An Age of Mysterious Memories

We continue our infiltration, and I navigate as speedily as I can, but the pathing is getting trickier. My senses aren’t updating well enough to guess the safest routes towards the bottom of Al'pa’ca’s keep any longer, due to how distracted I am. That’s a bummer, and means I’m going to have to start guessing, if Te and Lil have no ideas to offer up better plans. Glancing between them, it looks like they aren’t taking this seriously, but I know nothing could be further from the truth. They might be bantering quietly, or even telepathically, but they’re as on-edge as I am, and even though we’re all hustling, we each know it could be mere minutes before a horde several thousand strong bears down on us. Huff, Hellspit and Fel fires it’s a rough mission.

It’s too bad we had to destroy those Spellknights’ suits of armor and some of their other equipment to finish them off. Some equipment retains enchantments while damaged, but theirs, much like electrical circuitry, when a single piece is too heavily damaged, the whole thing fails. I mean, if it doesn’t have parallel redundancies. Circuits in series fail is what I’m trying to—. Why am I explaining myself to myself? Ugh. Because you’re stressed Reggie, trying to keep from dwelling on heavy issues, and the implications of all the revelations and prophecies and everything else going on. What about the rude room? What about it? You’re just being weird clinging on to that one.

Am I—, yeah, yeah I’m having full on conversations with myself now. This isn’t even a coping mechanism any more. Rattling my skull, I try to orient on the path ahead of us, and just focus on taking one step at a time. Figuratively. I’m TK Surfing, because why wouldn’t I be? Every last bit of energy saved between here and the final confrontation could be that last push we need to succeed or survive. Hm, okay, the next intersection has a few options, all of them go through rooms.

Ahead and to the left is a room that looks like maybe it’s an unoccupied prison or torture chamber. There’s a lot of chains attached to the walls. Straight ahead, my thermal senses are picking up something hot, large, and moving, and my electrokinetic senses are picking up some kind of frequency off of it. If that’s some sort of robot that has radio communication or something, we do not want to alert it to our presence. Off to the right, the room that way seems like it might house active electrical experiments, and my retrocognitive senses are guessing that the tunnel on its other side wraps back around the way we came to an intersection we passed up previously to avoid several magical traps.

Well, left it is then I guess. Te glances about, and flicks her head towards the left path and the prison-looking room, and I nod for confirmation. We’d both come to the same conclusion. Lil’s attempting to not complain about the monotony of the gray tunnels that are nearly endless, broken up only by intersections, crystalline lightning conduits, or traps. As we’re approaching the room we’d elected to go through, I notice something… off. I can’t quite put my finger on it, or rather, my nose on it, since it seems to relate to scent.

Wait, nearly everything has the same odor, the same scent, the overpowering sterility of ozone, but this room we’re entering lacks it. A room in a lightning-keep with no trace of lightning? Crap. As I’m realizing a moment too late, it feels like the gravity of a thousand suns pulls me towards the floor, shattering my TK Square, sending a wave of pain shearing through my brain, and blood trickling out my nose. Gasping for breath from the pain of my own body flattening me, I try to hold my breath for the Wyverium chestplate featherlight enchantment to take hold, but there’s two problems with that. One, it’s really only active when elevated off the ground, two, it’s not an increase in weight that’s drawing me downward, it’s magnetics. Worse, the magnetics are attempting to draw the electricity out of my body painfully through my flesh.

Horrifyingly, Teuila is similarly being dragged to the floor. My Wings, the lightest, most agile, most powerful person I know, succumbing to the grounding force of a trap must feel humiliating for her. I’ll have to help her with her mindscape later. Fortunately, Lil isn’t affected by the room’s magnetic flooring, unfortunately, the chains along the walls have sprung to life and sought each of us out. The chains are trying to siphon electricity from me and Teuila, in order to electrify Lil, as we both have electric powers and electrical charges running through us, while he doesn’t. If the chains succeeded, that would likely cause him to be susceptible to the floor then as well, since the floor seems to drag down those with lightning powers. This room seems to be Al’pa’ca’s insurance against betrayers within the keep.

