After long last…To recap: The Margravine has helped Bane recover from the attack on the intruders, Gleron has broken into the enemies’ mental link with a small assist from Stooth, and the Margravine and Skellum have quickly consulted about putting dementia space onto the link to attack them. Arkesh is in the warrens closely watching over Thrash as he gets his Witchlight Marauders focused on the enemies there, as Throisar and Bracken closely watch the action in the auction area and intruders' link.
Despite the din spilling in from the attackers' link, ideas flash across the party’s link, and Gleron finds himself struggling to keep them from spilling over and possibly alerting the enemies from inadvertently broadcasting stray thoughts about the party’s possible battle plans.
Bane grins and spits out blood. Bracken is paying close attention to issues of invisibility and sees that the blood stays invisible.
Yes, Bane’s 50% miss chance did operate, and it kept him alive; 2 of 8 arrows missed. Why not 4, the average under normal circumstances against very skilled archers who practically never miss otherwise? The combat map. The advantages the archers had, in being able to adjust for projected misses ahead of Time, and Bane’s 50%, partially canceled each other, so… his luck held, and 2 missed, perhaps to the enemies’ surprise!
Skellum silences Susan, easily succeeding in removing the vocal cords from his projection of her. Her bellows do stop, but the noise level in the cavern barely changes with the din of tornadoes, gravel, river, and fish splattering everywhere.
Considering the Margravine’s thought about the use of Dreamheart and dementia space together, Skellum easily realizes the connection must exist, simply based on his own recent experience; he was pulled into his dementia space immediately on contact with the Dreamheart just a short while ago.
33, Knowledge (The Planes), a decent roll, gets the planar connection.
That was his first contact with a dreamwalker; perhaps it was even the first time a dementist and a dreamwalker were ever near enough to each other to find out what they had in common, since both of them are so uncommon. No wonder the First didn’t know anything about this. Skellum’s view about the possibilities of this bad idea may be growing into excitement; it’s simply unprecedented in the annals of dementia.
It MUST be a place within Dream, which makes perfect sense the more Skellum thinks about it: it is his own private dream. His training and skill were all about making his dream real to others, which on reflection seems very much like what the Margravine has been doing to the enemy by immersing them in her Dreamheart.
29, Knowledge Arcana: he makes the connection but has no more detail to add about possible mechanics.
But that could make an enemy dreamwalker very dangerous to him, someone who might be able to do to his dementia space what the Margravine has been doing to the enemy. Some powerful enemy with Relic level magic to use against his source of power, coupled with the enemies’ uncannily familiar flexibility in polymorphing creatures much like his own, even if differently accomplished.
The same chill that crept across the Margravine’s realization begins to creep into the corners of Skellum’s thought too. What could they do to him if they got inside his dementia space? And to his beloved creations stored there?
And with an 03, he is uncertain, and completely clueless, a very unsettling turn of events for an area where he felt quite expert just a few minutes ago.
The dragonmind is strong: stronger and more flexible than most other creatures, and accustomed to thinking multidimensionally, in part from the ability to fly, in part from innate magic. Throisar finds that he can process the layers of connections in the enemy link with some ease, as he studies it carefully, though there is just too much to handle all of it without practice. He quickly notices some things that others may not have, and are worth sharing immediately on the party’s link: There are definitely numbered groups between 1 and 10 talking on the enemy link: 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10, and one set of individuals that refers to themselves sometimes as ‘originals’ and sometimes with no number. There are a lot more numbers for the being known as Ror, higher than 10, but they are talking to each other about some kind of extensive Ritual Magic preparations that are not familiar to Throisar, rather than to other groups. There are several originals with names that are not in the numbered groups faced so far, including someone named Ptolemaeus and someone named Sable. He hears numbers associated with Ptolemaeus, but not for Sable. He also doesn’t hear any numbers associated with Star Feather. What this numbering structure might mean is not entirely clear, but Throisar is able to cull it from the information flow.
