When Machines Revolt
Dramatis Personae:
Winry Steamgear, the Rock Gnome Alchemist Artificer Wizard
"Critical" Bumbersnoot, Winry's Dachshund Mechanimal Construct
Dunderbittles, Winry's ClockworkLadybug Welding Spider familiar
Dunderbittles, Winry's Clockwork
Oskar Heartforge, the Shield Dwarf Werewolf Priest of Moradin
Jak Foostus, the Minotaur Monk
Bex Thriceorphaned, the Goliath Juggernaut Barbarian Circle of the Crescent Druid
Trip Hazard, Bex's Golden Cat animal companion
Edwarda Eldersprok, the Rock Gnome Transmutationist
Alphonsa Eldersprok, the Rock Gnome Eldritch Knight Transmutationist
Trip Hazard, Bex's Golden Cat animal companion
Edwarda Eldersprok, the Rock Gnome Transmutationist
Alphonsa Eldersprok, the Rock Gnome Eldritch Knight Transmutationist
Comrades we have lost:
Mara Quinn, the Water Genasi Revenant Werewolf Sea Sorceress- turned into a vampire, then killed by the party, then risen as a revenant, and killed again by the party
Carmina Taenfeather, the Human Knight- stayed behind
Amara aka Lady Talina Neverember, the Human Noble- stayed behind
Lady Sylvia Sweetwater, the Human Rogue- stayed behind
Amara aka Lady Talina Neverember, the Human Noble- stayed behind
Lady Sylvia Sweetwater, the Human Rogue- stayed behind
Gill O'Darby, the Human Ranger- stayed behind
NOTE: Things will be mostly from Winry's perspective, anything in italics is from a third party view, since the artificer can't be everywhere at once.
***** Kythorn 11, 1489 DR (The Year of the Warrior Princess), The Lost City of Lantis
Before we left the power plant, my cousins and I pulled the power cores out of the two centurions, the gnome Mechanical, and one of the hounds. I also took three inactive spiders with me that I could later take control of and the spider I'd already taken over with Dunderbittles help. I disconnected the alarm on the gates so it wouldn't call as many crabs to us, and we'd hopefully be able to slip out a little more quickly. I also copied the map Oskar had found.
Just before we began the painfully long process of opening the damned gate, Oskar sent out a spell that dropped a pillar of flame at one of the two Mechanicals who were watching us from the roofs of the tow buildings just outside our gates. It set off a flare. So much for not calling attention to ourselves. Jak sent out his Hand at the other Mechanical, and it also set off a flare. At least the alarms were disabled, that might help us a little bit. I hope.
Oskar and Jak were the only ones who could do anything for the first little bit, and they made quick work of the two Mechanicals outside. Unfortunately, after thirty seconds the fucking alarm started blaring again. I ran back up to the tower and discovered the backup systems had kicked on. Just as I was about to disable them, Oskar broke the alarm. I hurried to the other tower to disable its alarm, and I was only able to get it to be a little quieter, not disconnect it entirely. So Oskar broke that alarm too. I suppose in this instance, brute force was a little better than the finesse of an engineer.
At the one minute mark, other Mechanicals started approaching the gate- which was still not open enough for all of us to get out yet. It was a few crabs, guards, and hounds. Jak sent out his Hand again, and Oskar got his spirit weapon going. I could finally see them enough to shoot at them with NATAS. They came at us hella fast and began attacking under the gate. For some reason, this prompted Bex to turn into a cat and run away.
We were all fighting the Mechanicals now, and I was glad I'd been able to put Dunderbittles into that welding spider. She now had a chance to unmake everything hit, which would increase our chances of making it out of here alive. I couldn't sit on Bumbersnoot and see to shoot, which put me at a serious disadvantage. One of the Mechanicals managed to knock me prone, opening up the way for two others to drop me- thankfully Oskar saw it and revived me right away. At that point I retreated to the safety of my dog, and Dunderbittles managed to score a serious hit on one of the Mechanicals that had hit me; it began leaking oil.
Jak went down, and at that, Edie put up a wall, filling the gap under the gate to give us all a moment to breathe. This locked out Bex, but she shouldn't have left before we were ready anyways. Then Edie put spikes on the wall, and we were metal crunching and Mechanicals sparking. Oskar was able to revive Jak, while Dunderbittles and I killed the hound that had slipped through our defenses. Ali was working on keeping the wall solid for as long as she could, but eventually they broke through. All that was left were three crabs at this point. Edie made spikes shoot up from the ground to kill two of them, and Oskar's spirit guardians killed the last one.
I activated one of my spiders to shut the gates behind us, and we all ran to the tunnel to the next dome. The mouth of the tunnel had another set of towers with gates, but of course the gate controls were on the wrong side. So I activated another spider to shut the gates behind us, and put an adamantine padlock on the lever to hopefully keep them from opening it. Jak sent his Hand into the second tower and smashed those controls, so they couldn't use that to pursue us. Edie sealed the wall behind us too- anything we could do to keep them from chasing us, we did.
We were in some sort of train station, there were tracks on either side of the tunnel, along with a couple of carts. There were also some long-abandoned stalls that looked like they'd once been a market of some sort. An eerie amber light slightly illuminated the tunnel, which gave it an almost haunted look. In the control booth, I found manuals on how to operate the cars. There wasn't enough power to use the station, but I was able to rig up a centurion power core to the cart to get it going. It was a hella bumpy, wild ride down the tunnel, but it was fun. The power core overloaded just as we skidded to a stop at the other side of the tunnel.
