(A short update. It's late and I'm tired and there's bound to be typos; for that I apologize.)
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 219
Chaos
Ernie is the first to speak.
“What happened?”
Kibi takes a deep breath and shakes some water from his beard.
“Well, I went through there and it was all wet, but I had my helmet so that was all right. And there was fire, and a boulder rolling along, and there was no gravity, and there was a current, and then I started thinking about good solid ground under my feet, and air to breathe, and it worked! And I thought about gravity, and that worked. It was fine. I had a nice little pocket of survivable space. And then I figured I should come back out and tell you guys it was all good, and that we should go.”
Okay then.
There’s a bit of discussion after that regarding the Stabilizer, and whether it’s specially tuned to Kibi, or if anyone can use it.
“Cause Morningstar has a whole lot more experience doing that sort of thing,” says Ernie. “You know. In Dream.”
“We should test it out with other people regardless,” says Morningstar. “In case Kibi goes unconscious for some reason.”
As a next step, Kibi goes back with Morningstar and Aravis, all anchored with ropes held by the others. This time there is no water, just a fortuitous pocket of air in which they find themselves floating. Kibi concentrates and instantiates a large rectangular stone floor a few inches below their feet, then imagines gravity to match. He drops to the stone, and then the other two follow suit.
“Kibi, what’s that? Up there,” thinks Scree to his master.
Above them, a sheet (or maybe a block, it’s hard to tell) of flames is descending toward them. It will be upon them in about ten seconds. Kibi’s first attempt to make a ceiling fails; he gets some large pebbles which float loosely in the air. Morningstar and Aravis also try and fail to create shelter. But with a few seconds still to go, and the heat starting to beat at them, Kibi wills into existence walls and an arched ceiling to go with his floor. (This creates something like a small hangar, a wide stone hallway open at both ends, with a round arched ceiling.) They can hear the roaring of the flames as it breaks upon the stone enclosure, hear it all around them as they wait, holding their breaths, in their pocket of airy safety. Then they see the flames through the open ends of their hangar, sliding past and downward. A minute later it has passed, and the three of them remain standing in Kibi’s enclosure, unharmed.
Morningstar takes the Stabilizer to experiment. She concentrates on changing Kibi’s dark stone to a lighter shade, and succeeds in altering it to a different type of stone altogether. For her next trick she lowers the temperature around them by twenty degrees, and after that (to make sure magic is working properly) she casts bulls’ strength on Kibi.
A few seconds later (and unconnected to her efforts) a mass of water hits the hangar end-on; water tries to spray into Kibi’s air, and breaks into droplets, pelting them with sideways rain. And a few seconds after that their hangar is spun around as a large mass of earth and rock thumps into it from above. Through the far open end of the hangar they see the rock pass by, and that it has a stand of huge trees growing out of it. The ragged island drifts by, and after the treetops have slid past their field of vision, only empty air remains.
As a last experiment, Aravis casts a rope trick and climbs up into it. “Not chaotic in here,” he announces, sticking his head out.
“And it’s fixed in space,” notes Kibi. And with that, the three of them exit the hangar, adjust their gravity, and fall into the Way leading back to the others. (Kibi, having done it once before, slows himself at the last minute and manages to step out gracefully. Aravis and Morningstar go sprawling on the grass.) The three of them deliver a full report.
“This’ll be a piece of cake!” says Dranko. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Ernie smacks him.
“Here’s a plan,” continues Dranko. “We’ll all tie ourselves together with rope. Morningstar can cast find the path and set her personal gravity in that direction, while we all just float behind. We’ll plummet at hundreds of miles per hour toward the next Way while Morningstar clears us a path by turning everything to air in front of us!”
The thing is, no one is quite sure if he’s kidding.
“Er, except that you can only stabilize things in about a fifteen foot radius,” says Kibi. “And it takes a few seconds to do.”
“Oh. Well then,” says Dranko, disappointed.
