Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
Shemeska
Adventurer
Dakkareth said:... which is of course implied. But yes, I really think, that dress suits you. You look simply stunning!
(Please don't kill me.)
Edit: Post #666, Yeah!![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
"Wait for April Fools Day next month and I'll show you just how good I look in that dress."
*wink wink, nod nod*
And drat, I was hoping to have post 666 on the thread. Congrats and consider your soul mine now.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Strange things, strange women, and strange strangeness
A bright yellow question mark appeared and hovered over Jeremo’s head as Florian approached him. The odd effects of his crown seemed to anticipate his next statement, or it might have simply allowed him to visualize his thoughts. Still, the effect was the same.
“What’s on your mind…” The Natterer asked with a lopsided grin, adding after a moment’s thought, “…Florian?”
The cleric smiled, “Not bad, you remembered my name out of everyone here. I’m impressed.”
Jeremo shrugged, “I try, though for the life of me I was confused earlier on this evening. Everything I’d been told had led me to believe that you were male. My dearest apologies for my confusion.”
Florian chuckled and waved away his concern, “That’s a long story, but not your fault at all.”
“So, what can I do for you?” He asked politely.
“Well, I wanted to ask you about the security of the palace.”
“Oh? I should think that it’s all the better to ensure that my guests are as safe here as they would be in their own homes. Some of you all consider that paramount.” Jeremo said before adding offhandedly, “Some more than others. The Titan wanted a list of who would be invited, especially any clerics or proxies. Noshtoreth wanted to make sure that I wasn’t inviting any full-blooded Baatezu, and tonight’s fuzzy entertainment wanted to know what the decorum would be so she could arrive in something fashionably out of place and clashing.”
“Well, she got the out of place and clashing part down…” Florian coughed softly.
“But it’s impolite of me to speak poorly of my guests and peers in the city. Anything at all else about the security?” Jeremo said deferentially.
“It seems to be a bit much… and it’s all oriented seemingly to prevent something from getting –out- into the palace, not to just prevent the guests from wandering off…” Florian asked skeptically.
Jeremo laughed and waved a hand dismissively, “Not at all the case. Seriously now, I’m just a bit overprotective about my guests and I don’t spare any expense. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some other things I really should attend to.”
Jeremo gave a tip of his crown, turned, and made an attempt to leave. Florian stopped him dead in his tracks with a single statement. “We saw a cranium rat in the palace.”
Jeremo paused and slowly turned around, his previous joking demeanor gone and replaced with a much more serious expression.
“It gnawed its way out from behind one of the walls before one of your servants snagged it.” She added to the now dour and frowning Jester.
Jeremo sighed, “I need to ask you in all honestly to not repeat to anyone else outside of myself and my servants what you saw today. To say that I have a problem is only the least that you could say about it. To an extent, today’s festivities were to put off any rumors that something was amiss in the palace and keeping me from having many visitors.”
“The rumor mill was starting to get you worried about people finding out?” Florian asked.
Jeremo nodded and pursed his lips. “Aye, both the polite and casual mill, and the paid gossip mongers of the city were close to having a field day with the speculations of what they perceived. Incidentally, that was also a reason for one or two of my jabs tonight. She took it harshly… a pity…”
The Jester gave a puckish smirk at his last comment before returning to a more serious tone and affectation.
“Suffice it to say, I have every intention of snuffing the vermin out before they pose a real risk to myself and others. But damn it all, there’s more in the bowels of the palace than I care to speculate on. Whatever it is, they’re less interested in me and my faction is seems, than on the underhalls of my home. Why they’re here or what they’re so keen on finding is an open question.” Jeremo mused, “Either they know something I don’t about the history of the place, or they’re using it to hide from one or two of the other rat hives in the city.”
“There’s more than one hive of those things in Sigil?” Florian asked with some alarm.
“At least two; and from what I understand, one of them has gone rogue on the God Brain. I can’t speak of their squabbles with one another much, but I do know that there’s an established hive or two in the Slags, the two or three ‘Great Minds’, but one of them has done its damnedest trying to move into the Palace of the Jester over the last cycle.”
Florian was about to ask another question except for Jeremo kept right on talking. The Natterer wasn’t a hollow nickname…
“…but did you say a servant of mine found it? Odd. I hadn’t heard about it yet. Who was he?”
Florian replied before Jeremo could launch into babbling any more. “I don’t know his name. Some githzerai.”
Jeremo fixed his different colored eyes on her harshly, “I don’t employ any githzerai…”
Florian found that odd. After all, the fellow had been dressed in one of the Jester’s servants’ uniforms. Still, he had been acting odd.
Jeremo adjusted his crown again, “How would you like to earn some jink or otherwise gain me in your debt?”
“Excuse me?” Florian asked.
Jeremo crossed his hands and grinned like a child with a treasure map. “I have a problem and you and your fellows have seemed resourceful from all that I’ve heard. I have more money than some powers of wealth, and so price isn’t much an issue.”
“Is this an employment offer?” Florian asked with a chuckle.
“Quite.”
“Well, I can certainly ask the others if they’re interested.” Florian said.
“Please do, and if you decide to take the offer I’ll be waiting. Let me know in the next several days and I’ll provide you with some more detailed information about the situation I have on my hands. Of course, I’d really appreciate it and suffice it to say that the pay will be commensurate to my means…” Jeremo said with a wink and a nod.
Florian grinned, the image of jink floating about her mind. “I’ll ask them and I’ll let you know what they say. And I swear to you on the Foe Hammer that I won’t mention any of what I’ve seen here to anyone outside of them.”
