After much deliberation, the party decided that its best plan of attack would be to have Silvana fight the pudding with her flame blade while Thorongil and Beeel parried for her, Frepper hung back and parried for Thorongil, Yves and Stealth tossed down lit torches (enhanced with a Log of Everburning cast by Thorongil) and burning rags, and Ganeth fired off some magic missiles before turning to the rag routine. However, this required getting the pudding out into the cube, and since it wasn't inclined to move toward food or other lures, that left smoking it out.
Karzen-Ben told the party about another habitat, where someone called Lubashish had learned to use sand to start fires and such; these people were also into "purity", spoke a different language, and wouldn't be happy about demi-humans. Beeel, Yves, and Ganeth went forth (after leaving the Helper's sand in Thorongil's care) to release a sand-user; their habitat turned out to be the one the Helper had been perched on when Thor first spotted him. Yves listened after Beeel knocked on the top panel and heard someone whisper, "Looks like someone's here. Switch to secret tongue." Other gems from this conversation (after the panel was pried open and Ganeth had hidden among the accompanying citizenry of K-B's habitat) included the Shatneresque "We...will...speak...your...tongue." and "We see all! The crystal has been broken?!" Beeel had little trouble getting Shish to agree to use the party's sand to implement Ganeth's "little flaming sphere down the crawlway" scheme (especially after telling him that there was good sand to be had in the sphere), so they all set out for the tower, and the panel just happened to slam shut and trap the remaining sand addicts in their habitat again. (Incidentally, Shish's comments about the dangers of dealing with impure people closely mirrored what most other people might say about the slide into drug addiction.)
So the plan went into action as Shish drew an irregular hexagon on the floor; it grew into a dodecahedron with a nasty orange glow, and he rolled it down the crawlway onto the pudding while the others got into position. The response was three gouts of pudding spewing out the other crawlways; one was engaged by Silvana and Co., while the others started climbing the walls of the cube. Fortunately, enough damage was applied in the first round to drive the creature into catatonia, preventing it from attacking the upstairs crew or splitting after weapon hits while it tried to regenerate. Everyone opened up on it, and in two more rounds it melted away. None of the chaotics exhibited symptoms of insanity during the combat.
After the combat, a whilg appeared from the central pillar, telling the party that it had won the right to return home; the whilgs even had access to the party's original bodies and would be able to return the souls and spirits to them. In the ensuing discussion, it became clear that the whilgs were responsible for giving Rakni her power conduit as a means of opposing the Shade Lord; they had at some point supported Hajmola as well. Either killing the illithid or destroying the desert tower crystal disrupted Rakni's reception of the conduit, which could only be reestablished from within the plane, so Rakni was getting no further energy from the trapped souls and spirits. They also admitted that the Shade Lord was on Dustplane, marauding around and jumping from body to body as she was repeatedly killed, but claimed to have set a trap for her using the conduit, and wanted the party to refrain from destroying the plane so that the Shade Lord could be dealt with once and for all. Silvana wanted the whilgs to agree to release the good and neutral beings trapped in the plane; they agreed to release "some" but argued that some would still be needed to keep the conduit going for the trap.
During this discussion, the Red One had his epiphany. The whilgs were clearly worried about the party actually destroying the plane; for that to be a possibility, several other crystals had to have already been destroyed, probably including the central one. Since the whilgs didn't care about the party going to the walls of the desert face, there was apparently little damage the party could do on any of the four adjoining faces. So the only place they could be trying to block off was a location that could only be reached using the dials in the sphere: the "punishment", which (based on the geometry of the room) was likely to be the sixth, opposite face of Dustworld. (A quiet conference with one of the archive experts confirmed that the "punishment" of the sixth dial was a different word than the "punishment" of taking the wrong passage or misconfiguring the sphere.) And since the whilgs seemed to be making a last-ditch stand on the desert face, their influence probably didn't extend to the sixth face, meaning that it could have no earth or rock at all. Such a face would seem inhospitable, but since the whilgs feared the party going there, it couldn't be anything as bad as a totally underwater world or a world built of fire; given the existence of a "gravity" face in the Consortium information and the general features of Dustplane, an especially Astral-like face seemed a reasonable speculation. The course of action then became clear: Go to the sixth face, destroy the crystal there, and blow the plane to kingdom-come.
Silvana tried to keep the whilg in conversation as long as possible while the party, a team of habitat dwellers, and Lubashish scouted the sphere (which was clear, but needed to have some sand cleared from the bottom dial) and reconfigured the dials for the trip to the sixth face. (The habitat people were along to bring the sphere back to evacuate their comrades; Silvana and Ganeth also speculated that hostile beings would be more hesitant to fire on natives than on the party. Lubashish happened to be down there looking for the alleged good sand when everything hit the fan.) Talks broke down when Silvana suggested that Good get a portion of the power being channeled from Dustplane; the whilg didn't take kindly to this and unleashed a petrifying gaze attack at Silvana, who dove into a crawlway and entered the sphere. (The pet scorpion came along.) Bad news: the walls of the sphere were stone.
