Roto-Mar
You won’t breath a word of this to anyone, she said.
The compulsion didn’t specify writing, but it seems to be broader than just speech. Let me try again. Sig-Mar, the leader of Roto-Mar is planning to
I can’t write it. I thought maybe I could if I wasn’t writing to anyone but myself, but I can’t. Luckily, we might have found a loophole: the compulsion probably doesn’t cover Ooziel-merges. I sure hope it doesn’t. Otherwise, how are we going to explain to Citrine what’s going on? Besides the part where the nice soldiers who gave her candy were actually planning to kill her, we already told her that and she didn’t seem to get it.
But that comes later. I’m going to try starting at the beginning, writing down what happened like I usually do, and see if I can get enough momentum to get around my inability to communicate what’s really going on in Roto-Mar. I’m not writing to anyone, this is just a record for myself, to organize my thoughts. Tell the story.
Roto-Mar is a small island kingdom (or should I say queendom?) an hour’s flight out to sea in the northeastern part of the safe zone. Approaching disguised as a cloud, we saw a city spread over the mountains which was quite different from any we’d encountered in this post-cataclysm world. It sparkled with metal and glass, proudly displaying tall buildings with modern-looking architecture. Modern-looking meaning normal buildings I grew up with, which is maybe not that modern since it’s 250 years ago. But anyway, none of those rainproof domes they have in Gotita or Charco. The closest place I’ve seen to it is the metal cathedral in Penitencia. There was another similarity to Penitencia in the prevalence of weapons. Otto identified several types of cannons and what he said might be anti-flying guns, as well as a few other weapons he eyed with interest but didn’t identify.
“Ooh, and they’ve got airplanes!” Clarence said excitedly, peering through binoculars improvised out of his very versatile tentacles. “I didn’t realize there were any left! And is that a radar station?”
Whatever the device was, a quick check with a Tall Man revealed that it was looking at us with interest. Perhaps a cloud-watcher? Probably not, though. We poked around with the radio until we found the right frequency, then asked for permission to land our cloud, assuring them we just wanted to visit and weren’t planning on destroying anything. Which was definitely true at the time! We certainly weren’t planning on flooding the secret underground science facility at the heart of the city.
The person on the radio directed us to the runway on one end of the island, a concrete strip amid a rare patch of greenery. We were waved in by several uniformed people carrying glowing orange batons, who led us to the end of the runway where a man in a crisp uniform greeted us. “We’ve been expecting you,” he informed us as we made introductions. His jacket was covered in enough patches and buttons to indicate he was an overachiever, and he wore a necklace of large black beads. The necklace wasn’t yet another mark of achievement, everyone else was wearing them; prayer bead media are common east of the Chasm.
“What do you mean you’ve been expecting us?” Otto asked suspiciously.
“Our glorious leader said to expect someone, and, quote, they will probably be riding a creepy cloud, end quote.” He actually said “quote” and “end quote”, instead of doing air quotes like a normal person. “I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but I’m pretty sure that thing” —he angled his head at the eye-covered cloud, which Jacqueline was patting affectionately before schlorping— “fits the bill. In any case, I have been instructed to escort you to the palace for an audience with our glorious queen.”
Their glorious queen… Last I remembered, Roto-Mar had been taken over by an archlich called Sig-Mar, but that had been more than 250 years ago. I wasn’t even sure if liches worked anymore, now that the Warp was cut off. I’d been a teenager at the time, and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the news, so I hadn’t gotten more than the impression that Sig-Mar had appeared basically out of nowhere, raised an army, and easily overturned the previous monarchy. Afterwards, Roto-Mar had cut off diplomatic ties with the surrounding nations, and militarized heavily. Everyone was worried it signaled an impending war, but the now heavily-fortified island instead seemed to be working on advancing its technology. And here was a Roto-Mar still filled with technology that has been lost everywhere else, seemingly unchanged by the Cataclysm and the passage of 250 years.
Otto evidently shared my distrust of the modern-seeming society, and asked our escort how they’d managed it. “And everything here seems quite militarized,” he added, gesturing to the man’s uniform. (Now that he’d pointed it out, everyone we’d passed so far had been wearing a similar uniform, except for the Multiliches we’d passed.) “Are you expecting trouble?”
“The world is full of trouble, and we are on the edge of the safe zone,” he explained. “As for the technology, we have a supply of crude oil as well as spells we can use for manufacturing. It’s not as easy as using mons for everything, but we think it’s worth the trouble.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Jacqueline interrupted the more technical explanation the talkative officer was offering to Clarence, “what is the role of skeleton labor in society?” So she’d noticed the Multiliches. I waited for yet another confused answer.
Our guide answered the question with practiced ease that suggested he got it a lot. “Our stance is that of our glorious queen: skeleton labor is very important; it forms the, ahem, backbone of the Roto-Mar economy, you might say.” He flashed a sheepish grin. “You’ll get used to the skeleton puns eventually.” He opened the door of a small bus, ushering us in, and began driving along a winding road up the mountain. On the way, we managed to find out that Sig-Mar the archlich was still in charge of the country (the skeleton puns had kind of given it away already). But not to worry, she was quite informal and generally wouldn’t take offense for small things provided you’d first shown some small gestures of respect. “Oh, and don’t interrupt her while she’s playing music,” he added as he led us through the entrance hall of the palace, our steps echoing loudly against the metal floor and walls.
