Marianna

Ooziel Merges

Since we found ourselves in reasonably safe territory (Gotita, with no one actively trying to kill us) Citrine decided it was time to experiment with transforming into an Ooziel.

Clarence had no problem adapting a transformation breastplate for Citrine. He's getting good at this medium-mod stuff.

Citrine enjoyed wibbling for a while, and then split. Her mind inhabited only one of the resulting oozielets. The other half obeyed her commands like a summoned mon, and seemed to know what she was seeing, even though she couldn't see through its eyes. Weird.

She then announced she wanted to try merging with someone else. Seeing an opportunity to dig through her mind for potential landmines, I volunteered.

We maintained separate trains of thought, with shared emotions and shared access to the combined set of memories.

Making sense of a merge of two people's memories is trickier than merging forks of myself. And the surreal quality of Citrine's early memories did me no favors. Well, it meant I had no trouble keeping straight which memories were which, so I suppose it did me one favor.

Citrine's early dream-memories contain a bunch of real history. It's all distorted and surreal, though. If we find ourselves with specific questions about history, digging through her memories might be useful. Though even before the distortions, it might be no more than the Monitors' best guesses.

Her dominant emotions are compassion and curiosity. Exactly what they seem on the surface. I almost felt bad about exposing her to the decades of war, suffering, oppression and treachery that fill my own memories. I probably would if I ever felt bad about things.

(I don't know what she thought about my memories. She didn't comment, and I didn't go digging for her thoughts on the subject.)

I sent images of eternal war and eternal puzzle-solving, then images of ways Humans and free Mons might interact: Mon civilization with no Humans, joint civilization, Mons enslaving Humans, Human and Mon cities linked by diplomacy and trade but basically separate... I watched her emotions looking for signs that she'd been programmed for or against one of these options. I found nothing.

I dug through her memories for any sign of purpose. I found no such sign, but I did find a bunch of memories that didn't fit with the rest. In them, she felt awake, and was in the power plant, and she stabbed glowing green tentacles into a bunch of Monitors. I couldn't tell why, nor whether these were her normal tentacles mysteriously glowing or new tentacles of light grown for the purpose. Perhaps this was actually a dream too.

And there were horrible images of glowing green snakes. Which might have had something to do with the glowing green tentacles. They didn't connect to any other memories, though.

All of this was happening at the speed of thought, so... actually we seemed to have been sitting perfectly still for long enough for our friends to get worried. I guess thought isn't as fast as we'd figured.

Maybe that's why the saying is “Observe; orient; decide; act.” If it were “Observe; orient; think; act,” you wouldn't act in time.

We reassured our friends. Talking and moving were awkward, but doable. Then we split back apart.

Entering Lluvia City

The moving Emerald seemed to have stopped in Lluvia City. I guess it wasn't actually coming to us. We decided to catch it there, and prevent it from making any trouble.

Clarence rechipped our media and prepared a kettle-bell to receive a sudden emerald. Then we mounted our cloud and were off.

We entered peacefully through the gate. They wanted to see our IDs, and accepted the ones from Vidriot. (Rupert didn't have one, but “No ID; recently emerged from a dungeon; especially bad case of amnesia; wears a standard gauntlet launcher” makes for routine paperwork, not the weirdness that we found at Vidriot). They did check our media, but it was nothing in-depth.

The locator spell led us to a tall apartment building. There was a bored guard sitting at a desk. Rupert tried just walking past him, but he was a little too alert for that. So he said he was visiting a friend in apartment 22b. The resident of that apartment was thrilled to have a visitor (she sounded old and short on friends). So we all crammed into the elevator.

At the 22nd floor, the locator spell still pointed up, so we got back into the elevator and kept ascending. It's not like the guard had any means of monitoring this.

The 24th Floor

We found the emerald on the 24th floor. We knocked on the relevant door, but got no answer. So Rupert teleported through and opened it from the inside.

The apartment's walls were covered in Ranger uniforms, which had been stapled (not rivetted) to the studs. We never did find out why.

The living room contained a sofa and a television. I hadn't seen an actual television since before my dungeoning, and I had assumed the infrastructure had collapsed during the Long War. As it turns out, I had been correct in this assumption.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is [going to kill you].

Sarah as Leviazyzmuth tremorsensed two people in the next room. One was short and walked oddly – possibly a kobold.

Rupert tried sending an antimemetic Tall Man in to silently steal the Emerald. This failed...

And I'm really not sure what happened next. Maybe too much antimemetics were being thrown around. Maybe some bit of my mind was still off from merging with Citrine.

