BECMI Chapter 15 – Explosive News
Infiltrating the pyramidal Temple to Gaebrel was something I had to approach cautiously. I wasn’t just intruding on a sacred place an Immortal might just be watching, I was intruding on THE sacred place to the Immortal sponsor of my people.
If my instincts were right and all those millennia of missing soul crystals were being used in there for something, this might be the center of Gaebrel’s Immortal projects on this world, all the shadenelves just a convenient smokescreen to his efforts here.
The problem, of course, was that all the priests of Gaebrel were also powerful elven wizards, with the upper tiers having access to VIII’s and IX’s, making them full Mages and Archmages.
Breaking into an area protected by magical wards of that level was a no-no, especially since I didn’t have IX’s of my own. Sure, it was potentially possible with a Greysphere up, if I was also a master thief and skulker, which I basically was not right now.
I wasn’t even two years old. If I wasn’t morphed, I could toddle along!
Ugh. Being young was such a pain in the arse. I was basically reduced to exploring and Karmic gain without being able to effect any real change because I was a child, and I wasn’t dumb enough to try and fake such things in a society where literally every single individual was a spellcaster!
Also, I was a Seven, not a Twenty, even if my Caster Level and the damn Ur-Priest Class here let me pretend otherwise.
I really needed to up my Scout options, but unfortunately the only actual Matrix Class I had was Ur-Priest, which had a paltry base 2 skill points a level, and I had a lot of intellectual skills and professional training I had needed to recover first. The only thing I had that really dealt with sneaking around was Stealth training, although I could bring up the ability to Find Traps as a spell, and maybe use Knock to get around some locks.
…
Okay, I probably had a lot of the tools I needed, if I could avoid the magical sensors and Wards of the Temple, which I probably couldn’t do. Evading such things was a bit different than evading the notice of living beings, and taking them down would be different, too…
Grrr, now it was an intellectual challenge. My biggest problem was I only had access to V’s on the Wizardry side of things, and having access to a couple VIII’s wasn’t going to help me with stealth ops, only Dispelling stuff in my way. But Dispelling was magical brute force in its own way, leaving a trail that could be followed if something twigged to it.
I was also pretty sure the Wards on the Temple were operating at a base of 30, which, while technically not completely beyond my means, was high enough that it heralded probably even more complete defenses around the actually important stuff below and within.
Grrr. I needed time. Time to grow up, to put my childhood behind me.
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It was a Mirror of Mental Prowess, the one that I’d cadged from the beholder a long time ago.
I still had an excellent knowledge of and appreciation for Divination as a magical discipline, and the Mirror was an excellent scrying and transportation device. However, it had its limitations, meaning it didn’t have a mobile point of view. You Scried a location, took a look around, and to move it you had to clear the view and reorient it to a new point, which could only be done a few times a day.
Said Mirror could also make a Portal to the places I was Scrying, which I could step right through, and return through if I so desired, leaving it standing open unseen for anyone to stumble into. This could be useful if I didn’t want to spend a Teleport to get somewhere, or it was somewhere off my Lived-Line I wanted to see and to explore.
Like, oh, the surface world, and a place called Transyvia, where the family of my father’s bloodline came from.
I didn’t like feeling like a peeping tom, but I wanted to know more of the history of the place, so I was surveying it for purposes of being familiar with it in the future, getting to know the language, the people, the traditions, and so forth.
It actually was my downtime job, picking out a tavern in one of the villages of the Principality of Transyvia, setting up in the corner, and listening to the people, watching them, and seeing what was going on.
Learning things people definitely didn’t want me learning.
Sims Two through Five had using the Mirror as their job, taking turns watching different areas, sharing memories with me when I hooked up, and Scrylocking me to whip up a Portal to return me home and save a Teleport when I Messaged them to do so.
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The one thing none of us could figure was why the image always defaulted to an old, ruined inn out in the middle of nowhere in the Bleaklands.
Real time, too. The image was a full Scrylocked image, immediately reset to it instead of being reflective, and it clearly showed day and night passing on the surface world in real time.
Actually, it wasn’t all that far away from us horizontally, it was just, well, about twenty miles up there.
It did allow me to condition my eyes for the sunlight with continued exposure to the image, which was nice. Last thing I wanted to have to do was wear shades up top when I decided it was time to go.
The key thing about the Inn was that things went in, and nothing came out.
My Sims had seen half a dozen different groups of wandering humanoids go into the place, and not a single one of them managed to exit. Actually, they were all so dense that all of them went into the place, leaving none outside to spread the message to not go in, so the place was likely one of those rumors and ghost stories.
