BECMI Chapter 460 – Will It Ever not be the Same?…
The local seas, impelled by so much mass and force, crossed miles of ground as they thundered towards us, ripping apart the carefully-cultivated and much-held fungi forests of Shadow Kheper and tearing them up like a godly plow come to reset everything. The salt water might actually do a good job killing a lot of them, but certainly wouldn’t get them all.
There was a LOT of hard radiation coming down, too, particularly in the UV bands, which fungi didn’t much like, sunlight being the enemy and all. Helos’ Force Field took care of it all for us, but without Radiance resistance, nothing else was going to endure long in the face of what was happening up there.
The flash of Immortal Power was enough to jerk everyone’s eyes up from the ravaging mess of the destroyed Mu fungal fields below us and back up to the sky.
The sky, and particularly that opening where the Theggla-Mu was burning up so cheerfully, had just changed to a more golden color. It was leaking bright yellow through the Veil, the color of a solar furnace opened up and devouring things.
“Someone opened a core to a star,” Lunia stated with absolute confidence. “An Immortal of Energy, and a powerful one.”
Indeed, streaks of hot sunlight were now punching through the Veil, streaming down and illuminating the land below. Water flared into steam and plasma, fungi forests burned to ash, and stone either vaporized or was glassed as the light danced wildly back and forth over the devastation below.
A couple of the beams swept across our location, but the Force Field dealt with the heat and the Masks with Devasight dealt with the brilliance as they did so. They etched wild and winding patterns on the plateau, however, further breaking up its pristine surface as stone flared into plasma, cracking the stone around it as it did so.
We saw the flames building around the main hole in the sky, devouring the remnants of the Theggla from without, eating it away, until a massive ball of flame, dozens of miles in diameter, and way too close to survive for long, blazed in that hole in its place, and filled this entire land with radiant light and heat.
Everything ignited. The soaked land couldn’t stay soaked under that heat, and water went to plasma as everything began to burn.
“There’s someone at the heart of that sun, looking down at us,” Sif stated, her emerald eyes narrowed. I had some powerful Illusionary camouflage up above us, so we looked to be as molten as the ground was turning around us.
There was a flash, a crushing display of power as a bar of solid solar energy plummeted from on high and came down right on Firebase Dawnbreak. There wasn’t even any plasma venting in response; the heat was so high it went right to an energy state and removed any and all evidence of technology there.
“Quarizon,” I muttered under my breath. “Guess we know where he stands on the technology argument.”
Supposedly he was the #2 or 3 Immortal in the Sphere of Energy, an ancient sun god figure who gloried in strength, light, and life. He was generally considered one of the most positive and benevolent of the Immortals overall.
But he gloried in mortal achievements by individuals, not by the masses, and so science held no value in his eyes, beyond what it helped a hero accomplish. Being dependent upon others for your might and power was just not proper in his eyes.
The burning bar was gone, and mere seconds later, the sun in the sky vanished, snuffed as quickly as it likely had been ignited. The golden rays streaming through the Veil faded away to pale whiteness and shadows, while Immortal Power in the sky pulsed once, twice, each wave wiping away cracks and flaws and restoring the sanctity of the dark sky, while the central hole shrank precipitously.
In under two minutes, the swirling temporal currents were cut apart, and the Veil crashed back together, ejecting the slow, ponderous weight of the greater universe and reclaiming its whirlwind acceleration as it did so.
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The whole of the island was ash. Everything had been burned to the stone, the shorelines were a hundred feet shallower than they’d been, and boiling rain was starting to falling back down as it recondensed in the higher atmosphere, forming raging clouds of millions of tons of water that wanted to get back down here, but had to shed a lot of heat to do so.
Even the access tunnel up the plateau to here was melted, fused, and collapsed. I recognized the arc of it as a canyon splitting the other Shadow Kheper on the Far Shore.
The only thing remaining was the Portal leading out of here. The Arch and its Artifact-eating receptacle were of Immortal make themselves, so the mundane heat couldn’t affect them without a directed will behind it.
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“That is a lot of energy dumped into a closed system,” Lunia murmured, looking around thoughtfully. “With the right magic, we could do some incredible things with this, couldn’t we, Arbor?” she asked.
Our druid and Nature representative nodded once. “The Nature Elemental is going to have a lot of energy to convert and work with. The air temperature is still near boiling water for the moment. We’re going to have to sink a lot of it somehow.”
“Someone is going to be making a Pyramid with a Domain filling out the whole of the plane. One wonders if they might be able to put a Heat Sink into it and harvest a whole lot of pyromana and such that way,” I remarked dryly to nobody in particular.
