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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 3504286" data-attributes="member: 11697">Aspaseka brushed off the comment with a laugh, but the mimir’s comments were something that were brewing in the others’ minds.    “I expected you to be a book.” She said. “Sentience wasn’t ever something I considered. But regardless, my employers will be very, very keen to speak with you.”    The skull said nothing, and merely floated in the air above the table like a macabre lamp.    “So what was it that you wanted him for?” Inva asked, ever curious, and for the moment willing to suppress her own speculation as to what Aspaseka might be, if not human.    “A location.” She answered, seemingly choosing her words carefully. “Somewhere that Nergal might have spoken of in his last moments. Somewhere that we’ve been looking for for some time now.”    She didn’t phrase the comments as a question, perhaps because she simply didn’t want the mimir to provide an answer to anyone other than her superiors.    “But in any event, I’m going to have you deliver the codex, or mimir, whichever term you want to use, to the person who’ll be most interested in speaking to him. It’s not a very long or involved trip, and they’ll be the only person there, so you won’t have much trouble recognizing them.”    “So what do they look like?” Victor asked.    “Well…” Aspaseka paused for a moment before replying. “I’ve never actually seen him before.”    “At all?” Inva asked, raising an eyebrow.    “I don’t work for him.” She replied. “I tend to work mostly with Tyranny, who you’ve already met, and to a lesser extent with one of his colleagues, a woman known as the Visionary.”    “Do your…” Velkyn paused and rephrased. “Do our employers have real names, or just titles?”    Aspaseka nodded. “They have names, though I’m only privy to that of my own lord. It would be best if his name were not widely known, given the things his interests involve, and given the enemies he might have gained in the past.”    “I think we can accept their secrecy for the moment.” Inva said. “I’m the same way. But after a while I would expect some trust to accrue.”    “And that’s understandable.” Aspaseka replied. “Knowing their full name or not, you’ll meet them all eventually, and they’ll reveal to you something of themselves and their goals as time passes. It’s not my position or right to say something before they decide what level of trust to display.”    Velkyn nodded. “I need to know one thing though before we do anything else.”    Aspaseka nodded. “Ask away. I’ll answer if I can.”    “I need to know if they have interests inside Sigil or not.”    Velkyn smiled with some relief as Aspaseka shook her head vigorously. “None of them have interests within the City of Doors. The place is a neutral ground, more or less, and their goals don’t center on the city, or anyone inside of it. It’s generally a poor idea to seek power in that place, which a long list of dead or missing people will attest to.”    She knew about that last statement on a more personal level than she might have let on as well. Sigil wasn’t anywhere on the radar for her employers, and it likely would never be, considering that a former member of their number had ultimately been mazed in the course of his own personal pursuits, divorced from any overall plans of their cabal as a whole. But that was an unimportant fact, and divorced from the issue at hand.    “Well that’s good.” Phaedra said. “I don’t want to get involved in Sigil’s politics. I like the city and all but… no. So which one of our employers are we going to go meet?”    “Death.” She bluntly replied, watching the light reflect off of the runes that decorated the ancient sorcerer-king’s skull.    Phaedra nodded. “How appropriate.”    “More appropriate when you find out where you’ll be going.” Aspaseka replied with a grin.    Victor gave a wary look.    “Don’t worry, it’s completely safe.” Aspaseka said, waving off his concern with her other hand. “You’re chatting with me in a city on the Gray Waste. He’s not anywhere even remotely similar. Ever been to the Astral?”Velkyn, Inva and Phaedra nodded in the affirmative and the other shook their heads.    Aspaseka pushed forward a sheet of paper and what looked like a small lump of marbled, pitted metal. “That’s a map to a portal in Sigil’s Clerks’ Ward that outlets to a specific spot on the Astral. Once there, you’ll find a rather special-looking color pool that’s something of a retrofitted portal in and of itself. That little lump of meteoric iron there will serve as a key to open it, and the portal will end up leading you to where our mutual employer Death makes his residence.”    “And where is that?” Inva asked.    “Another spot on the Astral actually.” Aspaseka explained. “Have you ever heard of something called the Bone Cloud?”    