BECMI Chapter 432 – And a-Delving We Shall Go!
I nodded in agreement with Catleya’s observation. “That’s about Level Twenty. Most normal adventurers Level until about Twelve to Fifteen, at which point they generally end up being guided into positions of nobility, servants of royalty, champions of churches, and founding new dominions here and there while being ready for war. They use the wealth of their new stations to support their ambitions for temporal power and keep raising their Levels, as the Karmic system here acknowledges gold gained from conquest and rulership alike.
“Twenty-five to Thirty is the period when either mortals are marked for potential Immortal membership, or they slowly max out their ambitions and coast along until they die.
“Doomrose Dungeon is capable of supporting straight Karmic gain until Thirty-Six and the Apex, but is definitely not ideal for that, as you’ll gain little but local reputation for such.”
“Spreading our names and doing outrageously grand and noble things is rather more our style,” Chardon smiled cheerfully, earning laughs from all of the others. “Are there any others who know of our arrival?”
I turned my gaze squarely on Helos and Dame Adama. “There is a Briggs and a Sama Rantha here. Their names are Thor and Sif. They are aware you are here, what you are meant to do, and will support you unequivocally.”
Lunia glanced over at the two of them. “That little project from you two is bearing a lot of fruit,” she remarked knowingly.
Dame Adama looked back at her while pointing at me conspiratorially. “Soulshard of the Ringlord Aelryinth,” she stage-whispered sweetly.
All of the others blinked, including Helos, who also smacked his own face. “I thought that Theurgic echo felt familiar, but an elf and half-dhampir!…” he trailed off, shaking his head in disbelief while suddenly realizing why my build was the way it was.
“You should have known it by the Words,” Dame Adama hinted, and they all groaned in realization. They’d been right on my Assay...
“I gather my Prime and the other Shards have been busy?” I asked archly, completely unsurprised by the comments.
“Incredibly so,” Catleya said conspiratorially, leaning forward. “You aren’t even the strongest of them!” she hinted to me cheerfully.
I didn’t know whether to be surprised, delighted, or remorseful about that. Being a proper elf and into my trope, I just waved it off as irrelevant. “Well, that is good to know. I’m sure they’ll be in contact with me. Ael was sure to track down at least one of us, and was in Sending contact with me before I incarnated here. He promised to track us down on the way home.
“I am aware of the vagaries of Time when passing through multiverses, so I have not been expecting him at any particular moment, and he would find me on the Far Shore, not in this realm.”
“That timeline is something we should also consider expanding into, I believe?” Lunia asked crisply.
“Yes. It also has four thousand more years of Immortal abuse heaped onto it than this one does. One of the things I am hoping to deal with here is how many arsehats were promoted to Immortal and simply started mucking things up once they did so. They basically became patrons and sponsors of their original peoples, and when their native peoples evolved past them culturally or fell from grace, they were frequently abandoned, or even outright scattered and destroyed as a people. All around this world, the same scenarios keep repeating, and the only reason it isn’t even worse is that the pissed-off Immortals frequently leave the world and go out exploring into the multiverse, never coming back.” I didn’t hide my ire with the whole set-up.
“That is… the action of those who have power, but not the maturity to use it wisely, and the inability to change,” Iatro nodded sadly, the Avatar of Family having considerable experience with that behavior. “We have also seen this. There are many pantheons that absolutely prefer that civilization never advance past what are considered the Middle Ages on Terra-Luna, at least in terms of science and technology. Magical can be tweaked and controlled, since it is so reliant on people. As science rises, people become less dependent on the gods in ways that magic simply doesn’t engender, because magic is so individualistic.”
“No real magitech or technomagic societies at the high end?” I asked archly, clearly surprised.
“There are some where high science and high magic are allowed to develop together, but it is rare,” Haki admitted, the Avatar of Justice leaning into her spouse. “Many Entities simply cannot tolerate losing power and influence over mortals like that. It would seem to be happening here.”
“Four thousand years from now, the Northmen clans are making the same longships as they are sailing now, wearing the same mail shirts. The merchants of the warmer climes reinvent the same frigates and sloops and galleys over and over again. Nomad horse tribes cling to the exact same style of life as their ancestors did, and think themselves born conquerors and the greatest warriors of the world. Knights and plate armor are re-invented at least three times on this landmass alone, longbows fall into history and then are rediscovered…” I just shook my head.
“Recycling the same stories with different names and faces,” Lunia uttered dismissively. “Yes, that is all very familiar, indeed. We obviously will have a great deal of work ahead of us.”
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That was all too true. “The Dungeon is there to start your Foundation. When you hit Twenty and equivalents, I will plug you into the Markspace and the information streams from all over the world. Then you can really start your gallivanting all over Nown’s world!”
The Avatars laughed and agreed heartily to that. Building up followers was going to be essential to gaining Divine status here, after all, unlike with the Immortals...
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The gods were here. The weight of my long-term planning had just lessened immensely. Divinities were much better at keeping their worshipers and servants on the right track than Immortals were, who didn’t have any kind of Divine Awareness or omniscience to fall back on. Really, Immortals were basically just mutated upgraded cosmic people with chips on their shoulders.
