We jump through the gate.
We're in a 20' x 20' room. There's a steel door at the other end and an alarm spell goes off.
Talib unfortunately has come through as a corpse. His gear was going to teleport away, but alas we appear to be in an anti-magic zone [it later becomes obvious to us that we're simply on another plane, a pocket plane].
Rather than leaving it for the taking, we of course remove all equipment from Talib's corpse. The obviously magical stuff includes a rod, a scimitar, a longbow, arrows, a broad belt with many pockets, weird metallic disks with glyphs (read magic indicates one is "the unseen/unknown", the other is a glyph within another glyph, some sort of powerful destructive magic), rings, a scarab, and a cloak. Since it seems foolish for this stuff to just be carted around, we distribute it amongst the party.
Note to self: don't go through girdles of many pouches without being cautious. Exploding Fireballs are a bad thing.
Give Roland the remainder of Talib's gear.
After this, we progress through the first level of the dungeon. There's the usual stuff, lots of door, traps, people shooting crossbow bolts at you from the ceiling through small holes, that sort of stuff. Alas, our task is made no easier by the Guards and Wards spell that has been cast.
However, for the short while that it lasts before one of the many dispel magic traps gets it, the Find the Path spell that Minora had on a scroll proves helpful.
Interestingly, the first level does not appear designed to kill us, so much as to slow us. And it is being very effective at slowing.
After a while of wandering along blindly in foggy corridor's, we finally find something of interest. A room with some pillars, a pit covered by a grill, and some monsters that hurl some sort of natural missile weapons.
With some spell-casting, we destroy the creatures. It would appear beneath the (trapped) grill, there's a large quantity of fire. Fortunately, Zim managed to disable this trap, although not without difficulty.
Of course, beyond this is what must be yet another trap. A large room flooded with water. Zim flies out on his carpet to check it out, and in doing so sees a very large fin cutting through the water. Deciding that perhaps feeding this might be a good idea, we feed it with the spike creatures. Its mouth is bigger than I am long. However, although it's hunger seems a little quenched after the fourth and last creature we feed it, we're not convinced it's not just going to swallow us whole just to spite us should we attempt to traverse the body of water.
Alas, it turns out that the area with the shark was also meant to delay us. The true exit from this first level is earlier, before even the spike creatures. But instead of finding the secret door, I just cast a flesh to stone on the ceiling. I probably should have done that long ago.
After wandering through the ceiling, it becomes clear that this is the true living area (of this lower level anyway). For example, the empty barracks that could hold 20 people of so is kind of a giveaway, along with all the secret doors.
But it is on the next level where the mage we are after clearly lives. Here we find a library, bedrooms, and the like.
We also get blasted frequently by what appear to be traps. Except they aren't, instead it was the mage in secret passageways casting spells at us. And did they hurt! Lani is really lucky we got her that ring of evasion. It's saved her life many a time now.
In the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom we find a man, a corporal, who speaks Cage Common. Refusing to tell us any information, he eventually indicates he needs to go to the toilet. But when he goes to the toilet, he instead throws a map into it.
But before we follow the map to what we believe is the lair of the mage, we check out the mages library wherein is a very attractive lady, guarding a baby. Which is of course all very suspicious, so after having removed all magic from her, we manacled her in the bathroom, and locked the door on her. With the baby, so she can still take care of it of course.
So we head to find where we expect the bad guy to be... only to find ourselves within another trap! In hindsight, it seems clear that the map may have been arranged for us to find. Anyway, the trap involved the mage blasting away at us from within his secret passageways (which we finally catch on to).
Alas, by the time we find a way in (Turia's Helm of Dimension Door), he's long gone. Outside, with his 40 crossbow-armed buddies.
Zim tries unsuccessfully to negotiate his surrender by threatening to kill the child. He appeared to actually be tempted by this, but it didn't work.
And after we discuss much with him... and it seems it's all a misunderstanding! Argh! Apparently his wife died a while ago. Unfortunately, when she was young, she signed a contract with the dust men (Cage group), saying that when she died, they'd get her body. Well, she died, and they wanted her body, but this mage didn't want to give it to them. But to buy out the contract would require 50000 gp. But he didn't have the money, so he thought he'd make an undead dragon to sell. Ooops.
He doesn't actually seem like that bad a sort. And we can't blame him for binding demonic creatures to his will. After all, Lani would do the same.
We've agreed to supply the 50000 gp in reparation, but he'll give us access to his spellbooks in return, so its not all bad. Anyway, we'll sort out the details later.