ZEITGEIST [ZEITGEIST] The Continuing Adventures of Korrigan & Co.

gideonpepys said:

(Next to the throne, Uru passed over a detail he would not recall until later, and only then would he realise his significance: a gilded birdcage on an ornamental stand now stood empty, its bars prized open.)

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I feel like I should know what this means, but I have no clue.

SanjMerchant said:

I feel like I should know what this means, but I have no clue.

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Copperhat the Headless is back on the loose!

Session 229, Part Three - Cracked Shell

Cracked Shell

Before anyone had time to start making plans for a rescue, a roar and flash of light came from outside the palace. “Constables,” said Rock Rackus, with awkward solemnity, pointing out of a window , “Is that an asteroid I do spy?” Streaking across the sky, it disappeared from view, but a moment later light flashed and the ground shuddered. Moments later came the ear-splitting noise of the impact.

“Son of a bitch!” cried Rackus. “There’s more of ‘em! Follow me!”

Leon bid him wait. If he focused, and drained his magical reserves, he should be able to teleport everyone to the Coaltongue. They gathered round him and he cast the spell, but it did not work. It was as if the space between them and the ship was cracked or distorted.

Word came from Admiral Smith: he had been forced by the asteroids to ground the Coaltongue. The ship was about five-hundred feet from the palace. His words crackled, though delivered via sending.

Without further ado, Uriel formed a hole in the wall and they poured out onto the lawn. Uru bid a reluctant farewell to his new toy, determined that he would one day make a better one.

The Gyre filled the sky in all directions, but dark shapes loomed before it. To their right, Gupta, Sly, Rambylon and the other fey refugees surged towards them, having been forced to abandon Rock’s pirate ship after it dissipated. They had come down to aid a few fey stragglers in the grounds of the palace, and suddenly found themselves scuppered.

Behind them – in fact, on all sides, came legionnaires in pursuit. In their midst was a hideous demon – a glabrezu, enslaved by the Golden Legion.

This was their vision of the far future from Ingatan’s Refuge, only now they didn’t have Matunaaga to one-shot the glabrezu. (Nor could Quratulain, in her current condition. Hildegaard now carried her arm.)

Some of the devils were still intent on capturing slaves; others were setting off across the lawn towards the Coaltongue, intent on hijacking it now that the Aurum Treasure was gone.

They set off, each trying to outpace the devils in their own way. Gupta took on tiger form; Uru leapt on Little Jack; Uriel polymorphed into a bird of paradise; Leon created dimension doors for the slower party members. (As they went, their route took them past the Fey Titan Shrine, another detail that didn’t seem too important at the time, but came back to them later: the statue of the Voice of Rot had grown so large it no longer fitted on its plinth; Granny Allswell was gone – her statue reduced to loose gravel – and was that a tiny replacement standing on the plinth?)

Now they could see the terrible affect the meteors had had on Av: the world was coming asunder. But it wasn’t just the surface of the world that splintered and cracked, the cracks extended into the sky as well. As a piece of the earth tilted to one side, so everything above it pivoted, as if a mirror was being turned. Behind – the blackness of the Bleak Gate.

They ran, fighting off devils, severing chains. Any that came near Rumdoom were struck by the Stone of Not and dissipated. Uriel cast a powerful spell and pinned the glabrezu in holy light. They ran, though devils still hounded them, and captured many fey. Sly Marbo and his family were able to keep pace – in fact, Marbo was only slowed to their speed by the need to corral his youngsters. Rambylon kept up too, with his odd, high-kneed, backward-footed run. Onwards, across the facturing landscape, they ran.

They had cleared about half the distance when a mighty chasm opened up before them – thirty feet across and hundreds of feet long. The wailing of souls from the Bleak Gate could be heard as that realm too was consumed.

Quratulain leapt the gap with her rocket boots, taking pot shots at the legion as she went. Uriel flew on, keeping the glabrezu pinned. Heedless of Leon’s injunctions, Rumdoom tried to Fourmyle Jaunt. Instead of arriving on the far side of the chasm, he emerged several hundred yards away, and had to turn several times before he could see the fires of the Coaltongue in the distance. Grimly, he began to run.

Korrigan was concerned about the refugees and waited to help herd them through Leon’s portal. Just then, the area where they were standing broke away from its surroundings and began to sink. There was a great cry, as some the refugees were on the sinking fragment, and their family members were left above. They began to try to haul their friends and relatives out, when devils arrived from behind. Korrigan gave a shout that bolstered their resolve, and Uriel fired beams of radiance at the devils, all while keeping the glabrezu, trapped in agonising holy light.

