the few exiles fallen in the EP, but never did reach us far off in EP3. In the end, the EP folks departed too.

Not a very successful trip by the usual benchmarks. But considering the enormous opposition we faced along every step of the way, our progress into PC6 was a testament to our pigheaded determination to advance and our hard-won experience in dealing with Pitch Arachnoids. If this is the worst the fickle gods can throw at us, we can handle it. And come the day when the opposition is correspondingly light, we will prevail all the more.

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