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Story Hour
Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 9265443" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>“Clearly my dear, you understand the legal position we find ourselves within?” His voice was cultured, with a tone of smug superiority that came with the overeducated and wealthy members of Sigil high-society who’d originated from somewhere on the Material plane, rather than growing up within the City of Doors itself.</p><p></p><p>Skalliska stared up at the man and let him ramble.</p><p></p><p>“It isn’t so much a transactional exchange, one payment for each portal use,” The man gave a slow, sly smile and a shrug, “That would be against the Lady’s demands regarding Her portals, such as they’ve been detailed through the oftentimes grey and fuzzy communications, legally speaking, via the dabus.”</p><p></p><p>Skalliska continued to stare up at him, her expression unchanging even as she pondered if she could simply kill him.</p><p></p><p>“This is more a proportional fee for average portal usage levied upon the property owners, yourself included, by clients and others, based upon the iron-clad status of myself having pre-existing ownership of the stipulated thirty-five portals present within the legal confines of the ‘Ubiquitous Wayfarer’ subsequently legally known as ‘Portal Schmortal’ and presently legally known as ‘The Portal Jammer’.”</p><p></p><p>Rammander the Wise snapped his fingers and conjured forth a copy of a lengthy legal tractate that ostensibly claimed to give him legal ownership to the -use- of the portals located on the Portal Jammer’s premises if not actual -ownership- of the portals themselves.</p><p></p><p>Skalliska narrowed her eyes and leaned in to read the vagaries of the document, the first few paragraphs seeming to have been composed by a drunken modron in league with an embittered baatezu scribe, only to have the document vanish with another snap of the wizard’s fingers.</p><p></p><p>“A one-time viewing of the full legal text may be purchased from the law firm of Zimrikan Ceolworth-Havindash and Partners in the Lady’s Ward.” Rammander smiled and briefly smoothed his close-cropped beard with a single, manicured finger. “Should you wish to consult it before submitting payment to me either directly or through the very same firm.”</p><p></p><p>The firm of course was the same law firm that for centuries had overseen the affairs of the estate-in-trust of one Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion, not that either Skalliska nor Rammander himself had any clue of that association nor its link to Shemeska the Marauder.</p><p></p><p>Rammander continued with details of implied legal penalties should the proper payments not be made in a timely matter, including but not limited to, monetary penalties to accrue with a compounding interest rate starting at 38% annually, compounded daily, and a lien upon and eventual seizure of the property housing the portals.</p><p></p><p>The kobold looked up at him with cold, reptilian eyes as she briefly adjusted the rim of her hat with a claw, lost in her thoughts as the wizard rambled on, utterly sure of himself and his apparently legally sound, morally rank, present foray into racketeering. Glanced past the wizard at the doorway behind him, she considered reaching into the pouch on her left hip and pulling out a portal key, opening a portal, and simply kicking the man through to whatever fate awaited him in… she thought for a moment as the portal in question varied over the course of the day and partially the month… the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash.</p><p></p><p>But no. That wouldn’t work at all. She briefly glanced behind herself in the brief moment when Rammander paused to inhale and blink, seeing two of her little ones peeking out from behind various objects, a tiny clawed hand, a snout, or a tail poking out into view as they hid, thinking themselves obviously invisible and spectacularly hidden. No need for them to see her do something rash.</p><p></p><p>Ten minutes later and more subtle and not so subtle legally-backed threats later, Skalliska let Rammander go with a promise to go over his monetary demands with the other owners of the Portal Jammer, wherever they were. And as she watched the wizard turn and leave, his tiny yugoloth familiar, a nalg, stared at her with a wicked, unsettling grin upon its hairless, purple-toned vulpine face, its scorpion tail wavering threateningly behind it. Despite the least-yugoloth being nothing by comparison to the archmage whose shoulder it perched upon, the kobold gatecrasher felt distinctly more unsettled in its presence than its master’s.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The seven of them stood before the bound space, a doorway into one of Nimicri’s myriad of false buildings. The bound space swirled with light, Sigil’s illumination at half-past peak washing out over the mimic-moon’s cobblestones, opening up into an alleyway somewhere within the Lower Ward. Escape from Gehenna was visible and unbeknownst to them all it would mean an escape from the very Oinoloth’s claws.</p><p></p><p>“A couple blocks from the Foundry and it’s only drizzling there on the other side.” Florian chuckled, “Sigil never looked so homey by comparison.”</p><p></p><p>The group of them looked around at the sentient moon they stood upon.</p><p></p><p>“No offense to our present city.” The cleric said, correcting her previous statement.</p><p></p><p>Nimicri itself made no comment, if it even heard them at all. Since they’d appeared with its errant child in tow, the mimic-moon had been entirely preoccupied with that reunion, one strained by the child-moon’s torture and brainwashing at the hands of the Oinoloth himself.</p><p></p><p>“I think we should make our exit from Gehenna as quickly as we can.” Clueless nodded his head towards the open portal, a gnawing worry in the back of his mind as the gemstone in his ankle flickered with a particular ache that he hadn’t felt before: the diffuse presence of the Oinoloth himself imminently peering in on them from a thousand different perspectives as his consciousness looked out through every yugoloth within hundreds of miles in orbit of Nimicri and even on the slopes of the distant Furnace.</p><p></p><p>“I think that you deserve the honor of going first.” Toras looked at the Mercykiller Factol and motioned for her to go on.</p><p></p><p>“I’ve been waiting and hoping for this for far too long. Years it seemed to me, though it was much shorter than that.” Alisohn Nilesia gazed at the portal into Sigil. She took a step forward and then paused, hesitant. Part of the once and future Factol of the Mercykillers was terrified to step back into the city of her birth, terrified to that she might almost instantly find herself in the Mazes, or to find the Lady’s Shadow falling upon her.</p><p></p><p>Nilesia steps forward and pauses, hesitant.</p><p></p><p>“I…I can’t…” Nilesia stopped in her tracks and shook her head, pulling a spell from her mind that had lain there, dormant, for the entirety of her imprisonment in the Waste, its use nullified by the anti-magic shackles she’d once worn.