Sig Mar

Arrival in Roto-Mar

We approached the Isle of Roto-Mar by air. Even from a distance, it was impressive. Skyscrapers gleamed. Docks stabbed out into the water, with massive motorboats docking and undocking. Troops marched through the streets wearing lasguns as sidearms. There were even airplanes.

How did they manage this? Khornecopia had struggled to maintain half this level of technology, sitting at the center of an empire of pre-cataclysm mines and factories. The people of Vidriot ran for shelter when Hangmon showed up, but here was artillery to drop it in seconds.

I liked this place.

We fiddled with our radio until we found Air Traffic Control and requested an approach vector. The sent us to a landing pad on the south shore, where we would be met by a military detachment. We were expected.

Say what?

How famous were we? I guess we have some high-level loot. And we've had a big impact a few places. And Hangmon was kind of a big deal... But we weren't really anybody special. Come to think of it, why hadn't anybody done the sort of things we've done before?

To worry about later. Eyes front.

The officer on duty met us courteously enough. His orders were to bring us directly to Sig Mar, who wished to meet with us.

Seriously, how big a deal are we?

Or was this a trap by Saurin? Had he told her we were coming?

On route, I took the chance to pick his brain a bit. All the militarism was situation normal for Roto-Mar. They weren't expecting any specific near-term threat. They just knew that they lived at the edge of the safe zone, and that the world was a dangerous place. They didn't have extensive mines, but used magic to conjure raw materials for their science. He didn't know why Sig Mar wanted to see us, and had assumed we'd already been in communication with her.

As for dealing with Sig, he had only two pieces of advice. Don't interrupt her music, and expect informality. Easy enough.

Sig was playing piano when we arrived, so we waited for her to finish. Then she ushered us to a table and we began to talk. She was quite friendly.

Which was awkward. She wanted to know about us: our adventures (she knew some basics) and our goals in Roto-Mar.

We hadn't decided if we were willing to tell her about the Emeralds. And we couldn't discuss it now.

Plans may be useless, but planning is indispensable.

We told her the story of the Power Plant Raid, minus the bit about the Emerald. She listened attentively. Around this time I noticed that Citrine had wandered off again. Perhaps we should get her a bell? But since she wasn't there, we didn't mention her, either.

After wrapping that up, I seized upon an explanation for why we were there: Saurin's map. We knew he'd visited here, I told Sig, and we knew that he'd left devastation the last few places he'd visited. I had been surprised as well as pleased to find things so intact here.

Sarah followed up on this by mentioning that the corruption of Vidriot had centered around the Ziggurat. Was there a similarly important place here?

"Sure," she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, "I'll take you on a tour of the palace, focusing on the most important and secretive parts. You can tell me if any are corrupted. Come on." And she got up to do exactly that.

"That would be lovely," I said, "I fear I've lost track of your sarcasm."

"You know? So have I. Come on."

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

Searching the Palace

Sig led us into her basement, where her arsenal is assembled. It looked very much like a pre-cataclysm factory. Except for the inputs. At the beginning of the process, can openers made of various materials were melted down for metal. Apparently there's something about the new magic that likes can openers. And with a little tweaking, you can get boron, apatite or carbon fiber can openers.

(Why do the new gods like can openers so much? Have they been "Sealed evil in a can" for too long? Or is our world the can they wish to open so they can gobble up the tasty stuff inside?)

She led us into the war room, where her strategy is coordinated. And then she claimed a side-room (kicking out some scheduled meeting) to show us videos taken in Lily's territory, east of the safe zone. It was densely populated, but everyone was wearing metal spirals and seemed to be permanently possessed. They seemed to be engaged in some sort of sacrificial rituals. Or something.

She led us into the magic research lab, and things started to get ominous.

She showed us the spell distillery, which Panasonico revealed was a bunch of decoration around a big cannister of pre-made spells, mostly can opener conjurers.

She expressed surprise at this, and demanded to know what was going on. Her subjects, usually so meek and obedient, became evasive. This looked like Emerald work, though Analyze did not show them as corrupted.

