Roguelike Roulette [Slot 1o]
Level 22: "This place looks uninteresting"
Not much excitement promised. She should head down, but first a diversion. She heads east for some troll-poking.
Unexpected non-evil creatures accompanying the trolls, a grape jelly and a giant yellow centipede. She snatches up a quartzite ring from beside the jelly without waking it, then destroys the centipede and sends what trolls have woken fleeing. Probably should try and track them down, in case they have anything nice.
A ring of free action and +5 soft leather armour. Neither worth keeping, and Marash needs to start making heavier use of her wands and staves if she wants to carry anything else. Not that she has been finding an abundance of those to replace with if they are used up... but down she goes.
Level 23: "You have an excellent feeling..."
Oh no. Oh, no. This can't be good.
A wyvern at the edge of her light as she enters. Probably nasty, probably dangerous. Probably, she can handle it. Sleeping, so a moment to think. No clue what else might be in this room. Lighting it up with the Phial would mean almost certainly having to fight the wyvern. Staying in place to activate her usual awareness runs the same risk.
A step to the west, creeping. She manages to find a corridor north and slips out, hoping the wyvern will not follow. Something in the darkness tries to blind her magically, but she shakes it off.
Activating a rod of light reveals a swarm of novice mages ahead, something she is now practiced at handling. Marash settles into firing off arrows, occasionally (and more lethally) swiping at those who venture too close. For a little while, until she sees the wyvern approaching from around the bend behind her.
She prays for protection from evil, repelling the wyvern's attacks, but one of the mages succeeds in confusing her at the same time, leaving her to drink a potion of cure light wounds to clear her head. Not so tough, that wyvern. Her main annoyance is having to drink another potion to unconfuse herself during the fight, but when it is hurt badly the wyvern pushes past a mage to flee. Never seen a creature do that before.
Marash has doubled the number of mages whose lives she has ended by the time they stop coming. Forty-four, now. Most of what they left behind is relatively useless to her, duplicating abilities she already has at her command. But the wyvern left rather a lot of treasure, having foolishly returned, and that's nice.
More mages to the southwest when she tries to head that way, and an awkwardly placed trap give her mild trouble.
[editorial note: at about this point, with the desktop PC dying, I transferred the save file to my laptop and have been since using Wine to continue playing the Windows release of Angband 3.2.0]
She pauses, taking stock of her situation, and gains access to the prayers of Dispel Evil and Turn Undead. Using her Identify staff on a banyan staff dropped by a mage reveals that banyan staves put mosters to sleep. A more powerful effect than the wand she carries, so she swaps them.
As she heads back to investigate a robe one had dropped, a surviving mage appears from around a corner. Must have been a straggler. Little else seems to inhabit this corner of Angband, but Marash does discover a mistletoe staff of teleportation. Useful enough to replace those magic mapping scrolls she never uses.
Marash heads north, wandering around in the dark, where she is surprised by a grizzly bear. No doubt the grizzly bear is also surprised to find itself 1150 feet beneath the surface of Arda. Luckily for Marash, the bear's lair held a pair of nifty magical gloves.
She continues he wanderings east, wondering what makes this place so excellent. Some arrows grabbed off the ground in passing and the sound of a door being smashed open in the distance stops her short. Detecting evil, Marash discovers a swarm of demons, Manes, at least 15 of them, nearby. Time to backtrack and find a more defensible location.
Had they been here long? Previously she hadn't been able to find much sign of evil around. Perhaps these demons are freshly arrived.
What she'd thought to be a tunnel leading to the Manes turned out to be a dead end, energy hounds following behind her. Arrows let fly at the one she can see.
Hounds hounding her through corridors, poisoned by a giant tarantula, finally the demons show themselves. Arrows and the Maul of Westernesse do away wih them.
Weirdly many giant yellow scorpions around here. Weirdly tough creatures too, which don't seem so dangerous. She chases one into a small cluster of cave orcs, satisfyingly easy prey now.
Roaming southeast Marash stumbles into a group of rangers at range. That's a bit more worrying, and still no sign of excellence. There must have been more of them than she thought. Many could be heard dying to her arrows in the dark, and still she crushed in sight more than her original count.
A moderately valuable slaughter. One carried a charisma potion, further enhancing Marash's looks. On the far side of the rangers, more orcs and a kobold.
So that is what Marash had sensed, that made this area feel so excellent. Laying, tossed unregarded in a corner of that room, guarded by rangers and orcs, the long sword Elvagil, fabled weapon of slaying orcs and trolls. It is, in fact, a rather lesser weapon than that she already carries. Marash is tempted to leave it where it lies, but perhaps someone will pay a pretty price for it back on the surface.
Marash discards her wand of Confuse Monster to make room in her pack for the artifact sword.
She doesn't sell the sword. Instead, she stashes it in her home, along with a ring of free action that she hopes will never become useful.
