TIME August 14th, night (continuing) LOCATION The ziggurat, then Chuza
BACKGROUND:
DikDik had agreed to help and teleported ahead as a prank – but there was still the small matter of the ancient, dying Sarry Oatsiet, and something in the temple that hadn’t finished waking up.
WHAT HAPPENED
Krusha caught the smell of vanilla a heartbeat before anyone saw the source – the illithid from the ship’s laboratory, materialising out of the shadows beside the bound orc captive, close enough that Krusha could smell it before he ever laid eyes on it himself.
Weapons came up across the clearing as it clamped its tentacles onto the orc’s skull without hesitation.
May I, King? I have not eaten in a while.
DikDik’s only answer was a muttered
“Lexi’s balls… dread, man,”
as the elves closed ranks around the King’s Father rather than the intruder.
It fed while Raven charged and missed, the creature side-stepping her blade in one fluid motion.
Its mouth latched onto the orc’s skull with a hideous scratch and crack, then a wet, sucking sound that didn’t stop until the orc’s eyes had gone wide, then lazily shut for good.
Once it was done, it asked, quite calmly, for permission to approach the Sarry Oatsiet.
“VWhat do you want with the Sarry Oatsiet?”
Grigori demanded, sword still drawn.
“Nothing of ill intent,”
it answered.
“He wishes to speak to me. It’s been so long since he has been able to speak with… someone.”
Grigori looked to the King’s Father himself for guidance, found nothing but rolling eyes and drool, and – against every instinct in the clearing – granted it anyway.
“Zis is a vwery unusual day. But I zink ze Sarry Oatsiet trusts you. And I think you could have already done much harm if you vwished, before revealing yourself. You may approach.” The effect on the old elf was immediate: the rolling eyes and drooling stopped, his posture relaxed for what Grigori swore was the first time in centuries.
Whatever passed between the two of them, telepathically and in private, brought the old elf something that looked, unmistakably, like peace.
Skarr turned to Raven before it said another word, and asked, with no particular emphasis, whether she had killed ‘the Child’.
The only one she could think of was the one back in Chuza – and after a pause, she bravely admitted to that one too.
The illithid introduced itself, in its own time, as Skarr – the last survivor of a ship that had crashed here fleeing something called Krell a thousand years before the Cataclysm ever touched Chuza – and settled off to one side to take a seat rather than loom over anyone further.
DikDik, watching him sit, turned straight to Krusha as though Skarr weren’t sitting close enough to hear every word.
“Is that the sleeper?” he asked.
“Yes, we think he is,” Krusha answered.
“What does he want?” DikDik pressed – only for Skarr’s own voice to cut in, entirely unbothered by the third-person treatment: “I’m over here. And I can hear you.”
Nobody much minded being caught out, and the questions kept coming anyway, out loud this time.
“Do you make those creatures then?” Krusha asked.
“Yes,” Skarr said.
“We have creatures like that in Chuza,” Krusha told him.
“Not mine,” Skarr said again.
Asked what the pictographs depicted, Skarr didn’t so much answer as anticipate the question first.
“Can you read my thoughts?” Krusha asked, wary.
“To a degree,” Skarr admitted.
“Go on then,” Krusha said.
The githyanki-like raiders, Skarr confirmed, were servants of the same enemy – “and if the creatures are not ours, they must be Krell’s.”
Krell – Destroyer of Worlds, by Skarr’s own account – and the hand-and-eye symbol carved throughout the temple was his own kind’s mark of protection, the very same one, Krusha pointed out, that Ash already wore.
Whatever had woken early in the temple, Skarr confirmed, was very much connected to whatever kept happening back in Chuza – and when Krusha asked whether he’d speak plainly with whoever led Section 18’s own investigation, the answer was an easy yes, so long as it didn’t involve walking there.
“It’s a long walk,” Krusha pointed out.
“No man,” DikDik said, “I ain’t walkin that away, man.”
