Vidriot
Our objective in Vidriot was to gain information. We went in without a list of questions, so I can't really say if the answers we got were the ones we wanted. But we did learn some things. And had a few other noteworthy achievements as well.
The Vidriot town guard spotted us well before we reached the town. They seemed very aware and capable, and we were rather nervous. My armor, glamoured, but we were far from ready for any serious deception.
The customs agents interviewed us one at a time. We were able to conceal little. We didn't explain what our kettle-bell contained, and I kept Anathema in marble form among my mundane gear, but they learned the rest. We did use the glamours to apply some judicious spin to the truth. I explained my Penetencian armor before they saw it, and I described Citrine as “experimented on by mons” before they saw her.
They took it in stride. Citrine got a special ID card. They managed to fit safety chips into our literal first-generation transformation breastplates. They acknowledged “We're confused and looking for answers” as a good reason to visit Vidriot. The announcement that we (well, Clarence) could repair Penetencian armor resulted in a job offer. I think I heard one of them mutter about needing a drink as we left, but they didn't freak out even once with us there. Very professional.
They warned us that some sort of madness seemed to be taking root in the vicinity of the ziggurat. An understatement, we (and they) would learn.
* * *
Wandering through town we encountered April. She was accompanied by a Tall Man, glamoured as an excessively tall human, and eating a funnel cake. How? We never figured that out.
April was superficially friendly, but refused to divulge anything about her goals or her doings in the past centuries. We suspected she was there to steal the Emerald. After an ominous discussion, we parted amiably.
We warned the authorities. They felt confident they could handle her. We emphasized that she'd been wearing a Steve-spiral for 250 years. They felt less confident, but still determined to try. I salute their courage.
* * *
We visited the library. The librarian was … disconcerting ... but ultimately helpful. He even set us up with library cards and allowed us to borrow books. Their history collection filled in a few gaps, though their texts on magical gems were quite limited. As for Suppression Fluid, he suggested contacting a practicing chemist.
* * *
We found such a chemist. He tasted (!) the sample we brought him, separated it into components, tasted them, and proclaimed it a mixture of graphite, canola oil and antifreeze. The first two would be easy to find, and the latter he would be happy to manufacture for us for a reasonable fee.
We also showed him the batteries. He declined to taste the fluids within, but determined how to use them to reset a medium. Each battery had the power to perform three resets. We'd been carrying some valuable loot!
We commissioned the antifreeze, selling some spare Ooziels to cover the cost.
* * *
Our conversation with the Chemist suggested it is simply in the nature of the Emeralds to generate heat, and we needed a way to get rid of it or the oil would fail. Actual refrigeration technology has withered without the need for food sustaining it (though the mons had an electric freezer, so apparently it's not forgotten altogether).
Keeping it simple, we collected a bunch of sand and hit it with cold (“crystal”) attacks until it was frigid, then packed it around the Kettlebell. When it warms to room temperature, we'll repeat the procedure.
* * *
After some reading, we concluded the real lore of interest must be inside the ziggurat. So we went in. (Except Citrine, who wandered off in search of more funnel cake.)
We received a pamphlet, containing the rules of proper fighting. Chief among them: don't attack your opponent directly. We weren't there to fight (hah!), but it was good to know.
The doorwardens challenged us to a fight. We explained that we weren't there to fight, but to learn. We were journalists, Jacqueline explained, perhaps thinking this would get a better reception (Really? Does anyone not hate journalists?). They interpreted this as “inspectors”, and took us to their manager.
Said manager turned out to have an extremely large head, laced with glowing yellow bits. In hindsight, this was a warning sign. He directed the doorwardens to their instructional pamphlets: “We do not have inspections. Ever. They're intruders! Get them!” But the wardens still seemed confused. He ruled that our trickery had defeated the first challenge, and that we might advance.
I hate to win a battle by trickery, but I'm not sure outsmarting these people could have been avoided.
I was encouraged that we seemed to have now met someone sane. My hopes were soon dashed as he introduced his rroboduelists. Flesh, he explained, was weak. He had achieved dueling perfection by creating machines that could use media. It would have been an extraordinary accomplishment had he actually done it. But the rroboduelists were obviously humans in cardboard costumes.
(As an aside, he pronounced rroboduelists with the rolled r that was used as a shibboleth in the old Militant Church of Vectron back in the Age of Colonialism. No one else we've met has used this phoneme. A sign of his true allegiance? Probably not. Inconvenient because none of us could actually pronounce our adversaries? Definitely.)
The rroboduelists were committed to their characters. They boldly ignored “this statement is false”, but accepted our challenge to compute square roots, which knocked one of them out of the fight before it began. The other two drew decks and fought.
We fought according to the rules. A slow back-and-forth of mon against mon. Exactly how this interacts with transformative media was somewhat unclear, and at one point I turned to the manager for a ruling. He declared there were no rules. So I yanked both adversaries' decks out of their hands, disabling them.