There were several shrugs, and none of them seemed to have heard of it, or heard of it in any real detail.    “Well, at some point in the distant past, at least several thousand years ago, a necromancer lord from an otherwise unknown prime material world managed to raise a massive army of undead servants. His enemies knew that they would be unable to defeat him and his minions in a direct conflict, and so as a last ditch effort they opened an astral rift beneath his forces and sucked all or most of them into the Astral.    Due to their sheer mass, they clumped together under their own gravity, and because most of them were skeletons and thus unintelligent, they were trapped there, utterly immobile within the vast cloud of bone.”    Victor of course looked uneasy about the entire idea. “Our employer lives there?”    “Hey, with a name like Death it sounds appropriate.” Velkyn said.    Aspaseka shrugged, “The location just makes it unlikely that he’ll have anyone intrude upon him. But don’t worry. Anything within the cloud that’s capable of moving like ghosts, vampires, and similar things, the place is warded to an insane degree, and once inside you wouldn’t even suspect that the walls were anything other than a curious sort of stone.”    “He carved himself a home out of the interior of the place?” Velkyn asked. “I take it he’s a necromancer?”    “A necromancer, yes, but not the typical sort you might expect.”    “Dressed in black? Skull motif decorations? Lich?” Inva said under her breath.    Aspaseka grinned and continued the explanation. “Yes, he made a lair inside the interior, building within natural hollows of the cloud, or excavating portions as needed. However you have to understand that the cloud is enormous. The whole thing stretches miles in each direction, and anyone tunneling through would probably never run into Death’s demesne by chance.”    “Interesting place…” Velkyn said. “Undead I assume?”    “From what I know, yes.” She explained. “But again, not the typical sort you might expect. Something like a lich, but more likely a unique type of his own creation.”    Victor grimaced a bit but Aspaseka again tried to alleviate his concerns, “It won’t take you guys more than a few hours at most, and by the time you get back here, I’ll have some nice wine to split with you all and we can discuss a better meeting place, as well as a more amenable way of paying you. I understand you didn’t like dealing with that bank with a branch in Rigus, so I’ll set something up in Sigil for everyone.”    “That would be appreciated.” Victor said.    She smiled. “I’ll try to get you an expense account as well. You’re talented, and I want to treat you as well as I can to make sure you’ll continue to work with me in the future. But we can make for more banter later, and handle future payment and such when you get back. I’ll still be here.”    A bit of small talk later and they were back out the door again, though they did their best to avoid the succubus the second town through the main room. Given the local notions of entertainment, while a few of them felt amused by it, Victor wasn’t the only person hoping that they’d find someplace better to meet in the future.***    Once back in Sigil, it was only a short distance from the portal in the Guildhall Ward, to the spot in the Clerk’s Ward that Aspaseka had indicated to them, a bound space framed by a series of cracks and lines of rust dripping down a buttress on the side of an old stone wall tipped with decorative spikes.    “So what’s the portal key?” Marcus asked, glancing at the ostensible outline of the latent portal.    Aspaseka hadn’t mentioned the key, just the location of the portal itself, but determining the key was probably the easier half of their task as Velkyn whispered the words to a spell.    “An iron rod half coated with silver.” Velkyn said after a moment of concentration. The notion of what the key was had come quickly, but it was actually finding the key that might prove more difficult.    “I find myself with a distinct lack of silver coated iron rods.” Inva said with a smirk. “Must have left it in my other pants.”    Phaedra shrugged. “Hopefully someone in the area knows of the portal and makes a living selling the key. Unless absolutely knows of this one, there’s probably someone selling it.”    Velkyn grinned as he looked back down the street. “Maybe another gnome for Inva.”    A few minutes later they found a portal key salesman a block distant from the portal. They weren’t a gnome, but rather a duergar, and the dark dwarf looked up at his potential customers with a bizarre look as if he expected half of them to rob him, and the other half to stop them.    “Which portal?” He asked, jangling a pouch of loose objects and a heavy iron ring at his belt that was festooned with a motley collection of knickknacks.    “A spot on a wall about a block down the way we came.” Phaedra said. “Marked with some rust and some cracks. Goes to the Astral.”    “That one’s easy.” The dwarf replied. “But it’ll cost you a dozen jink.”    “A dozen jink?” Velkyn asked incredulously. “That’s insane.”    The dwarf shrugged. “A dozen and a stinger then I suppose. Really, where else are you going to buy the key from?”    Inva pursed her lips and looked at the others. “You should feel lucky that we’re offering to buy it.”    He didn’t look impressed, and rather than replying he went about stuffing a pipe with tobacco. “You look like people in a hurry. Rather than take a few hours finding someone with the time and motivation to make you the key, assuming you know what the key to ‘yon portal might actually be, you could just pay me what the market’ll support.”    “We’ll give you five.” Phaedra said. “That’s more than amenable.”    “You’re got ears larger than my face.” The dwarf replied. “Surely ye heard the price. A dozen and a stinger is still the standing offer, or else you can find yourself an alternate way to the Astral.”    Then, to add insult to injury, he took a puff of his pipe and exhaled a thin stream of pungent smoke into the half-‘loth’s face. That was when things changed from hoping to bargain with him, to not bothering to care what it took to get the proper key. Phaedra simply stepped back and gestured, yanking the duergar off of his feet, spinning him upside-down and shaking him like a purse as she turned and walked off down the street with the dwarf telekinetically in tow.    A block later they stopped in front of the portal. Inva poked the dwarf in the paunch and tapped the edge of her tail spade against his cheek. “And I think you heard what I said before too.”Suspended upside-down in mid-air, the duergar ineffectually kicked and struggled. "This is undignified!""Having small children running after you yelling piñata is undignified too." Inva said with a smirk. “Sadly though, I don’t have any children, or a big stick. Care to lower your price for that key?”    “Pike it!” The dwarf snarled back.“Fine fine… have it your way. But I don’t really think you understand…” The tiefling sighed before she looked back up at Phaedra, “I got the gnome last time in Tradegate. You want the honors for the dwarf?”    “Wait.” The dwarf stuttered as he started to move. “What? What are you doing?!”    The silver light of the Astral spilled through the portal, carrying with it the distorted image of the tumbling portal key salesman and his thin, garbled cry of distress as Phaedra launched him through the bound space, still carrying the key. He was still struggling to right himself when they passed through the portal themselves, and he huffed and sputtered even more when they thanked him for his profuse generosity, right before Inva tossed him back through the portal and back into Sigil.    “I’ve noticed we do this a lot.” Victor said. “Tossing people through portals.”    “I wouldn’t call it a habit.” Inva said as she stopped waving to the dwarf as the portal finally closed. “Well, not quite yet. It’s been fun though so far.”    Victor shook his head. He’d probably have complained more, except the duergar hadn’t been hurt, and he really had been unreasonable with the cost of the portal key. And he was evil. It wasn’t an excuse, but it did make him less prone to feeling guilty he supposed.    “So now where?” Garibaldi asked as he and the others drifted in the void.    The local region of the Astral that they’d entered was truly desolate by comparison to what one might expect. The void shimmered with its ubiquitous silver light, but otherwise there was little to distinguish any particular spot from another. There were no rocky islands formed from the husks of dead gods, nor floating githyanki citadels, or any creatures drifting through the void. There was nothing but the same silvery light, and only a single blotch of color to mar the horizon rather than the standard constellations of dozens upon dozens of scattered pools.    “Well Aspaseka mentioned a color pool, and she said that we wouldn’t have any trouble finding it.” Phaedra said.    “I’m only seeing one color pool.” Marcus said, squinting his eyes and scanning the silvery haze in the distance.    “Then odds are that that’s it.” Inva replied as she moved towards it.    With the obvious mentioned, the group drifted across the void at varying paces, with the wizards invariably moving a bit faster than the more martial minded individuals simply due to the nature of the Astral. Eventually though, they gathered around the rippling edges of a swirling, metallic orange-yellow color pool, and it was immediately apparent that while the color pool’s hue would indicate that it most likely led to Arcadia, there was something different about that particular specimen.    