Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 372
A Killing Machine
Ernie casts magic circle vs. evil in case the Essence is stronger inside the temple. For a moment after that the Company just stands there at the precipice, gazing down upon the huge cone that is Temple of the Sisters.
Dranko jumps off. The others’ hearts skip a beat before they remember he always feather falls. Ernie nearly shouts, but remembers they’re all mind-linked. “What are you doing!?” he asks.
“I was bored. I’m going to scout, to make sure all the peshovar are inside the temple.” Dranko lands softly on the cavern floor, and sees it is carved similarly to the walls and ceiling, textured with finely-crafted shapes and designs. The feeling of Essence has increased a small amount, but is still nothing tangibly dangerous. He hears low, rumbling grunts from inside the temple, muffled by the stone walls. The hole in the ground that leads down and then up again inside has been shaped to be quite narrow. He guesses the stribe have done that to keep the peshovar trapped inside. Outside, he finds no tracks, no spoor, no sign of any lumbering beasts.
The rest of the party casts some personal long-term combat buffs, though they have to wait on party-wide enchantments now that Dranko is a hundred feet below them. Aravis transforms via shapechange into an enormous earth elemental, sinks into the ground, and sticks a giant stone hand out into the cavern. In this way he becomes a living elevator and shuttles his friends two at a time down to where Dranko waits. As he loads up Ernie and Grey Wolf, four stribe return.
“We are to here to wait outward,” one of them says. “In case you are need rescue.”
Now that the Company is again gathered together, they finish their battery of buffs, and then Kibi casts prying eyes, instructing them to go through the tunnel and explore the temple interior. A few minutes later they start to return, and provide Kibi a visual report. There are four peshovar inside, roaming around restlessly, black spots crawling over their rough gray lizardy hides. Each is about twelve feet long from nose to tail, seven feet high at the top of its ridged back, and true to the drawings of the stribe, resembles a cross between a lizard and a dinosaur. The motes of light closest to them, within about a foot of their skins, swirl and dart with atypical energy. Kibi sighs at the predictably razor-sharp claws and teeth.
Ernie decides a divination is in order. As he casts, he becomes acutely aware of the spiritual separation from Yondalla that comes from being on the wrong side of Yulan’s Barrier. In order to receive his guidance he will need to expend life-force, and this he is willing to do. He finishes the spell and asks, “Will we do well if we enter the Temple to battle the peshovar?”
STAY GROUNDED
A’aatra had already hinted that the peshovar have some control over gravity, and this bit of divine wisdom puts any thought of flying out of their heads. Taking Yondalla’s advice more literally, Kibi uses wish to effect a mass xorn movement on the entire party.
“Ready?” asks Dranko.
Down they go, sinking into the stone and then moving beneath the temple floor.
“This is weird,” thinks Ernie. “I can’t see anything, but I can sense vibrations.”
Except for Kibi, this is their first time under the effects of xorn movement. While blind, they have acute senses of movement and gravity, and the tactile sensations are bizarre. It feels like swimming through gelatin.
“I’ll scout,” says Dranko. He makes use of his robe of blending and pokes his head up through the floor, noting the positions of the four meandering peshovar. There are many large pillars in the temple, ten feet around and thirty feet high, and atop these are various oddly shaped sculptures. Two at the front end each support a statue of a stribe, one white, one black – the representations of the Sister Gods, Yavin and Wlaqua.
Hastily they work out a plan of attack over the mind link. Aravis rises up directly beneath one of the pillars and then continues to “swim” up the pillar until he emerges at its zenith. The others pop up in various places, staying out of “fireball formation” in case these creatures have any area attacks. The peshovar, none too bright in the best of circumstances, are taken entirely by surprise. Flicker immediately moves to stab one of the startled creatures, but his blade is turned by its knobbly hide. Dranko has better luck, carving chunks out of the closest peshovar with his whip.
Aravis plays a hunch and drops a disjunction on two of the peshovar far removed from any of his friends. A ripple of unstoppable abjuration spreads out and flows over the beasts, but it’s hard to say what effect it has, if any, because the spell also wipes out all of the light motes in its area. The two peshovar are now hidden inside a hemisphere of blackness.
Ernie figures that if they had any magical defenses, he should strike before they have a chance to reestablish them. He casts ice flowers into the darkness, and is rewarded by saurian bellows of pain.
Kibi bisects the temple interior with a wall of force, figuring that can only work to their tactical advantage since everyone can burrow beneath it. Grey Wolf lobs an acid orb at the nearest monster, while Flicker and Dranko flank and devastate another with their weapons. The peshovar isn’t dead, but slumps to one side due to having one of its hind legs nearly removed.