The enemy's gate is down.
The defeated rroboduelists still did not break character. Not even when we declared an intent to disassemble and reverse-engineer them. We got as far as learning that the cardboard was held on with duct tape to stop, offering us anything we wanted in exchange. We asked him some questions, but he didn't know very much. We also removed the masks and saw that the rroboduelists' eyes were glazed over as with severe compulsion magic, but we had no idea what to do for them.
(Later, frustrated with the phonemics, I recounted this as “We fought the oboeduellists and knocked them flute. They turned out to be total bassoons.” No one made a clarinet pun.)
* * *
We were given a little time to reset our media before facing The Champion. I took the opportunity to charge a hyperbreaker to full. I also raised the question of whether we should regard The Champion as an enemy or an opponent. After all, if we were determined to steal the Emerald which probably powered the Heart of Cards, we'd likely find ourselves as enemies soon enough. My assumptions here were quite mistaken – a warning that we still don't know enough about this world – so I am glad my comrades insisted on the “opponent” approach.
We entered The Champion's arena and found Citrine already there, chatting casually with him. How had she gotten here? Well, she got lost, and wandered a bit. Makes as much sense as anything.
The Champion declared that if we defeated him we would be blessed with cards straight from the Heart. Considering how many decks we'd seen on the way in, I asked if he lost often. He said yes. His job was to test us, not to keep all out, and a good test was one people often passed. This was not the philosophy embraced by my teachers back in officer training...
In any case, we fought. It wasn't much of a fight. He opened with a hat trick, concealing his actual location, and sent a Leviazizmuth out to face us. The Leviazizmuth didn't last long against Citrine's beam and my fully-charged Hyperbreaker. Perhaps their reputation is inflated. He had a variety of defensive options, but not enough for our sheer attacks-per-second. He surrendered.
As we discussed the fight afterwards, he reflected that taking on as large a team as us was a mistake. He should have insisted we face him in smaller groups. While I have little fondness for excuses, I can't actually call him wrong.
But just as we thought the challenges had resolved to a quiet anticlimax, we found ourselves somewhere else.
* * *
The room no longer had doors. I'm not sure if it had walls, or just eternal darkness. It definitely didn't have a ceiling, and the Heart of Cards hung above us. It was the shape of a human heart, and the size of a small house. There was a small hole punched deep into the left atrium, from which shone an ominous yellow light. Meanwhile, the floor was absolutely covered in cards.
I was reminded of the effect when one looks at the sun, or that alterverse castle from the mons' recordings.
The Champion transformed as well, albeit more slowly and apparently painfully. His yellow... stuff. We all piled on, in some mixture of comforting hugs and judo pins.
When the Champion completed his transformation, he released some sort of shock wave that knocked us all away, except for one of me that held on.
On the logic that our enemy was now mind controlled and I had the only nonlethal option, one of me focussed on blood-choking him. Air chokes probably don't work anymore, since breathing has become This became difficult as in his new form, he was stronger than me.
He used no deck, but cards would sometimes pick themselves up from the floor and cast themselves. Was he doing it? Was the Heart? We were never sure.
We tried to get at the Heart, but had limited vertical options. Sarah got some use of a giant floating vat, and one of me tried to dangle from the heart by a sword. Neither was very successful.
Meanwhile, the Champion now had a way of stabbing us directly in the mind – bypassing pinned arms, active mons, or even being transformed into a mon.
As the fight started to turn against us, I decided to deny our enemy resources by setting fire to the cards on the floor. They say only a fool fights in a burning house, but they also say if you're not willing to incinerate your own position, you're not willing to win. So I'm not sure if this was a good idea, really.
In any case it proved unnecessary. My blood choke finally succeeded.
But that wasn't the end. The Heart might or might not have been actively fighting us, but we were still stuck in this strange space (which was now on fire). The answer had to be in The Heart. Perhaps removing the Emerald? Citrine's tentacles might be long and thin enough. I urged her to stand on my shoulders to get high enough.
She reminded me that she could fly.
In my defense, the glamour hid her wings.
As it has been said: List all your assets when planning an engagement.
This worked. A moment later, we were back in the Champion's Arena in the real world. The Champion was human again. There was no Heart, no cards, no fire. Citrine held the Chaos Emerald in her bare tentacle.
I was left wondering just how early we could have done that.
The enemy's gate is down.
Soon The Champion woke up. He vomited glowing yellow stuff and a spell (the mind-stabby one). He looked around in confusion, and asked us what had happened, and what day it was. His memories of the past six months were fuzzy.
We were worried about leaving two Chaos Emeralds in one Kettlebell of Stabilization Oil, and proposed going out to collect the antifreeze which should be ready by now. The Champion objected to our leaving, saying that the police would want to interview all of us. As a compromise, one of me went and one of me stayed.