“Thank you, I appreciate it.” Jeremo tipped his tarnished crown. “But do go on and enjoy the rest of the evening. I’ll leave you to that, but I have a few things to discuss with the guards now, so if you’ll excuse me. Good evening to you.”
“So, Toras… I was wondering what you have planned for later on this evening?” Verden said seductively into the fighter’s ear as he chuckled in amusement and over consumption of the Jester’s free flowing alcohol.
“Excuse me?” His face was flushed with an equal mixture of gleeful surprise and drunkenness.
“I’ve enjoyed your company here tonight and I’m inviting you back to my place. You can go home in the morning…” Verden said softly as she rubbed a thumb over the back of Toras’s hand.
Toras’s eyes grew wide as he finally realized just how heavily the rather attractive owner of the Azure Iris was coming onto him. She was just as tipsy as he was, and so some small part of his mind was leaning towards saying no just to make sure than neither of them would regret anything in the morning, but that part was losing.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed your company as well. You’re quite attractive and its been a pleasure chatting with you all evening. My apologies for that unpleasantness earlier.” Toras said before she took his face in her hands and kissed him full on the lips with a drunken giggle.
“I promised that I’d tell you about some of the stuff I’ve seen from that one over the years, and you can ask me about that, and most anything else when we’re in bed together.” She was tugging him up from his chair as she winked at him.
Nisha rolled her eyes as Toras and Verden both staggered away from the table and made their way towards the exit.
“See you guys in the morning!” Toras muttered as he and the wood elf left with only a select few things on their minds.
“Oh, this is going to be interesting…” Fyrehowl said as Toras and the elf left.
“Mammals…” Skalliska muttered under her breath.
“Not a chance, I’m already taken.” Came the soft but argent and preemptive reply by Lissandra the Gateseeker to Clueless who was smiling at the young guildmistress as the previous impromptu couple made their way out.
“Damn. Oh well, can’t blame me.” Clueless said to the flattered wizardress.
“I’ll let you know if the situation changes, but it’s not likely.” Lissandra said with amusement as she gave a chuckle at the bladesinger.
Toras never noticed that Verden wasn’t intoxicated in the slightest as he left with her, his mind being run by organs other than his brain, and her own mind being filled with a hunger not of the carnal variety either.
The telepathic web of the hive stretched across miles and among the minds of hundreds upon hundreds of those who had rejected the poisoned succor of the most hated Godbrain. The psionic impulses of thought rocketed from mind to mind and point to point along that web that stretched invisibly through the burrowed tunnels in the Sigilrock of the Great Below and now into the forgotten hallways of the Palace of the Jester.
“The Natterer, he knows that we are not here for him and his own.” A single thought was shared by the many minds of the collective, spread out across the underhalls of the palace and the sewers and forgotten places in between.
“But does he know our purpose here? Does he know what we seek?” The voices asked themselves, pondering the thoughts of the single mind of The Jester above them. His thoughts were locked to them, by spell or by simply titanic force of will. But regardless, they had not managed to divine his own insight into their activities.
“He seals us away from the places he walks and the places he knows. He has made no organized move to seek us out here in the levels below that which he knows.”
The minds of the Us gave thought to what they had found in the labyrinthine network of chambers and forgotten halls below the Jester’s demesne.
“He does not know of what lies below his feet. He knows down to a depth, but nothing beyond it. He is ignorant of the history of his own house beyond a few centuries. Scattered names of former holders of his position perhaps are known to him, but nothing more…”
There was a pause again in the thoughts of the Us; a certain wariness about what it had found there beneath the streets of Sigil.
“There are thoughts here below, strange and distant, stronger as we travel further down and into the past. The walls are alive. We feel it, and whatever is here eludes our touch and evades our sight. It plays with us, prevents us from reaching whatever it covets and hides.”
For a brief moment a touch of fear rose from a minority of the collective, a fear of something that it did not recognize. The Palace of the Jester was Sigil’s oldest extant structure, and its past was shrouded in mystery. The underhalls were unmappable. The walls moved, shifted and changed to prevent any true understanding of its sprawling network of empty catacombs and abandoned chambers. It was Sigils past made manifest, and it was as alive as its present…
“Swalk’kur knew of this. He knew what was here. The visionary also avoided it and his lingering spirit only laughed at us when we found his tomb. It was shallow in this place compared to where we wander now amongst the laughing, watching galleries.”
The undercurrent of fear rose again amongst the component minds of the Us and the bulk of itself suppressed the feelings as best as it could.
“The Dabus are wary here. The Dabus are afraid of this place! But that is foolishness; if anything they avoid the depths simply because of ourself and nothing more. We do not concern ourself with the Dabus, but only with what we may find amid the labyrinth. There is power here…”
Florian had gestured them all together and into the back room almost as soon as they had gotten back from the Jester’s party. Despite having been away from them for a good while, speaking to the Natterer, she hadn’t said a word to the rest of her group during the course of the evening for fear of it being overheard. Besides, she had the nagging suspicion that Jeremo might have had his own people close at hand to let him know if she actually did spread word of what she had seen. The man seemed genuinely amicable, but he didn’t reach his position of power and influence by not knowing how to watch his own affairs and carefully cultivate public opinions, and frankly that was what he had been doing that entire evening: positioning himself in the eyes of his peers.
“So, what exactly is this about?” Skalliska said as she stroked the head of her familiar, whose head was currently flickering a soft halo of orange flames.
“Why not just tell us while we were at the party? Besides, it’s obscenely late.” Tristol yawned.
“Alright, you all saw the cranium rat in the palace, right?” Florian asked rhetorically.
“Sure, they had a few of them and Jeremo had his servants chasing them down. Big deal.” Fyrehowl said with a shrug.