</p><p></p><p>“Excuse me?” Toras asked, his question enjoined by the others’ blinks and stares of befuddlement. “We’re right here with a way out of the Plane of Yugoloth f*ckery #1b and you’re not taking the portal?”</p><p></p><p>Nilesia shook her head, a slight bit of regret in her eyes as she mentally caressed the pattersn and formulae of a planeshift spell, reaching for a specific location in Acheron’s layer of Thuldannin.</p><p></p><p>“I’ll rejoin you, eventually.” The Factol explained, “But it won’t be immediate. I have an equipment stash in a mine deep in Thuldannin, and it’s near a one-way portal to the Tower of the Wyrm in Sigil. I need to rest, I need to re-equip myself as best I can, and I need time to seek out what allies and supporters that I still might have alive and politically willing to help me take back my faction from whatever has become of it.”</p><p></p><p>None of them wanted to mention the fact that her faction, in her absence, had dissolved back into its old, original constituent parts, the Sons of Mercy and the Sodkillers, and that their ideological divide had grown ever more fractious in the years since the Faction War. She’d find out herself soon enough, though it wasn’t her faction itself and a desire to reclaim it that was her principle reason for forgoing entry to Sigil at the moment.</p><p></p><p>“I will find you in my own time once I have a better understanding of what base of support and power I still have.” The Factol took a deep breath and focused her eyes on each of her saviors in turn, “Do not release word of my survival or the circumstances in which you found me. I will handle that in my own way, on my own timetable, and I will see to it that you are rewarded in due time in an appropriate manner.”</p><p></p><p>The companions nodded, and one by one they vanished through the portal and back into the City of Doors, Nilesia waving goodbye to each in turn. The moment that the portal flickered and vanished though, her factol’s mind switched from the planeshift and into something more potent as she conjured forth a swirling Gate directly to her intended location deep within the tunnels burrowed into a cube in Acheron’s second layer.</p><p></p><p>One deep breath and three steps and she was gone, vanished from the Oinoloth’s prying sight.</p><p></p><p>“Free…”</p><p></p><p>The once and future Factol of the Mercykillers exhaled, the rust-tainted air filling her lungs, the darkness that surrounded her which might have been suffocating to most any other creature felt instead like a warm and comforting blanket. For the first time since she’d left the yugoloth prison back in the Waste, she felt free and for the moment, safe.</p><p></p><p>In the back of her mind, she could only think of one thing: the faces of her warped, errant copies produced by Nimicri’s wayward child. The mimic, tortured, abused, and indoctrinated by words and magic by the Oinoloth, was innocent of any crime against her. Her warped copies however, they still existed, still remained alive, somehow granted independence of the mimic-moon by the Oinoloth’s power, and still under Vorkannis’s control.</p><p></p><p>“You’re out there… all of you still out there…” Nilesia whispered. She felt them each like distant magnetic poles gently tugging upon the iron filings of her soul. Whatever purpose the Oinoloth still intended for them, she had every notion of delivering her own Justice to them, one by one, and ultimately the Oinoloth himself, however long and whatever it took…</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>“She requests an increase of 400% in the number of trained students sent to her. She does not require that they have actually graduated from their apprenticeship here in the Tower or elsewhere afield.” The Cheshire Fiend calmly explained. He then paused, a wry smirk forming in the illusory form of his manifested, illusory projection.</p><p></p><p>“The Manged asks for much…” Helekanalaith said, his features relatively blank by comparison to his spawn whose planar projection hovered in the air on the other side of his desk.</p><p></p><p>“Certainly, much more than she did when she graced your office for the past year or so.” The Grin chuckled with an irreverence that would have never been tolerated from scarcely any other arcanaloth within the Tower Arcane.</p><p></p><p>The Keeper actually smirked, fondly remembering the statue that for a time graced the corner of the room. Below him, on the current page of his omnipresent notebook that lay open before him, his right hand with a white-hot stylus had penned notes in an artistic, flowing script that meandered in such a way to form an image of that very same petrified astral form of the Overlord of Carceri.</p><p></p><p>Helekanalaith had already received Shylara’s request from three different sources, more a demand than a request in specific prose, and he nodded and listened acutely as his useful curiosity of a child read out the same request with commentary and analysis. Of course, Shylara had requested it directly of him when he’d last projected into the Tower of Incarnate Pain himself. Observing just how the wording and tone of each separate report of the same request altered depending on the one giving it to him occurred, it amused him. The Cheshire Fiend hadn’t altered a word, but it wasn’t the original text he desired so much as his eldest child’s commentary.</p><p></p><p>Next to him, Larsdana’s prison pulsed like a beating heart, and he made absolutely certain that she could hear, all that much better to torture her with the sound of her child’s voice.</p><p></p><p>“And so, I assume that her present galivant into the Inner Planes is going to continue.” The Cheshire Fiend continued, less a statement than a question, and both father and child had been, in the way that all greater yugoloths did, and arcanaloths especially, plying one another for information even as they gave it.</p><p></p><p>Helekanalaith didn’t give a reply to the implied question, though the answer was a very certain yes. It was going to continue and it was more likely than not going to expand. Even so, as he considered her request, he considered refusing, curious if the Oinoloth would step in to reinforce her authority and pick her over him in terms of favor, giving her what she wanted but wounding her pride in the process. A smile spread over his muzzle while the Cheshire Fiend continued his report.</p><p></p><p>“She has not stated the actual need for more forces from the Tower, but I think it patently obvious that losses are…” The Grin paused as the room grew suddenly silent and the Keeper stared off into space. “My Keeper…?”</p><p></p><p>That of course was when he saw it.</p><p></p><p>It wasn’t simply that Helekanalaith had grown silent and stared off, considering something else and ignoring the Cheshire Fiend, no, the entire room was frozen in time. Cinders from the brazier next to the Keeper’s desk hung in the air, glittering and motionless, frozen in space, and through the great window that looked out over the burning slopes of the Second Furnace of Chamada, the volcanic vents and lava flows were still, the entirety of the view frozen and paused.</p><p></p><p>A chill raced through the Cheshire Fiend as his illusory projection turned about and looked for anything else in the room moving beyond himself, and distantly, where his physical form sat, his fur stood erect, prickled with genuine fear.