As I ran to the Chemist's Shop and back, I noticed that roughly one fifth of the citizens were either vomiting yellow goo or rubbing their heads and asking what had happened. On the one hand, so much for low profiles. On the other, did we just save this city?
The Champion showed us a bunch of Emerald-related carvings in the lower levels of the Ziggurat. Apparently the Emeralds had been instrumental in separating the Materium from the Warp in the first place, and here were instructions on creating them, along with an ominous image of a human with spirals on both arms casting some sort of double-helix into the sky, reaching Steve and Lily.
There were also instructions on using them. Just hold one in your hand and cast old, warp-style magic. ::grumble:: Doing so is bad for your sanity, but once every few days is probably safe.
He also revealed that this Emerald had been brought to the Ziggurat about 6 months ago by a kobold named Saurian. This is also the name of the kobold who brought an Emerald to Sarah et. al.'s lab and began this whole mess. Coincidence? Same guy? Popular kobold pseudonym?
(And why is there a kobold still around and koboldy, when all the humans and elves and squats merged into modern “humans”?)
In any case, the city officials were very grateful that we had freed their home, and were very pleased that we could keep the Emerald harmless for now, and planned to take it far away soon.
* * *
The week that followed was surprisingly quiet. Clarence repaired the armor and got paid. (Turns out jump-rockets are an armor expansion, but they weren't for sale. Perhaps a small raid on Penetencia is in order?) I read a lot of books. Sometimes two at once, with both sets of memories combining when I merged. We built a bunch of Kettlebells (decoys for now, but with real stabilization oil for when we find more emeralds). I remained vigilant for an attack from April, but none came.
* * *
After a week, one of the decoy Kettlebells disappeared from our hotel room. Neither we nor hotel management saw anything. Naturally, we suspected April and her teleporting Tall Man.
But before we could investigate this, an air raid siren went off. The town was under attack.
The hotel staff urged us to head for the shelters. Instead we went to the militia to offer our services. They told us the attacker was Hangmon – a puppet reaper grown to colossal size. The puppet was a dragon corpse surrounded by eight eyes. The puppeteer was too high to see. And the cables that connected them could connect to our mons and media as well.
Given the types and the presence of multiple targets, Citrine proposed that an Ooziel barrage might be effective. The militia weren't interested, and told us to do our own thing while they did there's. They were probably on to something. Glomming armies together with no shared traditions or command structure is not a strategy with a good record.
As the monster approached, I swapped in Anathema. Desperate times; desperate measures.
We needed more Ooziels, so we broke into the mon shop. They had three (The same three we'd sold them a week ago? Probably.). We also took gauntlet launchers for Clarence and Sarah, since exploding Ooziels and transformation breastplates were a bad combination. We left some money. I'm not sure how much. It soon became a bit moot.
The plan was to send five Ooziels in unison, to fly up and detonate. Six base damage times five Ooziels times two for the types meant sixty damage to each of the eyes and the puppet-dragon. Enough to drop the eyes altogether.
As it has been said: Always blind the bastards.
There was an ominous frost on the ground, so we climbed to the roof of the shop. This also allowed us to clearly see the enemy. From there, we put our plan into action.
It has been said: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
But this one did.
Not all good news is enemy action.
Retaliation came swiftly, though. We learned the meaning of that ominous frost as the street exploded into massive crystals. And the same frost settled on our building. Meanwhile, the cables which once held the eyes grabbed our split Ooziels.
I slung Clarence onto my back and lept for the next house, while Citrine grabbed Sarah and Jacqueline (Can Jacqueline turn into a flock of bats? She should try that. But not in the middle of battle.)
Once we got into range, I tried Anathema on the creature. For a moment, something seemed to happen, complete with ominous visuals. But then nothing did.
But it's attacks were also of limited effectiveness. Blind, it groped through nearby spaces with its cables and froze random (presumably empty) buildings.
It turned out attacking a cable could cause it to detach. At first I used this to free any mons or media it grabbed, but then I discovered this applied to the cables holding the giant dragon as well. At the beginning, twelve cables supported the thing, and it turned out seven was the minimum to keep it in the air. The mon could reattach cables, as fast as two a second, but at an opportunity cost of doing other things. I could snip 1.2 per second with both of me using rapid-fire mode on the hyperbreaker. It didn't quite realize the danger in time, or take it quite seriously enough. So after a few rounds of exchanging blows, we had it on the ground and mostly combat ineffective.
The militia were hitting it the whole time too, using some sort of fireball spell that did a bunch of damage but took a really long time to cast. Not convinced they ran the numbers on that one properly.
Anyway, eventually we defeated the puppet. It dropped an enormous cluster of soulfruit, which we shlurped, though none of our media are anywhere near the capacity needed to summon it. I wonder how one increases the capacity of a medium...
The puppeteer wandered off. We'll probably face it again some day. Hopefully from dragonback.
It left a note. Scrawled on a piece of cloth, tied to a ten foot spear it cast into the ground near us. It said: “Watch your back.”
I always do.