BECMI Chapter 424 - Planeswalking
This multi-body existence was still the direction I was heading in, as I certainly wasn’t going to be left behind by some idiot Immortals in getting things done. Unlike an Immortal, my Sim Avatars wouldn’t be able to use my Eternal Magic… but that was absolutely fine, as they’d have full Valences of their own basically at the Elven Apex, and that was plenty good for now…
I had already left a full Clone in Delpha on the Other Shore. Dimensionally separated from me, she would grow in her own way and manner until the compulsion faded, as we’d be two different persons by then, deviating from the moment of her creation.
She would be at the Elven Apex, not Eternal, but that was plenty strong enough to get a LOT of things done, and she could enter Eternal on her own, once she built to those limits, exactly like the Sims who’d gained souls had done.
Delpha was going to be a different place with her there to educate a growing number of hydromancers and geomancers. She had chosen to go with an Ice Queen appearance, with white hair and mastery of Ice, the intersection of where Earth/Matter and Water/Liquid met. Mockery from Fire wielders tended to freeze on their lips rather quickly around her.
Together we were tracking Immortals around, locating home planes where we could… especially the most secretive of them, who tended to be the Entropic Immortals and those who dealt with such relatively frequently, especially arseholes like Gulgaz, Rathaseid… and even Tenya was pretty crafty about such things. A lot of Immortal Eternals and Hierarchs, secure in their power, had fairly open planes that were remarkably easy to visit, all things considered, although the Immortals had the resources to close them up instantly if required. Mostly this was done by making the access points on the Astral Plane very small and easy to close, and both hiding or making equally small the routes that might be used to come through the planes in-between.
Gulguz, for example, routinely ‘headed home’ through Gate spells when he thought no one was around and watching him while in Incorporeal form. Trace Teleport made it pretty easy to nail down the planar coordinates of his destination, but opening a Gate there would just let him know someone was following them… and it wasn’t to his home plane at all.
He had actually set up a stepping-stone path to his home plane through four other planes, none of which were technically ruled by him or even overtly guided by him. Two were primitive realms with a minor Earth bias populated by barbaric savages, the garls of Nown’s past, beings somewhere between humans and hill giants in their power and savage strength.
Another was a water world dominated by crashing storms, great sea serpents, and flying snake-like dragons, while only one realm was Energy-dominated, being a sweeping desert realm with paradisaical oases fought over with mad fanaticism by the different factions of non-human beings found there, and the Elementals who fought alongside or against them, on their own whims.
Mortals not raised on a balanced realm like the Prime could not become Eternals. It was the main reason so many Immortals came from the Prime Plane. There were precious few dimensions that could actually raise them!
Perhaps at one point Gulguz would have taken more secure precautions against being tracked and followed, but obviously it had been a very long time since anyone had bothered to do so. The only way to do so was physically, Scrying was impossible, and Immortals had very keen senses and were very good at sensing the intent of others directed at themselves.
But, habit breeds laziness, which breeds predictability, which breeds vulnerabilities.
Having a Sim in Morphed form just wait around at the areas Gulguz materialized in, tracked there with Trace Incorporeal Form, Trace Teleport where he went to, then later going there themselves and waiting for him to repeat the process, was quite successful in mapping his route across the various doorstep planes to his personal home realm and the resources he hoarded within it. A series of Teleports was little different than walking up the stairs to an Immortal of Empyreal status, he didn’t even bother to break them up with distance between them now, so the best way to follow was slowly and surely.
The final entry point was deep in the waterworld, located in an underwater temple dedicated to a nameless elemental being who was likely Gulguz in his Ice aspect. It also had numerous Construct guardians, some powerful sea serpents and underwater monstrosities in the area just in case, and all of them were ruled over by an Eidolon construct Avatar of his, a great krakenesque statue of black and green basalt stone. The Avatar basically sat inside the temple upon a crude and warped altar, guarding the access point to Gulguz’s home plane behind it.
A tiny little sliver of his consciousness wasn’t going to be stopping me. It was basically there to watch the entry like a guard dog, and likely bored out of its gourd in so doing, likely sleeping for months or years at a time. It wasn’t keeping watch so much as practicing thought suspension for megalomaniacs.
Which meant using its Truename to get it to open the Gate and promptly forget about it in a flash of bored imagination was perfectly easy to do. The rest of his mind only recognized that it was opened on his own authority and forgot about it, and then a certain someone waltzed unseen through the opening, leaving a certain Rune on the back of that Eidolon as it dozed while awake, basically kept busy by working on magical problems foisted off on it by the other slivers of his consciousness.
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I was totally happy to let it do so, because that Rune was tracking where each and every one of those alternate Avatars were as they communicated with this Avatar. Mixed in with the ancient and disturbing Runes wrought upon the Eidolon itself, it was hard to notice and concealed from sight beneath its tentacles, merging right into the rest of the thing.
Yeah, I took my infiltration attempts seriously, and I really wanted this bastard dead.
On the other side was a Plane that Detect Location named Crescendoom, because Gulguz wasn’t totally vain and narcissistic enough to think he’d created the ultimate Plane of Energy bias, no he was not.