She was playing music when we entered, a pitch-black skeleton sitting at the grand piano in the center of the enormous room. We stood quietly, but she seemed to notice us immediately, and got up, leaving another skeleton in her place. Unlike the duplicate which kept playing, Sig-Mar was dressed in an armored skirt and leather breastplate emblazoned with Lily’s heart emblem and some symbols of the old chaos gods. Those symbols have been cropping up a lot, we found what seemed to be a holy book marked with the same symbols in Sorin’s office. “Hello, friends!” she greeted us merrily. “Let’s have a nice little chat.”
“What brings you here today?” she asked once we’d bowed properly. “Weapons? We do have a lot of those, I’m sure we could make a deal.”
Otto visibly perked up at the prospect, but Jacqueline beat him to it with another question. “I take it you heard of us from Sorin?” she fished.
“That awful little kobold gremlin? No, let’s just say I have contacts in various places. I heard about what you did in Vidriot, and Penitencia, how you just might have killed their Pope. I’m sure you’ll deny it, but I wanted to congratulate you anyways. Well, done, it’s a big kill!” She chattered on, evidently thinking we were simply touring the world and its important places, “and well, my island is quite important,” she added proudly.
There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Had I met her before? I didn’t think so, but maybe it had happened in one of the gaps in my memory. My memories are still hazy for several months before we escaped from our lab. No, I had seen her somewhere else. But where? I felt like I was forgetting something important…
We explained what we were really doing here. That is, trying to track down a dangerous magical artifact that the traitorous Sorin had delivered here 50 years ago, which we would expect to be causing massive societal problems and general madness. “Except that it’s a little hard to see where the problem is,” I finished. “You all seem fine and not nuts, which is really not what we’d expect after this long.”
“Aw, thanks! But don’t be hasty,” Sig-Mar admonished me. “If that little gremlin snuck in and planted a seed of discord, I’ll have to murder him. But if I want to do it properly, I need to find out what exactly he did. So let’s work together! Do you have any leads? Or is that a secret? You can tell me, I’m great with secrets!” She bounced excitedly.
“It’s usually been pretty obvious,” I said hesitantly. How much should we reveal about our methods of tracking the emeralds? We really should have discussed this beforehand. “For example, in Vidriot it was their very obvious glowing green ziggurat which was the center of the city. I don’t suppose you have some culturally important pieces of architecture, like, say...” I checked Locator. The emerald was downwards, and towards the center of the island. “Maybe some underground catacombs, for example?”
“Perfect!” said Sig-Mar with great enthusiasm. “I will take you to all our secret places!”
“I can’t keep track of who is being sarcastic anymore,” Otto muttered as we were led out of the palace. We really should have been more suspicious at Sig-Mar’s bizarre level of delighted cooperation. But it did seem in keeping with everything else we’d seen her do, maybe she was just like that. And all we had to go on was her voice, since skeletons do not have very expressive faces. (Come to think of it, how did her voice work? She didn’t have a tongue or lips to articulate with, or lungs, or vocal cords.)
The first building we visited held weapons research. I’m not sure what Sig-Mar’s point here was, unless she was trying to intimidate or impress us. It certainly worked on Otto, who gazed covetously at a machine which could extrude jets of plasma. On the way, she told us about the expeditions into the dark zone the advanced weaponry had enabled. On the whole, they hadn’t been very successful, “only” getting about 100 km away from Roto-Mar (only? The safe zone is only around 300 kilometers across. But a lot of that is ocean, if you’re coming from Roto-Mar, so it’s not as much land progress). It was difficult to avoid dangerous mons, and more difficult to avoid the people. The dark zone is not uninhabited as Sally had told us, but filled with spiralled people who seem to be possessed by Lily.
“Mostly, they do construction,” Sig-Mar concluded. “We have no idea why they want these towers, but there they are.” By this time we’d arrived at the lab, and she opened a cabinet to show us photos of tall metal towers with spikes sticking out in a spiraling pattern. “That one’s about 200 kilometers to the east; we’ve had good success with long-range cameras. And sometimes they do this, which we really can’t figure out.” She showed us a video of a large group of Lilin walking in a circle with arms upraised, then falling to the ground in unison. A giant bird appeared in the center of the circle.
“A mass-summoning?” Jacqueline asked.
Sig-Mar nodded. “I think the Rain Bird of the west was born of something like that,” she confirmed. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you, the really interesting lab is the spell development one. Come on!”
On the way, she prompted us to tell her about the power plant. We explained the research they’d been doing on mon use of mediums as well as their attempts to merge mons with humans. We left out the part about Citrine being one of those experiments, because she wasn’t there to spill it herself. She had somehow vanished between the palace and the weapons research lab. Probably tracking a whiff of funnelcake or something. I would talk to her later about not wandering off without a plan for how to find each other again.
