Lundi, day 84 of Spring, 556

Once again, we took advantage of the Cloud Portal being in Camp Dred to shave almost an hour off our trip out to the Foothills.

The group gathered at Camp Dred, and set out through Dredwood toward the Malachite caverns. We arrived at the first Pitch cave within 20 minutes, and set right into softening it up.

We progressed rapidly, and found ourselves in PC5 within an hour of starting our expedition.

We had two Mystics along today, so Hepta took her turn first to teleport the runner group into PC6.

For insurance, we sent three runners today: Yor, CJ parker and Farhope.

When the main group teleported into PC6 a minute later, things looked pretty clear. The runners drew all the Noids away from the Landing Zone to the far North corner of the cave.

We quickly set up the Kudzu walls and prepared to start luring Arachnoids.

The one problem was that we were getting a large number of webs thrown from the South. Most of these ignored the healer rod, and instead targetted the clustered fighters. Of course, the fighters began moving North to get out of webs already on the floor and to avoid new ones, but this just compressed the fighting zone all the more.

When the first lure back was too big (4 webbers), no one had room left to maneuver, and everyone was quickly pasted with webs from the incomng Noids. Many folks fell where they stood, or were trapped by a wall of webs already to the South and then felled.

As usual when things go very very badly, it seemed to all be up to Natas and a couple healers, but today even he wasn't able to turn the tide in our favor. Everyone was fallen quite quickly.

It seems likely that one cause for the over-large lure was the fighters standing too far North, allowing Noids to wiggle past the Zu walls instead of being held tight against them.

Since we had made such quick progress to Pitch Cave 6 and then were massacred so efficiently, most of the group had time left and decided to try again.

The original goal was to attempt PC6 and beyond again, but while regrouping, we were joined by a number of outside exiles interested in trying to reach the Pathfinder Library in cave 1, and lost one of the teleporting Mystics. Without 2 teleport teams, we were not going to attempt to clean up the mess we left in PC6, so we settled for reaching the Pathfinder library.

It was a good thing we scaled back our goal for this second trip, because PC1 had refilled with a vengeance after our earlier passage through. It took several attempts to finally run most of the webbers to PC2 and get Kudzu walls planted, leaving most of the group leadership fallen in PC1 or PC2.

I don't know if it was the absence of usual leaders, or the late hour, or the presence of extra visitors, or whatever, but we turned into a mob.

Things became very uncoordinated, as subgroups started doing their own thing. People became impatient, and ignored folks who knew what they were doing to follow whoever yelled the loudest and most inistently. It wasn't pretty.

At one point, most of the group actually pulled up stakes and started to leave, and it took some effort to get them to return from the upper Malachite caverns.

Nevertheless, we did finally manage to control PC1, rescue all the fallens, and get all the folks into the Pathfinder Library who had wanted to go.

Inside the inner room, a Crimson Noid was lurking, but we entered in large enough numbers to kill that menace quickly.

So at least some small good came from today's trip.

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