Hello again. My last report seemed to be pretty well received, so I will go on and continue this series about the wonderful game of Exile. I would certainly suggest that you read the first one before you read this one, as failing to do so will probably cause some confusion. You can find it here.

At it again

If you recall, when we last left off, Mattz, Blitz, Dag, Lucky, Lithium, and I had just killed an overgrown cat, cut off it's head, and sold it to Fort Ganrick's Captain. Now we really weren't sure what to do. We wandered around the caves for a while, and killed some random goblins and Nephilim that were stupid enough to attack us. We eventually came upon Fort Duvno, a town where all the people were talking about some mysterious magical barriers blocking the roads all around the caves. None of them knew who put them there or how to get rid of them, but some of the people thought it was some new trick of the Empire, and that it meant that they were getting ready to attack. Seemed plausible enough, but since they hadn't blocked our road yet, we really didn't care much. After meandering through the town, we found a guy who offered to train us. Now we could finally put our higher levels to use, because each level gave us five new skill points to distribute. Mattz and I paid him to raise our dexterity, which would allow us to land our attacks more often instead of missing the enemies completely, which we had been prone to do. We also took a slight increase for our HP. Blitz, Dag, Lucky, and Lith all increased their Intelligence, which would make their spells more effective. They also all increased their HP. Now we were a more lethal group than ever, and we were ready to go out and fucking rape some badass monsters.

The Land of the Eternally Stoned

We left Fort Duvno and set out to the East, because that's where Sauron lived, and we had to throw his ring into a Fiery Mountain to save the world. Ok, ok, it was because there was a cave wall to the West, but that first reason sounded much more exciting, didn't it? Anyway, after traveling for a while, we found a farmstead, with what appeared to be mushrooms growing in the fields. I don't know what else would grow in a cave, anyhow, so I guess that we residents of Exile just had to become accustomed to this hallucination inducing diet. When we entered the farm, we saw some lizards in a pen. There was also a pen for cows. I have no idea how they got cows down here, but they were pretty pale and sick looking. Then again, with these graphics, everything in the game is pale and sick looking. We approached one of the guys who were running around the farm aimlessly and tried to talk to him. All he knew was that he had to, "get these big ol' lizards corralled up quick, 'cause them dirty salamanders'll be back!" The next person we talked to was a woman. We asked her about these slamanders, but all she knew how to say was, "I milk the cows here." Another farmhand told us, "I harvest the mushrooms in that yonder field." Apparently he had been keeping some of the pickings for himself, and handing out some of these special crops to the others as well, because they all acted like they were tripping. Finally we found the guy who ran the place, and he was coherent enough to inform us that his name was Tor, and he was the guy who had handed out food and money to the people who used to be sent into Exile. Since the Empire had stopped sending people down here, however, he had become a farmer. Then he told us about his problem with some salamanders attacking his farm, killing his livestock, and burning his fields. We agreed to help him out since he had been nice enough to give us gold and food back in the day.

It didn't take us too long to find the troublesome fire lizards, since they were hiding just behind the cow pen. Sadly enough, they were immune to fire magic, which rendered our mages' bread and butter spells innefective. On top of that, they had a resistance to all types of magic, so the other spells in our arsenal did only one or two damage at a time. As if that wasn't bad enough, the stupid salamanders also created a fire all around them where ever they went, which meant that Matt and I could not get close enough to them to attack without taking damage from the flames. Because of this, Blitz and Dag cast a Bless spell on Matt and I, and Lucky cast Haste on me. With these spells on us, we took slightly less damage, and I got one extra movement point per turn, meaning I could attack twice. Lithium also threw in a summoned spirit, but it died really quickly to the ravenous salamanders. After that Mattz and I continued swinging at the beasts, standing in the middle of the flames while Lith healed us. We landed our blows about every third attack or so (stupid low level dexterity shit), and the mages kept Bless and Haste on us constantly. Eventually we brought down the last of the ugly red lizards, and returned to inform Tor of our success. He was so happy with us that he gave us a necklace. Oh boy, a necklace! Now we had proof that we were really gosu! No monsters would dare screw with us once they saw this super mushroom necklace! Sarcasm aside, we let our good friend Mattz have it, because, well, he's a transvestite.