</p><p></p><p>At first, he saw nothing amiss and different, and everything was silent, devoid of the crackle of burning coals in his father’s stylus-holding brazier, nor the normal sounds of the Tower and the screams of its innumerable volumes, each penned upon a mortal soul. Even the subtle, omnipresent glow of Larsdana’s prison, the great, flawless gemstone that served as his father’s desk lamp stood unchanging and still, but in its frozen light where it cast the Keeper’s shadow out across the floor, something stirred.</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend watched with swiftly blossoming horror as it slowly stretched out and widened, and moments later his illusory features lost any notion of amusement or mirth as he watched something of primordial nightmare clamber up into the chamber from out of his father’s shadow.</p><p></p><p>Beginning with one withered, unnaturally elongated hand reaching up to grab hold of the edge of the floor to then drag the rest of its wasted, nearly anorexic body up into the chamber, the baernaloth Sarkithel fek Parthis the Chronicler emerged up from Helekanalaith’s shadow, clambering up into the Tower from wherever it had been, or at least a portion of itself. The Baern weren’t restricted to one corporeal existence, and it was likely that this was simply a manifestation of the baernaloth that existed within the Keeper like a gloriously malign parasite.</p><p></p><p>Towering over Helekanalaith’s seated form, placing one hand on the Keeper’s shoulder, treating the arch-yugoloth like a living walking cane, the baernaloth’s rheumy eyes turned and focused on the Cheshire Fiend. It stood there silently, a notebook hovering before it, its other hand reaching down to poach one of the Keeper’s burning styluses to begin taking notes of its own.</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend had no words, and his illusory projection actually shuddered as one of The Demented gazed down at him. His Father had spoken of the baernaloth only a few times. There had been a distant look of mixed terror and abject awe in his eyes each and every time, an expression now present ten times over upon the illusory visage of his progeny.</p><p></p><p>“Greetings to you, spawn of my host.” The baernaloth leered down from behind Helekanalaith, the Keeper and everything else in the room frozen in a moment between moments. It spoke in baernaloth, the words not understood but felt and known with a terrible innate familiarity, yet still utterly alien, their meaning simultaneously delivered telepathically such that The Grin could glean the proto-fiend’s meaning. “This is our first-time conversing, though hardly the first time that I’ve seen you.”</p><p></p><p>The proto-fiend smiled knowingly; the words open to a wild variety of meanings, and as it physically spoke in the language of its kind, even though the Cheshire Fiend wasn’t physically present there in the Keeper’s chamber, the words nonetheless caused it a building discomfort.</p><p></p><p>“I have a task for you.” Sarkithel intoned, his words as calm and emotionless as ever. “A name for you to consider. A life that I have for you to take.”</p><p></p><p>Even as the baernaloth’s words began to build from discomfort to something more than merely that, the Grin’s response was swift and his tone eager, bordering upon slavish. Gone was the manipulative, self-centered tongue of a greater yugoloth who viewed the entire cosmos as their own prize, their own plaything to torment and abuse for their own sick pleasure, replaced in an instant with a blind slave to Evil, one more nameless, meaningless cog in a machine of suffering begging for direction in how fast to spin.</p><p></p><p>“Anything!” He replied, “Ask it of me and it will be done without hesitation.”</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend’s eyes darted of course towards his sire, and distantly his physical heart quickened and a delirious smile of anticipation played across his muzzle.</p><p></p><p>“No.” The Chronicler’s answer was swift, even as it drew the words out, much to the Keeper’s child’s disappointment. “But you do think grandly, and in a grand tradition of betrayal that burns though your blood. Your Father, were he aware of our discussion, he would surely be proud of you for that instant assumption of yours.”</p><p></p><p>The baernaloth turned a page in its book, the continuous scribbling of notes a mirror to the Keeper’s own practice.</p><p></p><p>“Who then shall I slaughter for you?”</p><p></p><p>Sarkithel’s answer was not who the Cheshire Fiend would have ever assumed.</p><p></p><p>“Shemeshka the Marauder.”</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend giggled. Not an expression of humor, but a nervous tik wrought of a moment of overwhelming emotions: shock, fear, and delight all at once churning from a break in a mental dam and spilling out uncontrolled over the farmlands and populated villages of his mind.</p><p></p><p>“Pardon?” The Grin nearly stuttered in response. Perhaps he’d misheard.</p><p></p><p>The baernaloth’s rheumy eyes held his gaze and it reiterated the name once more.</p><p></p><p>“Shemeshka the Marauder, the King of the Crosstrade.” The baernaloth leaned forward, “Kill her.”</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend began to ache as the baernaloth continued to speak in its native, primordial tongue.</p><p></p><p>“However you desire to accomplish the task is of course your choice.” The baernaloth explained with clinical disregard for the enormity of the task, its fingers turning from one page in its notebook to the next, its notes painting a picture of the Cheshire Fiend’s actual face, an expression of overwhelmed delight, anticipation, and fear. “The details and minutiae are entirely your concern. Your practiced art to indulge and enjoy.”</p><p></p><p>Distantly, the Cheshire Fiend’s physical body began to bleed and he began to softly whimper. Something was happening to him beyond simply the soft agony of a non-baernaloth listening to the words of one of the Gloom Fathers.</p><p></p><p>“Ah, you feel it, of course.” The Chronicler leaned in, its caprine nostrils inhaling as if it would smell the yugoloth’s suffering from across the planes. “What you feel now is the sweet agony of each and every wound that you have ever experienced in your prolonged existence, all of them replaying, all of them meandering across your flesh at once, a reiteration of a lifetime of agony and injury.”</p><p></p><p>The baernaloth’s expression remained as utterly blank as ever.</p><p></p><p>The Cheshire Fiend’s whimper turned into a scream.</p><p></p><p>A tracery of lines across his chest, the claws of a vrock in service to Demogorgon who he’d disintegrated a moment later there upon the battlefields of Pazunia. A burn upon his left forearm from a torrent of holy water unleashed by an aasimon, moments before he’d torn out its heart. A silver blade in his back from a rival in the Tower Arcane, a rival whose teeth now decorated a wine glass he’d commissioned and later gifted to a long-dead lover. It played out in exquisite agony, a dozen dozen wounds and more from the incidental to the near fatal, each one remembered, each face and each moment associated with the injury known, cataloged, and each subsequent revenge savored in memory or planned and imagined for the future yet to come.