HeroesofChaos/ChapterTwoC
With a bit of luck and a lot of sneaking, the Heroes of Chaos and Huyla infiltrated Cinderfell once more. Still abandoned. Still trashed. They scoured the place up and down, left and right, and even diagonally a few times. Finally, Chahailis and Kaiju both happened upon the secret entrance, a fireplace that when the flue was pulled, the fireplace shifted and extended, becoming a massive, hellish maw leading downward. Kaiju immediately made his way down, running and screaming a challenge to Belasco. Chahailis was right on his tail, with Mako, Jasala, and Jannarin in swift, if distant pursuit. There was no sign of Huyla. Kaiju screamed and made his way down the stairs further and further. Finally the stairs ended and as Kaiju allowed took his first step, it was rewards with a sickening squish. The floor was covered in maggots. Crawling with them. The room itself was a freakish exact duplicate of the one that had led to it, albeit totally upside down. The furniture, the torches where blue flames burned brightly, everything was upside down. They had entered into some nightmare mirror world, and it would only get worse. With Inari's voice resounding in his skull, Kaiju bolted through the squirm ceiling of maggots and up and over through the nearest doorway. Meanwhile, everyone heard a faint skittering sound that seemed to reverberate off of the walls and then cease, only to resume occasionally. Chahailis leapt after Kaiju but as Jasala saw the maggots and tried to stop on the last stair, a determined Mako plowed into her, sending her flying into the floor of maggots.
At this point the players themselves issued squeals of ickiness. It was priceless.
Shooting upright again immediately and leaping back to the stairs, Jasala tore the maggots off of her that had started digging into her skin. As a bit of her blood was spilled on the floor, the maggots swarmed over to it and sucked it right up, growing from the size of a pinky to the size of a grapefruit.
More real life squeals. I love my work.
As Jasala cursed him out as an idiot and an oaf, Mako simply bulled onward, determined to aid his brother in finding his people in this perverted Shadowland. Finally, Jasala and Jannarin had no choice but the brave the maggots or abandon their friends. They were good friends. They did the right thing.
As Kaiju barrelled along he was treated to an ensemble of horrors. The entire place was an upside down mirror image of the estate above. In the ballroom they found a macabre dance going on, with bloodied ghosts and putrescent zombies dancing on their floor, the players ceiling, totally oblivious to the Heroes below. Some strange enchantment made them dance like marionettes, their bodies the toy of some dark enchantment. Kaiju was triply angered when he saw a few familiar faces among the ghosts, some of his tribeswomen.
On the equivalent of the second storey as they passed the bedchambers, they were treated to the sounds and images of two zombies, engaging in an obscene mockery of sex, their orgasmic cries intermingled with wails of anguish. The place got sicker and sicker the further they went. There would be HELL to pay for the man behind this.
Finally, they reached the equivalent of the third floor, or rather the stairs leading down to it. The stairs were shrouded in an inky darkness, utterly impenetrable with the eyes. Kaiju sent the darkness flying as he simply burst through it. His anger was monumental now. Mako and the other Heroes pursued, all secretly hoping their Icewalker friend could resist the sweet call of Limit Break long enough.
Rather than a mirror image, the equivalent third floor was a tomb. It's floor was not wrought of stone, but of hard-packed dirt. The walls were crypt walls, with occasional holes in them containing corpses that slumbered until the day they were to be summoned forth. The Heroes made their way, all of them tense. The sound of skittering by then had become loud enough to warrant serious caution. When the Heroes entered a large rectangular room whose opposite side could not be seen and whose floor was not hard but soft, loose dirt, grave dirt, they KNEW there was trouble.
It happened when Chahailis, in an effort to bypass the loose earth, ran sideways along the wall instead. In a shower of stone and dirt, a horrifying creature burst out of the walls, sending Chahailis flying. It was a spine chain.
A BIG spine chain. It must have had over fifty corpses sewn to it, many of them recognizably from Nexus. In that moment it was apparent what Belasco was buying slaves for. He was making an army. A terrible army. But to what end? Not exactly in the position to ponder it, the battle with the spine chain began. It was a difficult fight. While the chain was hardly stronger than the Heroes, it could strike by surprise as it burst from the loose dirt, strafed with it's side-blades, and then dove back into the dirt. It took incredible concentration to try and detect it's next point of bursting.