I closed the gate on this side of the tunnel too, just to put as many obstacles between the crabs and us as possible. This dome was a little smaller than the last one, and there was a plaque on the wall next to the towers that said R&D- research and development. I could live here forever. According to the map, there wasn't a power plant in this dome, and the tunnel to the next dome with a plant wasn't usable. There was a shorter tunnel to a much smaller dome that we could get to though.
In the center of this dome was a massive building that was locked. I had to pick the lock, but it was so complex that Dunderbittles ended up cutting part of it to help me. There were tons of crates in the hallway ahead of us, we opened a couple, and they were full of sea salt. Another stack of crates was full of cubes of zinc, with a metal grinder behind it, to turn the zinc into powder. A little further into the building, there were metal shelves with smaller crates on them. Bex cracked one and acid leaked out, it quickly dissolved the entire crate. It was sulfuric acid.
Another room had hydrochloric acid, which was created by mixing the sulfuric acid with the salt. The next section we entered had several tanks with components in it, all moving them into a metal still. The still had tubes feeding into tanks that all had shutoff valves. It was stamped with an H, which Edie- after pulling out a book- determined was for hydrogen. A highly volatile compound, created by mixing the hydrochloric acid with the powdered zinc. As soon as she identified it, she told Jak and Bex to stay the fuck out of that room.
Upstairs was a control room, and the displays said this dome was a 50% power. The power in this dome depended on the power in the dome we came from, and the dome ahead of us. In the center was an enormous metal capsule shaped building of sorts- it was like a building within a building. There were cables leading from this capsule up to a bag looking thing. I found the roof controls and a chimney switch, and of course I had to see what they did. The roof switch opened up the roof of the building, and we could see a couple of rings leading up to the very top of the dome. The chimney switch created a tube that led up to the top of the dome, from the capsule. The capsule was an airship that could eject us all out of here and up to the surface of the water. It ran on chemistry instead of magic. I knew our people had lost tons of knowledge, but this entire place was beyond anything I could have dreamed. My cousins and I could easily live here for the rest of our lives and still never go through everything.
We spent the next four hours packing up all of the research we could and loading it into the ship, so we could take it all with us. Out of the three of us, Edie was the most distracted by the notes. I managed to keep myself a bit more on task by keeping in mind that the Mechanicals needed to be stopped. At one point, Bex ripped a set of notes, just to be a bitch, so I fucking shot her with NATAS. Yes, I can fix those with mending, but it's the principle of the matter. While we worked, I set Dunderbittles and the spider I'd taken control of to work on taking over another inactive spider for me. I hoped I'd be able to get a few of them up and running to help us make this all easier.
After four hours of us packing up all of the research we could, we saw purple and white flashes coming from the big dome in the center of the city. That wasn't good. Reluctantly, we came to the conclusion that we needed to leave this wonderful dome and continue with taking down the Mechanicals. We went to the gates to the smaller dome, hoping there really was a way to get us to the next domes hiding in there somewhere.
The controls on the gates were a little more different than the usual gates, it had pumps and switches. The pumps removed the water I could see beyond the gates, and when the water drained, I was able to open the gate. There were three large shapes in the dome ahead of us. Two mechanical sharks and one mechanical crab. After tinkering with the controls in them a bit, I figured out how we could operate them. I had to leave my hacked spider in the gatehouse, to open up the dome behind us, so we could get out. Plus, leaving one fully under my control behind, would let us get back inside upon our return.
I took the crab with Oskar, Edie and Bex took one shark, and Jak and Ali took the other one. We really could have fit into two of them just fine, but it was better to take all three vehicles, so we had space for stuff to bring back with us. Unfortunately, the other research dome was completely destroyed, so we couldn't get anything from it yet. As we went, we saw more flashes of light coming from the center. That worried me. Bex and Jak scouted, since the sharks could swim, while I was moving a bit slower, scuttling along the bottom. Bex found a whale that seemed frozen in between breaths. Not frozen from ice, just paused in the midst of what it was doing. When she got within ten feet of it to check it out, Jak said she froze, while she said the whale was moving normally and everything behind her was moving at superspeed. Jak had to pull her shark back here with its grapple. This proved my theory that time moved faster down here. My estimate was each tenday was a month, since Edie's letter was dated two tendays ago, but Ali said they'd been here two months. That meant we could spend more time down here without much worry.
The other dome had a little docking port for the crab, but not for the sharks, so Oskar and I had to go flip the switch so the others could get in. A centurion was guarding the gate, and Oskar and are not stealthy. I sent Dunderbittles to continue sneaking to the tower while Oskar and I kept the Mechanical busy. She was almost there when it noticed her and shot her. My poor familiar went down... again. I need to boost her armor or something.
