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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6627044" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>Alex sat in the ruddy darkness of his prison cell on the third level of a particularly secure and dour section of Duke Melikaros’ manor. Normally the place existed as less of a jail and more of a temporary holding cell for the torture of political prisoners prior to their being transferred into the tender caress of one or another infernal ministry. Alex however didn’t fall into the category of rival, tanar’ri agent, thief, or abandoned servitor of another petty baatezu noble. Defying those categorizations, and given the unique circumstances of his arrival in Maladomini, he’d languished in his cell for two weeks’ time already. Of course, it was less as a means of punishment for his transgressions, and more for the fact that the Duke’s security neither cared about him and simply didn’t know what to do with him.</p><p></p><p>Alex yawned and stretched, wriggling his fingers and going through the practiced motions of spellcasting to which he was exceedingly adept and of course had yet to actually practice in sight of his diabolic captors. Somewhere in his third decade of life, the human ran a hand through his fussy blond hair and turned his head towards the door of his cell and the faint noises now filtering up from elsewhere more distant.</p><p></p><p>“They’re fighting.” He remarked, brushing his hand over something that perched unseen upon his shoulder. “Quite a large number of them too. I suspect that’s who we’re here to meet.”</p><p></p><p>“Prisoner!” The grim visage of an osyluth gaoler leered into view and the cell bars rattled with the impact of its spear.</p><p></p><p>“Yes dear jailor of mine?” Alex smiled innocently. “Whatever might be amiss? I thought that I heard fighting down below.”</p><p></p><p>“None of your concern mortal whelp!” The osyluth snarled, pausing and glancing backwards away from his prisoner as the dull whump of an explosion echoed up from the same direction of the fighting.</p><p></p><p>“That sounded like the detonation of a lightning bolt through several rather unfortunate and impromptu lightning rods.” Alex mused matter-of-factly, much to the jailor’s chagrin. A moment later he wrinkled his nose. “Definitely lightning. You can smell the ozone just now.”</p><p></p><p>The sounds of combat grew closer and louder, and now the osyluth keened it head not to listen to the sounds of fighting, nor to Alex’s banter, but to the telepathic call of its commander. Its lipless mouth moved just enough to discern what its mind was saying in response, just before it vanished with the bright flicker of a teleport.</p><p></p><p>“Soon.” Alex quipped as he stood and brushed off his robes. He glanced around his cell, knowing that it would hopefully be the last time that he saw it. Oddly, he smirked, feeling a bizarre sense of regret at leaving it behind. The tight, Spartan confines reminded him so very much of the cells that he’d seen in his dreams. There’d been a wild-haired man named Esmus that had spoken with him while behind and beyond him, all manner of wild, fantastic beasts crawled in and out of focus. He knew them well of course. They’d been his friends for years now. They’d taught him so many magical secrets and shown him the true nature of the world.</p><p></p><p>Those dreams had led him there to Maladomini. He’d waltzed in and introduced himself to the Duke. That hadn’t gone very well and of course they’d hurled him into a prison cell for his efforts. All the better though, since they fed him and now here he was ready to witness the events that the dreams had shown him. On the heels of what was soon to happen, the others that Esmus had shown him would hopefully arrive on their own and then he’d join up with them. Six of them in all, they’d been a group of figures crisp, distinct, and familiar amid a swirling, screaming ocean of unformed madness.</p><p></p><p>Gripping his cell bars, further down the passageway, Alex watched barbazu guards leaving their posts and dashing towards the spiral stairwell leading towards the main gallery far below. Visible only to his eyes, his familiar, a seven eyed raven opened its beak, revealing a translucent tongue that briefly split into nine wriggling tentacles. Croaking its eagerness, its seven pupils divided like organelles impaled upon mitotic spindles before merging back to normal and all was as it should otherwise be.</p><p></p><p>“I think you’re right,” Alex stroked the raven’s head and nodded, "It's time for us to go."