- I should point out here that I used the core book spine chain with the following house rules. Each attack it made was made against all Heroes, as it simply strafed past them all. Each turn, it would burst out, attack, and then sink in again. Since it is composed of so many bodies stitched together, it can do this without splitting. Any who got a higher initiative than the spine chain, which happened alot, had to wait until after the spine chain's turn to attack or perform a non-combat action, due to it's element of surprise. However, this element could be circumvented with a free, reflexive Perception+Awareness roll to try and predict where it will strike by the vibrations in the ground. 3 successes were necessary, and allowed the Heroes to hold their actions and attack right as the chain emerged. This worked rather nicely and gave the chain an element of challenge it otherwise really would not have presented. If you've ever played Legend of Zelda for the SNES, you should have an idea of what I'm talking about here. See, I ripped off more than just Castlevania!
Finally, after a long fight which tested the Heroes prowess, Kaiju caught the beast as it emerged and literally ran his claws across it's underside, allowing it's own velocity to rip it apart. His strength was such that as the chain finally ended and flew past him, it literally flew apart, spattering everyone and everything with even more gore. The Heroes pressed on.
On the far side of the room, they found a set of soulsteel double doors, sealed with some sort of magical lock. Outstretched from the lock were 10 fingers, almost stretched out like piano keys. Chahailis examined it, and after a long hard look, determined that the wrong combination would be deadly, but the fingers pressed in the right combination would open the doors and allow the Heroes to press on. And then she used the correct combination. A haunting piano-esque melody played in the background as the double doors swung open. There was a man, with long, raven hair and pale white skin, wrapped in soulsteel plate, and armed with a daiklave, blocking the way.
Mysterious Man: Ah, so we do have guests. I trust my pet provided some modicum of entertainment for you?
Kaiju: Belasco?
Mysterious Man: I'm afraid not. He's further inside, and a tad bit busy now. My name is the Prince of Shadows, how may I be of service?
Kaiju: Give us Belasco. He's the one we want. Our fight isn't with you. Is it?
Prince of Shadows: You must be the one that my mistress, the Lover Clad in Raiment of Tears, wants so bad. I cannot understand what she sees in you. Not much to look at are you?
Kaiju: Move or die!
Prince of Shadows: Death has long since lost it's mysteriousness, and thus it's scaring power, over me. And I'm afraid I cannot let you pass. Still, you seem an honorable sort, and so I'll allow you the luxury of a duel. drawing of a daiklave Have at you!
Kaiju: This is an unnecessary fight, but I shall take the life of any who stands between me and my people!
At this point, you were expecting a fight right? An epic, one on one duel between two masterful warriors. Nope. As the Prince raised his sword, a low moan issued forth, coming from the ground far, far below. Coming from the very mouths of the Malfeans themselves. The Prince, looking angry, sheathed his sword, claiming that it was not the will of the Malfeans that the Heros of Chaos die that day. As he opened up a portal leading into the hellish depths of the Labrynth, he made a promise that he and Kaiju would meet again.
Kaiju and the Heroes of Chaos pressed on. Down a short corridor and through another door, of black iron, they found what Chahailis had suspected all along, the Hearthstone chamber of a manse. An outstretched and bloody hand served as the Hearthstone setting, which was naturally absent. On the floor were all manner of obscene ritualistic runes that summoned the power of the Malfeans into the place. Chahailis made a quick mental note of the place, as she was determined to end that manse as soon as the Heroes had finished their business there. On the other end of the room was yet another door. A faint, sickly yellow light issued forth from underneath the door. As Kaiju and the others slammed through, they saw a cloaked and hooded man hunched over a pedestal bearing a yellow orb the size of a man's fist, a Yasal crystal. As the man turned around and pulled his hood back, the entire room paused. Their stomachs tightened and their throats dried. Their hearts quailed in their chests. The man in the cloak was Mako.
At this point, there was about a good 30 seconds of deadly silence from our gaming group. They were still picking their jaws off of the floor when I went on with the story.
