As the ice elemental appeared, Syttulg took the effects particularly badly. "I'm'm n'not'n an'n ev'vergr'reen'n!" He shouted. His movements now slightly sluggish, he moved towards Pheonix. "C'could'd y'you perh'haps's t'turn th'the heat't back'ck up'p?"

"Hm?" Phoenix asked Syttulg as Aryali finally formed fully. The elemental had already raised her left hand and given a ladylike fingersnap, causing the area around her in a 30 foot radius to suddenly be devoid of all heat energy. The flash of azure-white light between the Ice Queen's fingers signaled that yes, the heat had been converted to MP. Somehow. Summons were strange like that.

"Could you... Oh, I get it." Phoenix chuckles, looking at the stuttering Syttulg. "You're dying. How cute." The summoner smiled invitingly at the plant-being with a very... unsettling facial expression.

"Bastion of the Forbidding Demense!" She yelled, much like Arhra's own attack. Yet, this spell was hardly an attack. No, it extended Phoenix's immunity to her own summon's abilities (Doesn't everyone wonder why Yuna never gets hit with Mega-Flare?) to Syttulg and anyone else within 10 yards that she considered friendly. This basically meant Arhra.

"Aryali! Destroy them!" She commanded her summon, in a rather roundabout fashion. She could have been more specific, but at least Aryali was intellegent, and she tended to make rather good decisions based on what to do in any given situation.

The Ice-Elemental flourished her sword and raised her shield arm, and a chill feeling fell across the already very cold area around her Azure light trailed up her left arm to the slender fingertips of her icy hand, and her eyes closed peacefully... Several Float Fish and Kill Tortises were closing in for an easy attack, and Phoenix simply smiled as she wrote them off as moths being drawn to a fire. Yes, the trap was set, and now only to spring the trap.

Aryali's eyes suddenly snapped back open, and with a sudden gesture, her left arm flicked outward with predatory grace. The ice surrounding her feet cracked, and for a moment... Nothing. Then with the suddenness of a greased thunderbolt, several stalagmites of chill fury burst from the ground, impaling, scattering, or otherwise freezing to the bone the sundry water-fodder that bothered to crowd around her. Float fish were destroyed instantly, and a handful of Kill Tortoises shared their fate, albeit with less efficacy. Several of them however, were merely knocked backward, though severely stunned.

Phoenix grinned as she noticed the toxic gas surrounding the Tortoises. Luckily for her, summons didn't suffer from paltry status effects like poison or venom. Of course, that's not to say that she didn't...

"Thanks. Now I just have to hope that the boss in this temple isn't dual-type water/ice and I should be set. Don't know what I'm going to end up doing in the fire temple though." Syttulg reshaped himself to become mostly humanoid once again, and began slicing anything that entered the ten yard safe zone, taking advantage of the occasional lull to check whether the mysterious float fish were edible.

The shelled enemy charged Tarrin once again, the mist expelling from it's vents.
Placing the spirit lance in the creatures direct line of attack Tarrin used his weapon like a polevolt to excape the tortise' trajectory.
The creature passed thru the lance and as it did so the corosive vapour stopped ad it's small soul was rended from it's mortal form.

Tarrin stood up and grabed for the spear once again looking for his next target, a shiver ran up his back, turning he saw the summons Phoenix had called forth start it's attack, knowing that the tempreture was dropping more and more tarrin begain to sprout fur all over his body, the fur protecting him from the attacks to come.

Phil stood at the entrance to the cave. Rubbing his chin, he mused, "Fishies, seafood, what kills fishies? Uh, cats! But I already did the whole giant animal thing..." He glanced at a nearby turtle. "And normal cats won't stand much of a chance." He then considered Phoenix's summon. "A Final Fantasy style attack summon could get me lots of cats. That'd work."

Phil got in his fighting stance. "Right! ●Summon: Sakaki san!" A 174cm girl with long, black hair and a disinterested but serene expression appeared in front of him. "Now, use your special attack: Super Feline Rush!" Sakaki san raised her right hand over her head and spread her fingers. She then lowered it and put her index finger's second knuckle to her lips pensively. "Um," she started, "I don't have any special attacks."

Phil was taken aback. "Really? I thought you could make a fountain of cats spring from the ground."

"No, I can't do that. Why would you think I could?" There was a short pause. "And who are you, anyway?"

"Well, you've got that whole cat thing and... you know what, never mind." And, ignoring her second question, Phil dismissed her. Kicking a fish out of the way, Phil plopped down in the portal and asked himself, "Now what?"

I saw Arhra use knock one tortice like a bat, which gave me an idea. I waited for one to get within range, and at the right angle, then when it leaped, I batted it away with my spear like a baseball, sending it at the crab at a high speed.

