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Description
When the others returned they told Clere and me about the black orb. Apparently it's a really powerful magic artifact that has transmutative properties. The mage tasked with identifying it insisted that it could be used to turn lead into gold, though he didn't know how to operate it. The price he offered for the item was a joke (perhaps he did actually know how to use the device but was attempting to trick us into selling a 'useless' item to him for cheap?) so Jonas and Izumi returned without the huge piles of money we needed to pay for the food.
So then we got thrown out on our butts. The hotel owner claimed most of our equipment, and it still didn't cover our expenses. Needless to say, we're not allowed to return here anytime soon. Fortunately I never relied on magic items or weapons much anyway and Izumi's equipment is just a big stick (which they didn't claim).
It took us only an hour to find a job, mostly because we were desperate and had to accept whatever we came across. A mage working for a wealthy trader recruited us to clean up after a pudding-related experiment went bad. We travelled to the laboratory, which is eight miles from the capitol, and the mage bid us good luck.
So now we're standing in the hallway of a mansion, in the middle of a forest. Before us lies the jumbled mess of the pudding laboratory. There are smashed vials and flasks everywhere, and a green goop covers the ceiling. I pick a small crate off the ground and set it down on one of the tables to examine the contents. The crate contains standard ingredients. Gelatin, sugars (several kinds), various powders, and eggs and milk and the like. The milk has gone off, which is odd because the mage told us the incident only happened yesterday. Elsewhere in the room Jonas shouts that he has found magical ingredients. That seems a bit strange for a laboratory that develops new kinds of pudding. I'm about to fill up a bucket with water and start looking for a mop, when Izumi shouts from the next room. "Guys, the cellar's a mess too. There's vanilla and chocolate all over the steps, be careful when you go downstairs." Clere initially eats a piece of pudding she comes across but quickly discovers it has gone bad. From then on she avoids eating it; apparently even she has limits. When the four of us go downstairs we nearly slip as the floor is covered in pudding, it appears to not be quite fresh either. The cellar is quite large; this will be a lot of work to clean. From the looks of it this is where the pudding was stored. There are four enormous steel cylindrical containers, all with their large round lids opened. Oddly there is nothing inside them, save for some remnants.

We go further into the cellar and discover that it leads into an older, natural cave system. We agree to have a look around the caves first, perhaps mostly because we really don't want to mop up a mansion full of dried up pudding. The caves are drip caves, with stalagmites and stalactites, though it also looks like traffic comes through from time to time, judging by the foot and wagon tracks on the ground. We can all notice an odd bubbling noise that echoes through the caves, growing louder as we progress.
Then we hear a loud roar, and dull heavy footsteps drawing nearer from one of the cave tunnels. Though we're not helpless we only have very basic equipment on us so we decide to make a run for it in the opposite direction. No luck, the footsteps catch up with us. Behind us is a large, quite overweight dinosaur. It is definitely a predator, orange and brown, bipedal with tiny two-clawed forelimbs, and it is very hungry from the looks of it. Izumi can't help but shout at the larger dinosaur between panting. "That's cheating!"

Only moments after we started running we encounter more pudding. Only this time, it's not old - it's fresh. Before us sits a black cube six foot on a side. It looks like... chocolate. And it moves. We run around it, noticing that it gets bigger in short bursts, making a blubbering noise every time it does. It looks disturbing, but also oddly delicious. Fortunately for us the dinosaur chasing us takes a few moments to gobble up the giant chocolate pudding cube. It slides down the creature's fat neck and ends in its already chubby belly, only making it more round. And then it resumes its chase; apparently it doesn't mind eating meat after dessert. In passing we notice several more pudding cubes, when small pieces fall off them they form into new cubes that also slowly expand. I think I see vanilla and raisin pudding.