“And we saw them negotiating with this guy who can turn into the Rain Bird,” Jacqueline was saying.
“Really?” Sig-Mar leaned in. “Tell me more about this guy.”
Jacqueline described Indra’s distinctive hair and that he was a courtier. “And this is where the Sorin connection comes in: Analyze revealed him to have a medium that Sorin has notes on the construction of.” I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to tell her that, she seemed the type who would want Indra’s medium and wouldn’t mind what we suspected it takes to make one. Unfortunately, I was right.
“So this is the spell creation lab,” Sig-Mar told us excitedly as she led us into the elevator in the next building. We were getting close to the emerald; Locator was mostly pointing down instead of sideways. “It’s the secret behind our ability to make powerful weapons and keep up pre-Cataclysm technologies like aircraft.” The elevator dinged, arriving at the lowest sublevel. But still above the emerald. “Here we are!” She banged open a door, revealing two people wearing lab coats hovering around a complicated looking device reminiscent of the one we’d seen in Nosgoth. “Hello, scientists! Tell me about how you make spells!”
The scientists looked uncomfortable. “There’s a process,” said one, looking at the floor.
“Are you using a variant on Nosgoth spell distillation?” Jacqueline asked.
“A variation on spell distillation, yes,” said another with an anxious glance at Sig-Mar.
Clarence made a face like he was trying to decide how to phrase a difficult question. “Did they start making spells fifty years ago?” he asked Sig-Mar.
“Yes, they… Oh. I see. Yes, that might be a problem.”
“But they it seems like they might be handling it responsibly,” Jacqueline noted, looking doubtfully at the apparatus. It was quite similar to Kaine’s setup, but instead of connecting to a giant ring, this one had a tube leading to a large copper container.
“That’s the worst part!” Sig-Mar complained. “If they’ve been handling it responsibly, that means they knew what it was and didn’t tell me!”
The scientists looked downright panicked.
“We made a metal-generation spell!” the first one said a bit desperately. “It makes can-openers! See?” She pushed a button, and after some mechanical clanking a yellow-green blob rolled out of a hole in the bottom. She examined it. “Another tungsten one? Ugh.” She tossed it into the bucket of discarded can-opener spells sitting in a corner.
Clarence was making a face again, “How are you powering this?” he asked with deep suspicion. “Oh, never mind,” he decided, turning back into Parasonico (he’d given Sig-Mar a demonstration earlier when we were talking about the power plant). “You’re not making new spells at all!” he complained. “That canister has all the spells in it already.”
Sig-Mar seized the copper canister at the center of the setup and opened it, revealing several spell-blobs. “Iiiiinteresting,” she cooed. “Look at these! Look how juicy and bouncy they are!” she jostled the container and gave a delighted laugh and the spells wiggled like overripe glow-plums. She spun on the pair of scientists, demeanor making a hard turn back to scary. “So how did you do this?” she demanded, then kept going when they hesitated. “Am I not frightening enough? Do you need to disembowel someone?” She turned to me. “What are your instincts telling you?”
I should have realized at this point that she knew I had a Locator spell. “About whether someone needs to be disemboweled?” I asked, purposefully misinterpreting the question. “I have to say that really doesn’t seem necessary.”
Sig-Mar took my advice, and resolved the discussion by summoning a Leviazizmoth to check for hidden compartments, then ordering it to break through the floor when she discovered there was another level underneath what had supposedly been the bottom floor. “Hellooooo!” she called down the hole she’d made. “I’m doing a surprise inspection! Please take me to where the spells are made.”
The scientists on the secret level looked even more distressed than the ones up above had been. One of them pointed a quivering arm towards the next room which contained another spell distillation setup, this one connected to a large golden ring.
“Does this look correct to you?” Sig-Mar asked us. After she’d verified the safety of the portal by throwing a scientist through and asking his companions if they thought he was okay (they thought it was probably safe, and she figured they wouldn’t lie when she might throw them through next), she waved us towards it.
“We could just leave it here,” I suggested, reluctantly approaching the portal. “It seems to be doing fine, not corrupting anyone.” Clarence had checked the scientists upstairs, and they were fine. “April might come after it, but you could probably take care of her, you have an excessive amount of guns.”
Sig-Mar assured me she could definitely take care of April, but ignored my suggestion of leaving the emerald alone. “Who’s first?”
Inside, we found a narrow catwalk encircled by a glass bubble. Outside, space seemed to extend without end in all directions. It was empty, but had a shimmery, ripply quality that made it look more dense than air, almost as if it was a sea of some strange liquid. Ahead, there was a large metal sphere with a sliding door set into the side that met the enclosed catwalk. It was pretty reassuring: the scientists trusted in the safety of this dimension enough to spend a good bit of time in here building this setup. Unless it just came like this, which would be kind of worrying. I wondered how the catwalk stayed up—it just seemed to be floating, with no visible supports.