Leon stopped to fill his lantern with the light of menagerie. Now all bathed within could turn into any animal form they chose. Accustomed to such strange tricks, the fey at once took advantage of his magic and turned into a host of birds. The devils were baffled as the trapped fey at once became an admixed flock of geese, sparrows, thrushes, owls, cranes, swifts, swallows, budgerigars… the list was endless. In this bizarre fashion, they escaped the legion.

Their ecstatic flight was cut short when a massive meteor slammed into Thistle Palace. The fiery shockwave bloomed outward, and consumed everyone and everything that had not crossed the chasm. Those on the other side now saw that these meteors were just the vanguard: Above the Gyre was blotted out, eclipsed by thousands of massive, pitted stones, some of them hundreds of feet across, all of them etched with veins of gold. Av was crashing into another world. The Dreaming shattered into splinters around them, all of its magic released in a sudden blast.

Released in an instant from all their cares and concerns, they lost consciousness for a time, and then:

You awake, scattered across the ground in a snowy forest. The fey are not here. And nor is Uriel.

Embers of blazing thistles drift by on a wind, briefly providing enough light to make out the debris of the Coaltongue, nearly crippled but otherwise lying without even a hushed whisper in this night-time wood. Your injuries won’t kill you, and the damage wrought on your vessel can be repaired, but as your gaze drifts upward, you see a starry abyss looking back, its nebulous teeth poised to crush your world.

You are back in Risur, many months after you left. Your mission has failed. Your path to the Gyre has been cut off, and what little hope you had left has, like a candle reaching the end of its wick, guttered and turned to smoke.

Then you awake, gasping in pain, disoriented by the roar of explosions and the thunder of shattering stones. You shake the dream away and take stock of your quite-real peril. …

End of Session

Nice end for the session, just the right spirit of hope

Sorry about laughing.

RangerWickett said:

Sorry about laughing.

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It's quite understandable. You've waited almost eight years for that particular bucket to fall on my players' heads. And I worked very hard to have it fall right at the end of the session, so I'm glad you appreciated the comic timing.

Session 230, Part One - Motes of Gold

Motes of Gold

When they awoke, their circumstances were bizarrely different. Wind whistled and whined around them. Each unit member found themselves stretched out on a rock, alone, and only as they began to pick themselves up did some of them realise that one or two of the others were close by: Rumdoom was on the same, large expanse as Gupta; Leon was on a smaller body above them. Uriel and Uru were on similarly-sized chunks fairly close to one another. Korrigan was far away from everyone else, and linked them up telepathically. At once, Quratulain informed them that her boulder had collided with another at the very moment she awoke, crushing her lower body and pinning her in place. (She felt no pain and remained calm and matter-of-fact throughout). None of the others could see her; Korrigan ascertained that she was far below them, and that the Coaltongue had crashed onto a truly enormous rocky mass some distance away.

“This is Urim,” said Korrigan, who felt his stony form strengthened through contact with the plane. Teleportation would not work here; veins of gold ran through every rock.

Collisions were not the only danger: Uriel gave a yelp of alarm and ducked as an arcing field of glass shards swept overhead – the remnants of Av. Such jagged fields were all around them, as were thick webs, more like cables, that joined the rocks to each other. It was these webs that whined and sang in the bleak winds of the Gyre. Uru investigated them gingerly. They were extremely sticky, he warned.

Now it was Leon’s turn to give a cry of alarm: from his high vantage he could see a golden vessel sweeping towards them at some speed. Golden Legionnaires massed on its deck, a terrifying glabrezu among them. As it arced through the field of asteroids, the devils leapt off to attack Leon, Rumdoom and Gupta, then the windskiff swept on towards Korrigan. The glabrezu looked confused (insofar as it was capable) when its teleport power failed to function.

Gupta and Rumdoom were both ensared. In response, a bat-winged succubus swept off the deck of the windskiff and sunk her teeth into Gupta’s neck. Gupta cried out, but refused to be dominated. Growing weak, she dug deep and released the healing aelectricity which Wolfgang Von Recklinghausen had gifted her. Not only did it heal her in an instant, but the shock hit the succubus, and coursed along the devil’s golden chains, causing them all to yelp in surprise and let her go.

