Dust off and nuke the site from orbit.
Feb. 4th, 2006 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothAfter skipping a couple weeks -- one for FC, one for crunch time at Lazar's workplace, we finally had another session of the shadake game. Balthazaar and Perrel were rescued, then Balthazaar promptly went and got himself lost again. Under circumstances that probably mean he's dead, although he's sort of a cockroach that way...
The fixer-golems containing Balthazaar and Perrel's souls were easy to pick out, because they were the most skilled (or at least the most active), so the party (Wayne and Ka'sa still glued to Jardin's back) stuck two of their three SEP-field devices on them, then grabbed them and buggered off. After a long time spent wandering through the ruined city under SEP protection, they finally found an exit. After another similar interval, they found an exit they could use.
The ship was whole, but infested with soul-stealing scouts -- which seemed to be repairing the canopy. They made sure to stay somebody else's problem until they were securely locked in the forge room, at which point they started working on getting their friends' souls back in their bodies.
The soul-stealing attack was too difficult to really consider, but they decided they could do a sort of exorcism device that would say 'hey soul, go back to your own body!' much easier... although it was still pretty hard for a one-use device. While Ka'sa worked on the first device, Wayne tried to beg out of the second one by complaining that he'd need a lot of steel wire, which would take forever to make... so Jardin made a steel-wire-making machine, instead.
Unfortunately, the fixers had gotten free (the glue disintegrated suddenly as its duration expired, and the people holding them dropped them) and started building things -- Perrel working on building a potentially dangerous robot, and Balthazaar on 'improving' his own body. That looked dangerous, so Wayne hung the body up out of reach -- to which the fixer responded by copying the SEP fields and making one for itself and its body. So Ka'sa finished one device and popped Perrel back into his body, and Wayne didn't remember what he'd asked for all the steel wire for.
Perrel seemed angry at his rescue -- he'd been so close to finishing his evil robot! While they argued, the Balthazaar-fixer came out of SEP (having finished the task people were interfering with) and started completing Perrel's robot. When he was rescued, he had a lot more to say about the whole situation.
As they'd surmised, the golems were animated using the souls of the city's inhabitants, but somewhat to their surprise the city's original 'mage' was nominally in charge of 'war', while the original invading scouts were only in charge of getting more souls. Whoever was in charge, they were fixing the airship so that they could spread to other cities, which would be a very bad thing. They could take over the world!
Wayne had considered making a large 'exorcism-bomb' to get all the robots in the central room, since their crew was scattered through that whole area and would be hard to track down. Balthazaar decided to go one better, and make an 'exorcism-nuke' to purge the whole city, all at once. After all, if any of the scouts were left alive, they'd just recover the freed souls and start everything back up again. He started his hypnotic chant, and when the party awoke the device was completed, and ready for detonation.
Ka'sa flew out of the bomb's mile or so radius entirely -- he didn't want to be sent back to his proper body. The others huddled behind a bunch of anti-soul-stealing shields while Balthazaar lit the fuse... and failed to make it to cover in time. Fortunately, it didn't kill a still-living creature, which was what they'd intended but hadn't been confident of.
Unfortunately, in addition to exorcising all the fixers' souls back to their bodies (where most of them promptly proceeded on to oblivion or the afterlife or whereever, since their bodies were dead), the bomb scrambled the spiritual essence of all inanimate objects in the vicinity -- which blinded Perrel's aura-sight (his only sight-like sense) and disenchanted everything *except* for things Balthazaar had made. The safeguard had been put in to help the anti-soul-stealing shields work against the blast, but the side effect was to save the ship itself. Pretty much everything else was poofed.
Including Roshan. Apparently, the crazy murdering souls inside her weren't really her own soul, and she was now a completely soulless zombie of the sort they'd become all too familiar with. They decided to keep her alive, but it was obvious now that her true soul was, indeed, gone.
Worse, most of the valuables in the city had only been magicked into being valuable, and reverted back to rocks and leaves. During the most-of-a-week they had left to charge up the canopy for the trip over the pass, they managed to refill their hold with a reasonable supply of nonmagical raw materials, but there was no gold or magic herbs or anything like that, that they'd hoped to loot from the place. It pretty much just made up their losses from the pirate island.
They couldn't even salvage any of the city's books -- disenchanting the book curse in such a fashion set it off, so huge areas of the city where unexploded books had been kept were charred ruins now.
But anyway, they went on, through the pass. There were some tall, sheer pillars with civilization of sorts on top, but they didn't dare stop to trade, because their boat would quickly lose its extra bouyancy from the week's tie-down. There was also a huge army riding grasshoppers that refused to acknowledge their presence. For three days, they mostly lazed around or worked on projects (Perrel replenished his supply of healing potions, Wayne knitted illusionary decoys for the various combatants on the ship), until the storm hit.