Florian waved her hand in the negative, “Jeremo doesn’t have any gith on his staff…”
There was silence, and even Nisha paused and paid rapt attention.
“Whoever that was, he wasn’t one of Jeremo’s people. And there are more than just a handful of rats in the palace. Jeremo has a serious problem with them; he thinks a hive of them has managed to burrow into the underhalls of the place…” Florian explained to a half dozen open mouths.
“Well sh*t!” Clueless said bluntly.
Tristol nodded, “Damn. That explains all the crazy wards the place had while we were there. Jeremo wasn’t taking any sodding chances with the rats and his guests, considering that most of Sigil’s elite were there tonight.”
“Not that we’d have minded if the rats ever got to one or two of those elite…” Fyrehowl said as she rolled her eyes. “That’s going to come back and bite us you know.”
“What the hell are the rat’s doing there? Trying to influence everyone around the palace? I know that Autochon’s Runner’s Guild operates out of a wing of the palace. Maybe trying to get into the heads of the people in Jeremo’s ‘this is a faction on everything but paper’.” Clueless mused.
“Jeremo isn’t sure, but he’s not taking any chances. From what he’s told me, he’s managed to keep them confined to the lower levels of the palace, and they don’t seem to be at all aggressive about trying to break through into the parts of his property that he’s more or less sealed off from them.” Florian explained, “And that’s what worries him. He’s not certain what they’re doing down there, and he’d like to find out.”
“Do we get to name our own price?!” Nisha said with a glimmer in her eyes as she leapt forward, placed both hands on the table and jingled the silver bell at the end of her tail.
Florian chuckled and Nisha’s belled tail jingled again as Tristol tapped it.
“He made it clear that cost wasn’t much of a concern of his if you’re curious.” She said.
“Has he sent other people down there yet?” Clueless asked while Nisha continued to babble about ‘gods only know what all is down there’.
“I would assume so given what he talked to me about.” Florian said.
“And I think it safe to assume that so far none of them have come back?” Fyrehowl asked.
“Probably a safe bet. Cranium rats aren’t friendly neighbors, and hives of them are territorial.” Skalliska said, “And scary…”
Everyone nodded.
“And tasty if you marinate them in alcohol…” The kobold added.
“Ewwww…” Nisha said with a twisted expression. “I’ve eaten ashes spiced with arsenic just because nominally I can survive on it, but cranium rats? Yuck.”
“Suit yourself, you’re the person who wouldn’t eat fried bugs just…” Skalliska said before being cut off.
“Aaaaaand changing the topic of conversation…” Clueless said abruptly.
“So, I guess the question is are we up for taking Jeremo’s offer?” Fyrehowl said. “Personally I don’t mind going for it. Besides, having Jeremo owing us a favor may just end up helping to shield up from another certain someone’s displeasure in the future, and I don’t think we can put a price tag on that.”
The benefits and dangers of it all went around for some time, with both Nisha and Skalliska giving their previous experience with cranium rats to the group. Eventually though it was decided: they would accept Jeremo’s offer and meet him in the next day or two to find out the full details. Following the decision, they variously went for a bottle or yawned, or both before staggering up to their own rooms.
Clueless sat in his room surrounded by a few dozen random items that he’d managed to collect from the Astral, places around Sigil, and even back on Acheron. For hours upon hours he had sat nearly motionless there, surrounded by the odd and otherwise unremarkable sundry items that he’d assembled, and one at a time he had tapped the small collar around his neck. Each time, the single droplet of golden liquid it contained made contact with his skin, and each time he plucked into his mind the arcane symbols of a single legend lore spell. Despite that he was unable to actually case the spell himself, whatever the liquid that he had found in the Tower Sorcerous actually was, it was providing him a window into the history and background of the items.
Hours had passed as he looked into the background of those items. He watched in his mind as a scrap of the late Factol Alisohn Nilesia’s robe from Acheron blossomed into fragments and snapshots of her time in slavery, and then how her husband, the late Duke Rowan Darkwood, had callously and purposefully sold her into slavery on the plane of war eternal.
He watched as fragments of time from the Incantifers’ genocidal war of self-destruction began and ended in a haze of death, misery, and unintended consequences. He even watched a chronicle of just where a single silver piece had been in the past three weeks before it had first graced his purse. A single coin and it had passed from hand to hand in that time from aasimar to gnome, from archon to succubi, from abishai to mephit, and from a Nycaloth whose hand the silver in the coin had burned, right down to Nisha who the ‘loth had hurled the coin at a minute before she had cut his purse strings and made off with the rest of his jink.
Still, there were events that his magic failed to illuminate. Anything related to his experience in Carceri, or rather, anything surrounding the tower there on Othrys: it was all shrouded in what seemed to manifest as an impenetrable mental fog. The closer that he got to anything even remotely related to the newly ascended Oinoloth, the thicker that the block became.
“Oh you son of a b*tch, how the hell is it that nothing about you has any background? You can’t just have appeared out of sodding nowhere!” Clueless cursed as he concentrated on another question about The Ebon, only to have the magic fail him once more.
The feelings of interference only increased the closer that the bladesinger probed, and only gradually did he recognize a cold malevolence that underpinned the haze that shrouded any of the information that he sought. If it weren’t impossible for something to be aware of the interior of Sigil while not within Sigil itself, Clueless would have sworn that something was aware of his attempts. He ended that train of legend lore attempts abruptly and with a disturbed feeling playing about his mind as he glanced down at the gem in his ankle. He’d sworn that it had been glowing before he had canceled the spell’s effects.
“New subject… definitely a new subject…” Clueless muttered as his wings flickered with traces of faerie-fire that mirrored his discomfort.