</p><p></p><p>But then, one very special one beyond all of them. The illusion whimpered and the Chronicler took note.</p><p></p><p>“Ah, yes, that one you remember well.” The baernaloth tilted its head as if to listen to a particularly sweet moment in a song’s progression. “A claw upon your forehead, a single tentative nick, a pause, consideration playing upon her face and the blade upon your neck turned to another. Prove to me in this act that she made the correct decision.”</p><p></p><p>Sarkithel fek Parthis turned and glanced at the gemstone that held Larsdana ap Neut’s imprisoned essence, and for a fraction of a second the prison’s light stuttered and flickered, seeming almost like a chuckle, as if she were aware somehow, watching, leering, salivating.</p><p></p><p>“You have your name and your task, and for it you have one month.”</p><p></p><p>“One month…” The Cheshire Fiend gasped for breath, his heart in his throat and his senses afire with the magnitude of the Gloom Father’s request, the utter suddenness of it, the consequences to power structures and plots within Sigil and without, and the simple question of how he would do it.</p><p></p><p>“That of course is up to you, yugoloth.” The Chronicler gave a shrug, “I care only that the task is accomplished. There are otherwise no conditions or stipulations.”</p><p></p><p>“Yes Father/Mother…” The Cheshire Fiend whispered.</p><p></p><p>“Fail and everything you have felt now, it will all happen once again in one beautiful instant.”</p><p></p><p>Before the Cheshire Fiend had a moment to finish a single, articulated thought, without the chance to speak a single word more in response to the Gloom Father, time restarted as if the baernaloth had never been there.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Without so much as a word from his lips or a motion of his hands, Vokannis the Ebon stepped through a swirling gate and within his private chambers deep within the heart of Khin-Oin the Wasting Tower. Surrounded by the comforting gloom and the soft cries of the various mezzoloths that yet survived his experimentation, the Oinoloth sighed.</p><p></p><p>He opened his mouth, paused, and then remained silent. His mind swirled with a myriad of potentialities and options regarding the unfolding situation with Nilesia’s escape and how it impacted every other one of his innumerable schemes across the Lower Planes and beyond. He didn’t speak, and only a snarl issued past his lips, his fangs luminous white against the darkness.</p><p></p><p>Twenty minutes of thinking, brooding, and pacing later, the Oinoloth took a deep breath and glanced over one of the room’s far corners. The very same corner blanketed with a layer of ice and ash, his footprints limned in soot and frost traced back and forth to it from various points in the room, and at the moment his movements led him back to it once again.</p><p></p><p>Without words, with barely a sound, but with a slow, almost ritualistically methodical series of motions, Vorkannis let his robe slip from his shoulders to pool at his feet as he then stepped onto the frozen patch of ash and ice. Nothing happened as he sat down, his legs crossed, the frozen ash and icy soil in direct contact with his flesh.</p><p></p><p>The Oinoloth inhaled, closed his eyes, and focused, listening.</p><p></p><p>The screams of the host of celestials reached his mind and he smiled, savoring their horror and their agony reaching out to him, their warnings to him and any others that might hear them being a prophetic call. The screams of the yugoloths whose ashes mixed with theirs were just as sweet to his ears.</p><p></p><p>It was less a prelude to a conversation than it was meditation.</p><p></p><p>“The concern is minor, but it is a concern nonetheless.” The Oinoloth’s lips moved, mouthing the words in baernaloth as they were mirrored on the pages of his thoughts. “Out of caution I ask for guidance.”</p><p></p><p>In the utter darkness of the Oinoloth’s soul, eyes gazed back at him and the words of an answer filtered up from across an inconceivably vast distance. The words screamed, pounding into his brain and into every molecule of his being a response and always a singular, solitary word/phrase/name/concept/formula/everything at once: VORNELTHRAANIX.</p><p></p><p>Unlike most every other eye or ear that had ever perceived it, the Oinoloth knew precisely what it was and what it meant, and simultaneously he did not. Such was its very nature still.</p><p></p><p>Vorkannis’ ears twitched and he nodded, listening intently, though he did so without reverence or fear. At best, the notion of respect existed in his expressions and tone of voice as he replied, and for a moment the Oinoloth’s overwhelming sense of smug superiority was absent.</p><p></p><p>“Of course.” The Oinoloth’s mouth moved once again, his head tilting almost imperceptibly to the side as he listened, and then only a few moments later he nodded. “Yes, as I concluded as well.”</p><p></p><p>The conversation continued another twenty minutes before Vorkannis eventually opened his eyes, a mixed expression somewhere between satisfaction and continued, meandering worry playing across his muzzle. He stood, stepped free of the soil from the Vale of Frozen Ashes that he’d transplanted into his chamber there within Khin-Oin, and gathered up his robe, dressing before sitting atop his throne and directing his consciousness back across the planes and into his various puppets.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>One hour later:</p><p></p><p>When they returned to the Portal Jammer, they returned to news from Skalliska of a certain protégé of the Marauder making dubious claims about being owed remuneration for use of portals he claimed to “own”. That, however notorious the wizard in question was, was entirely secondary in their minds to the other figure waiting for them: Factol Nathaniel of the Fraternity of Order.</p><p></p><p>“I’ve found it.” The youthful factol could barely contain his excitement as they took him into one of the tavern’s backrooms to explain himself.</p><p></p><p>“Calm down,” Toras put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder, “You look as excited as Nisha with a basket of fireworks and a lit match.”</p><p></p><p>Neither the Guvner nor the party’s own personal Xaositect took kindly to the comparison, but the statement was nonetheless true.</p><p></p><p>“Well let me put up some charts that should explain it all!” Nathaniel proceeded to plaster a dozen posters on the wall, each covered top to bottom with a scrawl of mathematical jargon that held essentially zero meaning to everyone but himself, even including Tristol.</p><p></p><p>“I recognize most of the symbols, but you’ve lost me after half the way down the first page.” The vulpinal aasimar shrugged and took a deep breath.</p><p></p><p>Nisha simply stuck out her tongue and gave an emphatic thumbs down.</p><p></p><p>“Dial the numbers down a notch and just explain what it all means,” Clueless asked, “In layman’s terms, please.”