Roguelike Roulette [Slot 1j]
Level 15: "This place looks uninteresting"
A corridor, a door. At least she is momentarily safe. Her first actions are detections.
The evil she finds lies down an open path behind her. Most easy, except am illusionist she has not yet defeated. She chooses to move away, exploring deeper.
The illusionist appears behind her. She turns the rod of drain life upon it, but fails to activate it correctly. She protects herself from evil; the illusionist vanishes.
It reappears after she investigates a room, in easy smiting range. After trading some blows the Illusionist flees again.
Marash is soon confronted by a new beast of Angband, a stegocentipede. It seems much tougher than the metallic centipedes she has dealt with so far. Drain life fixes that. The illusionist sneaks up behind her, perhaps emboldened by Marash lacking her ultimate weapon, but she promptly bashes its skull in and takes its silver.
She finds some treasure and a nickel-plated wand, and scans again. Nearby evil now, a zombified orc, a baby red dragon and some creature called a homunculus. She returns to the area she initially avoided, no longer worried about the Illusionist.
The nickel-plated wand is tried on a large kobold that wakes at her passage, revealing itself as casting clone monster. She may have to be careful with that. The kobold archer and zombified orc try to ambush her during the battle, but she cleans them up.
And yet, in the next room, giant rats. If those get out of control she may have to abandon this place. It is worrying for a moment, but she manages to dispose of them.
She lets a sleeping cave bear lie and cautiously tries to creep past a giant tan bat. It remains undisturbed and she turns back, only to be confronted by a yeti. A few shots from her bow solves that problem, surprisingly easily. What bizarre menagerie the Enemy keeps!
Some more searching and Marash finds herself in possession of a Ring of the Mouse, wondering what cost that carries for the nimbleness and stealth it grants.
Perhaps foolishly, she tries it on the baby red dragon, only to discover it makes hitting her target much harder. She frantically swaps it back for her ring of strength.
Marash drains the dragon's life and prepares to face the swarm of paladins accompanying it. They aren't so tough, but behind them she sees black orcs.
Fighting them mingled is bizzare. Shouldn't orcs and paladins be killing each other? But when some orcs reach the front of the crowd she turns light upon them before praying for protection from their evil.
These orcs hit hard! Marash has to turn some attention to healing her own wounds. If it weren't for her being protected from evil, if she didn't have light to call upon, if Marash couldn't heal herself... she doubts she would have survived that.
Her relief comes too soon, again. Another stegocentipede hurts her badly, more paladins and black orcs arrive to take advantage of her weakness, and desperately she defends herself against a second onslaught, before finally being able to rest. Her reward for prevailing yet again is a prayer to protect herself from heat or cold.
A disenchanter mold? No way she is going near something with a name like that!
The ball and chain she won from Grishnakh is damaged in a fire trap, right before she is faced with a clay golem. Fortunately she is wielding a better mace she found above, in the room with the gnome mage and cave spiders.
The golem is immune to drain life. Marash chants for battle, and it is not as tough as she feared. The tan bat behind it, however, is literally terrifying.
She veers a bit far in a direction she had intended to avoid and picks up a zombified orc chasing her, with homunculus behind. Foolishly getting getting herself pinned down a dead-end corridor by them, she drops some of her weightier loot and says her battle prayers.
Marash learns the valuable lesson of being glad her boots protect from paralysis by homunculi, and sets off to scour its home for treasure. She kills a few guardian creatures and drops her Ring of the Mouse in favour of an unknown Onyx ring.
She quickly stumbles on a giant tarantula, while a swordsmen attacks her from behind. She is quickly hurt badly and fumbles for a solution. Desperation and healing herself seems to suffice. She kills the swordsmen for breathing room, but soon turns to her rod of drain life when the tarantula refuses to go down.
Badly wounded, she becomes aware of a tengu in the area and hopes she is still up to dealing with it. Luckily, the hit and run tactics of a tengu mean Marash is in significantly better condition by the time it is dead.
A swarm of novice warriors drop some interesting looking loot, but Marash foolishly explores further and uncovers a nest of giant white lice. She prays for an earthquake, hoping to do them in, but only seems to succeed in trapping herself with them.
Marash continues hacking at lice until her mana returns, then uses an orb of draining to drop lice numbers to a manageble level and finish them off.
She returns and tries on the ring she had her eye on, only to discover it is cursed. Fortunately a quick prayer takes care of that and Marash is off exploring again... except she is trapped. A prayer of mapping reveals, indeed, there is no path out except by tunneling through solid rock. Or taking the stairs down.
Level 16: "You are unsure about this place"
Her prayerbooks have been weighing her down, so Marash carefully sets down a couple of spares where she can grab them later. A pack of white wolves greet her, but she sees them off. And then, she encounters something interesting...
But she is unable to tunnel her way through to investigate, so sadly leaves the mysterious formation behind.
Marash ignores a sleeping rot jelly in favour of a chest on the floor. She snatches up a scroll from the chest to read, only to find it summons the undead. She beat those off and roamed around, accidentally getting herself trapped by a killer brown beetle.
The killer brown beetle proves too to be not as much trouble as she feared. She next is faced by a brigand and gnome mages, and very wary after losing a treasured item to her first brigand.
When the brigand falls she sends out a line of light and hisses at what is revealed. At least six of the gnome mages, and they appear to have summoned a red worm mass against her.
At first it goes well, but then one of the gnomes launches a frost bolt at her and destroys two of her healing potions. She would pray for protection from such temperature extremes, if only a careless potion drinking had not cost her that gift.
Six gnome mages, one giant red scorpion, three phase spiders and eight worm masses later, the gnomes are cleared out and Marash is safe again. They dropped a shield, which Marash can tell is excellent.
She takes to using her bow on anything she can't hit, or anything she thinks is unsafe. After killing a patch of yellow mold with an arrow she is rewarded with renewed knowledge of the prayer for resisting heat and cold.
She finds a bastard sword that slays demons, and discovers her new shield grants fire resistance, and feeling quite good about herself until, still trying to plot a way into that mysterious structure, she comes upon a hoard of giant fleas. Their breeding outpaces her ability to kill them and she is sure she must flee this place.
A last-ditch effort at magically blast them away fails. There are far more even than she had realised.
