Maintenance and Preservation - Session Nine (The End)

 

John Benson and Pepper woke up after a long fall. They were in a domed cave, on an island of fine grained white sand in a chalky blue underground lake. An Aelf fussed over them, face a photonegative of the unseelie fairies from the undercity they knew. He brushed a feather duster over John Benson's face, a stick with slimy tendrils cut off an underworld creature. The tendrils had no effect. Benson realized his hands were "bound" by a long glass spike, inserted through his wrists like a syringe. On a normal living human it would have made freeing his hands painful and debilitating. For an undead revenant it was easy.

 

Benson sat up and asked the fairy what was going on. The Aelf was disconcerted by his ability to move and talk. Pepper sat up, similarly unaffected by the paralytic poison from the cave crawler stick. The Aelf hadn't bound her hands yet, the glass spike lay on the sand ready for use. The Aelf shot Benson with a magic spell, which spattered harmlessly against his dessicated flesh. Pepper asked what was going on. The Aelf ran back into his hut, a structure of stone and leather. He turned out a bag onto the sand, containing their possessions.

Pepper realized that the weird underworld guy was trying to ensorcel/enslave them, and was trying to get rid of them now that he realized it wouldn't work. She thought about jumping him and stealing whatever he owned in retaliation, but Benson convinced her to focus on escaping the unknown cave before exacting revenge. He established a pidgin with the cave elf and learned that the way out was to the south, across a series of stepping stones sticking out of the beautiful blue water and through a passage in the rock. As for an explanation of his behavior, the Aelf told the humans that there was a vast wall of impenetrable glass, as high as the eye could see. There was a world on the other side, and he would kill every man in existence to get there.

 

The maintenance workers left. The Aelf was happy to see them go.

 

The stooped passage from the underground pool led to a doll's theater of tiny rock formations and sloped limestone. Benson picked a small stone flower and the duo looked for the exits. The cave Elf had forged two paths through the room, and the gang arbitrarily chose to explore the east one first. It led through a narrow tunnel to an even larger chamber, tilted granite floor shaped like the back of a spoon. It was a difficult climb, but with their ropes and harnesses they were able to scramble halfway up before trouble struck. From a seam in the rock over the entrance, a fossil vampire crawled out of a shale bed. The undead being croaked and ground its auger-bitted teeth, still hungry after millions of years. Pepper got the hell out of the way, Benson almost got bit but scrambled up after her. Behind them, they heard the scraping sounds of more vampires waking up. The cramped tunnel ahead suggested an opportunity to lay a trap for the pursuing monsters. Pepper still had the shells from the busted shotgun, and improvised a fistful of "toe poppers" by balancing the primers on sharp rocks.

 

Up ahead was a chamber of pink marble. Then a narrow climb up a chimney into a tilted oval of chalky limestone. A fork in the path, with an enormous stone ball like the Diquis Spheres of Costa Rica. One crawl blocked by a breakdown, another by a sump into a fast flowing underground river. Benson didn't need to breathe, he tied a rope to himself and dove in, swimming six feet to the other end of the tunnel without getting swept away into the depths below. He tied off the cable and Pepper crawled after him. they were both soaking wet, but not cold enough to freeze. A "wall of steel" blocked the path, really a banded iron formation polished to a mirror sheen and a sharp edge by dripping water. Benson climbed over and was snatched by a cave barnacle. He slashed the thing's tendril and it dropped him right onto the sharp edge of the wall, injuring him. He got the rope tied down and Pepper followed him over.

 

After the wall, a squeeze into a room split in half by a microfault, coming together like the jaws of an enormous dog. In there chamber were dozens of very sick people. Filthy, insane, not zombies like the ones from the Plague Pit above, but barely alive. Animated by diseases which they spoke to incessantly, promising they would infect the two surface worlders who bumbled into the room. Benson was already dead and unable to host a virus. Pepper was immune to disease. The cholerids died in droves, slain by their illnesses for the crime of failing to transmit them. There was barely enough room for the maintenance team to squeeze past the bodies.

 

A vertical shaft, leading up to a series of "branches" where the top of a fossil tree was eroded away. They climbed to the top and tested the air, and that told them which way was out. A scraping sound echoed from one of the tubes below. Benson peered down and spotted the culprit: a huge trilobite, bristling with weapons driven into his back, trying desperately to unstick himself where the haft of a spear had become lodged in a crack. Benson rappelled down and bent the shaft back, freeing the ancient beast. It surged forward and carried him up the shaft on its head, depositing him at the top. It signed its thanks using an archaic variant of the same dialect used by the living lamp. It was going to challenge the Death Knight to a duel, but since Benson helped it out of the squeeze that would be a little gauche. Instead it offered assistance with the next combat the group got into.

