Penetencia

Executive Summary

Our objectives in entering Penetencia were:

Results:

Overall, a rousing success.

Stage 1: Infiltration

Just as a glamour on Jacqueline disguises her hat, a glamour on our cloud disguises us so long as we are perched atop it, hat-like. There aren't many things in the sky that move like a stormnimbus, so we took on the appearance of a flock of starlings.

In this form, we surveyed the city from above. It was, indeed, ninety percent cathedrals. There seemed to be some sort of formal procession happening. Details were unclear, and we didn't want to get low enough to see clearly.

We triangulated the emerald to be deep underground beneath one of the smaller cathedrals.

We contemplated walking up to the front gate, but figured they'd probably torture us to death. So, instead, we decided to go after the emerald first. It was likely they were being mind-controlled, and might be grateful to be free. The people of Vidriot were, after all. Saner and grateful sounded like the state of mind we wanted them in when we met.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

It turns out Leviazizmoth can burrow. Handy, that. We bypassed the entire town and tunneled straight into the subsubbasement directly below the emerald.

The enemy's gate is down. (Until we got beneath it. Then I guess it was up. But it was still down, strategically speaking.)

We emerged into an enormous chamber with a giant statue of a compassionate woman cradling a tortured man. On closer examination (mostly via Panasonico Analysis) we discovered that only the woman was a statue. The man was a real human who'd been grown to giant size, impaled with metal spikes, and left there. Also, his feet were tentacles. That might be a bad sign.

Citrine wanted to help him, but I doubted we could. Except maybe by stabilizing the Emerald, withdrawing whatever magic kept him like this. Granted, the help that gave might be the sweet release of death (in hindsight, it was not), but that would at least be some help.

In any case, he woke up and started flailing around blindly. At his size, a single blow would devastate us.

I took decisive action, running to both doors and opening them. One was a supply closet. The other was a spiral stairway leading up. I regrouped at the stairway and the rest of the party met me there soon afterwards. We climbed.

We weren't retreating from the giant. We were advancing toward the primary objective. Which happened to be located away from the giant.

We soon found ourselves on the same level as the emerald. There was a bit of a landing and doors on both sides. We took the one toward the Emerald and found ourselves in a room of statues. The door from here to the Emerald room was occupied, so we lurked near the open doorway and listened.

An old man (addressed as “father”, though whether that was a title or a family relationship was unclear) was teaching a younger woman in power armor with 20 points of shielding. He urged her to gaze deeply into the Emerald, suggesting an advanced state of mind control. He also described himself as tired of life, a problem we would shortly solve for him.

We heard guards approaching, presumably summoned by the giant's ruckus. The rooms in order were: the guards, the stairwell we'd come up, the room we were in now, the room with the Emerald, an unidentified room, and another stairwell. Since this second stairwell didn't lead down to a rampaging giant, and had no guards, it was the obvious escape route.

Time to act.

Stage 2: Smash and Grab

Since we'd been expecting trouble, I had my hyperbreakers on full charge. I and I dive-rolled into the room and past the Penetencians. Then I caught the armored woman with the full blast of both hyperbreakers. The first smashed her shields. The second burned into her flesh. And both of them flung her back several rooms. From the sound of it, she flew into one of the approaching guards, knocking him to the floor.

Citrine, having the swiftest reflexes, grabbed the Emerald, smashing the display case in the process.

Then we turned our collective firepower on the old man. He was tougher than expected, both in how much damage he could absorb and in how many lasers he could fire at once from his metal tentacles. But quantity has a quality all of its own, and he lasted about 4 seconds, dealing no significant damage in the process.

(There was some discussion later of whether a more peaceful option existed. One of the fundamental principles of combat is that you can only make the decision to fight at certain times. The gap between our attacking him and his fighting back did not contain such a moment. Unless he had truly extraordinary abilities, the fact that we were there was sufficient reason for him to attack us. We were just faster than he was.)

((I suppose “there” was a secure facility we were clearly trespassing in, and lethal countermeasures were fairly reasonable. Whatever.))

Stage 3: Exfiltration

We paused briefly to slow any pursuit, then left for the clear staircase. Emma turned parts of the floor to lava (despite the fact that we weren't in the lowest subbasement). I filled the doorway in with neon tubes, and then stood behind as sacrificial rearguard. Meanwhile, I scooped up some water left over from the previous battle and left with the others.

