Mountains of Madness, Part 2

[AdamZero]

When Ayiee started talking security clearance mumbo jumbo I relaxed, glad something like this had a padlock on it. I walked over to the doorway, nothing but darkness beyond it. Well, not nothing, very clearly from the sound there was another room, rather than a bottomless void, and there was a subtle breeze, possibly from vents or built in magicks to filter and regulate the air.

I rolled my shoulders and felt my energy finally snap back, well... level out. I had a few more fireballs left in me, if I kept em small and tight... necromagick wasn't in my cache unless... wait...

"Did you say Jamie was in the "Weapons and Armorments" room?" Aiyee nodded, still accessing the panels. My eyes widened as I looked to Lucas.

"She's not gonna take a float-cart full of guns and ditch us.... isn't she?" Boris asked. I slapped him one.

"That's not the worry."

"Then wut is?" Boris stopped his skull's spinning.

"That she blow up this whole damn place up before the volcano or those freaks do."

[Sareth]

[OOC]I so apologize for what I am about to write. But I just can't resist...[/OOC]

"Jamie."

Gggggggaaaaaahhhhhhh...

"Jamie."

OH. MY. GOD.

"Jamie."

I... I've died and gone to heaven.

"Jamie!"

Better... than... sex...

"JAMIE!"

My breath came in sharp and hard, almost enough to cause me physical pain. "M...Mom?"

My mother was staring at me, shock and concern etched on her face. "Did... Did you just..."

"Did I jus..." My breath insisted in doing the sharp, hard, and painful thing again. "Mother! Wha? No! No I didn't! Don't be ridiculous! That's just... No... I..." I sighed and hung my head. "Just a little."

My mother gaped. "You... climaxed staring at a room full of antique weapons?"

My mother... the buzz kill.

[OOC]Again, I so apologize. But with a set up like Adam gave me, how could I resist?[/OOC]

[AdamZero]

{ooc: *bow* I aim to please and shoot to kill}

Inside the room were many weapons of destruction, defense, and demolition, and other words that start with 'de' that involve the violent reduction of matter to lesser quantities in short explosive bursts.

Most of the stuff was sealed behind diamond hard panels, but there were a few things that looked like they could be put to good use.

(ooc: Viking sensei or Greybeard, if you would?_

[Graybeard]

[OOC:

(ooc: Viking sensei or Greybeard, if you would?_

Sorry, not sure what I can do here. Jim has something in mind that he hasn't shared fully with me, although I know enough about it to try to help ... maybe. Possible retcon coming, but we really need him for the next phase. Anyway: /OOC]

A long way away (or perhaps no distance away at all -- "distance" doesn't describe all separations well), a -- being -- one might call him (it?) a "fisherman" -- was thinking to himself (itself?), time to make my morning check of the trotlines. (Actually, neither "morning" nor "trotline" represented his thoughts in any more than a metaphorical sense, and even "being" might not be totally correct either, let alone "fisherman," but close enough.)

The snood at Dead Man's Hill stood empty, and the hook was gone, to his displeasure; the fish had taken the bait, but the hook hadn't set. Or wait, had it? There were ripples coming from Tsuirakushiti; maybe the fish was there. He'd have to check on that later. The snood at Centoriel had had something messy happen to it, and the line was tangled. There might be a fish on the line, or there might not. He might have to come back and untangle that later too. He checked the other snoods, hooks and baits, and in almost all cases, found nothing very interesting going on.

But the bait at the end of the snood in the Mountains of Madness was still there ... and the fish that were circling the bait were very interesting.

---------

"I don't like the looks of that," Grope told his nephew as he eyed the brown cloud over the volcano, itself hidden behind a foreground ridge. "Have you ever seen anything like that before?"

Scrobian was not quite two hundred years old, which is long enough to have seen many, many things, but the tribe hadn't been in Farrel for very long. "No," he said. "I agree. Let's get this bear butchered, take the meat and the hide back, and see if we need to use this balloon to evacuate the tribe." They set to work.

----------

Elke's crystal ball sounded with that code, causing her to forget all about what her womb might be up to, and to close her office door. She also activated a little gadget she'd "liberated" from some goods coming into the port from Tsuiraku (causing a minor diplomatic incident, but that was in the past) that broadcast white noise to cover her conversation; whatever was coming, she didn't want it overheard beyond her walls.

Actually, there was no conversation, just a single voice. "Things have gone completely to hell in a hand basket. Emergency session in -- 28 minutes." The man at the other end of the line hung up without waiting for a reply.

[OOC: And welcome to your first, distant glimpse of the BBEG!]