Analyze did suggest interesting things were below us, despite this being the allegedly lowest subbasement. Sig summoned a Leviazizmoth and went down.

Sometimes the only way out is through. Through the floor.

Below, in a secret lab, we saw a Ring Gate attached to a distillery similar to, though more elaborate than, the ones gathering dust in Nasgoth. The technicians of this lab remained evasive, even as Sig became more threatening.

"Think it's safe to walk through that gate?" she asked.

"One way to find out," I answered, and Clone!I walked through the portal.

A minute later, when no memory rush arrived, the rest of us followed.

Inside the Distillery

We found ourselves on a narrow walkway, inside a tube of hardened glass. Beyond the glass lurked can openers. A great nebula of them. Or perhaps it was just one, visible from many angles by a trick of the light. Or perhaps it was the platonic essence of a can opener. It made my head hurt to look at.

But within the tube we had a little pocket of safe normality.

At one end was the portal we had entered through. At the other was a locked door. Seeing little choice, we proceeded to that door and opened it with Saurin's skeleton key.

Inside was a vast room. Glued to the ceiling was a person we didn't recognize, with his chest torn open and the Emerald inside. Proto-spells dripped from the wound.

And waiting inside, messing with one of the machines, was Indra.

"Thank you for not telling anyone I'm The Rainbird," he said, "I'm not sure why you didn't, but it made things easier for me."

We turned back to Sig in confusion.

She closed the door behind us and flipped the latch. Her friendly demeanor didn't waver. "Now that you're contained and utterly outgunned, we can begin our discussions properly."

The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.

Negotiations

"Begin by placing the Emeralds on the table," she instructed, gesturing at a rather ordinary conference table we'd overlooked.

"I'm open to letting you live," she added, "but not if you resist this."

We opened the box and put the kettlebells on the table. Including the decoys. "I don't remember which are the real ones," I explained truthfully.

Indra examined them somehow (a Locator spell he'd concealed from us?) and nodded. So Sig explained...

This material world is but one of thousands. And it isn't my native one. I came here intending a brief stay. No more than a hundred years. But I had the misfortune to arrive shortly before the incursion.

Steve and Lily are like cancerous growths on this world. Given enough time to grow, they could threaten the real gods. So the gods cut off this world from the rest of the Great Wheel. Cut us off from them for their own safety. Off from the Warp, and the power it would offer. Off from any chance of leaving.

The incursive gods feed on human activity. If I can get the human population low enough, they'll starve. Maybe they'll die. Maybe they'll just go quiescent again. Either way, the true gods will notice, and will let us back.

It's not that I want to kill enormous numbers of people. But if I don't, eventually the incursive gods will kill everyone. Even me.

My weapon is Heart Media. If I embed an Emerald in a human heart for a hundred years, the heart becomes a medium. And the victim becomes uselessly insane: a gibbering wreck. But I can transplant the medium into someone else, with rather little harm to sanity. Hence the Rain Bird, which was my first test of whether I could destroy a civilization. Hangmon is one of mine too (he's still annoyed at you, by the way).

Right now I have three Heart Media. With these four Emeralds, plus the one I already have, and another hundred years, I'll have eight. Eight should be enough to start the culling.

So, can you live with this plan? Or do I have to kill you?

"I can accept it as a plan B," I said slowly, "I don't actually like it, but it's better than no plan at all. For that matter, wouldn't you prefer a plan that involved killing fewer people? And took less time?"

"Certainly I'd prefer a plan that took less time. Do you have one?"

"Not yet. But we haven't been out very long, and look what we've already accomplished. Real victory in under a century? I bet we can. Even better odds with your help."

"What sort of help?"

"Information, mostly. High-tech weapons, at least of the sort you're issuing as sidearms. Maybe more when it comes to execution."

"That's help I can easily afford. What information do you need?"

Sig didn't know how Steve and Lily were forced into quiescence back when our materium was first formed. That was long before her time and no records survive.

She did know how this pocket of freedom came to be. Steve and Lily's battle lines stalled here for decades. Neither could advance. So neither could dominate the area magically. Without that enforcement, a culture of stripping spirals developed.