The rearguard action was chaotic. I unleashed highly flammable poison gas, my only true area-effect weapon. Emma detonated the lava pockets. This set off the gas in a larger explosion. The combination of being-turned-to-lava and a large explosion proved too much for the floor and it collapsed, dropping us all fifty feet or so into the giant's chamber. I think a chunk of masonry crushed my head around then, but it's hard to be sure.

Perhaps we should coordinate our attacks better? Especially where flammable gasses and sources of ignition are concerned? But this actually worked out pretty well.

We fled through the unidentified room, which turned out to be completely bare (perhaps boredom was another form of suffering they embraced?). Then down the clear stairwell. At the bottom of the stairwell, we were able to see into the storage closet through a peephole, and from there into the giant's chamber. The woman and guards were alive, but the giant might change that. We tunnelled out.

I ran alongside Citrine, and got the jar of water around the Emerald, providing a degree of shielding. A few minutes later, the jar was painfully hot to the touch. We stopped then, in a little bubble of air surrounded by stone. Neither Tremorsense nor Analyze detected a close pursuit, so we applied fresh cold water, then took a minute to swap in Fine Metal Manipulation and place the Emerald in a proper stabilization kettlebell.

Stage 4: Aftermath

They didn't mobilize fast enough to follow our trail, but that didn't mean they gave up. From our hilltop hideout, we saw a great swarm of people searching the countryside. Many had leviazizmuths of their own, searching for us underground. Others rode winged beasts, searching the air. The numbers were overwhelming.

It seems we had overestimated the effect that freeing them from mind control would have.

Eventually we spotted one soldier puking up glowing purple stuff – the sign of escaping purple Emerald mind control. We decided to secure and question him.

After a long discussion, and a few tests, we settled on a plan. Our cloud and its “hat” was reglamoured as a collection of crows. (We felt it was creepier than starlings, plus we got to start the Legend of the Murderous Murder.) Clone!I was glamoured as our target.

The actual switch went perfectly. Citrine grabbed the target and glamoured him while I jumped off. I fired my hyperbreaker at nothing and gave an incoherent story about a Tall Man floating in the air and directing the cloud.

Keep your lies minimal and full of uncertainty and confusion. Not only are you less likely to make a mistake, but you'll fit right in along with true accounts, which are also full of uncertainty and confusion.

Also, if they eventually try tracking down stories of Tall Men behaving oddly, they'll collide with April.

Stage 5a: Interrogation

We subdued the target with fascination and electroshocks. The latter caused spasms, so I held him where he couldn't hurt himself. After half a minute of this, Clarence got his armor disabled, rendering him mostly helpless.

We learned that he was missing a year of memory. Nevertheless, his free self seemed committed to the ideals of Penetencia. While he admitted to second thoughts about violent outreach, he ultimately believed in the program of redemption via suffering.

We also learned that the old man was not merely a teacher, but the leader of the entire country, who had shaped their religion and brought them through the chaos times. The entire nation was furious, and if we were not caught soon, they would form up into a crusade and ravage the land, killing everyone in the hopes that we were somewhere among the victims.

We proposed reviving him, but this would be an even greater blasphemy.

We pointed out that we hadn't meant to assassinate anyone. It was a simple smash-and-grab intended to free them which had used slightly too much force. And that we (not me: I never apologize for killing anyone) were very sorry.

None of this impressed him.

If anything, he seemed to find the idea that we could have assassinated his beloved leader by accident even worse. I pointed out that the entire cataclysm was probably the result of an accident, but that didn't help either.

We seemed pretty stuck. Freeing the Penetencians from mind control hadn't ended their violent natures. And killing their leader (perhaps we should have ascertained his identity before killing him?) had infuriated them. How could we stop them from exterminating Lluvia, Vidriot, and anyone else in the area?

We couldn't fight their army head on.

We couldn't talk them down.

We couldn't offer them restitution, save perhaps our own deaths. Those would be tricky to fake (Though maybe? They'd only seen a bunch of us in mon form. And we have a glamour spell...).

Strange as it sounds, resorting to violence had not resolved our problems. It had only created more of them.

Stage 5b: Other Interrogation

Meanwhile, I was left alone in the midst of enemies, glamoured as one of them. I didn't expect to last very long.

But, it turned out, they just weren't very paranoid. Strange, since approximately everyone is out to get them. Or at least should be.