We eventually reach a larger chamber. Under normal circumstances we would take the opportunity to admire the ...enormous house-sized cubes of green jello pudding. But, the dinosaur behind us has other plans; we keep running. We zig and zag between the huge green walls of jello, they are growing so large that they are becoming a hindrance. We also seem to have lost Clere, who has decided to take a different path. The dinosaur is coming after the three of us instead. We keep running. Behind us the creature attacks a jello cube, biting into it, slurping it, but it's growing too fast, regenerating even. It looks like the cube is slowly enveloping the dinosaur. A cube made of pudding is defeating a carnivorous dinosaur, how about that. As we are watching this struggle of titans, we hear a sloshing and creaking from elsewhere in the room, like someone is dragging a water-filled rubber sack over wet concrete. It looks like Clere is similarly engaged in fisticuffs with a jello cube. I know she likes jello, but I've never seen her bite into it before like this. In the hotel she even let me have half the pudding, something I wasn't expecting at the time. It quickly becomes clear that the creaking and sloshing sounds are coming from Clere, her body straining from the rapid growth every time she gobbles up more pudding. She's practically inhaling it, inflating herself with the stuff, and enjoying it too. Making gutteral growls she goes from pudding to pudding, briefly stalking them as though they were prey with survival instincts. It doesn't look like they do; they are just moving around randomly, though the fact that they are all growing and spawning new cubes might make them a threat to the surface world, if left unchecked. A delicious threat. This continues for a while, the pudding's replication ability is able to keep up with Clere's appetite, but not her growth. Before long she's reached the size of the dinosaur, her deep growls and moans and heavy footsteps echoing through the cavern like those of the actual dinosaur before her. As she grows, her ability to devour pudding grows with it, and the pudding cube population starts to decrease. She briefly casts a glance at us between feeding, but doesn't bother to stop. A pudding cube grows underneath us and pushes us up - I quickly cast a spell that normally allows us to walk on water, it seems to work here, too. The pudding under our feet immediately starts spawning smaller cubes, while just ahead of us the dinosaur has been enveloped to such a degree that only its head and tail are still exposed to air, the cube wandering off with it. Unfortunately for the dinosaur, it is moving in the direction of Clere, who has by now become so large that she can devour entire cubes in a matter of seconds. Her body has grown so fat that she's starting to push against the ceiling. Small cracks are appearing in the ceiling though she pays it no mind, and there are still enormous quantities of jello pudding in the cave, not to mention the other flavors in the other areas. We may have a problem...

Description
When the others returned they told Clere and me about the black orb. Apparently it's a really powerful magic artifact that has transmutative properties. The mage tasked with identifying it insisted that it could be used to turn lead into gold, though he didn't know how to operate it. The price he offered for the item was a joke (perhaps he did actually know how to use the device but was attempting to trick us into selling a 'useless' item to him for cheap?) so Jonas and Izumi returned without the huge piles of money we needed to pay for the food.
So then we got thrown out on our butts. The hotel owner claimed most of our equipment, and it still didn't cover our expenses. Needless to say, we're not allowed to return here anytime soon. Fortunately I never relied on magic items or weapons much anyway and Izumi's equipment is just a big stick (which they didn't claim).
It took us only an hour to find a job, mostly because we were desperate and had to accept whatever we came across. A mage working for a wealthy trader recruited us to clean up after a pudding-related experiment went bad. We travelled to the laboratory, which is eight miles from the capitol, and the mage bid us good luck.
So now we're standing in the hallway of a mansion, in the middle of a forest. Before us lies the jumbled mess of the pudding laboratory. There are smashed vials and flasks everywhere, and a green goop covers the ceiling. I pick a small crate off the ground and set it down on one of the tables to examine the contents. The crate contains standard ingredients. Gelatin, sugars (several kinds), various powders, and eggs and milk and the like. The milk has gone off, which is odd because the mage told us the incident only happened yesterday. Elsewhere in the room Jonas shouts that he has found magical ingredients. That seems a bit strange for a laboratory that develops new kinds of pudding. I'm about to fill up a bucket with water and start looking for a mop, when Izumi shouts from the next room. "Guys, the cellar's a mess too. There's vanilla and chocolate all over the steps, be careful when you go downstairs." Clere initially eats a piece of pudding she comes across but quickly discovers it has gone bad. From then on she avoids eating it; apparently even she has limits. When the four of us go downstairs we nearly slip as the floor is covered in pudding, it appears to not be quite fresh either. The cellar is quite large; this will be a lot of work to clean. From the looks of it this is where the pudding was stored. There are four enormous steel cylindrical containers, all with their large round lids opened. Oddly there is nothing inside them, save for some remnants.