Tapping the bubble of golden liquid on his neck, he called once more into his mind the inscrutable symbols and patterns of a legend lore spell, pulled it into his mind and then concentrated on a subject of interest: Bartol Trenevain and his work with the King of the Crosstrade.
Information on the fire genasi evoker wasn’t blocked in any way, and it was apparent from what glimmers of information the spell provided to the half-fey, that Trenevain had indeed been a complete and utter pawn under the clawed thumb of the Marauder. Trenevain was apparently openly loathed by his Nycaloth minders, and at least one of them was eager for the chance to kill the mortal as soon as he had outlived his usefulness to the nycaloth’s mistress.
Clueless snorted, “Figures that you’d break your toys so nobody else could play with them. But this only makes me want to look old Bartol up again and see what he has to say about a few things…”
The bladesinger moved on to other topics, but as soon as he asked a question that directly fell upon the Marauder or actions she had personally taken a part in, he hit a solid wall. The spell didn’t end, but his mind was abruptly filled with an image of a room in the Fortunes Wheel, the same one in which he had signed away his freedom to the gossip monger along with the freedom of another friend and the life of another.
“What the hell…” Clueless said as the image in his mind’s eye focused on the Marauder, sitting and relaxing on a cushioned chair. The fiendess was smirking and her tongue was partially stuck out at an angle, petulantly bitten between her fangs. Her eyes glimmered violet as the image of her shook its head and waved a finger as if to say ‘no’. Questions about her operations within Sigil were warded, and warded well.
Clueless snuffed the effects of the spell and the magic rapidly faded away from his mind, leaving him drained and exhausted from the effort of it all.
“B*tch… figures that you’d pull something like that. Otherwise everyone with money for magic would be divining everything about you and where you’ve got your clawed little hands sunk into the pie.” He sighed, “And you’re immune to mind affecting spells, so I might as well try and get Nisha to act rationale for an hour or two as I might try to pluck details from your twisted little head.”
Clueless paused and winced for a moment.
“What the hell?” He said as he reached up to rub at his neck. His fingers came back dappled in blood.
Clueless launched forwards and went for a mirror, looking at his neck. Where the collar had held the droplet of magical liquid against his neck, the skin was inflamed and there was a small and angry blister at the exact point of contact: the source of the blood on his hand.
“Alright… that’s not good.” He said as he dabbed up the blood from the broken skin. There was a small ring of white, seemingly dead skin that surrounded the blister. Obviously he’d had some sort of reaction to the repeated use of the substance, whatever the hell it was.
“Hmm…” he thought as his wings once again reflected his mood. “Time to lay off using this for a while. At least till I actually know what that stuff is. We’ll have to see what Tristol might know about it, because I’m not going to use it again to find out what it is and where it came from originally if I don’t know if it’ll blow my head apart to use it again.”
Still flushed from the experience of channeling magic beyond his normal means, and intrigued by much of what he’d discovered, Clueless placed the collar and its bubble of golden, and apparently dangerous, liquid in a locked drawer to stay safe for the moment. He rubbed the raw spot on his neck, and he didn’t plan on wearing the collar again for a while, at least until he was a bit more certain about what it was that it contained. He glanced at where he’d placed the collar for a few seconds, and at the globe that contained the bulk of the liquid, and having done that, he wandered downstairs from his room in search of Tristol.
Sitting at a table near the back of the taproom, sat three nearly identical men. They were all bald, dressed in black leather overcoats, and wearing dark glasses or spectacles each. They had walked into the Portal Jammer and sat down without saying a word to anyone, and ignoring the initial drink or food queries from the serving staff as if the employees simply didn’t exist.
After an hour or two of staring off into space, they had apparently noticed that everyone else in the room was drinking or eating, and so one of them asked for “what is normal”. A wary staffer served them ale and a scattered assortment of food, and then watched as the Keepers prodded at the food for nearly twenty minutes before making any attempt to actually eat it. Eventually the odd trio seemed to catch on, and the waitress wandered over to ask them a question.
“So, what plane are you all from? I can’t say that I’ve ever seen your kind around here.”
All three of them stared at her uncomfortably.
“The normal plane where everyone else is from of course. And no, you have never seen us around here before. I repeat, you have never seen us around here before, but not that we are out of place at all. You may be assured of that.”
She raised an eyebrow, “Uhh… yeah. So, uh, what are you here in town for?”
Again they all stared at her in silence before another one replied, in the exact same voice as the first had. “You ask many questions. Asking many questions is not something that you should do.”
The third answered quickly as the waitress wrinkled her forehead, “We are only here to wait for someone else. Nothing to be concerned about at all.”
“No, absolutely nothing to be concerned about at all. Everything is normal and as you might expect.” The first Keeper replied in a blank monotone, despite the awkward smile it tried to make.
“Umm, sure… alright…” The server said awkwardly as she walked away from the three odd and identical gentlemen. One of them was smiling awkwardly at her over a mug of lamp oil while the other two stared off into space as she walked away.
Several minutes later, Clueless walked down and made for the room that Tristol had been converting into an arcane lab for himself. The walk required him to make a quick transit through the common room of the bar, and as he did so, a sextuplet of eyes tracked him. The bladesinger swaggered across the floor towards that particular room where the mage had more or less locked himself away since they had been back in Sigil, identifying the glut of items that they had found previously. As he made for the door, the goggle-hidden eyes of the three men at the back of the room followed him silently. All three Keepers watched him before he was out of their sight.
“Watch him, he is going for the mage. The aasimar will have it undoubtedly for he would have recognized it for what it truly is. A few more cycles of observation before we make ourselves known. Till then, we act as the others do, till more of ourselves enter this place.”
“Agreed. We watch and then take it from the wizard.”
