Brain drain
Nov. 4th, 2011 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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lost_in_navirI'm going slightly mad -
---------------------------------
Rested and planned, we partake of another good breakfast as a swelling crowd of hooded Thoonites gathers around the House Enclave. The quick inventory of gargantuan statues to animate around Scijaarn has turned up nothing winged taht could fly there fast enough so that's a bit of a blow until Beth wonders idly how big the Nanarik is. Some quick discussions with Nanalto and Serenity give us a 'hmm maybe' for the viability of attack. Maybe the elemental will get snitty about trying to keep a living ship in the air, maybe not. Though the idea of hasting the ship will certainly aid the ramming part of the plan.
Mental protection, check. Buffsy stuff for the ram, check. Big scroll to drop the rumoured prismatic ugliness, check. I thought about doing a quick tour of the party to say thank you and goodbye, maybe, just in case but the time never seems quite right and I don't want to sound defeatist or fatalistic. The Warder of Dreadhold looks like he's waiting for something to kill and so does Drenak. I certainly haven't reclaimed the interesting samurai acceptance of impending glorious death I had before we did the Flame, but at least I can muddle through the next half hour or so on numb fatalism. The Nanarik'll take us where we need to go, and once there, options for a rapid exit'll be limited anyway. So, we're prepared and we lift.
The Nanarik handles like someone just strapped an overly heavy ram to the prow. It's not a happy vessel as it creaks into the air in a slow spiral over the mass of Thoon outside the gates. We dissemble and look like we're fleeing so that we can build up to ramming speed from the right distance away. The shadows on the horizon resolve in Beth's eyes into an approaching couple of fleets of airships plus a dragon. So they're going to nuke Scijaarn if we haven't finished when they get here. Good to have a plan B, I guess.
It's never simple though. That's not bad, just an observation. Everyone would be heroes if things did go simply and the little bad things were vanquished by commonality. Instead, we're charging down a floating brain under a yawning chasm of madness and horror. In a boat that's not trimmed for a ram. In a boat that recently acquired an animated perspective on life and the bonus of a haste effect. I must remember this next time I need a skycar chase. Team Thoon have sent about a dozen ogre cheerleaders to greet us though and the blubbery techno-zombies have 'ported onto the deck with axes and other badness.
Things look tense, there's more than enough of them to go around and still have spares to go worry Serenity in the wheelhouse. To further complicate things, Me and Rachael and Laura flew off so as not to stand next to the bad hurty things. It's the Nanarik that saves us, she's big enough and rigged enough that ropes and tackle and the foremast and ... other bits of an airship that I don't know what they're for can be pressed into service for grabbing these ogrethoon and chucking them overboard. No doubt there'll be property damage and irate peasants below, if they had their own minds to worry with. Drenak and co. seem to hack up the remainder with reasonable skill. It's fewer things to worry about, as Rachael yells her scroll at the protective prismatic walls around the brain.
We hit and physics seems to work in our favour. A profound relief given the massive invisible waves of oddness showering from the breach into Zoriat. The spike hits the brain and bites. Flailing tentacles and odd acid miasma and other grimness seem to boil around the brain as the thug posse leap gaily across to commence the high concept plan of hitting the Brain very hard indeed. From my invisbly flying vantage point I'm pretty well situated too, zipping in to heal the herds, or sing a bit more. It's unpleasant, though from the observation and detachment. I'm not cut out for generalling, I don't think. I get to notice Nanalto and Serenity falling down out of the wreckage as the Nanarik breaks up. She was a good little ship. She got us where we needed to be, and if this brain does survive, I hope it's one of the oddest things it can tell it's little brain grandchildren about. "And then they rammed me with a ship!". The elemental busts free of the containment ring and leaves to wherever elementals go and I can feel that the flotsam left behind in splinters of floatwood and flying debris has definitely lost whatever spark I could give it for a while. Yeah, if I get a bit teary over a ship, I don't think I want to be ordering people to their potential deaths over an objective just yet.
I flip in mid-air to dodge some wacky ray from a flying thoonite and I'm still watching the brain get pummelled when there's an odd creeping stoniness edging up my limbs and...
Bimbling -
--------------------------
... then thankfully it recedes and... I'm stood in Rachael's apartment, which is weird. Not that her apartment is weird, though it is. It's pretty sparse, like anything she'd care about is already in a haversack or the pit for portability. Maybe one day we'll settle a bit. She was asking the King for the rights to set up a shop. There's worse things to do than be a consulting artificer, I guess. Me, I can set up Bard Academy and ruin popular culture with reality shows. Scijaarn's next top Bard. Scandalay's got Talent. The Drow Factor. Yeah, that'll be a surefire hit.
They tell me a day passed while I was stone. Jaik was petrified too, and him and Drenak and the Warder were taken to Zoriat when the brain plane-shifted out. Fortunately it was close enough to the rift that Drenak and Jaik could escape before the dying brain zipped the rift shut. The Warder's still in there, likely dead by now. The Manifest Zone has re-established and things are apparently getting back to normal. Irate citizens are punching the surviving Thoon and there's divisions of gnome legionaries running around in an uneasy dance with a variety of Holtese troops. Apparently Rachael and Laura flew off to do some diplomacy and stop Argonth and the Empire from rubbling the city.