Morningstar casts firestorm. All of the peshovar are badly burned, and the one already brought close to death by Dranko and Flicker collapses in a heap of frozen flesh.
By now the lumbering beasties have worked out that something bad is happening. The one closest to Grey Wolf casts its dull-eyed gaze at the spellsword, and its black lesions start to jitter on its skin. Grey Wolf winces, knowing what’s coming, and he’s right: painful black pustules form on his own skin and burst in pocks of stinging fire. Then the remaining peshovar also look that way, and the light motes around them start to pulse and squirm. Each peshovar becomes encased in a shimmering aura. The closest opens its mouth, bellows, and sonic ribbons radiate out through the light motes, setting them to a frantic vibration. This quickly builds to a crescendo, before the light motes fall inward onto Grey Wolf with an astounding sonic boom. Grey Wolf is blasted from his feet, skin torn from his body, his bones bruised and teeth set to rattling in his mouth. Residual waves of sonic energy streak toward some of the others, but Flicker and Dranko dance out of the way, and Kibi is protected by one of the many silver discs of his effulgent epuration.
The second of the nearby peshovar looks balefully at Aravis, and he too feels the sickening pain of black pustules popping all over his face. Annoyed, Aravis responds with maze. The peshovar vanishes. Satisfied, Aravis sinks into the safety of the stone floor.
Ernie follows with flame strike on the monster that instigated the sonic attack, but the peshovar are at least moderately resistant to magic and the spell has no effect. Kibi suffers a similar failure with hold monster, but has better luck with a quickened rainbow pattern. The closest peshovar looks up at the sparkly lights, grunting with curiosity and snapping at them with its teeth.
Morningstar moves to heal Grey Wolf, then quickens divine power on herself. Grey Wolf shakes his head and struggles to his feet before blasting the closest peshovar with another acid orb.
Dranko realizes that if he goes invisible, he can lay waste to these things with sneak attacks. To buy himself more time, he reaches into the fragile recesses of madness deep within his mind and effects time stop. The battle freezes. Every light mote hangs suspended, grains of dust sheathed in tiny individual halos. The black spots of Essence stop squidging on the skins of the peshovar. And somewhere just out of view, tantalizingly close, lies the twinkling insanity of the Far Realms.
He moves into attack position, casts improved invisibility on himself, and waits to reappear. Giggles of anticipation threaten to burst from his lips.
What the others see is this: Dranko teleports across the battlefield to stand behind a peshovar, flanking it with Flicker. Immediately all the light motes within six inches of his body flock to his skin, coating him in a glowing membrane. Though technically invisible, he shines like a bonfire. He’s so startled that his whip strike goes wide.
“What did you do that for?” exclaims Flicker.
“Note to self,” says Dranko. “Invisibility in the Underdark sucks.”
Just like conversations, battles occasionally have tiny periods of incongruous silence, when every combatant’s pauses align. Such a moment occurs, and everyone can hear a faint sound from somewhere outside the temple. It sounds familiar, though no one can place it exactly. Some sort of machine?
Dranko looks accusingly at Kibi. “Not working as expected!” he shouts. “Your invisibility sash is broken!” His voice has taken on the slur of wisdom drain from the tentacle-powered time stop. Before Kibi can defend himself from this slander, the peshovar swivels to face Dranko, gives him the black-pustule treatment, and then savages him with the pointy ends of its claws and teeth.
Though the peshovar are physically imposing, Aravis hopes to get lucky with a disintegrate, and hits the jackpot. His spell overcomes all its resistance and resilience. For a moment it appears that nothing has happened, before the peshovar collapses into a powdery swirl on the floor. That leaves two beasts dead, one trapped in a maze, and the last still playfully nipping at the rainbow pattern. The various patches of darkness left behind by area spells are filling in as the light motes seek their natural spatial equilibrium.
The mysterious sound is much louder now, right outside the temple. Everyone thinks it familiar but none can place it – a rhythmic chopping sound mixed with metallic clanks. Echoes of metal colliding with stone come from the tunnel entrance in the floor; whatever it is, it’s on its way in! Kibi quickly casts a wall of stone covering the hole, a granite plug nearly two feet thick that should buy them a few minutes at least. They then rush to the hypnotized peshovar, surround it, and commence smashing and slicing it to pieces. Though Kibi inflicts serious damage with a pair of earthbolts and Aravis slams it with a Bigby’s clenched fist, the lion’s share of damage is done by Morningstar with Ell’s Will, which deals terrible damage to spell-resistant creatures.
