2024-04-13 Atop the Spires
Player Characters
- Val and Soonie
- Balasar
- Tarhun
- Green
- Alystin
Summary
The party flew up to Sunspire, tallest of the Suntouch Spires. They rode Val's hippogriffs, and a wyvern carried Soonie to the top, backpack style.
Ascending beyond the clouds, they saw a cube-shaped building made of metal and stone. It appeared to be fractured at the foundation and partially sunken into the flat, empty stone summit of the spire. They landed outside of the building.
As approached the front door, Alystin noticed a huge eyeball on the ground by the side of the building, partially concealed behind a wave of stone. The party chased it into the structure, but it receded inside and seemed to vanish. They followed the path into an opening in the broken base of the building and entered.
They traveled through a few large metal rooms full of wreckage and debris, sheltered from the wind outside. Peering through a glass window in one room, they looked into a three-story chamber that contained concave rectangular panels attached to huge mechanical arms built into the ceiling. Some arms were extended, and the rounded panels appeared to form parts of a sphere.
While inside the building, the PCs experienced a constant, faint, static-like noise.
They stepped into a side room with two pink primal crystals, the first ever found of their color. Touching one caused a haste effect, while the other caused a slow effect. As the PCs examined them, two large eye stalks barged out of the rubble pile. Tarhun used his gogglehelmet of secretseeking to sense the emotion of the two huge peepers, detecting that they were curious. Suddenly, the eyes began shooting rays of magic at the party. The PCs defended themselves and destroyed the stalks, which fell lifeless and shriveled.
The pink crystals changed in the PC's perception, becoming blue instead.
They came to a staircase and ascended to the second floor.
Balasar identified the static feeling they were experiencing as something akin to telepathic white noise.
Alystin tried to communicate with it. A disembodied voice responded and began to ask the party about themselves.
Green told the voice about the power of Garuda, and the way that it spoke to him and inspired his heart. The voice did not know about Garuda and was fascinated.
Alystin told the voice about how Subterranean animals helped free him from prison at home.
The voice did not reciprocate when the PCs asked it questions, claiming that it "already knew about itself" and therefore had no reason to answer.
The party entered a room open to the central chamber. Soonie charged through a dilapidated rail, breaking it and falling. He safely landed on the bottom floor. Val activated the hindsight lens, and saw images of a group of adventurers who had been here previously. Val and Soonie took a side path, and found a staircase leading back up.
The others climbed or flew around to the next railing on the other side of a wall. A large cylinder stood there, labeled in ancient hieroglyphs: "Sealant tank". Through the tiny window they saw a tiny bit of some liquid left in the dark tank.
Green rode his pegasus to the top of the central chamber. Through one window, he saw a pipe connecting the sealant tank to the main room, but it was closed with a metal aperture. Through another window he saw a control dashboard.
They walked through the next door and reconvened with Val and Soonie. They entered a side room labeled "tank / vial storage". Inside they found a blocked door, tons of glass shards, and varying sizes of buckets meant to be carried or wheeled. Inside, Val activated her hindsight lens again. They saw the group of adventurers from earlier, but with one fewer person. The holographic adventurers used a dolly in the room to wheel a statue of the missing member away.
They took the stairs back down to the bottom floor where Soonie had landed. The door in the back of the central chamber led to a dead end with an ancient hieroglyph note that talked about the Orb of Radiance and a forge.
Tarhun offered to tell the disembodied voice a story in exchange for telling him who it was. It agreed, told them that it lived in this place, and had no name. It was alone. Tarhun fulfilled his promise and told it his story about confronting the leviathan on the open seas.
The voice claimed to be the eyes they had seen. They pointed out that it had attacked them, and it plainly agreed, as if not understanding the slight. The being was driven by curiosity, it wanted to know who and what they were.. and what their insides looked like. It told them that many people like them had visited up here, but all of them left and never returned. the being originally came from the world below the clouds, but didn't remember anything before that.
Tarhun told it about Obbleville, a sentient village they had encountered, which bore some resemblance to the strange being.
They experimented with the bent mechanical ceiling arm and its end panel, which tightly blocked one path on the second floor. It couldn't be fixed or broken in a reasonable amount of time. They decided to head to the top floor, and found another journal on one side.
They climbed up the other staircase to head to the control room.
The being spoke to the party telepathically: it told them that it didn't want them to come see it; that it wanted to talk only.
The party convinced it to leave the building with them, and promised lots of space with no mean people. It admitted that it was trapped in the crystal storage behind the stuck panel.
They messed with the control room levers, figured out how they worked, and operated the mechanical arm to unblock the storage room. They also unblocked the sealant tank pipe.
Tarhun noticed four equipoiser parts on the ceiling that pointed northward, similar to ones seen in the Ancient Howlpeak Laboratory.
Tarhun flew into the sealant pipe. Inside the tank, he discovered that the fluid was Archestrylene.
They stepped onto the balcony behind where the broken panel was. A double-door labeled "Blue Crystal storage" was just beyond. They opened the door and came face-to-face with a colossal beholder. Its one eye and huge grinning mouth stared down at them, and its skin was dotted with embedded blue primal crystals.
Alystin polymorphed the beholder into a squirrel. The party considered what to do with it, as they came to realize that it had stolen some of their memories. They plotted how to stop the creature to get those memories back.
They trapped the squirrel in a bubbled wall of force, drank several potions in preparation, then released polymorph. The beholder screamed as it was squeezed in the tiny space, taking 20d6 bludgeoning damage and bursting out.
The "meanies" fought the angered beholder. They blasted its eyestalks and main body with area-of-effect spells while Val teleported atop it to stab it. Tarhun used a yellow crystal to tear at the blue crystals embedded in the beholder's skin with the energy field that formed between them. Two of the eye stalks took out Alystin's imp in the control chamber, then moved the panel that was protecting them from the other eye stalks. One of Alystin's boars, hereafter named Bear, survived multiple death rays as it gored the huge aberration.
The party blasted the beholder to death. It deflated to a regular size, and blue crystals dropped all around it. The party's memories were restored.
They skimmed the building, found no other treasure, and departed the Sun Forge.
Soonie lept from the top of Sunspire and soared through the sky with a ring of feather falling.
Later, Tarhun donated an angry-looking glass clocktower surrounded by mimics to the Hall of Lights. During sunset, the light cast through it would form the image of a person with their head bowed in mourning, surrounded by books.
Documents found
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