[Viking-Sensei]

The party walked through darkened corridors, guided only by the waning light of Ayiee's "headlights", which were dimming now because she was running low on power... the one drawback to a solar powered golem. Still, the floors were flat and even and smooth, with only the occasional shift or disturbance caused by what must've been centuries of geological shifting.

Switching back to one of Lucas' chemical torches and Marcus' magical fire, they continued on even longer... hours, possibly even days, since time became meaningless in the all-encompassing dark. "How far, Ayiee?"

"We are to enter the central chamber shortly."

And true to form, only a few short minutes later, Lucas saw exactly what she'd been going on about. Deep within and possibly under the volcano, lit only by the reddish flow of the lava vein running along side it (protected by another transparent wall) was a very small, but very sprawling, cityscape.

Barely visible against the gloom of the cavern, dotted with torch lights and reflective points giving off glimmers of reddish light reflecting off the lava wall, the party could make out some of the nearer structures to the point where they entered the city. Many of the buildings looked suspiciously like they were ruins of something else - they were the same white stone as the walls and the room they entered in the first place and the corridors they were exiting. Other buildings layered on top of those appeared cruder, but still functionally sound - stone and wood and mud helped form the basic shapes.

"And where is this other control room exactly?" Lucas said

Ayiee slowly raised her hand and pointed towards the dead center of the city, then up. "Up...there..." she said uncharacteristically sluggishly, her hand motioning towards a point lost in the darkness and distance. "Another access tunnel on other... side... of... ciiiiiittttyyyyy."

"Well... crap."

[Graybeard]

"The longer I look at that cloud, the less I like it," Grope said, and his nephew nodded. The column of gas and ash rising from the volcano hadn't really expanded, but it had turned an angry reddish-brown, and a glow at the bottom suggested that incandescent lava was at the surface, hopefully still confined to the out-of-sight crater.

The Robe was itching on his back. He paused in cutting up the cave bear to finger the Robe and see what his ancestors had in mind. Ah. I shouldn't have needed their Wisdom to see that.

"I think we should be safer here in this valley than in the village," Grope said. "Here's an idea: Sir Bear and I will stay here, and you use this amazing balloon to ferry our people over here for now. Then we wait it out. The village is just too close to that thing for my comfort."

Scrobian nodded again. "The Ancestors are wise. That is what we must do." Grope had to hand it to the young troll; he saw what had to be done, listened to Wisdom even though it was someone else's, and acted decisively. He'd make a good consort for a Matriarch some day. "Fare well, my uncle. I'll be back in an hour or so with the first of our people. Don't eat too much of the bear while I'm gone." He headed back toward the balloon, which Grope could see become airborne minutes later, leaving him alone with the remains of the bear and his thoughts ...

... And a Blood-Binding scar that had started to bother him too.

---------

"Mom, there's something we need to discuss," Layla said, after she and Ace had reached the house and she'd done all the mommy things with Zachary. Her face didn't suggest she was looking forward to the conversation.

Faye nodded; she knew what was coming, and she didn't like it any better than Layla did. "Soc" was going to want her to move to his home base, wherever that was (he'd never come clean on that), for the bulk of her education as a folk sort-of-mage. Well, Layla was a grown-up, and she had left home once before ...

And look how that worked out.

"Let's discuss it over lunch," she said, setting the table for three; this was going to involve Ace as well.

[Sareth]

"So are you still as pleased as punch?" Mother asked.

I glared at her.

After having come down from quite the bit of euphoria, had changed Nera's diaper, discovered that Nera was hungry and the handy dandy baby food making wonder that was Ayiee had wandered off to parts unknown, solved this problem with a rag, a water skin, some fruit juice mother happened to have along that hadn't turned (yet) and a carrot I'd mashed up and made the kid eat (I'd be days getting the stains out of my clothes. Mother thought that was hilarious.) Having completed those domestic chores I'd turned to the row upon row of weapons.

They were ancient. As such they probably should have been corroded and destroyed museum relics I could have sold for a good deal of money, but otherwise have gotten good use out of. Instead, they appeared to be in good working order. Perhaps the room had been carefully sealed to keep moisture out? Perhaps those ancient dwarves had learned some knack for making really quality goods? Perhaps they weren't as old as they should have been? I don't know. I'm no archeologist. Point is, as I looked at these things I had this sense that they still were practically factory fresh.

I just didn't have a damned clue how to use them.

"You don't happen to speak dwarf, do you mom?" I asked. I'd hoisted down a particularly big and mean looking gun, one that was longer than my rifle, and MUCH thicker and heavier, and tried to puzzle out how it worked. The thing had knobs, and levers, and more moving parts than any gun had any right to possess. It was also marked in the Dwarven script I'd seen examples of here and there, but I had no ability to read whatsoever.