We paused outside the bubble to examine the door. There was a button next to it, in style of Steve’s dungeons (red, and therefore an extremely dangerous button). Now that we were farther into the shimmering void, I could see something solid floating in the distance. A can opener. Of course. This was probably the metaphorical plane of can-openers or something.
Inside was a large room (but no bigger than the outside), the walls and ceiling lined with crystalline tubes which reflected the light coming through the doorway. (Where was the light coming from anyway? I don’t remember any source of illumination, but whatever it was apparently didn’t extend inside the metal structure.) Following them up to the ceiling, I could make out the glint of yet another emerald, embedded in something fleshy.
“I found the lights!” exclaimed Sig-Mar, flipping a switch and bringing the man strapped to the ceiling with the blue Chaos Emerald embedded in his chest into clearer view. “Hello!” she trilled.
“Hi,” said a somewhat familiar voice. I snapped my gaze away from the man on the ceiling and settled on Indra, who was standing confidently in the center of the room.
We all stared at each other, frozen except for swiveling heads and faces working in confusion.
“So when you were asking me about him…?” Jacqueline began in confusion.
“Indra, these are my friends,” Sig-Mar announced. “Friends, this is my cohort. They know who you are! I do hope you’ll get along.”
Indra and Sig-Mar… The man with the pink and blue hair and the pitch-black skeleton wearing armor with a stylized heart on it. And then I remembered. “You!” I gasped. “You were there, at the power plant! You knew… everything! You’ve known the whole time!” I turned to my companions. “She was there when the Monitors were showing Indra the failed experiments, don’t you remember?”
“But your scientists were lying to you,” Clarence objected uncertainly.
“No, they were lying to you. They did quite a nice job, I should probably give them a nice present.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about me being the Rain Bird?” Indra asked in the silence that followed. “I suspected you knew for a while now. I mean, I appreciate it, but why?”
“You were the Rain Bird! We figured if we said something you’d kill us.”
“How’s the tea in Roto-Mar?” Jacqueline asked pointedly.
“Barely passable,” Indra said, frowning. “The weather patterns here don’t provide the necessary precipitation, it’s terrible!”
“Is that why you became the Rain Bird?”
“When you put it like that it sounds rather petty, doesn’t it? But there were other reasons…”
“I’m sure he’ll answer all your questions later,” Sig-Mar interrupted. “Once you join us. We can be a big happy family: me, you, Indra, the gemstones…. It will be wonderful!”
And then she explained what’s going on.
There are other worlds out there, dozens of them. Sig-Mar had an aircraft she called a spelljammer (although it has nothing to do with jamming spells) which she used to travel between them. She’d crashed her ship here a short while before the Incursion, and took over Roto-Mar in order to jumpstart the technological capabilities necessary to repair her ship. But before she could finish repairs and leave, Steve and Lily showed up and ruined everything. (Sig-Mar calls them Steve and Lily like we do, since she was one of the people funding our labs, having caught on that the Incursion might pose a problem in her plans to leave. Should those names have alerted us earlier that something was up? Probably not, but now that I’m looking back, I keep thinking we should have figured it out sooner.)
“Imagine you’re the gods,” she said. “You’ve got a multitude of worlds to draw power from. Now a pair of order-monsters show up in one of your worlds, growing stronger like a pair of tumorous cysts. They’re anathema to the Warp, and a danger to you. So what do you do?”
“Are you saying the gods cut us off because they were afraid of Steve and Lily?” I asked. We had assumed that Steve and Lily had cut off the old gods, not the other way around.
“Exactly! We’re in quarantine.” She outlined her plan. Steve and Lily, like the gods, draw power from the people aligned with them (via spirals, in Steve and Lily’s case). If something were to remove that power draw, Steve and Lily would starve, and the gods might lift the quarantine. If they didn’t, the world was doomed. Humans might be more sturdy than we used to be, but the world is a lot more dangerous. There’s very little defenses against the really dangerous monsters, and the vast majority of the population—everyone outside this safe zone—is spiral-mad. Sooner or later it’s going to fall apart.
Which is where Sig-Mar and the emeralds come in. Like we guessed, the emeralds can create media like Indra’s if left in a person for a century. Once Sig-Mar has enough of them, she can unleash a small band of terrifying monsters to decimate the population, cutting off Steve and Lily’s food supply.
“And even if they don’t starve completely, I should be able to direct them in their weakened state. The gods might be upset if they escape prematurely, but I’m sure they’ll be much too busy dealing with Lily and Steve to bother with me.”
I could kind of see what she was getting at. If the world was actually doomed under Steve and Lily, then maybe it was worth it to kill ninety percent of the population so the other ten could escape. If the world was actually doomed. The past 200 years were bad, but from what I’ve seen the past few months in the future, things don’t look that bleak. So I wasn’t entirely buying it. Sig-Mar brushed the massive slaughter off as a necessary sacrifice, but I didn’t think she’d really thought through the alternatives very well. The others agreed, swiftly cobbling together an alternate plan based on Steve and Lily’s aversion to Warp, the emeralds’ affinity to Warp, and the Avatars’ connection to Steve.
