07/06/2026: Between Malbolge and Maladomini

In the fissure between Malbolge and Maladomini, the truck — reinflated, humming, improbably intact — sits balanced on a narrow ledge outside a crumbling structure. It hovers on its magical horseshoes, a fortunate circumstance given the decrepit state of the scaffolding suspended high above the arid Maladominian valley below.

Two of the party were stone, but have been relieved of the condition thanks to their friend Thunk, the cleric, who has restored them. One other, however, is still halfway petrified. The others are trying very hard not to join them.

⚔

Reklaw is seated behind the gun turret of the ion cannon. As the smoke clears, he can see that the front of the building has been vaporized by his blast. The many cockatrices that roosted within it lie dead on the decking that extends out over the precipice. Nearby, what appears to be an unoccupied suit of armor smokes gently in the aftermath.

As Reklaw prepares to fire again, a cockatrice flits past and bites him on the back of the hand. The monk's stomach clenches as a great weight descends, yet again, upon the lower half of his body. He is, once again, petrifying.

⚔

Thunk stands with the stricken Borark as Arman sprints away, out onto the fragile scaffolding. The rogue easily makes the ladder, climbs down to a lower level, and is crossing the planking at a full stride when he feels a board fracture beneath his feet.

Arman begins to fall.

He is tumbling in open space. Time telescopes, allowing him to hyperfocus on the span of scaffolding rushing up to meet him. For a moment, Arman feels a surge of hope. Then he strikes the planks and plunges straight through the rotted wood, his crashing descent uninterrupted.

"It's fine," he announces to himself. He does not believe this.

He crashes through yet another decaying walkway. In a third burst of splinters, Arman tumbles down into the valley, the bridges above shedding broken planks and shards of rotted wood to follow him.

⚔

Cockatrices are not clever, but they are territorial. This is established fact. And they do not need to be clever to defend where they roost. They only need to bite.

One of them gets its beak into Gearloose. The gnome feels the stone-cold numbness spreading from the wound — then, miraculously, it stops. Gearloose shakes it off. Wrenching himself free of the snarling cockatrice, he continues up the stairs with grim purpose. He must reach his mech suit, waiting above. He prays the blast of the ion cannon has not damaged it.

⚔

Vali is perched above the chaos, on the uppermost bridge leading back into Malbolge. He has no interest in testing the fragile-looking bridge into Maladomini or its ladder down — but he has formulated an idea. 

He conjures a massive spectral hand — Bigby's Hand — and as it shimmers into being, Vali steps onto its broad palm. He rides it gently down the cliff face like the world's most ostentatious elevator, stepping off beside Thunk and the half-petrified Borark, who are menaced by a pair of angry cockatrices. Once his boots touch the stone ledge, Vali commands the hand to shove Borark's startled cockatrice backward — less an attack than a firm suggestion.

The suggestion is not universally heeded. Another cockatrice darts in and clamps onto Vali, and a creeping stiffness takes hold of him. He is restrained, for now, and desperately hopes the progress of the stone goes no further.

Behind him, still rooted to the spot, the half-stone Borark fixes the remaining cockatrice with a glare that needs no working legs to land. The creature takes one look at that fearsome orcish expression, decides it has urgent business elsewhere, and flees toward the ruined cabin above, wholly intimidated.

⚔

Beside them, Thunk has not been so lucky.

The shoved cockatrice returns, striking at Vali's spectral hand. The surprised cockatrice moves right through the arcane haze and the bite lands instead on Thunk's broad shoulder. The cleric's breath catches. The bugbear healer — the party's only healer — goes rigid mid-motion, frozen from the legs down like a statue someone abandoned halfway through carving. He can no longer walk, and much of his healing energy has already been spent unpetrifying Arman and Reklaw.

⚔

Gearloose reaches his mech suit.

It is his second skin of iron and grinding servos, armor that walks the line between suit and siege engine. As Gearloose climbs in, the cuirass sealing around him, and the change is immediate: plates wrap snugly between himself and the world. The battleaxe affixed to one gauntleted hand suddenly swings with a great deal more authority.