They hadn't heard of floating Tall Men, but their reaction was more “that's disturbing” than “that's impossible”.

Once they established I was ok (“They hit me with something, but the armor took it”) 'we' continued our search for those bastards who killed Father Escobar. It was clear all three of them were sincerely furious over this.

I had to be cautious about steering the conversation, since I mostly didn't know the personality of the man I was impersonating. I tried to ascertain their capabilities. I directed their attention to a weird bit of ground, and they had a Leviazyzmuth dig it up (there was nothing). I encouraged speculation on who would catch “the bastards,” hoping for an answer like “it'll be the flier teams” or “my money's on the diviners”. Instead I got a bunch of “We must have faith”. Not big on speculation. Big on faith. In the Barbed Wheel. As Clarence would say, concern.

I also raised the subject of what would happen to us all now without Father Escobar. Chrisanta was his unambiguous heir. One of the soldiers admitted to being a bit frightened of her. Even by Penetencian standards, she was seen as extreme. This from a man who had been completely on board with a crusade scouring the countryside for a small team of enemies and burning all in its path. But, frightened as he might be, he still had faith. Again, concern.

Strange as it sounds, resorting to violence had not resolved our problems. It had only created more of them.

Stage 6: An Interlude with April

Eventually, we'd wrung all we could out of our captured Penetencian knight, and began debating what next. We considered releasing him with some misinformation, but he already knew too much truth. We considered killing him, but the more romantic party members considered him helpless, and didn't want to kill a helpless man. I pointed out that he was still our enemy (he made no secret of his desire to kill us) and that he was dangerous, in that he could reveal our secrets.

I was about ready to propose restoring his armor so I could kill him in a fair fight when April showed up out of nowhere and snapped his neck.

“You seemed troubled by the dilemna, so I took care of it for you,” she said, “Aren't I helpful?”

We did not, by general consensus, regard this as helpful.

The following conversation was unproductive as usual. She wanted shiny rocks. We didn't want to help her. She didn't want to explain anything. She tried to sell us on murderous insanity. Clarence tried to sell her on basic human decency. Of course, neither got anywhere.

I cut in with an offer. “If you tell us what these spooky rocks do, I'll tell you where the one in Penetencia was.” I think she picked up on the “was”, but what I was asking for wasn't very expensive from her perspective.

“They mess with people's minds,” she answered.

Two can play at the unhelpful game. “It was roughly eighty feet below ground level.”

I think I won a touch of her respect with that. “Fine,” she said, “The exaggerate people. Take whatever they believe in and make it more so.”

I gave her a detailed description of the cathedral the gem had been in. If she goes to investigate, she'll just run into a bunch of Penetencian elite guards and that giant.

But, assuming she was telling the truth (and I think she is), this is useful. The Emeralds aren't as dangerous as we'd figured. If I used one, I'd become even more obsessed with freeing humanity from the new gods, and what could go wrong with that? OK, several things, potentially, but it's not like a completely foreign set of values would overrule mine.

(Later, I suggested this to my comrades. They didn't think it was a good idea. Among incoherent objections, Sarah worried that I might become obsessed with winning the battle in front of me and neglect broader strategic concerns. Do I do that? I'll have to be more careful. I then suggested letting Citrine use one and become obsessively nice, though frankly that strikes me as more dangerous. The rest of the party is right out. I can't predict what they'd become obsessed with.)

Jacqueline asked if April had been mildly fond of murderous rampages in the old days. She hadn't. But she has spiral madness, which is quite different from Emerald madness.

Sarah offered to send a murderous rampage after April, presumably on the logic that if April was too enthusiastic about the idea we shouldn't do it. But April was evasive. “I like you,” she said, and vanished.

Stage 7: Chrisanta

Around this time, my cover got blown. The genuine Penetencian soldiers asked me to bring out a mon I didn't have, but which they knew I should. Things went rapidly downhill from there. I don't think I even managed to kill any of them.

When I died, I got all of my memories in a rush. I took a moment to sort through two streams. Two facts stood out:

  1. Chrisanta was seriously bad news.

  2. They knew we had access to a glamour spell.

The latter made all fake-our-deaths plans a lot less viable. The former introduced a new plan: kill Chrisanta. It wasn't clear who would take over next. Maybe someone reasonable? Or less capable? Or maybe there wasn't a clear line of succession and they'd have a civil war? Civil wars are nice. They're not aimed at us.

