Karzen-Ben: "The crystal was broken? Impossible! I mean, highly unlikely!" Roger: "Inconceivable!" Dan: "STOP SAYING THAT!"
After getting over her shock at seeing the open tower door and hearing about the demise of the crystal, Karzen-Ben said that she'd check the archives to see if anything like that had ever happened before. She also mentioned that the habitat had healers who could help with Stealth's spirit leak, though the cure would require a week of bed rest (which Quaz was going to need anyway) and might fail on non-Lawfuls.
Karzen-Ben went off to the archives and returned half an hour later, saying that they needed to await "Proof" before taking further action. The party offered to take K-B over to the tower to see the non-existence of the crystal, but apparently Proof is a more specific thing: "When the crystal is broken, the habitats will become inhabitable." There was no apparent change in the habitat, but it draws energy from the crystal at dawn, so it could have been running on stored energy. Some scholars had interpreted the prophecy to mean that the inhabitants of the "winning" habitat should take up residence in the tower before the change came to pass. When Ganeth pointed out that other habitats with mentalists might already know about the crystal's demise and be getting teams of their own together, K-B decided to send the party to establish a guard-force in the tower and then evacuate the entire habitat into the tower by nightfall. Since the party was still interested in exploring the lower portals of the crystal chamber (hoping that the all-temples-connect-to-the-center theory would pan out), they were amenable to this. The party left Quaz to start recuperating and were assigned a young functionary named Veroc-Dorc to represent the habitat on the mission.
- Beeel:
- "Are you an experienced fighter?"
- Veroc-Dorc:
- "I am familiar with a knife. I have never actually engaged a live opponent, however."
As the party headed out, Thorongil noticed a human in a sandy robe crouched atop one of the other habitats. The party ignored him (though Thor quietly kept an eye on him) and proceeded to the tower, where they encountered a pair of fat brown thorn-covered spiders waiting at the top of the ramp.
- Silvana:
- "Leader Beeel, order Veroc-Dorc not to fight. We don't want to lose him."
- Veroc-Dorc:
- "You should not order the leader! Should it be necessary, I shall gladly face the spiders alone."
- Yves:
- "Your expression seems anything but glad...and I might question your sanity if you were."
- Veroc-Dorc:
- "That is just surface terror."
Beeel ordered V-D to parry everything and report back to the habitat if everyone else were to get toasted, and Silvana wondered if the kid might have been slated for the next sacrifice.
- Veroc-Dorc:
- "One of us should probe their offensive and defensive potential before we engage. `To engage without knowledge is to enter a losing confrontation.'"
- Ganeth:
- "To engage one at a time is to lose the party to attrition."
V-D offered to attempt to establish communications with the spider (proboably psionically), but the party figured he didn't have hit points to spare, and Silvana used her speak with animals ability instead.
- Spiders: [all conversation passing through Silvana]
- "Begone!"
- Beeel:
- "Why?"
- Spiders:
- "8 > 4"
- Beeel:
- "Looks to me like there are more 4's here than 8's."
- Spiders:
- "8*4 > 2*8, yes."
At which point six new spiders emerged: four grey gangly ones and two pale white furry ones.
- Spiders:
- "8*4 < 8*8."
- Beeel:
- "I'm not impressed. It seems to me that 4 > 8, so 8*4 > 8*8."
- Spiders:
- "Error."
- Beeel:
- "Look, 8's, there are hundreds of 4's coming here today. If you don't leave the tower, we will have to kill all of you and then burn your webs."
- Spiders ponder, then retreat into the tower.
After some debate, the party decided to report back to Karzen-Ben, avail themselves of any healing that might be around (which they forgot to do before heading out), grab the horses, lure a bunch of spiders out by demanding a new leg count, drop an Evard's on them, and storm the tower. The first three stages went as planned, though K-B's cures seemed deterministic, healing 8 points of damage on the Lawful Yves and 2 points on the Chaotic Ganeth. Silvana's cure critical wounds fizzled, but she managed to get some more healing into the ragged adventuring folk. And back they all went.
- Spiders:
- "Begone!"
- Beeel:
- "Now you are truly outnumbered."
