Abyssal Road Trip - 311 - Whispers in the mist (Patreon)

Amdirlain’s PoV - Material Plane - Quil Tris

Wrapping herself in more concealments, Teleport placed her near the wooded edge of the first estate. Searching for distortions wasn’t a problem as she immediately heard the fractured notes within the main building. The owners had laid out four hexagonal structures in a lopsided Y-shape with an open mouth towards the driveway. The smaller wings and tail were each a modest two stories and fifteen metres across. Positioned against sides one, three and five of a middle hexagon, fifty metres across and six stories tall.

Forming a thin line of focus with Resonance, Amdirlain swept the place for barriers and traps the overhead surveyor might have missed. Aside from the wards the surveyor had shown her, she found minimal extra. Her efforts isolated the decaying energies of scrying spells at the estate’s front entrances and numerous deaths in the rear wing. Setting a crystal into the ground to tag any infected who entered the grounds, Amdirlain moved to her next location.

She appeared at the back corner of the property’s solid fence, hovering above the black gravel that covered the ground around the sole building. Catching a series of glimmers among the gravel, Amdirlain noticed a feature that hadn’t been visible from overhead. White starburst markers divided the whole ground up into parking spaces. The markers were tipped far over on their side to make them only visible by an approaching vehicle.

Weird line markers aside, Amdirlain wouldn’t have found anything odd about the parking facilities before her excursion to the club. Unlike those around the club, there was no overhead lighting, and the gravel material didn’t feel like it would allow Radiant Mana to pool.

The surrounding properties were part of an industrial complex, with all the warehouses and factory units shut down for the night. Amdirlain turned her attention to the central structure.

The structure was a loop formed from six linked hexagonal structures, the lone entry was on the side closest to the street. The other hexagonal structures lacked an outer door, but each had a door to the inner courtyard.

She heard more lingering traces of scrying spells focused on the property’s entrance over the last day. The considerable but bearable distortion within the structure made it hard to perceive the interior. Looking to isolate the effect again, Amdirlain formed Resonance into a narrow path and started a full circle sweep.

Even before she finished examining the structure, she found more than a few oddities.

The hexagonal walls were 33 metres long and made of black stone that hummed with distortion. Though it looked like a single structure, the only connection between the six buildings were the doorways between structures. There were subtle things off about its angles and joins. The walls' corners didn’t line up in equal lengths; the difference wasn’t much, but each was off by multiples of thirty-three millimetres.

Everywhere she started to look, more occurrences of thirty-three, or just three, were common.  The front structure had a wide reception counter sitting three metres and thirty-three centimetres inside the entrance. Beyond were three cloakrooms filled with cloth hooded robes and mostly wooden masks. The exception was a set of thirty-three robes that hung beside stone masks enchanted to assist the mental resilience of the wearer. Amdirlain wondered what was happening since they were apparently aware of the distortion's dangers.

The structures were linked internally counter-clockwise, and the central area was set up with thirty-three metal waves running southwest to northeast. Their formation allowed someone easy passage from any of the structures in the chain back to the second, but not in the opposite direction. Only the last two in the structures within the loop possessed any warding, and it was only against scrying, nothing against the undead.

As Resonance’s path moved over a warehouse five hundred metres up the street, she found a warded room with two wizards inside. The song of one matched the caster of the most recent scrying spells that had examined the building.

Picking up their thoughts, Amdirlain found the observers weren’t security for the cult but rather spying on the building. Their need to keep a low profile meant they were stuck in a chamber with nothing to do but play games until they detected a visitor's arrival. The female wizard wanted to know more about the structure and group that had taken her brother from her. The strange circumstances she and others had seen among the foundation’s members made her hesitate to break the observers’ rules.

Despite being assigned to a low-level meeting centre, she daydreamed about finding things at bigger sites during the easy game they played to pass the time. As she skipped a piece forward to claim more of her partner’s markers, a nudge from Amdirlain provoked idle speculation. Among the images that arose, other properties Amdirlain had intended to investigate were included. However, the images of a large lakefront property in the observer’s mind grabbed Amdirlain’s attention. Details that included images of medical beds and lists of the dead had her hackles rising.

It seemed the secretive cult bases weren’t so secret. Near each property that Amdirlain had traced the infected to was an observation post manned by a pair of wizards. However, they weren’t spying for the law keepers; they were private citizens, some volunteers and others employed full time. They'd all been approached by Professor Mor’lmes after the law keepers rejected requests for help with a loved one's strange behaviour.

