"When there's a trap set up for you
In every corner of your room
You learn the only way to go is through the roof

When there's a trap set up for you
In every corner of this town

You learn the only way to go is underground..."

Once they entered the Underdark, the group kept Del on a rather short leash. No sooner had they gone under the abandoned temple of Selune in the goblin camp and said goodbye to the sun for the foreseeable future, than Gale set up a rather ingenious alarm system. Always a maestro with the Weave, he had the idea to enchant one of Del's earrings – he'd worn a set of silver hoops in his pointed ears for years, a gift from Eldriss – to shriek a shrill tone when separated from Gale himself by too great a distance. As long as Del and Gale stuck relatively close together, the earrings would stay silent, but if Del made a run for it... Everyone and their mother would know, or at least that was the idea.

"Well, isn't that just humiliating?" Astarion commented as Gale cast the modified Magic Mouth spell. "Darling, are you going to let him do that to you? Speaks of a lack of trust, to me."

Del shrugged. "I get that you guys are worried, so no hard feelings. But honestly, I don't feel any different down here. I'm not planning to run away or anything... The Underdark is dangerous, and you realize we're hundreds of miles away from Oryndoll, right? This is literally a different country. Plus we have to deal with these tadpoles first."

"Yes, this is just a precaution," Gale said. "No need for your commentary, my fanged friend -" He shot a pointed look at Astarion. "And Del here is fine with it, aren't you? Absolutely copacetic."

To which Astarion muttered something about how Del would be fine with getting shoved in a barrel and thrown down a waterfall as long as it was done by someone with tentacles.

At least they were joking about it... That was a good sign, right?

The rest of the group also seemed to think that, since Del was from the Underdark, he would automatically know his way around the area they had entered. Sure, he could warn them of some common hazards, but this was the Upperdark, and wilderness rather than a city. He and Eldriss had traveled through some of it to reach the Sword Coast, but his experience was still limited. It was like taking a kid from Baldur's Gate and expecting them to navigate a forest, for God-Brain's sake.

This region of the Underdark was a strange and beautiful place. It was surprisingly well-lit by bioluminescent plants and fungi, as well as occasional enchanted torches set into stone walls by various inhabitants and a few chinks in the 'ceiling' that let in stray beams of sunlight from above. Bats roosted in the upper reaches of caves, and rats and spiders of unusual size made occasional appearances. The spiders, in particular, seemed to grow larger the deeper they descended.

The surface-dwellers among them had expected the Underdark to be a boring gray place, but the vivid reds and blues of mushroom caps frequently broke the monotony. This place was full of plants and fungi that Del had only ever seen served on plates or in stews, not growing in the wild. It wasn't his fault that Shadowheart inhaled some strange spores and laughed hysterically for twenty minutes, or that Karlach touched the wrong fruiting body and ended up with her arm coated in sticky acid that burned skin and was hellishly hard to remove.

Del did correctly distinguish between some of the fungi that were edible and could be added to their camp rations, and others that were poisonous. He identified the rumbling beneath their feet as a bulette and instructed everyone to lay low to avoid a confrontation with the creature that thankfully passed by and left them unharmed.

They were not so lucky with a pack of hook horrors less than an hour later. A single creature ambushed them and was dispatched by Karlach and Del with almost laughable speed, but before dying it clacked its hooks together in a display that soon drew more of them out from various hiding places nearby. Still, this was nothing they couldn't handle, at least until some idiot showed up and began slinging spells at them.

"Wait!" Del called as he dodged a firebolt. "Why are you fighting us? We're trying to kill those monsters too!"

The mysterious mage didn't respond, only misty-stepped away from Karlach's wild swing in his direction. He ended up closer to Del, and from this distance Del could tell he was a drow. Full-blooded, most likely. Del had never had the chance to speak to a free drow outside of Oryndoll. The one time Eldriss had brought him on a trading expedition to Sshamath, everyone sneered at him for being half-human, male, and a thrall.

This drow seemed determined to be openly hostile. Del's heart wasn't fully in the fight, so he focused primarily on finishing off the hook horrors, which for some reason seemed to make the drow mage even angrier. Finally, the monsters were dead and Gale took down their main opponent with a Magic Missile directly in the chest. The group approached cautiously once it was clear he was no longer a threat.

"Those were... my... friends..." the drow gasped.

They all looked around, but saw no other humanoids nearby. "Do you mean... the hook horrors?" Del asked.

But the drow was past answering. He stared off into the middle distance, his breath coming in short pants.

"Should we, uh... Never mind," Del cut himself off, noticing that the man's breathing had ceased entirely. Healing him enough to talk to him was one thing, but the idea had come too late. They were running low on scrolls of Revivify and needed to save them for members of their own group.