</p><p></p><p>He gestured to the darkened corners of the cell, a cell that held him in all honestly only so long as he desired confinement by the baatezu. The shadows grew thick and viscous, congealing and aggregating along the hard, perpendicular corners of the cell. There the geometry blurred and moved as something behind the angle pushed at the suddenly malleable space. Alex smiled and reached out to pet the head of the monstrous, translucent, vaguely canid head that emerged and forced itself into this reality at his calling.</p><p></p><p>"What are you doing in there idiot mortal?" The other jail warden called out as it stepped into view, just in time to behold the emerging beasts forcing its way out of the walls.</p><p></p><p>Alex moved to the side, turned and smiled at his cell guard. Exposed to the light and now fully visible, the Tindalos hound leered and sniffed at the air, panting as its jaws yawned wide with strands of iridescent mucus trailing between them. </p><p></p><p>"Feast.” Alex pointed at the osyluth whose eyes widened in time with the hound’s jaws. It screamed for only a short time before the ambient noise devolved into a series of wet gurgles, snapping bones, and the disquieting sounds of the Tindalos hound’s jaws disarticulating in order to swallow the fiend whole.</p><p></p><p>Watching his summoned pet eat with a fierce wagging of its translucent tail, Alex whispered a phrase and stepped through the cell bars as if they weren’t there. Once on the other side, he knelt down next to the hound and softly stroked it behind the ears. “Good boy. Such a good boy.”</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p><p></p><p></p><p>The doors into Duke Melikaros' estate opened onto the form of a thin, devil-blooded tiefling immaculately dressed in a black and scarlet butler's uniform embossed with the Duke's crest.</p><p></p><p>As soon as the door opened and the butler smiled a practiced and utterly disinterested smile, a lance of burning pain erupted at Clueless's ankle. The bladesinger struggled to remain standing as the yugoloth artifact lodged there in his flesh began pulsing with an inner heartbeat all its own.</p><p></p><p>"How may I help you?" The butler's eyes danced over the group that stood before him, his eyes a piercing, luminous color like rubies set within his delicate, makeup painted face.</p><p></p><p>Toras was the first to speak, "We're here to see a guest of the Duke's."</p><p></p><p>"I see," The butler stood still, not moving an inch, not opening the doors any more than his own slender frame covered. Any attempt to view into the manor beyond him was for naught, obscured by his frame. “The Duke has numerous guests at any given moment. Pray tell who in specific are you here to see?”</p><p></p><p>"An elf." The half-celestial answered with a certain irrational certainty as if the vague descriptor would open up the door of a baatezu nobleman’s manor for them to perhaps look and search without any worry whatsoever.</p><p></p><p>"An elf you say?" The butler raised an eyebrow skeptically, "And their name?"</p><p></p><p>Toras looked away, "We're not actually certain of their exact name."</p><p></p><p>"They're mortal and an elf, and they're a guest of the Duke." Florian gestured past the butler, "Surely there can't be many people fitting that description?”</p><p></p><p>The butler frowned once more and just faintly, one of his ears twitched as if listening to something further back and behind him in the manor. His reply to the Duke’s would-be visitors was blunt, "His infernal grace is not in the habit of allowing anyone without a formal invitation to browse through his court guests..."</p><p></p><p>“This is important sir.” Florian clasped her hands together with as sincere of an expression as she could muster to the disdainful look the butler glared down at her.</p><p></p><p>Behind her, Clueless grimaced and steadied himself. His ankle hurt worse than almost anything he’d ever experienced. Oddly, it increased the closer that he drew to the manor.</p><p></p><p>Florian pressed the tiefling, “If we could simply speak with one of the Duke’s functionaries and ascertain if the person that we’re looking for -on behalf of one of the factions I might add- is or has been here as a guest of the Duke’s, we could be out of your hair as swiftly as possible. Please.”</p><p></p><p>The butler’s ruby eyes stared daggers into the six of them and he continued to frown. Finally after a long moment of carefully examining each of them in turn, he sighed. “So be it. Please, follow me inside.”</p><p></p><p>With that, the butler spun around on one hoof and walked into the manor.</p><p></p><p>Giving a half wary, half giddy smile, Toras shrugged and whispered, “I didn’t honestly think that would work!”</p><p></p><p>Behind him, Nisha shrugged and stuck out her tongue. “Normally it doesn’t. Normally they sent a bunch of osyluths to chase you. Or they maze you, or throw you into an actual maze, with actual osyluths. At least that was what happened with Dagos that one… time… yes?”