I wasn't able to convince the others of this. They had this idea of “too much killing already”.

We checked the radio and saw we that both Lou and The Champion of Vidriot had tried to reach us. We called Lou back. Apparently he'd learned of the disruption to Penetencia's routine and was worried. (Does that mean Gotita has radio-equipped agents watching Penetencia? That would make a lot of sense, but we forgot to ask.)

He had little advice for us, though he did have an idea why resurrection was so taboo. A resurrected person came back with a madness spiral, and not always on their arm. It immediately possessed them and drove them into a murderous rampage. If they'd died with useful mons or spells, they usually took down several more people before the spiral could be removed. And if the new spiral was internal, they'd often die in the removal, so you'd have to start over again. Some had proposed just resurrecting everyone who died in a resurrection, but this seemed like the sort of plan which ended with more people dead than the survivors were capable of resurrecting, the countryside in flames, and whoever proposed it having lost their hat.

And any plan where you lose your hat is a bad plan.

Good background knowledge, but not very helpful to our current crisis. His plan, for what it was worth, was to deny any connection to us. We promised to support this.

We chose not to call Vidriot. They would likely have similar things to say, but with harsher language.

But, on the theme of radios, we checked the armor of the man we'd killed. There was indeed a radio in the helmet, and with a little fiddling Clarence had it usable. The Penetencians were using a single broadcast channel, and we could listen in (or talk if we chose). Sadly, their chatter was not particularly informative. “Completed search in sector 112. Nothing here.” “Roger. Proceed to 121.” That sort of thing.

Well, that plus angry rants from Chrisanta about finding us faster. She seemed to be a very angry person.

This got the rest of the party on board with plan assassination. We got back on the cloud and reapplied the starlings glamour. I reforked myself. Jacqueline stuffed the knight's body in the corpse-box (maybe we should carry things besides corpses sometimes?).

We were only a short way in when a Penetencian scout spotted us and radioed in. “That's them!” Chrisanta shouted, “I know it is! I'll kill them myself!”

How had she deduced this? From accounts of the murderous murder? From a theoretical understanding of glamours? From divinely boosted intuition? Or had she said this about a dozen other things, and this time she happened to be right?

In any case, she turned into a bolt of lightning and came after us. Not truly as fast as lightning (she could only spark across moderate distances, and needed a pause between each jump) but faster than anything else in the field.

We were the second fastest, and made a Parthian Retreat. She followed, and so we separated her from her army. A classic example of Godwinson's Mistake. Now it was on us to make her regret it.

We took up positions on a ledge with a cliff leading down in front of us and one leading up behind us. Weapons charged; mons readied.

Chrisanta arrived shortly thereafter, traveling in lightning form and then solidifying. She had twice the shields I did. Nevertheless, I shot her with both hyperbreakers the moment she arrived. One hyperbreaker wiped her shield, and the other hit so hard it probably did multiple wounds. Then the combination tossed her off the cliff. And whatever plans she had for opening the battle, they were wasted.

A good opening.

To a very hard battle. She wielded some sort of power sword that fired bursts of energy. I tried to disarm her, but she was stronger than me (but not than both of me working together) and the sword was welded to the armor. I really should have spotted that.

She moved around constantly, resulting in a lot of failed attacks from our group. She seemed particularly determined to kill me. Perhaps she thought I was a traitor? I briefly considered explaining that I had always been her enemy, and only looked like a traitor because I'd stolen some armor from the grave of one of her friends. I didn't bother.

She hurt me badly enough that I spent my last energy on Bear Form rather than recloning so that I could have the improved constitution of a bear.

Clarence-as-Panasonico used his claw power so much that damage became healing. Then Christanto overhealed him to death. This is a strange world.

We piled on the damage, and I think we came close to finishing her off. But three other developments really determined the battle.

First, Jacqueline got on the radio and tried to distract her with questions.

Second, Chrisanta's first wave or reinforcements (three bird-riders) got close to the battle.

And, finally, Chrisanta revealed that her allegedly sacrificed left arm was still there, and still had a flesh spiral.

Naturally, Jacqueline asked her about this. Over the radio. With the entire Penetencian army listening.

“I absolutely support the role of flesh spirals in society! Only through wearing a flesh spiral can one completely give oneself over to the Wheel! Everyone should wear one! Everyone will!”