Which god dominates an area is a function of boots on the ground. Exactly what those people have to do to ensure the god's domination is unclear. If we could somehow shuffle the world, such that each square kilometer had an equal number of Stevensites and Lilim, that would probably break the gods' hold.

She knew of no mass-teleportation powers.

She knew of several uses for Emeralds. They could create Heart Media as she was planning, and could power spell distilleries at the same time. They could also power teleportation, with no distance limit, but only for the person holding the Emerald (and maybe for people that person was carrying?). Finally, she had heard that all eight together could be used to travel through time, though something else was needed to do that. She didn't know what that thing was, and we didn't mention the speck of time we'd taken from future!April. She also didn't know what the rules of time travel were, with regards to attempts to change the past.

As for Heart Media and Spell Distilleries, she gave us full technical specs for both.

As for Emerald-corruption, it could be countered with regular doses of something she called "chemotherapy". The stuff was unpleasant, but it would hurt the corruption more than the healthy parts of your mind. She brought out a syringe of the stuff to demonstrate.

As for other suspected-corruption, the Anethema spell consumed a soul and turned it into energy. It didn't work on mons because they had no souls. And the corruption it caused was different from Emerald or Spiral corruption. Someone who used Anethema too often would lose magical capabilities: lower capacity or energy. Chemotherapy helped with this too.

Jumping topics, she agreed that avatars held some sort of portal to the gods. She was not aware of any attempt to take advantage of that.

She didn't know what Saurin was up to. "He's a Tzeentchian, so you can never really know." But she thought he was working with April. Also, he'd been the one to create Indra's Heart Medium, and he hadn't interfered with Sig turned Indra. Somebody was playing into someone's hands...

(As for why he was still a kobold, she didn't think the other races had merged into humanity, but rather had died leaving only humanity.)

She suspected the power plant network was being run by another powerful human. She didn't know who, but wild Panasonicos don't have the flexibility of thought we saw there.

Not the most cheerful information dump in the world, but the biggest one we'd gotten yet. I saw several possible plans:

As for the backup plan, it was still better than April's victory. And if we couldn't win this is a century, we probably couldn't win at all. (And, if I'd guessed right about the nature of time travel, if we didn't win this no one else would.)

I wasn't entirely thrilled with handing over the Emeralds for now, but in truth Sig was probably more qualified to hold off April and Saurin than we were.

So I was on board, and I think the rest of us were coming around to it.

Break Down

Until Sig added one more term to the deal. She wanted Citrine. To vivisect.

Citrine was the only successful hybrid the Power Plant had created. Her nature gave clues about media. Seeing how she worked might give clues as to how to prepare a Heart Medium faster. (I didn't much care for an accelerated deadline, but it sounded like Sig wasn't willing to bet anything she cared about on us.)

We offered to help with nondestructive testing, but Sig was sure that wouldn't suffice.

I struggled to find an argument that might convince Sig.

As I stumbled over words, I noticed that Jacqueline had shifted Angercycle to the top of her medium. We'd discussed that as a potential tactic against Rain Bird. Following that line of thought, I took the Anathema marble that was still in my hand from when I'd shown Sig and slotted that into my own armor.

A fighting unit must stand as one. If you can't stand by your comrades, you can't stand at all.

We opened the fight together. I'm not entirely sure how we did it, except that we've fought together a lot and we know how each other think.

Jacqueline summoned a Red Shadow and pounced into melee with Sig. I used Sig's distraction to snatch her medium.

She drew a heavy bolter and fired full auto, anyway, which did a fair bit of damage. Indra started his transformation, but apparently transforming into an endbringer takes longer than normal transformations.

And a half-second later I unleashed Anathema on Sig. It had failed on Hangmon, so I wouldn't trust it against Rain Bird. But Sig was probably still vulnerable. Her body vanished in a burst of black light, and I was holding 14 energy out of a normal maximum of 4. Her Leviazizmoth faded without its summoner.

And a second or two after that, the Red Shadow pulled the still-transforming Indra into a Fountain of Nightmares. No matter how thoroughly he stomped the ordinary mon, he was out of the fight -- out of the demiplane -- for the next thirty seconds.