"Nope," Mother replied, sounding particularly smug.

"Stop sounding so smug. Those thugs that were following us may be able to find another route to get here. And if they do, we may need these things."

"Jamie," Mother said. "You worry too much."

Well, wasn't THAT a role reversal.

While I was trying to figure out when my mother had become so much younger and optimistic than I, she dragged a metal crate from the far wall to where I was sitting, puzzling over the contraption. She pointed to some writing on the side of the gun, then at some writing on the side of the crate. "Isn't this string of symbols the same?"

"Yeah, yeah it is!" Eagerly I puzzled out how to open the crate, (which didn't actually take that long. I'd never seen that sort of mechanism, but it was the only one on it, and the lip on the end of the lever seemed obvious.) Ripping the top off I removed a cloth cover. "Ammo!"

"Looks brand new, too," Mother replied. "But why is it all tied together with some sort of metal... what would you call that? A belt?"

"More importantly," I commented. "How do I load it into this damn thing?" I said, feeling even more frustrated than ever.

[AdamZero]

I looked closely at Aiyee, figuring she was probably low on power. Lucas's words seemed to indicate as much.

"Boris do I still have that solar lamp?"

"No, boss, it exploded when we fought that cu-"I smacked him once. "That unpleasant female of a smart-zombie."

"Right, feedback loop overclocked.... we have anything else?"

"You could try and tune a light spell to a solar frequency..."

"huh... yeah... wait..." I fiddled with the magick, glad that Lucas's field of improbability wasn't too wide. I got a free floating flare ball that seemed to radiate a considerable amount of heat. I held it up close to Aiyee, and she seemed to stir, enough that she silently began to move, in moves that were surprisingly conservative compared to her usual sauntering.

I kept up as best I could, holding the ball of fire and light close enough for her to draw from its ambient energy, I just hoped we could pass through the damn 'town' soon, otherwise I'd be spent before the end trip....

[Graybeard]

The balloon hove back into view, but Scrobian seemed to be all alone. What was going on? Ah, now Grope could see: several small troll heads projected above the basket. His nephew had quite sensibly scooped up the young ones of the tribe for the first trip. "Women and children first" was as widespread a principle among the trolls as among the Small Ones. (Of course, it probably had something to do with the fact that few male trolls reached old age.)

"It's going to take at least two more trips," Scrobian told his uncle. "This thing's capacity simply isn't that great. I'd better get going."

"Indeed you should," Grope agreed. "I'll amuse the young ones. And hurry." The column of ash above the volcano was getting denser and higher by the minute...

[Sareth]

"I swear, I am going to feed you to trolls!" I swore loudly, trying to make myself heard over the sound of Nera bawling fit to bring the mountain down around our ears.

"Jamie Porter!" My mother was much better at being heard over Nera than I was, I can assure you that. "You will not talk about my granddaughter that way!"

"Mother! She is not your granddaughter! She's a stray! A noisy one!" I was really rather exasperated at this point. "Why won't she stop crying?"

"She's a baby. They do that." My mother sounded like patience incarnate. I don't remember her being patience incarnate, so this was quite the novelty. Not that I felt I had the need for novelty at the moment.

"I've fed her, I've changed her, what in the world else could she want?" Seriously, this kid was cutting into my figuring out how to work these antiques. Not that I had actually figured out a damn thing. The room was strewn with weapons and ammo. But I had yet to get a single one to so much as whimper. Unlike this kid, who was not only whimpering, but was, in fact, screaming at the top of her tiny lungs.

"A nap. Gimmie." Mother took Nera, and with a surprising amount of skill, re-wrapped the blankets about her. She then tucked the child into her chest, and began singing soothingly, rocking her. Within only a couple of minutes Nera was hicupping, but otherwise quiet.

"How the hell did you do that?"

"Practice. Don't worry, you'll get plenty of it yourself."

"That is not encouraging." I returned to figuring things out. The current object of interest was a small, round object with some sort of lever sticking out the top, then curling down around the side. There was a ring as well, sticking out of the lever. Curious, I gave the ring a tug.

It popped out. Bemused, I looked at the ring, casually shifting the round thing in my hand.

The lever popped off. Vigerously.

"Not good," I said, suspecting this meant very bad things were about to happen. Just to be safe, I chucked the round thing down the hallway that had led us here.

Mere seconds later, I learned that the small, round things went boom.

Loudly.

Nera stirred and started crying again.

"JAMIE PORTER! YOU WOKE THE BABY!"

Dammit.