3.504: Gleaming the Cube

Synopsis

3.504: Gleaming the Cube picks up where 3.503: Polterheist left off, with the party in the mayor's master bedroom after the stone creatures have fallen, and the DM, Alex Morrison, lets them finish the search. They turn up a jeweled comb and a bag of about fifty gold coins in a dresser, and Tim goes back to the closet to look behind the clothes for the vault. He doesn't find one, but he does find a hat that, when worn, gives him darkvision out to sixty feet. It was supposed to be a pair of goggles until the hat turned up. With nothing else upstairs, the group goes back down, over to the other side of the stairs, and into a grand study with a big wooden desk, bookshelves, a fireplace, a large mirror and a few glass cases on the walls.

Drandy Savage searches the desk and finds another twenty gold, a pouch full of keys and a ring. Tim picks one display-case lock but fails on two others, so he smashes the glass, and the party takes a decorative sword with a gold hilt and obsidian gems, a helmet and a pair of gauntlets. The gauntlets are no decoration, as the DM warns that they are "power gloves." While the others plunder the room, Glenn Ghoulia spends ten minutes casting Detect Magic as a ritual. A billiards room and a dining room turn up nothing, but back in the study he sees the goggles, the gauntlets, the ring and the mirror all glowing. Mathon, who feels "super not magical," argues for a short rest so that the party can attune the items and regain hit points and second winds, and the group takes one. Tim takes and attunes to the gauntlets, which raise his strength to 19, and the ring turns out to be a ring of jumping. Glenn walks up to the mirror and sees only his own reflection, but when Drandy is the first to touch it, his hand goes straight through. It is a portal. Everyone but Tim, who would rather someone put a head through first, steps through, and Tim soon follows, into a dark room that is empty except for a large metal plate in the floor with four keyholes, labeled in Elvish: the true king, the sentinel, the wise one and the rivals. Major Baker's Cat reads the plate with his Uranian eyes. The party matches keys from the pouch to each lock, with the cat turning each one with his mouth, until the plate rolls aside and reveals a hole straight down into the dark.

Glenn looks down with his ghoul darkvision and sees a huge room below, too deep for him to see the floor. The group has no ladder, so they tie their ropes together, and the cat is lowered into the hole. While he dangles, a Yog-Sothothery check turns up a memory of a family who were assigned, generation after generation, to protect "the ways," whose symbol is black stone, and of a place called the Obsidian Ossuary. The family's name is Ebengard, and the town is Evanstone. Further down, the cat's perception check shows him that the floor is dusty everywhere except one clean spot directly under the opening, and that the torch the party dropped, which was Mathon's, is hovering a few feet above it. He and the party work out that it is a gelatinous cube, and the cat asks to be pulled back up. After the party debates whether to shoot it, burn it, dissolve it with acid breath or light it up with faerie fire, Glenn volunteers to be lowered down on the rope, where the cube cannot reach him, and simply mocks it until it dissolves into a puddle of goo. The DM narrates this as a movie montage with the music rising above whatever is coming out of the ghoul's mouth.

The party ties the rope off to the heavy desk in the study and slides down into a large room lined with huge, featureless obsidian statues. The cat leads the way up a short flight of steps on a dais and through a pyramid-shaped doorway, and the party sneaks into a smaller room with a small black pyramid, flat on top, in the center of it, and an armored stone figure with a shield and spear standing against the right-hand wall. The cat's magic vision shows that the pyramid is not magical but that the statue glows with a faint blue light. On the pyramid there is a window of names, beginning with Warder Ebengard and then Cedric Ebengard, and every name down the list is an Ebengard. On top is a smaller pillar with one face polished to a mirror sheen. A second Yog-Sothothery check convinces them that this is the Ossuary and shrine of the protectors of the ways, and that the pyramid, with its pillar, is a model of the flat-topped hill outside town. The party realizes that the hill may be a black pyramid buried underneath the trees.