</p><p></p><p>It took two false starts for the Factol to accommodate the request, but eventually he got there.</p><p></p><p>“It’s all about what I told you before with my Mother’s obsession.” Nathaniel explained, still with fervent excitement, his words fast from his lips, “The coordinates. I found where they go, what they’re pointing to!”</p><p></p><p>That of course got their attention, and the Factol’s answer would point them towards the same destination that a massive yugoloth army was presently, unbeknownst to them, working their way towards as well.</p><p></p><p>“Here!” Nathaniel rolled out a conceptual map of the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Mineral and there, nearly straddling the border with the Positive Energy Plane sat a singular, mysterious point on the map: The Tower of Lead.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 9265443, member: 11697"] “Clearly my dear, you understand the legal position we find ourselves within?” His voice was cultured, with a tone of smug superiority that came with the overeducated and wealthy members of Sigil high-society who’d originated from somewhere on the Material plane, rather than growing up within the City of Doors itself. Skalliska stared up at the man and let him ramble. “It isn’t so much a transactional exchange, one payment for each portal use,” The man gave a slow, sly smile and a shrug, “That would be against the Lady’s demands regarding Her portals, such as they’ve been detailed through the oftentimes grey and fuzzy communications, legally speaking, via the dabus.” Skalliska continued to stare up at him, her expression unchanging even as she pondered if she could simply kill him. “This is more a proportional fee for average portal usage levied upon the property owners, yourself included, by clients and others, based upon the iron-clad status of myself having pre-existing ownership of the stipulated thirty-five portals present within the legal confines of the ‘Ubiquitous Wayfarer’ subsequently legally known as ‘Portal Schmortal’ and presently legally known as ‘The Portal Jammer’.” Rammander the Wise snapped his fingers and conjured forth a copy of a lengthy legal tractate that ostensibly claimed to give him legal ownership to the -use- of the portals located on the Portal Jammer’s premises if not actual -ownership- of the portals themselves. Skalliska narrowed her eyes and leaned in to read the vagaries of the document, the first few paragraphs seeming to have been composed by a drunken modron in league with an embittered baatezu scribe, only to have the document vanish with another snap of the wizard’s fingers. “A one-time viewing of the full legal text may be purchased from the law firm of Zimrikan Ceolworth-Havindash and Partners in the Lady’s Ward.” Rammander smiled and briefly smoothed his close-cropped beard with a single, manicured finger. “Should you wish to consult it before submitting payment to me either directly or through the very same firm.” The firm of course was the same law firm that for centuries had overseen the affairs of the estate-in-trust of one Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion, not that either Skalliska nor Rammander himself had any clue of that association nor its link to Shemeska the Marauder. Rammander continued with details of implied legal penalties should the proper payments not be made in a timely matter, including but not limited to, monetary penalties to accrue with a compounding interest rate starting at 38% annually, compounded daily, and a lien upon and eventual seizure of the property housing the portals. The kobold looked up at him with cold, reptilian eyes as she briefly adjusted the rim of her hat with a claw, lost in her thoughts as the wizard rambled on, utterly sure of himself and his apparently legally sound, morally rank, present foray into racketeering. Glanced past the wizard at the doorway behind him, she considered reaching into the pouch on her left hip and pulling out a portal key, opening a portal, and simply kicking the man through to whatever fate awaited him in… she thought for a moment as the portal in question varied over the course of the day and partially the month… the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash. But no. That wouldn’t work at all. She briefly glanced behind herself in the brief moment when Rammander paused to inhale and blink, seeing two of her little ones peeking out from behind various objects, a tiny clawed hand, a snout, or a tail poking out into view as they hid, thinking themselves obviously invisible and spectacularly hidden. No need for them to see her do something rash. Ten minutes later and more subtle and not so subtle legally-backed threats later, Skalliska let Rammander go with a promise to go over his monetary demands with the other owners of the Portal Jammer, wherever they were. And as she watched the wizard turn and leave, his tiny yugoloth familiar, a nalg, stared at her with a wicked, unsettling grin upon its hairless, purple-toned vulpine face, its scorpion tail wavering threateningly behind it. Despite the least-yugoloth being nothing by comparison to the archmage whose shoulder it perched upon, the kobold gatecrasher felt distinctly more unsettled in its presence than its master’s. [CENTER]***[/CENTER] The seven of them stood before the bound space, a doorway into one of Nimicri’s myriad of false buildings. The bound space swirled with light, Sigil’s illumination at half-past peak washing out over the mimic-moon’s cobblestones, opening up into an alleyway somewhere within the Lower Ward. Escape from Gehenna was visible and unbeknownst to them all it would mean an escape from the very Oinoloth’s claws. “A couple blocks from the Foundry and it’s only drizzling there on the other side.” Florian chuckled, “Sigil never looked so homey by comparison.” The group of them looked around at the sentient moon they stood upon. “No offense to our present city.” The cleric said, correcting her previous statement. Nimicri itself made no comment, if it even heard them at all. Since they’d appeared with its errant child in tow, the mimic-moon had been entirely preoccupied with that reunion, one strained by the child-moon’s torture and brainwashing at the hands of the Oinoloth himself. “I think we should make our exit from Gehenna as quickly as we can.” Clueless nodded his head towards the open portal, a gnawing worry in the back of his mind as the gemstone in his ankle flickered with a particular ache that he hadn’t felt before: the diffuse presence of the Oinoloth himself imminently peering in on them from a thousand different perspectives as his consciousness looked out through every yugoloth within hundreds of miles in orbit of Nimicri and even on the slopes of the distant Furnace. “I think that you deserve the honor of going first.” Toras looked at the Mercykiller Factol and motioned for her to go on. “I’ve been waiting and hoping for this for far too long. Years it seemed to me, though it was much shorter than that.” Alisohn Nilesia gazed at the portal into Sigil. She took a step forward and then paused, hesitant. Part of the once and future Factol of the Mercykillers was terrified to step back into the city of her birth, terrified to that she might almost instantly find herself in the