“Since you’ve got to wait fifty years for that guy to finish,” Jacqueline pointed out when Sig-Mar was doubtful of our plan,“would you be amenable to funding our research into alternative means of removing Steve and Lily? That way, everyone would get what they want.”
“Alright,” said Sig-Mar, nodding slowly. “So here’s the deal. You give me all your Chaos Emeralds and I’ll start them cooking. In the meantime, I’ll fund your research.” She started shaking hands with each of us. “And you won’t breath a word of this to anyone,” she added, tapping me on the shoulder. “You won’t.” She poked the boxy head of Clarence’s Parasonico form. “Word of advice, don’t let strange liches touch you. I have this very handy secret-keeping spell.”
She hadn’t said we couldn’t write, I thought, trying to figure out a way around it. And she hadn’t touched Otto’s clone. I stared hard at him, trying to get him to understand that he needed to write down what was going on immediately, before Sig-Mar noticed that she hadn’t bound him. Neither Otto nor his clone noticed; Otto stared at Sig-Mar while his clone paced a short ways from the group. Maybe he was trying to act normal so Sig-Mar wouldn’t figure it out?
Sig-Mar waved a hand and a table with six chairs appeared. “First things first,” she announced. “Emeralds on the table where I can see them.” Once we’d reluctantly complied, she verified that the kettle-bells indeed contained emeralds using a newly minted Locator a scientist brought in. “Alright, let’s begin. What do you ask from me?”
Jacqueline had a lot of questions. “Tell us more about the Warp! What does it have to do with traveling between worlds? How many worlds are there? Who put Steve and Lily to sleep and how? Is there a Steve and Lily on every world, or just ours? What’s Sorin up to? Or April? How do we stop them? Oh, and some good faith agreements would be nice, too.”
“The Chaos Emeralds are on the table and I haven’t killed you yet!” Sig-Mar pointed out. “That’s pretty good faith!”
It wasn’t, but it sounded like it was as much as we were going to get out of her on that front. She was much more forthcoming in terms of information. She knows quite a bit about Warp magic and how it used to work (not that it’s any help now; Clarence took notes though). She didn’t know much about what Sorin was doing, besides that she had a pretty easy time swaying the people he gave his mediums to over to her side, as she’d done with Indra. After all, she could promise them a way out of here if they followed her. (I wondered if they’d thought this through, and if they knew that mons probably didn’t work out in the wider worlds that weren’t run by Steve and Lily.) It was very convenient letting him do the work for her, but now that her endgame was getting close, she thought it might be time to stop him before he did something to actually mess up her plans. Sorin was probably working with April, but she thought someone else might be behind the power plant.
“There’s a whole network of them,” she told us unnecessarily. We’d seen the network diagram spanning the globe. “Someone is controlling all those Monitors. That big Monitor you told me about isn’t the one in charge; as far as I can tell it doesn’t have the innate ability to talk. Someone was talking to you through it.” But she didn’t know who, or why. I’m thinking it might actually be Sorin, or one of his allies. Those updates are coming from the same general direction as Sorin’s lair in the dark zone to the west.
“Have you learned anything else the emeralds can do besides Warp magic and creating heart media?” Otto asked once she’d finished complaining about Sorin and his scheming Tzeentchian ways.
“If all eight of them are brought together by a single person, they will channel incredible power for a brief time, and then be destroyed. They could move space and time, break out of a crystal sphere if it weren’t locked down by a god… the possibilities are endless.”
“You mean we could travel through time?” Otto asked, surprised. “We could go back to before the Incursion and make it not happen.”
“I don’t believe in time travel,” Jacqueline announced. “If it were real I would have done it already.”
“I would have done it first,” Sig-Mar retorted, “since I’m older. Anyway, it’s not possible just with the emeralds. There’s something missing, but I don’t know what.”
Otto looked like he was going to say something, but then changed his mind. “And warping space?” he asked instead.
“Long distance teleportation works pretty well, it’s just bad for you. Using the emeralds corrupts you. It fades after a bit, fast enough that it’s probably safe to expose yourself maybe once a week, but I wouldn’t recommend even that. Of course, I’ve got a shortcut for removing the corruption.” She took a small vial out of her pocket and shook it. “Have you ever heard of chemotherapy?” When we shook our heads, she went on. “Basically, it’s poison. It kills your disease more than it kills you, and once it’s dead, you can heal. This does the same thing for the corruption, although you’ll probably wish you were dead once you take it.” She set the vial on the table next to the emeralds.
Things were going pretty well for a bit. Sig-Mar speculated about the origins of Steve and Lily, asked us about our goals and motivations, and was generally came off as a great person to work with. Apart from the fact that she’d just magically compelled us to keep silent about her planned genocide. But she wasn’t actually planning to kill anyone for fifty years, so it was fine as long as we could come up with an alternative plan.
“I’m pretty surprised negotiations haven’t broken down already,” Jacqueline commented, thinking along the same lines. And tempting fate, it seemed.