Throisar is also able to identify something about where some of them are, from the visuals they are placing on their link and tagging with their numbers, and his own familiarity with the Illithid complex; the map of it is fresh in his mind, and what those areas look like. Group 1 must be somewhere in the warrens, but nearly standing still. 3 and 4 are about to attack him. 5 is scattered around BB and CC in the slave pens. 7 is also somewhere in the warrens, traveling quickly... he realizes they must be flying, from shifting aerial perspectives that he easily recognizes for what they are. 8 is somewhere in EE, the storage area. 10, and the unnumbered ones, must be inside rock, so it’s not clear where. The higher numbers of Ror are in a crowd together, talking to each other, but the background scenery looks like a very large storage pantry draped with cloth, and not rocky at all; it’s not clear where in the complex they might be, either.
And Throisar is able to sense something of the depth of mind for those he can identify on the enemy link. The mind of this new creature, Ptolemaeus, has depths even beyond a dragonmind, like the scent of dust lying in corners so ancient they are beyond recall; while Star Feather’s seems… bottomless, like endless Eternity itself.
Bringing his thoughts back to a more practical level, as Throisar thinks about making a noise, it also is not clear how much noise would be needed to be meaningful, considering the din in his mind and the din in the cavern.
On the party’s link, Throisar and Gleron have a brief opportunity to exchange information about Star, to further Gleron’s idea to locate where she is directing it from, and Throisar quickly notices this: perhaps she and the ‘originals’ are in rock, but Star seems to be looking everywhere at once. Based on what visuals she is returning to the link, Star has every perspective on the enemy link simultaneously. Sorting through his impressions of what he has noticed about her and the enemy link already, Throisar begins to put together some patterning in the flows she is sending, and… this leads him in some ways the worst yet of the realizations the Margravine and Gleron and he have been able to notice, but it begins to make a horrible kind of sense…
It took Throisar’s multidimensional dragon mind to perceive it clearly in the deluge of information on the enemy link: Star must be a multiple creature in some way, able to give full attention to many separate streams of thought at once. She is not just fast; she must have many parallel trains of fully attentive thought simultaneously.
Once Throisar perceives this, he is able to begin to sort out the strands of thought and images that Star is putting on the enemy link, and also realizes that she seems to be creating new ones whenever she has something else to think about. He can quickly begin to count, and loses track himself somewhere upwards of 25, but not before he notices she closes down strands of attentive thought when she is done, starting and stopping them seamlessly, which makes his effort in counting them all the more difficult.
Of course Star can make a vast, layered combat map that projects forward many possibilities simultaneously! She seems to be doing all of that and other things besides. Throisar even notices traces of humor, even amusement, in the tone of what she is sending to everyone on the enemy link: she is not struggling with it at all; quite the opposite, Star seems to be enjoying this immensely, even as she takes it seriously.
From Throisar’s powerful perception, it hits him: What Arkesh sees as a mighty weapon, Star sees as… play.
…Meanwhile, as the thoughts fly on the party’s link, Gleron focuses on the enemy link, and decides it’s Time to try using this superior weapon for whatever he can manage to turn against them, and shut down all of the enemies’ magical capabilities. He might even destroy some or all of them in a single attack.
Gleron sends a pulse of Mental Turmoil into the enemy link through the possessed tiefling’s connection, and feels the attack speed out, spreading along its multiple pathways. He follows that up immediately with Crisis of Life, trying to kill everyone on the enemy link in one massive blow.
Gleron’s attack has an immediate, spectacular effect, but not quite as spectacular as Gleron had hoped. Gleron can sense the Mental Turmoil rippling through the enemy link, reaching hundreds of end-points! …but then slamming against Mind Blank after Mind Blank at each end-point. It seems that *everyone* on the enemy link is Mind Blanked; how they managed a mass Mind Blank on this scale, he can’t tell – there is no such spell as far as anyone here knows – even Arkesh is mystified. The Crisis of Life has a lot more power, and though he senses no deaths, it does create a crashing wave of damage as it spreads across the enemy link! … but then it reaches the point Gleron has been straining to detect, and… he suddenly feels Star’s presence looking back across the link directly at him.