“Yes, agreed.”
A bright yellow question mark appeared and hovered over Jeremo’s head as Florian approached him. The odd effects of his crown seemed to anticipate his next statement, or it might have simply allowed him to visualize his thoughts. Still, the effect was the same.
“What’s on your mind…” The Natterer asked with a lopsided grin, adding after a moment’s thought, “…Florian?”
The cleric smiled, “Not bad, you remembered my name out of everyone here. I’m impressed.”
Jeremo shrugged, “I try, though for the life of me I was confused earlier on this evening. Everything I’d been told had led me to believe that you were male. My dearest apologies for my confusion.”
Florian chuckled and waved away his concern, “That’s a long story, but not your fault at all.”
“So, what can I do for you?” He asked politely.
“Well, I wanted to ask you about the security of the palace.”
“Oh? I should think that it’s all the better to ensure that my guests are as safe here as they would be in their own homes. Some of you all consider that paramount.” Jeremo said before adding offhandedly, “Some more than others. The Titan wanted a list of who would be invited, especially any clerics or proxies. Noshtoreth wanted to make sure that I wasn’t inviting any full-blooded Baatezu, and tonight’s fuzzy entertainment wanted to know what the decorum would be so she could arrive in something fashionably out of place and clashing.”
“Well, she got the out of place and clashing part down…” Florian coughed softly.
“But it’s impolite of me to speak poorly of my guests and peers in the city. Anything at all else about the security?” Jeremo said deferentially.
“It seems to be a bit much… and it’s all oriented seemingly to prevent something from getting –out- into the palace, not to just prevent the guests from wandering off…” Florian asked skeptically.
Jeremo laughed and waved a hand dismissively, “Not at all the case. Seriously now, I’m just a bit overprotective about my guests and I don’t spare any expense. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some other things I really should attend to.”
Jeremo gave a tip of his crown, turned, and made an attempt to leave. Florian stopped him dead in his tracks with a single statement. “We saw a cranium rat in the palace.”
Jeremo paused and slowly turned around, his previous joking demeanor gone and replaced with a much more serious expression.
“It gnawed its way out from behind one of the walls before one of your servants snagged it.” She added to the now dour and frowning Jester.
Jeremo sighed, “I need to ask you in all honestly to not repeat to anyone else outside of myself and my servants what you saw today. To say that I have a problem is only the least that you could say about it. To an extent, today’s festivities were to put off any rumors that something was amiss in the palace and keeping me from having many visitors.”
“The rumor mill was starting to get you worried about people finding out?” Florian asked.
Jeremo nodded and pursed his lips. “Aye, both the polite and casual mill, and the paid gossip mongers of the city were close to having a field day with the speculations of what they perceived. Incidentally, that was also a reason for one or two of my jabs tonight. She took it harshly… a pity…”
The Jester gave a puckish smirk at his last comment before returning to a more serious tone and affectation.
“Suffice it to say, I have every intention of snuffing the vermin out before they pose a real risk to myself and others. But damn it all, there’s more in the bowels of the palace than I care to speculate on. Whatever it is, they’re less interested in me and my faction is seems, than on the underhalls of my home. Why they’re here or what they’re so keen on finding is an open question.” Jeremo mused, “Either they know something I don’t about the history of the place, or they’re using it to hide from one or two of the other rat hives in the city.”
“There’s more than one hive of those things in Sigil?” Florian asked with some alarm.
“At least two; and from what I understand, one of them has gone rogue on the God Brain. I can’t speak of their squabbles with one another much, but I do know that there’s an established hive or two in the Slags, the two or three ‘Great Minds’, but one of them has done its damnedest trying to move into the Palace of the Jester over the last cycle.”
Florian was about to ask another question except for Jeremo kept right on talking. The Natterer wasn’t a hollow nickname…
“…but did you say a servant of mine found it? Odd. I hadn’t heard about it yet. Who was he?”
Florian replied before Jeremo could launch into babbling any more. “I don’t know his name. Some githzerai.”
Jeremo fixed his different colored eyes on her harshly, “I don’t employ any githzerai…”
Florian found that odd. After all, the fellow had been dressed in one of the Jester’s servants’ uniforms. Still, he had been acting odd.
Jeremo adjusted his crown again, “How would you like to earn some jink or otherwise gain me in your debt?”
“Excuse me?” Florian asked.
Jeremo crossed his hands and grinned like a child with a treasure map. “I have a problem and you and your fellows have seemed resourceful from all that I’ve heard. I have more money than some powers of wealth, and so price isn’t much an issue.”
“Is this an employment offer?” Florian asked with a chuckle.
“Quite.”
“Well, I can certainly ask the others if they’re interested.” Florian said.
“Please do, and if you decide to take the offer I’ll be waiting. Let me know in the next several days and I’ll provide you with some more detailed information about the situation I have on my hands. Of course, I’d really appreciate it and suffice it to say that the pay will be commensurate to my means…” Jeremo said with a wink and a nod.
Florian grinned, the image of jink floating about her mind. “I’ll ask them and I’ll let you know what they say. And I swear to you on the Foe Hammer that I won’t mention any of what I’ve seen here to anyone outside of them.”
“Thank you, I appreciate it.” Jeremo tipped his tarnished crown. “But do go on and enjoy the rest of the evening. I’ll leave you to that, but I have a few things to discuss with the guards now, so if you’ll excuse me. Good evening to you.”
****
“So, Toras… I was wondering what you have planned for later on this evening?” Verden said seductively into the fighter’s ear as he chuckled in amusement and over consumption of the Jester’s free flowing alcohol.
“Excuse me?” His face was flushed with an equal mixture of gleeful surprise and drunkenness.
