Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

The Season of Still Stone

Were you like the Burnlanders unable to see anything but living light you might have thought the sights before your mind's eye a glamor for every line of the olive skinned face of the woman before you was rendered with arcane precision, from the wrinkles on her forehead to the bags beneath her eyes, but you do not see a hint of temperature bleed behind her even though she is standing in what looks like a truly enormous cave the sort that only the fires of the deep earth could hope to warm. Her hair was shorn tight to the head, so as not to get in the way of a helm perhaps. Her eyes were bright amethyst like gemstones deep-sunken, recalling faces glimpsed in a dream. Half-faded bruises marked her face a healing half done

Her tone is harried as one might expect, eyes darting off to the side even as she gives her report: "This is Mirror Base Tranquility, Legion Claw Commander Ather reporting. Dimensional breaches all along the expanse between the Temple Pillars of Curchanus and Jaidi. They come not afoot bot on the back of wild Shantaks that we have driven from the Vale of Plenty Arcanum Mages are reporting a sudden surge of of power along the leylines and then... and then..." Her voice breaks and for a moment you think that she will turn away. "The whole of Somal shifted, every instrument, every wayfinder detected anomalous movement Fifteen point eight two thousand clicks. The axiomite laborers went mad... How? I can't explain it, I can barely believe it myself, but I saw three of the Arcanum masters slain as though by maddened beasts, others gouged out their own eyes and fell comatose to the ground. They bled out, we had to let them bleed..."

The message of the far distant and you suspect long dead Burnlander pleads with you for the absolution you cannot give her for you do not know her, but you can hear the pain and the despair all too well.

"All the healing magic except the Wands of Wellness failed. Hyerophant Bal'el is the most senior person on base, but I don't think... he's in any fit state to be left out of his room. He is weeping, claiming that the demons are right when they say... " She shakes her head. "Well it doesn't matter that they are saying, they are bloody mad demons aren't they. The spindle-men will have my head for ever repeating this over far-caster assuming we live and I have every plan to live. We are not just going to roll over for the damn pit-spawn. "

Behind her you can hear a few more ragged voices cheering, though they are as ragged as the woman as captain Ather looks.

"We will be launching the reentry pods pods, assuming we can get to them but none of us has the new codes. The star-heads, that is master mages. Fuck! They changed them at the last magic disruption half a moonturn ago citing fears of rebellion. All of it was drake shit, but we have to evacuate now. We need the master codes."

Something booms behind her, deep and sonorous, like a great sheet of metal being struck by a giant's hammer, then a rattling sounds unlike anything you have ever heard in your life that goes on and on for a long moment as the woman at the other end starts going though coordinates, the names of other bases like this one. It is too late, you know it with the sinking certainty of someone witnessing a traveler sink into black sand, the sounds of battle are replaced by the sound of pained hysterical laughter that sound ripped from bleeding throats and interspersed between them.

Memory limit reached. Cycling.

The words are like ice water upon your mind and then the message starts again from the beginning.

The question appears on another layer of perception almost mocking in its simplicity.

Send Codes? Y/N

Tears stinging at the corners of your eyes you reach out for the negative but the cynical voice of this strange place, the data bank asks again:

Confirmation?

This place is a tomb, it's been a toms for who knows how long....

10,973 Solar Cycles, the device answers. The Mark VII Adamantine Reentry Capsules are rated for 33,000 Solar Cycles of operation to account for the possibility of encountering temporal anomalies in the Black Heavens. They provide stasis for the crew should they have reached their intended destinations. Remote Launch for the capsules can be routed though this terminal

What do you do?

[] Send the codes, launch the capsules, if there is even the smallest chance of someone getting out alive from that madness you have to give it to them

[] No, those demons sounded far too close, you do not want your friends 'reentering the world' whatever that means

OOC: Vote for the files to access still open, but you will have to revote and include what to do about the message

The Season of Still Stone

It seems like madness, a span of time unimaginably vast, a place you cannot imagine, but if someone, somehow managed to get out of that place alive who are you to bar their final escape? So wordlessly you send the confirmation, the answer long sought. All you hear is a soft chime in your ear like a silver hammer almost beyond the edge of hearing, then scrolling beyond your mind's eye a list bewildering shapes stone outcroppings rising in jagged towers and impossible buttresses, falling into a carpet of rolling green dotted with towers of brown crowned with more swaying green. The colors are so bright they burn the eye, the contours so alien they bedevil the mind. You see water cut the land like a knife of foaming white only to descend into meandering courses. Dizzy and unarmored, without a sense of scale or of the height to which your mind's eye has been raised you grit your teeth and focus on remembering as many of the more notable parts hoping that you can make some sense of what is before you.

