Patchwall 14, CY 593
80—Two brass pair.
With hostilities in full bloom, subterfuge has (once again) lost the day, and while the Liberators tend to their wounds, Prisantha contacts Gwendolyn via sending. Within moments the young wizardess teleports to Prisantha’s side, her hair unbraided and freshly brushed for bed.
Heydricus is staring up towards the back of the room. “Jespo! Are you good at math?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I pride myself . . .”
“Can we fit that tapestry into our portable hole?” Heydricus is gesturing toward the massive wall-to-wall construction featuring the deeds of the saints and . . . well, the other saints of the Pale.
“Ah. No, but if we . . .”
Heydricus has moved on. “Has anyone healed the gnome? Tau! Cochrane is your responsibility until we get out of here. Do you know where your friend is held? Can you describe it to Pris?”
As it turns out, the answer is, “only sort of,” but when you are as skilled at teleporting as Pris has become, “sort of” becomes synonymous with “hell yes.”
“You’ve really gotten good at this,” Heydricus whispers to Pris as they appear ten paces from a functionary behind a lectern. The clerk is slumping against a pair of double doors set into an otherwise unoccupied hallway deep below ground. Prisantha blushes, and pretends not to have heard Heydricus’ compliment.
“Hello,” Gwendolyn says, using her most charming voice. “We’re here to extract a prisoner.”
“Halt!” the man yells, coming fully awake at the sight of seven full sized adventurers and a half-sized barrister loitering without a pass in his hallway.
“No, you halt!” Heydricus yells back, marching toward the man. “Stand at attention, there!”
The man pauses a moment, then stands up straight just in time to meet the downward arc of Heyrdicus’ sword-hilt. “Cocrane—tie him up,” Heydricus barks, stepping over the clerks’ unconscious form to stand in front of the double doors.
Lucius moves next to Heydricus and hands him a dagger with a meaningful look. Heydricus shakes his head no.
“Oh, for the love of the gods,” Gwendolyn mutters, as she shoves the gnome away from the guard. She kneels by his side and gently sprinkles water on his face until his eyes flutter open. Then she dominates him.
“Tell us about the prison,” she asks sweetly. “How do we get in?”
“You enter the doors behind me and ask the Indomitable to open the gate.”
Gwendolyn stands up and gives Heydricus the stiffest “I told you so” bow he’s ever received in a long life spent in the service of rulers who happen to be both very stiff and very smug. He shivers, and throws open the doors.
The double doors which seemed so large now seem small when compared to the truly massive double doors at the opposite end of the twenty-foot square room. To Heydricus’ right, standing within its own alcove is a larger-than-life brass statue of a fearsome Pale warrior.
“We saw a lot of these twenty-by-twenty rooms in the Temple,” Jespo lectures to no one in particular. “I’ve actually begun a study of the arcane symbolism inherent in the numbers two, zero and four hundred.”
“Open the doors,” Heydricus says to the statue hopefully, then adds, “please.”
“Heydricus Tritherionson,” the statue replies. “In the name of Pholtus,”
Then Lucius shoots it.
The arrow ricochets off the statue’s throat and twirls wildly before striking the back of the alcove. Heydricus flies upwards, directly at the thing. “Tritherion says hello!” he yells as he strikes the statue smartly about the torso.
“So it has come to this,” the statue says in a new voice unlike its earlier tone—deeper somehow, more present. “I have a message for you,” it intones gravely. “And you are not going to like it.” The creature lurches forward and in a blur of movement deals Heydricus such a blow that the burly sorcerer is beaten backward and knocked from the air, coming to a stop with his heels on the ground where he began his charge.
Gwendolyn dominates the monster, but despite its exchange of words with Heydricus, her spell fails to grasp any mind. “I think it is a construct,” she yells.
Jespo Crim hitches his robes with his right hand, and points his left at the statue. A beam of thin green energy streaks from his finger and with a flash, disintegrates the Indomitable.
“Was,” he clarifies coolly. “Was a construct.”
Heydricus has thrown open the huge double doors, and finds himself facing three more of the brass statues standing across a wide hallway running perpendicular with the doorway. The hallway is cut directly down the middle by a channel filled with running water. As Heydricus watches, the three statues stride purposefully toward the door.
“Why don’t we just do this the easy way and you let my friends go?” Heydricus asks. “Wouldn’t you rather this become a social visit?”
Lucius, unseen by even his allies, slips through the door and into the hallway beyond.
“We do not entertain either sin nor those that serve its purposes in the Halls of Rectitude!” the voice is thin and piercing, an older man’s voice—saturated with self-assurance. Following the sound, Heydricus turns to his left, where several yards away, the hallway terminates at a ledge set some fifteen feet above the floor. The faux-stream trickles into an opening in the wall, and on the ledge above it a white-haired man wearing full plate armor stands gazing down regally at the adventurers bottlenecked behind Heydricus in the doorway. He begins to mutter. “PholtusgrantmeYourdivinepowerPholtusimbuemylimbswithYourMightPholtusinYourLawwillwefindallstrengthPholtusblindoureyes . . . ”
The two Indomitables at either end of the triangle flash briefly with a white-hot light, as bolts of crackling electricity arc from their bodies and play about the doorway and into the room beyond, singing each of the Liberators in turn. Lucius evades both chain lightings, but the others are not so lucky. The third Indomitable stands still and apparently does nothing at all.
Or so it would seem until Gwendolyn attempts to maneuver past the doorway and finds herself restrained by an invisible barrier separating Heydricus, Lucuis and Regda from their companions. She instinctively dispels the thing, but to no effect.
“That is a wall of force!” Prisantha discerns, “disintegrate it!”
