BECMI Chapter 45 – A Cataclysm Cometh
Red light was leaking through the door coming down from the pantry, and the air was alive with gammathauma radiation, and more.
And it was all bad.
“Radiant Protocol!” I shouted as they all began to appear around me. “Get in formation! Radiant Protocol!”
The Portal was twisting and writhing, clearly unstable, like it was only intact because we were coming out of it! The shouts went out, and everyone hurriedly gathered up into the positions they would need to get out of here.
The writhing Portal behind us destabilized, and it wasn’t even moonrise.
“Do not resist. Freedom or Death, and I will not let you die!” I promised all of them.
“Freedom or Death!” even Cirruluxul shouted, all of them staring at me in both trust and anxiety.
There would not be another month of training for them now.
The Mass Flesh to Stone stole across them, and flesh and belongings crinked and cracked. Unmoving statues of the company now frozen in formation were all that remained behind.
I heaved a sigh of relief, and cast the Extended Protection from Radiation in my memory.
I would have to repeat it several times over the course of the day. I simply didn’t have enough Spell Slots to repeat the protection for everyone.
I hurried upstairs, looking to the north.
North, where a great red sun rose in a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
The Crimson Cataclysm.
It was not the unbelievably powerful event that had been Darkmoor, felt all around the world. But it was still what looked to a be a megatons nuclear-level event. It had been the second event that had driven the shadenelves into the Underdeeps, and in so doing had kept them there for nearly three thousand years.
Tellingly, there was no snow on the ground outside, and I could hear the wind howling overhead, while clouds in strange colors raced across the sky.
The air was full of some really deadly shit, and these people had no idea what radiation was.
“Interesting. An elf in attire completely unknown to me. You are not one of the native tribes of the area of this world… or has so much changed in the future?” a voice in elven with a very strange accent interrupted my inspection of the nuclear holocaust billowing on the horizon outside the window.
The concentrated and lethal blackness in my Detect Non-Good IX+1 was focused laser-like on the figure that was coming down the stairs, more gliding than walking really. There were a dozen more Black blots around, all of them lethal, dangerous, and moving silently in the rest of the main room out of sight of me, positioning themselves for sudden revelations.
There were no signs of any living inhabitants, of course.
I turned to face the speaker, who paused at the bottom of the stairs in surprise as he met my eyes.
His skin was faintly greenish, what remained of it, sticking tight to the bones of his skull. His eyes were hot points of arcane fire writhing in necromantic darkness, and power seethed around him to my Sight.
The mere sight of the lich would have collapsed half my company in terror.
“You must be the Gatekeeper,” I replied in elven as well, studying the lich standing there, who was likewise very curious about an elf with eyes glowing as liquid ruby as mine and attired in fashionable black and red. “I wondered when we would meet you.”
“The Gatekeeper?” His head tilted in amusement at the title. “And why would you call me that?” he asked with curious interest.
“The Portal through time exists, and I’m sure you know it. Plainly, with the array of servants you have gathered, you have been here for some time. You might even have known of the Inn before the Darkmoor Cataclysm, and sought it out as an amusing shelter. With Wishes, you can leave the Inn as you like, knowing that it will be here for your return if you do.
“The only way to travel through the Portals is backwards. But if unlimited traffic were to occur, then some horrendously dangerous creatures would inevitably come out at the far end of the Portal, which would inspire the makers of it to close it down, contain it, control it, or subvert it entirely.
“Unless something was killing the vast majority of the things that stumbled into the Inn and came back through time, reducing the threat to nil. A Gatekeeper.
“How many hundreds of time-traveling groups have you killed?” I challenged him coldly.
The lich of whatever race he was clapped his hands slowly in mockery. “Excellent deductions, young lady.” With a thought, five powerful undead drujs, in the classic skull/eye/eye/hand/hand configuration, drifted down from the second floor, while enslaved revenants, powerful physical undead corpses usually made from warriors, in full armor swung out from the walls into my line of sight between him and I.
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“But where are my manners? I am First-Class Master Technician Benjamin Horst,” the lich bowed to me mockingly. “Who do I have the honor of hosting this momentous day?”
“Of what ship?” I challenged him, completely unperturbed.
He actually paused. “What?” he finally asked, his servant undead twitching at his sudden agitation.
“Master Technician of what ship, Master Horst?” I repeated with just a hint of condescension. “You DO know the name of the ship on which you served, right?”
He was absolutely silent as he stared at me, and I stared right back, completely unafraid of him or his minions. “Well, this is most unexpected. It seems some of you in the future managed to figure out at least a few things.” I just sat there silently. “<I served on the FS Barhund, of course.>”
I filed the ship’s name away, while my Tongues spell easily accepted his sudden switching to a completely alien language and promptly translated my own words into it. “I am particularly good at sensing untruths spoken to me, Master Horst. You were neither First-Class nor a Master Technician. Given your current status, I am assuming a Second or Third-Class Technician specializing in programming and computer system maintenance.” He actually flinched slightly. “Before I give you my name, I will know this: who is Master Gaebrel to you?”
