How do you know the god is a potential ally?
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Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
How do you know the god is a potential ally?
Quartz
Hero
I'm guessing it's an agent of a god rather than a god itself.
carborundum
Adventurer
These guys will take help from anyone and anything. Even Flicker had some sort of cohort. I think. Maybe that was a while ago?
KerlanRayne
Explorer
1. He didn't immediately attack when he appeared. Always a good sign.
2. He talked about authorization so he's at least lawful and that's something they can work with.
3. He didn't seem particularly nice, which in their world means that he's probably a good guy.
coyote6
Adventurer
From the description of the entity, I'd say your guess is probably inevitably correct.
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
And yet, Dranko STILL doesn't have a fulltime torchbearer. How is that even fair?
carborundum
Adventurer
We still have a whole box of tapes to go. Maybe Sagiro will see sense 
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Hope springs eternal!
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 375
The Musician and the Scholar
The general opinion among the Company is that the black-and-white being is an agent working on behalf of both the Sister Gods, who appears when someone uses power that neither of Them wish wielded by others.
Dranko looks on the bright side. “Now if we want to get the Gods’ attention, we know how to do it!”
“Why would we want to…” begins Flicker, but he’s interrupted by a sizzling sound from Aravis. Crosser’s Maze tracery erupts and spreads across his skin, and he vanishes.
“Not again,” says Grey Wolf tiredly.
But Aravis’s absence is short this time. Less than two minutes later he reappears, lying peacefully on the floor of the Mehar-Bec morgue. He stands, yawns and stretches, feeling like he’s just woken from a sound night’s sleep. His memory holds another vision of the surface:
There are three of them – two woman and a man, each bedecked in the gold and white of Heros, the Kivian Goddess of Healing and Mercy. They stand inside a vast room shaped like a pyramid, the man and one woman pouring flasks of herb-scented oils into an inset pool at the room’s center. The other woman reads aloud from a scroll, chanting unknown syllables, worry clear on her face. After some minutes of this they cease these activities, look at one another, and sit down on the stone floor of the chamber.
“They should be back any moment,” says one of the women. She is tall, bulky, with long blonde hair down to her waist.
“Assuming enough survived to bring him here, Pelory,” says the man. He scratches his white beard with an old and gnarled hand.
“Stone, we sent fifty,” says the second woman. Her face holds both the blush of youth and the careworn lines of many years, making her age a mystery.
The man, Stone, shifts his weight on the hard floor. “If our intelligence was wrong, and he wasn’t alone, fifty wouldn’t have been enough. Not nearly enough. I’m not so sure of things as it is. Kaddrial said this warlord is so powerful, he can change the course of the war in a single moment, and we’re supposed to subdue him and haul his butt all this way? Just to dunk him in a cleansing pool?”
Pelory laughs. “Kaddrial knows what he’s talking about. He won’t say outright – says the enemy can hear everything anyone says on Kivia and Charagan both – but I’m guessing this warlord is under a curse, and he’ll be grateful enough when we lift it to fight on our side.”
The smaller woman looks up, no smile on her face. “If Kaddrial is right, maybe you should keep your mouth shut.”
“Watch yourself, Iris. I still outrank you.”
“Ladies,” Stone says with a croaking laugh. “If this Naradawk fellow hears everything anyone says, he’d long ago have been driven mad by the endless chatter of womenfolk. So don’t worry yourselves.”
Pelory smiles. “Stone, if you weren’t eighty years old, I’d dunk your head in the cleansing pool until you begged for Heros’ mercy. If you can’t…
“Quiet!” Iris shouts. “I think they’re back.”
Nine men, armed and armored, walk into the room, carrying a large wooden box like a coffin. Their boots clatter loudly on the stone floor. All of the men are wounded, some badly. One has lost an eye; another, his left arm below the elbow.
Pelory and Iris leap to their feet. Stone stands stiffly.
“Where are the rest?” asks Iris, her face pale. She knows the answer already.
“Dead,” says one of the soldiers.
“Then he wasn’t alone?” says Pelory. “Our divinations were wrong?”
“They weren’t wrong. It was just him. And he killed forty of us, including the sergeant. I’ve never seen a warrior like him. We had him outnumbered fifty to one, and by the end I was sure we were still outclassed. Cassik got in a lucky shot before he died; otherwise the rest of us would be dead too.”
