Frei's Memories: Day 2

Here's another installment of the gecko's memories.

Day 2:

When we became conscious again, we found ourselves outside the Elysium tower.  Serradus, one of the lower ranking Aons and the game master, appeared and gave us eight hours to make a sad statue happy.  With a minimum of searching, we found one of the marble statues in town was missing it's hand and, given the message on the plaque, a soccer trophy as well.  Surprise, surprise, when we walked past the area we noticed huge signs advertising a soccer tournament.  We entered the area in time to notice an ersatz goblin score a goal on a minotaur.  Then, the minotaur's team was consumed in pillars a fire!  I had seen Serradus's favorite game, "sudden death soccer", but never this early in the competition.  The Aons were trying kill everyone early this time.

We signed up to play the game, along with a team of elves and a team of dragonborn, but we had to wait over an hour to play.  From the look of the brackets, we suspected the tournament could easily last more than our alloted eight hours.  That was typical of Serradus.  He always seemed like a nice guy, but his games usually killed a huge fraction of the players.  We immediately decided to gain the prize by other means.

Our sniper spotted the trophy and statue hand on the balcony overlooking the arena.  Our team, along with the dragonborn, tried to create a ruckus on the path up to the balcony to distract everyone while the sniper found his own way up to the balcony.  To our surprise, Serradus allowed us on the balcony and told us to enjoy the view.  About that time, a group of humans met their ends on the bloody field of sudden death soccer.  Naturally, the shining trophy was an illusion.  Our priest asked Serradus for the ritual he used to create the illusion and Serradus, the joker that he is, completely filled the priest's ritual book with some kind of obfuscated spell.  He then wished us luck and told us, "I think it's your match, now!"

We had a couple of close calls with a hobgoblin running a Hail Mary play on us, but our team beat the ersatz creatures to death before they could score on us (it doesn't matter how you kill the other team in sudden death soccer).  Afterwards, we went into the city with the dragonborn and the elves to find the trophy.  We found the hooded man from the day before.  He told us three places in the city to find ways out of Elysium and instructed each of us to hurry.  After following his directions, we neared the end of a dead-end alley.

Strangely, a black obelisk appeared out of nowhere when we neared the end of the alleyway.  I emanated a destructive aura and had a slot shaped like the game piece the cloaked man had given us.  Our mystic placed the piece in the obelisk and it reacted by sucking the life out of all of us.  The obelisk hummed menacingly, but nothing else developed quickly enough for us to notice.  I still have trouble believing such a thing could have survived undetected by the Aons for as long as it did.  I surmise the Aons' unity is less solid than they let on.

A short while later, we met up with the elven and draconic teams.  They reported similar experiences with the obelisks.  We decided not to rely on the cloaked man's plan to save our hides and resolved to continue our search for the trophy.  We discovered the artifact in a museum of all places.  With the dragonborn covering us and the elves creating a distraction by streaking through the museum, we disarmed the traps on the display case and made off with the trophy.  With all due haste we escaped the museum and sprinted to the statue, pursued by a hoard of ersatz creatures.

With the statue in sight, we thought the game was over, but we were mistaken---Manath appeared.  The crazy Aon taunted us and erected a tall stone wall to block us.  Thinking quickly, the dragonborn stacked themselves and then launched our sniper over the wall with the trophy.  The dark elf channeled his adrenaline, fought through the pain of the fall, and repaired the statue seconds before we were all overwhelmed by our enemies.  Victory!  Serradus congratulated us on our teamwork.  He didn't seem upset at all.