He actually flinched in open shock, staring at me in disbelief. “Senior Engineer Gabriel was the head of Engineering, specifically overseeing the power core of the Barhund,” he admitted slowly, suspiciously, but still unafraid of me. “You are not a Federation Citizen…”
“I am the Lady Edge, and I regret to tell you that you have not out-lived all your fellow crewmen. Master Gabriel has ascended to the ranks of the Immortals, while you seem to have cut short your climb by embracing lichdom. Not enough faith in the magic of this world, or did the radiation from the power core do so much damage that not even the most powerful magic could remove it?” My voice was full of schadenfreude, because the gammathauma was particularly strong around him, concentrated on the right leg concealed under long and sharply-cut trousers and a long coat that looked more like a pretender’s imitation of a naval captain’s coat.
He trembled in front of me, shaking from rage or disbelief or both. “How do you know all this?!” he demanded of me shrilly.
“He is the Patron of my mother’s people. I assume some explorers found the secondary power core of your ship and generated the fireworks display on the horizon outside. Master Gaebrel is going to be quite wroth. Claiming it would have doubtless saved him quite a bit of time, but ah well. Probably too much attention on it, and I doubt the explosion is even an accident.”
“There were numerous elves recently living in the area where the Barhund went down. I admit to being surprised that anything of the ship survived after the antimatter cascade of Darkmoor’s demise,” he sniffed haughtily, but it lacked teeth.
“And you don’t have the foundational skills to develop technology back up to the required level,” I mused aloud, further disgruntling him. “First-person shooters or RPG’s?” I asked neutrally. “You don’t strike me as a puzzler or investigator.”
I swear he almost fell down. “I, you!…” he trailed off in complete consternation. “There are video games somewhere in the future?!” he almost screamed at me, stepping forward again.
“Master Gabriel is now an Immortal. He can recreate even the most advanced technology in his new home plane on a whim. Admittedly, he has to be much more careful on this plane, lest rivals notice… and he doesn’t have quite the programming chops for gaming that he does for gravity modulation and subspace containment fields.”
What? Like superhuman geniuses hadn’t been looking into high tech on Terra-Luna. The math was actually the easy part of all that. Building the required parts, that was something else in a realm with active magic. I actually had a rough idea of what it took to build a working cold fusion plant, and I could make a try at the anti-matter math, too. I couldn’t make any of the parts to do the required job, but I could probably do the math!
“I see.” His Aura was seething with agitation. “And how far in the future do you come from, that you know all this?” he challenged me.
“Twenty-seven centuries, give or take, Master Horst.”
“Ah.” He was attempting to calm himself, but was obviously still agitated. “So all this is merely ancient history to you…”
“More importantly, Master Horst, you are not there.”
He froze, and then he died.
I didn’t have to gesture, invoke, or anything. Roses on black vines exploded up around me, Thorns billowed out, Metas Raised everything to VII+ to get past his magical immunity, and then the shrieking points converged into obsidian black Rays of screaming blackness surrounded by swirling ruby rose petals.
His Shield came up, and his Spell Turning activated off Contingency, but Resonance drove through the latter and Shardcasting the former. He had just about enough time to realize what my effective Caster Level was, and then the Thornrays hit him square, before fracturing off to go through each and every one of the undead minions all poised to either come at me or waiting to jump down from out of sight.
His shriek of disbelief died in vivus, Blooding, and Holy Force. His connection to his Phylactery, which might have been this very building or a part of it, incinerated with his undead form and was consumed with his soul wherever it was hidden.
The dozen-plus powerful undead made from his victims blew away too, caught in crisscrossing Chained arcs of Burning rose petals and streams of shrieking darkness filling the air in front of me so thickly I lost sight of everything… and then it was naught but flower petals falling down and whiteness coating the entire area there.
There were no points of Blackness in my Detect Non-Good any more.
“There are gatekeepers, and there are gatecrashers,” I noted to the bright white stains over there. “I think you might have realized which one I am now,” I chided the silent white spots, many of them with gleaming magical stuff laying in them.
The radiation from the display outside was leaking through the building’s temporal protection. No doubt it would clean up at the dawn, but right now it was dangerous and accruing, and I could only believe that everything within two hundred miles of that explosion was going to get radiation poisoning and likely die badly, in addition to obliterating whatever idiot elves there had poked around something they should not have.
None of the elves I’d met on the way back had any idea elves had lived over in that direction. I gathered they were wiped out so completely nobody remembered much of them at all.
This encounter had solidified a lot of my suspicions. Fuckers dealing with gammathauma had a relationship to higher technology, and some of it had been very high, indeed. The Crimson Cataclysm was a fusion power core from a starship exploding, or at least releasing a lot of energy… energy that was still streaming out from the direction of Zanzyr City nearly three thousand years from now, and energy which the shadenelves far below the ground were also masters of… and had been wielding for far longer than Zanzyr had been around.