</p><p></p><p>Tristol peered down at Nisha with a look of worry, “Seriously?”</p><p></p><p>Giggling, the tiefling made a shrug just the same as her previous one, leaving the aasimar in complete confusion if she’d at some point angered one of the Dark 8 or simply was making up yet another quirky story that never actually happened to join the many others of her own eminently mutable past.</p><p></p><p>True story or complete fib, Nisha clip-clopped along in equally opposite time as the tiefling butler as he retreated past the open doors and into the manor. Following in his unwelcoming wake, they all proceeded into the diabolic estate.</p><p></p><p>The butler sighed, his voice echoing through the otherwise deathly quiet palatial chamber, “It’s rare that the Duke allows guests into his private estate without a prior vetting from the Ministry of Mortal Relations or Immortal Relations in the celestial bitch’s situation.”</p><p>Fyrehowl softly snarled at the insult, but still, she kept her hands at her sides, rather than lashing out while the offending devil-spawn’s back was turned. Striking down a servitor of the Duke before they’d had a chance to investigate would do them no favors.</p><p></p><p>They passed below a great vaulted archway crafted of gold and wrought iron carved with elaborate, baroque decorative patterns to resemble screaming tanar’ri beneath the boots of ranks of baatezu soldiers, with a laughing, leering sculpture of the Duke himself upon the keystone. Normally upon passage beneath such an icon, one of his legion of soldiers and even court members of noble rank themselves would make a subtle sign of obeisance, if not outright bow or curtsy in deference. The implied insult of ignoring it was subtle in and of itself, but Clueless and Tristol noticed and glanced at each other before the butler spoke again.</p><p></p><p>“I suppose that I’m violating some insipid rule of his by letting you in.” The butler gave a pronounced and careless shrug as he walked past the arch and into the grand expanse of the main gallery. “I should have left you at the door.”</p><p></p><p>Less than ten feet further in and Fyrehowl abruptly paused. Ears erect and fur prickled with worry, she twitched her nose at the scent of fresh blood and ozone. The Cipher’s senses screamed that something wasn’t right.</p><p></p><p>“Mother f*cker…” Clueless cursed under his breath as the gem in his ankle throbbed again. Belatedly he realized that the waxing of the pain wasn’t determined by how close to the manor he was, but how close he came to the butler.</p><p></p><p>“You should have simply walked away at my suspicion of your intent.” The butler stopped in the room’s center, turning around to look at the six of them as he stood amid a great pool of blood that oozed out upon the marble floor. Flanking him were the corpses of two cornugons, both of them torn to pieces. “I did not come here to the depths of this place reeking of Law and larvae to enjoy the scent,” He sneered in abject loathing at the description of Hell, “I came here for revenge, and sadly for you, you’ll be incidental victims of that.”</p><p></p><p>“Oh dear! I think we have the wrong address!” Nisha gave a nervous and exaggerated laugh. “We meant to go to the next manor over! So sorry, we’ll just be leaving now…”</p><p></p><p>Taba smirked as his guests stared at the dead baatezu and understood why the estate seemed deathly quiet and seemingly unmanned by any obvious security.</p><p></p><p>“May your deaths be swift and clean in the name of my master.” Taba’s mouth twisted and shifted, erupting from the slender lines of a tiefling into a vast fanged maw a dozen times larger in size. In the space of a heartbeat her flesh was fluid and malleable, twisting into a form better suited for combat against a half dozen foes. “Your blood is spent as penance for this delay in my hunt for a specific traitor whose heart will grace my gullet oh so soon.”</p><p></p><p>Clueless drew Razor, and as he did so, the pain in his ankle ceased. The gem had recognized the yugoloth lord, even if he wasn’t yet aware of the butler’s identity as that of the Infiltrator of the Planes.</p><p></p><p>“What the f*ck is that thing?!” Florian gripped her holy symbol tight and began to whisper a prayer to the Foehammer.</p><p></p><p>“Ugly…” Toras drew his sword and stepped to the right.</p><p></p><p>Eight armored legs, like those of a steel insect erupted from Taba’s flesh, lifting her body into the air while barbed tentacles ripped from out of her upper chest, each of them dripping an acidic poison to hiss and pit the floor. A trio of scorpion-like tails burst bloodlessly from her back, moving and threatening. In the end, only the butler’s horned head remained intact, albeit with a monstrously deformed maw and its ruby eyes now radiant and flickering.