In any case, we found ourselves back out in the hallway, confronting an enemy Tall Man and the television, which had grown psychic tentacles and was actually a Mon called “Botfly”. With 52 hit points. And devastating area-effect attacks.

The fight went reasonably well. Short-range teleports are a deadly weapon on the 24th floor.

Eventually the kobold teleported away and the Emerald-bearer opened the apartment door. She had a glass plate embedded in her chest, and the emerald physically inside her heart.

Jacqueline grabbed her and drank her blood. This didn't seem to accomplish anything. Vampirism is complicated.

I ran forward to grapple, but was too slow. The woman dived out the window. Citrine flew after her, but she was gone. It seems she had a teleportation power... but only while falling. I've heard weirder.

(In hindsight, maybe she didn't have a teleportation power, but had arranged to revive on the roof if she died, and merely needed to prevent us from taking her alive?)

We searched the room for clues. There was a map showing where Emeralds had been placed annotated with the dates. The one in the Tall Woods has been there for over a hundred years. Yikes. There was also a room with bolted down furniture and ominous blood. Clarence thought it was a torture chamber, but I'm not convinced.

Around this time there was a knock at the door and the guard from downstairs shouted “Security!” Apparently the noise of the fight, or perhaps the Mons plummeting to their deaths on the street below, had attracted attention.

Clone!I answered the door alone, while the rest of us prepared to exit via the window and pursue Emerald-woman.

I explained that we'd come following a dangerous cursed artifact, and that it was indeed here but no longer. The guard gave me a look that said “I don't get paid enough for this” and muttered something about paperwork. I asked about the rightful occupant of this apartment, and he described someone we hadn't met. Hopefully he was just out running some errands or something. Yeah. Hopefully.

In any case, he said the police would need to be involved, and I should wait here while he went to summon them. Then he left.

The conversation was short enough that the rest of us didn't actually leave on the cloud. We merely prepared to.

The guard didn't come back. I'm not sure how long we waited. Ten minutes, maybe? I suppose I could have been more patient. My old captain had a saying about patience:

Sometimes, patience is the key to victory. Sometimes, it leads to very little, and it seems like it's not worth it, and you wonder why you waited so long for something so disappointing.

Anyway.

We cast Locate Emerald, expecting to need a bunch of trigonometry. Instead, the arrow pointed almost straight up. We took to the stairs.

(Midway up the staircase Jacqueline and Rupert exchanged identity crises, and we realized April might try to replace one of us using a glamour. We checked each-other's arms and made a mental note to devise a password scheme.)

The Roof

We found Emerald-lady on the roof, with Mons readied. But I had hyperbreakers ready, so soon she didn't have Mons ready.

(Well, a Tall Man survived by anticipating me and deploying 4-d dodge. Apparently Emerald-lady either knew my habits or knew enough about Penetencian hyperbreakers to anticipate them. Worrying.)

She proved surprisingly vulnerable, and we made short work of her.

Then one of the roof's four water towers exploded, revealing a fully healed Emerald-lady and some more Mons.

Analyse found that each water tower contained a “phylactory” (similar to a lich's?) and several Mons.

The next batch of fighting was a bit tougher. Citrine got badly injured, but healed in time. Rupert got set on fire briefly, which he did not cope with well at all (I put him out almost immediately by punching a hole in a water tower and spraying him with high-pressure water. Citrine then reached in through that hole and extracted the phylactery within.). An angercycle charged itself to a frightening extent, but I threw it off the building before it fired. Ooziel fission proved remarkably effective against Mons in water towers – the shockwave harms Mons while passing through physical objects. Very weird.

Eventually we piled onto Emerald-lady, pried off her chest-plate, removed the emerald and deposited it safely in the kettle-bell. We hit her with rapid-fire healing energy, and she survived the surgery.

During the process, I got hit with Emerald-lightning with shot my energy up to 5/4. Rather than learn the effects of overenergy the hard way, I shot off a Neon Genesis spell and made a mental note to research it next time I was in a library.

The lady, now sans Emerald, identified herself as Marianna. And her last memory was from twenty years ago. Fun.

The mons in the towers had vanished, and the phylacteries had reverted to corpses. Rather than let the tenants of the building drink corpse-water, I slashed open the remaining water towers. I left the corpses in place, though. Once the plumbers realized they'd had corpses in the water towers, they'd sterilize the entire system. Hopefully.

(Also, I hope no one was shampooing their hair at the time. Rinsing with corpse-water or not rinsing at all. Hmm.)