Let the sound of water be thy guide, the old saw floats though your head and you start tracing the courses of water from the broken pillars down to the wide lake, but something niggles at you, something about that message. Though you are not sure how long a solar cycle lasts you know that this place has lain dead for long enough that all which remains is ash and stone. Water changes.

"Rotate, rise, repeat," you send message after message into the ether. Finally one of them seems to do the job, instead of rushing down into the 'bunkers' the perspective rises once more to its original configuration and this time instead of using the fickle rivers you mark crests covered with green, the angles to the broken spires... "What are those called?"

"Designation: Men-Andor Mountains; Astori Mountains"

Akorian Memorization: 1d20 +1 = 20 (Full Success)

Though you do not have the name for the green 'forest' above you at least have some sense of scale as to where you can find the nearest four evacuation shelter: Psetri to the south near the shores of the sea, accessible by draining the reservoir and then walking down the long spiraling steps along its outer edge. Far to the East in the Astori mountains is what looks like the shell of a titanic crustacean pressed in the side of the mountain, there the miners of the nearby towns are meant to take shelter, hidden behind a door that opens when when horns blow in a certain patterns, two, then six, then one. The third shelter Halios is to the north west though it is marked with a warning [Closed Archeological Dig in progress; Civilians are advised to a void unless all other paths are closed. Exit from the sight controlled by reasons of mental and spiritual hygiene]

Finally just when you thought you got a hang for this the fourth site is a single piece of marble standing among the green of the forest, the green pillars pulled back around it in a circle. Temple of Jaidi;Ley Nexus

A name you had heard before from the people on the... moon, but what you did not expect were instructions for how to bleed yourself on the stone to make... something open. Not just yourself either, the instructions are for 'one male and one female of the blood minimum for repopulation purposes', which by now is just understandable enough to make you weary.

Quickly you try to look into the ships, expecting something like the strange projection, instead what you get is numbers, three pairs of numbers, each of them four digits long, compared to the journey you had just taken it is child's play to remember. Thus emboldened you decide to press look for the thing visitors are apparently not allowed to know the name of... but whose contents they can somehow access

[Spindle Solution Files Accessed]

Error: No common language detected. Spindle Solution Files May not be Translated by mind-link; Change of Degradation too High. Initiating Language protocols

Words assail you like daggers from every corner, tens, hundreds, tens of thousands spoken by voices young and old, male and female, joyous, calm, wrathful, ecstatic, didactic, soft and loud... on and on until you cannot hear the voice of your own thoughts.

Akorian Linguistics: 1d20 +3 = 4 (Critical Failure)
Akorian Will Save: 1d20+3 = 15 (Success)


The stone is cold and unyielding against your back, but you still do not want to wake your head is pounding like someone had decided to drive a Snake's End Parade, brass drums and all, over it... Wait... what was...?

"Akorian! Akorian!" You hear the words as though through deep water over the roaring in your ears. "Kori!"

Finally your eyes snap open and you see Mina kneeling beside your head on the floor of the tomb. "What under Desna's bright eyes happened to you?"

"There was... information from the Old Ones, the ones who built this this place, shelter locations." Relieved, you realize you recall all four of the locations with perfect clarity. "They called themselves... High Ones?"

"Azlanti?" she answers, speaking carefully, as though trying to talk around the power of tongues.

"That is what I said..." The more you think about it the more the other pieces start falling into place, the smell of myth and honeysuckle in the spring, the fiery taste of moretum, the soft glow of far caster as it spun into moving images tales and myth of the Empire's founding, news of the present.

Kori Gains

• Knowledge of Four Azlanti Disaster Shelters
• Coordinates of Three Distress Beacons (Location unknown until plotted on a map)
• High Azlanti Language (Poor)
• Knowledge (History) as a class skill relating to the history of Azlant

Do you exchange any of your present skills for Knowledge History?

[] Yes (Up to 2 points)
-[] Write in from where

[] No (Skill will still be available for purchase on future level ups)

OOC: Not the best place for a crit failure, but a lot of archeologists and historians would kill for that skill you got for succeeding on the Will save which means that your brain was helpfully scrambled.