Gabe glares at the fiery serpents. I knew they were fickle but outright betrayal?!
"Fools! You've been given no gift beyond chains. Power is great, but power without freedom is death."
Maintaining his glare, Gabe simply vanishes.
Gabriel ghosts through the archway, briefly gliding up the curved wall to get behind the two traitorous lizards. His passage is like a light gust of wind, nothing more.
Caught unaware, Kessh-Amon readies his burning glare, and-
-screams in high-pitched reptilian agony as Gabriel's blades punch through the seams where the two scaly necks meet.
Ssuh-Luhss barely notices his companion's pain, and shoots his own fiery beams with glee.
The snakes are clumsy with their new weapons; they are clearly not used to keeping their gaze steady for the ray attacks. It misses Samen entirely. The beam plays over Abnaki for a long two seconds, scorching his skin and causing many of the flowers to char and blacken.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Idiots. We feed you, and this is how you repay us? No more healing potions." Abnaki starts his performance as a move action , and as a standard action casts Simple Order on the undamaged Salamander, "H̷̳͎̘͋̇́a̴̱̥̅̌l̸̜͍̫̀͠t̶͖̩̜̄͠!"
"What a volcing waste of time and energy. End yourselves with your fancy new 'power', and spare us the effort!"
"Step back, Gabe. This may get gruesome."
Samen contemplates the frailty of the physical brain as he sinks his subtle spikes into the creature's minds. Just slide a block here, a shunt there, and...that will do it.
Each salamander hisses in surprise as one of its own heads bites the neck of the other. Green eyes hiss and spit at green; yellow eyes bite and hate yellow. Blood-flecked fangs strike, and strike, and strike...
until nothing but pulp remains. Cracked lenses flare and go blank as the salamanders bleed out from their self-inflicted puncture wounds.
Combat Over
"That was completely awful. Can all humans do such things? My records are incomplete."
Samen continues staring hard at the lifeless lizards, watching them twitch their last. He considers Serv's question, and scans around trying to find the other human. In the end, he decides to answer honestly yet evasively.
"No, most of us cannot bite our own necks, but history shows we can be equally self destructive. It's a bit of a racial flaw."
Gabe fades away from the serpents as they begin biting themselves. He finally steps from the shadows once they are both eviscerated. "That was disturbing."
...the salamanders said...robes and glasses...have any of you met the being that calls itself Inquisitor Ky La?"
A chill runs down Samen's spine as he recalls the creature.
"Yes, a Moon-infused elen. He was responsible for the fall of Light and leader of the false inquisitors. We killed him, or at least an incarnation of him, right before evacuating Light. I carried his skin around with me for a while, to learn more about Moon. You suppose he's the one who corrupted the salamanders?"
Samen goes over to the dead bodies and searches them, looking for anything of value, or any magic about the broken lenses.
"That would be my own guess, yes. The thought is disturbing...I- the Observer-" Serv struggles with this newfound individuality, "was supposed to be working alone here. The inquisitor should not be here."
Down here is deep. Feels like home. Learningto and others are happy. Dig down deep, maybe help plant tree.
Samen looks over his own wounds, and those of Gabriel. "This might be a good place to rest up. One more night probably won't make the difference, and we need to heal. These rooms should be relatively safe."
Gabe nods in agreement with the idea. He's been nursing a nasty bruise in silence but it was starting to get to him. "One of those golems got a lucky hit in. Resting sounds like a good idea."
You travel down the wide, downsloping tunnels of the Branch library, and quickly find small traveler's room carved into the sides of the stone. It is conscpicuously clean inside, and you wonder if all the Observer's little helpers have been busy mopping up the remnants of their invasion.
As Serv sees Abnaki contemplating the little crawling observers that scurry about the walls and floor, he says, "Those little ones could heal your wounds, but do you feel nothing about consuming their very life force?"
The Sunlord, in a subdued tone, still gives his greeting to the new day. "All shall see the glory of a true dawn when the Sun truly rises!"
Samen, the two cracked salamander lenses in your posession heat up noticeably while the Sunlord speaks, just shy of blistering your delicate human skin.
"I suppose you're right. How would you have felt about it just yesterday I wonder?" Abnaki breaks into his own healing magics instead.
The silence of the corridors is broken only by the occasional light tapping sound of an observer skittering past. They seem shy, but curious, like the tiny pogonas of the cities. You leave the entryway behind, slowly descending on the gradual incline of the stone tunnels. The tunnels loop around the perimeter of Uluru again and again, feeling like an enormous flight of stairs.
After ten minutes of walking, you come to the end of the wide ramp. To the right, the way suddenly opens up-
You find yourself in a tall, airy space, a rock-cobbled dome arching overhead. There are many small holes in the dome, allowing glimpses of the broken, black Sky above. To your immediate left is a large series of pens and corrals for beasts of burden. The stench of old death is in your nostrils.