"Good riddance," Shadowheart scoffed. "That drow wasn't right in the head."

For some reason, Karlach shot her a stern look. "You all good, Del?"

"That was weird..." Del replied. "But yeah, I'm okay. Wish he'd have stopped fighting and talked to us for a second, but his loss."

Despite his brave words, he found himself wanting to keep looking back at the drow's body as they walked onward, leaving the dead man among the corpses of the monsters he had called friends.

They had never even learned his name.

The next humanoid they encountered was barely any friendlier. Sometime later that – day? Night? It was all the same in the Underdark... - they were investigating the ruins of a decrepit village near an underground lake, when a deep voice rang out from above them.

"Halt! Stay where you are, sun-scum, or I'll end you!"

Del looked up to see that the voice had come from a small figure perched up on a high catwalk and aiming a crossbow in his direction. The man was short and stout, appearing nearly as wide as he was tall from the skewed perspective at which they saw him. His skin was a dark cyan, marking him as a duergar rather than a surface dwarf.

"We mean no harm!" Del called out, hoping that the duergar would mistake him for a full drow from a distance. "Just passing through."

"Passing awfully loudly, you are. And in the company of surface dwellers. I can hear you stumbling. Can hear you blinking. Tell them that noise'll get them eaten down here. Maybe I'll hush all of you, before something hungry comes along."

He cocked the crossbow and aimed it at random, landing on Gale, who backed up hastily. Looking up at the duergar, Del noticed something interesting; he bore the same brand as they had seen in the goblin camp, the one that marked cultists of the Absolute.

"Wait!" Del called, hoping he'd be more successful with this one than with the drow. He focused on the parasite in his head, trying to tap into the illithid powers it carried. "Stand down. We are True Souls."

The duergar frowned, and Del felt him reach out mentally through his own parasite and make contact. "That's right..." he said slowly, lowering the crossbow. "A True Soul. Not like me to overlook one of the Absolute's chosen. But I've been a bit distracted, you see. Half my squad got killed by rotflowers, been dealing with the fallout."

"Rotflowers?"

"Them mushroom creatures. Awful things... Meddling where they aren't wanted, interrupting the hunt."

"What hunt? And who are you, anyway?" Del realized he should probably stop asking questions and just move along, but he wanted to know what they were dealing with here.

The man sighed, clearly not wanting to get into this whole story, but then seemed to reconsider. "Maybe you can help, if you're working with the Absolute. The name's Gekh, and I'm in charge of the slaves for the excavation 'cross the lake. I've been tracking a runaway. Deep gnome, stole magic boots from my sergeant. I'm to kill her, but she's holed up with the myconids. Damn things made half my men jump off a cliff, laughing !"

"That's awful," Del tried to sympathize, at least to make nice with the duergar so they could pass through without sprouting crossbow bolts. It wasn't like he agreed with the slaver or anything... But the rest of his party decided to dissent rather more vocally.

"A slaver?" Gale said, as if the word had been a mortal offense. "How barbaric. Awful custom, slavery. Don't see why so many cultures hold on to the institution."

"Not the time, Gale," Shadowheart hissed, echoing Del's thoughts.

The duergar lifted his weapon again, scowling.

"I agree wholeheartedly, but looks like you've just started another fight, darling." Astarion said to Gale as he pulled out his own bow.

Two more duergar emerged from makeshift huts up on a higher level of the scaffolding, bows drawn and ready for a fight. Gale and Shadowheart ducked behind a pillar of rock and started muttering prayers and incantations, while Astarion readied his own bow and Del and Karlach scrambled up the nearest ladder before the duergar could aim and fire. Moving in synchrony, they each took one opponent and managed to take them down before they could fire too many shots from their crossbows or properly switch to melee weapons.

Then it was just them and the original duergar called Gekh, who was more skilled than his compatriots. He had pulled out a giant axe and was shooting off spells now and again, reanimating his friends' corpses to continue the fight even after they'd been felled the first time. Everyone's concerted efforts were interfering with each other more than actually helping to take him down.

And then Del had an idea. Remembering what he had done to telekinetically throw Lae'zel in the grove, he reached out with his mind and found the presence of the tadpole coiled inside his skull. It responded immediately, eager to be put to use, and Del felt his consciousness expand as its mind merged with his own.

Del saw where the duergar stood, precariously close to the edge of the scaffolding as he tried to sidestep Gale's magic missiles and dodge Karlach's swinging axe. It would only take a single shove to drive him back over the edge.

And so Del reached out with his mind instead of his muscles, and pushed.

The duergar teetered, thrown off balance, but Del only intensified the mental pressure and pushed again. This time, the dark-skinned dwarf was visibly thrust backwards, a look of utter shock frozen on his face for an instant as he found only empty air under his feet. And then he disappeared, plummeting down towards the stony floor.