Leon ducked, dodged and parried with the Dreaming Blade, then struck out and killed one devil, creating enough space for him to leap off the rock. Better to free-fall than to fight four elite stars toe-to-toe.

By now, after what seemed like hours of fighting, even Rumdoom was growing weary. He unleashed the Icy End of the World to see the legionnaires off.

Korrigan transformed into a Bolt of Avilona to come to Gupta’s aid, but his lightning form was disrupted by the gold-laced rocks and he only went half-way, appearing suddenly in mid-air. He arrested his fall by invoking his Lightness of Being power.

Having flown from his isolated rock on Little Jack, Uru emerged from hiding and killed the succubus. “Sorry, Gupta,” he said as he vanished again.

The glabrezu leapt off the windskiff, which was circling back round, and tried to chase down Korrigan by using the thick webs; it found itself trapped and struggled to free itself.

Rumdoom finished off the devils around him with another cold burst. Korrigan flew to aid Gupta.

Leon, calmly casting a levitate spell as he fell, noticed movement on the underside of several rocks: huge spidery forms, invisible to any other eye but his. If they had not moved, their pitted shells might have camouflaged them, but now they unfolded their great legs and picked their way upwards. Leon warned the others as soon as his spell kicked in and he began to float slowly upwards.

Session 230, Part Two - The Not-So-Nice Spiders

The Not-So-Nice Spiders

As the monstrous spiders crawled up from below, the whining from the web vortices became a deep growl, and in this manner, the Voice of Rot spoke to them: “What have my precious little vaknids found for me? Ah, I witness the last lords of a dying land. Come, foes, if you can.”

Three huge vaknids pounced on isolated foes: one attacked the devils Leon had left behind him; another emerged behind Uriel; a third leapt upon the glabrezu. As they moved, two of them twitched their vast abdomens and spat out a fibrous orb the size of man. They pitched these into open space, where they created a vacuum, sucking in everything nearby. The windskiff was pulled sideways and its crew fell away; Korrigan resisted the pull of the other with help of his trusty military issue boots – one of the legionnaires was swept towards it instead, plugging the hole for a time.

Uriel felt the air sucked out of his lungs. These creatures created a vacuum wherever they went. It was a frightening thing to witness the speed with which one of them dispatched the legionnaires, while the other even seemed to have the edge over the glabrezu.

A truly gigantic vaknid now emerged onto the biggest rock and stomped at Rumdoom, shattering the rock silently where it struck. Webs spread out in all directions from its footfall.

Uru fired at it; feeling his sting, it caused one of the metallic webs to reach out and snag him, dragging him through the jagged field of glass. Pained and alarmed, Uru flew high on Little Jack and hid.

The Voice of Rot sneered, “I sense an upstart rival! Another titan is it? Intriguing…”

Gupta declared, “It was a mistake to send mere minions against the titan of the mountains!” She drew her bone wand and pointed it at the largest vaknid, before realising that this vast, alien thing could not comprehend the curse she meant to use against it. Her words died on her lips.

Leon’s progress was too slow. He filled the wayfarer lantern with oil of Walking On Sunshine, and ‘fell’ upwards. Now all those bathed in its light could choose their preferred direction for gravity: Uriel ran around the side of his boulder to get away from the vaknid, then leapt across to the other.

Rumdoom ran at the vaknid webmaster, but found it covered in desiccated skeletons which attacked him and drove him backwards. He steeled himself and ploughed onward, striking at the webmaster’s leg with the Stone of Not. The leg crumbled and vanished. “Keep it up!” said Korrigan. “Do that seven more times and you’ll have it immobilised!”

The webmaster spewed up acidic webbing that caught up Rumdoom, Uriel, Korrigan and Gupta. Then Rumdoom took out another monstrous leg.

Uru reappeared again, and almost killed one of the lesser vortexweavers. Its legs gave out for a moment, and Uriel spotted its weakness. He invoked Jannick, his dragonslayer incarnation, and drove the Arsenal of Dhebisu, sword-shaped, into its abdomen. A killing blow!

Gupta moved back out of the vacuum surrounding the webmaster, but found herself drawn towards the vacuous orb spun by the vortexweaver. At the last second she transformed into a tiger, reached out and grabbed one of the vaknid webs.

Rumdoom activated his icon of Avilona, flew at the webmaster’s head and struck it with the Stone of Not. Now the entire creature crumbled and vanished.