“Well, bring him over here,” says Stone. “Assuming that’s him in the box. We’ve been preparing the cleansing pool for three days now, and that’s after the months it took months for Kaddrial’s priests to find all the ingredients, or hire adventurers to find them. No point in wasting any more time.”
The men stagger forward and drop the box heavily next to the pool. The soldier grimaces and clutches his shoulder.
“I hope he was worth it.”
The soldiers pry the lid from the box, and tilt the unconscious body of Darien Firemount into the cleansing pool.
The rest of the party cheer when they hear this news. Tor! Good old Tor, the boy warrior who long ago left to become a double agent to help the war against the Delfirians, but who was found out and magically converted into an actual Delfirian war chief. For years now Tor has been leading armies of Delfirians against their enemies in the neighboring kingdom of Bederen, commanded by his ancestor Davarian Firemount inhabiting the body of Abernathy’s former apprentice Thewana.
At last something good is happening up on the surface, though they’d have preferred him to have been “cleansed” in time to join them in the Underdark.
So, where to next? The scholar (and the Leaping Circle near the university) are of more relevance to their quest, but they decide upon a short side-trip to the amphitheater. Kibi knows the way thanks to his earlier prying eyes. They march quickly through the abandoned streets of Mehar-Bec, crystal buildings growing up all around them.
Three blocks from the amphitheater, a small red ball of flame flares to life in the air before them. This elicits curses from all present.
“I guess they knew we’d be coming through here,” Kibi laments.
As before, Dranko saw no kind of sensor or magical effect ahead of time. He winces, thinking that some horrific ultramarine-tinged monster is about to come eat him.
The fiery ball is a little bit larger than last time, and from it comes a voice, tinny, distorted, muffled. The words are nearly impossible to make out, but the Company thinks they catch parts of a phrase. ”There! We’ve almost… dammit!”
With an air-sucking pop, the fire vanishes.
Parhol’s translator beads had let them understand the language, even though it wasn’t Undercommon. In fact, they have no idea what language it was. But it makes them reconsider. Maybe the little fireball is being conjured up by someone trying to help them? Or at least to communicate with them?
Or it could just be Meledien and Seven Dark Words, trying to cast some terrible spell using the fire as a conduit. There’s no way to know.
They continue on to the amphitheater, a wide five-sided bowl dug downward into the rock. At the bottom, in the center, is a tall ghostly figure, the musician Nellig, playing a long, dark instrument, like an oboe sized for a giant. Above his head is a miasma of pulsing lights, an umbrella-shaped aura of swirling hues that from time to time fires out a colored tendril that makes morphing abstract shapes over the heads of a purely theoretical audience.
Dranko starts clapping, and the music stops. The ghost lowers his instrument and stares at them.
“We are here for the concert,” says Dranko.
Nellig nods. “I suggest the seats directly across, five rows up. You’ll get the best acoustic effect, as well as the visuals from the mote-phone." (That’s not actually the name of the instrument, but it’s the best translation Parthol’s beads can come up with. It transmits both its lights and part of its sound through the ubiquitous light motes.)
The Company sits, and Nellig plays.
The music is exquisite, a soaring melody, sometimes exuberant and other times heartbreaking. They are hearing a master of his musical craft, performing a complex piece which he’s been practicing for centuries. The lights wash over them, pulsing in time to the music. Nellig is waving the end of his mote-phone at them, directing the lights specifically to them. He is literally playing to his audience.
The concert goes on for almost an hour and a half without pause. His music rises into the cavernous heights above Mehar-Bec. At the end he holds one final note for ten seconds, and as it does a final strand of blue light breaks into smaller bits and drifts away.
The Company stands and applauds.
“That was the most incredible music I’ve ever heard,” says Aravis, and the other murmur in agreement.
“I hope now you can move on to your eternal rest,” says Dranko.
“I could,” says Nellig. “I wonder if they have mote-phones in the beyond? There’s so much repertoire still to explore.”
He peers at them, as if really seeing them for the first time. “Where did you come from? I’ve never seen your type of folk before. Are you here to avenge us?”
“Yes,” says Dranko. “In fact we are. We know why you died, and we have come to avenge you.” He explains the fall of the Adversary’s hand.
“Interesting,” he says. “Though it’s too late now for anything to be done, too late by far.” He hands his giant oboe to Morningstar. “Keep it,” he says. “I won’t need it where I’m going.” He smiles, bows, and fades away.