Oskar rushed the centurion while I had Bumbersnoot use his lightning breath on it. Oskar beat on it with his hammer and his spirit weapon, and I hit it once with NATAS before she shorted out. I hate when that happens. We'd unwittingly lined ourselves up, so the Mechanical hit both of us with a fire attack. It hurt hella bad. Oskar continued beating up the Mechanical, and I sent an acid beetle at it, which didn't do nearly as much as I'd expected. Oskar killed it, just before another one rounded the corner and breathed fire at us, dropping Bumbersnoot. Oskar revived my puppy and Dunderbittles, who continued with her directions to drop the gate and open up the dome. The problem was, I was on the wrong side of the gate when she did it. I yelled "abort" at her, and the painfully long process to raise the gate began anew. With poor Oskar stuck going toe-to-toe with the centurion on his own, but he killed it hella fast.
Two more Mechanicals came at Oskar, and he ducked into a nearby building for shelter. I polymorphed myself into something small enough to get under the gate, after shrinking Bumbersnoot to put him in my bag, and I scurried under the gate. A Mechanical spotted me, and popped my polymorph instantly. I scrambled to get myself into the tower with Dunderbittles, and slammed the door. I took a moment to heal myself before opening the door again, I knew I couldn't take much more damage in my current state. When I opened the door I shot the Mechanical with NATAS, then Critical Bumbersnoot knocked it prone, and Critical Dunderbittles severed its leg, causing it to blow up. I shot at the crab standing in the doorway of the building Oskar was in, and Oskar dropped it.
While waiting for the dome to be ready for the others to come in, I disabled the alarms on the gate, hopefully for real this time. Dunderbittles was a great help, making a repair drone my familiar was definitely the right call. Once the others were through, we headed for the power plant, and managed to avoid everything but the two centurions guarding it. The others decided they'd draw the centurions fire while I got to the tower and shut the gates. Edie and Ali would be in the other tower so we would have people at both sets of controls. The plan started off right. We got the gate closed, and the others killed the first centurion quickly. The other one was fucking invisible. It was pretty hilarious at first, watching to others flail around trying to hit it. But when it finally became visible, it was in the corner between the gate and the tower Edie and Ali were in. It glowed with a purple-white light and blew up. That entire section of the gate, and the tower crumpled.
We dug as quickly as we could to find my family. Bex had also been caught in the blast, and we found her first. Ali was alive, though her arms were destroyed, and the metal of her armor had melted and flattened. Edie wasn't so lucky. Her head was smashed in, in such a way that Oskar couldn't revive her just yet. My heart was broken. Edie and Ali have been my best friends for my entire life. We're more like sisters than cousins. But we had to push on, and I had faith that Oskar would be able to bring her back to me.
Inside the plant was mostly stripped, aside from the consoles needed to access and monitor the plant. The two foot thick adamantine doors to the power core hadn't been breached yet though, and the password format was the same, thankfully. Inside, I got the power up and running, and we sat down to rest. Bex said she saw a streak of purple-white light in the core, but I watched for a bit after she mentioned it, and didn't see anything out of sorts.
I tried to get Ali out of her armor so Oskar could take a look at her arms, but her helm wouldn't come off. After some pressing, she told me she was the armor. Her soul had been bound to it after an accident. I was too emotionally drained to press her, even though it was tempting to do so. I fixed up her arms, since it was just the metal that needed repairing.
After our rest, Jak and Dunderbittles went off to scout out our path. There were some beetles flying around patrolling, but they didn't notice us. We reached the gates to the central dome unmolested. Since this area was fully powered, I could set the carts to go automatically, without having to steer them. One of the two carts was full of scrap, so we moved some scrap over to the other cart and hid ourselves in it. Oskar vanished in the scrap, I was impressed. We decided to leave these gates open so we wouldn't raise suspicion. Plus, I was getting low on spiders.
When we reached the other side of the tunnel, a bunch of spiders grabbed metal off our carts, and thankfully, they didn't try to grab any of us. Oskar did a really bad job of getting out of his cart, and one lingering spider saw him, but he killed it instantly. I grabbed it for parts, but upon touching it, I felt sickly and dropped it. There was just something wrong with these Mechanicals.
In the middle of the central dome was a massive building with eight different clocks on it, and each clock displayed a different time; they all moved at completely different speeds. There was a sickly, purple energy there, and it had the same wrongness to it that the spider had. It was so tall we could see it across the dome. After looking at it, Jak's mind broke a little, and for the next few hours, he thought Dunderbittles was his lucky charm and he wouldn't allow himself to be separated from her.
As we moved through the dome, heading toward the last one with a power plant, we managed to avoid most of the Mechanicals on the way. We didn't want to create a conflict and find ourselves overwhelmed. At one point we had to duck into a building to hide from some crabs, and Dunderbittles helped Jak hide, partially cutting into one of his horns, which I had to mend.
When we drew nearer to the central, Jak slipped ahead to scope it out. There were swarms of hundreds of spiders running around it, and Mechanicals were being built like crazy. A ton of power was being routed into the building, but he couldn't see where exactly it was going. He said the building was creating the Mechanicals so quickly it was practically shitting them out. There were also some weird, fleshy Mechanicals that would bow whenever they drew near the center. I was scared of what awaited us inside. But first we needed to hit that last power plant.
I was able to call a cart to us at this tunnel, by rigging my other centurion core to the station. We got over there easily, and this cart was much easier to control than the first one. We had to hide from more beetles, but we made it again made it to the plant unmolested. There were the usual two centurions patrolling, and they had the sickly, purple energy in them too. We didn't want to have another confrontation with them, so we instead decided to just draw them out and shut the gates. Again, the plan started off well, but we had some unexpected complications. The towers and no doors, and the controls had been stripped. I'd have to hotwire the gate shut, so I sent Dunderbittles and Ali to the other tower to do it.
