Ragnarr: Liches Ain't Shit, or the Dangers of Creeping Doubt

Pelor, thank you for answering my prayers. And in what a lovely fashion, too.

There are idiots involved in the plans of these bastards. Some of them are even powerful enough to be worthy of our efforts, but somehow still idiotic.

I mean, sure, he was a lich. Or was it a she? A wee bit skeletal, so it's hard to say. But a lich ought to be smart enough to see when it's not going to win a fight. And when you've got a whole lot of bastards with glowing symbols of Pelor strapped to them, it should be obvious that this is a bad place for undead.

And aye, sure you've managed to grease the floor between the bastards with big swords and yourself. Sure, you've managed to lock the archer in a force box and vanish one of the sworded bastards to somewhere or other. Aye, it seems like your life is fine, right?

Here's a clue: that "weakened" cleric is still a cleric, and of Pelor, you bastard, and when he asks Pelor to keep your arse right the hell there, he's not doing it for his health. It's because he's about to beat your arse, and everything else be damned.

The only downside is that the bastard got away.

But you know what's nice about that? By Pelor's beard, I'm looking forward to seeing the bastard's face when we do it again. Or when Arcadius get's him by the walls, wizard or no wizard.

Which reminds me: I'm not so sure about this archer. It seems like as not that mega-lich was there to try and stop the wizard from studying some things to help us out. So, you'd think that makes things for the rest of us pretty simple: keep the bastard off the wizard, and let the wizard do what he needs to do.

And there's the new guy, trying to convince the bird man that he should jump in and cast spells, just because he was in a cage, Arcadius had disappeared, I wasn't fully powered, and Azan was trying to learn bloody ice skating. I won't say we weren't savagely inconvenienced, but we still had Pelor on our side, damn it, and we weren't going to lose. We don't need some damn bastard trying to do the aboleth's work for him.

I'm not saying that he's a servant of the aboleth. I mean, I've got a link to him, but there's been things that the aboleths can do that I can't exactly tell through that, so it could go either way. Or he could be a willing servant of the damn fish. But something doesn't add up.

Like the fact that he walked right out of his invisible cage when he wanted to, after he'd spent some time, safe from the fight, trying to convince Big Bird to jump into the fight. (Which would have been a bad idea, anyway. The lich was reflecting spells right and left. At least mine only make me feel fantastic, and don't make us all dead.) So maybe he didn't have to spend all that time in there.

And maybe not even because he's an agent of the seer. Perhaps he's just a coward, terrified of facing overwhelming odds. But that doesn't make a damn bit of sense, either; he says he spent years fighting a guerrilla war against some bastards or others. You'd think that would make him used to overwhelming odds, and used to having to keep one guy out of the fight while he's up to no good. I would have thought that would be his life, aye? It only makes sense.

Unless he's an agent of the aboleth, or there's something very, very big he's not telling us.

Either way, he's going to visit the psychic surgeon with us, and that'll tell us the one.

And if he's clean, it's time he tells us what he was really up to. Because perhaps it was some manner of wankery, but that doesn't matter. The gods have been known to help a bastard out because he's a bastard, to bring him around to good.

But if he's to fight with us, it's only fair that we know.

Before he causes us some real problems.