Now, if the medic Pettim was right, there is only one more ghost, the scholar Corriv, still haunting Mehar-Bec. It’s almost a half-hour from the amphitheater to the university, and the walk is stunningly quiet, bereft of its music. Dranko can’t help but think that somewhere in the city is the treasury, full of loot that the Mehar are no longer using, but the others discourage him from spending time on such a project.
The buildings thin out a bit as they approach the University Square. At one end of an open plaza is the largest building they’ve yet seen, a towering edifice of blue crystal topped with a rising tower of concentric domes, rising three hundred feet into the air. Above the huge front doors (which are open) is a symbol like an inverted trident. And now they hear a new sound, coming from inside the building. It sounds like a rhythmic ratcheting, and a clattering of gears.
The doors lead into an anteroom, attached to the main university building itself. Its walls are lined with empty trophy cases, and at the far end is a smaller set of double doors, also thrown open. From beyond comes the ratcheting sound again, along with a creaking like a ship straining at its ropes.
“Hello?” calls Morningstar. “We mean you no harm!”
“Corriv, are you there?” adds Kibi.
From beyond the door, and sounding like it’s coming from very high up, someone shouts back. “Don’t touch anything!”
Dranko slips forward and looks through the inner doors. The center of the university is one enormous room, and he’s looking at … a scaffolding? It takes up nearly the entire floor, a hundred feet on a side. It’s very slightly reminiscent of the Vree’s machine in Het Branoi, but only in that’s a latticework frame on an exaggerated scale.
The others come forward too, and gape. With time to examine it, they see that the scaffolding is made of blue crystal and generally in the shape of a great cube, divided into twenty-seven smaller cubes. But the cube is not perfect; it’s twisted, torqued, and were it made of ordinary rock, would have cracked in several places by now.
Tied to various parts of the scaffolding are several dozen thick rope cables, snaking through the multi-cubed skeleton and terminating at an array of spools. The spools are enormous – six feet long and three feet around – and set into a niche about half way up one of the walls, and so outside the scaffolding.
Floating up by the spools is a ghost. He grabs a large crank protruding from the end of one spool and turns it. There is a ratcheting sound as the spool turns and the ropes pull and the crystal groans. A section of cubes twists a few inches around.
The final detail of the bizarre tableaux is that in ten different places, short lengths of rope dangle off the crystal scaffold, each suspending a two-foot-diameter crystal hoop.
“What are you doing?” calls Dranko.
“I said don’t touch anything!” returns the ghost.
“We won’t!” Aravis assures him. “But we are fascinated by all this.”
“It is fascinating, isn’t it?” the ghost agrees.
“What is it?” asks Kibi.
“Hold on, hold, on, I’ll be right down.” The ghost – Corriv, they presume – turns the crank of another spool, stretching his cubes another inch or two. As he floats down to meet them, the party sees that a number of papers are orbiting his head, but in a controlled fashion, so that he can read any of them at need. Corriv lands, gathers up the papers, and sets them down.
“Aren’t you a fascinating set of folk.”
“We are visitors from very far away,” says Aravis.
“Ah, you must be.”
“Have you seen other visitors come through?” asks Kibi. “Others like us?”
“There’d have been three of them,” adds Morningstar.
“Oh yes, I saw them,” says Corriv.
“Were they mean to you?” asks Dranko.
“They ignored me,” says the ghost. “Though I guess in some sense their actions mocked me, since I have no idea how they did what they did. They took the Leaping Circle in about ten seconds.”
“That was rude,” Dranko agrees.
“It was! I don’t know if they understood where it was going to take them, since it’s impossible to know, but I also would have said it was impossible to activate it in less than 144 hours. There were three of them, yes, dressed in black. I did try to warn them. I told them it wasn't going to work. But then it did, so it shows you what I know.”
“But you know how to activate the Leaping Circle in 144 hours?” asks Kibi.
“I could, if I had an assistant. I could do it. Couldn't tell you where it was going to take you, though.”
“Does it always go to one place, or could it go to different places?” asks Kibi.
“This one has two possible destinations… either to Circle 5 or Circle 3, depending.
Oooooh! Circle 5! That would get them on the path indicated by the Croaking Oracle!
“Depending on what?” asks Kibi.
