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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2114486" data-attributes="member: 1210">2:30 p.m.The underwater area, though full of nastiness, has not yet yielded anything of great interest, but that changes as our heroes continue up the slope, leaving the dead rakshasa behind.  Staring into the murky ahead, they see a flickering violet radiance.“Uh oh,” whispers Lester.  “I think something RADICAL is ahead.  We’d better be careful, or we’ll be dead!”“I bet it’s the golems we knocked into the water.  I think we’re coming up to the bottom of that shaft we say.”  Lillamere gestures ahead.  The light is visible through a ragged rent almost 20’ in diameter torn in a wall that is clearly composed of some kind of metal.  Our heroes are ready to do battle- between overcoming the rakshasa so easily and the return of Lester and Orbius, they’re feeling more than a little sassy.  They are one of the most powerful groups of adventurers in all of Cydra, and they know it.  “Golems, you say?” Orbius murmurs.  “I think I have just the thing.”  The party moves up and Orbius casts his spell- and a reality maelstrom opens, a tear in the very fabric of space that sucks everything within it through to another plane!  A loud roaring sound emanates from it, and a mighty current begins pulling our heroes towards it as water is sucked through with increasingly insane speed.“AAAHHH!!!  HELP!!!”  Both golems are sucked through, but so is Jezebel.Jezebel! Lester cries over the Rary’s telpathic bond the party is hooked up with.  I’ll save you!  And he dives right into the reality maelstrom.The rest of our heroes struggle against the current, and Orbius only needs a minute to dispel the reality maelstrom.  Gasping, the party swirls in the violently twisting water.  I got her, Lester comes through telepathically a moment later.  We’re almost back- I’ve already plane shifted us to Cydra, and now we’ll use my boots of teleportation to get back to you guys.  And indeed, he reappears, Jezebel on his arm.“Jezebel, I was so worried!” exclaims Orbius.“Then why didn’t you come yourself?” she replies reproachfully.“Well... Lester went...”“Why didn’t you come?”  A beat passes.  “Never mind.  Let’s go.  We’ll talk about it later.”He really doesn’t have much choice there, does he?Beyond the golems is indeed the bottom of the shaft.  Though deeply muted, the sound of klaxons can be heard from above.  At the bottom of the pit is a square hatch, about 10’ across.  The water in the shaft is noticably warmer than the surrounding water, and close to the hatch it is almost uncomfortably hot.Inoke and Lester exchange a glance.“Now, at a time like this, you might think you want to brashly open that hatch,” Orbius says, “but take it from Lester, you don’t.  Over the course of his career he’s pulled a lot of levers that he shouldn’t, and generally you want to have an idea of the consequences first.  Otherwise you’ll let out someone like Fuligin.”“Right,” says Inoke.  “But what if the answer is down there?  What if we can turn it off?”  He is wearing one of the hard ceramic suits, and it has absorbed some of the radiation that is doubtless pouring into him.  One wrist has a strange rod fixed parallel to it that crackles more the more radiation is around; it’s making a lot of noise just now.   “You don’t want a lot of RADs,” Lester exclaims.  “That would be really bad!”  Telepathically, he continues, Trust me on this one!  You get sick, your hair falls out... ugh!  It’s bad.  You get sores all over your body... it’s very, very bad.  Trust me.  Been there, done that.  Speaking of which, let’s get the hell back away from this!  Look up there.  There’s another way out.  Two, in fact. Indeed, there are two other rents in the wall below the waterline.  Our heroes ascend quickly now that Lester has expressed his concern; and they ascend to the nearer one and swim down another stone passage, apparently natural, perhaps begun by seismic activity at some point and expanded by the umber hulk above. In they go.***Many places at onceAnother dim light flickers into being in Master Control’s awareness.  There are all too few, all too few... This one has a runaway reactor, but contained.  Master Control begins to assess its status, sees that it is stable, and shifts an informational avatar to it.  Think of the bodiless, voiceless equivalent of a gasp.  How does information gasp?  Think of that for a moment.Master Control gasps. Lester is here.Immediately it begins the process of calling up whatever weapons this new possession may have- Nothing.  Only the reactor itself, which has already burned itself low.  There really isn’t anything to work with.Not there, anyway.  Master Control sends out a command, and several hundred miles away a deadly prototype aswarm with copper clockwork horrors begins checking its systems.  The activity of the horrors changes.  They begin loading ammuntion, fuelling, preparing for launch.  A few panels of armored plating must still be welded on.  It is a significant expenditure of resources, but one that Master Control is gambling Lester has not foreseen.If only there were better sensors at the lower levels, for that is where Master Control’s old enemy is!  But only within the upper levels could it actually see anything.Enough recriminations for now.  Lester was there, and he was a target.  By the time the unfinished prototype reached him, the first part of Master Control’s vengeance would already be well under way.Accursed bags of meat.***Our heroes travel through a large chamber with weird slimy growths waving in the current.  None of them seem dangerous, but there are two exits.  Our heroes continue across the room and pass into another large chamber.  Another golem moves to oppose them, but this one looks almost like a black-boned skeleton.  At first they mistake it for some weird undead, but as they pound on it it becomes apparent that it is made from some sort of metal.  Soon it has been cast down in pieces, and our heroes search its chamber.“Lookie here,” Gerontius cackles, popping open a secret panel and holding up a key.  “I bet that opens the door in the bottom of the shaft,” Inoke says. “Now don’t do anything hasty,” Orbius urges.  “Well, think about it- if we could shut this place down, we’d be doing a lot of good for my island.  Who knows what terrible effects all this radiation is going to have on my folk otherwise?”  He ponders for a moment, then says, “We could even use the wishes from the genie bottle.”*“You can use it if you get it,” Gerontius says, “but if I get it as my pick I probably won’t.”“’Pick?’” Inoke exclaims.  “If we get wishes, we should use them for the benefit of the whole party.”“How does that benefit me?”The exchange- half-serious, but half serious- continues as our heroes continue exploring.  The room with the hidden key in it has only one exit other than the passage from which they gained ingress.  They take it, continuing their debate, until Lester cries out. “Hey, look, all of youze!” he exclaims.  “It’s some kind of ooze!”Snapped out of their conversation, our heroes see a humungous greenish-turquoise ooze bristling with little hairs and growths.  It surges forward, sensing prey, and our heroes dispatch it without even slowing down.  The wide passage it was dwelling within has more of the bizzarre growths all over it, but soon it leads back into the central shaft.“I think we should try to shut it down,” Inoke says again.”Agreed,” Orbius answers, “but not today.  We need to be prepared.”Reluctantly, Inoke agrees.  The party backs up a few dozen feet, away from the shaft.  After a brief discussion, they recall the passageway they skipped from the first chamber they entered, and they return to it and begin to follow it.As they do, Orbius cocks his head.  I hear something, he relates over the telepathic bond.  Indeed... some kind of babbling, like many voices gibbering...Our heroes advance towards the Gibbering Garden.Next Time: Into the Gibbering Garden!*The genie bottle, which our heroes encountered earlier, was on Virri when they defeated him through Sybele’s ability to generate a wild zone, which our heroes believe killed the “rakshasa” when he tried to cast a spell.  Loot!</blockquote>

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