The spiders retreated, and a few rounds later, a single grey spider emerged. It was clearly harmed, and its carapace wriggled in a way suggesting lots of small creatures living within (like a creeping doom with a live delivery system).
- Spiders:
- "64 < 4096."
The party backed off, and Thorongil knocked the carrier spider to zero hp with a sling stone. Yves then clubbed it for one more point, starting it on the road to death. Finally, Ganeth hitched the creeping-doom-filled carcass to the horses, who dragged it off between two unknown habitats.
As the doom was dragged off, Thorongil noticed the sandy-cloaked human waving to him. Beeel waved back, the humanoid jumped off his habitat and closed to 20', and communication opened: "Sometimes less can be more."
- Humanoid: [to Silvana]
- "What manner of fair unearthly creature are you?"
- Silvana:
- "Almost everyone here is from off plane. I (and some of my friends) are elves."
- Beeel:
- "What manner of creature are you?"
- Humanoid:
- "I am a Helper."
- Silvana:
- "What is a Helper?"
- Helper:
- "What is an elf? What is anything? Such easy questions with difficult answers. I have come from afar, seeking the One. Which among you is the One?"
- Beeel:
- "Wherefore do you seek the One?"
- Helper:
- "My task is to help the One, so that All can become None."
- Silvana:
- "We're definitely here to make All None."
The Helper apparently decided that Thorongil was his #1 One candidate, since he had knocked out the spider. After getting Beeel to send Veroc-Dorc (and Frankel) to scout around the other side of the tower ("Rules won't allow us to talk freely in front of the natives."), the Helper indicated his belief that the party's job on the desert face was finished (after feeling a "great disturbance"), and that he'd come to show the party the way through the "Wall of Fire" ("Each domain seems to be surrounded by a Wall of some sort.") to the next face, which he calls Orcadia (for the obvious reason). And he further believes that without the crystal, the entire face will collapse, making it imperative that the party reach the wall and be off the face before dawn.
- Helper:
- "I have certain...resources. It will require travel through the night, of course."
- Ganeth:
- "Oh good...mass damage all 'round?"
There was some suspicion that the Helper was working for an Asmodeus faction, since Asmo and Rakni have been rivals for at least a few centuries, but in any case, moving to another face didn't seem like a terrible idea.
The Helper headed off to the cave where the party first arrived to make preparations; Beeel told Veroc-Dorc that Sandy would be able to help Quaz, but the party would have to take him from the habitat to the cave in haste. The party again returned to the habitat, somewhat to Karzen-Ben's annoyance; Silvana (shadowed by Veroc-Dorc) went in, appriased Quaz of developments, and had him brought to the surface. Meanwhile, Beeel filled Karzen-Ben in on the possible impending nonexistence of the desert face.
- Karzen-Ben:
- "So it will not matter whether we go to the Tower or stay here?"
- Ganeth:
- "Depends...what's supposed to happen when the habitats are no longer habitable?"
- Karzen-Ben:
- "The Archives say that will bring a New Dawn."
- Ganeth:
- "And then? Both stories are consistent with this face changing at dawn...the open question is how catastrophic the change is."
- Karzen-Ben:
- "The other Archives are locked. I presume that they will be unsealed in the New Dawn."
- Ganeth:
- "Where are the other Archives?"
- Karzen-Ben:
- "The Archives are locked within some of us, preserved carefully for the right time."
- Ganeth:
- "So after the New Dawn, you'll just know what to do?"
Beeel recommended that the habitat people take posession of the tower just in case, after warning them to expect a number of spiders to still be in residence. The party made a map of the tower for Karzen-Ben and headed off into the desert. (Sadly, this meant passing on the opportunity to feed Frankel's body to the jellybeans.)
As the party trekked into the desert, they spotted some creatures moving in the sand ahead; Yves thought they looked like flat arthropods, possibly crabs or spiders. They avoided the area. Some time later, they saw a pole with a piece of cloth atop it off to the left; they didn't investigate and reached the cave without further incident.
- Helper:
- "The best that we could do on horseback would be 16 miles in the eight-hour night. Unfortunately, we need to travel almost thirty. That is why I am here to Help."
- Pepper: [in control of Frepper's mouth]
- "The Hell-Per"
- The Helper makes no reply.