“Depending on…” Here he utters a word that has no meaning. “Quanta,” it sounds like. “It’s random,” explains Corriv. “It will either send you near to Circle 3, or to Circle 5, but there’s no way to know which until you’ve gone.”
Aravis gestures to the huge cubic framework. “What is this you’re working on?”
Corriv brightens. “Finally, someone who’s interested in it! Pettim didn’t care at all; she just wanted the bodies of all my assistants.”
“We spoke to the her, and to the musician,” says Dranko. “We were his audience, and then he passed on.”
“Really? He decided that you were enough?”
“His performance was amazing,” says Kibi.
“Pettim has also passed on,” says Aravis. “We assisted her in determining what happened to your people.”
“I can guess well enough what happened,” said Corriv. “There was a massive psychically resonant event. Must have occurred nearby.”
“It was a piece of an Evil God falling to earth,” says Aravis.
“Wlaqua?”
“No, another God. An outsider.”
“There are no other Gods.”
“We come from a place… beyond this world, where there are other Gods.”
Corriv gives them a sly look. “You’re from the surface, aren’t you!”
That brings the party up short. Thus far no one they’ve met understands the notion of the surface.
“You know about it?” asks Aravis.
“I don’t know about the surface, but I’ve developed theories. I’ve postulated that the surface must exist, but no one bought my theories.”
“They’re true,” says Dranko.
“I knew it! Ha! Too bad there’s no one left for me to gloat over.”
“Everyone else we’ve met down here seems to think it’s not possible,” says Morningstar.
“It has to be possible,” says Corriv. He starts pacing, in a floaty kind of way. “If you properly analyze magnetic shifts and tectonics and heat signatures, there’s no other conclusion one can reach! What’s it like up there? Tell me? Is there really no ceiling, as far you can see?”
“Would you like to see?” asks Morningstar.
“You can take me there?”
“No, but I can create an illusion of it.”
She shows him the night sky, and explains about the moon, and then the sun vis-à-vis the light motes.
Corriv just stares upward at the illusion, ghostly eyes wide, a huge smile on his face.
“It must be very hot,” he says, not looking away. “Your sun, I mean. It must be a source of moveable heat that rotates around and above the world.”
“Very impressive,” says Aravis.
“You’re extremely smart,” adds Kibi.
“Yes I am. Thank you for noticing. I’m glad to know my guesses are correct, but I've long given up on surface theory, and devoted my time to a more interesting and potentially relevant study.”
He motions to the scaffolding.
“Yeah, what is all that?” asks Dranko.
“That, my friends, is a map of the Leaping Circles!”
…to be continued…
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 375
The Musician and the Scholar
The general opinion among the Company is that the black-and-white being is an agent working on behalf of both the Sister Gods, who appears when someone uses power that neither of Them wish wielded by others.
Dranko looks on the bright side. “Now if we want to get the Gods’ attention, we know how to do it!”
“Why would we want to…” begins Flicker, but he’s interrupted by a sizzling sound from Aravis. Crosser’s Maze tracery erupts and spreads across his skin, and he vanishes.
“Not again,” says Grey Wolf tiredly.
But Aravis’s absence is short this time. Less than two minutes later he reappears, lying peacefully on the floor of the Mehar-Bec morgue. He stands, yawns and stretches, feeling like he’s just woken from a sound night’s sleep. His memory holds another vision of the surface:
There are three of them – two woman and a man, each bedecked in the gold and white of Heros, the Kivian Goddess of Healing and Mercy. They stand inside a vast room shaped like a pyramid, the man and one woman pouring flasks of herb-scented oils into an inset pool at the room’s center. The other woman reads aloud from a scroll, chanting unknown syllables, worry clear on her face. After some minutes of this they cease these activities, look at one another, and sit down on the stone floor of the chamber.
“They should be back any moment,” says one of the women. She is tall, bulky, with long blonde hair down to her waist.
“Assuming enough survived to bring him here, Pelory,” says the man. He scratches his white beard with an old and gnarled hand.
“Stone, we sent fifty,” says the second woman. Her face holds both the blush of youth and the careworn lines of many years, making her age a mystery.
The man, Stone, shifts his weight on the hard floor. “If our intelligence was wrong, and he wasn’t alone, fifty wouldn’t have been enough. Not nearly enough. I’m not so sure of things as it is. Kaddrial said this warlord is so powerful, he can change the course of the war in a single moment, and we’re supposed to subdue him and haul his butt all this way? Just to dunk him in a cleansing pool?”