The storm was Balthazaar's worst nightmare -- he'd been trying and trying to control the weather to prevent a storm from happening, because they were too close to the glowing lands, which were deadly in the rain (they were a natural nuclear reactor that put out large amounts of hard radiation when wet). The only reason he'd come this close to them was the same as he'd gone on the expedition at all -- to find a pre-war source of knowledge that shouldn't have been affected by the book curse. He had a finder he'd been using to lead them all this time, with the trading mission just a pretense.
The first stage of the storm was multicolored, hallucinogenic magical dye. Ka'sa went out in the storm to see what it would do (reckless with his stolen body, as always) and ended up dyed all different colors and, well, high. When it reverted to ordinary rain, Balthazaar and Wayne and Perrel went up to the canopy to steer the ship through the high winds, desperately trying to stay on course with the finder, fighting the shifting winds with the airship's ludicrously convoluted steering mechanisms.
At first, Jardin was keeping a look out for mountains or other obstacles, but soon the clould cover enveloped the ship, and he couldn't see anything at all... other than a faint green glow from beneath the ship, getting brighter. They were in the glowing lands! Jardin gathered everyone up, and they hid in the danger room, which was shielded against pretty much anything, so hopefully would also be shielded against this.
Wayne and Perrel stayed in the canopy to help Balthazaar, though. Wayne attached their spare signalling mirrors to the bottom of the canopy as shielding, hoping that would block the radiation (they were magical mirrors, after all... and wasn't radiation just a form of light?) but not really able to tell if it was working. Besides, even if they went for cover, Balthazaar was adamant about staying up in the canopy directing them...
The glow got brighter and brighter, until they ended up huddling over what they hoped was a well-shielded section while the canopy visibly withered and lost cohesion around them. The hydrogen sacks holding them up couldn't stand the radiation, and they were losing altitude fast...
The good news was that they'd managed to land outside the glowing lands. The bad news was that:
But the copy of the finder Balthazaar had left with his decoy seemed to be real, so they could probably follow him to this source of all knowledge. Once it was safe to move.
last session | next session
The fixer-golems containing Balthazaar and Perrel's souls were easy to pick out, because they were the most skilled (or at least the most active), so the party (Wayne and Ka'sa still glued to Jardin's back) stuck two of their three SEP-field devices on them, then grabbed them and buggered off. After a long time spent wandering through the ruined city under SEP protection, they finally found an exit. After another similar interval, they found an exit they could use.
The ship was whole, but infested with soul-stealing scouts -- which seemed to be repairing the canopy. They made sure to stay somebody else's problem until they were securely locked in the forge room, at which point they started working on getting their friends' souls back in their bodies.
The soul-stealing attack was too difficult to really consider, but they decided they could do a sort of exorcism device that would say 'hey soul, go back to your own body!' much easier... although it was still pretty hard for a one-use device. While Ka'sa worked on the first device, Wayne tried to beg out of the second one by complaining that he'd need a lot of steel wire, which would take forever to make... so Jardin made a steel-wire-making machine, instead.
Unfortunately, the fixers had gotten free (the glue disintegrated suddenly as its duration expired, and the people holding them dropped them) and started building things -- Perrel working on building a potentially dangerous robot, and Balthazaar on 'improving' his own body. That looked dangerous, so Wayne hung the body up out of reach -- to which the fixer responded by copying the SEP fields and making one for itself and its body. So Ka'sa finished one device and popped Perrel back into his body, and Wayne didn't remember what he'd asked for all the steel wire for.
Perrel seemed angry at his rescue -- he'd been so close to finishing his evil robot! While they argued, the Balthazaar-fixer came out of SEP (having finished the task people were interfering with) and started completing Perrel's robot. When he was rescued, he had a lot more to say about the whole situation.
As they'd surmised, the golems were animated using the souls of the city's inhabitants, but somewhat to their surprise the city's original 'mage' was nominally in charge of 'war', while the original invading scouts were only in charge of getting more souls. Whoever was in charge, they were fixing the airship so that they could spread to other cities, which would be a very bad thing. They could take over the world!
Wayne had considered making a large 'exorcism-bomb' to get all the robots in the central room, since their crew was scattered through that whole area and would be hard to track down. Balthazaar decided to go one better, and make an 'exorcism-nuke' to purge the whole city, all at once. After all, if any of the scouts were left alive, they'd just recover the freed souls and start everything back up again. He started his hypnotic chant, and when the party awoke the device was completed, and ready for detonation.