A turn later, after ropes had been strung to allow all the dials to be turned, everyone was in position, and Ganeth had cast his gaze reflect, a stony hexagonal creature with six eyes and standard earthy weapon resistances appeared at the top of the tower. Its gaze attacks appeared to turn victims into hexagonally patterened stone, and though it fired on both adventurers and natives, enough people were left to reconfigure the chamber. The expected gravity flip kicked in (as the bottom became the top), leaving the creature at the bottom of the sphere and open to attack; it was eventually killed, leaving a small hexagonal stone in its wake. Silvana, Stealth, and some of the natives had been "stoned", but the lack of anguished failed-system-shock expressions, high rate of fire, and casual nailing of habitat people indicated a less "expensive" attack. After some probing, they party figured out that the effect was a stony covering surronding the victims, who were slowly suffocating. Called shots with blunt weapons (hitting adjusted AC 2) and dropping the victims (on a failed item save) shattered the casings (though dropping had a tendency to damage the people inside as well).
In the upper hemisphere, the four lit passages showed that the sphere had arrived. The party picked a passage and headed up, leaving the habitat dwellers to return to the tower and evacuate their fellows before the desert face became uninhabitable.
In the hurry and confusion, the behir-head-sized (and growing) jellybean was left behind.
The scorpion was the first creature out of the passageway. It suddenly stopped moving, though its limbs were flailing; it found this fact very confusing, and everyone else could suddenly understand its thoughts. The last face was indeed very close to Astral conditions, though overall it was a bit friendlier: nonmagical items continued to exist, the space was only three-dimensional (though Thorongil's experimental attempt at 360-degree vision indicated that the apparent three dimensions were a user-friendly interface over something more complex, much as Dreamspace was), and characters used their normal base THAC0 (rather than 20) for combat. Items could be dropped freely, though transferring items required a CHA vs CHA battle, with the winner ending up with the object. Magic items and creatures were encumbering, with carrying capacity related to charisma. Movement rate was 1" per point of intelligence; high-INT people could also project their thoughts further. Closing one's eyes had no effect on vision. And all of the reduction and stat draining effects disappeared upon entry to the new face.
Some folks looked a bit different on the astral face:
- Stealth's harming was clearly visible, as his astral body appeared to slowly bleeding away.
- Ganeth, on the other hand, looked entirely too alive. Something very bright was lurking just under his skin, which would occasionally ripple and reveal something amorphous beneath.
- Lubashish had a jaundiced-looking orange aura. He was also lucid, though he had no memories of his existence before entering the astral face.
- Frepper appeared as a shifting confabulation of unicorn and centaur features. Pepper and Frankel could both speak at once; when they did, both of their heads appeared, which looked really creepy.
- The feather from Froot Loop looked like a confabulation of many small birds.
After some time spent figuring out the parameters of the face and deciding on a marching order (Beeel eventually chose a cubic configuration), Silvana thought back to the quasi-Astral combat for the Ketronel source before Kambheer and realized that the way to get to the crystal was simply to think about being there. Those who had seen the tower crystal pictured it, and those who hadn't just pictured themselves staying with everyone else. The DM rolled his checks for "those who know where to go...those who are going astray...those who are clueless about where to go...those who think they know where to go but are wrong...", and lo, there was a 6-inch cubic crystal in the center of the party.
Everyone who'd been conscious for the destruction of the first crystal pictured it imploding; those who hadn't seen it imagined it as best they could. As they did this, a beholder started gating in, but it was too late to stop the crystal's destruction. The harm backlash followed, getting Ganeth, Yves, and the beholder. The heal ended up going entirely to Yves; fortunately, the heal and the harm happened in the correct order. And everyone had a 25% chance to recover each of their cast spells, though the party went a pathetic 2 for 27 here.
The next round, Beeel closed with the harmed beholder and whacked it. The beholder only took damage from specialization bonuses, so getting attacked by a kensai was basically its worst nightmare, and it died. At the end of the round, red cracks started appearing across the landscape (or lack thereof), indicating that the integrity of the plane was breaking down. The elves, who'd been fully Astral before, tried to think their way out to the true Astral before the plane decomposed completely, and the others tried to stay with the elves. System shock rolls, using wisdom in place of constitution, followed; everyone made it to the real Astral, but only the people who made system shock got there with their minds intact. (The Astral in its full glory is quite a sight.) Fortunately, the only failures were the scorpion, who went catatonic, and Lubashish, who started raving and wandered off.
There was a lot of commotion in the Astral, including a globe with many, many eyes that went whizzing by. The party tried locating a ki-rin but only found a fake one (easily identified by its failure to grab Beeel).
- Fake-rin:
- "I heard a call."
- Party does nothing.
- Fake-rin: [leaving]
- "There are other fish."
The Consortium representative, someone who looked like the Liason but without the hellcat, was the first on the scene. It was surprised to find Yves there, since the Consortium had listed him as "disposable", but it was willing to take Yves back with Ganeth, and the three of them went off.
A real ki-rin arrived next to get Beeel; it waited around to verify the identity of Whitemoon's expected representative and then took off with his cargo.
- Ki-rin:
- "I'm not saying this out of lack of respect, but don't think too much during the ride."
Whitemoon sent a huge manta ray from the Beastlands to pick up the grey elves, Frankel, and Pepper. Though it wasn't supposed to take anyone else, it agreed to take Thorongil and the scorpion back to the Beastlands as well.
- Manta ray: [shrugging nonchalantly]
- "Sure, why not? I'll just get punished for it later."
The manta ray swallowed its cargo and headed off. It was attacked by some sharks on the way, but it eluded them and reached the Beastlands intact.