The Power of Ten

Chapter 8-221: The Bottom of the World?

It took us four days to reach our destination, riding over a thousand miles every day over snow and ice and wind-blasted rock, back and forth, tracing a Lived-Line over these time-lost ruins, and whole mountains carved into cyclopean monuments to who knew what.

I was pretty sure that the tips of the last few mountains were reaching up to thirty-five thousand feet, but it was impossible to tell.

We did find a city, trapped for the ages beneath the weight of ice and snow, only the edges of it visible in the windswept barriers. Naturally there were ways down into it, plunging down from inside the mountain, or tunnels bored through the periphery by probably-not unknown parties, leading to whatever ancient wonders and secrets were down below.

The theme to Raiders of the Lost Ark started running through my head despite myself. Sama started humming along, Briggs was very careful not to, and everyone who could hear it was wondering just what it was about.

-That is the theme song for action archeologists!- I /told them firmly, and the eyes of a whole slew of researchers lit up at the very idea. Promptly, a whole lot of them wanted to know if there were theme songs for action physicists, action historians, action chemists...

I pawned that off on Sama, who took it with a “Hell, yes!” and to their immense delight began to grab some really cool theme music from Terra-Luna her Minstrel Levels entitled her to, and it thundered through Markspace and the Allegiance network.

The A-Team theme made for a great Action Mechanics theme, and The Transformers was made for Action Engineers, after all...

If nothing else, we were leaving behind thousands of miles of corridors to explore, map out, and clear. Clearly a job for action guys of all professions!

The opportunity to clear an alien and ancient city and learn its secrets rippled through the Allegiance and beyond, and people gaffing off Levels suddenly had an inspiration to gain something so they could survive doing this sort of thing...

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Six sheer peaks, the tallest and most unnatural yet, gathered in a rough hexagon around a central valley the Mountains of Madness led right to... and which seemed to be centered around the South Pole. On the far side, the continuing Mountains slowly receded into the horizon. A circuit about the South Pole seemed to confirm there was another subductive current being channeled up this way, maybe all the way from the opposite coast.

Someone would have to go see after this, I reckoned, someone who also had business on the far side of the Pacific Ocean...

---

It was the day before Halloween.

My Melee/4, Archer/4, and Noble/4 Levels had ticked past, each with their own focuses and ‘gifts’. Finishing out the Sudden Metas Mastery was an interesting one, and now I was much more dangerous with a staff in hand, if I did choose to fight...

Noble/4 gave me just enough skill points to get my Duty to 10. Generous of it.

I eyed the spinning white Frostshroud that had overridden the grey Haze about the mountains ahead of us. The number of spirits diving and wailing about those peaks was much higher, but the area of the Shroudzone itself was barely big enough to encompass the peaks.

That generally was a sign that there weren’t very many undead within, but that seemed... strange, despite the fact that reasonably there shouldn’t be any carcasses up here at all, except things that were fossilized.

After all, we literally hadn’t seen any undead at all. I was under the impression that any humans that had died hereabouts had been eaten by oozes, so there was nothing to Animate.

We also hadn’t come across traces of any explorers, which was fine. Last thing I wanted to deal with was a race-for-the-prize rivalry here.

But, I needed the South Pole for the Ceremony of the Frozen Soul. Sure, it was up in rarefied air where it shouldn’t be. Sure, it was ringed by gigantic monolith-mountains that had appeared out of nowhere. Sure, there was no damn reason it was located in the middle of them, as that formation of mountains had to have been there way, way longer than the South Pole.

Whatever the matter, we were still going forward.

Unlike before, we now had a wide-open road... because there was a wide multi-arch bridge extending from the slopes of the last outer mountain, and into the facing mountain of the hexagon, unlike every other mountain along the way.

We didn’t go along it that fast, but we did notice that the spirits above weren’t getting close to the pathway, which was... unexpected, yet not all that surprising?

Sleipner trundled along boldly, but not overly fast, as there didn’t seem to be anything in front of us to be that wary of. Regardless, no need to go crashing into abrupt traps or energy fields or something, although such things seemed to have faded long ago.

Actually, if the spirits came on down, I wouldn’t be too off-put. There were plenty of ways and means to kill them, and I was paying a lot of attention to them if they decided to abruptly come down and investigate in force. This place was cold, the air was thin as heck, and it was strange to need Endure Elements just to be able to breathe smoothly. Acclimatizing to high altitudes was not a casual thing, after all, even with post-30 Con scores.

Also, base air temperature was sixty degrees below zero, before wind chill. This place was cold!

The winds wanted to buffet us and chill us, but were sadly diverted around us by Master Fred’s Stormbound Pact, unable to do so much as make Sleipner sway an inch.

It was a surreal experience, and if either of us had been subject to fear, it doubtless would have been harrowing and humbling, moving over the miles of ancient bridge, those ancient carved mountains and all their rooms and windows looking out over us.

I did make a concession to the noise and put a Sound Bubble around us. The maddening din was hitting over a hundred decibels, and combined with the wind was making the stones reverb with its insane song. I didn’t feel like screaming my fool head off to Counter it, so just shutting off exterior sounds was the way to go.

It meant I had to keep a sharper eye out, but I simply turned around in my seat. Master Fred looked forwards, I looked back and up, we put up the other’s views in our Visual Files, and on we went.