With her attack, Flare brought the crustacean ire of the Giant Enemy Crab down upon herself. Even as everyone recovered from their shocked, jaw dropped poses from seeing it crack that Kill Tortoise open as if it was no more than a slightly troublesome nut, the crab lumbered towards Flare in a zig zagging crab charge.

Unfortunately for Flare, the crab's armour seemed to be virtually impervious to fire, be it a strike, shield, twister, blast, storm, or even some sort of flare spell, no matter what the prefix. The thick shell was also remarkably spear-proof. As for whips, ha! The crab's armour seemed to made of an alloy of adamantium and tortoise shell.

Though bravely dodging its lunging strikes and snipping pincers with leaping and rolling and such, that was not enough. A backhanded sweep of one of its massive claws caught her, no way to parry such a powerful stroke. It knocked her down, making the armoured woman fall in one of the innumerable puddles about the place. Arhra gasped as she saw the crab step forwards to dispatch its prone foe.

She had to do something!

Arhra speculated on the feasibility of rendering the dead fish down into some sort of crude lubricant, which could have a variety of uses.

Something practical!

Arhra summoned to her mind visions of the most terrifying, mind haemorrhaging, fear inducing things she could imagine and then hesitated. What exactly would terrify a crab? Pulling up power, Arhra let the magic do as it willed.

The air wavered and warped, as if some nightmarish tentacle beast was about to materialise. Instead, there was a quiet but emphatic WOP! and a gigantic seagull appeared. Arhra could see its lack of substance, but to anything else it would appear all too real. Its head threatened to bump on the cavern roof as its mad, red ringed eyes locked on the crab. With a horrible, ear-splitting volume, it screeched, hopping towards the crab.

The crab paused in the middle of menacing Flare to regard this fearsome apparation. It scuttled to the left and then, with a sudden flurry of motion, buried itself in the soft sand there.

"I should have known," Arhra muttered, "What could possibly be more terrifying to the beast than the natural enemy of the crab?" Much more effective than trying to make the crab slip on fish oil.

With the crab in hiding, it looked like the NPFers had won. Whatever creatures left alive were either playing dead or running looking for a hiding place. Arhra tallied the results, taking the number of NPF casualties away from the number of enemy casualties. The number was positive and so it was a glorious victory! "Are you all right?" she asked, walking to Flare and offering her a hand.

OOC: Battle over!

I shook my head, and looked around and saw my helmet about 50 feet away. "Note to self....never eat crabs again..." I said, slowly getting up and grabbing my helmet. "Lucky my armor's made of Adamantium as well...though that stull hurt like hell..." I said, using Fire-3 on myself and feeling the pain go away. "Much better...."

Phil stood up. Talking to no one in particular, he said, "A seagull, huh? See, that's why I don't usually come along on these trips. I'm, like, the worst summoner around, and I can't even kung-fu fight. I can't even do my rudimentary black magic since I forgot to put it in my profile..." Phil slouched and sighed. "I'll try to be less ineffectual next encounter."

"Right. So, anybody hurt?" Phil had entered the chamber now. "Let's form a nice little marching order and continue on, shall we? Meat shields in front, casters behind, hobbits safely in the middle. Sound good?"

Syttulg picked up Phil and stuck him on his shoulder.

"How about hobbits on lookout with their heads higher than everybody else because everyone knows they have good eyesight?"

Hobbits in the middle? Arhra pondered. That didn't sound very typical. She could have been sure they were meant to be sent off on their own, preferably in pairs, and possibly with something critical to the success of the quest. Shrugging it off, she went to find Hydra.

Hydra, it appeared, had mainly fought the fish. Arhra's keen, deductive mind deduced this by the subtle clue that she was sitting with a large pile of fish in fron of her, eating them. The clue of her actually asked Hydra what she'd been doing also helped. Arhra didn't care for the taste of raw fish herself, but to each their own.

"You're a real glutton you know." Arhra said jokingly, sauntering over.

Some of Hydra's heads looked up from her meal. "Well, I do have a lot of mouths to feed." she quipped.

Arhra gave her a long, quiet look. Hydra shivered from the inexplicable menace there. "...Never use that joke again!" Arhra shouted at the cowering girl.

"I'm sorry!"

* * *

Moving deeper into the Temple, the NPFers came across what looked like a dried up pool. Craning their necks, they could see the pond covered what would have been an underwater tunnel that extended under the wall of the room, deeper into the temple complex.