White Water Fun

After that we returned to Fort Duvno to rest, when we noticed a building we hadn't seen before. It turned out to be a place where we could buy a boat to traverse the subterranean waterways in. For 200 gold, it couldn't be a bad investment (unless, of course, it had a hole in it), so we purchased one and were informed it would be left by the river south of town. We hurriedly made our way down the bank of the river to try out our new purchase, and were rather disappointed. The rickety thing was roughly the size of my boot, and it didn't have a sail or a motor. What a frickin ripoff. We hopped in, decided that Blitz could be our bitch, and made him row us south. After a while, we decided that boating wasn't nearly as fun as we had hoped it would be. With Blitz rowing like a wuss, we couldn't even get up enough speed to go skiing. Just then, however, we saw a small landing site with a small white dot on it, indicating an action encounter! Quickly our party exited the cramped boat and stepped on the dot. There was a cairn there, and when we got near, a spirit started to form. Given the option of whether to attack it or not, we chose to let it form, because we're really nice people (who decapitate cats, remember) and we wouldn't want to attack the poor thing. When he was fully formed, the spirit, who turned out to be the ghost of some warrior, asked us to avenge his death by killing the Ogres who ambushed him in some hidden valley to the south. He said that he would reward us if we set his spirit free by doing this, so we jumped right back in our little boat and made Blitz continue rowing down the river.

Eventually we came to another small landing point, and stopped to explore it for any sign of the Ogres. Sure enough, we found a secret entrance to a cave filled with lots of things that made it obvious ogres lived there. There were bodies all over, and stacks and stacks of garbage, and even a few rats scurrying around in the corner. There were, however, no ogres inside at all. We set out to look for them, but they ambushed us before we could even make it out of the cave. They looked an aweful lot like the ogres in Warcraft, only without the second head. They even had an ogre mage with them. Dag took an immediate liking to him, since his skin was bright purple, and he became quite forlorn when Lucky killed the brute with his leet Fireball hax.

After killing the ogre tribe, we returned to the fallen warrior's cairn and told him that his dirty deed was done and his death had been avenged. He then gave us his eternal gratitude as a reward. What... the... FUCK!? What the hell kind of worthless, stupid reward is a dead man's thanks? We wanted gold and jewels, fame and prestige, not the gratitude of some corpse! Whatever, he floated away (to Hell, I hope) and we continued on our merry little journey down the river. We hadn't gone very far when Blitz started whining about how hard it was to row us all over, so we landed on another patch of ground and started exploring. We found a small, burned out village that appeared to be deserted, but we knew better, because when I right clicked it, the title said "Tiny Slith Fort". So there were some big bad lizard men in there somewhere, and it was our sacred duty to kill every last one. When they finally made themselves known, however, we were a little surprised.

This was our toughest battle yet, and all of the Sliths had a high HP coupled with decent armor, which made them hard to kill. Eventually we did, though, and we looted what we could from their big, ugly bodies. They dropped some nice armor and a few pole weapons that mattz would be able to utilize, not to mention a healthy amount of gold. After that, we made our way back to the boat, and Lucky pulled out his kinky love whip and used it to force Blitz to take us even farther downstream.

After a very long journey indeed (the whip did it's work remarkably well), Blitz rowed us up to another landing, which yielded absolutely nothing of interest. That is, until I misclicked the cave wall while trying to get back to the boat, and we ended up in a secret tunnel. Being the avid spleunkers that we were, we delved right in, and found a lava filled cavern on the other side. In the middle of the lava moat was a tall tower, and we made our way inside stealthily. Unfortunately, a bunch of kids who wasted their youth playing Starcraft and then got sent through a one way portal to Exile were not exactly blessed with the gift of sneakiness. We were immediately noticed by a large group of demons, who attacked us without a question. We failed to kill a single one of the flying devils, and they absolutely pillaged us. It didn't even say "Dead" in our Party Status screen. It said "Dust". They slaughtered us so completely that our corpses were beyond being revived. I promptly reloaded the save and stayed far way from that tower from Hell.

Eight Legged Freaks!

Unfortunately, rocks jutting out of the riverbed prevented us from getting much further down the underground stream, and we returned to Fort Duvno and docked our boat, much to Blitzkreig's delight. We had the trainer teach us more about fighting and spellcasting techniques with the skill points we had earned on our white water adventure, and became even stronger. But, strong as we were, we were still clueless as to what we were supposed to do next, so we wandered around fighting random battles again for a while. Finally, however, I noticed a passage to another area that we had not explored before, and we quickly entered it. A lot of spiders attacked us, and as we went further and further, more and more of them were supported by Aranea, which are basically bigger, badder spiders that can cast spells. After fighting through the hordes of relatively weak arachnids, we arrived at the entrance to a cave, and went in looking for a fight. We were disappointed, however, when all of the spiders inside turned out to be friendly. They said really scary things to us, like, "Your cute!" and "I really like you!". All of us were pretty uneasy with this odd turn of events. Well, almost all of us.