Mazes, or to find the Lady’s Shadow falling upon her. Nilesia steps forward and pauses, hesitant. “I…I can’t…” Nilesia stopped in her tracks and shook her head, pulling a spell from her mind that had lain there, dormant, for the entirety of her imprisonment in the Waste, its use nullified by the anti-magic shackles she’d once worn. “Excuse me?” Toras asked, his question enjoined by the others’ blinks and stares of befuddlement. “We’re right here with a way out of the Plane of Yugoloth f*ckery #1b and you’re not taking the portal?” Nilesia shook her head, a slight bit of regret in her eyes as she mentally caressed the pattersn and formulae of a planeshift spell, reaching for a specific location in Acheron’s layer of Thuldannin. “I’ll rejoin you, eventually.” The Factol explained, “But it won’t be immediate. I have an equipment stash in a mine deep in Thuldannin, and it’s near a one-way portal to the Tower of the Wyrm in Sigil. I need to rest, I need to re-equip myself as best I can, and I need time to seek out what allies and supporters that I still might have alive and politically willing to help me take back my faction from whatever has become of it.” None of them wanted to mention the fact that her faction, in her absence, had dissolved back into its old, original constituent parts, the Sons of Mercy and the Sodkillers, and that their ideological divide had grown ever more fractious in the years since the Faction War. She’d find out herself soon enough, though it wasn’t her faction itself and a desire to reclaim it that was her principle reason for forgoing entry to Sigil at the moment. “I will find you in my own time once I have a better understanding of what base of support and power I still have.” The Factol took a deep breath and focused her eyes on each of her saviors in turn, “Do not release word of my survival or the circumstances in which you found me. I will handle that in my own way, on my own timetable, and I will see to it that you are rewarded in due time in an appropriate manner.” The companions nodded, and one by one they vanished through the portal and back into the City of Doors, Nilesia waving goodbye to each in turn. The moment that the portal flickered and vanished though, her factol’s mind switched from the planeshift and into something more potent as she conjured forth a swirling Gate directly to her intended location deep within the tunnels burrowed into a cube in Acheron’s second layer. One deep breath and three steps and she was gone, vanished from the Oinoloth’s prying sight. “Free…” The once and future Factol of the Mercykillers exhaled, the rust-tainted air filling her lungs, the darkness that surrounded her which might have been suffocating to most any other creature felt instead like a warm and comforting blanket. For the first time since she’d left the yugoloth prison back in the Waste, she felt free and for the moment, safe. In the back of her mind, she could only think of one thing: the faces of her warped, errant copies produced by Nimicri’s wayward child. The mimic, tortured, abused, and indoctrinated by words and magic by the Oinoloth, was innocent of any crime against her. Her warped copies however, they still existed, still remained alive, somehow granted independence of the mimic-moon by the Oinoloth’s power, and still under Vorkannis’s control. “You’re out there… all of you still out there…” Nilesia whispered. She felt them each like distant magnetic poles gently tugging upon the iron filings of her soul. Whatever purpose the Oinoloth still intended for them, she had every notion of delivering her own Justice to them, one by one, and ultimately the Oinoloth himself, however long and whatever it took… [CENTER]***[/CENTER] “She requests an increase of 400% in the number of trained students sent to her. She does not require that they have actually graduated from their apprenticeship here in the Tower or elsewhere afield.” The Cheshire Fiend calmly explained. He then paused, a wry smirk forming in the illusory form of his manifested, illusory projection. “The Manged asks for much…” Helekanalaith said, his features relatively blank by comparison to his spawn whose planar projection hovered in the air on the other side of his desk. “Certainly, much more than she did when she graced your office for the past year or so.” The Grin chuckled with an irreverence that would have never been tolerated from scarcely any other arcanaloth within the Tower Arcane. The Keeper actually smirked, fondly remembering the statue that for a time graced the corner of the room. Below him, on the current page of his omnipresent notebook that lay open before him, his right hand with a white-hot stylus had penned notes in an artistic, flowing script that meandered in such a way to form an image of that very same petrified astral form of the Overlord of Carceri. Helekanalaith had already received Shylara’s request from three different sources, more a demand than a request in specific prose, and he nodded and listened acutely as his useful curiosity of a child read out the same request with commentary and analysis. Of course, Shylara had requested it directly of him when he’d last projected into the Tower of Incarnate Pain himself. Observing just how the wording and tone of each separate report of the same request altered depending on the one giving it to him occurred, it amused him. The Cheshire Fiend hadn’t altered a word, but it wasn’t the original text he desired so much as his eldest child’s commentary. Next to him, Larsdana’s prison pulsed like a beating heart, and he made absolutely certain that she could hear, all that much better to torture her with the sound of her child’s voice. “And so, I assume that her present galivant into the Inner Planes is going to continue.” The Cheshire Fiend continued, less a statement than a question, and both father and child had been, in the way that all greater yugoloths did, and arcanaloths especially, plying one another for information even as they gave it. Helekanalaith didn’t give a reply to the implied question, though the answer was a very certain yes. It was going to continue and it was more likely than not going to expand. Even so, as he considered her request, he considered refusing, curious if the Oinoloth would step in to reinforce her authority and pick her over him in terms of favor, giving her what she wanted but wounding her pride in the process. A smile spread over his muzzle while the Cheshire Fiend continued his report. “She has not stated the actual need for more forces from the Tower, but I think it patently obvious that losses are…” The Grin paused as the room grew suddenly silent and the Keeper stared off into space. “My Keeper…?” That of course was when he saw it. It wasn’t simply that Helekanalaith had grown silent and stared off, considering something else and ignoring the Cheshire Fiend, no, the entire room was frozen in time. Cinders from the brazier next to the Keeper’s desk hung in the air, glittering and motionless, frozen in space, and through the great window that looked out over the burning slopes of the Second Furnace of Chamada, the volcanic vents and lava flows were still, the entirety of the view frozen and paused. A chill raced through the Cheshire Fiend as his illusory