The sky was filled with constant small explosions as tumbling asteroids and meteors ignited in the far distance. Random portals to Earth seemed to be opening every now and then, disgorging mountains of mass to tumble forth and eventually ignite in the crackling atmosphere of the Plane. Conduits of fire, lightning, thunder, and even currents of ice and chemical reactions rippled and flowed through the air, tearing apart, bringing together, turning the whole place into a wild interplay of various energies.
Both my Bloodlines promptly ignited as I stood there, my skin going ice blue while my hair ignited into actual flames.
I was standing on a field of force, nominally immune to the interplay of mismatched elemental energies going wild all around me. I was particularly frowning at the inclusion of both negative and positive nodes visible in the field of magic, resonating in the Sublime Chords of this place and really adding some positive/negative excitement to what was going on here.
This place had a very strong Energy bias, there was no doubt. All other Spheres were hostile in here, which would weaken any potential rivals from other Spheres, while helping Gulguz regain any expended power quickly. He could spend the power Teleporting on the intervening planes because he’d have all the expended power back within minutes here.
He hadn’t done much for the size of this realm, it still being about the average size of a Plane an Initiate Immortal started with. But the geography and magical structure of the place had been heavily modified from whatever its starting point was.
There was only one planet here, and it looked like a shelled Dyson’s Sphere, all other worlds of the place sacrificed to build it. The outside of the Shell blazed like a sun, providing heat and light from which there was no escape on one side, but emanating chilling cold on the other half of it. Visible through the floating cracks of this odd-star was another star within it, and, I presumed on the inside, another world being bathed in raw energy.
I was standing on one of three Ringworlds in orbit around that planet-star, possibly the foundations for another iteration of the Sphere for when Gulguz accumulated enough interest in expanding it once more.
It was huge and grand, and clearly indicated Gulguz had been around a very long time. Captain Emeril had made it plain that Immortals could move around moons in their own homeplanes with raw physical power, truly able to reshape the place like gods.
This place had seen a lot of investment of Immortal Power, shaped to exactly the way the twat liked, built up in layers and shells over time.
But this place I was standing on was at least two thousand years old, so there hadn’t been much movement after this. Yeah, the Sphere was much smaller than a sun, maybe half-again as big as Jupiter, but it was still a lot of work to build, organize, sculpt, and then seed something like that.
Huh, probably less a ringworld than an orbital ring, then.
Eagle Eyes ranged out from my Mask, showing me the monstrous denizens of fire and ice on the Ringworld, and of lightning and thunder in the skies. Many giants and dragons were among those creatures, as well as plenty of elemental beings, showcasing Gulguz’s connections to the Elemental Planes. This was a world of extremes that dwarfed the mortal plane, since gravity was just an afterthought to the physics of the place. Mountains could rise for tens of miles, oceans of flame abutted continents of ice, volcanoes big enough to swallow kingdoms raged with torrents of power, and realms of ice and fire tracked slowly across the ringworlds as the sun turned, forcing the inhabitants to keep scrambling, keep moving, keep adjusting to changing conditions.
It was a psychedelic madscape done in temperature differentials and eruptions of energy, change and conflict without ever advancing anyone or anything by a material amount. Lots of distracting busy-busy display, but not actually MAKING anything.
In other words, Gulguz truly was a chaotic idiot.
As for me, I put a whole lot of ranks in Planar Lore, Advanced Math, Physics, and Spellcrafting to work as I stood there examining his Home Plane, watching it, and most importantly, listening to it.
This place was a powderkeg maintained by warped Immortal Power and magic. With the right amount of pressure in the correct places, this solar-system-sized edifice to overdone excitement would shatter and collapse inwards as the energy was released, like a star going nova compressing down to a white dwarf.
Everything inside would be killed, and it wouldn’t even be that hard.
I’d probably need about two thousand IP stuffed into the proper Pyramid, aligned just so, and then one of the twat’s Avatars suborned to pick apart the Laws he’d warped here to a couple specific loops and tolerances, bringing the whole thing down rather quickly.
One surge of Immortal Power released into the Plane itself at that moment, and it would come falling down like a house of cards.
Two thousand IP was a fairly large number of powerful creatures to kill, but ho, look who had provided me with all those powerful, magical, and elementally-Aligned creatures to take advantage of.
I was pretty sure he just used the creatures as Artifact fuel. His Avatars Thyr and Surt were both residing here, at what looked like junction points between advancing areas of fire and frost on the orbital rings.
I was pretty sure they were both leading different armies of frost and fire jotuns respectively into the border lands, clearing the way for the tribes coming behind them with epic fights and slaughter against creatures of the declining element who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.
That he was their maker and creator merely meant he was allowed to slaughter them as he deemed fit!
The unending slaughter would generate Immortal Power for the Avatars, which Gulguz could channel into either Artifacts or anything else needed to upgrade the Plane. Some of his expenditures in the past were likely pretty massive when making this place, and the lives of his followers were the fuel that built it…