From the tunnel comes a rising sound, as of something hydraulic powering up, followed by a tremendous boom. Kibi’s stone wall quivers and sprouts a latticework of small cracks. The dwarf exhorts his familiar Scree to investigate – carefully! – what’s in the tunnel.
“It’s… I don’t know what it is, Kibi. Some kind of machine is smashing through your wall, but it’s also alive. I think. And it has an aquamarine glow, just like the…”
A volcano of rock shards erupts from the floor, and the whole Company is now afforded a good look at the thing as it emerges. If a bored God had set out to make a war machine out of gleaming iron plates and assorted deadly weapons, and decided halfway through to just start bolting on any dangerous-looking object He could find, this is what his creation would look like. It’s very roughly humanoid, seven feet tall and extremely bulky. Its surface bristles with jointed saws, hammers, spikes, spinning blades, bolted-on pipes, and dozens of little protuberances like insect antennae. Tiny arcs of electricity spark and pop all over it, while it emits a ceaseless cacophony of buzzes, whirs, clicks, hisses and crackles. It smells of ozone and oil.
From its very top a large propeller unfolds, and the creature – called an “Anaxim,” though none of the Company have heard that word – rises a few feet into the air. Now they all recognize the sound. It’s the chop of propeller blades, which they have heard once in their lives, from the strange mechanical Screel in Het Branoi.
As Scree had reported, the Anaxim is limned in aquamarine light, just as had the many-winged horror that had assaulted them near the Croaking Oracle.
In Dranko’s mind he hears a monotone voice. Primary target acquired. Dranko Blackhope. Kill, kill, kill.
“Meledien must really be angry that I have her arm,” Dranko mutters. Over the mind-link there’s a brief burst of chatter. Is this the real trap? Weaken the party with the peshovar and then spring this clanking death-machine on them? Dranko dives into the ground, putting a few feet of earth between himself and the monster. Flicker and Grey Wolf quickly follow.
Aravis regards this new threat and wonders if its various electrical components can be short-circuited. He casts lightning ring, then quickens a cone of cold. The Anaxim is coated with frost, but isn’t much slowed, and seems to have resisted much of the damage. Ernie slides through the stone beneath the wall of force and casts radiant assault, but as the light of the spell bursts outward, most of the Anaxim’s iron plates flip on hidden gimbals to reveal brightly-polished mirrors. The spell energy is deflected, scattering harmlessly into the air, and the plates flip again to present their unyielding iron faces.
Kibi drops his wall of force (since the metal creature can fly over it) and casts his own cone of cold, but again the panels flip and deflect the spell. Frustrated, the dwarf commands his Bigby’s clenched fist to punch the thing, and that actually works. A tiny antenna snaps off and skitters across the floor. Morningstar calls down a firestorm on the Anaxim, but once more its mirror-plates protect it entirely. She glares at it before retreating into the rock.
A little dish pops out of a hidden panel on the Anaxim’s head and swivels about for a second or two. Scanning lights flicker to life and sweep an arc in front of it. With most of his allies hiding in the rock, only Ernie falls within the Anaxim’s scan. A little clawed hand pops out of yet another hidden compartment, holding what looks like a tiny wand. The wand flares, and four towering iron golems appear surrounding Ernie. They are ten feet tall, with featureless heads and enormous iron fists, and Ernie has a terrible flashback to his death-by-anvil, delivered by a golem not dissimilar to these. But he is a much more experienced combatant than he was all those years ago, and is almost smothered with defensive enchantments. He dodges, ducks, and lets his armor do its job. Though eight enormous fists come crashing down upon him, he weathers the storm entirely unscathed.
Flicker pops up next to the Anaxim and lunges at it with his ice dagger, but the machine bats the blade away with a length of iron pipe dangling from a short length of chain. Dranko emerges as well and unleashes a full flurry of whip strikes, an assault of the sort that usually delivers horrific damage to his enemies.
The Anaxim deflects them all. All of its scanning lights swing to shine upon him. Dranko Blackhope. Kill, kill, kill.
Aravis fires off two lightning bolts from his lightning ring, but both are deflected by the flipping mirrors. The same happens to a quickened disintegrate.
Even surrounded by iron golems, Ernie manages to cast lion’s roar, but none of the enemies even seems to notice. Dismayed, Ernie retreats into the floor. Kibi then gives the golems something to do, casting summon monster IX and bringing forth five greater earth elementals. These immediately move to grapple, thus instigating an epic golems-vs.-elementals melee the likes of which the world has likely never seen, though in current context it’s relegated to the undercard.