---

Entering the mountain proper was anticlimactic. No sudden silence, which I was hoping for, the wind instead focusing down and through and blowing past us like a hurricane. It lost some cohesion with its pure violence, but the sound level was now at 120 decibels, and it was hurtling by at over 180 kph.

Despite everything urging us to zip on through and get driven onward, we instead took it slow and steady... and quiet. The Sound Bubble was actually rippling as it kept out the noise, which was something of a first for me, but just showed how empowered the cacophony was.josei

It was silent on our end, Sleipner zipping forwards with Wrath-powered energy; no roaring of a combustion engine, no watery echoes of progress through a high and mighty stone tunnel, bored out with some fantastic power and then carved with ripples and profound patterns in between some fantastical historical dioramas... and depictions of creatures that mankind definitely didn’t want hanging around.

And, naturally enough, there was a break in it.

Sleipner didn’t trust the surface of the road, so he was actually zipping along it on his Wardway an inch above it, enjoying absolute control of friction coefficients so he could slide or grip as he pleased. He drifted sideways to a stop right at the jagged lip of the bridge, giving us a look over it.

Master Fred craned his neck over for a look over and down, relayed what he was seeing as his glasses magnified it, and jerked his head back.

It was pitch black below, not that it mattered to him. Bottom of the ocean, high noon; all the same to someone with both Devasight and Devilsight.

There were at least forty shoggoth milling around down there, and some ancient-looking devices glowing in the UV spectrum with subdued energies and equipped with what looked like projectors. I eyed the jagged and fused edges of the bridge, looking like something had melted and exploded through it at the same time, occasional jagged protrusions of what looked like half-melted adamantine sticking out of the fused silicon metal it was made of.

There were numerous side-tunnels in the walls to either side, while the scattered rubble of this road was tumbled here and there, shoved into mounds by the idle swatting of massively powerful organic appendages, even now shoving around boulders and debris as if they needed to be in some constantly evolving pattern.

-Blowing the road changed the winds. The sound isn’t right,- I /concluded, and Master Fred nodded. The shoggoth below were trying to get the song back to the way it should be, and naturally that was impossible without rebuilding the bridge. They were continually trying to get it right, and who knew how long they had been at the impossible task? No real sense of time or boredom, only eternal despair and mad devotion to their teke-li-li-li song...

-Those look like some sort of weapon emplacements?- Master Fred /asked, focusing on the half-dozen projectors. He could make things out better than me in this place with no lights, and I followed his eyes over the marring gouges in the wall, the ceilings.

The Great Race hadn’t made all this. The Moon Beasts had.

The story that had unfolded on the roof had been rambling and very stream-of-consciousness, with cognition traps for the unwary and those without properly expanded thoughtstreams in all the improper directions. Master Fred hadn’t even tried to comprehend them, and hadn’t paid much more attention than noting interruptions that were out of place, while I had been unwinding them, getting them together in something resembling an orderly pattern, and putting them back together.

This whole set of Mountains and the Ring ahead of us was some grand project of the Moon Beasts, a great road leading to a bright shining destination ahead. Given the creatures were natives of Leng, an open road to the high plateau of that dimension could be a very bad thing, indeed.

The shoggoth had been Summoned and made as both laborers and singers, and even after they rebelled, they had still maintained the formation and Sang to it. Allusions that magic had been much stronger back then were part of the whole formation, and as it failed and the power retreated, their great project was caught up in the dimensional pressures they had been playing with, and folded up into the void, lost from this world.

As a consequence, their control over the shoggoth had failed, based on magic as it was. There was no end to the story, but this break in the history, only a thousand-some meters from the exit, seemed to be most apt in indicating what had happened.

I couldn’t see any barriers in place to stop us, but also didn’t want to risk the emplacements below were still working, things probably meant to kill shoggoth, and then likely turned on their masters.

Still, we had to get to the other side, and the Thunder of the reverb coming through was giving clear indications that trying to do so dimensionally was not a good idea.

“Sleipner, give yourself a running start and let’s shoot over to that other side before they can respond.” I could pick them off, sure, but if those weapons got working, they could do the same to me, and I had no incentive to be the target of the things if I didn’t have to be.

We were likely causing some subtle disruptions to the windflow, so the shoggoth seemed to be a little more energetic than before. Sleipner smoothly backed away, turned around, and headed back the way we’d come for about a mile before turning around.

Master Fred pumped his engine, I ignited his turbines. With a hearty neigh that didn’t pass the Sound Bubble, Sleipner took off.

It was a solid ten g’s of acceleration, enough to force us back in our seats. The wind was with us, so no resistance there, and we were rapidly outrunning it regardless.

The gap in the ruined bridge was up on us in less than fifteen seconds, and a solid line of gold and flame shot across the gap. Hundreds of eyes of all kinds snapped around to follow us as we blurred by overhead, flashes of light without sound, taking our disruption of the wind with us.

Some of the shoggoth made a move towards the emplacements, but they only had a few seconds to react, and then we were on the far side and had left them behind.

That didn’t stop them from shooting things off, and for a wild and crazy minute or so, actinic flares of crazed energies not unleashed for longer than man’s civilization had existed danced and stroked in the air behind us, further tearing and marring at what had been left behind.

Perhaps for a moment it finally brought their eternal mad song to a new and fevered height...