((Though the smart tenants would keep some jugs of water around precisely to cope with scenarios like this. Never depend exclusively on a water source you don't control!))

And then, rather than face the consequences of our actions, we got on the cloud and fled.

In hindsight, something was up with that building. Even if Emerald-lady only arrived today, the apartment was too weird to just be a random apartment she broke into, and the water tower phylacteries probably took time to prepare. Perhaps the local authorities will investigate and we'll hear about it over the radio.

The Ranger Station

Marianna wanted to return to her ranger station, where she thought there might be records that would help her understand what had happened. This sounded like a good idea, so we went there.

We clarified that we weren't kidnapping her, just providing transportation. And she was welcome to get off the cloud if she wished. Then we clarified further that we would land the cloud so she could get off if she wished, and we weren't simply offering to throw her over the side.

Maybe we should stop trying to not threaten people. We don't seem to be very good at it.

The ranger captain recognized Marianna, and was both happy to have her back and upset at the amount of paperwork this would generate.

Then we all settled down to figure out what had happened.

Marianna put on a standard Gauntlet launcher and extruded all her spells. She had a spell to summon a wild Botfly (“That one goes in the never-to-be-used vault”), a bunch of mundane Mons, a nifty damage resistance spell that we traded some of our spare spells for, and a bunch of Locator and Locator Locator spells.

Assuming Locator-Locator spells are unblockable, there are only seven Locator spells in the world and we have accounted for six of them. The last one is in the direction of Roto-Mar, the same as the Blue Emerald. It's probably in Roto-Mar, but we'll need a better triangulation baseline to say for certain. (We never returned the Locator-Locator after checking this. Neither Marianna nor the captain noticed, or perhaps did not care.)


Locator-Locator spells do not detect other Locator-Locator spells, even though those are, in a sense, Locator spells. So we don't know how many of those there are.


(We also don't know if Locator-Locator-Locator spells exist. It is said that all recursions end in three steps, but it is also said that sometimes things do not finish according to their natures, and instead someone cuts them off and now they're finished because they ended there.)


Does April have a Locator-Locator spell? Is that how she keeps finding us? But, if she does, why hasn't she attacked us and taken our Locator spell? It would be very useful to her.


This wasn't getting us a lot of answers, so we tried an Ooziel-merge. I figured maybe the mental skills that let me recover my pre-dungeon memories would help recover Marianna's.


We recovered bits and pieces. Marianna had spent most of the time under Saurin's control. At one point, he seemed to have extracted spells from her heart. At another, they visited the heart of the Tall Woods where the Emerald there had formed a pocket dimension and left behind a ring gate. And whenever it seemed like she might be starting to think for herself again, he brought her to a (wild?) Tall Man and asked it to perform Proxy.


This is a move we hadn't heard of. And it wasn't listed when we summoned a Tall Man and Analyzed it.

Could we find out by getting within Analyze range of a Tall Woods Tall Man? What sort of senses do Tall Men have anyway? To investigate this, Sarah transformed into a Tall Man and reported on her experiences. She had a sense of when she was being looked at. How didn't matter: analyze sweep, mirror, tremorsense, glamor. Nothing fooled it. And she found it very uncomfortable.


She also had a sense of how to most efficiently kill every living thing around. Let's keep that in mind for later.


As long as we were here, we offered to Analyze all the unknown spells in the vault. And asked them to set up radio-monitoring gear in the hopes that one triggered an Update. The spells did not prove very interesting (Plague Knight is a Mon with a permanent poison aura – this might be useful in rare circumstances.) But we did track the update. It came from far to the west.

Apparently the entire area we've been wandering over, within a few days flight of the great chasm, is a region where wild mons are smaller and less dangerous (Rainbird and Hangmon excepted?). Chasing down the source of the signal is not recommended, at least not without better weapons and armor. It's not clear why this is the case. I expect we'll head out there at some point.

This basically ran out what we could usefully do here. We considered taking the Emerald from the Tall Woods, but it doesn't seem to be tyranizing people, only Tall Men. And its influence might be why all those Tall Men haven't come out to rampage across the countryside.

We offered to take Marianna with us, but she wanted to stay here in her home and reconnect. We also checked if Rupert would rather stay here, with peaceful paperwork and less incineration-risk, but he chose to stay with us. And, as one final afterthought, we swapped radio frequencies with the ranger station.

Next stop: Nasgoth, before Jacqueline disappears. Then we go kobold-hunting.

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