They definitely were not gods, even if they could pull Faith. Faith did nothing for them except make it easy to return it as Divine Magic to their Priests.
Actual Divinities could do a whole lot more with Faith than that, but Faith had to be nurtured and rewarded.
Happily, there was already a Church of the Morning and a philosophy of the New Day. It was broadly spread and not that numerous now, but then it didn’t have martial champions spreading it about with zeal and the like.
The Aruan Pantheon was here, I’d given them tools, and they’d happily run with them. If that meant killing Immortals once they were Eternal and more, well, they were a fighting Pantheon, too, and knew how to scrap, duel, skirmish, do battle, and make war.
A weight was now off my shoulders. I would do my duty as their protector as long as they needed it, then at some point they’d be equals, then hopefully they’d make it back to godhood and I could kneel to them freely once more.
Right now the only forces around greater than me were the Immortals, who I could not bow to, and Nown itself, which simply didn’t have the regality to be bowed to, even though it was using Avatars to expand its own consciousness to real time and ever-more effective power. It was more like a big, slow brother that still had to be prodded to life and didn’t understand the world around itself, as its Avatars were so small compared to its true self…
Eh. In time. I had my own work to do, and it was basically foiling bullshit tribal Immortals with the metaview of clannist, racist conquerors. Yeah, they had long, hard roads to get to Immortality, the chances of it happening were not high, and I, I was going to make it even tougher for them.
Which actually would dovetail completely with my reputation, so I was fine with that.
In the meantime, I needed to take a quick trip home and let them know the gods had arrived here….
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Coming home ten minutes after I left decades ago was always an interesting experience, involving a forcible reset of active memories and relationships that for others had never stopped, and for me had lain idle for a very long time.
That was what extra thoughtstreams were for, in the end. Cycle over to Public Persona #1, the default for the Far Shore...
Of course, reconnecting with the Markspace with notable differences in my presence after just a few minutes always drew attention, too. It’s like collapsing an entire dimension and obliterating an Immortal earned some Karma or something. Stats go up, baby!
Sama was there waiting, having patiently waited for me to come back through. “How’s my boy?” she demanded the moment I slid out of the Portal at Innspot.
“Fully grown, almost twenty-five, delving into Dungeon Doomrose to meet his foundation requirements for that obscene Racial Class of yours, and hauling out tons of gold and loot and adventure tales to warm the campfires,” I replied instantly. “He said to wave hi,” I did so in his way up high manner and big burly body language, exactly like her Briggs, which earned an instant grin from Sama, “to tell you he’s very happy with his Hag Sif, they have a lot of work to do, but they are getting to it.”
She exhaled in relief. “Good. Sending him off there without his own Sama guaranteed for him felt awfully mean to me, but she popped up!” She looked me up and down once. “You had a major advance on something. What happened?” she asked me.
“I killed Gulguz on the Other Shore,” I informed her as we headed for the Mirror Portal. Her eyes widened in appreciation of the fact.
“No shit? Difficult? Can we replicate the feat here?” she asked quickly, eight canines gleaming in ferocious expectation.
“He’s had four thousand years to improve his Home Plane since then. I’m sure there will be upgrades and improvements… but I also got to study the damn thing and learn a great deal about it.
“I killed him by collapsing his whole Home Plane about himself and feeding a great amount of its power into the Dimensional Vortex. Given the Vortex is reaching beyond the Fifth Dimension, I’m of the opinion that repeating the trick might not go over too well with the things that exist beyond it who can probably see across timelines,” I told her warily.
“Ah, so you need to come up with a different catastrophic way of destroying him and everything he holds dear,” Sama nodded. She patted her taut stomach, which had never really changed appearance, but was only a few days from carrying a rather large baby within. The Warrior’s Womb effect of her Girdle no longer needed to serve that function, of course. “I am finally able to take up the task of killing Annelids again, and Fuzzy and I are close to breaking Eternal. How long are you planning to stay here?” she inquired.
“I mostly came back to tell you that the gods have arrived on the Other Shore.”
That brought her to a halt, her smile lighting up her face. “Truly? That did indeed work?” she asked unnecessarily. “Just… wow. I never had any thoughts of actually meeting a true Divine Avatar. What was it like?”
“They came in as gender-reversed Threes. Eight humans of various heritages, two elves.” I whipped up a small display of their appearances, which she bent over to examine closely, grinning widely at what she was seeing as she worked out who was actually who.
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” she reasoned, seeing their appearances. “A little large for a Fellowship, they’ll have to be using mixed teams?” she inquired.
I nodded. The Gate to the Dungeon only accepted Fellowships up to nine, you couldn’t simply go in with an army… and there were sixteen different random locations you might enter from, more if you were trying to be clever and the DM got snippy and dropped you inside a hot zone, something likely to be the death of people trying to game the well-known rules of the place. “They are currently light on Arcane Casters, but that will be changing quickly. They have Levels to gain and adventures to experience, and are quite excited about it all.”