Member
Lord Zee
Thayr
Enzayne
Vec
WrongEndoftheRainbow
ActRaiserTheReturned
Dezuel
Dark Cloud
VerjilHell in Heaven - Turn 3
Turn 3 has started, please check the MP Spreadsheet for your updated MP counts. Please let me know if any number is off and I'll fix it when I can.
Deep within the Great Tree, the Khodex shivered. Encased and suspended in the air as it was, it was still impossible for any onlooker from seeing the way it silently rumbled and lit up. What had once looked like a large piece of obsidian to the mortals who lived at the Tree now looked like a gemstone filled with liquid light of all colours known and unknown, forming shapes and crashing desperately - and silently - against the crystalline surface of the cocoon.
“Big rock be Big crazy.” said a hunched over goblin from underneath its thick blankets beneath the towering statue of Syllia, his favourite spot to camp out at night.
“Me think small crazy. Not big.” Chimed in another goblin, much smaller and voice much higher pitched. It was a child, with her skin every bit as beige as the adult beside her. Unlike the adult however, she wasn’t covered in blankets but instead wore a thick tunic and bandages along the entirety of her arms and legs. “Not big. Tree big.”
“Choonga head small. Choonga no understand. Big crazy. Pah-wah-fool things pray to big rock all time. Big crazy.”
The child huffed and turned away, cheeks puffed out. The adult continued to watch the Khodex, flinching a bit every time the liquid light flashed bright and holding his breath every time the Khodex went dark. He couldn’t take his eyes off it and every one of his instincts was telling him to leave the Khodex’s presence, but he didn’t know where else to go. If big rock big explode, then no big distance be safe, right?
Deep in the Astral and Dream Realms, so far away that even the Gods who dwelled within couldn’t notice in time to react, a tiny spark went off.
It was an unassuming thing, a simple speck of light that soon vanished as if it had never been there.
And then it happened again. And again. And again for a thousand thousand moments, until a fingertip-sized Cantar redcap colony within the Astral Realm took notice of it. The watched it for a long time and when they were finally satisfied that it seemed to be inoffensive, they settled below the empty spot from where Sparks would fall.
Sparkfall eventually became a massive colony numbering in the billions of consciousnesses, fed by the strange light and warmth of the sparks. In the Material Realm, the Sparkfall Mind had taken over all the caverns, submerged or not, beneath the Blood ocean. They thrived, and despite being so numerous they were peaceful. They did not eat anything else and instead let the animals feed on them freely. There was no hunger and no cold, all thanks to the sparks.
It had been a long time. One day, one of the many mushrooms that made up the expansive Sparkfall Mind felt a sharp pain in its cap. It wasn’t being eaten, it wasn’t being stepped on, it shouldn’t even be able to feel those things either to begin with, nor should it be able to think. The redcap Cantar wracked its tiny astral mind trying to find an answer, and that’s when it realised - its mind was connected to its body, and it couldn’t hear the Hivemind anymore. It was stuck in its own immobile body in the Material Realm.
That wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t right. It could see, somehow. It saw blurry shadows and pulses of light and warmth around it. A massive network, many blinking lights, most of them wailing silently in pain…
The Hivemind had been shattered in a split second, and all the blinking lights were desperately trying to reconnect to one another. The flashes of warmth the redcap mushroom felt were proof of that. It was as if thousands of other minds were trying to talk to it, but they were all turned away by some kind of fiery shield around its very being.
Its vision clouded. All the lights dulled. Far away, a shockwave of darkness made its way through the entire network. Lights vanished without a trace by the hundreds of thousands, swallowed by some unknowable thing.
At the same time in the Astral and Dream Realms, the Sparkfall spewed light forth so strongly that it became a beam of light, one so incomprehensibly hot and unstable that as it moved around in its normal erratic manner, it tore apart the fabric of the universe.
In the blink of an eye, the largest and most successful Cantar Hivemind in the universe was simultaneously blown apart, shattered, sucked out of the universe itself and turned into raw energy. Energy that was absorbed by the ethereal beam of light that was now clawing at the edges of the universe, where the Khodex’s protection was most thin, and energy that it used to transform the innocent Sparkfall Mind into a living portal, an entryway into the Universe.
An earthquake rumbled below the Blood Ocean. Waves dozens of metres tall exploded in all directions and flooded and devastated anything around it.