In that moment several things become clear. First, it is as if he can see her, glaring at him: an Elven beauty beyond words, pale skin and strangely unfocused eyes, long golden hair almost alive with silently crackling sparks of light, she herself glowing softly with Radiance, but her expression turns from a brilliant, playful smile to ice as she senses his attack. Then he realizes why he had been missing her in his search across the enemy link for her: She simply is not there! She does not seem to exist on the telepathic landscape – the ultimate defense! – even though she surely has a point of presence on the enemy link, and seems somehow to be receiving his telepathic attack. It’s as if she is elsewhere, listening and answering into an otherwise empty room. He can sense the wards around the room, strong as a fortress, but now that he has attacked with an effect strong enough for a bit of it to seep through them, he knows no one is there inside; he belatedly understands it must be there as bait, perhaps among other reasons. In that moment, those wards trigger, but some of his two-pronged attack’s telepathic energy reaches inside.
Too late he sees the detail, in the image Gleron has of her as Star’s attention suddenly blazes at him, even though she doesn’t seem to exist there: she is cloaked in a voluminous garment that seems to be a crazy quilt of mirror shards...
The Crisis of Life effect splashes across her Mind Blank, pushing to get inside as it did for most of the other points, and just as it succeeds it suddenly comes rolling back at him, reflected, trailing right behind the wave of a returning Mental Turmoil as well. Neither seems to have hit her at all; they are now two reflections, the first one loaded with an additional charge of magic.
Gleron is immediately affected by his own damage from the Crisis of Life ((the same 7d6)) and just before it hits him, the reflected Mental Turmoil hits him too, but with damage coupled to its own, an additional magical effect that has been loaded on top of it, giving him searing mental pain from a triggered trap that comes right back up the telepathic path that sent the Mental Turmoil to her.
4 mental attacks, each dealing 2d6 damage.
Gleron finds himself staring into a spell duel with Star Feather herself, arch-nemesis of the Illithid Empire, as his mind reels from the damage she reflected back onto him from his own telepathic attacks.
A bit of the returning damage washes past Gleron into the party’s link, enough to give everyone an instant headache, as everyone senses the arcane energy slap them through the link back from Gleron. For those with spellcraft, or arcane knowledge, the style of casting for that extra damage tied to the Mental Turmoil seems ancient, like the oldest, most basic spells are, despite some of their contemporary changes; spells from the earliest weaves like Detect Magic and Light; but the spell is not at all familiar otherwise, and seems like a strange hybrid of magic and something else.
A look of sudden horror passes across Stooth’s face, and Arkesh screeches on the party’s link, but not from the damage.
<Mother defend us! We’ve all been tainted by Agra’s Ambush!
The witch has doomed us all to death in one fell stroke! For tens of thousands of years, the Illithids have repressed this illegal spell – which reflects added damage back onto a telepathic attacker through the attack’s own thought link – everywhere their Empire can reach throughout the Multiverse, and they have obviously succeeded because almost no one in these Times knows of its existence, and even fewer know of its casting. To have a scroll of it is death; to teach it is death; to learn it is death, and even to experience it is death, because we now have seen its work enough to reconstruct it – by someone else who might take our minds, if not us ourselves. All of us now have something of its pattern of casting and damage imprinted in our minds, and if the Illithids find out, they will eat our brains to destroy that scrap of knowledge.
I only know of this spell through the Drow, who have kept and guarded the secret against the Illithids as a last weapon in the battle for the Underdark… for obvious reasons. But no one uses it now even among the Drow, and it would never be used so casually, because of the danger from their Empire; the Illithids don’t hesitate to stamp out any appearance of this spell to prevent it from coming back into common practice. Illithids are trained to sense it, and the next one that meets you will sense it on you and take you as soon as it can. They’ll kill their own kind to repress the secret, if one of them is hit with it – that must be why the witch came prepared with the trap cast already on herself, to use in here, so she could guarantee the death of any Illithid who tried to attack her mentally.
Curse her, she has cursed us. Theres’ nothing for it now, we’re caught between these attackers in front of us and the Illithids behind us. The only way out is to destroy all of the attackers and then flee all together, to get away from the Illithids before they find out, or they’ll pursue us endlessly. We can forget payment any time soon; we’ll be lucky to keep our brains intact. Once we’re away, I can contact them from a distance and arrange to have payment sent to us.
By the Spider Queen, we must finish this, and soon. Thrash? Cease your dawdling and destroy this group, so we can return to the others.>As Gleron stares across the enemy link at Star, bracing for the spell attack he knows is sure to come, suddenly everything changes.