After winding our way through the cave, past all of the wierd, sexually suggestive spiders, we found the spider that was apparently the leader of all the other ones. He kept the sexual harrassment to a minimum, and informed us that the evil Aranea that lived to the south had recently stolen all of the friendly spiders' eggs, and offered us a reward if we helped them recover them. We had started to get used to things here in Exile by now, though, so we knew that by "help" he meant "go fight alone" and that "reward" probably meant "something inherently worthless". But, since the main storyline had yet to resurface, we decided to help these eight legged sex offenders out anyway. After leaving the cave and heading south, fighting mean spiders and Aranea all the way, we eventually came to a point that was impassable because of all the spiderwebs clogging the road. We returned to the big boss spider to ask for his advice, and he told us that to get to the Aranea lair, we would have to bathe in the "special spider potion" that we could find in one of the rooms in their cave. We found it, and it looked and smelled suspiciously like spider giz. Ewww. Disgusted, we wiped it all over ourselves, and upon returning to the afore impassable point, we found that this "special juice" the spiders gave us allowed us to slip through the webs without getting stuck. After that, finding the Aranea cave and killing all the baddies inside wasn't too hard, although some of the Aranea Lords inside were able to cast spells like Flame and Fireball. Our fire burned brighter though, and we returned the egg sacs to the nice, friendly spiders.

Our reward turned out to be more generous than we expected. Apparently, these spiders weren't friendly with just anybody, and they had a lot of dead bodies stored behind their cave. We were allowed to loot these bodies and take what we wanted. Most of it was pretty worthless, but we took everything so that we could sell it and make some money next time we got to a town. One nice thing we found was an Empire Pass, which would allow us to roam unchecked through the Empire controlled lands, if we ever got there. Aside from all this, mattz was also granted a special award in the form of twenty minutes alone in the cave with any of the spiders he wanted, and Lucky's love whip. After we had collected our rewards, we returned to more hospitable lands.

Cult of the Damned

We went back to Fort Duvno, rested, sold our excess loot, and trained our new levels. Then it was back to the hack and slash of the real world, with dead brigands, goblins, and nephilim left all over the countryside. We started going farther and farther south, where the enemies grew progressively stronger. Eventually we came to Formello, which is supposed to be the biggest town in Exile. A guy who claimed to be the mayor there (even though he was dressed like a
Ringling Brothers reject) sent us on a mission to destroy some cult. So of course, being the obedient adventurers that we were, we set off to find this accursed cult's base of operations.

Along the way, we were attacked by a group of Empire Soldiers! Our first battle with the Empire! And damn, they had a hell of a lot of fighters in their group. Soldiers, brigands, archers, swordsmen, a couple of acolytes and a lone mage put up a valiant fight, but being grouped like they were, they fell in droves to the power of the Fireball (plus the fighting skills of mattz and I, which were finally starting to be effective enough to be deemed "ok").

After that battle, drained of health and mana, we rested. Then we moved on again, and eventually came across the castle that was supposed to be the home of this infamous cult that was attacking Formello. Turns out that the god of whatever religion they were a cult for gave them the ability to turn corpses into the undead, because even though there were only a few of the acolytes running around, there were a lot of zombies and skeletons. Fortunately, their strength was in their numbers, which were quickly reduced by Fireballs from our cuddly and loveable killer mages. Upon killing the last of the undead and chasing the acolytes into some room with an altar, we were informed that they had cast some spell or something and that we would have to destroy the altar to complete the quest. Unfortunately, we had no idea how, so we just killed everything that was still moving and left.

The Storyline finally Continues!

We returned to Formello to see if the mayor would give us any advice on how to get rid of that altar, but we were greeted by a bunch of screaming when we entered the city's courtyard. An apparition appeared in the air, and it looked like one of those aliens from "Signs" or "Close Encounters". It was the typical tall, pale, gangly looking thing with big, black, buggy eyes. This one was a bit femmy though, rapped in light blue and pink robes. It started speaking and all the retarded townspeople quickly shut up. He told us that he was a "Vahnatai" and that his people had created those barriers that everyone was so pissed about as a preparation for an attack on the human lands. Apparently, the majority of these Vahnatai folks thought that the humans had stolen some sacred relics from them, and wanted to wage war. This guy, however, was blessedly learned about the different human factions, and informed us that it was the Empire that had done this evil deed. Even so, his people wanted to punish all the humans, so if we wanted to save ourselves, he told us we would have to send delegates into the Vahnatai lands to plee our case to their Council. With that, he pointed at a cave wall at the edge of the town, and a great big crevice opened up, leading to unknown perils. Then he disappeared. All the people generally acted pretty stupid after he left, and the mayor immediately assigned us to be the "delegates" he had talked about, and then ran away and hid. So it was up to us to save all of Exile. Great.

Will our heroes be able to convince the Vahnatai Council that we didn't do anything and that they should help us fight against our mutual enemy, the Empire? Or will they simply be killed by the girly sci-fi rejects? Will they even get up the guts to go through that crevice? Will mattzarella ever act like a heterosexual? Join us next time to find out!