A trio of metallic blocks drifted around the periphery of the pool, seemingly locked into a diffuse orbit around the pool’s edges. Each of the blocks were decorated with a meandering series of golden runes, and every few seconds they shimmered with a discharge of energy that leaked across the surface of the pool like tiny electrical insects dancing across the surface of a pond.    “Jury-rigging a portal indeed.” Velkyn said as he gently pushed at one of the metallic blocks. It moved, but only to a certain distance away from the pool, at which point it refused to budge just as much as an activated immovable rod might.    Inva drifted towards the pool and held up the lump of meteoric iron that Aspaseka had given them. “Anyone else care to have the honors? You know, just in case there’s a race or something… or an explosion or planar rift, etc etc…”    The tiefling turned back to the others and grinned as she tapped the iron against the pool’s surface and activated the latent portal.***    The portal opened into a room carved from cut, white marble, though as Aspaseka had told them, the stone possessed a curious speckled pattern that betrayed its origin as being compressed, possibly transmuted bone. The air was cold as well, and Victor shivered as he realized that the chill was not from any actual difference in temperature from the Astral at large, but from a latent nimbus of negative energy that slowly bubbled out of the walls and floor.    Normally they would have drifted across the room, but in another difference from the Astral as a whole, gravity was normal and their footsteps -or hoofbeats in Inva’s case- echoed and rebounded off of the walls as they stepped forward out of the evaporating portal behind them.“I trust that Aspaseka sent you after you recovered the Codex?” The question came from a figure at the far end of the room. Dressed in plain brown robes with no decoration or display of wealth or power, their back was turned and they appeared to be looking out of a window constructed into the side of the room, though it might have just as easily been an illusory scene, or a form of scrying mirror as well.    “That she did.” Velkyn said as he took Yuvaraj’s skull out of a bag of holding. “Though you might find the “codex” to be a bit different from what you might have expected. Aspaseka certainly was surprised.”    Victor was already on edge due to being surrounded by miles upon miles of aggregated undead bones. He could imagine sentient undead trapped within the walls as well, and some of them even wriggling and worming their way through the ossified matrix like serpents sniffing out his life and warmth, thousands of them lurking within the walls as unseen predators. But as the figure at the other end of the chamber turned to face them, he stepped back.    The being known as Death wasn’t actually standing on the ground. In fact he was hovering ever so slightly, with only a flickering, phosphorescent glow emanating from beneath his robes where feet should have been. In fact as he turned to fully face them, it was apparent that he was some form of undead, but not something typical as Aspaseka had told them. The flesh of his hands and face was transparent, seemingly formed of congealed silvery-blue light than anything more tangible. Motes of light seemed to evaporate off of him, and the same cold illumination drifted through the edges and seams of the robe he wore.    Undead or not however, his voice was not the chilling, decayed rattle of a lich or similar figure. In fact his voice, while somewhat haunting and carrying with it a weight of a very long existence, was surprisingly young or middle-aged in sound.    “Death?” Inva asked.    The figure nodded and turned to look at the skull in Velkyn’s hands. “You are quite correct. That’s not what I was expecting.”    “You’re the second person to have said that today.” Yuvaraj replied. “And once again I’m forced to say the same. You’ve certainly found yourself a curious way to avoid mortality.”    Death drifted towards Velkyn and accepted the mimir, “And so have you. I would not have expected the Untheric gods to be so vindictive as to enslave you thusly. Your sentience will be an aid, as callous as that might sound.”    They handed over the skull of the former Imaskari emperor, and explained the circumstances that they’d found him in, and whatever additional information they thought relevant. Death nodded, though it seemed that he might have already suspected some of the basic story.    “Aspaseka will see to your payment, and any other concerns that you have.” Death explained as he took the mimir and turned to leave. “Additionally, she’ll bring you a number of potential tasks in the next few days, and you’ll have your choice of them. You’ve done very well.”    “Thank you very much.” Inva said, giving a short bow. “I think you’ll find us very much more than competent.”    “So how do we leave?” Marcus asked, realizing that the portal into Death’s lair had only been one way, and that the room had only a single exit that Death was already moving towards with no indication that they were to follow.    Death turned back and gestured, conjuring forth a swirling gate in the room’s center. Cold, gray light leaked out from the gap between the planes, leaving no question as to where it went. “That should speed your return to Aspaseka. But if you will excuse me, I’m quite keen to speak with the Codex.”    “Enjoy.” Marcus said.    “I suspect that I’ll be meeting with you again in the near future.” Death replied as they moved towards the gate. “My apologies for being so brief at the moment. Your payment should afford you no small comfort till that point however, so enjoy yourselves in the interim.”    The gate closed and took them with it, leaving Death alone with the skull of the Imaskari Artificer-King. Clutching it gently, he carried it to another chamber and opened his senses to a mental link to the two of his fellows most interested in the mimir’s words: the diviner known as the Visionary, and the entity known as the Risen. The former was very much mortal, while the latter’s mental touch was discordant and disquieting even to Death’s unliving mind, not to mention unquestionably older.    “If you wish to speak directly, in person, following this conversation with the Codex, the gates will be open. Tyranny’s latest additions have proven themselves in quick and decisive fashion, and I expect one of you to claim their services for a task of your own choosing. I will wait my turn to employ them given that the Codex has information of importance to myself beyond our shared concerns.”    To his right, the circle of glyphs keyed to the Visionary gave no reply, but he felt her mentally nod from somewhere in the ethereal. To his left, a candle in the shape of contorted, tormented succubus flickered with pale green flame, opening a metaphorical and literal eye into the being that had formed the wax from the rendered fat of a dozen true-tanar’ri. The flame sparked and sizzled, like the gentle hiss of a docile serpent, and Death felt the being extended into the candle flame nod its acceptance.    Allowing the pair to listen in on his conversation with the mimir, Death placed the skull in front of himself and began.    “I will wish to hear the entirety of Nergal’s dying statements, but this I must know before anything else. Did he speak of the High House of Eternal Twilight Waning? Did he say where it was located? What plane, which world, any clue to it at all?”    Yuvaraj nodded and his soul-gem glittered from within. “Yes. Yes he did.”***    True to what Aspaseka had said, their trip to deliver Yuvaraj had taken less than two hours, and the gate that Death had provided for them had opened within a hundred yards of the Niflheim Gate leading back into Center. Less than thirty minutes later they had passed through the gates and were walking back along Ebon’s Walk towards the Prancing Nightmare.    As they passed a stand of black poplars and a merchant selling Arcadian wine and Arcadian fruit, and a shadow fiend next to him selling Arcadian souls, Victor frowned and looked at his companions. “Would anyone mind if when we got to the inn I asked Aspaseka if we could start meeting elsewhere?”    “Don’t like the surroundings?” Inva asked.    “Not at all.” The cleric replied. “I feel the constant urge to bathe in holy water, or the need to start smiting things.”    Victor briefly glanced at the shadow fiend and then looked at Inva. “Not good. Not good at all. And that’s the least of it!”    The city was relatively safe, but it was a living cesspool of morality. Center was a civilized film grown over the stagnant stewpot of the Waste.    Victor shuddered as a cambion and a group of heavily armed reave mercenaries passed them by, “I can’t be the only person that feels that way.”    Phaedra nodded. “Admittedly the place is a bit too close to the Waste at large for my comfort too. And let’s not kid ourselves about the ‘loths not having influence here…”    “So where do you want to meet instead?” Velkyn asked. “Sigil seems like an obvious choice, or one of the gatetowns maybe. Just not Acheron.”    “Or Hopeless. Or Torch. Or Curst.” Phaedra amended to Velkyn’s caveat.    Another line of mercenaries cut across the street and bustled their way through the normal pedestrian traffic, momentarily separating the half-‘loth from her fellows, and forcing her to detour to the other side of the street. Unfortunately as she did so, she turned and walked directly in front of the yugoloth that she’d already twice avoided in past trips to Center. She jerked to a halt and tried to turn and avert her eyes, but the other ‘loth simply smiled and beckoned with a knowing look, almost as if he’d been waiting for her, or even if he’d engineered her path through the crowd.    “Hello child.” The arcanaloth whispered in an almost seductive tone. “Three times now I’ve seen you, twice you’ve passed me by, and the time has come for us to speak.”    Phaedra went cold as the full-blooded greater yugoloth started into her eyes and smiled, exposing glinting fangs to the air. She’d stood in the presence of her father’s kind before, that was an understatement actually, but something felt manifestly different, manifestly wrong as she looked into the other fiend’s eyes.    It wasn’t just the fact that its eyes danced with the colors and horrific depth of an ultroloth’s, without it actually being an ultroloth itself, it was something else on a much more subtle level that disturbed, cajoled, disgusted, seductively beckoned and horrified her at the same time.    “I know that you are not whole, you are not pure.” The arcanaloth’s eyes shifted from green to violet to cerulean. “But that does not matter to me. What matters is what you can become. Transcendence comes in many stages, many forms, and I have seen them all. The Oinoloth in her grace would accept you, purify you, and perfect you.”    She glanced down involuntarily, breaking eye contact with the proselytizer and in doing so she caught a glimpse of the amulet hung around its neck, the one that she’d noticed the last time that she’d been in Center. At the time she hadn’t been able to fully discern the symbol at the center of the talisman, just the outer symbols of the three planes of conflict, but staring at it now she recognized it in an instant, and dreaded the proximity.    Nestled in a splotch of black metal between the other portions of the amulet stood the scarlet profile of a snarling jackal’s head crowned by a twisting mass of writhing shadow, the margins of its profile pocked and pitted as if by disease: the symbol of Shylara the Manged, self-proclaimed Oinoloth of the Waste. Her claim was by no means settled, but she occupied the throne of Khin-Oin nonetheless, and her flock of deranged fanatics –as much as they could be called such by comparison to the rest of their kind- possessed enough power to operate openly, seeking converts to their perverse creed.    Phaedra mumbled an incoherent response and backed up.    “Even you would be welcome.” The words echoed in the back of her mind, reverberating against her skull even as the glib-tongued fiend spoke them audibly. “The shame of your blood might evaporate, might sublimate into something altogether different. We could show you the way.”    How the hell did he know about her heritage?! Was it a guess? Some sort of spell he had active?    “I really don’t have time right now…” Phaedra replied unsteadily, but with growing worried impatience born of a healthy undercurrent of fear. “What do you want with me?”    She knew immediately that her choice of words had been wrong on that last question.    “Now phrased a different way perhaps, that would indeed be my question to you.” The priest smiled and his eyes once more began to transit through their circuit of colors.    “This is a really bad time.” Phaedra stammered, trying to step back and away from the fiend. She didn’t expect him to get violent -especially not in Center- but his kind were psychotic zealots.    He smiled and reached forward, clutching one of her hands. She felt him immediately press something into her palm and close her fingers tightly around it. “Then take this and find your answers when you find the moment. Those who come to us, come to us of their own accord.”    Phaedra looked down at the thin, metallic scroll case in her hand and then back to the ‘loth. The case radiated no magic, and accepting it might let her brush off the fiend’s attention and leave without looking back. It seemed like a reasonable avenue of escape, but had she been looking down at the glassy flagstone beneath her feet she would have seen the fiend’s triple reflections staring up at her, each independently acting within scenes completely detached from the reality that should have been casting them. The reflection pooling at her feet and mingling with her shadow was simply spreading its hands in supplication, having given her its gift, but another appeared to be feasting upon her heart as it stood above her lupinal-looking corpse while the other hungrily copulated with a reflected image of her in a more ‘loth aspected form.    Her revulsion to them would grow quickly, but it would be some time before she would encounter them again. But she never saw the reflections, and she accepted the scroll case and its contents, paying some unthinking lip service and confused thanks to the fiend as she stepped away and rejoined her companions.</blockquote>

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