Session Nine: Pillar of Existence
From the logs of M'K'Splswap
Scene 1: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT
So, boy. Lotta stuff in the station. I won't bother you with the details, but here's the haul:
Guns 6 autoguns 6 laser shotguns 3 holdout guns 2 SAWs 2 grenade launchers 1 crossbow 1 bolt pistol 1 damaged bolt pistol (revolver) 1 pistol 1 Good needle rifle
Grenades 12 frag grenades 7 krak grenades 1 ocular grenade 1 warp grenade
Edged Weapons 16 knives 2 greatswords 1 wrist blade
Armor (all size 4) 8 suits flak armor 2 voidsuits 1 suit heavy power armor
Drugs 10 doses tranq 7 doses biogel 2 dose comfort 1 dose spook
Magic Items 1 boring stick 1 jar abnormally imposing mustache 1 soul dagger 1 pair boots of Mario (size 4) 1 small box containing 73 remarkably angry snakes
Special Items 1 jar agitated sand 1 pair garrote boots (size 4)
Other 170 person-days of hard rations 78 flexible zip tie cuffs 2 adhesive explosive pads 2 fire axes 1 auspex 1 collapsible 11 ft pole
Scene 2: Marble and Rod
Scarlett's tragic death notwithstanding, we were all pretty jazzed about being alive and in possession of some new toys, apart from Igneous, who had somehow lost almost everything in his bag of holding. I'd warned him: I once had an uncle who liked to sleep in one of those things, and when it malfunctioned, they had needed to bury him in it. We had no idea what had happened in this case, though. The Thief of Stars? Who knew.
Igneous consoled himself by examining Karen's corpse. It was no longer utterly invincible, but it was still durable beyond all reason. Igneous packed it away, with plans to make leather armor out of the skin (gross) and to try to engineer more of the same. M'k made himself an extremely durable Arcane Eye.
We wrapped Scarlett's corpse, which was covered in what tasted like dragon saliva; Igneous glared at M'k and took a sample the normal way. Scarlett would get a 'jammer's burial.
Doktor Meetslab decided to open the jar containing a living mustache. "It looks friendly", he said, "And besides, it really seems to want me to. It looks impatient."
Before we could unpack that, the mustache was already skittering up our captain's arm on long, insectile legs.
Doktor had gone from looking apprehensive to panicked by the time the mustache reached his lip and plunged those legs deep into the flesh of his face. He shrieked like a little girldarin as he tugged gingerly on the beastling, but it was anchored securely.
We told him to leave it, sir. It looked great, sir. Very...imposing. Commanding. Regal. Sir.
(The mustache seemed to emit a magical aura of command, but it didn't seem to be affecting Meetslab himself, so we figured it was probably ok. It was a magnificent mustache, after all.) We examined the iris disk, which we figured to be some sort of portal and probably the reason for the whole station's existence. Black runes on its base stood out as later additions, not matching the aesthetics or construction of the rest.
Igneous and Aephyr examined the runes, identifying the language as Infernal. Igneous was able to start poking around the magical machinery of the disk, humming to himself as he made steady progress at figuring out the purpose of the setup.
A few minutes into this, Igneous went very still. He told the rest of us to back up, in a strangled voice, as he did the same, very slowly and carefully.
Apparently this device had been modified to hijack someone else's portal connection. Igneous had traced that connection to Baator, which was somewhat expected, given the Infernal runes and the fact that Karen had feared invasion from Baator. What was truly horrifying was that the portal seemed to lead directly to the lair of Azmodeus himself: Igneous had recognized the portal connection as that which the King of Devils was said to personally use for the capture of unwilling souls.
Time to fucking go, then. We still didn't know how we'd accomplish our escape. Nobody wanted to listen to M'k's suggestion, however many times he made it.
Igneous went through more of the station's systems, prying open panels, splicing wires, plugging thingies into whatsits, and furiously tapping at keypads as though the devil himself were about to burst in, which of course was exactly what we feared.
At some point he found an access hatch leading to the level that had been sealed off, with no entrance from the access tube. We'd previously found that the floor on either side of that level was suspiciously thick and solid. It turned out that the entire level was filled with explosives; with the thick metal floors, it formed a shaped charge pointed at the portal, capable of destroying the entire station instantly.
Sensible.
M'k suggested, again, that we escape the sphere by popping it from the inside. Immobilize the Rod on one side of the sphere, set the Marble moving away from it on the other side...the velocities of the two artifacts when activated were, as far as we could tell, utterly fixed. The worst that could happen would be that nothing would happen, should the sphere prove stronger than the artifacts.
Igneous explained with pained patience that popping the sphere wouldn't help, because then we'd be stranded in the Astral Sea with no portal relay, and then we'd die slowly of starvation.
He further explained that the worst-case scenario was not that nothing would happen, but that breaking the sphere would cast us directly into the Warp.