While Kibi sinks into the floor, Morningstar moves to stand near Dranko, then quickens a searing darkness which manages to strike a spot not protected by the mirrors. The damage is not great, but there’s a small cracking sound and a handful of springs pops out from the Anaxim’s busy interior to bounce crazily on the ground.
While the iron golems and earth elementals continue their scrum, the Anaxim rises swiftly into the air using its whirring propeller until it hovers forty feet above the ground. A panel on its underside flips around to reveal a metallic cone, and from this cone comes a deafening sonic boom. Dranko rolls out of its area, but Grey Wolf and Morningstar are caught full in the blast. Flicker avoids a portion of its nerve-crushing shock, but still feels his hair standing on end.
Dranko looks up. “Is that the best you can do? Who sent you, anyway?”
“Information sharing criteria not met.”
Some of the more damaged of its plates flip around, and from deep within the Anaxim’s body there comes a furnace roar and a red glow that shines out from between its seams. The plates flip back, and much of the damage has been repaired.
As Flicker fights down his fear and flies upward to engage the Anaxim, Grey Wolf notices Dranko fishing out his bag of endless rope, to which he has tied a grappling hook onto the end. His “Dranko is about to do something foolish” alarm goes off, and he casts indomitability on his friend. Dranko swings the rope around a few times and hurls the grappling hook upward, hoping that the rope will tangle in the machine’s propellers and bring it down. Miraculously the hook does get caught on one of the blades instead of ricocheting off, but the rope ends up winding rapidly around the propeller shaft, hissing out of its enchanted bag at an alarming rate. With only a few seconds before all the rope will be pulled up, Dranko runs twice around the nearest pillar and braces himself.
The rope runs out, and the force of the Anaxim’s propeller is tested against Dranko’s ability to hold his ground. Dranko comes out of that contest rather badly. Unwilling to release the bag, he is whipped around the pillar until he has become unwound, before being flung outward and reeled in like a fish biting down on a hook. In under two seconds he has been brought right up against the Anaxim’s body, where he becomes impaled on several small spikes. This turns out to be a lucky break, as he is not pulled into the propeller itself, which would surely have sliced him to ribbons.
The smell of fire and hot oil fills Dranko’s nose, and the sounds of ratcheting hammers and whirring saw blades are loud in his ears. Wind from the propeller blows his hair.
Aravis thinks to Dranko over the mind-link. “I’m going to try more lightning bolts, in case electricity is its weakness and I get them past its spell resistance. Can you dodge them?”
“I’m sure I can,” says Dranko, eager for anything that might solve his predicament. Aravis fires his bolts, but it doesn’t work out very well. While they do get past the creature’s resistance this time, the electricity becomes diffuse and spreads into a crackling web around the Anaxim’s body, while dozens of tiny antenna jitter and like electrified cilia. Dranko gets burned, but the machine is unscarred. Aravis curses and quickens an anti-magic ray, but this has no effect at all.
Things are starting to look desperate. Weapons and spells are failing to have much effect, and now the thing has Dranko seemingly at its mercy. Ernie flings an energy drain at it, but discovers that the Anaxim has no life energy to drain. Kibi, with an angle on the side of the creature where Dranko isn’t, blasts the monster with an empowered maximized coldfire, but between the thing’s unnatural agility and natural resistance to elements, it’s hardly scratched.
Dranko. Kill.
Two large saw blades swing downward on jointed arms and buzz toward Dranko’s head. He manages to flip over to avoid the first (impaling himself on a new set of spikes) but the second slices deep into his arm, and then an iron trip hammer smashes him in the thigh. Finally, adding injury to injury, a small sparking arm scorches him with a jolt of electricity.
Astoundingly, he’s not dead, though his blood is now sheeting down both his body and the Anaxim’s and dripping onto the floor far below. Morningstar looks up and comes to two conclusions. First, her reckless husband needs rescuing. Second, it’s going to be up to her to take down this metallic horror. “Grey Wolf, can you make me fly?” Grey Wolf obliges with a wand, and up Morningstar soars. When she’s close enough, she casts a mass heal that encompasses herself, Dranko and Flicker. Then she draws Ell’s Will.
Dranko, meanwhile, has not stopped thinking about how he might foul up the flying apparatus of the Anaxim. From his haversack he calls up his immovable rod. The metal beast is swaying slightly as it hovers, oscillations caused in part by his own weight pinned to its spikes. He takes a couple of seconds to time its movement, and cringing from the danger to his fingers, reaches up and presses the button that fixes the rod relative to the world.