Delving into her thoughts, Amdirlain finally found the reason they were close enough for her to find. Although Amdirlain's Resonance could detect their scrying spells, they were purposely designed by a divination specialist to be almost undetectable. A large downside, however, is that they were equally limited in range. The closer they were positioned, the clearer the images returned, making it a real problem for some isolated sites.

Amdirlain sliced open the structure’s strongest wards and moved. As the contained energies spilled out, the wards’ fraying triggered alerts within the observation post. Teleporting into the structure, Amdirlain started cursing at what she found. Along the walls were mind-twisting patterns that offered hints of greater secrets if they were studied. Though different to those the Eldritch Drifter had left etched in stone, they were no less damaging.

Amdirlain hastily broke into the structure’s inner sanctum. She only spared it a glance before unleashing songs that caused the stone’s surface to soften and blur, ruining the effect of the images before the observers peered in. The central chamber was an irregularly shaped room, like an inkblot represented in 3D. Positioned off-centre in the chamber was a pool large enough for a tall Catfolk to lie in that looked like it had been moulded off a car melted by nuclear fire. The thick sludge that filled it was the source of the distortion and had Amdirlain’s fur standing on end.

As the pool’s exterior melted under the blurring from Amdirlain’s song, the material promised emptiness and screaming distortion. The material had no resistance other than the energy that had twisted its existence. Enfolding the boundaries where its nature touched the realm, Amdirlain applied the death theme of the Eldritch and worked to eject it. Though the materials resisted her efforts, she used its similarity to the Far Chaos to send it from the realm.

As the observers’ scrying started through the building, Amdirlain confirmed her concealments had stayed intact and left them to the mess. Teleport placed Amdirlain on the road outside the lakefront property she’d learnt of from the observer. Far below it, through a hiss of static, were thousands of screeching sources of distortion, with fifteen of them significant in strength. Locating the observation team, Amdirlain looked into their minds as they reviewed medical files and autopsy reports. What hadn't been clear from the other observer was that this place was for palliative care.

The outer fence of the property had a large sign above the front gate: The Lakeside Retreat.

A small plaque beyond the reach of the gate’s wings read: Constructed by The Remembrance Foundation.

Maybe I’ll leave a Sunnydale sign out the front later.

The sprawling estate was dozens of square kilometres of lakefront on the city’s northwest edge. On the rolling grounds, the property’s only building was near a few piers extending into the water. It was a single hexagon that, while only three-storied, provided plenty of space, with edges over a kilometre long. The institution’s front door led into rooms filled with desks and chairs, but a single Catfolk was present. He was close to the central lift lobby and had his attention on an array of Artificer panels secured to brackets on a nearby wall. Among the other lifts, a concealed one plunged into the earth through the centre of what appeared to be a foundation pylon.

Four of the building’s segments held wards of private rooms containing elderly and gravely ill adults. The rooms within the sixth segment hosted children. In each ward, some adults tended to the patients, and she heard one softy reading a small child a story of a cub adventuring on a lake. The surface seemed peaceful and sedate except for two adults transferring a drugged child to a gurney with less care than a bag of flour. Within a bag at the gurney's end were arcane implements, heavily contaminated with Eldritch energy and traces of death.

Amdirlain had intended to learn more first, but that plan had just crashed and burned.

Confirming the only warding around the upper floors was for privacy and protection against the undead, Amdirlain appeared in the room. Mentally eviscerating the eldritch manipulators that controlled them, Amdirlain caught the convulsing adults. Extended tentacles slowed their fall and muffled their screams before she put them to sleep.

Amdirlain winced as she listened to their neural pathways and found old and new memories tainted by the Eldritch insanity. Shielding the memories that weren’t twisted, Amdirlain quickly dissolved the rest. When they were clean of distortion, she reached into their minds and sighed unhappily at having returned adults to their teenage years.

A lullaby pressured the security guard to sleep and rolled across the hospital. It was deliberately not fast acting allowing staff and patients to avoid injury. Once everyone was asleep, Amdirlain set to work. Mentally crushing hundreds of eldritch manipulators, she repeatedly caught at their death keel’s song. Her experience with ejecting the effigy provided new insights into the interlocking themes that cast the residue from the realm.

