The Long Caverns: Dragon Lair (11)

The bones of myriad creatures, familiar and strange, line the cavern walls and floor leading to a large wooden door. The door is banded in iron and blacked with age.

Bones and shards of bones crackle beneath your feet as you walk towards the door. A great brass ring hangs at the center, and above it three iron bars cover what may be a sliding pane.

The door opens inward; the hinges are on the inside. If they knock, Kelelmien will first open the sliding window.

The small pane slides open, revealing more iron bars behind it and a well-kept cavern beyond the bars. Coins glint from the cavern’s walls as a pale man steps in front of the window.

“Welcome, visitors!” he says. His scraggly white hair lies almost clear atop his long face. He peers at you through a monocle held in his right eye. From it hangs a brass chain.

He steps aside again, disappearing from view. The door opens slightly inward, then opens fully.

Your host is a tall, gangly man, perhaps late middle-aged, with white hair and a monocle around his neck. His green and yellow robe is luxurious, hanging in folds about his thin frame. He rubs his hands together.

“Do you come for questions?” he says, “or passage? Regardless, there is a fee. Come in, come in!”

The room is about 30 yards high. It is lit by dim eternal flames on roman-style lanterns throughout the cavern.

Kelelmien, an albino dragon, guards two exits (or entrances, depending on your point of view).

Kelelmien normally maintains the form of a tall, gangly, late-middle-aged man, pale, with scraggly white, almost clear, hair. He wears the monocle of Petar on a gold chain.

Kelelmien is a numismatist, or a collector and cataloguer of coins. One wall of the cavern is a display of one each of the type of coins he has collected. He has coins from Crosspoint, Black Stag, Great Bend, Byzantium, Ancient Rome, modern Rome, China, Venus, Europa United, and Arcade. He has almost a full collection of Astronomer zodiac coins, missing only a Pisces and a Taurus.

Kelelmien charges ten coins or ten sheets of paper for passage through his cavern, per person, whether it be from the exits to the caverns, from one exit to another, or from the caverns to an exit. He also will charge up to ten coins or sheets for information. Kelelmien keeps track of everything that passes through this cavern. He has a library filled only with his own journals, each categorized and cross-referenced so that he knows where each bit of information came from and which coins came with the person who brought that information.

Kelelmien knows, for example, that this is currently the year 2021 Anno Domini in Highland, and that the people of Highland think it is only the year 1991. He knows that the Cataclysm occurred sometime between the year 989 and 1013 A.D. Probably around 1007 A.D.

Kelelmien provides no information without payment. However, he will not accept payment for things that he does not know, and will be happy to inform them of this. He will engage any friendly party in conversation. Except for being a stickler for payments, a real obsessive-compulsive with regards to information, and having the ability to shoot shards of glass as a breath attack, he’s kind of a nice guy.

Kelelmien will accept any coin for payment, and will be willing to bargain for coins he definitely does not have. He will tend to not accept the same coins twice from the same person, however. If they pay with silver on one trip, he will require gold, copper, or some other coin the next time through. The value of the coins doesn’t matter, only how unique they are. He always accepts sheets of paper, as he always needs something to write on.

Kelelmien (lesser dragon: 7; Ordered; Move: 12/24; Attacks: claw and bite; Defense: +7; Damage: 2d6/2d4; Special Attacks: shards, command)

His shards do 6d6 points damage, or 3d6 on a successful Evasion roll, to any in their path: forty yards long, one yard at Kelelmien’s mouth and ten yards wide at the end.