</p><p></p><p>Taba laughed a shrill telepathic cry even as she wordlessly began to intone the words of a spell.</p><p></p><p>“All glory to the General of Gehenna!”</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 6627044, member: 11697"] Alex sat in the ruddy darkness of his prison cell on the third level of a particularly secure and dour section of Duke Melikaros’ manor. Normally the place existed as less of a jail and more of a temporary holding cell for the torture of political prisoners prior to their being transferred into the tender caress of one or another infernal ministry. Alex however didn’t fall into the category of rival, tanar’ri agent, thief, or abandoned servitor of another petty baatezu noble. Defying those categorizations, and given the unique circumstances of his arrival in Maladomini, he’d languished in his cell for two weeks’ time already. Of course, it was less as a means of punishment for his transgressions, and more for the fact that the Duke’s security neither cared about him and simply didn’t know what to do with him. Alex yawned and stretched, wriggling his fingers and going through the practiced motions of spellcasting to which he was exceedingly adept and of course had yet to actually practice in sight of his diabolic captors. Somewhere in his third decade of life, the human ran a hand through his fussy blond hair and turned his head towards the door of his cell and the faint noises now filtering up from elsewhere more distant. “They’re fighting.” He remarked, brushing his hand over something that perched unseen upon his shoulder. “Quite a large number of them too. I suspect that’s who we’re here to meet.” “Prisoner!” The grim visage of an osyluth gaoler leered into view and the cell bars rattled with the impact of its spear. “Yes dear jailor of mine?” Alex smiled innocently. “Whatever might be amiss? I thought that I heard fighting down below.” “None of your concern mortal whelp!” The osyluth snarled, pausing and glancing backwards away from his prisoner as the dull whump of an explosion echoed up from the same direction of the fighting. “That sounded like the detonation of a lightning bolt through several rather unfortunate and impromptu lightning rods.” Alex mused matter-of-factly, much to the jailor’s chagrin. A moment later he wrinkled his nose. “Definitely lightning. You can smell the ozone just now.” The sounds of combat grew closer and louder, and now the osyluth keened it head not to listen to the sounds of fighting, nor to Alex’s banter, but to the telepathic call of its commander. Its lipless mouth moved just enough to discern what its mind was saying in response, just before it vanished with the bright flicker of a teleport. “Soon.” Alex quipped as he stood and brushed off his robes. He glanced around his cell, knowing that it would hopefully be the last time that he saw it. Oddly, he smirked, feeling a bizarre sense of regret at leaving it behind. The tight, Spartan confines reminded him so very much of the cells that he’d seen in his dreams. There’d been a wild-haired man named Esmus that had spoken with him while behind and beyond him, all manner of wild, fantastic beasts crawled in and out of focus. He knew them well of course. They’d been his friends for years now. They’d taught him so many magical secrets and shown him the true nature of the world. Those dreams had led him there to Maladomini. He’d waltzed in and introduced himself to the Duke. That hadn’t gone very well and of course they’d hurled him into a prison cell for his efforts. All the better though, since they fed him and now here he was ready to witness the events that the dreams had shown him. On the heels of what was soon to happen, the others that Esmus had shown him would hopefully arrive on their own and then he’d join up with them. Six of them in all, they’d been a group of figures crisp, distinct, and familiar amid a swirling, screaming ocean of unformed madness. Gripping his cell bars, further down the passageway, Alex watched barbazu guards leaving their posts and dashing towards the spiral stairwell leading towards the main gallery far below. Visible only to his eyes, his familiar, a seven eyed raven opened its beak, revealing a translucent tongue that briefly split into nine wriggling tentacles. Croaking its eagerness, its seven pupils divided like organelles impaled upon mitotic spindles before merging back to normal and all was as it should otherwise be. “I think you’re right,” Alex stroked the raven’s head and nodded, "It's time for us to go." He gestured to the darkened corners of the cell, a cell that