Funny Moments

Tim finds a hat that gives him darkvision, and when he asks whether the DM just made that up because he wanted a hat, the DM admits that it was going to be a pair of goggles until the hat showed up. Tim says that he kind of likes the goggles, but he already has a hooded cloak.
The table fights over who gets the fifty gold coins and who gets the jeweled comb, and one player claims to have stolen it.
When the party asks about a basement, the DM points out that they came in on the ground floor and then went upstairs, and that this is "the opposite of a basement."
Looking at the display cases, the DM describes a sword, a helmet and a mirror, and a player says that they would take a "night vision helmet" and a "night vision sword." Tim announces "I take the power gloves" and says "they're so bad."
Drandy rolls to search the desk and gets a pouch of keys and a ring, calling out "Wait a minute, brother. I got a bunch of keys." A player who searches the rug gets only "you find floor."
Glenn inspects the mirror and reports that it is "imbued with magic," that "it's glowing," and, when pressed, that "it's a mirror." The table asks whether the ghoul will sing the song from Mulan, and the DM says that the mirror shows who he is inside.
When Drandy's hand goes through the mirror, the table realizes "it's a portal" and shouts "he's Neo," and a player wonders whether it will start engulfing his whole heart.
Tim, who wanted someone to put a head through the mirror first, says in the key room that the place feels like "I've been here before." The table points out that going through a mirror is what feels familiar.
The cat insists on turning the keys with his mouth, and the DM describes each key in turn, the owl for the wise one, a man with outstretched hands for the sentinel, a crown for the true king and two hearts pointing at each other for the rivals.
The DM tells the audience that fitting the keys "took a lot longer than it's going to sound after we edit this," from a pile of about thirty keys. When he admits he was surprised that the table solved the rivals lock, a player asks to redo it to see what happens when you pick the wrong key, and another says "my face melts" and "I would have eaten him."
Lowering the cat on a rope prompts a request for an animal handling check, and the DM says that this is "literally" what that skill is. When the cat's broad-spectrum vision comes up, the DM tells the table to "pick up Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos if you want an OP cat."
The DM explains that the cube was a request from one of the players, who answered a question about whether there would be a gelatinous cube with "there is now." The table decides that it is "a good thing we didn't jump down there."
The party wonders how to kill a cube that dissolves whatever touches it. Tim suggests dipping an arrow in lantern oil, Drandy has acid breath, and Glenn points out that faerie fire does no damage but would only light it up.
Glenn is lowered on the rope, twirling like a baby held by the armpits, and tries to play his lute. A player describes him as a "freaking bard ghoul" playing "some real bangers," and then Glenn announces "I'll just keep mocking it until it dies."
The DM describes the mocking as a movie montage in which the music swells over the foulest things anyone has ever said, until the cube dissolves into a puddle. The table likens it to the Ghostbusters 2 scene where the team yells at the river of slime, and the DM says "that's exactly what just happened," followed by "welcome to Dungeons and Dragons."
The pyramid prompts a player to ask if it says "Bass Pro Shop" on it, and the DM says it does, and "there's a white hat sitting there waiting for you."
After a long, serious reveal about the ways and the black pyramid, a player asks about "the curds" and the DM answers that they were tied to Little Miss Muffet, and the DM "awards you no points."
The DM stumbles over "perceive" and says "percept," then asks himself "what's wrong with me?"

Notable Quotes

"I'm a man of opportunity and there's no one here." —Tim
"Wait a minute, brother. I got a bunch of keys." —Drandy Savage
"It's glowing." "It's a mirror." —Glenn Ghoulia
"I can put it in with my mouth." —Major Baker's Cat
"I feel like this place feels very familiar, like I've been here before." —Tim
"Pull me back up, please. I'm ready to come back up and report what I see." —Major Baker's Cat
"I jump at will." —Drandy Savage
"I'll just keep mocking it until it dies." —Glenn Ghoulia
"Welcome to Dungeons and Dragons." —Alex Morrison
"It's the opposite of a basement." —Alex Morrison
"It says Bass Pro Shop on it, and there's a white hat sitting there waiting for you." —Alex Morrison