- Pepper:
- "I've had it with being pushed around by you Lawful morons."
- Helper:
- "I beg your pardon?"
- Pepper laughs a bit crazily.
- Beeel:
- "Did you have another course of action in mind?"
- Pepper:
- "We should call their bluff."
- Frankel: [taking control]
- "I am a merged spirit and the strain is wearing on half of me. I will be no more trouble unprovoked."
- Helper:
- "I quite understand. This cannot have been easy for you."
The Helper indicated that he would call upon an ally to assist with transportation; this ally would basically move the sand that the party was riding over, increasing their overall movement. The catches were that the AOE was only 10' by 30', the Helper would need to maintain concentration during the trip, stopping would require some sort of check, and no stop could be longer than a turn. (When Silvana asked what sort of payment these allies wanted, the Helper replied that their deeds would be payment enough.) The Helper also expected opposition from the following varieties of foes:
- Scorpion skirmishers: Fast, tail strikes grab and stun
- Sand elementals: Rumored vulnerable to water-based attacks, able to disperse into a sandstorm or coalesce into a humanoid form
- Spiders
- Dune lich: "a powerful free-willed (long-dead) soul that has removed itself from the Cycle in order to gain further powers through austerities"; not likely to be happy about the party's progress toward breaking the plane
The Helper's associates were also able to remove the reduction on Thorongil in exchange for a Silver Token (an encapsulated magic item). To accomplish this, the Helper drew a hexagon on the ground with some bright orange sand and the concentrated on the diagram. The figure became three-dimensional (three vertices rose while the other three fell), and extra lines appeared to create a cube; meanwhile, the Helper's eyes took on an orange glow. The cube floated over to Fred the horse and touched its token (holding a death's door armband); the token vanished, and the cube turned silver. It then touched Thorongil, returned him to normal size, and disappeared. During this process, the Helper appeared to be on a little trip of his own, reaching a decidedly pleasureable-looking climax when the cube disappeared.
After a moment's recovery, The Helper (with a manic look and shaking hands) took some more of the bright orange sand and drew a rectangle around the party. He then went into a trance, and the party felt the sand under their feet start to shift, as if they were on the deck of a ship. The sand began to appear somewhat blurry, and the party headed out across it.
Stealth soon noticed a group of eight scorpions (the skirmishers) gaining on the party; Ganeth and Quaz thought their outlines looked a little blurry, much like the sand underfoot. Beeel had the Helper stop the "carpet", and the party engaged the scorpions, who attempted to concentrate on Thorongil and Ganeth and drag them away. (Stealth attempted to put an Evard's in the path of the scorpions, but the bucking sand underfoot preventing him from starting to cast) The scorpions holding Thorongil were killed before they could drag him away; the one dragging Ganeth managed to move him 420 yards before the Red One unstunned, went insane, and killed it. Another scorpion went for the Helper (presumably to disrupt his concentration and get the carpet moving away while the party was separated) but was intercepted by Thorongil and killed. After doing some damage to Silvana and belting out his song for the combat, Ganeth was brought back to both his senses and the carpet, and the party headed off again. (The Helper, incidentally, was very concerned with who had been dragged away while the party was waiting for G's return; Beeel mentioned that the Red One was missing, and this term surprised the Helper a bit.)
The Helper said that he expected to see more scorpions on the party's tail in the near future; he also noted that he'd adjusted the carpet's trajectory to avoid the domain of the dune lich. At sunset, the Helper stopped the carpet and offered some of his distilled sand to someone (preferably a non-Chaotic) so they could use it to either summon a light source or channel fire onto a torch. Despite the Helper's insistence that speed was of the essence, Silvana and Thorongil stuck with known dwarven technology (fire sticks) to get a torch going.
- Helper:
- "The sand amplifies your natural resonances. It is dangerous to the (mentally) weak but the (mentally) strong can harness its powers -- like I do."
- Beeel:
- "What are the dangers, and the powers?"
- Silvana:
- "It's addicting."
- Helper:
- "No more addicting than adventuring itself."
- Silvana:
- "So that means you have to keep doing it, once you get started?"
- Helper:
- "The `addiction' is hardly a drawback, since the strong would choose to use it regardless."