held him in all honestly only so long as he desired confinement by the baatezu. The shadows grew thick and viscous, congealing and aggregating along the hard, perpendicular corners of the cell. There the geometry blurred and moved as something behind the angle pushed at the suddenly malleable space. Alex smiled and reached out to pet the head of the monstrous, translucent, vaguely canid head that emerged and forced itself into this reality at his calling. "What are you doing in there idiot mortal?" The other jail warden called out as it stepped into view, just in time to behold the emerging beasts forcing its way out of the walls. Alex moved to the side, turned and smiled at his cell guard. Exposed to the light and now fully visible, the Tindalos hound leered and sniffed at the air, panting as its jaws yawned wide with strands of iridescent mucus trailing between them. "Feast.” Alex pointed at the osyluth whose eyes widened in time with the hound’s jaws. It screamed for only a short time before the ambient noise devolved into a series of wet gurgles, snapping bones, and the disquieting sounds of the Tindalos hound’s jaws disarticulating in order to swallow the fiend whole. Watching his summoned pet eat with a fierce wagging of its translucent tail, Alex whispered a phrase and stepped through the cell bars as if they weren’t there. Once on the other side, he knelt down next to the hound and softly stroked it behind the ears. “Good boy. Such a good boy.” [center]****[/center] The doors into Duke Melikaros' estate opened onto the form of a thin, devil-blooded tiefling immaculately dressed in a black and scarlet butler's uniform embossed with the Duke's crest. As soon as the door opened and the butler smiled a practiced and utterly disinterested smile, a lance of burning pain erupted at Clueless's ankle. The bladesinger struggled to remain standing as the yugoloth artifact lodged there in his flesh began pulsing with an inner heartbeat all its own. "How may I help you?" The butler's eyes danced over the group that stood before him, his eyes a piercing, luminous color like rubies set within his delicate, makeup painted face. Toras was the first to speak, "We're here to see a guest of the Duke's." "I see," The butler stood still, not moving an inch, not opening the doors any more than his own slender frame covered. Any attempt to view into the manor beyond him was for naught, obscured by his frame. “The Duke has numerous guests at any given moment. Pray tell who in specific are you here to see?” "An elf." The half-celestial answered with a certain irrational certainty as if the vague descriptor would open up the door of a baatezu nobleman’s manor for them to perhaps look and search without any worry whatsoever. "An elf you say?" The butler raised an eyebrow skeptically, "And their name?" Toras looked away, "We're not actually certain of their exact name." "They're mortal and an elf, and they're a guest of the Duke." Florian gestured past the butler, "Surely there can't be many people fitting that description?” The butler frowned once more and just faintly, one of his ears twitched as if listening to something further back and behind him in the manor. His reply to the Duke’s would-be visitors was blunt, "His infernal grace is not in the habit of allowing anyone without a formal invitation to browse through his court guests..." “This is important sir.” Florian clasped her hands together with as sincere of an expression as she could muster to the disdainful look the butler glared down at her. Behind her, Clueless grimaced and steadied himself. His ankle hurt worse than almost anything he’d ever experienced. Oddly, it increased the closer that he drew to the manor. Florian pressed the tiefling, “If we could simply speak with one of the Duke’s functionaries and ascertain if the person that we’re looking for -on behalf of one of the factions I might add- is or has been here as a guest of the Duke’s, we could be out of your hair as swiftly as possible. Please.” The butler’s ruby eyes stared daggers into the six of them and he continued to frown. Finally after a long moment of carefully examining each of them in turn, he sighed. “So be it. Please, follow me inside.” With that, the butler spun around on one hoof and walked into the manor. Giving a half wary, half giddy smile, Toras shrugged and whispered, “I didn’t honestly think that would work!” Behind him, Nisha shrugged and stuck out her tongue. “Normally it doesn’t. Normally they sent a bunch of osyluths to chase you. Or they maze you, or throw you into an actual maze, with actual osyluths. At least that was what happened with Dagos that one… time… yes?” Tristol peered down at Nisha with a look of worry, “Seriously?” Giggling, the tiefling made a shrug just