It was also really hard to find, up a side canyon and crooked defile, an awkward path with nothing really living in the bowl at the top it was located in, so likely only to be seen by things like rocs and manticores and chimeras and sphinxes and other dangerous shit flying overhead looking for idiotic orcs and goblins to swoop down upon and have for dinner.
It was also rebuilding itself constantly.
The Sims had seen siding fall off, paint flaking, shutters dropping, even the sign out front break in the wind and get flung away.
The next day at dawn, the stuff that had fallen off was gone and it was replaced as good as if new.
And this Mirror was locked onto this place for some reason.
It was far from anywhere in a sun-blasted, rocky area of badlands nobody was around in and nobody would be looking for me in.
It was… actually a good place to start exploring from. Since exploring was all I could do, why not?
And I really wanted a better look at the place.
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It was night-time when I stepped out of the Mirror-Portal and onto the blasted rock of the surface world. My eyes instantly went up to the stars overhead, the sense of infinity looking down at me instead of the pressure of the miles of stone above me, and a sense of openness, of freedom and potential that was thrumming in the air.
It was an incredible contrast to the constant, steady and fairly oppressive strength of the Earthpower down below, and it cleared a big mental weight off from my heart. I could feel magic thrumming happily about me, ready to sing with me if called upon, in a way that it wouldn’t down below the surface.
That was good. Really, really good.
Today’s examination of this Inn in the middle of nowhere commenced.
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I was loaded up with Divination spells of various types, all nicely boosted by +1 with Earth Spell to give me better results, and most of them I was Upcasting to see what results I could get.
The first result was that an Upcast Detect Time revealed the whole structure was about four thousand years old.
I just looked around at the weathered bowl of stone it was sitting in, atop a rock plateau in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and wondered just what the heck had happened that an Inn was built in the middle of nowhere.
Then I remembered the shadenelven history, which started something over three thousand years ago… with explosions that had devastated an ancient land called Darkmoor, a cataclysm blamed on filthy stupid humans performing magical experiments that they should not have.
A cataclysm that seemed to have destroyed the world and replaced it with a red sun or something for well over a thousand years, at the very least… or, at least the world my ancestors knew of.
You didn’t build an inn set up like this one was without a lot of travelers to service… and who the fuck built a place like this with this much magic about it?
Detect Magic at VIII+1 was very supportive of the idea, because the residual gammathauma spectra in this area was intense, but all in the higher bands and thus not affecting reality that much. It had definitely infused and changed the landscape all around, but it wasn’t ‘active’ so much now as it once had been. Back when it had been born, it had to have been devastating from both a real and magical vector.
Yet this ‘Thisbean Inn’ had been infused with so much magic that, despite suffering an explosion that had at least rivaled atomics, perhaps more, precipitating a cataclysm and an Ice Age, it had still managed to rebuild itself, and keep rebuilding itself, slowly and steadily, at every dawn.
It wasn’t regeneration, as regeneration would have been obliterated by whatever had warped stone and sky. No, this was literally spinning things out of time and resetting things to a prior paradigm.
Detect Magic and Detect Time confirmed that there were massive amounts of temporal energy leashed and controlled here. Someone incredibly brilliant and/or incredibly stupid had somehow chained time itself to the structure and very concept of this Inn, and so it had endured being blasted to atoms, probably buried underwater, enclosed in ice, and now sitting here being weather-beaten for who knew how long.
Magical attacks didn’t affect the Inn at all, being sent randomly out into the timestream to be dissipated. Likewise, there was a field of time extending through the doors and windows. It was possible to go in, but it was not possible to Cast a spell inside. I couldn’t shoot Shards through the door, and the Wizard Eye I attempted to send through dissipated on clearing the doorway. I couldn’t use Clairvoyance to send my sight inside, be it through a window, to bypass a wall, or through an open door.
Telekinesis couldn’t grab anything within. A fighting dog I Summoned up went through the door, then paused as I immediately lost all contact with it. It turned back to look at me, tried to come back through the door… and it failed.
It was… a little comical. It would jump at the door, then instantly be a full pace back from it, staring at the opening. It tried to jump through repeatedly, and was always sent back to the same spot, never getting anywhere until the duration of the magic was up and it dissipated.
I waited patiently, but his barking inside didn’t seem to attract any attention from any of the other rooms or floors. The Sims hadn’t seen any humanoids coming in through the place for at least two months, and I couldn’t see any signs of them within the main room.