Mako recognized his double immediately. His brother...Garet...Who had left his family long ago in search of fame and fortune. Mako was almost in tears. Garet i.e. Belasco, had been irrevocably tainted by the dark ones he served. His once fair hair had been turned pitch black, his skin had become sallow and pale, and his eyes had changed from the color of the sea to a pale violet. Yet he was not Abyssal. Nor was he mortal. He was some sick, sick thing. Something else.
In a totally resigned tone, the tone of a man devoid of hope or fear, Garet relayed his tale.
Let me state that what follows was a good half an hour of exposition and dialogue. All talk. No dice. Freeform style. And it was fucking marvelous.
After he left Nexus in search of fame, Garet quickly found himself a natural in the field of First Age exploration and recovery. A Scavenger Lord. He soon became feared and famed as one of the most ruthless, effective purveyors of artifacts in the Threshold outside of Lookshy. He had changed his name because Garet sounded weak, and didn't evoke the right mix of fear and awe in people he dealt with. Belasco had just the right ring to it.
He was in the Deep South 3 years ago, looking into rumors of a First Age site nearby to a rural village. Belasco couldn't even remember what it was he was seeking. The point was moot though. The site was real, but the rewards weren't. There wasn't a scrap of valuable material to be had. Outraged, Belasco began to leave, and then tripped on something. It was a metal shard, about the size of a shekel, but cast of soulsteel and inscribed with half of a black rune. As he picked it up and brushed the sand off of it, it came into his head. It was a voice. The thing was alive, sort of. It wanted to be whole, to be united, to be one once more. It had a name, they called it the Soul Mirror.
Yes. The Soul Mirror. It didn't take long for Lover Clad, or rather the Prince of Shadows, to find Belasco after that. Since the Black Rune had bonded with him, it was decided that Belasco would make a fine candidate for the search for the White Rune, the other half of the map to where Soul Mirror lay hidden. Belasco wasn't given a choice. The Prince took him to the Fortress of Red Ice, where the Lover Clad changed him.
At this point, Belasco pulled up his sleeves and pulled down his shirt, revealing veins of soulsteel running throughout his body, and where his heart was, the Black Rune had been stitched into him. Mako began to feel violently sick when he saw what his brother had become but he kept his cool, for a little longer anyway...
Belasco had become neither man nor corpse, living nor dead, but forever trapped in the twilight realm of both. With the Black Rune stitched to his heart, he gained the Soul Mirrors power of regeneration, and became unable to die. Further, the soulsteel cords threaded throughout his body became the equivalent of magical armor, giving him steel hard skin. All of this came at a horrible price though. To sustain his nebulous half-existance Belasco had to eat the still-living flesh of his fellow humans, and drink of their blood. Anything else that he tried to eat or drink turned to ash in his mouth and made him violently ill. Even worse, he eve became unable to have sex with a partner without his partner perishing painfully, as all of his vital fluids had been made wholly poisonous. The Lover promised him release from that hellish state ONLY if he retrieved the White Rune and restored the Soul Mirror to it's former terrible glory.
After that, Belasco went on, the search for the White Rune consumed his existence. It took him two years, but he had finally found the White Rune, or so he thought. A Guild merchant informant of his had told him of some silly Icewalker girl trying to sell him a soulsteel fragment to try and earn enough money to save her dying tribe.
Kaiju blanched. He had a feeling he knew where this was going...
Belasco blandly relayed how he had his men, disguised as Guild slavers, raid tribes from all over Kaiju's native area, and the Lover Clad arranged for the painful exodus that resulted in the Sabretooth tribe capture. Kaiju began to shake with rage as Belasco went on to point out that nothing was coincidental about his people's forced exodus, and subsequent life of slavery. Belasco knew it was one of their women who had found the White Rune and had no need for the men, so to make a tidy profit off of it all he sold them off to House Cynis, who in turn shipped them out West to one of their holdings out there. That was Kaiju's people.
It was when Belasco informed the Heroes of what he did with the women when he got them that Kaiju and Mako both lost it. He was vividly describing how he tried all manner of torture to get them to talk. The rack, the vice, the clamps, the wall, the well.. *SMACK* Kaiju delivered a brutal haymaker to the man, sending him flying backwards, into the wall and onto the floor. As the downed bastard was commenting on Kaiju's good arm, Mako kicked him in the ribs, demanding to know how he could let himself fall so far. Belasco merely smiled sadly and went on with the story, rising slowly and dusting himself off.