Star’s icy gaze fastens onto another flow of images, not his own, and she cries out a warning tagged to Group1:
{Star} <Something comes! Again, I can’t see what it is!> On the enemy link, Gleron sees her racing to update images tagged as Halfaz1, Halt1, Ror1, Tanatou1, Sheerak1, and Vir1. They respond with images of their own, and he sees what they see.
In split seconds, a chaos of destruction erupts as a blackness floods toward the enemy Group1 in their position somewhere deep in the warrens. A wave of freeze washes around them, overlapped by a spinning shower of needle-like shards, shown in starkly contrasting colors as Star updates the images. With Star’s color-enhanced imaging, Gleron spies a cloud of parrots in the near distance just as they drop out of the air, smashed to the cavern floor by the broad needle shower. Arkesh sighs,
<Finally we have taken care of the parrots!> in a mix of irritation and satisfaction.
The six creatures identified as Group 1 seem motionless in the moment, and then thick pink tentacles reach from the darkness to snatch them as it wells over them. The images wink out, and the flow of information from Group 1 drops off the enemy link. Gleron can hear shouts of dismay, pain, and then rapid healing coming from some of the creatures Throisar identified as ‘originals’.
Then Star is no longer staring at him, or focusing on the emptiness where Group1’s information flow abruptly ended. Instead, the area where Group1 had been snaps back onto the enemy link; the darkness is gone, and Star is there instead, exactly where they stood. There was no teleport or dimension door, at least Gleron detected none. Star simply ceased to be wherever she had been hiding in the rock and was now in the warrens instead, just as she snarls onto the enemy link,
{Star} <WITCHLIGHTS! Take the others as it pleases you… I must take these!!> Then she snatches a sword from the sky-blue scabbard on her back behind a shoulder, with a cry:
<Aurora!!!> and it is as if the sun has come down into the warrens as the sword shimmers into view. Gleron winces at the glare.
As Radiance blasts the fell darkness away, Thrash springs into view in Star’s flowing images on the link. He is rooted to the spot for an instant, thunderstruck in surprise. Then he points, and the Witchlights move toward her.
But on the party’s link, Arkesh wails
<nonoNO! Insane witch, how can you face them alone! Too soon, TOO SOON!>… and she drops out of the tunnel ceiling right next to Star, in the midst of the closing circle of Witchlights.
Thrash’s face twists, even uglier as he grins. He points at the Drow, and the Witchlights’ massed tentacles flail. Arkesh is a whirlwind, moving so fast that she's nearly invisible, but she is no match for a half-dozen Marauders. There is a moment of frenzy, and then Arkesh is replaced by a heap of… snow and ice? The monsters recoil; what happened to the tasty elf they were expecting to eat? Thrash gapes at the spot where she stood, then erupts in glee at her apparent death as he points the monsters toward Star again.
Stooth swears in rage, and instantly the dumpy man’s appearance shifts before the party’s eyes: Stooth... is Arkesh? An evacuation rune crackles, and this Arkesh vanishes, appearing in exactly the same spot next to Star. The Witchlights hesitate momentarily in confusion, suddenly under the influence of conflicting orders, and Thrash’s glee cuts off. His old enemy Arkesh, not dead after all!
The drow roars at Star:
<THE TRUCE OF LOLTH!> and raises her forearm, sword in hand. Star responds instantly, striking her own forearm against Arkesh’s.
<Star Feather is with you!> The drow gives a formal, straightforward reply,
<Arkesh, special emissary of Lolth. Empress, I know you.> Star’s blade swings in a wide arc, lopping off enough reaching pink tentacles to create an open circle around the two elves and the orc, and raises Aurora to strike Thrash down as Arkesh draws her own weapon and grits at him,
<Thrash, you die here.>Thrash is stupefied, confronted by Dark Elf and Light, with the Witchlights protecting him now beaten back momentarily. Caterwauling in terror, he bolts down the tunnel, vanishing into darkness. Surrounded by the Witchlight Marauders, the two elves reluctantly let the orc go as the Witchlights converge on them again, but not before Star flicks a trio of bright throwing stars down the tunnel after Thrash in a single motion, and a triple detonation rocks the compound, throwing the Witchlight Marauders off their feet as the two elves lightly dance in place.
