Tall Men
Prologue
The first great strategic sin is to have no strategy at all. That's how we entered the Tall Woods. I suppose it had to be uphill from there.
My hope was to somehow transform the nature of the Woods to be more useful and less horrific. Perhaps changing the nature of Tall Men in the process, sparing Lluvia one terror, and producing a usable Spell Forge under our own control.
Others were talking about taking the Emerald, and hopefully not unleashing a massive army of Tall Men on Lluvia.
Hope is not a strategy.
What we would do with it next was unclear. Perhaps they were already favoring the Time Travel Plan. I am not entirely on board with retroactively destroying myself and everyone I've ever known. But, maybe that's what I have to do.
The Woods
Our first obstacle would be the Woods, and the Tall Men within. Sneaking past them wasn't an option. If we saw them, or heard them, or sensed them in any way, they would know it. And hate it. Whereas if we completely blinded and defeaned ourselves, we probably wouldn't make it through the Woods at all, and they'd likely spot us with mundane senses and kill us on general principles.
But if Tall Men hate being seen, how do they live communally? Perhaps they don't hate to be seen by each other?
We tested this by morphing two of our own into Tall Men and all turning our backs on them. Not only did they not hate the feel of each other's presence; they found it downright comforting.
We brought our morphed Tall Men to the edge of the Woods, and they felt the same sense of kinship from the wild ones there. And, as the wild ones neither fled nor killed ours, they must have felt it too.
We returned to the ranger station and told Director Lynne our half-formed plans.
“It's suicide,” she said. “No one who goes into the Tall Woods ever comes out. At least it's a form of suicide that doesn't require much paperwork from me.”
Still, she agreed to barter a pair of transformation breastplates and some Tall Man spells for some of our spare inventory.
While we were there, the radio rang. It was Lou.
“You know you can't kill Liches, right?” he opened the conversation.
“What makes you think this is relevant to us?” I replied.
“We just got word from Roto-Mar that Sig Mar is temporarily unavailable and everyone's in a frenzy over it. And I thought: ‘Who's been there recently that's in the habit of killing world leaders?’”
“Did they specifically mention us? Or a price on our heads?”
“Not that I heard.”
“Well, that's good. Let us know if they do. Or if Sig recorporates or it becomes apparent that she won't. Or if the Rainbird shows up, though I'm pretty sure that's gone for good.”
“Gone for.... OK, fine. But if anyone else asks, I've never heard of you guys.”
“That's fine. On the off chance that anyone asks us about you, we won't have heard of you either.”
So with that cheerful thought, we swapped media (I felt very vulnerable without my armor), morphed Tall, and headed into the woods.
The disguises worked. There were many, many Tall Men in the Woods, but none of them tried to kill us. In the center, was a ridiculously tall tree. And high above the ground, embedded in the trunk of the tree, was the ring gate.
It wasn't spinning. Nor did it drip spells. Presumably the energy it leaked fueled this tree, and maybe the rest of the Woods as well.
We hadn't come this far to turn back. We climbed the tree and tumbled into the unknown.
The Town
We landed in an eerie, fog-filled suburb. It might have been pleasant, were it not for the thick fog and the deep, pervasive sense that everything wanted to kill us.
If the leakage from this pocket dimension was full of Tall Men, did the dimension itself attach to the platonic essence of creepiness?
But why a suburb?
We got off the street and into an abandoned convenience store. There was a radio playing precataclysm music. The incredibly well-stocked shelves were full of precataclysm goods as well. The food had gone bad, but it hadn't turned to soil.
There was a map of the town available, which we took. If the entire town was in the demiplane, it was much larger than the Can Opener demiplane in Roto-Mar. Many of the shops on the map looked mundane enough. Finney Street Book Store and Cut Rite Chain Saws caught my attention as places to visit. Meanwhile, Ghouls Ichiron's Drugs seemed like a place to avoid.