The copper tree--the top of which you saw outside--dominates the middle of the area, but there are enormous empty spaces in between. Torn rugs and broken pieces of wood are scattered on the floor. Suspended from the tarnished copper branches are four large nets made of woven reeds. Each net is slashed and empty. A few heaps of stale ashbread and rotting fish are all the remain of the famous feasts of Branch. The echoes of your footsteps are loud here.
"Yesterday? I didn't have the burden of feeling anything, yesterday. Being a limb of the Observer was...nothing. Bliss." He stares at the stone walls, seeing nothing, longing for nothing.
Grimacing at the stench, Gabe drinks in the surroundings, looking for anything that might pop out and surprise them. There are so many places to hide in such a large area after all. "This can't be the restricted area yet, not with the... former animal pens. Someone obviously didn't like the place."
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"No, this is merely the vestibule, where the necessities of a city happen. We need to go in and down to get to the interesting places."
There was a time when Samen would've been willing to kill to gain access to the knowledge stored in the restricted area, but he is at peace with his newfound humanity and the answers that the sunlord has provided. Still though, if there's time and opportunity, he'll spend a bit of time learning forbidden knowledge, just for the thrill of it.
Scraps of a former way of life are strewn about the plaza, trodden into dusty floors. Merchants' rugs, all as unique as the merchants themselves and their wares, lie in tatters alongside broken lamps, moldy food, dry dung, and shattered glass. Chaos and Entropy have visited this place; They have have not been kind.
Gabriel, the only movement you see are some six or seven observers. As tiny as they are, you are still able to find them all easily, given your now ultra-keen sight. You are confident no other beings are present. You feel not a breath in the stale air, save your own human exhalations into the cold, dry spaces.
Serv observes the carnage.
Down another interminable ramp--no observers scuttling about now. They seem to shun these deeper places. You see more traveler's rooms off to the sides of the long, long tunnels - all meticulously clean. The utter silence makes your footsteps sound loud, intrusive.
Finally, you come to the second level. It is another huge, airy space. Samen, you recall this was a cavernous library, shelves upon shelves made of the very living rock, holding paper-made books, the kind you would associate with ifrits and sylphs...
...or at least that's how it was. Now, the shelves lie empty. Every book sprawls open, carelessly piled upon the floor. Every page is empty, as meticulously clean as the rooms.
Seeing the empty books, Gabe posits some questions, "Why would they have empty books in the Library? And why are the rooms so clean when these central areas are such a mess? If it was the observer we encountered outside that cleaned things up, why not clean these other areas as well... simply more mysteries."
As the answers are not likely to be forthcoming, Gabe stays alert for any unexpected traps or creatures.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Same sighs as he sees the destruction and emptiness of the hall.
"These books were not empty. They've been scoured clean, presumably by that army of skittering observers. The information was literally collected. Much knowledge was stored here, but it was nothing that could only be found here. A lot of it was false history created by the church. We must go deeper still to see the true price of this invasion."
Gabriel, you manage to disarm a minor memory trap, the type that could cause a person to forget their purpose in being here. Samen, something about the construction of the pretty nuisance puts you in mind of Inquisitor Ky La. The ugly feeling that he may be close by lingers in all your minds.
You also find a sloughed-off skin from one of the salamanders. (which might give you a nasty shock, but they remain dead upstairs) This must be the level where the hasty surgeries took place. It does beg the question though - what happened to the salamanders' real eyes?
Serv tries to follow a single observer he has located. Something about him repulses the small machine, however, and the observer continually skitters away from him. The golem sighs and ends the fruitless endeavor. He wanders back to the group, eyes melancholy but still scanning for danger alongside the rest of you.
"There are a million copies of Ky La, you know. You can't ever kill him for good." He states this in a matter-of-fact tone.
Samen, undaunted, shrugs at the assertion. He responds in a similar nonchalant tone. "If a god can be killed or destroyed beyond interaction, then so can anyone. If he is ant colony, with a million drones and a single intellect, the mind can be destroyed. If he is a collective of individuals, their unity can be sundered. If he is empowered by an external entity, that connection can be severed. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is invincible. Everything has a weakness. The trick is finding it, and not despairing in the meantime."
"If he has a million copies, we just need to kill him a million and one times," Abnaki says brightly, "He may be legion, but he isn't the only one here nearing apotheosis, now is he?"
After finishing with the memory trap, Gabe considers killing Ky La a million and one times. The thought triggers some deep satisfaction left over from his previous persona. "We'll do what we have to in order to free this place from his madness."
"Such a sick sense of humor."
At first you think he refers to one of you, but you see he is looking at the one piece of writing within view: a scroll.
"If he has a million copies, we just need to kill him a million and one times," Abnaki says brightly, "He may be legion, but he isn't the only one here nearing apotheosis, now is he?"
"He's right, you know."
But no one is there, and no one remembers. Thrice-Slains' smile falters for a moment, but nothing can mar his good humor for long.