NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 7869559" data-attributes="member: 79141">Session 248, Part OneReflecting on the GyreAfter a few more days, and some minor adventures, the Coaltongue arrived at Teykfa – the second-to-last plane in the Gyre. One of the first worlds with intelligent life in the multiverse, Teykfa saw its last sentient life end eons ago, but the plane did not enter the Gyre because of the steady ticking of Teykfa, a megastructure carved into the heart of a parched desert mountain. Crafted of rust-resistant metal alloys and perfectly balanced with dozens of redundant structures, the mechanism functioned as a clock that kept time on a geologic scale. Once, vigilant stewards wound its counterweight, but even after they perished it took millions of years for the structure to run down. Soon it would tick its last. The planar trait was that people were more aware of the scale of time, and could better weight long-term consequences. Time could be manipulated. Indeed, time passed very slowly here on Teykfa, and for a group that was about to breathe its last, the hiatus was welcome.They had visited other planes on the way here, of course, but none of them had been hospitable or worthy of much attention. Gardboral was a chimeric maelstrom where they encountered gargantuan elementals composed of fire, stone, ice and lightning.  They avoided these giants for long enough to learn that generating numerous, and increasingly large elemental beings was the unappealing trait of the plane. Eons ago, this world underwent a final epic battle between giants and normal men, and the giants won, ascending to the form of titanic storms as a reward for their victory. Now nothing persisted here except these titans whose sole desire was to destroy interlopers. One almost caught the Coaltongue as it circled high above, but Sly Marbo was on the alert and used the fey portal pad just in time.*Metarie provided a slightly longer diversion. Long, long ago Metarie was a nature preserve in a great plane-wide city whose people relied on innovative mechanical technology to keep out their world alive even as they hollowed out its core. Carelessness led the people of that plane to ignore for too long the primitive three-armed gremlins, who out of jealousy sabotaged the machines that ran to the core. The world collapsed under its own weight, and only the gremlins survived, frolicking in the ruins of a culture they still instinctually resent. All the unit saw when they arrived was a vast swamp, but they could hear a rumbling engine in the distance – the hiss-churn of a steam boiler. It turned out to issue from a hole that had been punched in the surface of the plane, revealing nested layers of marsh. Each layer had bits of boggy ground covered in tall grass separating murky ponds, all of it beneath a looming canopy of moss-draped trees that supported the layer above, in a kind of swamp sandwich. The roots of the trees above wove into columns that supported each layer, and many of these columns were infested with carnivorous fireflies. Who knew how many layers there were? The hole they found went down just three, and the unit sent Uru on ahead to investigate. Little Jack’s wings stopped working halfway down – their first sign of the planar trait. Technology was naturally disrupted, here on the Swamp of Sabotage. It was necessary for the others to follow on their magical stone discs - to rescue Uru and to further investigate the noise; all save Quratulain, who soon began to suffer the same effects as Little Jack, and returned to the ship before any serious damage was done.At the bottom of the hole, the others found an early Golden Legion vessel that ran on steam, not diesel. It must have crashed here thousands of years ago. Its crash punched a hole a hundred feet wide, and now it lay in a pool of water, conspicuously clear of any overgrowth. The ship’s hold was full of treasure, and its pit fiend captain – Kebez Pol – was still alive, locked inside the steam boiler. The hatch was irreparably rusted shut. The boiler still ran, filling with water from above, and driven by the pit fiend’s own aura. The heat could not kill him, but Kebez Pol was insane from isolation. They decided to put him out of his misery. Rumdoom, in particular, wanted to give him a ‘good ending’.While they were thus distracted, the gremlins stole their stone discs.  How the creatures managed to figure out how to use them was anybody’s guess.  Uriel summoned them back to him one by one, then they bonded with Metarie and returned to the Coaltongue.*The coastal flats of Bonilathe shuddered with thunderstorms, as the sentient staff of a long dead weather mage tried madly to stop itself from being drawn into the Gyre’s teeth. The staff was trying to create intelligent life by striking pools of primordial ooze with bolts of lightning, but so far the best it could do was conjure reptilian beasts of high animal cunning. They typically killed each other before they could do anything useful for the poor, desperate staff. The planar trait was, bizarrely, that storms spawned reptilian creatures. Leon offered the staff a ride, and it accepted with great relief. He studied it to see if he could tap into the weather mage’s power. It was only too eager to help.And so, having decided not to bond with Bonalithe, they came at last to Teykfa, and there they waited.</blockquote>

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