The Map
While we were studying the map, a strange monster showed up and tried to kill us. It wasn't a mon. We knew how to fight those. It was some sort of giant insect thing that didn't have hit points. It still died when we hurt it enough.
The radio had turned to static when the monster approached, and back to music when it left. It was battery-powered, so we brought it with us as a monster early-warning system.
I didn't want my Tall Man form to die here, when we really needed it for getting home. So I morphed Ooziel – the other mon I had on hand. Clarence and Sarah took the opportunity to morph Panasonico and Leviazyzmuth – their preferred combat forms – as well.
We visited the book store, which was indeed precataclysm. We looted a small library of science, engineering and warp magic texts. If we don't destroy our current timeline, these will be useful in rebuilding civilization.
We also visited the chain saw store and picked up five gas-powered chainsaws. Those will be useful now.
For lack of a better target, we triangulated the Emerald with a locator spell and concluded it was on the opposite shore of the lake. Assuming Euclidean geometry.
We walked to the main road, avoiding fights, and the followed it around the lake. Once we got to the south shore, we saw that the Emerald was a little off shore, in the lake itself. So we stopped at the boat launch and stole a boat.
The Emerald was under a small, artificial-looking island. There was a hatch in the ground, so we opened it and descended the ladder below. We proceeded down an increasingly creepy corridor until we came to a locked door. It had three keyholes. Our skeleton key would fit one, but all three needed to be filled at once. A note scrawled on the wall told us that the keys could be found at the Hospital, Amusement Park, and #309 of the Blue Creek Apartments respectively.
Tremorsense revealed that there was absolute nothingness beyond the door. Which meant some sort of semidemiplane. Blasting or circumventing the door wouldn't get us in. We'd need to solve this the way it was intended to be solved.
I hate doing that.
The Apartment Complex
The apartment complex was ordinary enough, albeit abandoned. Except for a few zombies with lumps of crystal stuck in their heads. And it room 309 was a Nightmare.
That's not me editorializing. That's the name Analyze returned.
It was a mon. With two hundred hit points. And I was facing it without my hyperbreakers.
So, to editorialize, it was a nightmare.
The fight that followed was ugly. We didn't have our best options, nor any tactical advantage, nor a plan.
It seemed to spend embedded crystals to power its strongest attacks, and to shoot beams of destruction from its eyes. So those crystals and eyes became our targets, attacking with knives and crowbars.
(We'd already forgotten our chainsaws. How many times do I have to remind myself? List all your assets before a fight!)
Eventually, we wore it down. It jumped out the window, but we followed. If it broke contact in the fog, it might heal and come back at us. I could fly as an Ooziel; Citrine untransformed and spread her native wings; Jacqueline's small army of nullified didn't mind breaking their legs.
So we killed it. And got the key.
Jacqueline shlurped its soulfruit. Surprisingly, the energy cost was possible for her to cast. Our party had a new heaviest hitter.
The Hospital
If we were going to be in fights like that, I wanted my regular armor. The others stood guard while I changed.
Also, traveling to the hospital on foot with that caliber of monsters around sounded dubious. Seeing the full parking lots, we stole a large car. Our skeleton key turned the ignition easily, and our flasks of everflowing gasoline filled the tank. Clarence and Sarah were both precataclysm, so they knew how to drive. They were centuries out of practice, but anyone we hit was probably an enemy anyways. So we drove to the hospital.
(We needed one more key, and while the amusement park was closer, it was an amusement park.)
We were attacked by a flock of pteradactyls on route, but with our regular weapons, our chainsaws, and our mobile fortified position, we easily fought them off.
When we reached the hospital, we thought we heard some people moving around, but the first floor was empty. There was a helpful map near the entrance, labeled with things you would expect to find in a hospital: doctor's offices, examination rooms, medicine store room, a morgue in the basement, but that wasn't all that creepy.
The doctor's office was full of books about lobotomies. Just lobotomies. No other medical procedures.