“This is true. What should the rest of us be doing, then?” Thor grunted, crossing his arms.
“Spoken like someone who just came off a month of killing gargantuan alien flying mushroom things and is looking for something to do,” I just sighed.
“BORED! BORED! BORED!” Sif promptly sang out, climbing up behind Thor and hanging effortlessly from his shoulders.
“There are always minor things that can be done to pass the time, and I assume we all have raw materials we can work on,” Lunia agreed. “Something beyond that, however?”
“Well, for the moment, why don’t you get started on the design work?” I flicked up the middle twenty levels of the Pyramid, separating them out for them to gaze upon. “I need a shrine for each of you and a joint holy place in the middle. Ornamentation, designs, motif, the works. Something that can serve as the ultimate holy spot as a focus of faith for you.”
I instantly had everyone’s attention. “Purpose?” Haki asked quickly, like all of them doing mental calculations.
“There is no Heaven in this multiverse.” I waved my hand around us. “It is small for now, yes. But we’re going to change the planar coordinates, we’re going to reinforce its link and reflection of the Prime, and most importantly, with Immortal Power, we can make it grow. We can duplicate that very easily with Eternal-grade magic, too, simply expanding the size of this plane every day once your Holy Site lays claim to it and makes it your own.”
Helos leaned forward. “You are Upcasting Genesis for the effect…” he murmured, considering.
“Yes. Making an Eternal Rod of Supreme Magic, to be imbued within the central Altar of All Heavens. Once active, it will expand the demiplane by a radius of 100 feet every day, expansion under your total control.”
“In a plane where time runs at a hundred thousand to one currently,” Chardon pointed out softly. “Two thousand miles a mortal day once it gets working. In but four days this realm will be the size of a planet, in any configuration we seek to make it.”
The Avatars all looked at one another.
“We will need to walk through the Arch before this comes fully online,” Lunia stated softly. “It should be we who jointly Cast the spell, as well.”
I waved off the glances in my direction. “I may be Gold, but I am not Divine, not intending to be, and certainly am not one experienced in managing a planar Afterlife with Good affiliations. This is the job I invited you here to do. I am merely preparing the tools, my lords. I will stay Finite. The mortals of this place need the Infinite.”
They all let out audible sighs of relief that I was not resenting being excluded like that. “The planar barriers on this realm will need to be vastly increased,” Dame Adama pointed out professionally. “We also need to change its location before others become aware, and change the Portal connections from the mortal realm.”
“Do you know who made those Portals?” Thor asked, interested. “It obviously wasn’t the Mother Spider from the Other Shore. Thanatos again?”
“He knew of this place, perhaps after seeing Quarizon intervene here and tracking it down to use it. But no, those Portals are not built of His power. The fact they consume Artifacts and Immortal Power, plus the Mu being here, leads me to believe something Aberrant formed the place, although why the firebase was pulled here eludes me, and will likely remain a mystery.”
The Avatars were already injecting their own ideas into the illusion of the Pyramidal space they’d have to play with. Helos took it a step further and simply blew the whole thing up to full size and scale, giving them something to play with.
The Force Field was brought down, the worst of the danger passed, and everyone possessed the fire resistance to ignore the enhanced heat. The Gallivants strode off into the center of the illusion excitedly, figures twitching and ready to put together something for me to use when I made the full-scale version.
“I suppose Sif and I should just sit down and do some serious smithing?” Thor asked, watching the Avatars at work as he patted Sif’s arms around his thick neck.
“I have a set in my Sanctum if you need it, although I doubt you do,” I noted, both of them sniffing in tandem at the very idea they wouldn’t have some forging materials and equipment handy at all times in case of need. “Actually, how’s your alchemy chops?”
Both glanced at me in some surprise, than turned thoughtful together. “We should be up to par, just not as good as smithing. The very best stuff requires alchemical treatments, after all. What are you suggesting? Start using Mu Goop?” Sif asked, clearly interested in the idea.
“Potions of Master’s Luck,” I said with a calm face, and both their eyebrows rose.
“Oh, hey, yeah, those would be wicked nasty. You don’t just find those things,” Thor mused solemnly.
The Luck series of Potions could be extremely powerful. The standard Luck Potion let you adjust a chosen dice roll by +/- 5% in your favor. In cards, it would shift your chances of drawing a better card or hand by roughly the same odds. It lasted about ten minutes, and was enough to give someone a good run of cards and make some real money, or win a bet and a die roll.
A Gambler’s Luck Potion allowed you to change exactly one set of odds by reversing the percentage. So, 14% could become 41%. It could make a low roll of 09 a 90, totally changing a result with outrageous luck… but 01 still wasn’t going to do much for anyone.