He puts that authority to work. The axe slashes into a cockatrice with a blow that should, by any reasonable accounting, end it. But the cockatrice, held together by spite and luck, narrowly survives.

The armored gnome swings again. This time the creature, spending the last of its good fortune, ducks it entirely.

"That's fine," Gearloose growls from inside the suit. "I have all day."

⚔

From her position midway up the stairs, Kiki understands that saving Thunk the healer is paramount. She dashes downward, throws the half-petrified cleric over her shoulder, and struggles back up the steps.

"I was saving," Thunk gasps, "my more powerful reserves just in case—"

"This might be 'in case,'" Kiki observes, breathlessly.

But before Thunk can begin the incantation, the petrification overwhelms him.

Kiki buckles under the sudden and vastly increased weight of the now fully petrified cleric on her shoulder.

There follows a brief, deeply undignified interlude in which the fully stone Thunk does exactly what all cumbersome weights do when confronted by gravity and a staircase. Thunk noisily descends the steps.

The banging of stone against each stair is answered by the fracturing of wooden planks: crack — crack — crack — crack.

Then comes a different timbre of breaking.

Kiki gulps. Most of the stone Thunk lies at the right side of the bottom of the stairs.

To the left lies one of his legs, snapped off cleanly at mid-thigh.

⚔

Reklaw drags his half-petrified self inch by scraping inch from behind the ion cannon toward the truck's driver-side door. He breaks out the window with a swing of his own stone feet — the Nine Hells' least dignified lockpick — and hauls himself through.

The echo of shattering glass momentarily draws Kiki's attention from below. It also draws the cockatrice back to Reklaw.

The monk swings himself into the pilot seat just as, through the broken out window,  the beak pierces his knuckle wrapped around the steering wheel. The petrification takes hold completely. Reklaw is frozen, stone hands locked around the wheel — a statue of a driver, going nowhere.

⚔

Sixty feet is a long way to fall, but the ruination of three separate bridges has, fortunately, slowed Arman's descent. The landing at the bottom is bone-rattling but survivable. The rogue lies in a broken pile, inhaling lungfuls of sulfurous dust, which does not even begin to address the special humiliation of arriving in such spectacularly destructive fashion.

Arman begins to take stock, catching his breath.

And, disconcertingly, he hears the distant slam of a door, and the crunch of many feet on gravel.

Moving up the hill, a small procession makes its way toward him. Two squat lemures struggle beneath the weight of a portable writing desk, which they set before the most impossibly round devil Arman has ever seen — obese even for an amnizu. Broad-headed, heavy-lidded, radiating the particular menace of middle management, the creature is flanked by two profoundly bored-looking chain devils.

The amnizu opens the squeaking lid of the desk and draws out a thick leatherbound tome, a bottle of orange ink, and a quill made from a cockatrice feather. This last he wields with a flourish.

Without so much as a glance at Arman, still in a heap, the devil queries officiously, in a voice like a filing cabinet closing: "Name?" The quill hovers, ready.

The lie Arman tells — of who he is, and precisely what business brings him to Maladomini — is smooth, confident, and largely paperwork-adjacent. The devil listens through a long and thorough stare, then scribbles something on a long roll of parchment.

"Is that business," it sneers, "or... 'pleasure'?"

From their place beneath the heavy desk, the lemures titter with malicious laughter.

Deflecting, Arman asks, "Who exactly are you?"

The devil draws itself up to its full height, which is approximately half of its full width. "I am Gratchis, Acting Third Assistant Undersecretary of Ingress and Egress of the Maladomini Fissure Crossing, by the Grace of his Excellent Excellency, Lord Baalzebub."

The Nine Hells run on documentation, and Arman will do his best to talk the party's way forward with nothing but a straight face and a lie about a soul coin payment.

Somewhere above him, the cockatrices shriek.