====== Chapter 17: Eyeballs in the Sewers of Rathess ======

[ [[empress:protagonists:isha:reports:report16|Chapter 16]] ] [ [[empress:protagonists:isha:reports:index|Back]] ] [ [[empress:protagonists:isha:reports:report18|Chapter 18]] ]\\ \\ 
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Retaking the Basilica of course involved monumentous amounts of poo water. 

After searching outside for a bit, they were able to find a well-trod entrance. In they went. The entry was full of water and stink. The room beyond held two guards. Voltaz disappeared to "take care" of the guards while the rest of them made their way along the uneven floor. As they came up to the second door, those who were still in the first room were attacked by eyeballs, giant flies, and flying slime. Nasty.

After a quick amount of sword work, the critters were smacked down and the rest snuck into the large, well-lit main room. It was less wet and less stinky in here.

Across the floor they hurried. Voltaz informed them that there had been people walking back and forth through this room, and they all seemed to be heading into the far room. So that's where they snuck over to.

Voltaz peered in and quickly informed that some acolytes were having dinner. It was quickly decided that they'd just go in and wipe everyone out so as to get the unruly god's attention in the quickest way possible (assuming they didn't already have it and he was just not voluntarily appearing).

The acolytes were basically unarmed and certainly unprepared, and they were dispatched quickly. They were again attacked by poo creatures and whatnot, but still no gods appearing before them.

They searched around some more and Voltaz was finally able to discover a trapped door in the corner. Isha pulled it open and they all slipped down to the bottom, one by one. 

The smell was different here, not nearly as nasty somehow. They made their way along a path and down a staircase. 

At the bottom was standing water across a long room, with a giant eyeball on the wall on the far side, with an altar sitting right before it. The water between them and the eyeball was the same, burny, acidy water as everywhere else, and was bound to sting if one tried to wade through it.

But there were no obvious footholds between here and there. Not in the center, not on the sides, nowhere.

Almost immediately, the big eye did a mind-confuddling attack. Grant was out of it. Wrath had no range. Voltaz and Isha began making their way across the room. Voltaz walked daintily along the surface, while Isha jumped through the muck a few times, to land neatly on the altar.

Immediately she noticed an imp-like creature standing below the big eye, behind the altar. Apparently Grant had snapped out of it long enough to send a few attacks at the eye, which seemed quite wounded.

Isha looked at the imp, and immediately unleashed upon it instead of the eye. Voltaz arrived and did so as well.

The thing had very few defenses. The distance, lack of line-of-sight, and hypnotic eye were it's primary defenses. Later, Grant and Voltaz would mention that the creature had cast an illusion of a giant muck-monster in the middle of the room, but Isha and Wrath had seen through it and thus not even noticed it.

Isha and Voltaz tore through the creature in short order. And as the god of disease evaporated before him, a knife clattered to the floor in its place. The knife was retrieved and returned to Grant, who would in turn take it back to his Ninja Assassin Lizards as the proof they sought that he was the one.