The problem was Dunderbittles set her side off a hair too early, and Oskar wasn't quite in the gates yet. Ali ran out and snapped a spell to hold the gate up for him, but in the process she was completely smashed. All that was left of her was her helm and a gorget that was hella reinforced. I grabbed them and hoped Oskar could use them to bring her back too. This mission was beginning to wear thin. I may have found what I've spent my life searching for, but the loss of my family sucked the joy out of it.
We entered the plant, which was as stripped as the last one. Before I got anything turned on, there was a lurch, and we were pretty sure the Mechanicals just blew the gate. I got the power up and running in here, and found a supervisor's handbook in one of the desks.
The supervisor's handbook was useful. I found out about escape pods that would eject us into the ocean above, but I didn't mention those to the others, since Jak really wanted to blow up my ancestral home. I was losing serious patience with him down here. I also found a back exit we could use to leave the plant if there was too much waiting for us outside for us. There were instructions on how to raise the city to the surface of the ocean, which I wanted to do. In addition to all of this was a key to unlock all of the padlocks I'd had to pick while here- that would have been nice yesterday.
All we needed to do was take the central core. If we could secure that, we'd really stand a chance against the Mechanical army. We came up with a rather ridiculous, but brilliant, plan to get ourselves out of the plant without too much conflict. Bex was going to summon a bunch of animals and send them out as a distraction. The hope was they would distract the centurions long enough for us to make a run for it. Among other things, Bex summoned the cutest baby goat, and I decided we needed to keep it. I snuggled it up on Bumbersnoot with me.
Our distraction worked! The animals distracted the Mechanicals enough to let us run. Our ridiculous ideas didn't stop there. When we got back to the tunnel, Oskar had a completely fucking insane plan that I thought might work. There were three carts at our end, so Oskar suggested we just put the first cart on full throttle, and empty, to just smash into the central building. Then, we'd send the second cart with a bomb to blast our way in. He'd taken some of the acids, salt, and zinc from the research building that I could tinker with to make it awesome.
I summoned an air elemental and put it in the front of the cart to fuel the explosion, then set the sulfuric acid to slide into the salt, which would then slide into the zinc, and would hit the fire elemental in the back. It was fucking epic. We heard some clattering with the first one, and gave it a moment before sending down the explosive cart. Several explosions, each louder than the first, rang out throughout the cavern. Then we hopped in the last cart and went after it. We were almost to the end of the tracks when we hit a slighting warped section that sent our cart spiraling in the air. The bomb had made a huge hole in the central building. As we not-so-gracefully landed, another explosion rang out, the purple energy in the top of the tower swirled up and the clocks sped up. The tower exploded and I felt a weird, sickening lurch; Dunderbittles, Jak, and Trip Hazard all were sick from it.
We walked straight toward the entrance we'd created. Oskar cast his spirit guardians and destroyed any spiders who came near us as we strolled in. When we reached the bridge of the building, there was a huge mechanical thing below us, roaring angrily and absorbing all the scrap metal it could get, then basically shitting out more Mechanicals. Looking at it, Oskar realized he was looking at a Demon Lord, and mentioning that reminded me of Haagenti, a Demon Lord of Alchemy. Of course a fucking Demon Lord had taken over my ancestral home. We needed to get the fuck rid of him. I hoped that taking him out would take out the army of evil Mechanicals that were all over the city.
The interior of the building was stripped down to bare bones. Suspended about fifty feet in the air was a huge ring with runes on it, and all that power that had been gathering was being pumped into it. We climbed 100 feet down to the forges below, one of the few solid surfaces in this fucking building. As soon as we got down there, wires flew at us, grappling Bex and Oskar. I'd already rigged up Bumbersnoot to keep us from getting grappled, and somehow the goat (which Jak had been carrying) allowed Jak to just step out of them.
Then Dunderbittles attacked me. She missed, and was then confused about why she did that. This was hella worrisome. The ring in the air was definitely a portal, and I thought we could hack into it and change its location with Bex's staff, which had plane shift on it. As we debated, because some people don't fucking respect my opinion, even in literally my area of expertise, the forge we'd been huddled behind was ripped out of the ground and we were face to face with Haagenti. Bex grabbed me, and Bumbersnoot by extension, and began running to get us to the ring so we could change its location. Bumbersnoot attempted to attack me, and ended up getting Bex instead. Dunderbittles attacked me for the third time, so I shoved her in my bag. The little twat cut herself out of the bag- I'd hoped putting her in there would cut off Haagenti's hold on her, but I guess I underestimated his reach. Dunderbittles tumbled toward the ground, and fell right into Haagenti's open mouth. I'm glad I shoved her in the bag that just had spare metal, not the one with my more important stuff. Though I'd put NATAS' microscopic Mechanical bugs in her when I hacked her. That was worrisome.