We were alone in the chamber, except for the poor bleeding sob on the ceiling.

"What happens if we collapse the demiplane while the Fountain is still running?" I asked.

"Anyone in the Fountain is lost to the Void forever," Clarence answered, "Same as to anyone in the demiplane at the time. But the Fountain only has 25 seconds left, and the demiplane takes a full minute to collapse."

Either he'd done the math ridiculously fast or he'd already been thinking about the possibility.

I took 14 energy and channeled it all into a super-dense Neon Genesys around the Fountain. Glass, or possibly quartz, was everywhere. What the Bird would need to break through was less a maze of tubes and more a thick sheet of solid rock, mixed with my raw determination to present an obstacle.

And the glass went everywhere, including in between the flesh of the ceiling-man and the Emerald in his heart. That was enough dislodgement to disrupt the demiplane and start the timer.

We scrambled to get the kettle bells back in the still-open corpse box. Some of the corpses helped. I hacked away stray glass with my swords. Meanwhile, Jacqueline floated up and grabbed the Emerald from the ceiling.

Another round of grabbing and we had all the Emeralds stowed. I made sure to get the syringe of chemo, and somebody grabbed one of the spells off Sig's medium (later identified as Matrix Glitch). Ominously, it started raining.

We ran.

I wanted to put more obstacles behind us, but channeling that much energy at once had shorted out my armor. There wasn't much I could do.

We exited into normal space and saw the not-actually-rebellious technicians open fire on us. They weren't very good at it.

Sarah morphed Leviazizmoth and we all went down.

No one followed. I guess none of the people on the scene were carrying Leviazizmoths.

Less than a minute later, we all felt the giant shockwave of the collapsing demiplane. And Sarah's more precise tremorsense felt two giant severed bird heads hit the ground. The thing had almost made it out.

Rescue Mission

Sig had been holding Citrine somewhere in preparation for vivisection. We had no idea where.

The only things we could magically locate were Emeralds and Locator spells, and she carried neither.

We could locate buried things with tremorsense, though, and one thing that sometimes gets buried is data cables...

Tracing a bunch of them, we found the underside of the main surveillance hub. Clarence as Panasonico spliced himself into the network and started poking around.

One thing he saw immediately was that all over the island Leviazizmoths were headed down. They'd lost our trail, but they weren't giving up. And if their chain of command had just lost its top link, they weren't letting it slow them down.

We were close enough to the surveillance hub to hear (well, for Sarah to hear) the conversation of the guards on duty. Sig was indeed missing presumed discorporated, and if so she would need a few days to return.

Discorporated or dead? My spell had consumed her soul. On the other hand, liches are hard to kill, and she was an arch lich. I guess we'll find out in a few days. Maybe.

The enemy burrowers were getting close by the time we found Citrine. Fortunately, she was on the lowest level of her building. We went directly below her and burrowed a hole under her feet. We got away before the guards realized what was happening.

So far as she knew, she hadn't been imprisoned. She'd simply been distracted and offered candy. (Just how closely have they been watching us?) But when we told her about the vivisection, that did not appeal to her at all.

We headed for a cliffside, where horizontal movement would get us into open air. As we ran Citrine glamoured us as Roto-Marian soldiers.

Enemy Leviazizmoths caught us before we could make the cliffside. They'd been sent on ahead without handlers so that they could move faster. This had disadvantages. I ordered them to search elsewhere, and they obeyed.

We made it to the cliffside before anybody managed to countermand that. We summoned the cloud, reglamoured as a flock of butterflies (they might be watching for starlings or crows) and sped off into the distance.

I was sad we couldn't make a deal. I was sad we might have weakened Roto-Mar, which was ultimately our ally. I was sad we hadn't acquired any high-tech weapons. I was even sad we hadn't managed to collect the Rain Bird's skulls -- truly throne-worthy.

But we emerged victorious. Still together. With valuable intel. And a pair of glorious victories to our name.

Today was a good day.

(For someone else to die.)

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