Days later, from the depths of the blood ocean came Outer Beasts. Ancient, lumbering entities that dwarfed the smallest of mountains and the tallest of hills. The first one to surface was the Egrioth, a horse-like thing with six spire-like legs and 6 wings, with the head of a horse and the body of a lion, covered in bony plates as thick as the thickest city wall.
Then there was the Drowned One, which did not walk or crawl, but was instead carried around by its million spawn. It had no discernible shape or form other than that of a bloated, amorphous blob of green-grey flesh, with 3 wide white eyes on its front.
And there was the army of other lesser Beasts which spilled forth from the Blood Ocean covered in red mud, their claws and pincers and maws and stingers and minds all sharpened and ready to do as commanded by the two Outer Beasts.
As more and more spawned from the accursed ocean, they assembled around the two great beasts and bowed. A quarter of the Horde staying put and started building structures and roads by vomiting black slime into the sand, a quarter joined the Drowned One as it headed west towards Shangshi-La and a quarter joined the Egrioth as it headed towards the Land of Origins. As for the remaining quarter, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they headed off in whatever direction they saw fit. Some went straight north, others followed their guts and went off in random directions, and others still chose to go back into the blood ocean.
It had been decades since the tribe had earned the name of “The Peevers”. Ever since that unfortunate encounter with the small river God, the Chieftain of the Tribe called Gorchok had faced nothing but humiliation after humiliation. From being forced out of their homes all the way to being spat at when seen travelling down the banks of the World River, the Peever tribe could catch no break.
That day was no different. After having been finally driven from the safety of the World River, the Peever tribe had settled in a particularly lush oasis just a few days’ travel from the nearest settlement. They numbered fifty strong, with a few children and elderly, and life was tough but survivable. That is, until a deformed thing appeared on the horizon. It dragged itself across the sand, almost as if it had no bones, and moaned and groaned out loud as it did so.
Naturally, a group of hunters was dispatched to meet the thing. It, which looked like some sort of desiccated red-capped deformed mushroom person, did not stop crawling as they approached. Instead, it groaned and moaned even louder.
“E…. He… lp… De… ad… Run…”
The chieftain, who had now just caught up thanks to his ageing joints, looked at the biggest and buffest of the hunters and nodded his head. The beaver hunter then smashed the red-cap’s head in with his massive sandstone club, making it explode into off-white chunks… only for it to continue crawling, only this time with no sound other than the laboured ragged breads coming out of its neck.
So the hunters wailed on the mushroom-thing and eventually it stopped moving. They carried what they could back to their home, cooked it and ate very well for the first time in days.
That night a dozen bull-sized creatures the shape of which they’d never seen before crawled over the horizon and descended upon the village, where they ate very well for the first time in days.
TRANSCENDENTAL QUEST #1: Hell in Heaven
The barrier between our universe and the Outer Gods’ Realms has been bypassed. A massive portal lies at the bottom of the Blood Ocean, spewing forth creatures of unknowable intent and power.
Two Outer Beasts spawned from the portal, the Egrioth and the Drowned One.
The Egrioth is a mountain-sized beast covered in plates of bone armour. Each step it takes is like a miniature earthquake and each flap of its wings is like a storm. It has its own kind of curse-based magic and can cast body-related curses as it sees fit.
The Drowned One is a mountain-sized beast that looks like an amorphous blob of flesh. It is carried by its spawn which number in the millions and it defends itself with hordes of such spawn, which can take on many different forms. It has its own kind of curse-based magic and can assault unshielded mortals’ minds.
Outer Beasts may be injured and killed by either a God using MP, via the use of a Godbane Artifact, or by finding and exploiting its weakness until it’s rendered harmless.
Besides the Outer Beasts, near-endless hordes of lesser beasts continue to spawn from the depths of the Blood Ocean. The lesser beasts have split themselves into four groups. One stayed around the Blood Ocean, where they are building some sort of home; one tagged along with the Egrioth; one tagged along with the Drowned One; and one was given free reign to do as they wished, which mostly involves heading straight for civilised areas and killing everything to both eat and take the corpses back to their settlement.
It will take many Gods and their Heroes to hold the eventual tide of uncontrolled chaos and destruction back, and someone will have to eventually brave an expedition straight into the heart of darkness in order to seal the portal by exterminating every last trace of what used to be the Sparkfall Mind as well as sealing away the light beam that’s currently tearing up the edges of the Astral and Dream Realms.
EXPECTED POSTS FOR QUEST COMPLETION: ??
DANGER LEVEL: EXTREME