[Combat Summary

Eldritch Manipulator x320

Total Experience gained: 3,792,000

Ostimë: +1,896,000

Ontãlin: +1,896,000

Advanced Telepathy [M] (80->82)

True Song Architecture [S] (101->102)]

With the parasites gone, she carefully dissolved memories from healers and nurses, taking out only what had been infected. The teenage state of many of the minds had Amdirlain deciding to give them a second chance. Their minds held in her grasp, she forced their agreement and stripped the few eldritch sorcerers of their classes. Then she reverted their physical ages to match the minds that now inhabited their bodies. Though she knew it wasn’t the optimal solution for all their families, the staff had no hope of recovering from their ‘amnesia’ with what she’d done. A fresh start was their only hope to redeem the damage in their souls; a teenager’s body was the best way for others to accept it as fact.

Having handled the staff, Amdirlain turned her attention to the patients. The melodies of healthy Catfolk let Amdirlain deal with the cancerous growths and magical aliments she found in young and old alike. There were a few whose themes Amdirlain considered repugnant, but she left them alone with their natural deaths not far away. Knowing they still might harm others, she added their hidden crimes to the medical records attached to their beds.

Not wanting to leave the staff and patients where more Eldritch infected could easily claim them, Amdirlain teleported them away. The corridors of distant shopping centres became packed with patients in their beds and slumbering teenagers in medical garb. Before they’d been there a few seconds, the first guards tending those locations had tripped alarms.

Moving to the lift lobby, Amdirlain bodily ripped apart the false facade that hid the deep lift. Masked by her concealments, the receivers in the security station didn’t show Amdirlain present. But they displayed both the destruction and the words she set into the wall beside the exposed lift. Inventory placed the stone shards metres away, formed into the same words.

‘Insanity and monsters lie beneath. Incomprehensible beings led the staff and others into madness and enslavement, sacrificing lives to gain more power.’

Her swift demolition hadn’t damaged the lift platform, so Amdirlain stepped onto it, triggering its descent. Above her, though, shorting Mana conduits started to set off blaring alarms. The lift was past the foundations when the native grey stone of the area showed a seeping black discolouration. Looking at the lift platform, she considered the self-contained Artificer mechanism and started to sing. Amdirlain breathed a sigh of relief as the platform continued to descend smoothly despite the white granite plug she created to fill the shaft above her. The local symbol for hazardous material appeared etched into the granite's upper layer.

Reaching out, she touched the observers’ minds and sent a message.

‘Your targets worship beings that make the darkest gods appear benevolent. I cleaned up the mental infestation in the staff and evacuated everyone.

The chambers and tunnels beneath the retreat are populated with monsters beyond Mortal limits.

The mat-black stones contain hazardous energies.’

Ensuring they wouldn’t forget a fragment of the message, she broke the connection and swept Resonance through the static below. The lift shaft descended directly into one of the largest chambers and a distortion source. Dozens of pathways radiated from that point, twisting paths to other chambers and Eldritch beings, big and small.

Having descended nearly seven hundred metres, the shaft opened up around her, and the hovering platform continued to descend. The top of a thick mist rippled beneath her, but it wasn’t the nearest source of distortion. As the platform descended further, the pea-soup thick fog blocked her True Sight, and the hiss of distortion squealed all around her.

[Species: Loathsome Void Spawn

Primordial Tier: 2

Health: 1,723,912

Melee Attack Power: 9,923

Details: Whether birthed in the Far Chaos or the void between stars, they all share the hunger for the essence of life. Sometimes they can be bound to protect effigies of greater beings if regularly provided energy from sacrifices.

Note: They can feed off the essence of the living and the undead alike; just got to throw food their way.

Note: Stupid cultists think the Eldritch are tools to cast off the eternal threat of the undead.

Note: I thought you planned to be subtle on Quil Tris. Review the definition of subtle; perhaps reading it might help?]

Ouch, burn! Fine, but there was a child to save.

Her descent halted atop a dais surrounded by undulating ramps that ran to the chamber’s floor in serpentine paths. An altar surrounded by bloody troughs sat on the chamber’s floor. When she stepped off the lift platform, a trio of giant ten-metre-tall pillars suddenly loomed at the ends of the gutters.

The outline of a pillar shrouded in the chamber’s congealing mist suddenly changed. Its motion filled her mind with broken jigsaw pieces while she attempted to study its form. A flared crest around its head dissolved into a ridge of spiked horns that gained, yet somehow always had, oozing feelers. Focusing on one part of its body gave the rest free rein to swirl unchecked into something else. With every transformation, True Sight tried to perceive the reality of the being but caught only incomplete analogies of pieces. With the Power blocked by the being’s incompatibility with the realm’s rules, Amdirlain turned it off, and darkness swallowed her.

