cloud spiders and lightning hearts

Last Sunday the players decided that despite all the weird shit that happened during the night, they had little choice but to play along with the elves for now and accompany their champions out on their daily battle with the creatures spawned by the purple blight.  The party was surprised to learn that they were expected to go off on their own instead of accompanying one of the elf champions.  They headed out over the fleshy purple landscape, at one point stopping to cut a section of the purple flesh out.  While at first there seemed to be no response to this action, soon some purple cat-like beasts with tentacles coming out of their shoulders emerged from the ground and attacked the party.  Hello, displacer beasts!  Realizing very quickly that ranged fire was not the way to deal with these critters, the party fell to dispatching them in hand to hand combat and shortly emerged  victorious.

They tramped on further, and soon the sky began to darken as great clouds coalesced overhead.  Flashes of lightning arced from cloud to cloud, and soon the the party found themselves directly underneath an enormous cloud, with eight smaller clouds arranged in a circle below and around it.  Lightning strikes next began to target individual PCs.

My memory at this point gets a little hazy - I am not sure exactly what they used to do this, but somehow the party managed to shoot something into one of the clouds (a missile maybe?  An energy ray?  Who can keep all the high-tech shenanigans straight?) which caused a momentary dissipation of the mist and revealed that the party was underneath an immense floating spider, the body of which was concealed in the large cloud.  Each of its eight legs ended in a strange disc like foot, around which the smaller clouds formed.  Realizing that they should focus their attacks on the main body of the cloud spider, the party started unloading into the central cloud.

The cloud spider reacted by drawing its legs together beneath it, shielding its body with the large discs that tipped each leg.  It then began to spin rapidly, and the clouds began to stream out and form a whirling layer around it.  The party was unable to damage its main body while it was in this position, and soon a tornado began forming underneath the spinning spider which began flinging party members into the air like matchsticks.

At this point the party began calling for help from Dr. Hops, the wererabbit who had stayed behind in the castle because he was pretending to be the party's servant.  He had been trying to get information out of the short hairy servitor race referred to by the party has "dwobbits" (an amalgamation of dwarf and hobbit) and called "gnomen" by the elves.  Dr. Hops had been unable to get any of the gnomen to respond to him as they silently and efficiently went about their business.  The previous evening at dinner he had been able to talk to one who identified himself as "Grosso", so he began wandering about the various areas that the gnomen worked loudly inquiring if Grosso was present.  He found him in a metal workshop (which, incidentally, contained a furnace that burned the boxed wood shavings accumulated in the wood workshop - this is where Pliskins would have ended up last session when he became trapped in sugar glider form in a box full of wood shavings if Stang had not saved his unconscious ass) and soon learned that apparently Grosso was the only gnomen who had an individual personality.  Grosso revealed that he knew from the moment he emerged from the birthing vats that he was different than his fellows, who found all the satisfaction they needed from mindlessly performing the tasks that they were created knowing how to do.  Dr. Hops soon managed to shatter Grosso's world and convince him that there was more to life than doing what the elves wanted him to do.  It had apparently never occurred to him that he could stop working - when Dr. Hops pointed out that he had not been performing his job the entire time he was conversing, Grosso freaked out but quickly realized that nothing bad seemed to have happened.  Around this time is when the party called for Dr. Hops help.

Dr. Hops, you see, can teleport.  He rapidly rounded up all the grenades that the party still had (they go through those things like candy!) and joined the crowd of elves on the castle walls that were watching the progress of the various fights going on (between their champions and the manifestations of the purple blight and between the party and the cloud spider).  He got a good bead on the party's location, then teleported into the sky high above the cloud spider.  As he was free falling down towards its main body from above, he pulled the pins on the grenades and tossed them down at the spider, then teleported back to the castle.

He also used his once a session roll of the d30 for this attack and got above a 20, which (according to my houserules) meant that he did double damage!  He pretty much blasted the spider to little pieces which rained down on the party.  Go team mutant!

The party searched among the grisly debris and found two strange organs - one appeared to be its heart and the other was attached to its spinnerets.  Both were translucent and seemed to contain bottled lightning...