Second Ptolus Campaign Journal, #46
The 4th of Birth
We decide that our best course of action is to go through the Dresden Door and collect evidence that Shilukar is in fact working with Nicodemus against Castle Shard. That way, we can bring back the evidence and let Zavere and Rill take care of the traitorous dark elf. We also buy image crystals to capture the scenes we encounter in this place, as further proof of Shilukar’s collusion.
We’re not sure what to expect when we pass through the expanded ring. We stretch it out to portal size in the back of the shop and each in turn pass through. At first, there is not really a strong feeling of transition. We’re still back there in the back room of our shop, but then we notice that things look a little different. Some crates are in different places, and stuff seems to have been moved around. We also smell a smoky burning smell. Taeval’s bed looks different, but we can open the vault — it contains different but fewer things than we remember.
This is really weird! That’s what I’m thinking when suddenly the door to the vault opens. It’s a startled and angry-looking elf. “Who are you people? What are you doing in my shop??!” We think it might be Myraeth, but in fact, it’s his nephew. “My uncle hasn’t owned this store for years,” he tells us, eyeing us suspiciously. He also doubts that we’re long-lived enough to have known Myraeth. Wow, what year is this? We’re very confused, but when he threatens to call the authorities, we decide to leave, assuring him that we stole nothing from our – his — vault.
As we walk out, Diethan notes a mark on the counter that he remembers making during a fight there when he knocked his head on it. We exit out into Delver’s Square. There’s a thick darkness to the air — it feels uncomfortable to breathe here, choking and stifling. Stranger still, the Ghostly Minstrel is not here — instead, there’s a tall metal tower. A bridge connects it to surrounding buildings. Running along this bridge is a multi-carriaged conveyance like we saw when we were down in the Shuul headquarters. A couple smokestacks belch smoke into the air from Rastor’s — well, what ought to be Rastor’s. Passersby all look dirty and unhappy. A pair of Shuul knights nearby stand guard, watching the square.
We decide to head toward Castle Shard, hoping to find some answers along the way. We spy a broadsheet for sale, the Imperial Gazette: The date is Toil 11, 848. Wow! We’re over one hundred years in the future! The news vendor says this is the only broadsheet published these days — and has been for a century. I buy three copies. This newssheet discusses Emperor Segaci IV and his benevolent reign. Segaci the Fourth!? When we left, there was only Segaci I — and his claim to the throne was quite contested.
The newssheet also tells us that, in this time, Killraven’s a fugitive; one of the members of House Shever is the Commissar; and there are festivals of Teun and the Iron God coming up. What is going on?
As we continue walking, we note that we see no elves on the street. There’s no shortage of dwarves, but only one or two Halflings and gnomes. Not as many adventurers as we’re used to, either, that’s for sure. We see many new buildings as we walk, but also many ruins where the neighborhoods we left were quite nice. We see stairs down into the Undercity on every street corner. People go down and come up and they don’t even have swords! The people who come up from there are covered in soot and look weary. What sort of machines are they tending down there? I feel a cold burning in the pit of my stomach.
We also notice a couple figures walking down the street, wearing helmets with small doors in them; they look larger than normal for human heads. These guys also have gauntlets on with only four fingers. Mind flayers, Archinemus says. He’s sure of it. A mechanical cat walks along near us. Aeroships fly up above, and even some of those dragonfly-machines that Diethan hijacked when we stormed the Prajdall laboratory.
A plump man approaches us, then flees fearfully after seeing me. We decide it would be prudent to take our coach instead, and stay out of plain sight. Other coaches on the streets are pulled by clockwork horses. Vendors’ carts are mechanized with steam contraptions. Some Shuul agents lead a chain gang of trolls and ogres who are all branded with the symbol of the Brotherhood of Redemption. Everything is so strange here! I’m simultaneously repelled and attracted.
When we arrive at Dalenguard, the checkpoint before entry into the Nobles’ Quarter, we’re surprised to see the doors shut. A small guard-door opens and a Watchman says, “Papers, please!” When Diethan gives him his, he frowns. “Wait a minute! The dates are all wrong. And this is the old Imperial seal!”
Thanks to some fast-talking on Calista’s part, we manage to convince the guard that we’re out of towners who were victimized by forgers. He lets us go, and we head off to the Pale Tower instead. Answering the door is a strange creature with spiked armor who speaks in an odd dialect in Infernal. Great Mother of all Machines, where are the Malkuth?