Well, as I’ve said before about electricity being directed towards Lil, that ain’t happening. Using my QCR I swap to the lightning-curse greaves, dragging all free-flowing electricity in the area towards me as concentrated lightning strikes. Painful, but it keeps Lil from becoming susceptible to the trapped floor. My best bud, my dragon pal Lil grunts quietly, trying to keep from roaring in frustration as he begins tearing chains out of the wall, and shattering them in his powerful jaws, or simply by flexing the muscles they’re wrapped around.

Teuila, seeing Lil’s muscles bulge effectively enough to shatter chains, does the same thing, flexing her own slender, sleek muscles against the chains that had been tightening more and more roughly around our throats and arms. The chains don’t immediately snap, since Teuila’s muscles, while impressive, aren’t many inches across each, the way that Lil’s are.

However, when Teuila begins inching her way up in order to stand anyway, while still chained, while the floor is still exerting hundreds of tons of force on us, I can’t begin to describe how impressed I am. She had no leverage, and is fighting this force with sheer, sweat-inducing determination. It’s pouring down her brow and off her slightly-freckled nose in rivulets. She begins to break a single chain with her indomitable spirit. Let no one ever tell Te that she’ll never break the chain.

When Te looks my way, still rising from a three point position, she calls out, “Hey, huff, Airhead. Remember. It’s only an illusion. You too Dragbutt.”

Doing my best to draw breath while my lungs feel like they’re being compressed into pancakes, I can’t nod or acknowledge Teuila in any way, but I get it. We’ve each got three uses per day of Lesser Shadowy Evocation, and Lesser Shadowy Conjuration. The spells can mimic anything within those schools, to a lesser degree of power, but the versatility comes with a trade-off, they’re technically only illusions. There’s some interplay with objects not being able to sense illusions, so the spells always *seem* to work on them, but then after the spells end, are revealed to not have had any effect, unless you get the desired effect and outcome before the spell wears off. For example, like dragging people and objects crashing through walls shattering those walls beyond repair, or creating an enormous steam explosion, blowing a magma worm sky high. Heh.

Mjolnir teleports to Teuila’s hand, from her dimensional sheath, a benefit I didn’t think would be coming in so handy so soon. Still, it seems to be taking all of her strength and willpower just to stand, as Lil fights his way through endless animated chains on his way to us, to help her out. I watch, heart thudding in my chest, as Teuila rises, her eyes narrowing with that fierce determination that could scare the scales off a dragon. There's a deep focus in her, a storm of her own brewing behind those determined eyes. Suddenly, I see crackles of power pouring from Teuila’s eyes. They’re less a color, and more an absence of light. As soon as I realize what she’s doing, I use my QCR to swap back to number five, the Glacial Greaves, so that I’m not wearing the lightning-cursed leg-guards any longer.

"Anti-lightning," Te murmurs, more to herself than to us. And as she does, the air around her starts to hum, a low vibration that seems to suck at the very light. She’s always been the storm, unbridled fury, and lately, lightning incarnate. But this? This is her becoming the eye, the void, where light and lightning go to die. I’d jokingly complain that that’s my domain, my purview, but holy freaking hell this is hot. Erm, I mean, impressive. Koff.

The chains around Te hesitate, as if sensing the shift, the impending doom of their purpose. She's not just resisting the magnetic pull; she's becoming anathema to it, an absence where force becomes futility. Around her, a shroud of darkness gathers, not the thick, oppressive shadow of my Void Dragon Honoris Causa that swallows sound and space, but a living, breathing absence. It's like watching the night sky without stars, the Worldstorm with the lightning inverted to dark-ning. It moves with her, writhes around her like a living thing, tendrils of obsidian energy that seep into the very chains that seek to bind her.