“We do have the same goals,” Otto pointed out. “The part about getting rid of Steve and Lily, at least. I for one would prefer to not kill everybody, but I’m sure you can agree that leaving us to do our thing certainly won’t make your life any harder.” He addressed this last to Sig-Mar.
“As you said, you could be quite helpful to me. Now what are your plans for the hybrid?”
As the last condition on the deal that let us walk out of here without the emeralds but with our lives, Sig-Mar wanted Citrine. “The hybrids are my personal project,” she explained. “We’re breaking down the barriers between human and mon. She’s the first success we’ve had, so she’ll provide vital information for the project.” She looked around at all of us. “So that’s the deal: I keep the emeralds, I keep the experiment, you all go out and try to come up with a plan in the next fifty years. Sound good? Hmm, this went better than I’d hoped! And I’d thought you might have gotten attached to the hybrid.”
“About that…” Jacqueline was fidgeting uncomfortably. “We have, actually. I don’t suppose we could take her with us, and bring her back to visit every so often?”
Sig-Mar laughed. “No, no, that wouldn’t be nearly enough. We need to find out what makes her tick! We can’t just wave a little analyzer at her, we’ll need to vivisect her.”
And that’s when negotiations broke down. Sig-Mar insisted she needed to vivisect Citrine, and didn’t pay any attention to claims that this wasn’t what we had been negotiating for, or that this wasn’t at all a fair exchange. I was starting to think that the whole negotiation thing had been a lie. Sig-Mar was just pretending to negotiate so she could look like a nice person, when really she had all the power and could do whatever she wanted.
“What does this even get you?” I asked in frustration. “Are you just curious or is this also part of your plan to save the the world?” I resisted the urge to add air quotes around “save the world.”
“I don’t need to explain all the little details to you,” Sig-Mar said, waving a hand. “It would take much too long.”
“Why you want the information is actually extremely relevant to us possibly letting you vivisect our friend!” Clarence insisted.
“What do you think?” Jacqueline appealed to Indra, who had been pacing silently for the entire conversation.
“It could speed up the medium development, although it seems needlessly cruel.”
Sig-Mar threw up her hands. “Oh, not you, too! You’re all making a big fuss about it, don’t you realize we’re going to end up killing basically everyone outside this room?”
“That’s the backup plan,” Otto reminded her. “We’re trying not to do that one. Speaking of which, what if you let Citrine stay with us for the next year? She’s been an effective part of our team so far. You’re looking long-term, and we’re relatively new here. We have a chance of providing a much easier and faster solution than your plan, in which case you won’t need the information because you don’t need to kill everyone.”
“I’m not convinced you’re going to come up with anything that works, so no, it’s not worth it to sacrifice speeding up my plan. Go on and do your stupid little plan already!” She stood up, ending the conversation.
Jacqueline and both Ottos mirrored her motion, getting to their feet in unison. Jacqueline summoned a Red Shadow and the Ottos drew their swords. Clarence and I scrambled out of our chairs as Sig-Mar’s left hand flew to her necklace. I turned into Plaguelock, not wanting to be human in what was suddenly a fight.
“Fountain Indra!” Jacqueline yelled, so I Knockbursted the Red Shadow towards Indra’s side of the room. Water swirled around his feet and dark blue feathers flowed down from the top of his head. He was transforming. I hoped Jacqueline’s Red Shadow, now next to him, would be able to pull him into the Fountain of Nightmares before he finished transforming and drowned us.
“Indra, I’m really sorry,” I told him. “We didn’t want to fight you. But we also don’t want Citrine to die. So we’re going to put you in a box. Maybe you could not kill us when you come out? We don’t want to hurt you, we just didn’t want you to go all Rain Bird on us.”
Then the Red Shadow snared him with its long, sticky, disgusting tongue and they both vanished into a swirl of purple and black mist which hung in the air where they had been. I turned around to see Clarence and Otto standing over Sig-Mar, who was wreathed in red and black fire. Black beads from Sig-Mar’s necklace lay scattered on the floor, and the Leviazizmoth which had been following her was fading away. As I watched, Sig-Mar vanished and a bolt of energy flowed into Otto, who started shaking and glowing as much as if he held three fully charged hyperbreakers, even though his armor was supposed to be invisible.
“What do we do now?” Clarence asked shakily. “He’s just going to come out and kill us, and—did you just eat Sig-Mar?”
“What happens if you take the emerald out of this demiplane?” Jacqueline asked.
“It collapses after about a minute, destroying everything in it, why—oh. I see. So we’d just have to keep him in here long enough to keep him from getting out.”
Since when were we trying to kill Indra? I didn’t think he actually wanted to fight us, although that might have changed now that Jacqueline put him in a Fountain of Nightmares.
“He’s probably already killed my Red Shadow, so we’d better go now,” said Jacqueline.