The conference room was drenched in blood. There was a Shadow World Engine sitting there, just as horrifyingly spiky as the one at the Mons' Power Plant. We didn't use it.
We did take it, though. Into Jacqueline's box, which was no longer full of corpses because she'd expended those in fighting the Nightmare. I'm not really sure why we wanted the horrifying thing, but it wasn't bolted down.
The medicine storeroom had no floor. There were some shelves still attached to the walls, some of which held medicine, and one of which had a green ceramic plate. We took the plate on general principles.
Around this time a nurse came by to investigate us. She was clearly mind-controlled, and had a massive, suspicious lump on her spine. We thought removing the lump might free her, so we tried it.
All of us at once. With chainsaws.
Chainsaws are not precision surgical tools.
But the next nurse we successfully freed without killing. And the one after her.
We encouraged our two free nurses to take emotion-damping drugs to help cope with the situation. They seemed qualified to compute appropriate dosages.
(My normal way of dealing with weakness is to shout at people. This was better.)
They helped us find our way around the hospital, though their last memories were of the place intact and functional. We gathered some drugs, and two more ceramic plates (yellow and blue). Nobody makes three things yellow, green and blue. There had to be a red one somewhere.
Eventually the nurses passed out from stress and seditives. Clone!I stood guard over them while the rest of us continued to search. Eventually we made our way to the roof.
Meanwhile, the nurses stirred, and announced they needed to get something. I insisted we all stay together, and when they didn't respond, followed them. I probably could have subdued them both, but I thought following them would be more informative.
They no longer acknowledged me at all. Instead they made their way to a landing on the stairwell we hadn't used and activated the sacrifice engine there.
I was close enough to be dragged with them into the Shadow World.
The Shadow World version of the hospital had the same layout, but everything was dark and bloodstained, and the walls were rusted metal. Also there were more corpses strewn about, with gems in their skulls like the zombies from the apartment complex.
The nurses made their way silently to the morgue. I followed silently, charging my hyperbreaker.
The morgue's walls were painted with Lily's emblems, and in one corner sat a giant egg.
I shot it.
Sometimes it pays not to do in depth friend-or-foe analysis.
The fully charged hyperbreaker made short work of the egg, but did not completely kill the creature inside it. Some strange monstrous assortment of chitin and flesh.
I slashed at it with my chainsaw, dealing another wound, but it slipped past me and into the ventilation duct.
I filled the ventilation duct with highly flammable poison gas. And, when that didn't seem to finish it off, set the poison gas alight with my flamethrower.
This didn't finish off the creature either, but at least it had one fewer ventilation duct to hide in.
I got a call from other!me on my helmet radio. The rest of the party had followed me into the Shadow World, and were now on the roof. I gave a standard sitrep.
(How did original!I figure out to go into the Shadow World? I don't remember. Sometimes, when putting together widely divergent memory streams, a few bits get lost.)
I followed the creature upstairs (abandoning the nurses), while I led our team downstairs to converge on the enemy. We eschewed time-consuming stairwells, choosing instead to blast holes in the floors. Does it really matter if the building is still standing when we're done? This place isn't very real anyway.
We converged on the first floor and made ready to fight.
Sometimes you have a stand-up fight. Sometimes you just have a bug-hunt.
This was a bug hunt.
The thing was fast. Way faster than we were. And it could go through ventilation ducts.
But it turned out there was a security room with cameras that still worked. And Analyze could find it from a decent ways away. Between the two, it couldn't lose us.
A couple of times it laid new giant eggs. Bigger than it was. We smashed them all before they hatched. I was a little curious what would have hatched out of them, but not curious enough to let it happen.
Eventually we settled on a strategy. Don't all follow it. Instead, spread out to all the places it could go. And fill all the vents with poison gas.
After what seemed like an eternity, the thing was too hurt to keep fighting. It retreated into the elevator. And went up. From the top floor.
We'd already punched a hole in the roof. The only way up was the elevator. And we had to wait for it.