"Hmmm, looks like you were meant to swim through here to get further in. Well, that makes this a lot easier." Arhra jumped down onto the sandy bottom of the pond. The traces of water were definately there, including dried clumps of seaweed carpeting the place and the occaisional, pathetic pile of fish bones. It was as dry as a bone.

"I wonder where the water went?" Hydra said, voicing her thoughts as she walked down stone steps carved into the pool's edge to join Arhra on the lake bottom.

"Probably a giant toad drank it or something. Wouldn't be the first time that kind of thing has happened." Arhra said offhandedly. "The important thing is it not here and probably will not come rushing through while we're down here, drowning us all."

And so it was the NPFers headed into this water starved labyrinth. Twelve steps in, they ran into trouble. The ambient light seemed to dim, flickering lights ahead like a swarm of fireflies, moving at them purposefully. It was a school of little fish, pale and spectral, a flickering light like a candle's glow in their bellies.

"Look out! Ghost fish! Defend yourselves everyone!" Arhra cried.

The fish didn't do anything.

Arhra untensed slightly and cautiously approached them. Simply flitting around aimlessly, the shoals split up to avoid her when she came too near, just like regular fish. It was quite anticlimatic. The NPFers walked through the spectral schools with nothing worse happening than an disturbing burst of coldness when ghostly fish accidentally darted though them.

After a little more wandering, only running into one dead end (although there had been a treasure chest there), they reached the end of this should-be-underwater maze.

"Ah, so that's where the water went." Arhra said thoughtfully, looking up. "I don't suppose anyone knows some sort of spell that lets you breathe water?"

Above them, at what should have been this dried-up pool's surface, began a mirror-smooth expanse of water, ignoring gravity with calm dignity. The halls ahead were flooded.

Staring upward at the hovering water, MT pondered what best to say about the situation. Presently, it came to him:

"Oh no, not again."

He then began thinking out loud. "I remember water was a problem in the last one I was in, but what did we do about it? It wasn't my tank, it wasn't a sub, it wasn't a giant air bubble... Oh yeah, it was that weird slimy stuff that exuded oxygen gas!" He looked around hopefully, but didn't find anything that might have been the miracle slime from before. "Damn."

A somewhat more practical solution came to him. "Hmm... my tank might actually work, if we could somehow fit everyone inside, and make it transparent so I could drive with the hatch closed..." He waited for the others to either agree with the plan or offer alternatives.

"Hmm, giant air bubble you say? Now that gives me an idea!"

Micro-vacumns formed around Hawk again as the air began to condense into a sphere, only this time the sphere didn't form in front of him, but all around him instead. Those closest to him could feel the air being ripped away from them as Hawk attempted to compact as much air as was physically possible to fit into so small a space without compromising the integrity of the orb that he would soon be depending on to survive.

When he figured it was enough he turned to the others and said, "See you on the surface".

And with that, he ascended throught the gravity defying barrier and headed off as fast as he could (his wings somehow controlling the bubble and allowing it to move miraculously forwards), lest he run out of air before finding the surface.

"Well, I assume we shou*ack! choke*" Phoenix began to ponder, shortly before Hawk sucked the air out from around her. Soon however, the ambient pressure equalised, and she was able to continue talking without being overtly choked. Two pairs of red eyes glared up at Hawk in response to this, however.

"As I was saying..." She continued in a slightly more flustered voice, "We should simply drain the water with a gravity spell. Much like opening the hatch on a submarine in port to escape, if we drain the water into this hallway, we can ride the ascending air much like Hawk is doing now." and gently took a moment to poke the water-ceiling with the tip of her staff.

"Anyone got a gravity spell?"

"Don't you have some super gravity element monster-beast summon, Phoenix?" Phil asked from Syttulg's shoulder. "I mean, I could summon a black hole, but that'd probably be too much. Oh! I could summon one of those hovering robots from Dynamite Heady that flip the level upside down! That might work, if I could remember their name." Phil wondered for a moment if he could get a wireless signal down in the cave so he could check gamefaqs.

"Or," he eventually said, "I could summon a small sub to get us through, or at least those of us who don't want to ride in Mammoth's tank. I could even tether the tank to the back of the sub so he wouldn't have to somehow make its armor transparent. Seems easier than tampering with space time and sub atomic particles." Quickly, he added, "Not that it wasn't a good idea, Phoenix. Great even!"

Maybe she won't kill me now.

Gills formed just under Tarrins ears, thile underwater these gills would extract the needed oxygen from the liquid suroundings.

Grabing paart of the wall Tarrin lifted himself part way into the water floating above the NPF heads, after a few seconds he lowered himself again.
"I can't see how far it goes, it's fairly dark up there" then with a quick flick of his head a small stick like protrusion with a glowing bulb on the end grew from his forehead, "Got this idea from an Angler fish" Smiling Tarrin popped his head back into the watery nether.

