We awoke on the fifth floor of this cursed teleportation dungeon after a much-needed long rest in Momen’s Tiny Hut. I was in rough shape after that beating I took in the gauntlet yesterday, so the rest was essential. When we emerged from the hut, I noticed that all the elemental corpses from our previous battle had mysteriously vanished overnight. This place really does repair itself.
I pulled out those notes the goblin gave us and started reading through them properly for once. There’s mention of a mining operation on the sixth floor, with a note that says to “skip it because it sucks.” Naturally, this only made us more curious about what might be down there. Loot Pluck got excited when we mentioned mining, making pickaxe sounds and humming that dwarf song.
Momen cast his telepathic bond spell so we could communicate properly, and prepared some defensive magic. We decided to test one of the purple portals we hadn’t tried yet to see if we could find this sixth floor.
The portal took us to a new area where we immediately ran into two fire elemental myrmidons. Nothing too challenging - I used some of my meteors to blast through the barricades blocking our path while engaging them in melee. Tittlin picked them off with his bow, and Momen finished the weakened one with Toll the Dead. Loot Pluck helped out with his Vicious Mockery, making water sounds that somehow hurt them.
We pressed on through another purple portal, hoping to find that mining operation. Instead, we found ourselves back in the nightmare that is the gauntlet room. Dozens of fire elemental myrmidons arranged in tiers behind barricades, all armed with longbows. I estimate there were about thirty of the bastards.
Realizing we were completely outnumbered, we had to get creative. Momen threw up a Wall of Stone to block the right flank, which helped limit how many could shoot at us at once. Tittlin used his Amethyst Lode Stone to fly up and turn invisible, though some of them still spotted him eventually.
I started blasting holes through the barricades with my remaining meteors, trying to create a path forward. Loot Pluck managed to cast Hypnotic Pattern on a group of them in the back, which helped thin the numbers shooting at us. Momen hit several with a Cone of Cold, then used some gravity magic to pull a bunch of them together.
Things got desperate fast. We were taking too much damage from all the coordinated arrow fire. Loot Pluck dimension doored himself and Momen up to what we thought was the exit portal. I had to make a mad dash across the battlefield, chugging a healing potion and raging to try to survive the gauntlet. Somehow I made it without getting killed by opportunity attacks.
Tittlin flew through slowly while invisible, though one of those damned emerald eyes started following him around.
When we all finally dove through the “exit” portal, we discovered the cruel joke - it simply sent us back to the entrance to the current floor. All that effort for nothing.
We took a short rest to lick our wounds and figure out our next move. Loot Pluck helped with some healing, and we discussed our options.
The dungeon’s deceptive design is getting to all of us. We’re starting to question whether we’re actually prepared for what lies deeper in this place. If the sixth floor is this brutal, what horrors await us below? We need to be much more strategic about which portals we test going forward, but we also can’t leave for too long or risk losing all our progress to the dungeon’s self-repair mechanisms.
Still planning our next move, but I’m not feeling great about our chances.