But when we reached that space-folded shadow-semidemiplane between the top floor and the roof, the monster hadn't quite made it into its restorative water-tower yet. And my fully charged hyperbreakers had a lot of range. I annihilated the creature and the tower behind it.
I have nothing against water towers, but I've yet to meet one I didn't destroy.
In the monster's body, we found the fourth ceramic plate. And on the wall, we found a place to put the four plates, with a riddle directing where to put them.
I took a moment to check for live enemies while my teammates examined the wall. By the time I'd turned around, they'd solved the riddle.
Lily may be the demon-god of puzzles, but they aren't very difficult puzzles.
Beyond the fancy ceramic lock, we found the other key we needed.
Before leaving, we used Shape Metal to put a small, neat hole in the wall and peaked out. The space we looked out on was empty, except for a cylinder to the south (our destination) and another strange space in the direction of the Amusement Park. Beyond them, the backdrop was an ominous red-grey, like ash and embers of a dying fire.
We considered riding the Eyecloud through the empty space to enter the cylinder without having to go through the town again, but it would mean abandoning our car and leaving a trail April could follow if she ever came here. Also, we'd have landed in the Shadow version of the cylinder, which might not be what we wanted.
So we closed up the hole and returned the way we'd come.
Tallest
As we approached the place we'd tied the boat, we heard a great deal of stomping. Rather than fight a herd of terribly large and noisy monsters, we returned to the boat launch and stole another one.
We took our new boat to the island, descended the ladder, opened the door, and entered the semidemiplane beyond.
As expected, we entered a cylinder, though from the inside it had no top. Not entirely surprisingly, there was a Tall Man in the cylinder. Or, perhaps, a Tallest Man. Analyze called him “Kin”. His head was taller than we were. His chest seemed proportional, but his stomach was concealed under some sort of oil. We had no idea how deep the oil pool was, or if it even had a bottom. But swimming in it seamed inadvisable. The oil looked... lethal.
Those of us who had come in Tall Man form got a feeling from the gaze of the Tallest Man: not of kinship, but of fear.
The Tallest Man shut the door behind us, and the fight was on.
In addition to the giant monster trying to kill us, the oil level kept rising. The Tallest Man just got taller with it, but we needed to clamber up ladders to stay in the clear.
The Tallest Man boasted a whopping 397 hit points, almost twice what the Nightmare had. But we were in our preferred forms, now. Including Jacqueline's new Nightmare form.
As Nightmare, Jacqueline had a move called “Gemectomy”, which cost a target half of its original hitpoints, but could only be used on a given target once. We decided to save it for the end: shave half the creature's hit points the hard way, then surprise it with a death-blow when it thought the fight was only half over.
But the Tallest had a trump card of its own: Kidnap. A single tick before Jacqueline's gemectomy went off, the Tallest Kidnapped her into its own nightmare realm.
The fight turned against us at that point. The Tallest realized Kidnap was its best option, so we were losing a team member each round into its private hemisemidemiplane of nightmares.
I was the last to go. My clone remained outside, for all the good it did me. Chainsawing at the thing's head wasn't freeing anybody.
So what does it actually look like? The nightmare of a lord of monsters in a semieuclidean deathtrap in a city of fear in a forest where the wise dare not tread in a world gone mostly to the hells?
It looked like the original lab where Steve and Lily were first unleased. The one where the Emerald was studied in ways it should not have been.
Was that all that Tall Men were? The private nightmare of some short staff member at that ancient facility? Tall Men were among the first Mons unleashed in the incursion. So, maybe.
There was an Avatar of Steve there, or the memory of one, but we made short work of it. And once we got our bearings, we made short work of the Tallest Man in his form within the nightmare realm too.
The Emerald
This deposited us back in the cylinder, minus its death-oil, plus the contents of the lab. Most notably, a giant pile of Clarence's, Sarahs's, Aaron's and April's corpses. Because there's always a giant pile of corpses.