projection turned about and looked for anything else in the room moving beyond himself, and distantly, where his physical form sat, his fur stood erect, prickled with genuine fear. At first, he saw nothing amiss and different, and everything was silent, devoid of the crackle of burning coals in his father’s stylus-holding brazier, nor the normal sounds of the Tower and the screams of its innumerable volumes, each penned upon a mortal soul. Even the subtle, omnipresent glow of Larsdana’s prison, the great, flawless gemstone that served as his father’s desk lamp stood unchanging and still, but in its frozen light where it cast the Keeper’s shadow out across the floor, something stirred. The Cheshire Fiend watched with swiftly blossoming horror as it slowly stretched out and widened, and moments later his illusory features lost any notion of amusement or mirth as he watched something of primordial nightmare clamber up into the chamber from out of his father’s shadow. Beginning with one withered, unnaturally elongated hand reaching up to grab hold of the edge of the floor to then drag the rest of its wasted, nearly anorexic body up into the chamber, the baernaloth Sarkithel fek Parthis the Chronicler emerged up from Helekanalaith’s shadow, clambering up into the Tower from wherever it had been, or at least a portion of itself. The Baern weren’t restricted to one corporeal existence, and it was likely that this was simply a manifestation of the baernaloth that existed within the Keeper like a gloriously malign parasite. Towering over Helekanalaith’s seated form, placing one hand on the Keeper’s shoulder, treating the arch-yugoloth like a living walking cane, the baernaloth’s rheumy eyes turned and focused on the Cheshire Fiend. It stood there silently, a notebook hovering before it, its other hand reaching down to poach one of the Keeper’s burning styluses to begin taking notes of its own. The Cheshire Fiend had no words, and his illusory projection actually shuddered as one of The Demented gazed down at him. His Father had spoken of the baernaloth only a few times. There had been a distant look of mixed terror and abject awe in his eyes each and every time, an expression now present ten times over upon the illusory visage of his progeny. “Greetings to you, spawn of my host.” The baernaloth leered down from behind Helekanalaith, the Keeper and everything else in the room frozen in a moment between moments. It spoke in baernaloth, the words not understood but felt and known with a terrible innate familiarity, yet still utterly alien, their meaning simultaneously delivered telepathically such that The Grin could glean the proto-fiend’s meaning. “This is our first-time conversing, though hardly the first time that I’ve seen you.” The proto-fiend smiled knowingly; the words open to a wild variety of meanings, and as it physically spoke in the language of its kind, even though the Cheshire Fiend wasn’t physically present there in the Keeper’s chamber, the words nonetheless caused it a building discomfort. “I have a task for you.” Sarkithel intoned, his words as calm and emotionless as ever. “A name for you to consider. A life that I have for you to take.” Even as the baernaloth’s words began to build from discomfort to something more than merely that, the Grin’s response was swift and his tone eager, bordering upon slavish. Gone was the manipulative, self-centered tongue of a greater yugoloth who viewed the entire cosmos as their own prize, their own plaything to torment and abuse for their own sick pleasure, replaced in an instant with a blind slave to Evil, one more nameless, meaningless cog in a machine of suffering begging for direction in how fast to spin. “Anything!” He replied, “Ask it of me and it will be done without hesitation.” The Cheshire Fiend’s eyes darted of course towards his sire, and distantly his physical heart quickened and a delirious smile of anticipation played across his muzzle. “No.” The Chronicler’s answer was swift, even as it drew the words out, much to the Keeper’s child’s disappointment. “But you do think grandly, and in a grand tradition of betrayal that burns though your blood. Your Father, were he aware of our discussion, he would surely be proud of you for that instant assumption of yours.” The baernaloth turned a page in its book, the continuous scribbling of notes a mirror to the Keeper’s own practice. “Who then shall I slaughter for you?” Sarkithel’s answer was not who the Cheshire Fiend would have ever assumed. “Shemeshka the Marauder.” The Cheshire Fiend giggled. Not an expression of humor, but a nervous tik wrought of a moment of overwhelming emotions: shock, fear, and delight all at once churning from a break in a mental dam and spilling out uncontrolled over the farmlands and populated villages of his mind. “Pardon?” The Grin nearly stuttered in response. Perhaps he’d misheard. The baernaloth’s rheumy eyes held his gaze and it reiterated the name once more. “Shemeshka the Marauder, the King of the Crosstrade.” The baernaloth leaned forward, “Kill her.” The Cheshire Fiend began to ache as the baernaloth continued to speak in its native, primordial tongue. “However you desire to accomplish the task is of course your choice.” The baernaloth explained with clinical disregard for the enormity of the task, its fingers turning from one page in its notebook to the next, its notes painting a picture of the Cheshire Fiend’s actual face, an expression of overwhelmed delight, anticipation, and fear. “The details and minutiae are entirely your concern. Your practiced art to indulge and enjoy.” Distantly, the Cheshire Fiend’s physical body began to bleed and he began to softly whimper. Something was happening to him beyond simply the soft agony of a non-baernaloth listening to the words of one of the Gloom Fathers. “Ah, you feel it, of course.” The Chronicler leaned in, its caprine nostrils inhaling as if it would smell the yugoloth’s suffering from across the planes. “What you feel now is the sweet agony of each and every wound that you have ever experienced in your prolonged existence, all of them replaying, all of them meandering across your flesh at once, a reiteration of a lifetime of agony and injury.” The baernaloth’s expression remained as utterly blank as ever. The Cheshire Fiend’s whimper turned into a scream. A tracery of lines across his chest, the claws of a vrock in service to Demogorgon who he’d disintegrated a moment later there upon the battlefields of Pazunia. A burn upon his left forearm from a torrent of holy water unleashed by an aasimon, moments before he’d torn out its heart. A silver blade in his back from a rival in the Tower Arcane, a rival whose teeth now decorated a wine glass he’d commissioned and later gifted to a long-dead lover. It played out in exquisite agony, a dozen dozen wounds and more from the incidental to the near fatal, each one remembered, each face and each moment associated with the injury known, cataloged, and each subsequent revenge savored in memory or planned and imagined for the future yet to come. But then, one very special one beyond all of them. The illusion whimpered and the Chronicler took note. “Ah, yes, that one you remember well.” The baernaloth tilted its head as if to listen to a