Again the Witchlights are halted momentarily. The first to regain its feet charges at the two elves, but Star snatches a long whip from a pouch at her belt, a sinuous length of adamantine links polished to brilliance, and calls to the whip,
<Frakaggan, the drow Arkesh is on our side!> as she lashes the whip directly at the Marauder’s maw. The whip cuts a gash like a canyon across the Marauder’s face but the monster does not pause; it simply swallows the whip whole as Star lets go; she looks satisfied at success, not dismayed at failure. The rest of the whip wriggles down the Marauder’s throat on its own as she releases it, and the Marauder falls to the floor, clawing at its own sides trying to get at the whip before it is flayed apart from the inside. Suddenly the Marauder is a stone statue; the statue begins to crack and fall to dust as the whip starts chipping and crawling its way back out.
At the same time, Arkesh shakes out a pouch, and the Armada crew comes tumbling out, rolling to their feet directly into precision battle formation with weapons drawn. Arkesh demands of them,
<I have fulfilled my bargain! Now you keep yours.>The next Marauder on its feet leaps at the pack of Elves, but Star and Arkesh swing their swords together, and its head, legs, body, and tentacles all part company. The head snaps at Star as it flies past her, ripping two fingers of elf flesh from her hand to slake its appetite. The body rolls toward its own legs, trying to get itself back together. An intense tiny ball of flame erupts around Star’s hand; the blood stops immediately and fingers start to re-form.
Ignoring the injury, Star laughs, in peals like tiny bells.
<Haha, we’ve come to rescue each other! Vint, Peralia, Shallen, Cyradel, Mallena, and… Corlin! Here, catch!> Star had begun to draw a staff to replace the whip, but tosses the staff to Corlin: a five foot length of kaleidoscopic colors. The sleepy eyed elf Corlin is more than awake now, and cries out in delight at the staff,
< Spell Cannon!!! > Corlin raises the staff, swings it in an arc at the Witchlight Marauders, and Light fountains from it, so intense that the cavern walls brighten with glow all over the compound – the glow is plainly visible, even here in the auction area, right through hundreds of feet of rock.
Everyone on the link is momentarily mentally blinded, but from the battle cries, monstrous squeals, deep-throated roars, shuddering floors, flashing walls, and furious clanging of weapons against scaly hides that ring stronger and more harsh than iron, the battle has begun; the elves are fighting for their lives against the monstrosities bred specially by the orcs to destroy them. The images are so bright that all detail is lost.
As if this destruction still isn’t enough… the Margravine and Bracken suddenly realize that the
alarms from one of the rooms in the southern part of the complex have all simply vanished. They gain no more information from them. Then, a moment later in the auction compound, just as the battle is joined with the enemy attackers, there is the telltale pop of a
teleport, and a goblin wielding appears from nowhere right on top of the flat rock platform where the party has been mustering, then another pops in, then another, then another. With a rolling thunder like mighty popping corn, the trickle turns to a flood; in a trice there must be a hundred goblins spilling across the floor of the auction area. And they are attacking everything in sight, the party and the enemy, apparently ignoring everyone’s invisibility without pause for thought.
The two Allips that Stooth noticed on the Astral Plane are gesturing excitedly to each other about the goblins popping onto the flat rock platform. It’s the way past the Forbiddance that they have been seeking, and an instant later, they too are on the flat rock platform, both babbling incoherent curses of rage while trying ineffectively to claw goblins to ribbons and stuff them into their intangible mouths, a horrible sight made even stranger by the effects of their madness as the images of their transparent, spectral bodies now look as if they are digesting imagined goblin remains from the confused results of their attacks. They seem completely unaware that their attacks are not in fact affecting the goblins directly, but for the goblins the Allips’ strikes pass through, they suddenly stumble about, lost in a confusion of their own.
Without Stooth, who is apparently also Arkesh, the party is left on its own in the auction area in a four-cornered fight with Allips, goblins, and the remaining two groups of attackers, as a stream of blindingly bright images floods down both links from the battle to the death between the elves and the ravening Witchlight Marauders.
