Roddy Applecreek the Mad Bomber, Delgal Haberkorn the Hundred Handed Mage and Al Hafiz the Preserver went out into the Fazenda gardens to retrieve the Threshers for an expedition through the second portal, into the heart of the alien base. They found La Mal wrestling with a huge pile of lianas and yellow trumpet flowers, while Condition Killer shouted pointers. He explained that the success of the expedition against the Gnolls on the previous day convinced the Grain Cult to loan the team a Mound. It didn't have a name, but they called it Phosgene because it smelled like hay. Al Hafiz collected his ax wielding henchman Eric the Barbarian, but Grit was dead and Gowonry was nowhere to be found.
A team of masons and carpenters came out of the portal in the Gnomish mines, carrying trowels, saws and other tools. One of them handed Al Hafiz a business card, bearing the epigram
Stone is not too hard
Nor mud too soft
and an address in the Marble Cliffs. Condition Killer explained that he hired these people to do some work in the tomb, to make it easier to get into the portal and stop desert beasts from nesting there.
On the other side of the first portal, the entrances leading out from the tomb to Hogman's Plain were all bricked up. The workers added a ladder going up and down the central shaft, surrounded by a wooden cage to stop the user from falling off. The party mounted the ladder to the third floor, waited for Phosgene the Mound to catch up, and went through the other portal - the one that led to the alien base.
Al Hafiz immediately attacked the room full of slimy breathing organs with his Sword of Sharpness, ripping the bag and sending black fluid squirting everywhere. The others advised him against this, prompting a debate about whether destroying the base's support systems was bad for the enemy or bad for them. They went to the next room and investigated the energy door that Roddy probed on the previous delve. Between the two of them, Roddy and Delgal determined that the door's malign green energy instantly killed beings with low power levels, leaving stronger creatures unharmed.
Al Hafiz invited Eric to try the door. Eric asked if he was trying to kill him, like he did Grit when he abandoned her. Al Hafiz said that Grit was faithless and got what she deserved. Eric attacked him in a bloodrage. Al Hafiz parried with his shield. Roddy and Delgal rolled their eyes and went through the evil green door, easily ignoring its negative effects with their beefy hit dice. They entered a glowing purple garden filled with spiny bushes and large flowers shaped like bells. Al Hafiz and the hired help heard a sound through the wall, a large creature with an eight legged gait. They peered through the door and saw a giant starfish disappear into the room with the life support systems, effortlessly squeezing its eight giant limbs into the small entrance. Eric chased after it and Al Hafiz followed, leading the Threshers and the Mound.
The starfish looked like the night sky, blue-black with pinpricks of light on its "skin". It pressed a tentacle to the bladder Al Hafiz ripped and sealed it shut, repairing the damage. Eric attacked the monster and the others joined in. They sunk their weapons into it. The door behind them squelched open and a Migo fired a lightning bolt through. It nearly killed half the group, Condition Killer burned all his divine power in one burst and Al Hafiz made up the rest to stop a party wipe. The electrical arc traveled through the group and exploded the starfish, at least removing the threat to their flank. Roddy and Delgal heard the sound of the blast and rushed to help.
The window broke and the room explosively decompressed. The adventurers let the air out of their lungs as the bug flew out through the hole into space. Only the sticky membrane of the conveyer stopped them from being sucked after it. Al Hafiz slashed open the ceiling hatch with his Sword of Sharpness and the conveyer flung them through into the upper level of the satellite. The hatch nearly dismembered them as it slammed shut behind them.
With hard vacuum between him and the rest of the group, Roddy sent the badly injured Eric home through the portal and led the team around the other end of the base, looking for another way to the upper level of the satellite. The garden was now full of ordinary earth baboons, which shrieked and gibbered at the intrusion into their territory. Roddy lit a torch and advanced, hoping to scare them off. A purple flower turned its bell toward him and he heard a whisper in his ear. His eyes unfocused, blurring his vision as Something whizzed overhead. Condition Killer tackled him to the ground, protecting him from further missiles shot from the undergrowth by the prickly plants.