We go further into the cellar and discover that it leads into an older, natural cave system. We agree to have a look around the caves first, perhaps mostly because we really don't want to mop up a mansion full of dried up pudding. The caves are drip caves, with stalagmites and stalactites, though it also looks like traffic comes through from time to time, judging by the foot and wagon tracks on the ground. We can all notice an odd bubbling noise that echoes through the caves, growing louder as we progress.
Then we hear a loud roar, and dull heavy footsteps drawing nearer from one of the cave tunnels. Though we're not helpless we only have very basic equipment on us so we decide to make a run for it in the opposite direction. No luck, the footsteps catch up with us. Behind us is a large, quite overweight dinosaur. It is definitely a predator, orange and brown, bipedal with tiny two-clawed forelimbs, and it is very hungry from the looks of it. Izumi can't help but shout at the larger dinosaur between panting. "That's cheating!"

Only moments after we started running we encounter more pudding. Only this time, it's not old - it's fresh. Before us sits a black cube six foot on a side. It looks like... chocolate. And it moves. We run around it, noticing that it gets bigger in short bursts, making a blubbering noise every time it does. It looks disturbing, but also oddly delicious. Fortunately for us the dinosaur chasing us takes a few moments to gobble up the giant chocolate pudding cube. It slides down the creature's fat neck and ends in its already chubby belly, only making it more round. And then it resumes its chase; apparently it doesn't mind eating meat after dessert. In passing we notice several more pudding cubes, when small pieces fall off them they form into new cubes that also slowly expand. I think I see vanilla and raisin pudding.

We eventually reach a larger chamber. Under normal circumstances we would take the opportunity to admire the ...enormous house-sized cubes of green jello pudding. But, the dinosaur behind us has other plans; we keep running. We zig and zag between the huge green walls of jello, they are growing so large that they are becoming a hindrance. We also seem to have lost Clere, who has decided to take a different path. The dinosaur is coming after the three of us instead. We keep running. Behind us the creature attacks a jello cube, biting into it, slurping it, but it's growing too fast, regenerating even. It looks like the cube is slowly enveloping the dinosaur. A cube made of pudding is defeating a carnivorous dinosaur, how about that. As we are watching this struggle of titans, we hear a sloshing and creaking from elsewhere in the room, like someone is dragging a water-filled rubber sack over wet concrete. It looks like Clere is similarly engaged in fisticuffs with a jello cube. I know she likes jello, but I've never seen her bite into it before like this. In the hotel she even let me have half the pudding, something I wasn't expecting at the time. It quickly becomes clear that the creaking and sloshing sounds are coming from Clere, her body straining from the rapid growth every time she gobbles up more pudding. She's practically inhaling it, inflating herself with the stuff, and enjoying it too. Making gutteral growls she goes from pudding to pudding, briefly stalking them as though they were prey with survival instincts. It doesn't look like they do; they are just moving around randomly, though the fact that they are all growing and spawning new cubes might make them a threat to the surface world, if left unchecked. A delicious threat. This continues for a while, the pudding's replication ability is able to keep up with Clere's appetite, but not her growth. Before long she's reached the size of the dinosaur, her deep growls and moans and heavy footsteps echoing through the cavern like those of the actual dinosaur before her. As she grows, her ability to devour pudding grows with it, and the pudding cube population starts to decrease. She briefly casts a glance at us between feeding, but doesn't bother to stop. A pudding cube grows underneath us and pushes us up - I quickly cast a spell that normally allows us to walk on water, it seems to work here, too. The pudding under our feet immediately starts spawning smaller cubes, while just ahead of us the dinosaur has been enveloped to such a degree that only its head and tail are still exposed to air, the cube wandering off with it. Unfortunately for the dinosaur, it is moving in the direction of Clere, who has by now become so large that she can devour entire cubes in a matter of seconds. Her body has grown so fat that she's starting to push against the ceiling. Small cracks are appearing in the ceiling though she pays it no mind, and there are still enormous quantities of jello pudding in the cave, not to mention the other flavors in the other areas. We may have a problem...