Grigori, for his part, needed no convincing that Skarr belonged with them rather than with the elves – it was, he said, a vwery strange day, but there were old, half-forgotten stories among his own people of a sleeper who would wake again to offer aid in a time of dread.
Whatever came next, it sounded like Skarr was needed more in Chuza than here.
With introductions made and no reason left to walk, DikDik trotted down to retrieve the recovered meteorite fragment before gathering the group – Skarr included – into a huddle for the teleport, joking that everyone needed to get “familiar” first.
Krusha drew the dubious honour of holding Skarr’s warm, slimy, three-fingered hand for the privilege.
“Ready? I haven’t done this for some time. Wonder if it still works…”
DikDik muttered something in a strange, deep, resonating tongue, and the world spun – foliage blurring into a solid green wall, then stopping dead like stepping off a roundabout. Krusha, alone, staggered and went down; everyone else stayed upright.
The air turned suddenly, sharply colder, dark but for candlelight, thick with the smell of perfume and incense.
Once their eyes adjusted, the spell had deposited them, without much precision, in the foyer of a rather exclusive establishment called the Open Arms.
The receptionist, Prissy, looking up startled from behind the desk before her shock broke into a wide smile.
“Mr Bonabi! Sugar… what a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know y’all were in town…”
DikDik went to talk to her while the others debated whether to wait or head straight back to the Section House – a decision made for them moments later, when the returning house guard let slip a warning on his way back in: another harvest looting was already moving through the streets.
The doors held only until the mob outside broke them down and flooded in, a supernatural ‘harvest’ of citizens compelled to loot coraman crystals from the surrounding streets.
Skarr melted into the shadows without a word – not his fight – while DikDik pulled Prissy clear and out of the way entirely.
The door lost the fight first, disintegrating inward under the hammering and kicking, and a swarm of bodies poured into the reception hall behind it – Raven, Krusha and the guard all knocked flat and trampled in the first rush before any of them managed to get back on their feet.
Raven waded straight back in with both swords, no holds barred. Krusha tried to show more restraint – the spongy end of his mace first, worried about caving in the skull of someone who hadn’t chosen to be here – but it was hard to be precise in a crush that thick. Arms, legs, fists and teeth came at them from every side; the guard went down under a mass of bodies and didn’t get up again on his own.
Ash’s Kemercannon barked again from the stairs. Citizens fell and were trampled by their own crowd as much as by anything the Agents did, candles and lanterns smashing underfoot and catching the first small fires.
Krusha, taking another beating for his restraint, finally gave it up and turned the business end of the mace on the crowd instead – a decision made for him as much as by him.
Raven carved through more of the press, Krusha lending a firmer hand than before, until the crowd finally broke and rolled back out into the street chanting ‘Coraman! Coraman!’ as suddenly as it had arrived – trampling both Agents one last time on its way out, but leaving them standing.
Ash fired a parting shot into the backs of the fleeing crowd before meeting DikDik and Prissy on the landing and descending together into the wrecked entrance hall below.
The Open Arms’ other workers and their ‘clients’ peered out from behind half-open doors here and there, too frightened to venture any further than that.
Eight bodies were left behind, along with a guard Krusha managed to revive.
Outside, the street told the rest of the story.
Shot and burned citizens, lampposts dark, a trail of wreckage leading to a shop across the road already smoking.
The Agents crossed over, stepping around bodies and pooled blood to beat out the last of the flames before a pair of riot-geared Agents jogging past stopped just long enough to check their badges and the damage, then moved on.
DikDik, for his part, insisted he’d see Prissy properly compensated for the doors.
Back at the Section House, Skarr and DikDik were introduced around to a startled Bowlohr, Sam, and Reese.
Sam leaves with DikDik (and, more reluctantly, Skarr) in tow.
The Agents cleaned up, collected their overdue bounties, and turned in for the night before reporting back in the morning.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Skarr – a mind flayer, and apparently an ally, now embedded at the Section House.
- A supernatural ‘harvest’ mob compelled ordinary citizens to loot coraman crystals across Chuza – cause unknown.