Igneous then took out a pencil and notepad to show with math that we would, in fact, almost certainly be cast into the Warp if we tore a hole in reality the size of even the smallest crystal sphere.
He stopped mid-sentence, breaking his pencil's point. "Fuck. We need to get to the Warp; not being able to get to the Warp was the problem with the sphere-popping plan in the first place. This might work."
Doktor explained that he would rather die of starvation than fall into the Warp, but Igneous was ahead of him. "We know the whaleship will return to attempt rendezvous with us in a matter of hours. I've looked at the intrusion logs; the system recorded the precise time whenever we spelljammed in for the barest few nanoseconds. We can -- I can rig something to launch the Marble and break the sphere at the exact right moment. Then we and the whaleship will be cast into the Warp at the same place and time, and we'll be within the Geller bubble, and we can navigate to...fuck. To Sigil."
Doktor asked for the odds of success of both steps of the plan: entering the Warp within the whaleship's Geller field, and nagivating to Sigil, which would be our only visible beacon but which lay in the deepest chaos of the Warp.
Igneous filled a few pages with scribblings and diagrams before crumpling them. "You don't want to know. Let's try everything else first."
We searched again for anything looking like a map. Nothing.
Igneous used necromancy to reanimate the most intact corpse, Jen's, and began triggering muscle memories, hoping to expose another way out. Most of Jen's muscle memory had to do with hair-brushing and exfoliation. Doktor covered Aephyr's eyes for a couple of the more private muscle memories. Nothing indicated that Jen had ever left the station.
As the rendezvous loomed, the party resigned themselves to the reality that the insane sphere-popping plan would actually be put into action. M'k's eyes literally sparkled. Some of the sparkles caught things on fire.
We prepared for our exit. Igneous collected more data and samples, then carefully prepared a device that would push the Marble when triggered by the station's sensors. He explained at length how he was ripping out sources of unnecessary latency. M'k went around collecting documents and memorizing every scrap of writing in the station, from the annotated sketches of daemon-hide to the label on Jen's pants; perhaps Octocat could translate them later.
Aephyr used his phase sword to carve away the walls on either side of the station, until he reached the crystal sphere itself. Doktor carried the heavier loot to the shuttle, which was still in the middle of the level where we'd left it. He stared wistfully at the undersized power armor.
It was go time. M'k stilled his Rod where Igneous told him to, and Igneous put the Marble assembly in place and pre-activated it. "Go get 'em."
We piled into the shuttle and waited for all hell to break loose.
Scene 3: All Hail
M'k could feel as the whale flickered in and out of the sphere.
He could feel as the sphere began to strain against the Rod and Marble.
He could feel the Rod holding fast, and the Marble steadfastly in motion.
He could feel the sphere shatter, all at once, as though he himself were shattering, as though each particle of his being were shattering into an infinitude of worlds. And they were, he realized. They always had been. This had been what Vectron had been telling him all along.
And then they were in the Warp, with no whale in sight. No Geller field.
They were all already dead, by the plainest of logic. M'k had exactly zero seconds in which to do something. This was more than enough time, given what he was feeling and seeing and learning and understanding, and given where he was doing it. M'k spent a good long portion of those zero seconds staring at the warp through the godshatter of jagged crystal, eyes unaverted and unblinking, drawing into himself by degrees and then by torrents the raw power of belief that had for so long held a pocket of reality safe from the Warp.
The fragments, which had been drifting into the chaos, drifted back, surrounding M'k, shielding the party. Embracing them, tenderly. At the end of those zero seconds, they were still intact.
Then a whale swallowed them.
Scene 4: Fire Sail
We were parked in the whaleship's mouth, the shattered sphere engulfing the shuttle and intersecting whale-flesh harmlessly. It hadn't been large enough to preserve the whole station, though the whale could have. The portal was lost to the Warp, which was probably for the best. Our captain was immediately horrified to see that the Marble, at which he'd been staring with worry, had been lost as well.
For his part, M'k was disappointed to be without his Rod, his trusty, and only, weapon, garment, and Implement. He could, he realized, have held onto it during the whole procedure; the shuttle could have been placed at the edge of the sphere. Would things have been better, or worse, had the Rod not been sacrificed along with the Marble to buy their safety? Would a sacrifice of Motion had been somehow wrong without a partner of Stillness? Had Vectron seen to it that they would act as they did? More so than usual, obviously?
Igneous checked his bag of holding immediately, making several sounds in quick succession as he realized he was missing more things (the box of snakes, some biofoam) but that most of our loot was intact.
The redshirts, surprised and relieved at our return and terrified at having jumped into the Warp unexpectedly, were reluctant to cross M'k's boundary, but they had urgent messages for the captain. Messages along the lines of, "Holy shit, how did we get into the warp? Where are we going? Are those fragments of a crystal sphere? Where is Scarlett, and whose corpse is that?"