So... we won, I guess. Feels odd not to have been there, though. And now we've got an audience with the King of Scandalay scheduled and I've got nothing to wear. The King's very pleasant and grateful to us for saving his city. We get the Order of Scijaarn, with Oak Leaves! He very politely doesn't point out that we loosed this horror on his City in the first place. Mid Audience, Laura's transfixed with silvery light and gets another call from Irrasha to haul off to the Crucible and have an audience. The King's only too happy to pack us off out of his jurisdiction on quite a comfy airship bound for Neveriven. Meanwhile the assembled Lordly Council, or whatever they call themselves are discussing peace with the Autok in the face of the Greater Threats unleashed on the world. Fantastic. We ripped off Ozymandias in Watchmen to end one war. Except our one wasn't a hoax. We really did let loose some extradimensional scariness to kill... thousands? Probably. Cutter Drago is in town too, for the negotiations, and we have quite a pleasant evening chatting about the way things went and how well the Gate is doing over in Autok lands. Renaba Shahan seems to be an murderous elf-hating psycho, though so I can shuffle Sungiven back down my list of holiday destinations.
Life goes on, it seems. Scijaarn's getting rebuilt. Shayla's taken some leave to run off with Drenak to Neveriven. Rachael's still spending almost every waking moment in the pit scribing scrolls and doing some magick stuff. One more loose end tied. I don't owe a favour to the Warder any more, which is nice, but... gods, I'm shallow. I knew him a bit, spoke to him on occasion, kind of wheedled some chocolate dessert from him, so I feel more sorry that he's gone because of all that? I've no idea how many died in the disaster at Scijaarn or anywhere else we screwed over with the gate opening. I still don't know where Lizetta is, so I ought to make some enquiries.
Oh yeah, and we need to kill Gareth and Tess. A couple more corpses to lay at the altar of us gloriously healing the World. See me ripping off Watchmen again. If I drift down the comics thing, was Katala influencing Tess to send us back to stop the damage that Vendemiatrix was doing? The Will of the Harbingers... Maybe you work with the tools you've got, and Tess' reward is to get back here in return for sending enough of us minions to get it done. So yeah, maybe she's evil. Or maybe she's been scrying us and seeing how we think she's evil and she's just protecting herself.
I don't know why people just can't play nicely with each other.
---------------------------------
Rested and planned, we partake of another good breakfast as a swelling crowd of hooded Thoonites gathers around the House Enclave. The quick inventory of gargantuan statues to animate around Scijaarn has turned up nothing winged taht could fly there fast enough so that's a bit of a blow until Beth wonders idly how big the Nanarik is. Some quick discussions with Nanalto and Serenity give us a 'hmm maybe' for the viability of attack. Maybe the elemental will get snitty about trying to keep a living ship in the air, maybe not. Though the idea of hasting the ship will certainly aid the ramming part of the plan.
Mental protection, check. Buffsy stuff for the ram, check. Big scroll to drop the rumoured prismatic ugliness, check. I thought about doing a quick tour of the party to say thank you and goodbye, maybe, just in case but the time never seems quite right and I don't want to sound defeatist or fatalistic. The Warder of Dreadhold looks like he's waiting for something to kill and so does Drenak. I certainly haven't reclaimed the interesting samurai acceptance of impending glorious death I had before we did the Flame, but at least I can muddle through the next half hour or so on numb fatalism. The Nanarik'll take us where we need to go, and once there, options for a rapid exit'll be limited anyway. So, we're prepared and we lift.
The Nanarik handles like someone just strapped an overly heavy ram to the prow. It's not a happy vessel as it creaks into the air in a slow spiral over the mass of Thoon outside the gates. We dissemble and look like we're fleeing so that we can build up to ramming speed from the right distance away. The shadows on the horizon resolve in Beth's eyes into an approaching couple of fleets of airships plus a dragon. So they're going to nuke Scijaarn if we haven't finished when they get here. Good to have a plan B, I guess.
It's never simple though. That's not bad, just an observation. Everyone would be heroes if things did go simply and the little bad things were vanquished by commonality. Instead, we're charging down a floating brain under a yawning chasm of madness and horror. In a boat that's not trimmed for a ram. In a boat that recently acquired an animated perspective on life and the bonus of a haste effect. I must remember this next time I need a skycar chase. Team Thoon have sent about a dozen ogre cheerleaders to greet us though and the blubbery techno-zombies have 'ported onto the deck with axes and other badness.