The Voice of Rot then said, “At the end of time, I await you. Our homeworld has withered, but I cannot kill it until its last champions have lost either their lives, or their will.”

Then the boulders on which they stood cracked and began to crumble away. This action freed Quratulain, and the whole unit was able to use the power of the Wayfarer Lantern to ‘fall’ west towards the Coaltongue.

The two remaining vortexweavers scuttled off with their prey.

Session 230, Part Three - Strange New Worlds

Strange New Worlds

The Coaltongue was crippled, laying on its side. Alongside it was a scorched, dead vaknid – killed by the Tyrant’s Eye. Admiral Smith welcomed them on board and they quickly established that no one had seen Rock, Sly or any of the other fey refugees.

Uru began repairs at once. Korrigan and Gupta volunteered to help. It was vitally important to get the Coaltongue moving. Quratulain began repairs on herself. Only one of her limbs was fully functional.

Meanwhile, even while going about their tasks, the whole unit conversed telepathically. Each spoke of their dream of returning to Lanjyr, and discovered it had been shared in precise detail by everyone except Uriel. Uriel had dreamed that he had been there, while the others dreamed that he had not been. But in Uriel’s dream, he had been trying to speak to them, to get their attention, but they had not been able to see or hear him.

“I think it is the future,” said Korrigan, grimly.

No one wanted to think about what this vision of failure meant. Right now, their job was to focus on what to do next. One thing they knew they had to do was find Thisraldion, on Egalitrix. Korrigan tried to locate him mentally, but failed. Leon pointed out that, as the ruler of the Unseen Court, Thisraldion could not be divined. So Korrigan tried to make contact with Rock Rackus, but that would not work either. Uriel said he might have a few tricks he could use, but for now he was focused on a more immediate problem – navigation.

He fetched the gidim vortex array, and enlisted the aid of both Kai and Xambria, to examine the nearest planes. This took some time, and became all the more urgent when Uru announced that the levitationals would no longer fully function, as the energy from Perlocus was too faint. He estimated that the most they could cover before an eight-hour recharge would be about twenty miles; same for propulsion (which required fire energy from Jiese). But if they could retune the levitationals to use energy from another plane, the problem could be fixed.

Using the vortex array, they examined the adjacent planes:

Due north (taking the Gyre itself as their lodestar), they detected no energy of note, suggesting it was altogether desolate. Indeed, with a spyglass it was possible to see that it was comprised of nothing but plundered ruins, which appeared to have been abandoned for aeons. However, the sensitive array was able to detect minor energy of fire and time coming from the plane north of that.

Likewise, north-east there was no energy of note. Visual inspection revealed a field of dead motes, barren rocks of a world torn apart by the churning edge of the Gyre. Frustratingly, the north-west plane was also plundered ruins, though the array faintly detected magical energies of life and time coming from beyond it.

By good fortune, to the south-west, the plane registered air and life energy. They could just make out forested hills beyond the tumbling asteroid field of Urim. The plane even further beyond it showed traces of fire and water magic.

South lay Av, utterly destroyed. And south-east was another empty void. No planes lay beyond, as this was the southernmost reach of the Gyre. Nor were there any stars or planets on view, though Lanjyr must have been out there somewhere.

While they scanned the Gyre and Uru fixed the Coaltongue Leon took a moment to speak with Lavanya, who had been ably hosted by Amielle in his absence. She wondered how long she had left: she felt sure that the Ob would find her recumbent form and break the ritual that allowed her spirit to roam. Where this strange foreboding came from, she could not say, although it might be her mother’s connection with the plane of time. (Lavanya would occasionally refer to Kasvarina as her mother, which was slightly disconcerting.) In any case, this voyage through the Gyre was borrowed time; her final act was to reunite them with Grappa. Now they had all the ingredients they needed save one: Conquo. She had said this before, but it bore repeating: “I created him on Axis Island for a reason. It is a shame you took him from there. Then you lost him in the Dreaming, and I rescued him from there too. And then you lost him again! It’s a pity I couldn’t tell you how important he was at the time, but it always creates problems if you know too much. We will have to manage without him I suppose…”

Their conversation was interrupted by a voice that reached them on the wind. A mild female voice, it said, “I am Calily Buen of the Kinava monastery. I know disaster has befallen you. Will you promise my safety if I come to render aid?”