The Tallest lay against the wall of the cylinder like a puppet with cut strings. More surprisingly, there were actual strings. Or maybe more like tubes, filled with blood. They led through a door, so we followed them.
(Had the tubes and door been there the whole time? Probably not.)
Past the door was a bedroom. It was ordinary. Cute, even.
In the bed was a little girl, and in her heart was the Emerald.
She whimpered.
She was having nightmares.
Most likely, this whole place was her nightmare.
We tried to comfort her. To make her dream a more pleasant one. But neither gentle touch nor soft music nor hard drugs had any effect.
In desperation, I tried to reach out the Emerald itself. I didn't touch it, but sent feelings of safety and love at it. I was borrowing a leaf from Jacqueline's book: I had no proof that I wasn't a telepath.
I got a remarkably coherent response: “What do you want?”
When the world-breaking artifact of doom asks you what you want: don't answer.
Some very cautious poking with Analyze revealed that all the Emeralds are reading the minds of everyone around them all the time. Eep.
Departure
We were completely unable to alter the state of the Emerald's embedding except by removing it.
On the other hand, the fog was lifting and the monsters were turning into wooden statues. We had a precataclysm town to loot.
But that wouldn't last. Sooner or later, the little girl's Emerald enhanced nightmares would remanifest: either as the Tallest restored or as some new terror.
And any journey out needed to go past an entire forest of Tall Men.
We spent a while planning our departure. The key discovery was how the Box interacted with my Clone spell. If I slotted Box, either of me could summon the it, but not at the same time and it was the same box. So one of me could put things into the Box, and the other could take them out.
We went on a giant looting spree: drugs, books, Shadow Engines, motorcycles.... Then Clone!I stayed behind in the cylinder while everyone else drove back to the entry point.
Everyone else morphed Tall Men, while Original!I put on a blindfold and earplugs to avoid their wrath. (I can't be morphed and cloned at the same time.) Then we climbed through the Ring Gate.
Climbing down the tree with only tactile guidance was very difficult. And walking back through the Woods was nerve-wracking. But we made it.
According to my morphed comrades, we might not have needed to worry. All of the Tall Men were gathered in the center of the Wood staring at the Tree. (Granted, being stared at by an army of Tall Men would normally be cause for a great deal of worry.) They weren't doing anything. Perhaps they had no will, without the Tallest providing it? Perhaps they were in shock? In mourning?
We made it back to the Ranger Station, to Director Lynne's great surprise (but no paperwork). We removed the Shadow Engine from the Box.
Meanwhile, Clone!I had been periodically summoning and unsummoning the Box. When I found it empty, I loaded the next pile of loot into it.
When we'd sent everything (including several April corpses: resurrecting (not nullifying) those might trap her soul away from the Final State Medium), I plucked the Emerald from the girl's heart and placed it in the Box. Then I sat back to watch the world end.
It didn't fade. It shrank. The edges of reality became visible and closed in. It was a sphere, half full of earth and water. At the edges, earth started to rise up like mountains rather than attempt to compress. Then something fell on me and I died.
When my memories integrated, I realized that all that matter – cubic miles of it – was going to burst out of the ring gate in a period of under six seconds, less than a minute from now.
“Shutter the windows!” I shouted. “Put armor on the woods-facing side of the building!”
Matching deed to word, I found some corrugated sheet metal and propped it against the side of the building.
The shockwave in the ground hit first: a minor earthquake. Then the sound arrived: too loud for the ears, comprehensible only by the lungs. And a few seconds after that, the debris. Tree limbs mingled with rock and water in pounding against our improvised shields.
But distance is an excellent defense. We caught only the tiniest fragment of the destruction, and the station held.
Instead of the Tall Woods, there was a shallow pond. And instead of the army of wild Tall Men, a trove of buried soulfruit.
Lou called us.
“We felt that all the way in Gotita! Which world leader did you kill now?”
“The King of the Tall Men”
I think we broke Lou.