There was a flash of light and an explosion of glass as the biggest Neon Genesis I’d ever seen appeared around the place where the Fountain of Nightmares still hung. They spread out through the entire room, upending the table and lifting the chairs into the air. And blocking the path to the door. One tube dislodged the emerald from the man strapped to the ceiling. The countdown had started.
“I don’t feel so well…” said Otto, swaying slightly. His clone was fading away the same way Sig-Mar’s Leviazizmoth had when her prayer beads had broken. There went our one way of telling people what was going on. But Otto himself was no longer glowing or shaking, and his armor was still invisible. Which meant Citrine was okay enough to keep the Glamour up.
Jacqueline flew up to grab the blue emerald while the rest of us shoveled emeralds into her corpse box with the help of Rafael Still, who was looking more muscular than before. As we smashed our way through the tubes blocking the way to the door, it started raining, streams of water spiraling out from the Fountain of Nightmares. We got on Jacqueline’s cloud and zoomed down the catwalk, bursting out the rusted, twisting metal ring into a room full of soldiers. They looked alarmed, then opened fire, but by then I’d crashed through the floor and we were safe in a bubble of mud underground.
No, not safe for long. Sig-Mar knew a lot about what we’ve been doing, no doubt she figured out what really happened in Penitencia and was already prepared to send Leviazizmoths after us should we try to escape underground. Assuming they were traveling alone, they would be able to move much faster than I could with three people to bring along, four once we found Citrine. But at least nobody was shooting at us.
The flood of water emerging from the portal washed into the room we’d just left, expanding the range on my Tremorsense even as I swam away. Two snakes emerged from the ring, then there was a sharp change in pressure and they fell to the ground. After processing the confusing impressions, I concluded that the portal had closed on the Rain Bird’s necks, decapitating him. Which was unfortunate, since I really hadn’t wanted to kill him. But we could deal with that later. I swam on, away from the center of the mountain, until Clarence had finished swapping in his metal manipulation spell so we could properly stow our latest emerald. It was fairly safe to travel with it in the watery mud I created, but we might run into pursuit at any time.
Next on the agenda was retrieving Citrine. This seemed like it would be difficult, except that we came upon some wires, which led to a surveillance room. Clarence tapped into their feeds and started looking for Citrine. Otto reset his malfunctioning armor using one of the batteries we stole from the power plant. I eavesdropped on the guards, who were on edge, having gotten word of an incident involving Sig-Mar. They knew the protocol—she’d reform at her phylactery in the next few days—but it was still disconcerting to be without a queen. To make matters worse, the vice-chancellor (apparently this is the second in command, even though Sig-Mar isn’t a chancellor) had told everyone to be on the lookout for a band of intruders who needed to be captured. But these surveillance guys hadn’t seen anything interesting.
“They’re sending Leviazizmoths in,” Clarence announced after about a minute of sifting through footage. “I can see a line of soldiers at a resetting station. After they walk away they’re summoning Leviazizmoths and equipping them with some kind of headset, then sending them through a hole in the wall.”
So they were searching for us already, and with surprising coordination. Clarence couldn’t figure out how to jam the signals from the headsets to prevent one that found us from alerting the others, and I wouldn’t be able to run away. So we needed to find Citrine as soon as possible. Luckily, Clarence located her after less than another minute. She was not far off, seated at a table piled with an assortment of carnival foods. Three guards accompanied her, heads turned carefully in the opposite direction from their prisoner.
The guards’ purposeful inattention to Citrine made the rescue easy. I burst through the floor directly under Citrine, and dragged her into the pit. The guards whirled around, but by then all they could see was the table and two remaining chairs slowly falling into a sinkhole which had mysteriously appeared under their prisoner.
Citrine looked around in confusion, then brightened, taking in the familiar faces. “Friends! I have sugar skulls!” she announced, holding one up. It was melting from the water which was slowly draining away. When I’m tunneling, the water helps move the dirt around, but if I stand still it will drain away faster than I produce it, leaving a pocket of empty space.
“We need to get out of here,” Clarence said distractedly, patting her down for signs of injury.
“Could you glamour us to look like guards?” Otto asked. “Me, you, and other me.” (Once his armor had finished resetting, he re-cloned himself.) “Sarah’s a Leviazizmoth like they’re using, Clarence looks like some kind of mon, and Jacqueline can be our unconscious prisoner. Anyone know why she passed out this time? Never mind, let’s get on with it.”
Re-glamoured, we set out towards the edge of the mountain. Put as much distance between us and Roto-Mar as we can before Sig-Mar can reform at her phylactery. There was only one dicey bit on the way, when we ran into a Leviazizmoth, but Otto ordered it to search somewhere else, and it obeyed. By the time we reached the surface, Jacqueline was awake enough to summon her Stormnimbus for transportation. (If she hadn’t been, I would have tried out the Anonymous Wolf Kaine gave us, which lets you summon any species of wolf that has ever lived, including the now-extinct Mafler bigwolf, which was certainly big enough to seat six.)
“What happened?” Clarence asked Citrine once we were safely glamoured to look like an innocent cloud with a normal amount of eyeballs (none). “Did they hurt you? Did they say what they wanted with you?”
