From the Diary of Rudolpho Milano

Dear Diary,

I hate statues.

I especially hate the kind that come to life and try to kill you. That’s usually the kind of statues that we run into. We seem to have a real talent for finding those. It’s uncanny.

Let me back up. After the monkey slaughter, we settled in the filthy monkey room to rest for a few hours. After the big brains got all of their magic tricks prepared for the day, we tried to figure out how to find and rescue the rest of the team.

Well, I sure as hell never came up with a plan and if anyone ever came up with a plan I sure as hell never heard it but we took off anyway like we knew exactly what we were doing. To look at us you would think “Wow. There’s a bunch of guys that have their shit together.” And you would be completely wrong.

I guess our ‘plan’ amounted to bashing a locked door and running down a hall of screaming monkey statues. That’s right – screaming monkey statues. At the end of that hall was a pair of big, demonic brass doors. We opened those doors to quite a scene.

At our end of the room was a short set of steps down to the floor level of a sixty-foot-long room. In the middle of the room was a ten foot wide fire pit. At the far end of the room was a short flight of steps up to a platform where stood a freaking huge statue of my favorite two-headed monkey snake loser. Suspended with chains forty feet above the fire pit was – Daria! We found Daria! As soon as we opened those brass doors, a winch mechanism began lowering Daria into the fire pit.

I was already through the doors when I heard screaming from the hallway. I figured that the rest of the team could manage to defend themselves and that someone else would save Daria so I took off to deal with the most pressing problem: the statue.

I took off across the room. I jumped down the steps, across the fire pit, and up to the platform and hit the statue with all I had. Nesta took a couple steps down the stairs and fired three arrows at the winch mechanism. One of the arrows stuck and jammed the works so that Daria stopped descending.

Throughout all of the shouting and fighting, I just kept hacking away at the inert statue. After half a dozen chops, I had it destroyed and could turn my attention to the battle going on behind me.

Apparently, the team was fighting the chief demon monkey and he was pulling out all the stops - turning invisible, teleporting, summoning darkness… the whole works. I got one good whack at him before he disappeared on us. I then had a great idea and moved to attack another one of his statues. Sure enough, he wasn’t about to hide and let me systematically destroy his temple. Gwen sang one of her songs and an area of the room was coated in raining gold flecks. The gold flecks revealed the invisible monkey demon moving to stop me. He was quickly cut down.

Guess what happened next. After what should have been the last battle, the damn statue that I had so thoughtfully destroyed, reassembled itself and came to life. The whole team had to give it all we had to destroy this damn thing. Just like the monkeys, the statue seemed resistant to all but our mightiest blows (mine). We killed it just he same. Ha! The loser just should have stayed dead until we left.

Mystic Z supposes that the statue may have just been an inert stone statue until we earned the personal attention and wrath of whomever the statue represented – just freakin’ great.

We still didn’t find much good treasure.

-R