Spit rejoins the group - it's been 2.5 weeks in game time... he passed out in anger from the bugbear fight. And has been recuperating/on a vision quest with the druids in Hommlet. But now he's better and meets up with the hirelings on the surface.

After the fight in the kitchen, a gecko shows up telling us that Spit has returned from his vision quest. And with the four goblin "prisoners"/hirelings we head to the surface.

We meet up, stories are exchanged. And then we head back down to the rooms south of the kitchen. We kick in two adjacent doors simultaneously. It's a horde of bugbears with a couple of gnolls! Spit is pleased and grins wickedly. We start kicking ass - then a door opens and a cleric comes in, darn it. Smiting of bugbears continues, and the cleric causes some damage and backs away. Theldin charges after, Diren is "vanished" and gets a kidney. The cleric is trapped and tries to cast, but can't get off the spell or escape.

The cleric's room is gray - very gray. There's some limited treasures such as a fine robe. He's got minor magic weapons and armor, along with a magic cloak we can't identify. And in the secret passage behind his room there's a pittance of cash and some weapons and armor. Searching through the other rooms we find a ring of some value.

We head out and south from the end of a long hall, where there was a secret door. Entering a door, we find four bugbears who we kill along with their chief when he comes in. There's little loot and we move on to a nearby room with more bugbears. As we fight them, an ogre barges in complaining of the noise. We take no pity and Elmo kills the ogre with a bit of help from allies.

A bit of looting. We find a secret door. Based on the map, we think it enters the main water temple chamber. We split up to enter it at Diren's prompting. Sure enough, it's the water temple. And it's pretty cool.