Jespo removes the mirror of life-trapping from his pouch and, after closing his eyes, presents it toward the cleric. But Pholtan’s light must be in the man’s eyes, and he does not appear to notice his reflection. Regda charges past Heydricus, attacking the lead Indomitable with her brilliant energy morningstar. The creature, while not technically “alive,” is neither technically “not alive;” Regda’s weapon connects harmlessly with its bronze skin, producing a crystal clear bell-like peal—a perfect D. She entertains a wild vision of playing “Goblin in the Well” on these creatures with her morningstar, and she giggles to herself, her war-face be damned. She then throws the useless weapon aside, and draws a gleaming razor-sharp two-handed sword from a sheathe across her back.
Prisantha uses a quickened greater invisibility and a greater teleport to place herself directly behind the chanting cleric, even as Lucius moves unseen along the wall searching for a good angle on the priest. Heydricus, exposed and suddenly the lone focus for two brass giants and an angry cleric, also makes himself invisible, and slips back through the door, hugging the wall of force and getting out of the cleric’s line of sight.
“PholtusYourlightistheflamethatcarriesknowledgeofallthatisPholtusinYourlightallthingsarerevealed.” His eyes widen as he notices Prisantha grinning at him portentiously.
The lead Inevitable draws back both of its arms and crushes Redga between them, producing a lightning spark and a thunderclap on impact. One of the bronze giants out to her flank moves in, replicating its companion’s technique. The sound is deafening, and Redga’s knees buckle.
“Regie, No!” Jespo cries, helpless to assist her from behind the wall of force.
The third Inevitable moves around the scene of the beating, and stops beneath the double door’s arch, having no trouble locating Heydricus, despite his greater invisibility.
Gwendolyn points a finger at the wall of force and disintegrates it with a raised eyebrow toward Jespo. Jespo steps forward and enacts a quickened haste spell for Redga, and then summons his old companion the hound archon (okay, technically the archon is Pris’ companion, but Jespo knows its celestial name as well).
“You have summoned me here to battle with celestials?” The archon demands. “This is not just, Crim.”
Jespo cackles briefly. “Nevertheless, you must obey!” And truth be told, the archon must. It half-heartedly moves to Redga’s side, but it might as well be attacking the blue sky for all the effect its assaults have against the mighty brass juggernauts.
Regda is swinging furiously at the Indomitables, having abandoned her brilliant energy weapon in favor of her more pedestrian (although not technically mundane) greatsword. This magic sword doesn’t glow, it doesn’t talk, and certainly doesn’t sing; it is as generic as these sorts of fantastically expensive weapons go. It could be exchanged for enough gold bouillon to ransom a prince, but against these creatures she might as well be trying to wound them with a reproachful expression.
Still, she is in her own way quite indomitable, and has not had the fight beaten out of her quite yet. Blinking her eyes against the blood pouring down her face, she lays into one of the giants furiously. Her giggle has been replaced by a thin gasping, and her hopes of becoming the next Indomitable Maestro have been crushed under the Cruel Wheel of Reality. Like most musicians, her dreams will die before she does. Unlike most, it won’t be by much.
Heydricus flies past the Inevitable in the doorway and lays into the cleric, arriving just behind the first volley of Lucius’ arrows. The Pholtan staggers back and touches Heydricus with a maximized harm spell, muttering “Pholtusburnallinfidels.”
Heydricus cries out in pain, but manages to remain conscious as the Light of Pholtus pours into every crack and crevice of his soul, expanding and withering as it goes. Prisantha presages the cleric’s death with a feeblemind spell followed by a quickened charm person. Thus, the Pholtan goes to his god with a really stupid-looking infatuated expression on his face, as Heydricus swings from his agonized heels and takes the cleric’s head off (at the torso).
Prisantha steps over the bottom half of the fourth-ranking cleric in Wintershiven, and summons a leonal guardinal into the fray. This conjured creature does not sass its summoner before stepping forward to heal Heyrdicrus. The two beings--one real, and one a figment of its true self juxtaposed into the physical plane through wizardry--favor one another with smiles before turning their attention to the fight playing out below them.
Redga may have noticed this touching exchange just before her head was vaporized by a thunder-fisted bludgeon; the Liberators will never know—the rest of Regda’s corpse isn’t talking.
As Pris and Heydricus attempt to join the fray down below, they discover that another wall of force has been placed between them and the beating that awaits Jespo, Gwendolyn, Lucius, Cochrane and Tau. The leonal discovers the invisible barrier (nose-first), and seizing the initiative, Jespo Crim summons an earth elemental to burrow a hole through the stone floor and tunnel beneath the wall. The leonal is the first to follow the elemental, with Pris and Heydricus not far behind.
Of course, in so doing, they have made the Inevitables’ environment that much more target-rich. Lucius’ weapons are useless against them, and the construct-esque celestials are immune to Jespo and Prisantha’s enchantments. Only Heydricus has the brute force required to batter through their brass skin, but he can’t be everywhere at once.
“Um, this is bad,” Heydricus says to no one in particular as he whangs his sword repeatedly against an Inevitable tuned to E#.
Gwendolyn is struck down, and stabilized by Prisantha. All three summoned monsters are destroyed, but Heydricus doesn’t actually give up hope until he sees the Inevitable that he just killed stand back up.
“Okay, this is bullsh-t.” Heydricus turns to Prisantha and makes the “teleport us the f-ck out of here” signal, proving to her satisfaction that he can remember her carefully crafted plans when he wants to. She sets her huff aside long enough to drag the entire group four hundred miles through space where they can bleed onto their own really expensive furniture instead of the Pale’s dungeon floor.