Things look tense, there's more than enough of them to go around and still have spares to go worry Serenity in the wheelhouse. To further complicate things, Me and Rachael and Laura flew off so as not to stand next to the bad hurty things. It's the Nanarik that saves us, she's big enough and rigged enough that ropes and tackle and the foremast and ... other bits of an airship that I don't know what they're for can be pressed into service for grabbing these ogrethoon and chucking them overboard. No doubt there'll be property damage and irate peasants below, if they had their own minds to worry with. Drenak and co. seem to hack up the remainder with reasonable skill. It's fewer things to worry about, as Rachael yells her scroll at the protective prismatic walls around the brain.
We hit and physics seems to work in our favour. A profound relief given the massive invisible waves of oddness showering from the breach into Zoriat. The spike hits the brain and bites. Flailing tentacles and odd acid miasma and other grimness seem to boil around the brain as the thug posse leap gaily across to commence the high concept plan of hitting the Brain very hard indeed. From my invisbly flying vantage point I'm pretty well situated too, zipping in to heal the herds, or sing a bit more. It's unpleasant, though from the observation and detachment. I'm not cut out for generalling, I don't think. I get to notice Nanalto and Serenity falling down out of the wreckage as the Nanarik breaks up. She was a good little ship. She got us where we needed to be, and if this brain does survive, I hope it's one of the oddest things it can tell it's little brain grandchildren about. "And then they rammed me with a ship!". The elemental busts free of the containment ring and leaves to wherever elementals go and I can feel that the flotsam left behind in splinters of floatwood and flying debris has definitely lost whatever spark I could give it for a while. Yeah, if I get a bit teary over a ship, I don't think I want to be ordering people to their potential deaths over an objective just yet.
I flip in mid-air to dodge some wacky ray from a flying thoonite and I'm still watching the brain get pummelled when there's an odd creeping stoniness edging up my limbs and...
Bimbling -
--------------------------
... then thankfully it recedes and... I'm stood in Rachael's apartment, which is weird. Not that her apartment is weird, though it is. It's pretty sparse, like anything she'd care about is already in a haversack or the pit for portability. Maybe one day we'll settle a bit. She was asking the King for the rights to set up a shop. There's worse things to do than be a consulting artificer, I guess. Me, I can set up Bard Academy and ruin popular culture with reality shows. Scijaarn's next top Bard. Scandalay's got Talent. The Drow Factor. Yeah, that'll be a surefire hit.
They tell me a day passed while I was stone. Jaik was petrified too, and him and Drenak and the Warder were taken to Zoriat when the brain plane-shifted out. Fortunately it was close enough to the rift that Drenak and Jaik could escape before the dying brain zipped the rift shut. The Warder's still in there, likely dead by now. The Manifest Zone has re-established and things are apparently getting back to normal. Irate citizens are punching the surviving Thoon and there's divisions of gnome legionaries running around in an uneasy dance with a variety of Holtese troops. Apparently Rachael and Laura flew off to do some diplomacy and stop Argonth and the Empire from rubbling the city.
So... we won, I guess. Feels odd not to have been there, though. And now we've got an audience with the King of Scandalay scheduled and I've got nothing to wear. The King's very pleasant and grateful to us for saving his city. We get the Order of Scijaarn, with Oak Leaves! He very politely doesn't point out that we loosed this horror on his City in the first place. Mid Audience, Laura's transfixed with silvery light and gets another call from Irrasha to haul off to the Crucible and have an audience. The King's only too happy to pack us off out of his jurisdiction on quite a comfy airship bound for Neveriven. Meanwhile the assembled Lordly Council, or whatever they call themselves are discussing peace with the Autok in the face of the Greater Threats unleashed on the world. Fantastic. We ripped off Ozymandias in Watchmen to end one war. Except our one wasn't a hoax. We really did let loose some extradimensional scariness to kill... thousands? Probably. Cutter Drago is in town too, for the negotiations, and we have quite a pleasant evening chatting about the way things went and how well the Gate is doing over in Autok lands. Renaba Shahan seems to be an murderous elf-hating psycho, though so I can shuffle Sungiven back down my list of holiday destinations.
Life goes on, it seems. Scijaarn's getting rebuilt. Shayla's taken some leave to run off with Drenak to Neveriven. Rachael's still spending almost every waking moment in the pit scribing scrolls and doing some magick stuff. One more loose end tied. I don't owe a favour to the Warder any more, which is nice, but... gods, I'm shallow. I knew him a bit, spoke to him on occasion, kind of wheedled some chocolate dessert from him, so I feel more sorry that he's gone because of all that? I've no idea how many died in the disaster at Scijaarn or anywhere else we screwed over with the gate opening. I still don't know where Lizetta is, so I ought to make some enquiries.
Oh yeah, and we need to kill Gareth and Tess. A couple more corpses to lay at the altar of us gloriously healing the World. See me ripping off Watchmen again. If I drift down the comics thing, was Katala influencing Tess to send us back to stop the damage that Vendemiatrix was doing? The Will of the Harbingers... Maybe you work with the tools you've got, and Tess' reward is to get back here in return for sending enough of us minions to get it done. So yeah, maybe she's evil. Or maybe she's been scrying us and seeing how we think she's evil and she's just protecting herself.
I don't know why people just can't play nicely with each other.