La Mal took over bellowing at the baboons, preventing them from advancing to capitalize on Roddy's disability. The Halfling handed a grenade to Condition Killer, who threw it into the undergrowth to dispatch plants and primates alike. They cleared several rooms of hostile plant life this way, sending the Shambling Mound forward to tank stinging needles and whispering flowers. Roddy's vision gradually recovered and he used the spines from the strange plants to make fragmentation sleeves for his grenades. A room guarded by glowing green energy (presumably a security measure to keep the baboons trapped in the gardens) yielded racks of tubes, filled with eggs and embryos. La Mal devoured the two largest eggs, slurping up a Fire Lizard embryo and a larval Remorhaz. They hit a dead end when the chamber door led into the airless void created by the destruction of the quartz window, so they went the other way around.
In the last room of the garden, Roddy got the idea to harvest one of the strange flowers. Condition Killer instructed Phosgene the Shambling Mound to take one as a sample and devour the rest. Roddy determined that the flower functioned as a parabolic microphone that cast Feeblemind on its target, a potent weapon he could use exactly once before it wilted. The surviving baboons wanted nothing to do with the adventurers and hid as they exited the terrarium.
The garden gave way to a chamber with a ceiling hatch leading up to the next level, and a floor window of quartz through which the world was visible below. Roddy decided to investigate the last room on the lower level before heading up to find his friends, concerned about being attacked from behind. The door opened to a spiral passage like the one with the Wax Mask shrine on the top floor of the tomb. At the end of the passage was a mural: a wax mask bursting out of a rock dome, flanked by bat-like creatures with stars for heads. The mural was studded with sweaty pinkish diamonds, but Roddy remembered that the last shrine was trapped. An iris in the ceiling promised to drop something horrible on him when he took the gems. Using his engineering and biological acumen, he found the nerve channel inside the resin wall that controlled the trap. La Mal jammed a dagger through the shellac and severed the cable, allowing Roddy to steal the gems.
The next level of the fortress had no gravity. A ceiling hatch looked down on the Great Moon below, and two doors led further into the base. Roddy crawled along the wall/floor/ceiling to the heavy Bloodiron door and found a security corridor beyond, trapped with a wand protruding from the wall. He tossed La Mal's poncho over it and removed it from its mounting without any trouble. The corridor led to a teleporter room. Roddy considered it unlikely the others had entered the portal, and searched for them elsewhere.
The other door led to a vast chamber of suspended superoolite boulders. Roddy heard an explosion from the other end and took off, bounding nimbly between the floating spheres in microgravity as the Threshers clumsily pinballed off the rocks behind him.
While all that was happening, Al Hafiz and Delgal shot upward into the upper level of the satellite, ejected by the conveyer and almost bisected by the closing hatch. They floated in microgravity, hit the opposite wall, stabilized themselves and looked around. The room was filled with tubes and wires, all leeching off a tiny Pixie stuck to the ceiling. The Pixie was alive and her eyes followed Al Hafiz' sword, but she couldn't speak or blink. Concerned that dispatching her would summon another monster, the adventurers investigated the doors out of the room. One was epoxied shut, one made a murmuring sound, and one made a sound like a raging whirlwind. Al Hafiz recognized the wind as the sound a Genie made in its transformed state and decided not to go that way. The adventurers stacked the door with the murmuring sounds and opened it, just in time for the Genie to burst out of the other room and shoot through the open door, bowling over two murmuring monsters.
Al Hafiz used his amulet of ESP to read the Pixie's thoughts. She had no hope of escape and wished only that the adventurers would destroy the satellite and the aliens leeching her power. Al Hafiz killed her with a stroke of his blade, sending strange iridescent fluid everywhere from the ensconcing machines.