“I’ve enjoyed your company here tonight and I’m inviting you back to my place. You can go home in the morning…” Verden said softly as she rubbed a thumb over the back of Toras’s hand.
Toras’s eyes grew wide as he finally realized just how heavily the rather attractive owner of the Azure Iris was coming onto him. She was just as tipsy as he was, and so some small part of his mind was leaning towards saying no just to make sure than neither of them would regret anything in the morning, but that part was losing.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed your company as well. You’re quite attractive and its been a pleasure chatting with you all evening. My apologies for that unpleasantness earlier.” Toras said before she took his face in her hands and kissed him full on the lips with a drunken giggle.
“I promised that I’d tell you about some of the stuff I’ve seen from that one over the years, and you can ask me about that, and most anything else when we’re in bed together.” She was tugging him up from his chair as she winked at him.
Nisha rolled her eyes as Toras and Verden both staggered away from the table and made their way towards the exit.
“See you guys in the morning!” Toras muttered as he and the wood elf left with only a select few things on their minds.
“Oh, this is going to be interesting…” Fyrehowl said as Toras and the elf left.
“Mammals…” Skalliska muttered under her breath.
“Not a chance, I’m already taken.” Came the soft but argent and preemptive reply by Lissandra the Gateseeker to Clueless who was smiling at the young guildmistress as the previous impromptu couple made their way out.
“Damn. Oh well, can’t blame me.” Clueless said to the flattered wizardress.
“I’ll let you know if the situation changes, but it’s not likely.” Lissandra said with amusement as she gave a chuckle at the bladesinger.
Toras never noticed that Verden wasn’t intoxicated in the slightest as he left with her, his mind being run by organs other than his brain, and her own mind being filled with a hunger not of the carnal variety either.
****
The telepathic web of the hive stretched across miles and among the minds of hundreds upon hundreds of those who had rejected the poisoned succor of the most hated Godbrain. The psionic impulses of thought rocketed from mind to mind and point to point along that web that stretched invisibly through the burrowed tunnels in the Sigilrock of the Great Below and now into the forgotten hallways of the Palace of the Jester.
“The Natterer, he knows that we are not here for him and his own.” A single thought was shared by the many minds of the collective, spread out across the underhalls of the palace and the sewers and forgotten places in between.
“But does he know our purpose here? Does he know what we seek?” The voices asked themselves, pondering the thoughts of the single mind of The Jester above them. His thoughts were locked to them, by spell or by simply titanic force of will. But regardless, they had not managed to divine his own insight into their activities.
“He seals us away from the places he walks and the places he knows. He has made no organized move to seek us out here in the levels below that which he knows.”
The minds of the Us gave thought to what they had found in the labyrinthine network of chambers and forgotten halls below the Jester’s demesne.
“He does not know of what lies below his feet. He knows down to a depth, but nothing beyond it. He is ignorant of the history of his own house beyond a few centuries. Scattered names of former holders of his position perhaps are known to him, but nothing more…”
There was a pause again in the thoughts of the Us; a certain wariness about what it had found there beneath the streets of Sigil.
“There are thoughts here below, strange and distant, stronger as we travel further down and into the past. The walls are alive. We feel it, and whatever is here eludes our touch and evades our sight. It plays with us, prevents us from reaching whatever it covets and hides.”
For a brief moment a touch of fear rose from a minority of the collective, a fear of something that it did not recognize. The Palace of the Jester was Sigil’s oldest extant structure, and its past was shrouded in mystery. The underhalls were unmappable. The walls moved, shifted and changed to prevent any true understanding of its sprawling network of empty catacombs and abandoned chambers. It was Sigils past made manifest, and it was as alive as its present…
“Swalk’kur knew of this. He knew what was here. The visionary also avoided it and his lingering spirit only laughed at us when we found his tomb. It was shallow in this place compared to where we wander now amongst the laughing, watching galleries.”
The undercurrent of fear rose again amongst the component minds of the Us and the bulk of itself suppressed the feelings as best as it could.
“The Dabus are wary here. The Dabus are afraid of this place! But that is foolishness; if anything they avoid the depths simply because of ourself and nothing more. We do not concern ourself with the Dabus, but only with what we may find amid the labyrinth. There is power here…”
****
Florian had gestured them all together and into the back room almost as soon as they had gotten back from the Jester’s party. Despite having been away from them for a good while, speaking to the Natterer, she hadn’t said a word to the rest of her group during the course of the evening for fear of it being overheard. Besides, she had the nagging suspicion that Jeremo might have had his own people close at hand to let him know if she actually did spread word of what she had seen. The man seemed genuinely amicable, but he didn’t reach his position of power and influence by not knowing how to watch his own affairs and carefully cultivate public opinions, and frankly that was what he had been doing that entire evening: positioning himself in the eyes of his peers.
“So, what exactly is this about?” Skalliska said as she stroked the head of her familiar, whose head was currently flickering a soft halo of orange flames.
“Why not just tell us while we were at the party? Besides, it’s obscenely late.” Tristol yawned.
“Alright, you all saw the cranium rat in the palace, right?” Florian asked rhetorically.
“Sure, they had a few of them and Jeremo had his servants chasing them down. Big deal.” Fyrehowl said with a shrug.
Florian waved her hand in the negative, “Jeremo doesn’t have any gith on his staff…”
There was silence, and even Nisha paused and paid rapt attention.
“Whoever that was, he wasn’t one of Jeremo’s people. And there are more than just a handful of rats in the palace. Jeremo has a serious problem with them; he thinks a hive of them has managed to burrow into the underhalls of the place…” Florian explained to a half dozen open mouths.
“Well sh*t!” Clueless said bluntly.
