Rooster interrupts some prime ukulele strumming to summon Silly Lilly, Blameless, Pan, Uke, Fin, and Huck to his office. It seems that the villagers of Blamboof, R&S’s newest client, have been displaced from their farms by forces unknown, their crops ruined. R&S must conduct a relief mission to deliver supplies and resolve the cause of the crisis. Due to the bulk and weight of relief supplies, and not the mission’s urgency, the operatives will take the slow moving Train Of Regional Transport, Ox-Impelled Services Extender (TURTLE).
Epi Glottis pilots the TURTLE to a camp city upon the hills overlooking Blamboof valley. The relief team is met by farmer Blarfmoo who directs the unloading of supplies.
The trouble with the farms, explains Blarfmoo, started when a tremor coughed up a big purple pod. After that, the vines spread rapidly, drinking up the river, smothering the crops, and forcing people out of their homes.
Honestly, weeding out a plant seems like a cakewalk of a mission despite Blarfmoo’s arbitrary prohibition against simply burning the entire village to the ground, vines, houses, and all. Uke flies off to get a sky view of the situation, hoping to discover and perchance longbow the pesky purple pod in the middle of the mess and call it a day. Instead, three flying thorn men intercept her at the edge of the vine wall and launch salvos of ouchy thorns. Uke retreats to the party dashing up to help her.
The regrouped party pushes into the viney maze through an obviously safe opening. The walls are otherwise impassible, Silly Lilly points out, because this razor vine, indigenous to jungle climes, will certainly injure anyone misfortunately entangled. She confirms that finding and destroying the central heart pod is the key to success. Pan casts locate plant to learn the direction of the pod.
As they make their way in the pod’s direction, Blameless spots the tracks where the three thorn men landed here and melded into the vine walls. Fin’s danger sense informs her something isn’t quite right, confirmed when the three thorn men re-emerge and attack Pan and Fin. The party deals with them quickly enough and Silly Lilly sifts through their remains, determining they are winged needle blights who likely came along to make the new vine city their comfy home.
Pan guides them to the next clearing where a scarecrow hangs from a crossbar right in the center. Uke, an aarakocra, is impressively unafraid of the scarecrow until it detaches from the crossbar and, fixing its glowing red eyes on her, attacks with metal claws. The scarecrow frightens her profoundly. The rest of the group surrounds the scarecrow and dices it up, avenging Uke’s broken psyche. What little coherent scarecrow remains burns down from Silly Lilly’s firebolt.
Uke remains inconsolable, no longer in fighting condition.
Fin exuberantly runs into the next clearing, bolstered by the previous successes and looking for some action. This time four winged needle blights are joined by a pair of vine blights who entwine Fin. Her cohorts concentrate on breaking the hold of the vine blights, despite their warning that the adventurers are trespassing on the vine people’s claimed land. In answer, Blameless hurls a pair of fiery chromatic orbs that burn down one of Fin’s vine blight captors and injure the other. A follow-up chromatic orb finishes of the second vine blight while Pan sleeps out the winged needle blights until they can all be slain in turn.
Pan charges into the next room where he has difficulty seeing the giant, hideous, pulsating, purple pod because of the nine scarecrows guarding around it. The scarecrows charge, frightening and paralyzing Blameless, Pan, and Huck. They swarm around the adventurers, striking with metal claws and paralyzing gazes. Silly Lilly fireballs into the line of scarecrows, setting them all afire, and then summons a flanking dust devil to stir up the back of the line. Pan thunderwaves the murder of scarecrows twice, throwing them into walls and each other, injuring most and disrupting their skirmish line. Blameless shockingly grasps to get away from the line while Fin and Huck try to bottle them up and keep them away from the casters. Pan’s thunderwaves mortally damage the pod and it oozes away its disgusting life goo. Pan retrieves a glowing blood emerald shard from the mess.