The tale begins again with Mishkal / Unnamed Wizard trying to convince the party to open the portal to Hell and chuck the demon box through. Meanwhile, Margaret is quietly looking at Emily and explaining what she has caught from the Vargoyle. She has been snogged to death, and the death isn't going to be a nice one. Over the next 24 hours she's going to lose all her hair, then have her ears grow into bats wings before finally her head will detatch from her body and fly round screaming. And judging by the speed of hair loss, it's going to be a lot less than 24 hours. Only sunlight can slow this process, and that is in short supply underground.
Meanwhile the debate is going on. The portal can be opened to somewhere it has already gone, or a random location in space-time-plane. And it really is random. Unnamed Wizard pointed out that the Plane of Ultimate Evil might really be a misnomer compared to what could be out there and suggested renaming it (Plane of Somewhat Evil, Plane of Evil > 0). Finally the party decided to go ahead with the mages plan. Again, there seemed no good reason to do this and the entire group agreed it was a bad idea, but this seemed to be the norm these days.
Emily and Margaret activated the portal to a preset location - somewhere nice and sunny with the portal on top of a giant plinth above the treeline - and traveled through to wait in the sun until the deed was done. Beard and Ug took up positions around the gate and Mishkal and Arthur fetched the box. After a brief debate, they decided opening it up was a really REALLY bad idea and carried it over to the portal. Beard dialed Hell and they chucked the box through. Sadly the portal had a time limit on it and had to time out rather than having, say, a CLOSE button. It took a few moment for Beard to realise he could override this by dialing another location whilst it was open, but in that time a crowd of Dretches had appeared in a cloud of foul-smelling gas.
The party moved as one to defeat this enemy. Beard poked ineffectually with his stick (although one did manage to slip in the vomit he produced from the smell), Arthur stabbed with his sword causing horrible wounds and Mishkal flailed madly. Ug finished it all up by terminating the things with massive swings of his axe.
Victorious, the party minus Beard traveled back to the sunny island where Margaret and Emily were waiting for them only to find Margaret was fiddling with another portal generator and Emily had vanished. Beard stayed behind in the lab so someone could re-open the gate when it timed out. And loot the other lab which was full of exciting "things". These were tested by the age-old method of putting them on and seeing what happened...
Back on the island the party had found Emily sitting in a clearing not far away being fanned with a palm leaf by a large ape. Nearby were a large collection of monkeys and baboons all dancing for her pleasure.
We don't ask how she got there.
When she saw the party, she got up to join them before being firmly told to sit down by the large ape. Undeterred, Emily carefully passed out bananas to her minions, drawing them to either side of the stone throne. Clearly she had a clever and intricate plan... Here is came... "LEG IT" she yelled and scarpered through the crowd of eating monkies, heading for the path back to the portal. Enraged, the monkies persued. A couple were terminated by The Axinator before he followed Emily up the path. Mishkal and Arthur, seeming not to understand the concept of running away, stood their ground in the face of the onrushing apes and started slowly hacking their way through the things.
Reaching the portal, Ug noted it was closed. Screaming "DAMN YOU KROPOTKIN" he danced round in sheer rage, succumbing to his own anger in the Barbarian Strop. Meanwhile, the giant ape was scaling the plinth...
Beard was exploring the second lab, sure the party would be a long time before returning.
Back on the plinth, The Axinator moved to block the giant ape as it climbed up but it was too clever for him and opted to simply climb somewhere there wasn't a frothing loony swinging an axe. Instead he homed in on Emily who, in the tradition of every small girl ever, managed to defeat it in a grapple and retreat. Arthur and Mishkal finised off the monkies and arrived just in time to see the ape beating Ug to death and move back after Emily. Emily threw herself between his legs and attempted to help the downed Ug, pausing momentarily to fend off the giant ape again. Finally Margaret plucked up the courage to come over and help whilst Emily distracted the ape and Team Violence stabbed it. The ape broke Mishkal's jaw, who collapsed, and moved in on Arthur who suddenly realised he wasn't invulnerable. Margaret poured more potion into Ug, trying to get him to awake, whilst Emily tried to help Mishkal.
Finally, with the ape distracted by a dazzling display of handstands and flips by Emily, Sword managed to stab it and it collapsed looking mournfully at Emily who felt she should be upset. But she was more worried about her friends who were busy dying. That was quickly solved once Mishkal was back on his feet and Beard even remembered to open the portal again, which was nice.
Now came a logistic problem. They were 4 days from a road which would take them to civilization and another week from that point to anything meaningful. On the other hand, Emily was likely to be dead in less than 24 hours. So without a hope in hell of running for it, the party decided the only sensible course of action was a game of "Spin the Wheels on the Teleporter!" They chose the portal generator on the plinth rather than the one back in the lab. It was closer.
The first hit was a poor choice, with a bunch of people speaking some kind of weird foreign language accusing them of being demons and trying to seal the portal. The second was a mountain range and (once the time knob was spun) the rest just got worse, with a portal to the world before the lands rose from the sea and another so far into the future all the peoples had grown to giant size.
At this point Beard pointed out this was a really, REALLY bad idea and if they were going to do this at least they could do it back in the lab where they could target our own plane. He'd forgotten the last random setting was the Place of Evil. Fortunately the rest of the party remembered before they were all killed in a horrible way and portals were opened to new random locations - a higher level of Hell (which was sandy and notably less full of demons) and finally the Elemental Plane of Fire. This time when Mishkal stuck his head through he burnt his nose and it was decided to curtail the experiment at this point.
Finally Michael chimed up and told them that Pixus, far from teleporting to civilization as had previously been assumed, had in fact gone and visited the local druids. The party decided to randomly guess which preset would lead them to the druids and, with Michael in tow, stepped through into a beautiful glade, hunting for someone who might possibly be able to save Emily's life before she turned into a flying, screaming head and lost any chance of getting a job as a storyteller.
And there we leave it. Emily has less than a day to live, but at least nobody has died playing Wheel of Ineptitude...