particularly sweet moment in a song’s progression. “A claw upon your forehead, a single tentative nick, a pause, consideration playing upon her face and the blade upon your neck turned to another. Prove to me in this act that she made the correct decision.” Sarkithel fek Parthis turned and glanced at the gemstone that held Larsdana ap Neut’s imprisoned essence, and for a fraction of a second the prison’s light stuttered and flickered, seeming almost like a chuckle, as if she were aware somehow, watching, leering, salivating. “You have your name and your task, and for it you have one month.” “One month…” The Cheshire Fiend gasped for breath, his heart in his throat and his senses afire with the magnitude of the Gloom Father’s request, the utter suddenness of it, the consequences to power structures and plots within Sigil and without, and the simple question of how he would do it. “That of course is up to you, yugoloth.” The Chronicler gave a shrug, “I care only that the task is accomplished. There are otherwise no conditions or stipulations.” “Yes Father/Mother…” The Cheshire Fiend whispered. “Fail and everything you have felt now, it will all happen once again in one beautiful instant.” Before the Cheshire Fiend had a moment to finish a single, articulated thought, without the chance to speak a single word more in response to the Gloom Father, time restarted as if the baernaloth had never been there. [CENTER]****[/CENTER] Without so much as a word from his lips or a motion of his hands, Vokannis the Ebon stepped through a swirling gate and within his private chambers deep within the heart of Khin-Oin the Wasting Tower. Surrounded by the comforting gloom and the soft cries of the various mezzoloths that yet survived his experimentation, the Oinoloth sighed. He opened his mouth, paused, and then remained silent. His mind swirled with a myriad of potentialities and options regarding the unfolding situation with Nilesia’s escape and how it impacted every other one of his innumerable schemes across the Lower Planes and beyond. He didn’t speak, and only a snarl issued past his lips, his fangs luminous white against the darkness. Twenty minutes of thinking, brooding, and pacing later, the Oinoloth took a deep breath and glanced over one of the room’s far corners. The very same corner blanketed with a layer of ice and ash, his footprints limned in soot and frost traced back and forth to it from various points in the room, and at the moment his movements led him back to it once again. Without words, with barely a sound, but with a slow, almost ritualistically methodical series of motions, Vorkannis let his robe slip from his shoulders to pool at his feet as he then stepped onto the frozen patch of ash and ice. Nothing happened as he sat down, his legs crossed, the frozen ash and icy soil in direct contact with his flesh. The Oinoloth inhaled, closed his eyes, and focused, listening. The screams of the host of celestials reached his mind and he smiled, savoring their horror and their agony reaching out to him, their warnings to him and any others that might hear them being a prophetic call. The screams of the yugoloths whose ashes mixed with theirs were just as sweet to his ears. It was less a prelude to a conversation than it was meditation. “The concern is minor, but it is a concern nonetheless.” The Oinoloth’s lips moved, mouthing the words in baernaloth as they were mirrored on the pages of his thoughts. “Out of caution I ask for guidance.” In the utter darkness of the Oinoloth’s soul, eyes gazed back at him and the words of an answer filtered up from across an inconceivably vast distance. The words screamed, pounding into his brain and into every molecule of his being a response and always a singular, solitary word/phrase/name/concept/formula/everything at once: VORNELTHRAANIX. Unlike most every other eye or ear that had ever perceived it, the Oinoloth knew precisely what it was and what it meant, and simultaneously he did not. Such was its very nature still. Vorkannis’ ears twitched and he nodded, listening intently, though he did so without reverence or fear. At best, the notion of respect existed in his expressions and tone of voice as he replied, and for a moment the Oinoloth’s overwhelming sense of smug superiority was absent. “Of course.” The Oinoloth’s mouth moved once again, his head tilting almost imperceptibly to the side as he listened, and then only a few moments later he nodded. “Yes, as I concluded as well.” The conversation continued another twenty minutes before Vorkannis eventually opened his eyes, a mixed expression somewhere between satisfaction and continued, meandering worry playing across his muzzle. He stood, stepped free of the soil from the Vale of Frozen Ashes that he’d transplanted into his chamber there within Khin-Oin, and gathered up his robe, dressing before sitting atop his throne and directing his consciousness back across the planes and into his various puppets. [center]****[/center] One hour later: When they returned to the Portal Jammer, they returned to news from Skalliska of a certain protégé of the Marauder making dubious claims about being owed remuneration for use of portals he claimed to “own”. That, however notorious the wizard in question was, was entirely secondary in their minds to the other figure waiting for them: Factol Nathaniel of the Fraternity of Order. “I’ve found it.” The youthful factol could barely contain his excitement as they took him into one of the tavern’s backrooms to explain himself. “Calm down,” Toras put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder, “You look as excited as Nisha with a basket of fireworks and a lit match.” Neither the Guvner nor the party’s own personal Xaositect took kindly to the comparison, but the statement was nonetheless true. “Well let me put up some charts that should explain it all!” Nathaniel proceeded to plaster a dozen posters on the wall, each covered top to bottom with a scrawl of mathematical jargon that held essentially zero meaning to everyone but himself, even including Tristol. “I recognize most of the symbols, but you’ve lost me after half the way down the first page.” The vulpinal aasimar shrugged and took a deep breath. Nisha simply stuck out her tongue and gave an emphatic thumbs down. “Dial the numbers down a notch and just explain what it all means,” Clueless asked, “In layman’s terms, please.” It took two false starts for the Factol to accommodate the request, but eventually he got there. “It’s all about what I told you before with my Mother’s obsession.” Nathaniel explained, still with fervent excitement, his words fast from his lips, “The coordinates. I found where they go, what they’re pointing to!” That of course got their attention, and the Factol’s answer would point them towards the same destination that a massive yugoloth army was presently, unbeknownst to them, working their way towards as well. “Here!” Nathaniel rolled out a conceptual map of the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Mineral and there, nearly straddling the border with the Positive Energy Plane sat a singular, mysterious point on the map: The Tower of Lead. [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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