Confused, we make our way to Pythoness House, just a couple blocks away. But the house is gone. The fence is there, and in good repair. Covering the entire hill are mounds of scrap metal, much of it all rusty. At the top of the hill where the house once stood is a small building. As Barbatos and Archinemus approach the shack, they hear a female voice. “Hey, I know you! Hey, jerk, I know you!” It’s Kanagi, the forlaran we rescued so long ago from the prisons of Cordaris!
“You should be dead,” she tells the wizard — I guess she’s surprised to see him in this future, as he’s human. She tells Barbatos that the shack belongs to a scrap dealer. She’s been squatting in a little hidey-hole here.
We invite her into our carriage. “Have you seen Seanus?” she asks, getting in. It does our heart good to hear that he’s still alive and living in Midtown. We head down to see him.
She reveals the following as we travel:
- The Church of Lothian is still around but much less powerful than before.
- The Balacazars are gone.
- The Pale Tower is now the home of the Iron Angels.
- Something weird happened regarding me, but she won’t tell me what. She said we should ask Seanus about it.
Seanus’ place, it seems, is still the apartment that he and Tharn used to share. When we go inside, the apartment smells dank and close. Lying there in a small bed in a back room is a small wrinkled halfling. It’s Seanus! Seeing us shocks him. “Oh, no, it’s my time. It must be! I hear you calling! I’m coming…”
We manage to calm him down for a moment but he shocks us in turn, when he says, “It can’t be! I saw you die!” It was so long ago, he says. “It was the vampires, the Covenant of Blood.” He explains that they went to find us each alone and picked us off one by one. Except for me.
We went through the portal “back in 725 IA,” he tells me. “After so many of us were murdered back in 725 … well, you just weren’t the same old Benris I used to know. You changed your name, and then you got taller. Then you and your new friends, the Shuul, found and killed all the Covenant vampires.” He turns to the others. “She’s one of the most powerful people in the city. Even the Commissar is a little afraid of her.”
Savane, leader of the Shuul, became something called “the Vested of the Elder Brain,” it turns out. Apparently, that’s what the secret project they were doing down deep in the Foundry. “They brought up all that power from deep below the city,” Seanus relates. “It infused Savane with lots of power.”
Not too long after the death of the high priestess of Teun, a new, younger one came in. “But of course, Ia-Regalas has that title now. She’s got all sorts of titles.” He looked at me again, somewhat fearfully. How strange, to think that this other me switched to my birth-name, which I’ve only recently even discovered.
Seanus has heard of someone north of the city called Nicodemus, and he’s heard of sibeccai named the Perfect Ones who hang around with the Vladaams. He thinks Nicodemus is wanted by the government. Hmm… is Nicodemus trying to undermine this future?
We try to catch up on other friends of ours: It seems that Tharn left that one Newyear’s Day, “and I never saw him again,” the halfling says. Taeval died more than one hundred years ago. “That was a sad day.”
Kanagi believes some of the skulks are still around, and she thinks she can find us someone who can forge us some new papers.
When we mention the Balacazars, Seanus says, “Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. They rounded them up not long after all the Covenant of Blood were slain.” He looks pointedly at me.
Barbatos brings up his old Dragonscales scores. “Ah, I haven’t thought about Dragonscales in quite a while,” says Seanus. “With all the frivolity regulations — you know singing, music, games, all of it’s gone.” Apparently now you need a license to sing, or to do almost anything.
He reflects that Rehoboth was the last Holy Emperor. “They did away with that title.” Segaci again. “Back then, the Empire was falling apart. But then fifty years ago there were all those wars….” Our friend trails off, and Kanagi adds that now the Empire has conquered Uraq and the lands south of there.
When Barbatos asks about the Necropolis and undead, Seanus replies, “Well, there’s the Mechanized Dead….” That’s enough — we don’t want to know.
He mentions that lots of people work under the city in the Furnaces, which power all the manufactories. So that’s one good thing about this future, Seanus admits. “Now we have all these machines that do things for us.” Of course, he doesn’t have anything like that in here.
“I remember back when I was a young halfling I used to hear about ‘chaos this,’ and ‘chaos that.’ But it seems to me that chaos isn’t really our enemy.” He sighs and lays back in his crumpled bed.