“And what about metal spirals?”

“Exterminate them! Everyone who wears a metal spiral must be killed! Everyone who ever wore a metal spiral must be killed!” (This presumably includes half of Penetencia.)

Which was finally too much for the Penetencian soldiers. When the reinforcements arrived, they struck her down.

In places of universal deceit, the truth can be a deadly weapon.

Stage 8: Diplomacy

By happy coincidence, the leader of the fliers was also next in line to the throne. Or at least he claimed to be. Maybe we'd started a civil war after all?

He acknowledged that a large fraction of the community had been under mind control, and that our freeing them was a good thing. He recognized that Chrisanta was a traitor and our taking her down was a good thing. With extreme effort, he tentatively said some slightly nice things about us. And he gave us a “do not kill” token.

But he also wanted us far away, for a long time.

All of which works for us.

He also declared that it was the traitor Chrisanta who had killed Escobar. Which worked fine for us too.

The crusade was cancelled. There would be mourning. There would be rebuilding. And then there would be moderation. At least to the point where anyone possessed by a flesh spiral would stand out.

After some more diplomatic niceties, he and his men returned home with Chrisanta's body, and we returned to our journey.

In hindsight, it was obvious why resorting to violence hadn't solved our problems. We'd failed to resort to enough of it.

Stage 9: Cleanup

Once we'd traveled a respectable distance, we touched down to take care of some things.

We removed the knight from his armor, patched that up for later use, and then cremated his body with dignity. I carved onto a nearby stone “Here lie the bones of a loyal soldier of Penetencia. He died with honor.” And then, with some reluctance, I carved the image of the Barbed Wheel.

We called Lou and let him know the new cover story.

We also called Vidriot and told them the story as well. I suggested that, after the period of formal mourning, they might be open to diplomatic overtures. Perhaps they might be interested in some sort of scholarly collaboration, that could lead to better media for everyone. They were noncommittal on the subject.

Stage 10: Dungeon

As we traveled, we spotted a Steve-dungeon that seemed still occupied. Having no urgent mission, we stopped to clean it out.

Being a Steve-dungeon, my Lily-key didn't work on it. But there was a simple button to open the door.

The dungeon was designed to give its victim something close to a sporting chance before killing him (over and over again). Its victim being a single individual with no weapons beyond what the dungeon gave, and no understanding of the world. As an experienced and well-armed team, we blasted our way through it with little difficulty.

We found a bunch of ordinary mons, including a couple of Tall Men, which may prove useful for future transport.

We found an Avatar of Steve – whom we destroyed with great enthusiasm.

We found a mutated chrystalis. Is Steve working on deadlier monsters? Ominous. In any case, we killed it and shlurped the seedfruit.

We found a wall that extruded hands that used media. Then we destroyed it utterly. Apparently it is possible for a soulless entity to use a medium. At least when Steve wills it.

And we found the victim. He seemed to be taking the mind-wipes harder than most. He'd lost track of things like “different people can exist”. He hates living, fears dying, and cannot cope with either the thoughts in his mind or the slightest pain in his body. He can't even remember his name, but his coffin says “Rupert”, so that's what we're calling him. Hopefully his mind will come back soon.

We gave him Negative Man. It seemed appropriate. Also safer, if he attempts a murderous rampage.

In the midst of this, Jacqueline's elbow spontaneously disappeared. She maintained control of her lower arm, in defiance of logic and physics. Apparently this started back in Vidriot, but she didn't think it was worth mentioning at the time. She did think it was worth researching in the library there, but had found nothing. Analyze revealed it was because she'd become a “second gate” vampire. Sometimes Analyze isn't very informative.

The answers regarding Jacqueline's condition may be in Nazgoth. The answer as to why she kept this from us, not so much.

We then traveled to Gotita so that Rupert could get his spiral removed by an experienced surgeon, possibly with anesthetic. (Lou greeted us with “Kill any more gods?” “Just an avatar”.) Rupert found both conscious removal (with “some” pain) and unconscious removal to be unacceptable. Eventually drunken removal proved an acceptable compromise. I hope he doesn't become an alcoholic. That could be an expensive habit.

Trigonometry suggests the mobile Emerald is headed straight for us, and getting fairly close. Interesting. We'd better figure out what we can do with these things soon.

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