the same as her previous one, leaving the aasimar in complete confusion if she’d at some point angered one of the Dark 8 or simply was making up yet another quirky story that never actually happened to join the many others of her own eminently mutable past. True story or complete fib, Nisha clip-clopped along in equally opposite time as the tiefling butler as he retreated past the open doors and into the manor. Following in his unwelcoming wake, they all proceeded into the diabolic estate. The butler sighed, his voice echoing through the otherwise deathly quiet palatial chamber, “It’s rare that the Duke allows guests into his private estate without a prior vetting from the Ministry of Mortal Relations or Immortal Relations in the celestial bitch’s situation.” Fyrehowl softly snarled at the insult, but still, she kept her hands at her sides, rather than lashing out while the offending devil-spawn’s back was turned. Striking down a servitor of the Duke before they’d had a chance to investigate would do them no favors. They passed below a great vaulted archway crafted of gold and wrought iron carved with elaborate, baroque decorative patterns to resemble screaming tanar’ri beneath the boots of ranks of baatezu soldiers, with a laughing, leering sculpture of the Duke himself upon the keystone. Normally upon passage beneath such an icon, one of his legion of soldiers and even court members of noble rank themselves would make a subtle sign of obeisance, if not outright bow or curtsy in deference. The implied insult of ignoring it was subtle in and of itself, but Clueless and Tristol noticed and glanced at each other before the butler spoke again. “I suppose that I’m violating some insipid rule of his by letting you in.” The butler gave a pronounced and careless shrug as he walked past the arch and into the grand expanse of the main gallery. “I should have left you at the door.” Less than ten feet further in and Fyrehowl abruptly paused. Ears erect and fur prickled with worry, she twitched her nose at the scent of fresh blood and ozone. The Cipher’s senses screamed that something wasn’t right. “Mother f*cker…” Clueless cursed under his breath as the gem in his ankle throbbed again. Belatedly he realized that the waxing of the pain wasn’t determined by how close to the manor he was, but how close he came to the butler. “You should have simply walked away at my suspicion of your intent.” The butler stopped in the room’s center, turning around to look at the six of them as he stood amid a great pool of blood that oozed out upon the marble floor. Flanking him were the corpses of two cornugons, both of them torn to pieces. “I did not come here to the depths of this place reeking of Law and larvae to enjoy the scent,” He sneered in abject loathing at the description of Hell, “I came here for revenge, and sadly for you, you’ll be incidental victims of that.” “Oh dear! I think we have the wrong address!” Nisha gave a nervous and exaggerated laugh. “We meant to go to the next manor over! So sorry, we’ll just be leaving now…” Taba smirked as his guests stared at the dead baatezu and understood why the estate seemed deathly quiet and seemingly unmanned by any obvious security. “May your deaths be swift and clean in the name of my master.” Taba’s mouth twisted and shifted, erupting from the slender lines of a tiefling into a vast fanged maw a dozen times larger in size. In the space of a heartbeat her flesh was fluid and malleable, twisting into a form better suited for combat against a half dozen foes. “Your blood is spent as penance for this delay in my hunt for a specific traitor whose heart will grace my gullet oh so soon.” Clueless drew Razor, and as he did so, the pain in his ankle ceased. The gem had recognized the yugoloth lord, even if he wasn’t yet aware of the butler’s identity as that of the Infiltrator of the Planes. “What the f*ck is that thing?!” Florian gripped her holy symbol tight and began to whisper a prayer to the Foehammer. “Ugly…” Toras drew his sword and stepped to the right. Eight armored legs, like those of a steel insect erupted from Taba’s flesh, lifting her body into the air while barbed tentacles ripped from out of her upper chest, each of them dripping an acidic poison to hiss and pit the floor. A trio of scorpion-like tails burst bloodlessly from her back, moving and threatening. In the end, only the butler’s horned head remained intact, albeit with a monstrously deformed maw and its ruby eyes now radiant and flickering. Taba laughed a shrill telepathic cry even as she wordlessly began to intone the words of a spell. “All glory to the General of Gehenna!” [center]****[/center] [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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