Pelory laughs. “Kaddrial knows what he’s talking about. He won’t say outright – says the enemy can hear everything anyone says on Kivia and Charagan both – but I’m guessing this warlord is under a curse, and he’ll be grateful enough when we lift it to fight on our side.”
The smaller woman looks up, no smile on her face. “If Kaddrial is right, maybe you should keep your mouth shut.”
“Watch yourself, Iris. I still outrank you.”
“Ladies,” Stone says with a croaking laugh. “If this Naradawk fellow hears everything anyone says, he’d long ago have been driven mad by the endless chatter of womenfolk. So don’t worry yourselves.”
Pelory smiles. “Stone, if you weren’t eighty years old, I’d dunk your head in the cleansing pool until you begged for Heros’ mercy. If you can’t…
“Quiet!” Iris shouts. “I think they’re back.”
Nine men, armed and armored, walk into the room, carrying a large wooden box like a coffin. Their boots clatter loudly on the stone floor. All of the men are wounded, some badly. One has lost an eye; another, his left arm below the elbow.
Pelory and Iris leap to their feet. Stone stands stiffly.
“Where are the rest?” asks Iris, her face pale. She knows the answer already.
“Dead,” says one of the soldiers.
“Then he wasn’t alone?” says Pelory. “Our divinations were wrong?”
“They weren’t wrong. It was just him. And he killed forty of us, including the sergeant. I’ve never seen a warrior like him. We had him outnumbered fifty to one, and by the end I was sure we were still outclassed. Cassik got in a lucky shot before he died; otherwise the rest of us would be dead too.”
“Well, bring him over here,” says Stone. “Assuming that’s him in the box. We’ve been preparing the cleansing pool for three days now, and that’s after the months it took months for Kaddrial’s priests to find all the ingredients, or hire adventurers to find them. No point in wasting any more time.”
The men stagger forward and drop the box heavily next to the pool. The soldier grimaces and clutches his shoulder.
“I hope he was worth it.”
The soldiers pry the lid from the box, and tilt the unconscious body of Darien Firemount into the cleansing pool.
The rest of the party cheer when they hear this news. Tor! Good old Tor, the boy warrior who long ago left to become a double agent to help the war against the Delfirians, but who was found out and magically converted into an actual Delfirian war chief. For years now Tor has been leading armies of Delfirians against their enemies in the neighboring kingdom of Bederen, commanded by his ancestor Davarian Firemount inhabiting the body of Abernathy’s former apprentice Thewana.
At last something good is happening up on the surface, though they’d have preferred him to have been “cleansed” in time to join them in the Underdark.
So, where to next? The scholar (and the Leaping Circle near the university) are of more relevance to their quest, but they decide upon a short side-trip to the amphitheater. Kibi knows the way thanks to his earlier prying eyes. They march quickly through the abandoned streets of Mehar-Bec, crystal buildings growing up all around them.
Three blocks from the amphitheater, a small red ball of flame flares to life in the air before them. This elicits curses from all present.
“I guess they knew we’d be coming through here,” Kibi laments.
As before, Dranko saw no kind of sensor or magical effect ahead of time. He winces, thinking that some horrific ultramarine-tinged monster is about to come eat him.
The fiery ball is a little bit larger than last time, and from it comes a voice, tinny, distorted, muffled. The words are nearly impossible to make out, but the Company thinks they catch parts of a phrase. ”There! We’ve almost… dammit!”
With an air-sucking pop, the fire vanishes.
Parhol’s translator beads had let them understand the language, even though it wasn’t Undercommon. In fact, they have no idea what language it was. But it makes them reconsider. Maybe the little fireball is being conjured up by someone trying to help them? Or at least to communicate with them?
Or it could just be Meledien and Seven Dark Words, trying to cast some terrible spell using the fire as a conduit. There’s no way to know.
They continue on to the amphitheater, a wide five-sided bowl dug downward into the rock. At the bottom, in the center, is a tall ghostly figure, the musician Nellig, playing a long, dark instrument, like an oboe sized for a giant. Above his head is a miasma of pulsing lights, an umbrella-shaped aura of swirling hues that from time to time fires out a colored tendril that makes morphing abstract shapes over the heads of a purely theoretical audience.