The exit to the northeast led to a narrow and tall rock fissure, with ghastly white walls that crumbled away at the slightest touch. The Trilobite Knight warned that an Alkalion was near, and pointed at a cloud of enormous spores hovering around the ceiling. He warned that once the spores made contact, the lion would be inexorably drawn to their location. The maintenance crew decided they weren't interested in dealing with it. They ran through the room as fast as they could, sidling through the passage at the end where the big spores couldn't fit. The room after that was the origin of the underground stream they found earlier: a waterfall cascading down from the level above, into a room filled with fossil sea creatures. The Trolobite sucked in its eye stalks and then popped them back out, a gesture of respect for its fallen ancestors - and descendants.

The gang climbed up the shaft to the source of the waterfall: an underground stream shooting out of a hole in the rock. Benson peered into a low passage and saw a pair of eyes, which blinked at him and disappeared. He crawled in after the strange creature and was attacked by a blackfoot gigaferret. The enormous mustelid wrapped itself around him and there was nothing he could do - nothing Pepper could do, stuck behind him in the narrow tunnel where she couldn't swing a weapon or even reach the monster attacking Benson's head.

The Trilobite scuttled forward and attacked the beast, easily maneuvering in the cramped passage. The ferret tried to escape and the living fossil's blades flicked out to skewer it. A couple thrusts from the Knight's keratin misericordes were sufficient to dispatch it. 

 

With the impediment removed, the gang crawled forward into the next cave to examine their kill. The room was full of fragmented cement blocks, probably fallen in from the city above. The gigaferret was quite dead, and the Knight offered the pelt to the adventurers. Then it took its leave, scuttling off into the dark to help other lost explorers.

 

Then there was a high ceilinged room filled with obsidian blocks, and at the top of the chamber a way out. The way out was blocked by a heap of rubble, beyond which the explorers heard rushing water. They shoveled the pieces of broken stone out of the way and threw them down into the chamber. The falling rocks broke the glass and the sound of shattering glass was answered from deeper in the cave system 

A flock of stormsheep skated into the cave on spindly silicate limbs. They pressed their glass mouthparts to the obsidian floor of the cave and sucked greedily, searching for electrical signals. The maintenance team continued shoveling rocks out of their way, but threw them across the room so the blind rock monsters wouldn't locate their position.

The unblocked path led to a beach of plastic and glass, pebbles rounded by a swift flowing river that divided the chamber in two. There was a passage on the other side, but there was also an enormous insect visible at the bottom of the river. Benson waded out to pester it and it rolled over, clearly aware of his presence. The duo decided not to wait around for it to climb out of the water and pushed upstream, into the fast moving water. They got into the passage before the giant caddis larva could crush them. It led upstream to a room made of opalized bones - the spine and ribcage of an enormous being. They crossed around the edge of the chamber to avoid falling into the deep water in the center, and a huge hermit crab came out to greet them. Its shell was the skull of a giant. Benson raised a hand in greeting. The crab nipped him, eager to collect his skull. He waded away before it could pinch him again.

The origin of the stream was another waterfall, which cascaded down from a chamber they recognized: the whirlpool where all the water in the underworld ended up. They could even see the cooling spike from the Lithic project overhead, cold and dead. At the bottom of the pool were a bunch of humanoid olms and a handful of shimmering magic items. 

• A footstool
• A round pair of rose colored spectacles
• A katana
• A set of three stones
  

Benson waded into the pool to steal the items and the olms turned to face him, no longer transfixed by the water cascading from above. They asked if he had any food. He offered them the ferret pelt in exchange for the stones. He really wanted the rest of the items, but Pepper wouldn't give up any body parts when the Olms asked for more food in exchange.

Benson used his scroll of Instant Summoning to teleport a big ladder from the Central Services basement. That got him up to the rim of the funnel, but there was still a long way to go and some fast moving water forcing him down. Pepper engaged the weird salamanders in conversation, searching for another solution. The olms spent most of their time not moving, conserving energy until food fell from above. Pepper suggested they try their luck on the floor above, since the Lithic Courts had been wiped out and their space was ripe for the taking. The olms took her seriously and swam up the waterfall like salmon.

One of them asked if the maintenance workers needed a ride. The olms carried them up to the big cooling spike, granting them access to the Lithic Courts they visited on the last delve.

The Lithic outpost was cold and dead, volcanic activity ceased. The Magma Children in the dog park were stone statues, frozen in the act of fighting over the big stone sticking out of the now cooled lava. The Dwarves from the Fairy Enclave were busy ripping cables out of the walls in the Lithic throne room. They congratulated the Central Services workers on their great work kicking the rock people out before they destroyed the entire undercity with their stupid God King bone plot. Benson said he didn't mean to genocide the rockmen with bacteria from the Men In Black, it was an accident. The dwarves said they didn't want a lecture on moral responsibility and went back to cutting the throne out of the ground.