With a sound like a hyperactive titan banging on an anvil with a metal rod, every one of the Anaxim’s propeller blades is sheared off; they spray around the temple like a fan of throwing knives, each quivering at it sinks into the stone wall. And the Anaxim falls, though even bereft of flight it keeps focus on its goal, tipping its body so that it lands with Dranko underneath it. Dranko does his best to avoid the longest of the spikes, but is still somewhat crushed and impaled beneath the Anaxim’s metal bulk. Now that he’s being pressed to the floor, he is able to slide from the spikes and sink into the ground, which he does. He swims away through the stone and pops up well away from the Anaxim, his back to a wall.
Morningstar, recently arrived at the spot forty feet from the ground, looks downward and lets out an aggrieved sigh. “Goddess, I really am trying to use my weapon in Your name.”
Aravis tries polymorph any object, but the Anaxim will have none of it. It is a creature of a sort immune to a myriad of magical subtypes, including polymorph. Ernie, realizing his spells are doing little good, draws Honor of Nemmin even while swimming through the rock and uses its ability to transform himself into a pure fighter. His face glows gold and green, he seems to grow a few inches, and his armor takes on a faint pattern of green leaves.
Kibi sets his Bigby’s fist to keep punching the Anaxim, and sends the silver disks of his effulgent epuration to protect Dranko. They streak across the battlefield like a swam of tiny gray meteors and form up around the beleaguered half-orc. Seeing that four of his elementals have effectively locked down the iron golems, Kibi sends the fifth one to harass the Anaxim, though it cannot find an opening for its rocky fists. Having done as much, the dwarf sinks into the stone.
”Dranko Blackhope. Kill, kill, kill.
The Anaxim retracts the useless stub of its propeller and clanks swiftly to Dranko. Circular spinning blades and iron sledge hammers come at Dranko from multiple angles and he cannot dodge them all. The one hammer-blow he does manage to avoid knocks a chunk of stone out of the wall, a testament to its power. Once more Dranko’s blood is splattered everywhere.
After Flicker swoops down and once more fails to damage his enemy, Grey Wolf quickens an acid orb and hurls it at the Anaxim. Its resistance doesn’t extend to acid attacks, and small hissing holes appear on its iron plating. Threads of acrid smoke rise up, and Dranko is only barely able to contain his gorge. Morningstar lands and casts heal upon Dranko, who then sinks backward into the wall until only his face and knees protrude.
Aravis, his spells continually foiled, changes into an enormous dragon and tries to grapple with the Anaxim. But the creature is built to repel such assaults. Aravis finds it’s like trying to grab a fistful of naked knife blades, and falls back, gashed for his efforts.
Ernie pops up from the ground and swings Honor of Nemmin. The Anaxim’s vaunted resistance to damage cannot stop such an exalted blade, and he slices off several spikes and a section of plating. His final swing severs a thick rubber tube which sprays hot oil in all directions. Lights and dishes swivel to Ernie with a series of clicks.
“Secondary target acquired”
“No!” shouts Dranko. “You’re not giving up on me, are you?”
The blades and hammers fall upon Ernie, making a wreck of his armor and leaving him battered and bloodied, near to death.
Grey Wolf splashes the Anaxim with another acid orb, and several of its pieces melt, some of them dropping off entirely into little puddles of slag. There are several buzzes as a series of circuits shorts. A thicker plume of black smoke rises from a vent near its shoulder. And yet the blades continue to spin, and its primary sledgehammer cocks back for another swing.
Flicker has given up on trying to damage the Anaxim, but figures he can distract it while Morningstar makes her attacks. Kibi instructs his extra elemental to do likewise. Focused on Ernie and Dranko, the Anaxim hardly notices that Morningstar has finally managed to close, Ell’s Will raised to strike.
Down comes her weapon, once, twice, a third time. Infused with Ell’s power, her strikes fall like lightning blasts. The first hit knocks off its largest spinning blade. The second cracks the sledgehammer off at its base. And the third caves in its side completely. Several internal belts snap and fly loose, springs and gears explode in all directions, and the Anaxim crumbles into a clanging heap of metal, grease and smoke.
As the Anaxim’s remains vanish with a flash of aquamarine light, and the iron golems wink out a second later, Morningstar stands triumphant. Holy fire flashes in her eyes.
She is a killing machine.
…to be continued…
I'm actually a little shocked no-one's made that pun yet.