Dranko starts clapping, and the music stops. The ghost lowers his instrument and stares at them.
“We are here for the concert,” says Dranko.
Nellig nods. “I suggest the seats directly across, five rows up. You’ll get the best acoustic effect, as well as the visuals from the mote-phone." (That’s not actually the name of the instrument, but it’s the best translation Parthol’s beads can come up with. It transmits both its lights and part of its sound through the ubiquitous light motes.)
The Company sits, and Nellig plays.
The music is exquisite, a soaring melody, sometimes exuberant and other times heartbreaking. They are hearing a master of his musical craft, performing a complex piece which he’s been practicing for centuries. The lights wash over them, pulsing in time to the music. Nellig is waving the end of his mote-phone at them, directing the lights specifically to them. He is literally playing to his audience.
The concert goes on for almost an hour and a half without pause. His music rises into the cavernous heights above Mehar-Bec. At the end he holds one final note for ten seconds, and as it does a final strand of blue light breaks into smaller bits and drifts away.
The Company stands and applauds.
“That was the most incredible music I’ve ever heard,” says Aravis, and the other murmur in agreement.
“I hope now you can move on to your eternal rest,” says Dranko.
“I could,” says Nellig. “I wonder if they have mote-phones in the beyond? There’s so much repertoire still to explore.”
He peers at them, as if really seeing them for the first time. “Where did you come from? I’ve never seen your type of folk before. Are you here to avenge us?”
“Yes,” says Dranko. “In fact we are. We know why you died, and we have come to avenge you.” He explains the fall of the Adversary’s hand.
“Interesting,” he says. “Though it’s too late now for anything to be done, too late by far.” He hands his giant oboe to Morningstar. “Keep it,” he says. “I won’t need it where I’m going.” He smiles, bows, and fades away.
Now, if the medic Pettim was right, there is only one more ghost, the scholar Corriv, still haunting Mehar-Bec. It’s almost a half-hour from the amphitheater to the university, and the walk is stunningly quiet, bereft of its music. Dranko can’t help but think that somewhere in the city is the treasury, full of loot that the Mehar are no longer using, but the others discourage him from spending time on such a project.
The buildings thin out a bit as they approach the University Square. At one end of an open plaza is the largest building they’ve yet seen, a towering edifice of blue crystal topped with a rising tower of concentric domes, rising three hundred feet into the air. Above the huge front doors (which are open) is a symbol like an inverted trident. And now they hear a new sound, coming from inside the building. It sounds like a rhythmic ratcheting, and a clattering of gears.
The doors lead into an anteroom, attached to the main university building itself. Its walls are lined with empty trophy cases, and at the far end is a smaller set of double doors, also thrown open. From beyond comes the ratcheting sound again, along with a creaking like a ship straining at its ropes.
“Hello?” calls Morningstar. “We mean you no harm!”
“Corriv, are you there?” adds Kibi.
From beyond the door, and sounding like it’s coming from very high up, someone shouts back. “Don’t touch anything!”
Dranko slips forward and looks through the inner doors. The center of the university is one enormous room, and he’s looking at … a scaffolding? It takes up nearly the entire floor, a hundred feet on a side. It’s very slightly reminiscent of the Vree’s machine in Het Branoi, but only in that’s a latticework frame on an exaggerated scale.
The others come forward too, and gape. With time to examine it, they see that the scaffolding is made of blue crystal and generally in the shape of a great cube, divided into twenty-seven smaller cubes. But the cube is not perfect; it’s twisted, torqued, and were it made of ordinary rock, would have cracked in several places by now.
Tied to various parts of the scaffolding are several dozen thick rope cables, snaking through the multi-cubed skeleton and terminating at an array of spools. The spools are enormous – six feet long and three feet around – and set into a niche about half way up one of the walls, and so outside the scaffolding.
Floating up by the spools is a ghost. He grabs a large crank protruding from the end of one spool and turns it. There is a ratcheting sound as the spool turns and the ropes pull and the crystal groans. A section of cubes twists a few inches around.
The final detail of the bizarre tableaux is that in ten different places, short lengths of rope dangle off the crystal scaffold, each suspending a two-foot-diameter crystal hoop.
“What are you doing?” calls Dranko.
“I said don’t touch anything!” returns the ghost.