 

The steam baths where they encountered the Seismic Knight were now host to a strange plasma being encased in a suit of diamond, tapping the ground rhythmically with its spiny limbs. No one was interested in interacting with the creature, so they made their way up and out of the Lithic zone, to the research facility above. They decided to pay the Fairy Enclave a visit before leaving. The Fairy Princess they met earlier was still swirling her drink dejectedly, this time the Fairy Knight who attacked them alongside the Red Caps was with her, passed out drunk. They asked how she'd feel if they killed him. She said she'd hunt them to the ends of the earth. They thanked her for her time and left.

They made it up to the first level of the undercity before the Morlocks attacked. They hadn't forgiven Benson for his theft of the skin. They were silent and invisible and they tore him to pieces with picks, leaving only the head. They told Pepper she could keep it, along with his scrolls and all the other dross he carried. They took the severed parts and scuttled off into the undercity, leaving her with the skull. Benson blinked lazily, dimly aware that somewhere, the severed head of a revenant was being carried toward the surface.

They made it to the Necropolis, almost out of the underworld, before they ran into Tombherd. He sat on a lectern which once held a book holding the names of everyone interred in the necropolis. His body was headless and held his skull in its hands, blue flame glowing behind the eyes. He spoke again, to the severed head of John Benson. He asked if he was ready to undergo the final transformation. To the other side. Benson said yes. The Lich told him to imagine all the flesh that had ever been eaten. The teeth tearing. The tongue savoring the taste. Then take away the teeth and the tongue and the flesh.

Benson imagined it. He opened his eyes and found himself staring out of a skull, held in the hand of a skeleton.

From Pepper's perspective, the light in Tombherd's eyes changed from blue to yellow. Then the skull spoke in John Benson's voice. He had achieved his dream of Lichdom. He knew everything. He could feel the bones of every dead thing in the undercity. Nothing was beyond his grasp.  Death itself was something he could overcome trivially.

And with that came the understanding that he could never return to the surface. It wasn't for him, that cold and narrow bed. He could never go back.

Benson sputtered and babbled. There was so much he wanted to do. So many good things with his power and his riches, so many people he could save and things he could fix. To Pepper it sounded like a man dying of cancer, listing all the things he would do when he was cured. But there would be time to ruminate on that later. She went to the surface and called up the maintenance Supervisor. Kurta was ecstatic to hear that she was still alive. Gunnie had rescued the others and been badly injured in the process, and he couldn't get permission from City Hall to send anyone else into the undercity to look for Benson and Pepper. She reassured him that everything was fine, but he needed to come down to the undercity.

 

The One Legged Supervisor arrived forty five minutes later, in a work truck with his One Armed Secretary. They brought a hydraulic jack, assuming from Pepper's cryptic message that Benson was trapped and needed to be extracted from under something. They were a little perturbed when they descended into the Necropolis and found a surprise party of prancing skeletons, demonstrating his newfound occult power. It didn't matter that the city wouldn't let Kurta send people into the underworld anymore. The Lich King John Boneson could do it all by himself with his army of the undead.

Pepper called in the favor Benson owed her from earlier: she wanted him to kill the Fairy Knight from earlier. He had cut off John Benson's head that one time and generally been a nuisance and now it was time for him to die. The lich John Boneson went down to the enclave to negotiate with his wife. She promised that if her husband died, she'd immediately inaugurate her reign with a war against his undead empire. They negotiated it down to a nonfatal beheading.

Pepper visited Gunnie in the hospital, while John Benson sent his skeletons to steal the armor of Saint Hildegrin from her apartment. She had lost her arm to something horrible while rescuing the other survivors of the collapse alongside Lloyd the Vampire. The expedition was Lloyd's idea, but Gunnie paid the price. Pepper explained that Benson had become a lich and Gunnie warned her that this kind of thing happened sometimes in the underworld. He'd be alright at first, but his behavior would get more erratic. He would have trouble separating his thoughts from reality and his godlike powers would fire off erratically as he did things just by imagining them.

John Boneson declared that the Men in Black were banned from Clearmountain, punishment for making him an unwitting pawn in their genocide of the rock people and in general for their nasty attitude toward freaks and monsters. Made slightly nervous by his power and potential ravenous madness, Pepper decided to serve as Benson's link to the surface world, helping him maintain his connection to humanity while covertly feeding information about his most dangerous activity to the MIBs. 

 

And that's how it ended.