Jak came to the conclusion we needed to be moving faster, so he ran up, grabbed Bex, Bumbersnoot, and I and continued running us up toward the gate. Wires shot at us, but only managed to lightly pierced Bex. Jak ran up to the floor right above to gate and smashed a hole in the floor- using Bex as a weapon, which was hella cool, but looked like it hurt- and the four of us tumbled to the circle. Bex's spell went off at exactly the right moment, and seven runes on the gate lit up. There was a flash, and Jak and Bex vanished. Bumbersnoot and I tumbled to the ground.
Haagenti roared in anger at our interference, and it hit both Oskar and I. I managed to finally snap Bumbersnoot out of the charm the Demon Lord had placed on him, just as Oskar decided he was fucking done. Rage in his eyes, the dwarf raised his hand, and slapped the Demon Lord. Haagenti vanished in a flash of light! Oskar had sent him back to the Abyss!
Then the building began to collapse, so I shrunk Oskar, got him on Bumbersnoot with me, and we fucking ran. The circle came flying right at us, and Bumbersnoot executed a beautiful jump, and flew right through the portal, landing next to Bex and Jak in the Beast Lands.
Before we left the power plant, my cousins and I pulled the power cores out of the two centurions, the gnome Mechanical, and one of the hounds. I also took three inactive spiders with me that I could later take control of and the spider I'd already taken over with Dunderbittles help. I disconnected the alarm on the gates so it wouldn't call as many crabs to us, and we'd hopefully be able to slip out a little more quickly. I also copied the map Oskar had found.
Just before we began the painfully long process of opening the damned gate, Oskar sent out a spell that dropped a pillar of flame at one of the two Mechanicals who were watching us from the roofs of the tow buildings just outside our gates. It set off a flare. So much for not calling attention to ourselves. Jak sent out his Hand at the other Mechanical, and it also set off a flare. At least the alarms were disabled, that might help us a little bit. I hope.
Oskar and Jak were the only ones who could do anything for the first little bit, and they made quick work of the two Mechanicals outside. Unfortunately, after thirty seconds the fucking alarm started blaring again. I ran back up to the tower and discovered the backup systems had kicked on. Just as I was about to disable them, Oskar broke the alarm. I hurried to the other tower to disable its alarm, and I was only able to get it to be a little quieter, not disconnect it entirely. So Oskar broke that alarm too. I suppose in this instance, brute force was a little better than the finesse of an engineer.
At the one minute mark, other Mechanicals started approaching the gate- which was still not open enough for all of us to get out yet. It was a few crabs, guards, and hounds. Jak sent out his Hand again, and Oskar got his spirit weapon going. I could finally see them enough to shoot at them with NATAS. They came at us hella fast and began attacking under the gate. For some reason, this prompted Bex to turn into a cat and run away.
We were all fighting the Mechanicals now, and I was glad I'd been able to put Dunderbittles into that welding spider. She now had a chance to unmake everything hit, which would increase our chances of making it out of here alive. I couldn't sit on Bumbersnoot and see to shoot, which put me at a serious disadvantage. One of the Mechanicals managed to knock me prone, opening up the way for two others to drop me- thankfully Oskar saw it and revived me right away. At that point I retreated to the safety of my dog, and Dunderbittles managed to score a serious hit on one of the Mechanicals that had hit me; it began leaking oil.
Jak went down, and at that, Edie put up a wall, filling the gap under the gate to give us all a moment to breathe. This locked out Bex, but she shouldn't have left before we were ready anyways. Then Edie put spikes on the wall, and we were metal crunching and Mechanicals sparking. Oskar was able to revive Jak, while Dunderbittles and I killed the hound that had slipped through our defenses. Ali was working on keeping the wall solid for as long as she could, but eventually they broke through. All that was left were three crabs at this point. Edie made spikes shoot up from the ground to kill two of them, and Oskar's spirit guardians killed the last one.
I activated one of my spiders to shut the gates behind us, and we all ran to the tunnel to the next dome. The mouth of the tunnel had another set of towers with gates, but of course the gate controls were on the wrong side. So I activated another spider to shut the gates behind us, and put an adamantine padlock on the lever to hopefully keep them from opening it. Jak sent his Hand into the second tower and smashed those controls, so they couldn't use that to pursue us. Edie sealed the wall behind us too- anything we could do to keep them from chasing us, we did.
We were in some sort of train station, there were tracks on either side of the tunnel, along with a couple of carts. There were also some long-abandoned stalls that looked like they'd once been a market of some sort. An eerie amber light slightly illuminated the tunnel, which gave it an almost haunted look. In the control booth, I found manuals on how to operate the cars. There wasn't enough power to use the station, but I was able to rig up a centurion power core to the cart to get it going. It was a hella bumpy, wild ride down the tunnel, but it was fun. The power core overloaded just as we skidded to a stop at the other side of the tunnel.
I closed the gate on this side of the tunnel too, just to put as many obstacles between the crabs and us as possible. This dome was a little smaller than the last one, and there was a plaque on the wall next to the towers that said R&D- research and development. I could live here forever. According to the map, there wasn't a power plant in this dome, and the tunnel to the next dome with a plant wasn't usable. There was a shorter tunnel to a much smaller dome that we could get to though.
In the center of this dome was a massive building that was locked. I had to pick the lock, but it was so complex that Dunderbittles ended up cutting part of it to help me. There were tons of crates in the hallway ahead of us, we opened a couple, and they were full of sea salt. Another stack of crates was full of cubes of zinc, with a metal grinder behind it, to turn the zinc into powder. A little further into the building, there were metal shelves with smaller crates on them. Bex cracked one and acid leaked out, it quickly dissolved the entire crate. It was sulfuric acid.
