Maintenance and Preservation - Session Eight

New hires Avery and Daniel joined old hands Parker, Benson and Eddie at Eddie's museum in downtown Clearmountain. Eddie had set up all the treasures he found in the underworld, along with paragraphs of factual and conjectural information about what they might be. The healing chair made by the famous Barzini was in the lounge area, where the

Or so they thought. The boss quickly apologized, he wasn't feeling his act. Then he shifted. It wasn't Kurta, it was another illusionist. Not the lizard/goat/old woman, the other one. He had a gift for the explorers: a sack of magic scrolls. They were going into a dangerous place to do a public service, and that reminded him of some people he knew back in Cow Town. People who deserved better than what they got. And they needed to be quick with their work this time, or they'd be lost forever beneath the earth. He left the museum without answering any more questions, and almost ran into the real Kurta as he slipped and fell down the alley stairs.

 

Fortunately for everyone, the one legged supervisor wasn't hurt. He had a big briefcase, containing two smaller cases. One was filled with hand grenades, one for each member of the team, courtesy of the marker he finally called in with the surviving Ponda Rays. The other was sealed, and it contained their mission. The team had to take the machine down to the third level of the undercity, below the now-opened hatch, and open the case in the room with "the machine". This would end the earthquakes and save the city. Then they needed to get the hell out as fast as possible. The things on level three might not recognize the maintenance team as a threat on the way in, but once they broke the device all bets would be off.

The explorers decided to spend some of the money they accumulated before delving back into the underworld. They bought ammunition, weapons, supplies, and a Scroll of Fireballs using money from the museum and the treasure they found over the last seven weeks.

 

 

Once again, the closest entrance was the old subway. There was an enormous train unloading at the surface railyard, blocking every grade crossing in the city. The explorers went through the fenced off entrance into the undercity. Daniel noticed scoring on the rusted rails, indicating a train had passed through recently. There was no indication of how it got through the fence, but it was only a couple days ago at most. The explorers didn't linger to solve the mystery, they were on a strict timetable. 

 

To reach the cave system and the shaft to level two of the dungeon, they had to pass through the power room with the junction boxes. This time, the living lamp was treed on top of one of the switchboards by a pack of cave hyenas. The lamp flashed his bulb to blind them, but the hyenas were already blind and hunting by scent. The new hires quickly devised a plan: the junction boxes were still live, all they had to do was shoot one with the shotgun (for which Pepper had finally purchased ammunition) to create an electrical arc that would scare the beasts off. The blast was loud enough to scare off the beasts, and the arcing electricity only energized the lamp further. Eddie and Benson were able to communicate with the creature in sign language. It would gladly help them through the rest of this floor, but wouldn't accompany them to the level below. The rock people had gone mad, seduced by the promise of power if they successfully resurrected the bones of the God King.

 

Everything was fine in the limestone caves, until a seething tide of cave centipedes came pouring out of a passage toward the group. The living lamp flashed at maximum brightness, stunning and blinding the light sensitive patches on the creatures' heads until they attacked each other in a frenzy

The shaft down to the thermal caves was devoid of monsters. The stone worm no longer lounged on the stone bench. The chasm below the bridge glowed red and billowed with steam. The team realized that the cooling fin was somewhere below, inundated with water from an underground river. They debated descending and finding a way to break it, but didn't want to brave the fast moving water that led straight to superheated rocks.

The path took the team through the mines. The petroleum sludge was all drained out of the first room through a crack in the floor, but the same earthquake that created the crack also collapsed the most convenient passage to the research facility. A detour took the group into a room half filled with water. In the water: a fuligin black orb the size of a small car. Faces flickered across the surface. Pepper, Benson, Tombherd the Lich, Morlocks, other people and monsters they didn't recognize. But they did recognize the blob, it was the shoggoth from the necropolis that briefly imitated them. 