Yves ended up with a pinch of sand, which Beeel told him to use only in a dire emergency with explicit authorization. Once the torches were lit, Ganeth noticed several skirmishers in the area (within 50 feet, though not showing up on infravision), apparently waiting for the carpet to start moving again (the one-turn stop duration was fast approaching) before trying to pull people off. Beeel decided to have the helper go ahead, stop again when he was able, and then turn around and come back for the party. The Helper didn't like this plan, citing difficulty in making that many stops, and tried to convince Yves to use the sand to take out some of the skirmishers instead.
- Silvana:
- "Let's summarize. Our dear little Asmo helper is deliberately putting the party into a tight spot hoping to accomplish some of his secondary mission objectives.
- Addict someone to Sand.
- Deposit some people in the desert, weakening our concerted effort and making us more vulnerable to their offers."
The party left the carpet, and the Helper zoomed away. The next round, Yves and Frankel moved forward to engage the scorpions; the scorpions took some lumps and withdrew from the scene, heading off at right angles to the carpet's path. After some pondering, the party came to two conclusions:
- The Helper may himself be a Dune Lich. He has quite a few sand-related powers, and this would give him a motive to distract and hose the party; it also explain how he knew about the crystal's destruction so quickly.
- The Helper's plan was to separate the One from the others, since that person posed the greatest threat to the Helper's domain. The skirmishers may have been focusing on Ganeth and Thorongil because they didn't know which unreduced male elf was the One. (The Helper's first guess was Thorongil, so keeping him reduced wouldn't have increased his distinctiveness.)
So the party decided to risk the Helper's story of impending cataclysm being true and started walking back toward the habitats. They figured that the Helper would catch up to them at some point, but Silvana thought that if they could convince him that they just want to go home, he might be willing to take them back to the tower to play with (and perhaps kill themselves with) the portals at the bottom.
Sometime after midnight, a wall of sand rose up in front of the party; Silvana and Ganeth pegged it as a sand version of Alcoreax's Ice Trail. Stealth, Beeel, and G had time to get out of its way, but everyone else was run over, and Quaz was instantly killed. (The main difference from Ice Trail was the aftereffect...nobody takes damage digging through the sand wake, but a strength check is required to dig either from within or from without.) A large humanoid, made of sand, was standing behind the wall, with the bizarre property of taking damage from weapons in accordance with the wielder's proficiency (0 for non-proficient, 1 for proficient, 2 for single-specialized, etc.). Silvana noticed that the creature was sinking slightly as party members entered melee with it, and Stealth remarked on the creature's lack of counterattacks; everyone backed off just before the creature dissolved into a sandy whirlpool that would have sucked down anyone standing close to it.
The Helper reappeared and urged the party to hurry onto the carpet before the local Sand Witch ("a vengeful soul who uses elemental powers to hurt the living") launched another attack. Quaz's soul rose and tried to enter Yves; Yves didn't appear to resist, but the attempt was unsuccessful. Silvana made her "we're tired and just want to go home" pitch, but the Helper refused to return the party to the tower, noting that he wouldn't reach the wall by dawn if he did. (In retrospect, perhaps he needs to be on a face with a working crystal each dawn?) Quaz tried to enter the Helper but was rebuffed.
- Helper:
- "There are other towers in other Lands that lead to those places. Do not fixate overly on this Land. I gave you my Sand, I gave you my Help. Do you scorn me now, you arrogant little mortals?"
- Beeel:
- "Surely there's something more you can tell us to convince us of the truth of your words."
- Helper:
- "The time for talk is over. I leave in one minute. What happens in that one minute is entirely up to you. Board now or face the consequences."
- The party does not enter the rectangle.
- Helper:
- "Sorry, the minute has passed. You had your Chance. I hope that this Gift serves you well."
With that last remark, the Helper scattered some more sand and took off at high speed. The party, fearing a final attempt to deal with the One, scattered as well. Looking back a few rounds later, they saw a large glowing dodecahedron form in the sand. They also realized that Quaz hadn't been able to move far from his body and may have been caught in the effect.
Relying on Silvana's direction sense, and not daring to camp for the rest of the night, the now-guideless party continued their long trek back to the tower.