"Shit!" yelled Karlach as she overbalanced a strike meant for the duergar and nearly followed him over the edge. Del was thankful she managed to catch herself, because he wasn't sure he would have been able to react fast enough to pull her back the other way.

"Sorry!" Del called down to her as he shimmied down the ladder to her level. "My bad, just trying out the tadpole powers."

"That was you? I swear I didn't push him."

"Yeah! Guess those tadpoles were good for something after all."

Shadowheart, Gale, and Astarion came to join Del and Karlach as they looked over the edge of the scaffolding. It was a long way down, but they could see the crumpled form of the duergar on the ground below.

"That was all the tadpole?" Astarion asked. "If so, I call claim to the next one we find. Which, incidentally, just crawled out of that dead dwarf's eye."

"You can see that?" Shadowheart asked. "Just looks like a bloody mess to me."

"Oh Astarion, what else do your elf eyes see?" Karlach teased.

"Aside from the tadpole, mostly a bloody mess but in more detail. And I'd say the enhanced vision is more of a vampire trait than an elvish one."

They took turns climbing down the single ladder leading from the scaffold to the ground, with Gale complaining that the whole thing was one big safety violation.

Once at the bottom, Astarion approached the body of the duergar and looked down at the tadpole beside it with an expression of exaggerated distaste. "So, Del. What exactly am I supposed to do with this thing?"

Del shrugged. "Just pick it up and focus on it, I guess. Link to it with your own tadpole."

Astarion grimaced as he picked up the tadpole and held it in his hand, but did as he was told. He stared off into space for a moment, brow creased with effort, and then gasped suddenly as he made contact with the tadpole. The thing writhed in his hand for a moment, and then lay still. It really didn't look like much had happened from an outsider's perspective, Del mused. But only he could guess at what Astarion was experiencing from the inside.

Despite his communion with the parasite, Astarion dropped it to the ground at the first available opportunity.

"I'll never get used to that," Shadowheart said.

"Soldier, you weren't going to actually help that man, were you?" Karlach asked, turning back toward Del. "You do know slavery is wrong... right?"

"I was just trying to avoid a fight," Del huffed as he cleaned the blood off his weapons and wrapped up minor cuts that didn't warrant wasting a healing spell. "I wasn't going to help him or anything. His slaves, his business. But if he mistreats them or can't keep track of them, then he deserves to have them run away."

Karlach just shook her head and turned away.

They skirted around the lake shore and followed a gentle slope downward. There was a boat moored at a dock near the village, but they figured they'd come back to the lake if there wasn't a clearer path forward elsewhere. The water was murky and went down to unknown depths, not to mention it was too dark to see what lay on the other side.

As they ventured further into the Underdark, the group found all sorts of wonders, most of which were of the fungal variety. Mushrooms that exploded, mushrooms that gave off poisonous gas, and more of those mushrooms whose spores caused hysterical laughter in anyone who walked too close to one growing at the side of the path. Del tentatively identified those as sprouting tinmask 'shrooms, and it looked like Shadowheart was oddly susceptible to their spores.

In one patch of poison mushrooms - not the laughing kind, these were deadly serious - they found the body of a surface dwarf once the clouds of gas had cleared. The dwarf had nothing useful on him, so they shrugged and continued onward. Del must have inhaled more of the poisonous spores than he thought while investigating the body, because after that he had a headache for the rest of the day.

They stopped and made camp at a time that seemed like it should be night based on how long they had been traveling. No place was truly safe in the Underdark, but they found a secluded area partially enclosed by a mixture of giant mushrooms and some kind of rare trees that could survive in the eternal gloom. Karlach and Shadowheart set up their tents, and Del helped Gale prepare dinner using a mix of ingredients they'd brought from the surface and mushrooms he had picked in the Underdark. Scratch, who had bravely followed them into the dark and kept close at their heels the whole time, ran around yipping until someone threw a well-worn rubber ball for him.

After dinner, Astarion taught them a new card game, but Del kept losing. He blamed it on distraction from all the strange noises outside, not to mention that annoyingly persistent headache. Eventually everyone retired to their respective tents and bedrolls, and Del subverted Gale's rather low expectations of him by not deciding to make a break for it and go off in search of the way back to Oryndoll.

It had been an eventful first day underground.

Author's Note: Ayyy we're in the Underdark now! I completely skipped this part of the game by accident in my first playthrough, and am only just now experiencing it in my second one. Since this is all so fun and new, it's gonna be hard to avoid just going into detail on all the little things I did in my game. But don't worry, I'm planning to throw a bit of a wrench in things next chapter...