 

Benson approached the beast and it formed a duplicate of him, budding off from the mass like spores off a slime mold. He took its hand and it nearly crushed his fingers. He tried to talk to it and it spoke in the voice of terrified explorers, repeating their last words when they encountered it. Benson reached inside the slime's body and pulled out an unexploded thermite grenade, losing most of the skin on his arm in the process. By this point the new hires realized there was something wrong with him - for a moment his arm was completely skeletal, then it flickered and it was covered in a layer of illusory skin. Avery rendered first aid, which was really more like taxidermy stapling missing parts back on to the revenant's arm. The shoggoth didn't pursue them on the way out.

Adrian Bush

The radon elemental couldn't harm Pepper because she was immune to radiation, thanks to a trade with the dwarves of the Fairy Enclave. It swirled around her while the rest of the group just walked past, and couldn't keep up when she followed them into the research facility.

The flowing iridescent substance was crystalized on the floor of the old chemical lab. The glowing corpse of a morlock lay in the pool, magical spells tattooed on its skin. John Benson picked up the body, undeath granting him immunity to the disease it carried. The liquid limestone was drained out of the pipe room, but there was a giant jumping spider on the ceiling, covered in hungry spiderlings. The team deduced that the jumping spider was perceptive and intelligent enough not to simply drop on top of enemies who were alert and had weapons ready. They kept their eye on it as they passed through the chamber, and it waited until they were across to drop down and follow them. 

 

Rather than wait for it to attack them in an unguarded moment, Benson cut the patch of skin with the magic spell off the Morlock, then tossed the body for the spider and its children to suck dry. The others warned him that desecrating the body of a morlock was a bad idea, but he wouldn't be deterred.

 

The screens in the old control room were smashed, and the dwarves of the Fairy Enclave had put a big OUT OF ORDER sign over them. Avery took an adapter from Eddie's toolbox and plugged a smartphone into the console to use as a display. The cameras showed a pair of suited special agents in the particle accelerator room: a woman and a man with a black glass mask, both wearing cufflinks with an eye pierced by a dagger. Another camera showed the "waste outflow" chamber on level three of the undercity, a huge underground whirlpool fed by subterranean rivers. The wall was pierced by an enormous stone spike that glowed red with heat, cooled by the raging waters.

 

The locker room from last time was empty, the dwarves had removed even the lockers. The chamber beyond held the hatch. The team realized that all the signal flags they placed last time were gone. The hatch had a perfectly circular hole bored clean through, eight feet in diameter. They peered down into the room below.

 

Four starfish shaped rock men fussed over the circular plug of stone cut out from the hatch above. They had lengths of cable attached to it, running to stone blisters on the wall. Benson called down to them and asked what they were working on. The overly officious stone men explained that they were fixing the stone hatch. The underworld explorers convinced the rock men to let them help, then convinced them that the fall had caused stress fractures in the stone plug and the whole thing would have to be replaced. They also got the location of the "machine" out of the Igneous Peons, who proudly bragged that King Dolomite's magnificent machine would wake the bones of the God King and grant him final victory over the lich Tombherd, a filthy surface worlder LARPing as a silicon inhabitant of the underworld.

The explorers moved quickly through the scorching chambers of the lithic outpost. They had previously encountered a couple of stone creatures, and they encountered the giant magma squid again in a big throne room. The stone envoy wasn't sitting in the throne, indicating he wasn't the big boss. He was furiously tapping away at a control geode, connected to a wall outlet by a tube of molten glass. Benson introduced himself and the stone squid told him to go away. He didn't even notice the others, or take any interest in the ominous sealed case they were carrying.

The room behind the throne was filled with pillars of minerals that belched jets of flame. A handful of Igneous Peons waddled through the chamber, letting the flames wash over them. The group convinced the rockmen to turn off the "decontamination chamber" so they could go get a new stone fitting for the hatch.

 

The next pool of bubbling magma was distinct from the previous series of bubbling magma pools in one important way: the magma in it was alive. A pack of lumpy volcanic war beasts frolicked in the molten slime, chasing each other around and making thumping sounds in their throats. Pepper snuck around the rim of the volcanic dog park and was almost slurped into the pool when one of the beasts leaped out to catch a falling rock from the chamber wall.

