So enroute to Nibenay the party had acquired more mounts, to whit several Kanks (think giant spiders) and somehow I forgot entirely about this. This involved a second Djinni + Strimko puzzle, more spawn until solved monsters, this time swarms of baby Kanks, and this time after solving it the players were able to decipher that the magic lock had been teleporting the Kanks in from somewhere nearby, and a bit of investigation and roleplaying on their part allowed them to acquire enough Kanks so that the entire party was mounted…
The 4e mount rules are kind of crap, and I hadn’t really learned them, so I hand-waved that they hadn’t trained them well enough to use them in combat. This made many thing easier. And of course if I remember right, even this post is kind of out of order, as before the party went to find the Kank Hive, they went into the cave system of the Djinni. That’ll have to be a story for another day (like tomorrow) and eventually we’ll get back on track (or I’ll edit this, and put these 3-4 posts in chronological order once I am sure exactly what that order is).