A wave of rushing wind assaulted her senses with the stench of a rotting sea. Spinning away, Amdirlain empowered the tensed ligaments in an out-flung arm to unleash a spray of ordered shards. Light flashing from the energy release showed the trio charging, and Amdirlain leapt clear. By reflex, Ki State and Angelic Aura snapped to full strength and shunted aside a flurry of blows. With her experience on the other world, Amdirlain drew on Primordial Mana and filled the armour that covered her flesh with its flames. The illumination let her see more incoming assaults that warped in form and direction.

Behind stabbing tentacles, the second one advanced, and a paw bigger than her torso slapped down on the stone. As its form rippled in her senses, Amdirlain struck out. Her form exploded outwards, fighting fire with fire, and her tentacles closed on the beasts, squeezing with brutal strength. Her expanded mass and contact with them prevented them from teleporting away. The sound of shattered rock transformed into pulping flesh as their exteriors crumpled. Their undulating multi-dimensional sounds had Polyglot confused between translating anger and pleasure.

As blows battered against her armour, and spells seized upon their connection to rip into her, the creatures tried to pull away. Pain Eater issued a spike of notifications, but Amdirlain ignored it and stopped trying to hold her ground. The force of their retreat catapulted her forward, and Amdirlain grew further in mid-air. Instantly a mass twenty metres across, the power of her momentum rocketed but, before impact, she drew on more of her Protean-absorbed mass and quadrupled her size. She engulfed them, pulling them into a tight embrace before her impact with the far wall shook the chamber to its foundations.

Eldritch energies broke her resistance, and Amdirlain saw the danger in her approach as Protean struggled to fight their influence. Still, she pushed for victory with the trio already pinned by her unexpected move. Amdirlain sang on as she weathered their increasingly frantic blows.

She reflected the chaotic songs of their parts into perfectly ordered crystal translations. As they fought and clawed, she endured the pain and added bits and pieces of what she sensed to the theme while other aspects fought for translation in her mind. Angelic Aura helped turn aside the worst magical assaults while its energy fought the eldritch natures. When Amdirlain finally rose, three crystal sarcophagi sat on the chamber’s floor amid the blood and gore ripped from her form. The mist that had filled the chamber was no more, compressed in with the entities whose nightmarish existence had spawned it.

The sarcophagi differed from those within the Abyss—these had no key.

[Achievement: Pet groomer

Details: You’ve wrangled your first strays and got them to sit, not just shooed them out of the yard.

Note: You might qualify as a wildlife handler yet!]

[Combat Summary:

Loathsome Void Spawn x 3 (Imprisoned)

Total experience gained:  10,343,472

Ostimë: +5,171,736

Ontãlin: +5,171,736

Resistance: Eldritch [I](43->44)

Angelic Aura [S] (46->47)

Protean [S] (81->82)]

Forcing her body to shift set her flesh aching in protest, but Amdirlain returned to her Elven form.

Amdirlain got a clear view of the chamber’s engraved walls with the mist gone. Black stonework tried to drink up the golden glow from her gaze and smoother it with an oppressive gloom. Each block showed twisting patterns similar to what the Eldritch Drifter had impressed into its resting spot.

Sigils and carvings covered the wall and tried to entice her to stare closer and seek the mysteries hidden within the alien swirls. Though these patterns seemed incapable of influencing her, she didn’t want to risk the observers exposing themselves. Adjusting the melody she’d used at the last site, Amdirlain’s song softened the stone’s surface. As the walls glistened with tears of black ink, the pull of gravity ruined the patterns.

A confusing catacomb of passages spread out in all directions, but the nearest distortion was impossible to hide. Her awareness stretched through the contaminating energies, and Amdirlain teleported to its chamber. Through the screams spiked in Resonance, a physical silence and thick mist blanketed her. Not wanting to engage in hand-to-hand combat so soon, she turned to option ‘burn.’ A maelstrom of music struck out through the muffling fog sending Primordial blades searing through Eldritch flesh and bone.

[Combat Summary:

Loathsome Void Spawn x 1

Total experience gained:  2,147,824

Ostimë: +1,073,912

Ontãlin: +1,073,912]

The distortion was of equal strength, so imprisoning them nets me more per void spawn. Gideon said they can come back, so they’re rewarding me for keeping them on ice for a few billion years. Maybe?

The last notes of her songs echoed through the surrounding corridors, and distortions started her way. Looking at the gaping wounds she’d left in the stone, and already decaying mound of flesh, Amdirlain whistled and called out. “Here, boy!”