“We won’t!” Aravis assures him. “But we are fascinated by all this.”
“It is fascinating, isn’t it?” the ghost agrees.
“What is it?” asks Kibi.
“Hold on, hold, on, I’ll be right down.” The ghost – Corriv, they presume – turns the crank of another spool, stretching his cubes another inch or two. As he floats down to meet them, the party sees that a number of papers are orbiting his head, but in a controlled fashion, so that he can read any of them at need. Corriv lands, gathers up the papers, and sets them down.
“Aren’t you a fascinating set of folk.”
“We are visitors from very far away,” says Aravis.
“Ah, you must be.”
“Have you seen other visitors come through?” asks Kibi. “Others like us?”
“There’d have been three of them,” adds Morningstar.
“Oh yes, I saw them,” says Corriv.
“Were they mean to you?” asks Dranko.
“They ignored me,” says the ghost. “Though I guess in some sense their actions mocked me, since I have no idea how they did what they did. They took the Leaping Circle in about ten seconds.”
“That was rude,” Dranko agrees.
“It was! I don’t know if they understood where it was going to take them, since it’s impossible to know, but I also would have said it was impossible to activate it in less than 144 hours. There were three of them, yes, dressed in black. I did try to warn them. I told them it wasn't going to work. But then it did, so it shows you what I know.”
“But you know how to activate the Leaping Circle in 144 hours?” asks Kibi.
“I could, if I had an assistant. I could do it. Couldn't tell you where it was going to take you, though.”
“Does it always go to one place, or could it go to different places?” asks Kibi.
“This one has two possible destinations… either to Circle 5 or Circle 3, depending.
Oooooh! Circle 5! That would get them on the path indicated by the Croaking Oracle!
“Depending on what?” asks Kibi.
“Depending on…” Here he utters a word that has no meaning. “Quanta,” it sounds like. “It’s random,” explains Corriv. “It will either send you near to Circle 3, or to Circle 5, but there’s no way to know which until you’ve gone.”
Aravis gestures to the huge cubic framework. “What is this you’re working on?”
Corriv brightens. “Finally, someone who’s interested in it! Pettim didn’t care at all; she just wanted the bodies of all my assistants.”
“We spoke to the her, and to the musician,” says Dranko. “We were his audience, and then he passed on.”
“Really? He decided that you were enough?”
“His performance was amazing,” says Kibi.
“Pettim has also passed on,” says Aravis. “We assisted her in determining what happened to your people.”
“I can guess well enough what happened,” said Corriv. “There was a massive psychically resonant event. Must have occurred nearby.”
“It was a piece of an Evil God falling to earth,” says Aravis.
“Wlaqua?”
“No, another God. An outsider.”
“There are no other Gods.”
“We come from a place… beyond this world, where there are other Gods.”
Corriv gives them a sly look. “You’re from the surface, aren’t you!”
That brings the party up short. Thus far no one they’ve met understands the notion of the surface.
“You know about it?” asks Aravis.
“I don’t know about the surface, but I’ve developed theories. I’ve postulated that the surface must exist, but no one bought my theories.”
“They’re true,” says Dranko.
“I knew it! Ha! Too bad there’s no one left for me to gloat over.”
“Everyone else we’ve met down here seems to think it’s not possible,” says Morningstar.
“It has to be possible,” says Corriv. He starts pacing, in a floaty kind of way. “If you properly analyze magnetic shifts and tectonics and heat signatures, there’s no other conclusion one can reach! What’s it like up there? Tell me? Is there really no ceiling, as far you can see?”
“Would you like to see?” asks Morningstar.
“You can take me there?”
“No, but I can create an illusion of it.”
She shows him the night sky, and explains about the moon, and then the sun vis-à-vis the light motes.
Corriv just stares upward at the illusion, ghostly eyes wide, a huge smile on his face.
“It must be very hot,” he says, not looking away. “Your sun, I mean. It must be a source of moveable heat that rotates around and above the world.”
“Very impressive,” says Aravis.
“You’re extremely smart,” adds Kibi.
“Yes I am. Thank you for noticing. I’m glad to know my guesses are correct, but I've long given up on surface theory, and devoted my time to a more interesting and potentially relevant study.”
He motions to the scaffolding.
“Yeah, what is all that?” asks Dranko.
“That, my friends, is a map of the Leaping Circles!”
…to be continued…
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