“Hey! Everything all right in there?” shouts one of the guards. The locals who guard this Way have been watching, fascinated, as the Company has sent scouting parties into the Chaos.
“We’re still working out the details,” calls back Ernie.
“You go in yet?” asks the guard.
“We tried a couple of times, yeah,” says Ernie.
“It’s hell, ain’t it?” chuckles the guard.
“No, the Demon Slices are in hell,” says Dranko. “This is more like formless chaos.”
Aravis, as usual, doesn’t bother correcting him.
“Well, don’t make anything in there mad enough to come out here,” says the guard.
Morningstar manages to get everyone coordinated, makes sure there’s planned redundancy in their stabilizing of the chaos, and points out that an attack could come from any direction. Dranko oversees the ropes as they tie themselves together, and shows the others how best not to get tangled. Right around the time Dranko starts to speculate on how they could swing the plate-mail-clad Ernie around like a flail using gravity tricks, Kibi declares that they’ve waited long enough, and that it’s time to go in.
They each experience the cold black pulling of the Ways, and then are deposited into the Chaos, and specifically into a roaring fire. Morningstar, Flicker and Dranko avoid getting burned, and Kibi’s energy buffer is triggered, but the others are somewhat burned. Everyone immediately tries to recreate the immediate space into more friendly elements, and Kibi has the most success, reestablishing his hangar at a scale large enough to comfortably accommodate everyone. Nearby fire and lightning illuminate the interior with an orange glow. Hissing sounds fill the air as fire and water collide in the outside maelstrom, and these mix with the grinding sounds of stone on stone, blending into a dim cacophony.
When it’s clear that Kibi’s shelter is holding, Ernie tries to create chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, cookies not being an element per se, it fails. Dranko then tries to re-sculpt the stone into images of naked women. That fails too, though no one (except Dranko) finds that unfortunate.
The hangar is sound but rough, with a few ragged holes in the walls that turn out fortuitously to serve as windows. Some of the party looks out of these, enjoying the light show. Ernie’s too short to use any of the holes, so he walks to one of the open ends of the hangar and looks out. He does a double-take, and squints. It looks like something enormous is coming toward them. It’s another block of dirt and rock, and it’s large enough that he can’t its full extent – only the leading edge, lit up here and there by (relatively) small flashes of fire and lightning. He guesses it’s about a quarter mile across.
“Uh… guys?”
The others look out and see the problem.
“Just concentrate on air on the other side of our wall!” exclaims Dranko.
“Can’t I change its gravity?” cries Ernie.
“ No, that won’t work,” says Aravis calmly.
“Make a hole when it gets close enough!” says Morningstar
The gargantuan boulder drifts inexorably closer. It’s not coming fast, but it won’t need to. In the last few seconds before impact Ernie concentrates furiously on manifesting air in a fixed area relative to their own position, just outside their hangar. The others do likewise. Sure enough, when the rock mass reaches them, the continuously-generated air starts to carve out a divot, and it seems for a moment as if they’ll simply “tunnel” their way through. But the chunk of earth is also rotating, and it’s simply much too big. It collides with the hangar , but because of its rotation it doesn’t’ just push the Company along in front of it. Instead, the hangar starts to rotate around its long axis and spin along the face of the huge boulder. At first they each try to keep adjusting their own gravity to keep up with the floor, but after a few seconds no one can concentrate that well, and it becomes a nauseating minute-long exercise in trying to maintain equilibrium. When the hangar finally skitters off the rounded edge of the boulder, and finishes revolving a minute later, everyone falls in a different direction.
“ My gut hasn’t felt like that since I was almost killed back by the Black Circle,” groans Grey Wolf.
“And I was about to say this was sort of fun…” says Morningstar, holding her stomach.
Flicker looks out one of the hangar’s open ends. He sees the blue glow of the Way in, now well over 50’ away, and at a crazy angle relative to their new “down.”