Come on, baby, be my bonfire.

The things that approached were waist height on Amdirlain and flitted from one side of the tunnels to the other in erratic movements. She couldn't see much of their bodies because hundreds of tendrils thrashed about them.

The ten of them grouped up and dropped closer to the ground when they spotted Amdirlain. They only waited a beat before charging her in a rush of tendrils. With the form she chose challenging her control of Primordial flames, the song twisted in Amdirlain’s throat. Forcing it to completion, a boulder of flames barrelled forward to melt stone and incinerate the group.

[Combat Summary:

Loathsome Void Spawn Larvae x10

Total experience gained:  845,960

Ostimë: +422,980

Ontãlin: +422,980]

As Amdirlain moved through the tunnels, more died in isolated strikes. The rush of a pack saw the Primordial flames again flood the tunnels and melt stone in its wake. The destruction of that first large pack provoked others to rush in. Increasing waves of the weaker ones fell to the flames. Though larger ones mixed in with them, she heard a stronger pair in a distant location that hadn’t shifted position. As the last of the latest attack died to the flames, Amdirlain skipped to them. Two looming figures stood on either side of a massive door that dwarfed them. Without pause, the figures charged towards her, and Amdirlain’s glowing gaze gave her all the light she needed to fight back.

Arcing backwards beneath a cable-like tentacle that morphed into a spiked beam, Amdirlain drove her foot up. Unable to stop its attack in time, the Primordial flames sheathed within her flesh carved a path along the passing beam. Smashing down to stomp on a separate attack aimed at her back leg, she felt the solid limb squeeze and ooze before the heat of her flesh sent it up in flames.

As tentacles swept in, Amdirlain danced between them and unleashed blows of flesh and song. A close call from one shifting form snagged at her clothing, but Amdirlain absorbed the shadow vines and spun with the motion. A wet drumbeat sounded on alien flesh from fist, elbow, and shoulder strikes, all leaving charred wounds in her wake. The flesh of her side and thigh opened under alien strikes, but she neither flinched nor fell into the spikes waiting for her stumble. Spinning back the other way, she dropped and rolled beneath a scything limb and came up behind it.

Eyes and antennae fixed on her, and the spawn’s attack slowed to reverse direction. The Primordial Kopis appeared, and the weapon’s white flames momentarily drowned her gaze’s golden light. A sucking noise sounded as the blade severed the limb, and the weapon vanished again. The charred stump of the limb flopped about, and Amdirlain flowed away from it. As the alien grasped for the severed flesh, Amdirlain’s mind seized it and drove the limb into the closest maw. That provoked them to use purplish-black Eldritch bolts and lances that Amdirlain slipped past or let Angelic Aura dampen.

Ki Flight lifted her off the ground and skipped her from limb to limb, missteps in the fray marked by her blood and body parts. Along her path, the charred footprints highlighted her passage with cauterised wounds. When Amdirlain’s foes were at last nothing but blood-splattered flesh, the surrounding mist faded into the stone, the energy staining it darker.

Amdirlain listened to the realm’s songs that sent their true energies home before she turned to consider the now fully visible vault door. With the distortion of the guardians gone, she could hear summoning circles and containers of imprisoned spectres.

[Combat Summary:

Loathsome Void Spawn x 12

Loathsome Void Spawn Larvae x3,923

Total experience gained: 357,643,996

Ostimë: +178,821,998

Ontãlin: +178,821,998

Angelic Aura [S] (47->48)

Protean [S] (82->83)

Ki State [S] (100->101)

Ki Flight [Ad] (32->34)

True Song Genesis [M] (19->21)]

Pulling the two imprisoned Eldritch critters to her, Amdirlain sent them through a Gate to one of the existing storage locations in the Abyss. With them dispatched, she took in the growing activity above and the energy-soaked stone about her.

The tunnels were a problem, though the priority was the patterns; she’d need to deal with the Eldritch energy contaminating the stone eventually. Setting a barrier before the door, Amdirlain took the next song slowly to husband her strength. She set it loose only after it had built towards a loud crescendo that rattled her bones with restrained power. The power burst forward and continued to race out as she sang on. Lava mixed with Primordial Mana and flooded the tunnels, melting everything in its path, including the remains of the battle. The difficulty in using the same energy that filled the Titan’s forge kept trying to pull the song from her control.

Amdirlain didn’t stop until all the tunnels were filled, ignoring another rush of experience and a further increase in her True Song that appeared along the way. With a glowing wall of white lava restrained a few metres away, she turned towards the vault door.