The final chamber glowed with blue energy, dangerously radioactive. Pepper was immune to disease, and John Benson was undead, so they took the case and went inside. A huge jellyfish of molten glass manipulated controls on a huge brass contraption that fired a ray of blue energy at an enormous bone embedded in the ceiling - a piece of something truly massive. Igneous Peons and Flint Songbirds fussed over equipment. A huge spike extended out the wall of the chamber and into an enormous interior space full of rushing water, glowing red hot and giving off steam as it vented heat generated by the laser.

 

Benson bowed to his majesty King Dolomite. The jellyfish turned its bell to regard him, without taking its hands off the controls to the laser. The awakening of the God King under control of the Lithic Courts would cement his victory over Tombherd the Lich, and it was a little surprising to see one of the Lich's creations in his demesne. But then, there was something different about Benson, something else controlling him, which must have been why the rockmen didn't instantly destroy him. But that was all irrelevant. Benson could give whatever gift he brought and leave. Benson gave Dolomite the thermite grenade. Dolomite shaved a glass dagger off his bell and gave it to the zombie in return.

 

Pepper opened the suitcase before the rock people realized she was there. Inside was a sample container of the kind infectious disease researchers used to hold live cultures. It hissed, a compressed air cylinder hastening its dispersal around the chamber.

The beam shut off. The rock monsters shrieked with a sound like a chalk boulder slowly breaking in half. The stone eating bacteria from the suitcase killed them before they could do anything about it. Except Dolomite. He lashed out at Benson, honestly impressed by the humans' treachery and hoping to at least take one of them with him. Benson was wounded, but swore to avenge the dead rock king. He was a maintenance worker, he didn't sign up to genocide rock people with biological weapons. There was a further rumbling, then the caves were silent.

Everyone agreed it was time to leave. The magma beasts were busy playing king of the hill on a giant rock that fell into the pit. The flame jets were back on, so the team had to take the long way around. They pulled on their respirators and rushed through a room filled with corrosive gas, but were stopped in the steam filled chamber that followed by the enormous stone worm they met on the previous delve. The Seismic Knight shouted that John Benson was no Knight, he was a poltroon and now he was going to die. The maintenance team killed the charging worm with a hail of grenades before it could kill their pet Death Knight.

Nothing accosted them on the way up out of the Lithic Courts. They stopped to rest for a moment in the control room. The terminals showed the spike cooling down without the machine heating it up. The suits were gone from the particle accelerator room. They heard something big come through the hatch and decided to leave. The last quake sealed off the way out of the labs that they had come in through, so they plotted an alternate route to the surface.

 

They made it to the frontier before the morlocks attacked. Three of them leaped out of the water in the room with the duckboards, all gunning for John Benson as he reached for the hatch in the ceiling, incensed by his desecration of their dead. Two sunk their blades into him before he could pull himself up. Eddie read the scroll of Fireball he got from the witch and fried the pair, sending the third one retreating into the water. Benson hauled his teammates up out of the hole, Avery stapled his missing pieces back together and they ran for the surface.

They made it to the old bomb shelter when they ran into the Men in Black - the woman and the man with the glass mask. The MIBs were pleased. The Lithics had been on the verge of destroying the entire city by awakening the God King, and now they couldn't do that. All they had to do was finish off Tombherd and the whole situation would be under control.

John Benson handed Eddie the scroll of Silence, hoping his friend would stop the suits from casting long enough that he could kill them in hand to hand combat. Eddie shook his head, not interested in fighting super-secret agents with special powers. Benson opened the scroll and prepared to read himself, even knowing he probably wouldn't succeed. The MIBs reached for their weapons.

The Lich Tombherd passed through the wall of the chamber. The masked agent cast Timestop and the Lich ignored the spell, killing them both with a disintegration beam. Then he turned to the maintenance workers. The blue light flickered behind his eye sockets, the soul of the dead man seeking out beneath the vault of the skull all the places it had known in life. And finally he spoke, the first words any of them had heard him say.

 

He said that he was wrong. There were not four ways to die. There was but one.

 

The Lich blinked. The world around them disappeared, rock below their feet turned to mud turned to dust, and then they were falling, falling.

Down to the deepest groves. Those furthest from the nigh-forgotten sun.