Morningstar casts find the path to the Monastery, but it’s not on the same Slice and so the spell fails. She casts the spell a second time, this one to “the nearest Way that’s not the closest one,” and this gives her a direction to travel. It’s down, directly through the floor of the hangar at its current pitch and yaw.
So now something else becomes evident. The Company has no way to actually move the hangar. Rather, it has to be constantly remade in a new place. Kibi tries to reform it facing the right direction, but he’s still queasy and can’t concentrate. Everyone else tries, but only Grey Wolf, who has some experience with staying sharp while nauseated, is able to make it happen. He reforms the hangar to face the desired direction, while everyone else has to constantly readjust their gravity to stay on the floor, and not fall into Grey Wolf’s newly formed walls. Step looks as though he’s going to be sick.
“Just think about the floor,” suggests Ernie.
“I am thinking about the floor,” says Step. “That, and not throwing up.”
“Moving” the hangar now has to operate in the same way. They have no way to physically propel the stone, so someone has to keep creating more tunnel ahead of them, in the direction they want to go. Behind them, the tunnel they no longer need (and one which no one is concentrating) slowly gets eaten away by chaotic forces, crumbling into pebbles and rocks that float in the void or get blasted by other elements. At one point, they watch as a huge fast-moving boulder smashes apart a length of tunnel left some 50’ behind them.
“The place cleans itself up after us,” says Grey Wolf nervously.
They consider other simpler structures, but the hangar provides cover from most directions, while they can keep a look out for trouble through cracks and holes in the walls. Together they settle into a rhythm, moving their tunnel forward. With several of them concentrating on the task, someone is always succeeding. Still, it’s mentally draining.
Half an hour later the hangar lurches to one side and tilts, sending everyone scrambling to adjust their gravities. They see a wall of water sliding past the edges of the hangar, and it starts to push its way in, spraying them with droplets. The water mass soon passes, but it leaves a fish behind, hovering in midair at the far end of the hangar. Ernie thinks it might make for a good meal, but when he reaches it he discovers that it has twelve eyes and six fins arrayed evenly around its body.
“Cool!” says Dranko. “A Chaos Fish. It’s adapted to the chaos!”
“And there are enough eyeballs for everyone,” says Grey Wolf.
“Someone can have my eyeball,” says Ernie, looking a bit queasy.
A few minutes later they see that they’re heading into a meteor shower of fireballs. Worried about the structural integrity of the hangar, they halt their progress and wait for the shower to pass. It lasts for a good fifteen minutes, a spectacular sight, thousands of fireballs streaking through the chaos, illuminating clods of earth, and colliding with water masses in hissing explosions of steam.
When the hail of fireballs has ceased, they continue their journey through the chaos, toward the Way out. The next half an hour is (relatively) uneventful. Then someone spies another huge chunk of earth tumbling through space, maybe three quarters of a mile off, generally in the direction they’re heading. A large fortress has been built onto its surface; it sticks out of the top of the rock mass like a growth. It’s hard to see detail since it’s only visible in brief flashes of fire or lightning, but it looks abandoned. Aravis shares his belief that beings with enough experience can make semi-permanent structures in the chaos, that don’t need constant mental upkeep. It’s a rare talent.
The rock with the tower is roughly spherical, about a hundred yards in diameter. It’s swiveling as it moves, so that by the time they’ve closed to within a few hundred yards, the tower is pointing almost directly at them. As the tower starts to drift past them, its boulder suddenly slows to a halt, and swivels to keep the tower pointed at them. Morningstar keeps them moving, past the rock with its tower, and soon it moves out of easy sight, though they can still keep an eye on it through the “windows” in the walls.
Grey Wolf is the first to see the smaller boulder. A second chunk of rock, this one only about twenty feet in diameter, has detached itself from the tower rock and is tumbling toward them. The whole Company moves to that side of the hangar to take a look.
They can see creatures moving about on the smaller boulder, as it moves ever closer, and faster than they themselves can “move” their hangar.
“Boarding party!” shouts Grey Wolf.
…to be continued…