We bid goodbye to Seanus, apologizing for leaving him alone. “I missed you,” he says tearfully. “Those days working at Myraeth’s Oddities, those were the best days of my life.” (Apparently some corporation run by the guy who owned the Emerald Eye eventually bought Myraeth’s Oddities. That hurts!) As we leave, I give Seanus my leafy circlet from Faestra the dryad, and ask him to remember me the way I was in my adventuring days, not the way I supposedly am now. He promises.
Kanagi takes us down below the city to find a forger. People are shoveling coal into furnaces that power pistons and belch out black smoke. We’re all quickly covered in soot. “Yeah, real labor-saving devices,” remarks Archinemus, looking at the workers toiling in the heat.
A secret door opens up to admit us, and Kanagi arranges for us to get new papers for 100 gp each. Her forger friend says that Archinemus’ kind is watched pretty closely. “My kind?” Archinemus whispers. He’s not used to hearing about anyone else like him. Barbatos drops the name of Shilukar, and the forger scoffs. “You’re a friend of Shilukar?” he seems dubious. “You knew him back when he lived at Castle Shard? That Lord Rybus kicked him out. I think they found out he was working some angle from within.” He mentioned that Lady Rill is still one of the Lords of Castle Shard.
We discuss using magical disguise spells to cover up me and Archinemus. “I know where you can get some scrolls, for a price,” the forger says, “and they’re not registered.” He encourages us to get higher-level spells that are harder for the Sorn Watchers to see through.
Diethan ponders going undercover again among the Shuul. “Well,” the guy says, “you’d need the right papers, and you’d need a Temple Implant. That allows them all to communicate.” He says this implant technology has existed for thirty or forty years. “I suppose you could have something that just looked like illithitech, and no one would know until they tried to talk to you.” Illithitech!?
We manage to get more info from him once we open our purses.
- Nicodemus is an undead (has been for thousands of years) who lives north of the city.
- The Perfect Ones use hungerswords amplified by Lady Kirstara Vladaam to just leach life away, much more powerful than they used to be. Today they don’t just sap energy: They annihilate with the merest touch.
- Castle Shard opposes the Commissar and her people, so the place is probably watched.
- Savane still leads the Shuul as a Vested of the Elder Brain. No one ever seems to see him, though, just hear him in their heads.
- Warden Ia-Regalas (gulp!) might become a Vested of the Elder Brain one day. “But it’s not like she needs more power up there in the Prison District.” Prison District? “Yeah, right across the river.” Kanagi tells us. Oh, great. The Temple District has turned into a prison.
- Shilukar lives up there at the Tomb of Nicodemus.
Once we take our forged papers (and a polymorphed giantess and sibeccai) up to the Nobles’ Quarter, it seems to be the most unchanged of all the places we’ve been. It’s even less smoky up here. We see more clockwork creatures and people that seem to be acting as couriers and servants. Small aeroships putter about in the sky above us. From up here, we can see the elevated trains winding about above the street level. One airship is moored in the Guildsman District at a series of large mooring towers, we spy. Lots of smokestacks dot the city. Hundreds of them.
Thankfully, Castle Shard looks exactly as we remember it. It’s not even soot-stained. When we knock, we are thrilled to see Kadmus open the door to us. He looks exactly the same as he did three days and one hundred twenty-three years ago. The butler ushers us genially into a waiting room and we ask to see Lady Rill. After a moment she arrives, floating as always, wearing a dress that looks as though it’s made of butterflies. She looks at us. “All right,” she says, cocking one eyebrow. “I’m surprised.”
We fill her in on the Dresden Door and how we arrived here. She tells us more about our deaths. “You know enough about vampires to know what happens to those slain by them.” Gently, she explains that Benris-of-then had to slay all her friends, who had become vampire spawn, to end their monstrous existences. The whole idea makes my chest hurt.
Zavere was killed and his soul destroyed in a battle with Iristul Vladaam, she updates us. But Iristul paid for that now, and he is still paying.
We realize that the Legacy didn’t understand the concept of time and so told us to come here to this “place” where Shilukar would come with Nicodemus that was not in Castle Shard.
“The Legacy?” Lady Rill asks. “Isn’t that the force that accompanies Ia-Regalas? That grants ‘you’ all that tremendous power?” Great Kint! I’ve become as bad as any velator!
Rill says she believes that Shilukar had been plotting with Nicodemus for a very long time. She thinks Nicodemus has always sought the Shard. What does an undead sibeccai want with such a source of power? “I don’t think Shilukar’s ambitions know any bounds,” she says. “I don’t think he seeks anything less than divinity.”