The darkness around her lashes out, a negative image of Thor wreathed in his crackling aura. Where his lightning dances and destroys, her anti-lightning devours and nullifies. The chains become brittle, fragile as they're starved of their purpose, of their power. She stands, and the darkness surges outward, a wave of negation that crashes against the magnetic trap, breaking its hold on us with the sheer impossibility of its existence.

The anti-lightning doesn't flash or crackle; it whispers, a purr of silk against steel, of night against day. It's the antithesis of blinding light, the soft, inexorable pull of oblivion where energy doesn't explode but implodes, collapsing into nothingness. Lil whistles a low note of appreciation, his expression one of mixed horror and admiration.

My best buddy queries, "Te, you're... what are you?"

She doesn't answer, but her smile is all the response we need. She's the anti-storm, the shadow to the lightning's gleam. And as she stands there, wreathed in her cloak of anti-lightning, I feel a flicker of hope. With Te wielding the absence of storm, maybe, just maybe, I can ignore the prophetic vision I’d had of her derezzing. Te’s anti lightning can only last about sixty seconds, but sixty seconds for Teuila, wielding Mjolnir and Jarngripr, wreathed in anti-lightning? Yeah, that’s plenty of time for her to demolish a room, before the illusory effects wear off and the state of the room returns to normal.

Thankfully Teuila plays it even smarter than that. She rescues my lame butt and ushers Lil through the trapped room out the other side. If she didn’t have Mjolnir, and whatever other affinity to storms she has, to boost her lightning, or anti-lightning, powers, that probably wouldn’t have worked so well, or at all. With this room in the way of one of the paths required to follow us, the horde behind us will either be thinned out of a good few foes who aren’t branded, or funneled through the other room, having to take even longer to catch up to us due to bottlenecking.

Before I even have to ask, grinning, Teuila answers the obvious question, “I got it from you, natch. The idea to use an opposite, an absence. Heee. Whatsamatter, you’re not jealous that you’re not the only one who gets to be cool and dark and edgy anymore, are you?”

Rolling my eyes, I can’t help snorting a laugh at Teuila’s tease, especially since she sticks her tongue out immediately after, while Lil is approaching to nuzzle her cheek. Lil ends up with a cheek full of Teuila-tongue on accident, and they both blame each other for it. I’m just trying to not double over with laughter as the two initiate their version of a Shellcracker Family Slap Fight, an SFSF. My lungs and ribs still hurt too much from that pancaking.

All in all, we were probably in the chain room from the time it activated until we exited for maybe around ten seconds, possibly less. Not even enough time for Lil to fill his lungs in case he wanted to do a full fire blast, let alone enough time for Lil to ramp up his flames hot enough to melt enchanted metal and stone. It’s a good thing we didn’t have to wait until he’d have been able to. I’d have been taking too much lingering damage. Although, I think between the gargoyle guard dogs, and that room, the lightning spirit-swarm within me, my newest symbiote, has settled in rather contentedly into my EM-field organ, and, my regeneration has started back up again. Phew. Still, being down to around two thousand or less health, out of well-over five thousand, is not a great place to be right now.

While I’d like to be able to blame the damage I’ve been taking for what I’m detecting, that wouldn’t make any more sense than any other explanation. My thermal scans after a long tunnel up ahead are… fuzzy. It’s like there’s static in a room up ahead. I have no idea how to rationalize static in thermal sensations. Determined to be better than useless, I try again with my abilities and retrocognitive data. As I stretch out my senses, probing for the lay of the land ahead, I'm met with a baffling feedback. My thermal scans, usually so precise, so revealing, are now betraying me with an indecipherable muddle. It's as though the heat signatures ahead are being scrambled.

It's like trying to listen to a radio station on a long ride when you’re leaving its range. Trying to make out one last song through a cacophony of static — each note, each instrument, normally clear and distinct, instead lost in a haze of interference. Grr, come on Reggie, figure it out. This isn't the stagnancy of a landscape chilled by a permanent dampness, nor a stable ebb and flow of living bodies nor the simmering heat of machinery. No, this is something else. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.