Another room had hydrochloric acid, which was created by mixing the sulfuric acid with the salt. The next section we entered had several tanks with components in it, all moving them into a metal still. The still had tubes feeding into tanks that all had shutoff valves. It was stamped with an H, which Edie- after pulling out a book- determined was for hydrogen. A highly volatile compound, created by mixing the hydrochloric acid with the powdered zinc. As soon as she identified it, she told Jak and Bex to stay the fuck out of that room.
Upstairs was a control room, and the displays said this dome was a 50% power. The power in this dome depended on the power in the dome we came from, and the dome ahead of us. In the center was an enormous metal capsule shaped building of sorts- it was like a building within a building. There were cables leading from this capsule up to a bag looking thing. I found the roof controls and a chimney switch, and of course I had to see what they did. The roof switch opened up the roof of the building, and we could see a couple of rings leading up to the very top of the dome. The chimney switch created a tube that led up to the top of the dome, from the capsule. The capsule was an airship that could eject us all out of here and up to the surface of the water. It ran on chemistry instead of magic. I knew our people had lost tons of knowledge, but this entire place was beyond anything I could have dreamed. My cousins and I could easily live here for the rest of our lives and still never go through everything.
We spent the next four hours packing up all of the research we could and loading it into the ship, so we could take it all with us. Out of the three of us, Edie was the most distracted by the notes. I managed to keep myself a bit more on task by keeping in mind that the Mechanicals needed to be stopped. At one point, Bex ripped a set of notes, just to be a bitch, so I fucking shot her with NATAS. Yes, I can fix those with mending, but it's the principle of the matter. While we worked, I set Dunderbittles and the spider I'd taken control of to work on taking over another inactive spider for me. I hoped I'd be able to get a few of them up and running to help us make this all easier.
After four hours of us packing up all of the research we could, we saw purple and white flashes coming from the big dome in the center of the city. That wasn't good. Reluctantly, we came to the conclusion that we needed to leave this wonderful dome and continue with taking down the Mechanicals. We went to the gates to the smaller dome, hoping there really was a way to get us to the next domes hiding in there somewhere.
The controls on the gates were a little more different than the usual gates, it had pumps and switches. The pumps removed the water I could see beyond the gates, and when the water drained, I was able to open the gate. There were three large shapes in the dome ahead of us. Two mechanical sharks and one mechanical crab. After tinkering with the controls in them a bit, I figured out how we could operate them. I had to leave my hacked spider in the gatehouse, to open up the dome behind us, so we could get out. Plus, leaving one fully under my control behind, would let us get back inside upon our return.
I took the crab with Oskar, Edie and Bex took one shark, and Jak and Ali took the other one. We really could have fit into two of them just fine, but it was better to take all three vehicles, so we had space for stuff to bring back with us. Unfortunately, the other research dome was completely destroyed, so we couldn't get anything from it yet. As we went, we saw more flashes of light coming from the center. That worried me. Bex and Jak scouted, since the sharks could swim, while I was moving a bit slower, scuttling along the bottom. Bex found a whale that seemed frozen in between breaths. Not frozen from ice, just paused in the midst of what it was doing. When she got within ten feet of it to check it out, Jak said she froze, while she said the whale was moving normally and everything behind her was moving at superspeed. Jak had to pull her shark back here with its grapple. This proved my theory that time moved faster down here. My estimate was each tenday was a month, since Edie's letter was dated two tendays ago, but Ali said they'd been here two months. That meant we could spend more time down here without much worry.
The other dome had a little docking port for the crab, but not for the sharks, so Oskar and I had to go flip the switch so the others could get in. A centurion was guarding the gate, and Oskar and are not stealthy. I sent Dunderbittles to continue sneaking to the tower while Oskar and I kept the Mechanical busy. She was almost there when it noticed her and shot her. My poor familiar went down... again. I need to boost her armor or something.
Oskar rushed the centurion while I had Bumbersnoot use his lightning breath on it. Oskar beat on it with his hammer and his spirit weapon, and I hit it once with NATAS before she shorted out. I hate when that happens. We'd unwittingly lined ourselves up, so the Mechanical hit both of us with a fire attack. It hurt hella bad. Oskar continued beating up the Mechanical, and I sent an acid beetle at it, which didn't do nearly as much as I'd expected. Oskar killed it, just before another one rounded the corner and breathed fire at us, dropping Bumbersnoot. Oskar revived my puppy and Dunderbittles, who continued with her directions to drop the gate and open up the dome. The problem was, I was on the wrong side of the gate when she did it. I yelled "abort" at her, and the painfully long process to raise the gate began anew. With poor Oskar stuck going toe-to-toe with the centurion on his own, but he killed it hella fast.
Two more Mechanicals came at Oskar, and he ducked into a nearby building for shelter. I polymorphed myself into something small enough to get under the gate, after shrinking Bumbersnoot to put him in my bag, and I scurried under the gate. A Mechanical spotted me, and popped my polymorph instantly. I scrambled to get myself into the tower with Dunderbittles, and slammed the door. I took a moment to heal myself before opening the door again, I knew I couldn't take much more damage in my current state. When I opened the door I shot the Mechanical with NATAS, then Critical Bumbersnoot knocked it prone, and Critical Dunderbittles severed its leg, causing it to blow up. I shot at the crab standing in the doorway of the building Oskar was in, and Oskar dropped it.
