We open on everyone in their cells in the Folendemkar dungeons, awaiting their fate.
Fluffy Fluffy crawls around the cell she shares with Lord Cornelius, looking for anything useful. She sees some roots poking through the wall near the ceiling, and notices that the guards outside pass by the door on a regular schedule.
Then she becomes suddenly sleepy. As a druid, she has not ever really needed to eat or sleep. However, she feels the need now, and gives in to this exhaustion, finding herself once again in utter darkness, with a faint light in the distance. She approaches the light, and again sees the huge orc, this time standing before an anvil. "Thank you for coming when I called," he says, and puts down his hammer.
He senses in Fluffy, he says, the same desire he possesses to tear down civilization. The orcs have become soft and weak, and destroying what they have built here is the best way to bring them back to their old, warlike glory. He asks her to be his agent in the world of the living, and to help him bring about this destiny.
Fluffy asks what she would get in return. The orc god smiles. When she next returns to his realm, he says, he will make sure she has special consideration on whether her stay will be permanent. She accepts his bargain, and feels a sudden burning in her right paw. The symbol of a crescent moon hanging over an anvil is now burned into it. She wakes up.
Dave the Average's cell is better furnished than the others', larger, with a small wash basin and mattress against the wall. Dave doesn't have too long to wait however before his mother is there to visit him. She says she had to be interrogated after what happened, and that while she was found innocent, the same could not be said for Dave's friends. She begs him to give up this nonsense, and just come stay with her in Folendemkar, at least for a little while. Dave says he isn't leaving without his friends, and asks to speak to the person in charge. His mother heads off to get someone.
After some time, another orcish face appears outside the bars. She introduces herself as gautil, head of the club_and_hammer, effectively Folendemkar's border control. She says that Dave's "mommy" pulled some strings to get him released. She could not do the same for his friends. Eventually, Dave agrees to leave his cell and enter Folendemkar (was there more argument or something involved here???). Gautil unlocks the door, and they head down the hall together.
Professor Quigley is thrown in his cell, and hears the familiar sound of stol yelling (????) one cell over. A few times, he calls the nearby guard over to his cell, just to annoy him. The guard ends up slamming his palms against the door to startle Quiggers, then walks back to his post chuckling.
Quiggers and Stol start up a conversation (about what????). pomin, who is two cells over, joins in. Through this conversation, Quiggers senses that Pomin might know more about the blight than she had previously let on. He presses her on it, and eventually she concedes that she picked up a decent amount of knowledge from ken on their travels. She says that the Blight is a disease, but not one that affects people. It only spreads through infecting plants. The flickering green creatures they have encountered are only spores, which take humanoid form as a way of scaring off potential predators. In actuality, the Blight is a disease of the earth.
Corny, after his long dream-filled sleep, wakes up in the dark cell he shares with Fluffy. Upon his inspection of the cell, he finds the same things Fluffy found. However, the roots which she noticed towards the ceiling are now faintly glowing green, and flickering, and very slowly inching their way down the wall.
At about this time, an orc appears outside the cell door. She introduces herself as mokrab, and even goes so far as to say Corny's entire name in the process. She says she heard of Corny's recent impressive accomplishments reaching back in time, and invites him to stay in Folendemkar to help her in her research. Corny responds well to the flattery, but goes a bit too far in self-praise, leading Mokrab to say that he's full of shit, and that she just figured stroking his ego would be the best way to get him to help her. There aren't many good magicians around Folendemkar, she says, and like it or not he's the best chance for an assistant she has.
Fluffy tries to sneak into Corny's hat, but Mokrab notices and says she only has permission to take Corny out. So Corny leaves the room, Mokrab hands him his staff and other gear, and they head down the hallway together. Fluffy, waiting for the window between guards, transforms into a bat and flies through the bars after them.
Halt, after breaking his wrist, hears a voice from a cell over. "Didja hurt yourself?" it asks. Halt tries to save face, but the person in the other cell sees through it. He introduces himself as Kaea, and asks if Halt wants to get out of here. He himself is imprisoned because he was trying to steal from Folendemkar's treasury, and he plans on making another attempt. A sound of scraping and tinkling metal comes from the cell, and after a minute, the door creaks open. Halt hears a guard shout "Hey there!", run to the door, and then grunt and fall to the ground.
A handsome, smiling human face appears outside Halt's window. Kaea unlocks the door and lets Halt out, bowing and saying "Prince of Thieves, at your service." Halt quickly checks for a weapon on the body of the dead guard, but Kaea holds up a bloody dagger and says "Already got it." Kaea quickly splints up Halt's wrist, and they both head out to burgle the treasury.
Halt follows Kaea through the twisting passageways, when suddenly he hears a few familiar voices. They are passing by Quiggers, Pomin, and Stol. Kaea kills the guard there, and agrees to let them all go as long as they don't tag along to the treasury. He can't deal with too much dead weight. Halt grabs the dagger off the dead guard, and they all continue on to what appears to be a storage room.
Halt decides to check out all the boxes for potential supplies. While searching, however, he topples some over. A bow, some arrows, and a pair of gauntlets fall out, and he grabs them, while guards head towards the room. Kaea shifts a pile of boxes away from the wall, revealing a hole, and the group one by one crawls through it. The guards are too big to fit in after them.
They crawl for a distance, and then Kaea in the lead shifts his body and drops straight down what appears to be a chute. The rest of the party follows, with only minor injuries. Halt falls into a pile of animal poop. They have landed in what appeared to be an underground stable. A heap of hay sits against one wall, a trough of water against another. In the middle, two strange gray creatures with huge bodies like seals or manatees and flat faces like apes flop around. The group has managed to get into Folendemkar.
Dave and Corny, however, are led inside through the front. They run into each other outside the gate, Dave led by Gautil, and Corny led by Mokrab. The huge gate grinds open, Gautil leaves Dave to enter the city on his own, and they head inside. Fluffy, still a bat, follows them.
They walk down another passage, now well-lit with sconces on the walls. This is more of a hallway than a tunnel, wider and less rough than the way that led them from the surface to the gate. Eventually they arrive at a wooden fence. It opens for them, and beyond is the massive entrance chamber of Folendemkar.
Orcs flitter around the edges of this circular open space, buying and selling items at the hundreds of shops lining the walls. The shops themselves are dug into the stone, with wooden awnings and counters and displays built in front. Torches keep the cavern fairly bright, an impressive feat considering the ceiling is several hundred feet up. In the center of this chamber is a gigantic stone conical structure whose point just contacts the roof. Around the base of the structure are tunnel entrances leading down into the body of the city. Each is labeled with some orcish numeral.
Dave and Corny both need to head to level 5, so they and Mokrab head down the tunnel capped by the orcish "5" glyph. From there, Dave heads to section 7 to see his mom, Corny and Mokrab go to her workshop in section 34, and Fluffy begins exploring the level.