Tristol nodded, “Damn. That explains all the crazy wards the place had while we were there. Jeremo wasn’t taking any sodding chances with the rats and his guests, considering that most of Sigil’s elite were there tonight.”
“Not that we’d have minded if the rats ever got to one or two of those elite…” Fyrehowl said as she rolled her eyes. “That’s going to come back and bite us you know.”
“What the hell are the rat’s doing there? Trying to influence everyone around the palace? I know that Autochon’s Runner’s Guild operates out of a wing of the palace. Maybe trying to get into the heads of the people in Jeremo’s ‘this is a faction on everything but paper’.” Clueless mused.
“Jeremo isn’t sure, but he’s not taking any chances. From what he’s told me, he’s managed to keep them confined to the lower levels of the palace, and they don’t seem to be at all aggressive about trying to break through into the parts of his property that he’s more or less sealed off from them.” Florian explained, “And that’s what worries him. He’s not certain what they’re doing down there, and he’d like to find out.”
“Do we get to name our own price?!” Nisha said with a glimmer in her eyes as she leapt forward, placed both hands on the table and jingled the silver bell at the end of her tail.
Florian chuckled and Nisha’s belled tail jingled again as Tristol tapped it.
“He made it clear that cost wasn’t much of a concern of his if you’re curious.” She said.
“Has he sent other people down there yet?” Clueless asked while Nisha continued to babble about ‘gods only know what all is down there’.
“I would assume so given what he talked to me about.” Florian said.
“And I think it safe to assume that so far none of them have come back?” Fyrehowl asked.
“Probably a safe bet. Cranium rats aren’t friendly neighbors, and hives of them are territorial.” Skalliska said, “And scary…”
Everyone nodded.
“And tasty if you marinate them in alcohol…” The kobold added.
“Ewwww…” Nisha said with a twisted expression. “I’ve eaten ashes spiced with arsenic just because nominally I can survive on it, but cranium rats? Yuck.”
“Suit yourself, you’re the person who wouldn’t eat fried bugs just…” Skalliska said before being cut off.
“Aaaaaand changing the topic of conversation…” Clueless said abruptly.
“So, I guess the question is are we up for taking Jeremo’s offer?” Fyrehowl said. “Personally I don’t mind going for it. Besides, having Jeremo owing us a favor may just end up helping to shield up from another certain someone’s displeasure in the future, and I don’t think we can put a price tag on that.”
The benefits and dangers of it all went around for some time, with both Nisha and Skalliska giving their previous experience with cranium rats to the group. Eventually though it was decided: they would accept Jeremo’s offer and meet him in the next day or two to find out the full details. Following the decision, they variously went for a bottle or yawned, or both before staggering up to their own rooms.
****
Clueless sat in his room surrounded by a few dozen random items that he’d managed to collect from the Astral, places around Sigil, and even back on Acheron. For hours upon hours he had sat nearly motionless there, surrounded by the odd and otherwise unremarkable sundry items that he’d assembled, and one at a time he had tapped the small collar around his neck. Each time, the single droplet of golden liquid it contained made contact with his skin, and each time he plucked into his mind the arcane symbols of a single legend lore spell. Despite that he was unable to actually case the spell himself, whatever the liquid that he had found in the Tower Sorcerous actually was, it was providing him a window into the history and background of the items.
Hours had passed as he looked into the background of those items. He watched in his mind as a scrap of the late Factol Alisohn Nilesia’s robe from Acheron blossomed into fragments and snapshots of her time in slavery, and then how her husband, the late Duke Rowan Darkwood, had callously and purposefully sold her into slavery on the plane of war eternal.
He watched as fragments of time from the Incantifers’ genocidal war of self-destruction began and ended in a haze of death, misery, and unintended consequences. He even watched a chronicle of just where a single silver piece had been in the past three weeks before it had first graced his purse. A single coin and it had passed from hand to hand in that time from aasimar to gnome, from archon to succubi, from abishai to mephit, and from a Nycaloth whose hand the silver in the coin had burned, right down to Nisha who the ‘loth had hurled the coin at a minute before she had cut his purse strings and made off with the rest of his jink.
Still, there were events that his magic failed to illuminate. Anything related to his experience in Carceri, or rather, anything surrounding the tower there on Othrys: it was all shrouded in what seemed to manifest as an impenetrable mental fog. The closer that he got to anything even remotely related to the newly ascended Oinoloth, the thicker that the block became.
“Oh you son of a b*tch, how the hell is it that nothing about you has any background? You can’t just have appeared out of sodding nowhere!” Clueless cursed as he concentrated on another question about The Ebon, only to have the magic fail him once more.
The feelings of interference only increased the closer that the bladesinger probed, and only gradually did he recognize a cold malevolence that underpinned the haze that shrouded any of the information that he sought. If it weren’t impossible for something to be aware of the interior of Sigil while not within Sigil itself, Clueless would have sworn that something was aware of his attempts. He ended that train of legend lore attempts abruptly and with a disturbed feeling playing about his mind as he glanced down at the gem in his ankle. He’d sworn that it had been glowing before he had canceled the spell’s effects.
“New subject… definitely a new subject…” Clueless muttered as his wings flickered with traces of faerie-fire that mirrored his discomfort.
Tapping the bubble of golden liquid on his neck, he called once more into his mind the inscrutable symbols and patterns of a legend lore spell, pulled it into his mind and then concentrated on a subject of interest: Bartol Trenevain and his work with the King of the Crosstrade.
Information on the fire genasi evoker wasn’t blocked in any way, and it was apparent from what glimmers of information the spell provided to the half-fey, that Trenevain had indeed been a complete and utter pawn under the clawed thumb of the Marauder. Trenevain was apparently openly loathed by his Nycaloth minders, and at least one of them was eager for the chance to kill the mortal as soon as he had outlived his usefulness to the nycaloth’s mistress.