End of Session

Session 231, Part One - Half A Hundred Years of Solitude

“If safety is in our power to grant, it is yours,” Korrigan replied.

Calily thanked him, and half an hour later she jogged into view, wearing loose-fitting sand-brown clothes, hooded and carrying a staff. When close enough to make eye contact she pulled back her hood to reveal the white hair and wrinkled face of a woman far older than her agility would suggest.

Enthusiasm bubbled from the old monk as she came aboard and greeted them. She offered them bits of a salted fish, which she calls an Amrou Hunlow Snapper, in an act that was clearly symbolic. Some accepted, lest they offend, and the gesture was duly resolved. Calily warned them to ration their food because there was very little to be found here. She mentioned that her own monastery was raided by the Golden Legion, and she only has survived the past… she guesses fifty years… because of her ring of sustenance. “A gift from the Golden Legion, believe it or not.” She flashed the unassuming band.

Calily was seventeen when her world died. The plane of Caeloon was scoured in fire by the Demon of the West Wind, but Calily’s monastery survived by flying on paper wings. When the smoke cleared, she and her fellow monks found themselves in the Gyre, and the only remnants of her world was a scorched forest. Shortly thereafter they were raided by the Golden Legion, who took slaves from among the survivors, but left enough to nurture the forest back to health because they desired regular tribute in the form of lumber.

There was no food, and no animals survived in the smouldering woods, but the legion gave the monks enchanted rings that would sustain them without food. It was an act born of efficiency, not mercy, but the monks – divorced from even the mundane comforts of food – devoted themselves wholly to asceticism. Their master, Chyak San-Cho, guided the monastery to enlightened detachment, where the goal was to be empty, like the air. In the wake of their world’s death, they endured without purpose, looking inward and awaiting their own inevitable deaths. Fifty years later, only a few dozen of the monks survived.

Calily also mastered the techniques and self-discipline, but she was defiant of the oppression of the legion. Though she has the body of a woman of nearly seventy, her training has spared her the infirmities of her long years, and she acts with a cultivated, youthful optimism. She told them she had ranged to all the worlds of the Gyre she can reach – and has even brought back the occasional game animal to feed her fellow monks.

Recently, however, several new worlds crashed into the Gyre. The legion sent scouts to investigate these new planes, but found them devoid of potential slaves. Not wanting to return to Egalitrix empty-handed, they came to Caeloon, where Chyak San-Cho agreed to go with them if they left his students alone. Their master’s sacrifice dispirited her fellows and they had abandoned the monastery entirely. Now she was the only one who remained, determined to honour the memory of her master.

Initially, Calily assumed that they would want to return to the remnants of Av and offered to guide them back there, but when their true intentions became clear, she became excited and asked what experience they had of the golden legion: she could see a pile of gold chains on the main deck, gathered up by the crew. Their response caused her enthusiasm to build even further and she offered to help them affect repairs to their ship. When she learned what this entailed, Calily said that her own realm was deeply infused with air energy. They worked out that it must be the plane to the south-west registering Air and Life. Calily also said that she had a map of most of the Gyre that they were welcome to use. She didn’t have the map with her; it was back at the monastery on Caeloon.

She warned them that if they went of searching at random, they were liable to run into trouble: Shabboath and Hunlow had deadly foes living there, while Wilanir and Padyer were fatally inhospitable. She mentioned that a half-dozen worlds crashed into the Gyre in the past year, and Av was the seventh. She hadn’t explored them yet, but she knew where they were, except for one that was shaped like a silver ring. She saw it dragged away by something like a comet, white and serpentine, toward the mouth of the Gyre. Korrigan warned her about the Voice of Rot and asked if she had had encountered the vaknids before. Calily said she had, but that the spiders were usually docile.

They decided to accompany her back there while the Coaltongue powered up. They would take the stone discs, and offered one to Calily. Given that her ascetic mind-set closely mirrored that of the gith, it was no surprise that she found the disc easy to use. They left Uriel and Leon on the Coaltongue as both were able to augment the levitationals by releasing magical energy into the capacitor. Quratulain did not want to be left behind, although repairs to her limbs were not finished. Then they remembered the duplicants Pardo had brought on board – both stowed belowdecks since Pardo’s had collapsed in a heap as soon as they left Lanjyr: link severed; experiment failed. They knew the ritual that enabled Quratulain to use one of the duplicants and so she came along to guard the king and Kai, albeit in a slightly weaker body than her own.