Ka'sa flew out of the bomb's mile or so radius entirely -- he didn't want to be sent back to his proper body. The others huddled behind a bunch of anti-soul-stealing shields while Balthazaar lit the fuse... and failed to make it to cover in time. Fortunately, it didn't kill a still-living creature, which was what they'd intended but hadn't been confident of.
Unfortunately, in addition to exorcising all the fixers' souls back to their bodies (where most of them promptly proceeded on to oblivion or the afterlife or whereever, since their bodies were dead), the bomb scrambled the spiritual essence of all inanimate objects in the vicinity -- which blinded Perrel's aura-sight (his only sight-like sense) and disenchanted everything *except* for things Balthazaar had made. The safeguard had been put in to help the anti-soul-stealing shields work against the blast, but the side effect was to save the ship itself. Pretty much everything else was poofed.
Including Roshan. Apparently, the crazy murdering souls inside her weren't really her own soul, and she was now a completely soulless zombie of the sort they'd become all too familiar with. They decided to keep her alive, but it was obvious now that her true soul was, indeed, gone.
Worse, most of the valuables in the city had only been magicked into being valuable, and reverted back to rocks and leaves. During the most-of-a-week they had left to charge up the canopy for the trip over the pass, they managed to refill their hold with a reasonable supply of nonmagical raw materials, but there was no gold or magic herbs or anything like that, that they'd hoped to loot from the place. It pretty much just made up their losses from the pirate island.
They couldn't even salvage any of the city's books -- disenchanting the book curse in such a fashion set it off, so huge areas of the city where unexploded books had been kept were charred ruins now.
But anyway, they went on, through the pass. There were some tall, sheer pillars with civilization of sorts on top, but they didn't dare stop to trade, because their boat would quickly lose its extra bouyancy from the week's tie-down. There was also a huge army riding grasshoppers that refused to acknowledge their presence. For three days, they mostly lazed around or worked on projects (Perrel replenished his supply of healing potions, Wayne knitted illusionary decoys for the various combatants on the ship), until the storm hit.
The storm was Balthazaar's worst nightmare -- he'd been trying and trying to control the weather to prevent a storm from happening, because they were too close to the glowing lands, which were deadly in the rain (they were a natural nuclear reactor that put out large amounts of hard radiation when wet). The only reason he'd come this close to them was the same as he'd gone on the expedition at all -- to find a pre-war source of knowledge that shouldn't have been affected by the book curse. He had a finder he'd been using to lead them all this time, with the trading mission just a pretense.
The first stage of the storm was multicolored, hallucinogenic magical dye. Ka'sa went out in the storm to see what it would do (reckless with his stolen body, as always) and ended up dyed all different colors and, well, high. When it reverted to ordinary rain, Balthazaar and Wayne and Perrel went up to the canopy to steer the ship through the high winds, desperately trying to stay on course with the finder, fighting the shifting winds with the airship's ludicrously convoluted steering mechanisms.
At first, Jardin was keeping a look out for mountains or other obstacles, but soon the clould cover enveloped the ship, and he couldn't see anything at all... other than a faint green glow from beneath the ship, getting brighter. They were in the glowing lands! Jardin gathered everyone up, and they hid in the danger room, which was shielded against pretty much anything, so hopefully would also be shielded against this.
Wayne and Perrel stayed in the canopy to help Balthazaar, though. Wayne attached their spare signalling mirrors to the bottom of the canopy as shielding, hoping that would block the radiation (they were magical mirrors, after all... and wasn't radiation just a form of light?) but not really able to tell if it was working. Besides, even if they went for cover, Balthazaar was adamant about staying up in the canopy directing them...
The glow got brighter and brighter, until they ended up huddling over what they hoped was a well-shielded section while the canopy visibly withered and lost cohesion around them. The hydrogen sacks holding them up couldn't stand the radiation, and they were losing altitude fast...
The good news was that they'd managed to land outside the glowing lands. The bad news was that:
- their canopy was dying, and couldn't be saved through mundane means
- most of the crew was showing signs of radiation sickness -- oddly enough, Wayne (the most exposed) seemed to be affected the least.
- the glowing lands were still glowing, visibly, not too far away from them, so they had to stay in the danger room until things dried out
- Balthazaar was not in the canopy as they'd thought -- it was the decoy Wayne had knitted for him, with a duplicate of the finder, pretending to guide them for the last who-knows-how-long (since steering the ship involved getting out of sight of each other)
- Consulting the actual magnetic compasses in his room indicated that the dangerous green glow was coming from the *south* -- they'd travelled all the way past the glowing lands, and even if they got the ship working again, they'd be cut off from home.
But the copy of the finder Balthazaar had left with his decoy seemed to be real, so they could probably follow him to this source of all knowledge. Once it was safe to move.
last session | next session