Clueless snorted, “Figures that you’d break your toys so nobody else could play with them. But this only makes me want to look old Bartol up again and see what he has to say about a few things…”
The bladesinger moved on to other topics, but as soon as he asked a question that directly fell upon the Marauder or actions she had personally taken a part in, he hit a solid wall. The spell didn’t end, but his mind was abruptly filled with an image of a room in the Fortunes Wheel, the same one in which he had signed away his freedom to the gossip monger along with the freedom of another friend and the life of another.
“What the hell…” Clueless said as the image in his mind’s eye focused on the Marauder, sitting and relaxing on a cushioned chair. The fiendess was smirking and her tongue was partially stuck out at an angle, petulantly bitten between her fangs. Her eyes glimmered violet as the image of her shook its head and waved a finger as if to say ‘no’. Questions about her operations within Sigil were warded, and warded well.
Clueless snuffed the effects of the spell and the magic rapidly faded away from his mind, leaving him drained and exhausted from the effort of it all.
“B*tch… figures that you’d pull something like that. Otherwise everyone with money for magic would be divining everything about you and where you’ve got your clawed little hands sunk into the pie.” He sighed, “And you’re immune to mind affecting spells, so I might as well try and get Nisha to act rationale for an hour or two as I might try to pluck details from your twisted little head.”
Clueless paused and winced for a moment.
“What the hell?” He said as he reached up to rub at his neck. His fingers came back dappled in blood.
Clueless launched forwards and went for a mirror, looking at his neck. Where the collar had held the droplet of magical liquid against his neck, the skin was inflamed and there was a small and angry blister at the exact point of contact: the source of the blood on his hand.
“Alright… that’s not good.” He said as he dabbed up the blood from the broken skin. There was a small ring of white, seemingly dead skin that surrounded the blister. Obviously he’d had some sort of reaction to the repeated use of the substance, whatever the hell it was.
“Hmm…” he thought as his wings once again reflected his mood. “Time to lay off using this for a while. At least till I actually know what that stuff is. We’ll have to see what Tristol might know about it, because I’m not going to use it again to find out what it is and where it came from originally if I don’t know if it’ll blow my head apart to use it again.”
Still flushed from the experience of channeling magic beyond his normal means, and intrigued by much of what he’d discovered, Clueless placed the collar and its bubble of golden, and apparently dangerous, liquid in a locked drawer to stay safe for the moment. He rubbed the raw spot on his neck, and he didn’t plan on wearing the collar again for a while, at least until he was a bit more certain about what it was that it contained. He glanced at where he’d placed the collar for a few seconds, and at the globe that contained the bulk of the liquid, and having done that, he wandered downstairs from his room in search of Tristol.
****
Sitting at a table near the back of the taproom, sat three nearly identical men. They were all bald, dressed in black leather overcoats, and wearing dark glasses or spectacles each. They had walked into the Portal Jammer and sat down without saying a word to anyone, and ignoring the initial drink or food queries from the serving staff as if the employees simply didn’t exist.
After an hour or two of staring off into space, they had apparently noticed that everyone else in the room was drinking or eating, and so one of them asked for “what is normal”. A wary staffer served them ale and a scattered assortment of food, and then watched as the Keepers prodded at the food for nearly twenty minutes before making any attempt to actually eat it. Eventually the odd trio seemed to catch on, and the waitress wandered over to ask them a question.
“So, what plane are you all from? I can’t say that I’ve ever seen your kind around here.”
All three of them stared at her uncomfortably.
“The normal plane where everyone else is from of course. And no, you have never seen us around here before. I repeat, you have never seen us around here before, but not that we are out of place at all. You may be assured of that.”
She raised an eyebrow, “Uhh… yeah. So, uh, what are you here in town for?”
Again they all stared at her in silence before another one replied, in the exact same voice as the first had. “You ask many questions. Asking many questions is not something that you should do.”
The third answered quickly as the waitress wrinkled her forehead, “We are only here to wait for someone else. Nothing to be concerned about at all.”
“No, absolutely nothing to be concerned about at all. Everything is normal and as you might expect.” The first Keeper replied in a blank monotone, despite the awkward smile it tried to make.
“Umm, sure… alright…” The server said awkwardly as she walked away from the three odd and identical gentlemen. One of them was smiling awkwardly at her over a mug of lamp oil while the other two stared off into space as she walked away.
Several minutes later, Clueless walked down and made for the room that Tristol had been converting into an arcane lab for himself. The walk required him to make a quick transit through the common room of the bar, and as he did so, a sextuplet of eyes tracked him. The bladesinger swaggered across the floor towards that particular room where the mage had more or less locked himself away since they had been back in Sigil, identifying the glut of items that they had found previously. As he made for the door, the goggle-hidden eyes of the three men at the back of the room followed him silently. All three Keepers watched him before he was out of their sight.
“Watch him, he is going for the mage. The aasimar will have it undoubtedly for he would have recognized it for what it truly is. A few more cycles of observation before we make ourselves known. Till then, we act as the others do, till more of ourselves enter this place.”
“Agreed. We watch and then take it from the wizard.”
“Yes, agreed.”
Dakkareth
First Post
Shemeska said:
It will be a delight, I'm sure.
(Now where was that one-way portal people talked about the other day? Now might be a good time for some exploration ...)
And you still have *reply* #666, so not all is lost. Or maybe I shouldn't have said that, considering the unclear ownership situation of my soul ...
Edit: Mmmhhhh, hive minds and arcane mysteries. Tasty.
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