"Well that's... interesting," Mauve said for lack of a better adjective. She scratched her head as she regarded the hovering water. "Don't see that every day, now do you?"

If Pyros was here, he probably would've summoned the Hellspawn Yellow Submarine again. The thought was highly amusing, if still incredibly disturbing. Phil's proposed NON-DEMONIC submarine idea was less funny, but much more appealing to ride in. So was Mammothtank's non-demonic-non-submarine scuba-tank.

"I might be able to cast float on a submarine or tank in order to get it from down here to up there," Mauve supplied, trying to be helpful. "Status effects don't always work though, and I'm not sure if it'll be useful on a non-living thing. But still, if we end up going that route, it might help."

She stared back up at the tranquil surface of the water, and at her own reflection staring down at her.

"Of course, there's always the chance that we'll do what we ALWAYS do to solve our problems and find some violent and/or psychotic way to reach our goals, which works for me too."

"Does spamming lightning spells count as violent and/or psychotic? If so, I may just have the solution."

"Of course, there's always the chance that we'll do what we ALWAYS do to solve our problems and find some violent and/or psychotic way to reach our goals, which works for me too."
A skeletal hand clattered slightly as it settled itself down on Mauve's shoulders. Lumaes' grimacing skull loomed into view behind Mauve in the reflection, at least he wasn't a vampire as well.
Cold breath washes over her neck as the spectre speaks,
"That would be, my dear, because you are violent, psychotic idiots" he smiles benevolently, explaining in very precise, indulgent tones.
He casts a disparaging glance at Newb, he indicates the plant-thing with his free hand, "Exhibit I"
He leans in close, his voice whispering playfully into Mauve's ear,
"The I stands for idiot"
He chuckles, shaking his head as he slinks into the shadows quietly.

"Well, make with the sub summoning!" I said, though I still didn't look to comfertable in this place....especally whenever a ghostfish flits through me, my phoenix soul kills it...again.

"So, I'm assuming that most folks are behind the sub idea. Let's get this nut cracking, or something."

Phil thought of the best way of going about this. The water was right there; he could easily summon the sub directly into the water with neutral buoyancy, but that would leave the trouble of getting into the sub. But he couldn't just summon the sub in this hall; subs can't fly. So he needed a sub that could somehow get up into the water and a way of succinctly expressing such.

"●Summon: Frog Sub!" A large, metal frog suddenly took up most of the hallway. A reflective visor took up the space where the eyes should've been, and a silly-looking dome-shaped hatch with an orange, metal wheel was situated half-way down the frog's back.

"Ok, I think maybe six of us could get in there comfortably, so we can maybe cram eleven or so in there. Lesse, don't need to bring the bird or Tarrin, MT may have himself covered. That leaves Arhra, horrible snake beast, Flare, the skeleton, the guy with the orange cape, plant man, Mauve, Phoenix, Skyshot (if he's around here someplace), myself, and that robot monkey if I'm not imagining it. Hey, cool, eleven. Did I miss anyone? Would someone ride in the tank when Mammoth somehow gets it here and tethers it to the frog's butt?" Phil climbed up the ladder to the frog's hatch and turned the wheel. "I call pilot!"

Syttulg climbed up and in, looking around. "Oh hey, one of those bigger inside than outside dealies." He walked around and laid one of his hands on a console looking device, resting the gold contact points on his fingertips on the data ports.

"It appears that you need three people to man this thing. A pilot and two gunners. I call the secondary weapons system." With that, he walked into a corner, climbed up a ladder, and got comfortable in the control seat.

"It's name is Hydra." I told Phil, as I slimed in, and scrunched up as much as I can.

Raising an eyebrow at the gigantic frog-shaped submarine, MT shook his head. "Whatever. I can fit at most two additional passengers so long as they don't mind the lack of elbow room." As he spoke, he pulled out a round disc that looked like a large reflector and placed it on the ground where there was much open space. He then pulled out a remote and pushed the single button on it. A second later, light gathered in the air above the reflector, and the famous Mammoth Tank materialized.

Retrieving the telebeacon from beneath the tank, MT turned to the group with slightly narrowed eyes. "Again warning about the tight fit, who wants to ride back here? And come to think of it, anyone got a tether strong enough? I doubt bungee cord will cut it..."

"I'll take Primary!" Phoenix gleefully shouts, leaping into the Frog-Machine behind Syttulg. Aryali, naturally, could not fit, and so Phoenix dismissed her. After all, a stately ice-summon like herself was not fit to swim around in water in such undignified manners.

"Alright, let's go!"