When we tell Lady Rill that we seek to return and change things to stop this future from coming, she urges us to prevent Savane from becoming the Vested of the Elder Brain. (Thank heavens the “truce” that Barbatos and Diethan formed with the Shuul ended at the end of last year.) “I knew Savane before he became the Vested of the Elder Brain, and he was no friend of mine,” Rill says, “but he was never a city-killing mad tyrant.” The change happened in 726 IA, so we have a year. Except we really don’t, because the vampires will come for us — them — before then.
We have a lot to think about. Perhaps we have to find the Dresden Door in this time in order to get back. We also ask Rill if she would provide us with a message back from herself to “our” Lords of Castle Shard to serve as the proof to make them exile Shilukar. (In this time, they only kicked him out a year and a half ago, once they had the proof at last.)
“I would like very much to give you something to give to Zavere,” she says. “It will say a number of things.”
We explain that we met with Seanus, who doesn’t recall the past the same way we do. For instance, he didn’t remember us going forward in time. “No, that makes perfect sense,” Rill agrees. “It suggests that you’re going back, and that you changed things. Today’s Seanus doesn’t remember you going to the future because his friends didn’t.”
Rill reflects back to when we told her about the future threat to the Shard and the enhanced the hungerswords carried by the Perfect Ones. But it seems that Kirstara Vladaam (daughter of Navanna) invented that process only a dozen years ago. That means the Perfect Ones that we fought months ago in our own time came from here, this time. Not our own.
Rill has a lot of helpful background for us.
“The illithids were creations of the Galchutt, but they rebelled against them and took on an orderly nature, as opposed to a chaotic one. But in those final days right before the Night of Dissolution, we all learned that the Galchutt had slain one of themselves and buried its body deep below the earth. The shigmaa named Wuntad bathed in its blood in a final ritual that the Runewardens and the Company of the Black Lantern, working together, stopped beneath the Temple of the Fifty-Three Gods of Chance. In the intervening years, the flayers got hold of the body and blood of that dead Galchutt and used it to create the Elder Brain. In your time, the Elder Brain already lives. That’s what Savane is about to discover as they drill beneath the Foundry.
“I have no doubt that the flayers were behind this every step of the way, guiding the Shuul to uncover their creation. As I understand it, with more than a century of hindsight, they focused a large degree of their power onto the creation of the Elder Brain. Its destruction would certainly put an end to them.”
She also recounts that Killraven betrays her Shuul allies and that’s why she’s wanted in this future. The high priestess of Teun was killed by the Maleskari (posing as chaos cultists) working for Killraven. “Kevris wanted to kill all the clerics of the city, but I never really understand why.” She tells us Killraven is an annis hag, not human. “Maybe it has something to do with the Pactlords of the Quaan.” But she doesn’t recall more about this group.
Rill says that Segaci ascended the throne around 735 or 736 with the support of the Shuul.
And what of the soul riders in this time? Rill shrugs. “For all I know, Emperor Segaci is controlled by one of them. As manipulators, they make Shilukar look like a child.”
Rill thinks she knows of a way we can get back to our own time. Someone named Lanasal has a small organization called the Chosen Dusk and lives in a castle in the Rivergate District. Ah — we recall of hearing of a castle there that arrived mysteriously from the future! But it arrived before we left… that’s weird.
While Rill goes off to draft her message to Zavere-of-the-past, Kadmus brings us fabulous food and drink (Barbatos asks for delicacies that were not invented in our own time). We try to enumerate the things we need to find out before we can attempt to go back to our own time:
- The location of the Tomb of Nicodemus (might be easier to get it in our time, when information is not so tightly regulated).
- Proof that Shilukar is working with Nicodemus. He has always seemed to have the ability to think twenty steps ahead of us, not just three or four. Did he come from here, this time? Or is he experiencing the timestream the same way as most people do?
- Information to lay a trap for Savane, so that we can rid the city of him before he discovers that thing below the Foundry.
Then Rill returns and hands Calista a black pearl to give to Zavere. She then gives us directions to the Castle of the Chosen Dusk and wishes us good luck on our undertaking.
“We’ll kill the grandfathers of these Shuul, and then these will never exist,” Archinemus wisely declares as we take our leave. We steel ourselves and head back out into this strange world.
