Chapter 7, Part 1: "The Curse of Gan-Ron's Sword..."

This Episode's Cast:

BULL'S EYE BUCK McGOVERN - Earth Man Fighting-Man, bears Gan-ron's magic silver needle-sword

CORPORAL RADAR O'REILEY - Teenaged Earth Man, former member of a failed Terran Exploration Mission, has a metal nose
DICKIE DEE - Bone Man Sorcerer and indulgent intoxicant enthusiast
MONSTER MONAGIN - Earth Man Fightin' Sailor
RODAN THE SCROUNGER - Green-skinned Scavenger and Fighting-Man
RYGARR - Green Man Sorcerer
THORAZ AND KALERVO - Cactoid Brothers, Fighting-Men

Part II Here.

Desperately battling gargoyles beneath the Melted City, the party finds their weapons ineffective aside from Bull's Eye's magic silver sword. Monster Monagin is brought down by the stony talons and fangs of one of the rock-demons and lies bleeding and unconscious on the floor.

Ignoring the still-unfired laser pistol holstered on his belt, Rodan the Scrounger pulls out a techno-magical artifact of the Ancients, "The Eye of Retarding Destiny", and aims it at the foes. Two of the three gargoyles begin moving slowly, at one-third their normal speed. This doesn't stop one of the monsters from disemboweling Bull's Eye Buck, an act of retaliation for the injuries inflicted by his magic needle-sword.

As Rodan scrambles through Buck's steaming entrails, scrabbling for the magic sword, another of their foes tears into Kalervo the Cactoid, leaving several sap-spurting deep wounds in his green flesh.

Rygarr the Green Man Sorcerer draws forth one of his trophies, "The Eye of Being an Unimpeachable Shield Against Foes" and turns the tables on their invulnerable foes by rendering Rodan and the two Cactoids impervious to their claws and teeth.

With three members of the party temporarily invulnerable, the companions manage a semi-orderly retreat leaving the bloody dying bodies of Monster Monagin and Bull's Eye Buck to their fates. Using the invulnerable fighting-men to hold the corridor they pull back to the stairs and rush up them into the Melted City where they desperately run through the ruins for several minutes before concealing themselves in a narrow crevice, their wounds filthy and ragged.

The party hears no sign of the gargoyle and presumes that they have escaped. However they realize that during their mad dash through the ruins the Bone Man Sorcerer Dickie Dee was separated from the party and lost. Was he caught and slain by the Gargoyles? Is he lost and wandering The Melted City or The Prismatic Wastes seeking his companions? Some opine that the intoxicant enthusiast deliberately separated his person from the party in order to find a secure location in which to consume the four packets of intoxicants that he took from Maggot Mort's corpse.

The exhausted party decides to rest for the night in their cramped, filthy hiding hole. During the night one of them hears the sound of several men traveling through the darkness outside their hideout but the party remains undiscovered.

The next morning when they drag themselves out of their miserable hole there is no sign of the Gargoyles or Dickie Dee. Returning to where they secured their Ornith bird-steeds they only find bloody feathers, splintered bones and scraps of flesh, the handiwork of the Gargoyles or some other denizen of the Prismatic Waste.

The battered and depleted companions decide to make for the safety of civilization and begin trekking westwards through the Prismatic Wastes towards the mining town of Pit.