Everything Belasco could think of would not work. Finally, a little girl, no older than her early twenties, spoke up. Her names was Inari, and she claimed that she knew of the Rune fragment, but wouldn't talk unless Belasco spared the others. Belasco lied and claimed he would, and then had the other women sent out to be given to his men as entertainment and then strangled.
Kaiju clocked him again. Belasco pulled himself up again and resumed his grisly tale.
The girl, Inari, had seen through Belasco's lies. Belasco actually shuddered as he regaled how her eyes seemed to pierce right through him, as if she could read his soul. Nothing would work while she was living, but the Lover Clad had taught Belasco some tricks that might make her talk as a ghost.
With that, he tapped the Yasal Crystal gently, producing a *TINK TINK* sound. Kaiju's face fell as he understood what Belasco meant.
At that point, Belasco said that that was where the story ended. Even as the Heroes were bursting into his chamber, he was trying unsuccessfully to get the girl's trapped ghost to talk, using what he called "handy necromantic voodoo" given him by the Prince of Shadows to torment her soul.
At that point he rose to his full height and stated plainly that the Heroes could kill him if they liked, or at least try, but that he wasn't going to stop, that he would do anything, ANYTHING to end his personal hell. Mako, tears streaming down his face and enraged slammed Belasco against the wall and demanded to know how he could fall so low, be so selfish.
Then Belasco snapped. He pulled himself down and with demonic strength bodily lifted Mako into the air one-handed, soulsteel veins running down his arm as the sleeve fell back.
"Look at me...Look at me! LOOK AT ME!!!" he screamed, starting from a whisper and ending in a bellow. "What would you have done!? You have no idea what my hell is like, and I will do anything, kill ANYONE who stops me from gaining my release!!!"
I should state that I'm rather proud of those above lines and how I played them out. Thankfully we didn't have to worry about waking or bothering anyone, so I was actually able to yell those lines, and I think that I conveyed the certain dark intensity that really drives Belasco. The brief, ensuing silence stood as a testament to that.
Mako, after a stunned silence, picked himself up off of the floor and retaliated that he would stop him, and that he would not let his brother fall any further. He drew his daiklave and readied to thrust when Kaiju stopped him for a second.
Kaiju looked into Belasco's sad, violet eyes and asked if any of his people had been spared, almost pleading. Belasco shook his head in the negative. And then he died as Mako pierced him through with his daiklave. As his pathetic corpse slid to the floor, Chahailis made her way back to the Hearthstone chamber. Mako scooped up his dead brother, promising him a fitting cremation, and then the Heroes quickly followed. By the time they got to where Chahailis was, she gave them all a somber look, so uncharacteristic of her, and informed them matter of factly to start running for exit starting then. She had reconfigured the manse in just the right way that in short order, it would explode, incinerating the Shadowland that had formed around it and obliterating Cinderfell Estate.
They started running. When they got to the spine chain room, Kaiju, in a moment of total desperation, noticed something that the Heroes had missed before, a corridor from which pleas for help were issuing. Kaiju and Jasala wasted no time going down there, while Jannarin and Mako made for the exit. Down the corridor they discovered a small series of cells, which contained, to Kaiju's grateful disbelief, a dozen Icewalkers from various tribes, including a few surviving members of his own tribe. It was a split second before the bars trapping them were obliterated and Kaiju was offering reassurances and helping the weak to stand and start running.
The Heroes made it out of the estate and onto the streets of Bastion just in time, with Chahailis being the last to go. As she literally dove through the open wrought-iron gates that marked the entrance, did several flips, and landed on her feet, a massive Essence explosion rocked the neighborhood, as the Cinderfell Estate was vaporized by a massive, magical blast. The well-armed and trained guards were quick to respond but interspersing herself between them and the Heroes was Huyla, who was urging the Heroes to escape back to their ship while she played distraction. Mako and Kaiju were both lost to the world at the moment but Jasala offered her genuine thanks. Huyla just nodded and then charged the guards, flaring her Anima for all to see.
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