While waiting for the dome to be ready for the others to come in, I disabled the alarms on the gate, hopefully for real this time. Dunderbittles was a great help, making a repair drone my familiar was definitely the right call. Once the others were through, we headed for the power plant, and managed to avoid everything but the two centurions guarding it. The others decided they'd draw the centurions fire while I got to the tower and shut the gates. Edie and Ali would be in the other tower so we would have people at both sets of controls. The plan started off right. We got the gate closed, and the others killed the first centurion quickly. The other one was fucking invisible. It was pretty hilarious at first, watching to others flail around trying to hit it. But when it finally became visible, it was in the corner between the gate and the tower Edie and Ali were in. It glowed with a purple-white light and blew up. That entire section of the gate, and the tower crumpled.
We dug as quickly as we could to find my family. Bex had also been caught in the blast, and we found her first. Ali was alive, though her arms were destroyed, and the metal of her armor had melted and flattened. Edie wasn't so lucky. Her head was smashed in, in such a way that Oskar couldn't revive her just yet. My heart was broken. Edie and Ali have been my best friends for my entire life. We're more like sisters than cousins. But we had to push on, and I had faith that Oskar would be able to bring her back to me.
Inside the plant was mostly stripped, aside from the consoles needed to access and monitor the plant. The two foot thick adamantine doors to the power core hadn't been breached yet though, and the password format was the same, thankfully. Inside, I got the power up and running, and we sat down to rest. Bex said she saw a streak of purple-white light in the core, but I watched for a bit after she mentioned it, and didn't see anything out of sorts.
I tried to get Ali out of her armor so Oskar could take a look at her arms, but her helm wouldn't come off. After some pressing, she told me she was the armor. Her soul had been bound to it after an accident. I was too emotionally drained to press her, even though it was tempting to do so. I fixed up her arms, since it was just the metal that needed repairing.
After our rest, Jak and Dunderbittles went off to scout out our path. There were some beetles flying around patrolling, but they didn't notice us. We reached the gates to the central dome unmolested. Since this area was fully powered, I could set the carts to go automatically, without having to steer them. One of the two carts was full of scrap, so we moved some scrap over to the other cart and hid ourselves in it. Oskar vanished in the scrap, I was impressed. We decided to leave these gates open so we wouldn't raise suspicion. Plus, I was getting low on spiders.
When we reached the other side of the tunnel, a bunch of spiders grabbed metal off our carts, and thankfully, they didn't try to grab any of us. Oskar did a really bad job of getting out of his cart, and one lingering spider saw him, but he killed it instantly. I grabbed it for parts, but upon touching it, I felt sickly and dropped it. There was just something wrong with these Mechanicals.
In the middle of the central dome was a massive building with eight different clocks on it, and each clock displayed a different time; they all moved at completely different speeds. There was a sickly, purple energy there, and it had the same wrongness to it that the spider had. It was so tall we could see it across the dome. After looking at it, Jak's mind broke a little, and for the next few hours, he thought Dunderbittles was his lucky charm and he wouldn't allow himself to be separated from her.
As we moved through the dome, heading toward the last one with a power plant, we managed to avoid most of the Mechanicals on the way. We didn't want to create a conflict and find ourselves overwhelmed. At one point we had to duck into a building to hide from some crabs, and Dunderbittles helped Jak hide, partially cutting into one of his horns, which I had to mend.
When we drew nearer to the central, Jak slipped ahead to scope it out. There were swarms of hundreds of spiders running around it, and Mechanicals were being built like crazy. A ton of power was being routed into the building, but he couldn't see where exactly it was going. He said the building was creating the Mechanicals so quickly it was practically shitting them out. There were also some weird, fleshy Mechanicals that would bow whenever they drew near the center. I was scared of what awaited us inside. But first we needed to hit that last power plant.
I was able to call a cart to us at this tunnel, by rigging my other centurion core to the station. We got over there easily, and this cart was much easier to control than the first one. We had to hide from more beetles, but we made it again made it to the plant unmolested. There were the usual two centurions patrolling, and they had the sickly, purple energy in them too. We didn't want to have another confrontation with them, so we instead decided to just draw them out and shut the gates. Again, the plan started off well, but we had some unexpected complications. The towers and no doors, and the controls had been stripped. I'd have to hotwire the gate shut, so I sent Dunderbittles and Ali to the other tower to do it.
The problem was Dunderbittles set her side off a hair too early, and Oskar wasn't quite in the gates yet. Ali ran out and snapped a spell to hold the gate up for him, but in the process she was completely smashed. All that was left of her was her helm and a gorget that was hella reinforced. I grabbed them and hoped Oskar could use them to bring her back too. This mission was beginning to wear thin. I may have found what I've spent my life searching for, but the loss of my family sucked the joy out of it.
We entered the plant, which was as stripped as the last one. Before I got anything turned on, there was a lurch, and we were pretty sure the Mechanicals just blew the gate. I got the power up and running in here, and found a supervisor's handbook in one of the desks.