Doktor came to his senses, realizing that we needed to set a course immediately. He started to shake M'k, who was still laughing maniacally. Ah, I forgot to mention that. He was laughing so hard it looked painful, not seeming to draw in breath for minutes at time -- perhaps not at all? He flailed and writhed, rolling on the floor and then, when he found he could, on the ceiling.
When he couldn't get M'k to stop laughing, Doktor covered up M'k's mouth, hoping to apply his Karen strategy. M'k simply kept laughing, with no air, liver-spotted chest heaving.
After a few minutes of this, Doktor gave up on the laughter and just started giving orders. M'k kept laughing, kept writhing, but he willed an "Aye aye" into his Captain's mind.
Another mental message: "We've never gone nearly so deep into the Warp. It won't be easy. There's been something I've been meaning to try, but it's going to take some Luck."
M'k sat cross-legged on the ceiling, laughing only very slightly less, and began to cast the same spell over and over. The air thickened, vision warping, as the sphere of shattered crystal grew clearer and brighter. The magical emanations strengthed with each cast.
A minute later, M'k willed a message to the assembled crew:
"I've chosen a path. Let's go to Sigil."
An uneventful day of travel passed. M'k was asked a great number of questions, which he answered clearly and simply. Nobody understood the answers.
A funeral was held for Scarlett.
Another day of smooth sailing saw the last of the loot dispensed among the party. Igneous hoped to reverse-engineer Karen's invulnerability and take it for himself, while Tau, perhaps, would wear the armor we planned to make from Karen's skin. Doktor worked with Igneous on ideas for modifying human power armor to fit a particularly large ork. Zephyr might take the magical boots, and might use the magical knife, unless it seemed like M'k would make good use of it. M'k had bonded with Amira's power sword, for the time being.
The jar of "sand" (which weighed some 40 kg, by the way) turned out to be full of nanites, which wanted to reassemble themselves; we allowed this under controlled conditions. They became...a wolf. Igneous found and deciphered their radio command interface, and found they could be ordered to store themselves inside a host. He nearly killed himself figuring that out; goblins are too small to fit wolves inside of, as M'k had repeatedly told him in somewhat less relevant earlier scenarios. Captain Meetslab, apparently resigned to being a nesting ground for bizarre things, filled his belly with the powdered wolf, gaining a bit of a paunch. It looked good with the mustache, though. Sir.
M'k decided to carve the a wand out of the magically boring stick. This took some time, as magic items are extremely durable; it was a matter of extremely small shavings removed via power sword. This was way too boring and he put it off until the next day.
There wasn't much to do on the third day. M'k got ready to work on his wand, then decided that it could probably wait until tomorrow. Transcribing page after page of unreadable text for Octocat to translate was somehow much less boring.
M'k finally stopped laughing. Everyone slept better.
Everything was suddenly on fire.
The air was on fire. The floor was on fire.
The fire extinguishers seemed to be particularly on fire.
M'k teleported to the shower. The water was on fire.
The party, screaming in pain, cut into the whale's flesh, trying to douse themselves in whale blood, which was on fire.
M'k teleported to the airlock, and vented it. Aha! Even if everything is on fire, nothing can't be on fire! M'ks own air, provided by what he'd taken to calling his territory, took a second after creation before it was on fire. M'k let the room continue to vent, cast a portal, and teleported back to get the others.
Arriving, he cast another portal below himself, falling back into the safety of the airlock as he urged the others to join him.
Igneous, however, had already concocted a better plan; after all, surviving the fire wasn't worth much if the ship were destroyed, or if we lost too many crew to make it to Sigil. Igneous, his hands shaking with pain, readied a vial he'd been saving for quite some time. He pressed it against Doktor Meetslab's face and opened it, allowing the unusually powerful ice elemental within to bond with the captain's hidden laser-eye.
Doktor faced the wall and fired. The laser went nowhere near where he meant to aim -- the captain has terrible aim -- but he literally couldn't miss the whale surrounding us. The entire ship grew ice-cold instantly, the fire consumed by hoarfrost. Thank Vectron that we were in a living ship, such that an elemental would treat it all as a unified whole.
We looked on with dismay as the ice began to melt; small patches of cursed fire began to reappear. But Doktor's magnificent mustache ruffled itself gloriously, like an infinite sun-dappled field of tall grass rippling in the wind, or like Vectron's mustache rippling in the wind, and the captain stood straighter, and crossed his arms, and glared at the fires so hard that they subsided.
Like I always say: fuck Warp travel. Fuck it left, right, and sideways.
Like I also always say: nice fucking mustache, Captain.
We checked on the crew. The humans were wounded, terrified, and confused, but alive. The reptiles had already gone back to work on some song about a dragon. Igneous decided to give them some help, as they were having some problems with rhyme and meter.
Sigil loomed.