“They gave me candy,” Citrine replied, puzzled at his concern. She explained how someone had offered her a mysterious new food called a corn dog on the way to the palace. She’d followed them, swayed by promises of more new foods, and they kept up their end: she’d tried cornbread and flavored ice, as well as sugar skulls, which she really enjoyed. “They’re crunchy! Wait, why would you want to attack them?” This last was directed at Otto, who was discussing with Jacqueline the relative merits of running away versus trying to raid Roto-Mar for their advanced weapons. “They were nice people, they gave me candy.”
“Citrine, these weren’t nice guys.” Clarence sighed. “I’m not sure how much we can explain about this, but they weren’t sharing food to be nice, it was a trap. They just gave you candy to make you stay with them so they could vivisect you so Sig-Mar could—” he broke off before he could say anything about Sig-Mar’s plans for the world. Her plans for Citrine were evidently fair game, since she’d mentioned them after she laid the compulsion.
“But… they gave me candy!” Citrine didn’t seem to get the idea that someone who offered her candy could also mean her harm.
“To answer your question, Otto,” I interrupted, “I don’t think attacking them is going to work. You just said that they have better weapons than us, and we don’t have much in the way of secret advantages. We don’t even have an effective stealth cloud, if they’ve got radar like Clarence thought.”
“We could burgle them instead,” Otto suggested. “Much as I hate to suggest it, trickery and stealth might be appropriate here. They did seem like pretty decent people, apart from the thing where they want to kill everyone later. But they’re fine now, we can always kill them later if we need to.”
“I think that we keep saying we’re going to sneak in and steal something, but then we end up killing people,” Citrine said. “That’s bad.”
She had a point there…
So instead of turning back to Roto-Mar, we drifted away on our cloud, heading back to the mainland with its much less fearsome villains of scheming Sorin and insane April. When we were a safe distance out with no sign of pursuit, Otto and Citrine did an Ooziel-merge to fill Citrine in on what we’d learned. Now that she already knows everything, we can speak more freely in front of her, although the compulsion still won’t let us say some things directly to her. I don’t think she really gets it, though.
We’ve been discussing ways of defeating Steve and Lily. They gain power from the people they control via spirals, and from territory they control via the spiralled people occupying it. The safe zone is useless to them because almost everyone here has had their spiral removed, and it came to be this way when the mixture of Stevenites and Lilin was roughly equal after some battles. The two forces neutralized, and people woke up enough to realize they could remove their spirals. We could weaken Steve and Lily if we removed the spirals from the people in the dark zone, and it would be a lot easier if we could expand the safe zone by mixing the two kinds of spirals. If we had safe mass teleportation, we could move large groups of Lilin to the west and Stevenites to the east, but unsurprisingly, mass teleportation is difficult. It might be possible with the Chaos Emeralds, but they certainly aren’t safe.
Otto just asked Clarence to Analyze him. “I’m still feeling off after that Anathema,” he admitted. “I’m debating using the corruption fixing drug I grabbed before we left, but I’m not sure if it’s safe, either.”
Clarence stared hard at Otto. “It’s showing me the negative effects of consuming someone else’s soul,” he said concernedly.
“I ate someone’s soul?”
“Basically, yeah. Anathema lets you eat people’s souls. That’s why it doesn’t work on mons, they don’t have souls.” Or transformed humans, apparently; it had no effect on Hangmon who we now know is a human with a heart medium. “Their body is destroyed and you get their energy stores as well temporarily absorbing some of their mind-patterns.”
“Huh….” Otto looked thoughtful. “What did you say the negative consequences were, again?”
They were surprisingly little: Otto would suffer some temporary mental effects from the residual bits of Sig-Mar he’d absorbed, but they would fade in time. If he used Anathema too many more times, there would be permanent effects, but those only damaged his ability to channel energy and soul storage into mediums, decreasing the effective capacity and energy of anything he tried to use in the future. Overall, not bad for a last-resort defense against someone like Sig-Mar.
“She’s going to be so mad when she comes back,” Clarence moaned. “We’re doomed!”
“Hold on,” I said, having thought of something. “Is she even going to come back at all? I mean, liches tie their souls to an object, right? But Otto just ate her soul. So what’s going to happen?”
Clarence sighed. “Did we just accidentally kill an archlich? This is just like Penitencia. Why do we keep sleepwalking into completely screwing everything over?”
There wasn’t a good answer to that. If we had accidentally killed a lich, that was kind of worrying. And if we hadn’t killed her, then she would soon come to kill us, which was more worrying. Either way, we had lost a good source of information on mons, the emeralds, and how the universe actually works. And we still didn’t know what we were doing with all these Chaos Emeralds we were collecting. Sure, there were rumors that they could enable time travel, but nobody knew what the missing piece was.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Otto. “I’m pretty sure we have the missing ingredient.”
We did???
Citrine caught on first. “You mean this?” she asked, pulling something out of her pocket. Something small, shiny, and hard to look at.
It was the piece of Time she’d stolen from the end of the world.