With the Pixie dead, Al Hafiz went to parlay with the Genie. The room she retreated into was full of enormous superoolite boulders, but he knew she was in there somewhere with the murmuring monsters. He shouted that he approved of her plan to both foil the Migo scheme and destroy the Rock Dome - he was a schismatic and believed the mainstream Mercy religion needed to be destroyed to reform it. Khamsin believed his assertion and shot out of cover to join him, narrowly avoiding the grasping hands of the Murmoring Maggothings.
The Migo chose this moment to attack from behind. It hypnotically commanded Delgal to throw away his scrolls and dispelled the enchantment on Al Hafiz' sword. It fled into the airlock and Al Hafiz pursued along with Khamsin, intent on killing it before it escaped again. The Migo opened the airlock and vented it to space. Al Hafiz hung onto the hatch, resisting the Migo's hypnotic commands to let go. The Murmurers attacked Delgal, focusing him down with their grasping tentacles as he retrieved his scrolls. Al Hafiz managed to haul himself back through the airlock membrane and into the ship, just in time to be grabbed by the beasts' acidic tentacles as they luxuriantly stroked Delgal's unconscious form. Al Hafiz squirted out of the monster's grasp and quaffed a potion of Invisibility before they could catch him.
Kevin Oniel
The
airlock burst open in a flash of magic. A squad of Fedaykin in masks
and robes tossed a fireball into the depressurizing room, unaware that the invisible Al Hafiz was still alive. The blast finished off the unconscious Delgal and nearly killed the schismatic Mercy cleric, who broke invisibility to wave his holy symbol and ward off another attack. The Fedaykin poured into the room, using their Belts of Levitation to move against the rushing air, and their Mage cast Hold Portal to seal the door behind them. The leader, Garshasp Al Abas, commended Al Hafiz for taking down the satellite's invisibility field, alerting the Rock Dome below to the danger, while his Hierodules hacked the Maggothings to death with magic sabers.
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Delgal stood in a many columned hall. The Liberator leaned over in his throne and told him he had a job for him. He knew it was hard for Delgal, living after the rest of the Red Ball mages died fighting tyranny. The mage could rejoin them, or he could perform one final task for his God. There were some people who needed to be taught a lesson. Their hearts were in the right place but the only language they understood was martyrdom.
Rock Dome was a garden city, a beautiful holy place filled with vegetation. Al Hafiz had been there before on hajj, and he was immediately reminded why he turned against his faith in the first place. All around the city were slave gardeners, clad in chains of gold. He was ashamed to be rescued by people who saw all this and still put their faith in the Cult of Mercy. The Clerics prepared Delgal's body for interment in the Vault of Martyrs. The mage's charred body wept tears of wine. The tears became a stream, then a river, then a waterfall. The flowing vino took shape, an enormous tidal wave or wine jelly that surged outward to slurp up the Fedaykin who, though they fought for justice, still made compromise with sin.
Al Hafiz was forced to choose. He could flee and survive, he could help his former coreligionists protect the holy site from a foreign body. Or he could stick to his principles.
A Fedaykin raised his staff to destroy the onrushing torrent of Wine Slime with a single blast. Al Hafiz struck him with his sword, shouting.
GOD WILL DECIDE! GOD WILL DECIDE!
The Holy Warrior fell over and bled from his mouth. The tidal wave fell over him and Al Hafiz both.
He didn't say much after that.
Roddy sat on the porch of the Fazenda with a big bowl of feijoada and a tall glass of aguardiente and told Doctor Pleroma what happened. The slime was curious what exactly the Migo were doing up there. What was the Intellect Devourer scheme supposed to achieve? The mural was a clue, the Wax Mask breaking out of the Dome, but how? What then? With the satellite destroyed, hopefully the bugs wouldn't try it again. The Slime Doctor thanked Roddy for all his work saving the hospital and foiling the bugs' plot.
La Mal vomited a larval Remorhaz onto the table. One of the Mutants attending the Doctor grabbed a knife, but Roddy said he'd deal with it. He shoveled the little bug into a pail and set off. Away from the big house and the Mutants and Thouls and crippled psychics and surviving Grain cultists.
He blew it up.
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