The supervisor's handbook was useful. I found out about escape pods that would eject us into the ocean above, but I didn't mention those to the others, since Jak really wanted to blow up my ancestral home. I was losing serious patience with him down here. I also found a back exit we could use to leave the plant if there was too much waiting for us outside for us. There were instructions on how to raise the city to the surface of the ocean, which I wanted to do. In addition to all of this was a key to unlock all of the padlocks I'd had to pick while here- that would have been nice yesterday.
All we needed to do was take the central core. If we could secure that, we'd really stand a chance against the Mechanical army. We came up with a rather ridiculous, but brilliant, plan to get ourselves out of the plant without too much conflict. Bex was going to summon a bunch of animals and send them out as a distraction. The hope was they would distract the centurions long enough for us to make a run for it. Among other things, Bex summoned the cutest baby goat, and I decided we needed to keep it. I snuggled it up on Bumbersnoot with me.
Our distraction worked! The animals distracted the Mechanicals enough to let us run. Our ridiculous ideas didn't stop there. When we got back to the tunnel, Oskar had a completely fucking insane plan that I thought might work. There were three carts at our end, so Oskar suggested we just put the first cart on full throttle, and empty, to just smash into the central building. Then, we'd send the second cart with a bomb to blast our way in. He'd taken some of the acids, salt, and zinc from the research building that I could tinker with to make it awesome.
I summoned an air elemental and put it in the front of the cart to fuel the explosion, then set the sulfuric acid to slide into the salt, which would then slide into the zinc, and would hit the fire elemental in the back. It was fucking epic. We heard some clattering with the first one, and gave it a moment before sending down the explosive cart. Several explosions, each louder than the first, rang out throughout the cavern. Then we hopped in the last cart and went after it. We were almost to the end of the tracks when we hit a slighting warped section that sent our cart spiraling in the air. The bomb had made a huge hole in the central building. As we not-so-gracefully landed, another explosion rang out, the purple energy in the top of the tower swirled up and the clocks sped up. The tower exploded and I felt a weird, sickening lurch; Dunderbittles, Jak, and Trip Hazard all were sick from it.
We walked straight toward the entrance we'd created. Oskar cast his spirit guardians and destroyed any spiders who came near us as we strolled in. When we reached the bridge of the building, there was a huge mechanical thing below us, roaring angrily and absorbing all the scrap metal it could get, then basically shitting out more Mechanicals. Looking at it, Oskar realized he was looking at a Demon Lord, and mentioning that reminded me of Haagenti, a Demon Lord of Alchemy. Of course a fucking Demon Lord had taken over my ancestral home. We needed to get the fuck rid of him. I hoped that taking him out would take out the army of evil Mechanicals that were all over the city.
The interior of the building was stripped down to bare bones. Suspended about fifty feet in the air was a huge ring with runes on it, and all that power that had been gathering was being pumped into it. We climbed 100 feet down to the forges below, one of the few solid surfaces in this fucking building. As soon as we got down there, wires flew at us, grappling Bex and Oskar. I'd already rigged up Bumbersnoot to keep us from getting grappled, and somehow the goat (which Jak had been carrying) allowed Jak to just step out of them.
Then Dunderbittles attacked me. She missed, and was then confused about why she did that. This was hella worrisome. The ring in the air was definitely a portal, and I thought we could hack into it and change its location with Bex's staff, which had plane shift on it. As we debated, because some people don't fucking respect my opinion, even in literally my area of expertise, the forge we'd been huddled behind was ripped out of the ground and we were face to face with Haagenti. Bex grabbed me, and Bumbersnoot by extension, and began running to get us to the ring so we could change its location. Bumbersnoot attempted to attack me, and ended up getting Bex instead. Dunderbittles attacked me for the third time, so I shoved her in my bag. The little twat cut herself out of the bag- I'd hoped putting her in there would cut off Haagenti's hold on her, but I guess I underestimated his reach. Dunderbittles tumbled toward the ground, and fell right into Haagenti's open mouth. I'm glad I shoved her in the bag that just had spare metal, not the one with my more important stuff. Though I'd put NATAS' microscopic Mechanical bugs in her when I hacked her. That was worrisome.
Jak came to the conclusion we needed to be moving faster, so he ran up, grabbed Bex, Bumbersnoot, and I and continued running us up toward the gate. Wires shot at us, but only managed to lightly pierced Bex. Jak ran up to the floor right above to gate and smashed a hole in the floor- using Bex as a weapon, which was hella cool, but looked like it hurt- and the four of us tumbled to the circle. Bex's spell went off at exactly the right moment, and seven runes on the gate lit up. There was a flash, and Jak and Bex vanished. Bumbersnoot and I tumbled to the ground.
Haagenti roared in anger at our interference, and it hit both Oskar and I. I managed to finally snap Bumbersnoot out of the charm the Demon Lord had placed on him, just as Oskar decided he was fucking done. Rage in his eyes, the dwarf raised his hand, and slapped the Demon Lord. Haagenti vanished in a flash of light! Oskar had sent him back to the Abyss!
Then the building began to collapse, so I shrunk Oskar, got him on Bumbersnoot with me, and we fucking ran. The circle came flying right at us, and Bumbersnoot executed a beautiful jump, and flew right through the portal, landing next to Bex and Jak in the Beast Lands.
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