My Detect Aquatics V was scanning as we headed out across the waters, naturally enough. None of us wanted to waltz into an ambush by the creatures of the Deep or T’Thuun, but they seemed to recognize us, be it by my subsonic humming of the Sublime Chord or the constant ding-ting of Quaver letting them know he was totally willing to come out and play with them.
Indeed, they were mostly clearing out of our path. I guess we’d made a certain impression on them, as in land dwellers running that fast above the waves should be left alone. Their bosses probably didn’t want to start a feeding frenzy and become meals, so no sleeches or other nautiloids popped up to harass us, either.
Couldn’t say I missed them. The Mick’s tales of the things floating around the islands in the north didn’t give me any confidence, but we’d have to see.
------
“Looks like a bunch of moarsmen still got in. Even built one o’ their little spawn pools there. I remember them being some there, but they were always little things, ye could almost punt them around if ye were inclined to.”
“Assaying at 200, Lord Mick,” I noted to him.
“Aye, which means this just be getting fun, it do,” he agreed cheerfully, unsheathing Bunita’s Kiss. I eyed the additional Name-Runes that had popped up on his Claymore, said nothing. Obviously with his lady returned, his Sword wouldn’t keep her name as it had been. “Highness?”
“Damage type?” Kris replied.
“Assay says weakest to cold. Probably descended from Moarsman Island nearby,” I responded.
“Coldphasing it is. As I recall, high resists, low armor?” she asked calmly.
“That were the truth,” the Mick agreed.
“Imperils to speed things up, then. Keep a watch out for any nautiloids, but I don’t think we’ve got to worry about those.”
“On yer mark, Highness.”
Princess Kristie nodded once, and darted off, the Mick following instantly and dragging the rest of us after him. The Disks slid into a line, Kris hit the Shoreward of the small island and her Null punched clean through it, then everyone slid through the opening without any trouble.
Split Imperil IV’s began to flash, reducing moarsman armor to nil or negatives, and the frozen arrows punching into them shattered flesh and scales as they bit in.
Then the Mick cut us free so he could join her as the moarsmen turned to the new threat, and the slaughter commenced.
---
It took less than half an hour to clear the entire island, including the spawn pool edifice. The place simply wasn’t that large, and so the moarsman presence was not that overpowering, even if they were individually much, much stronger than they had been. I guess nearly two decades allowed for a lot of improvement.
“They left the cottage alone. Why would they leave the cottage alone?” I asked aloud, watching everyone hewing with adamantine weapons at the structure of the shrine and spawn pool building. I’d already brought the sea in under it, so it just remained to chop the thing down, and now everyone had adamantine Weapons capable of hacking through the coral shell of the place.
“Maybe that NPC Ulgrim the Unappreciated is defending it?” the Mick asked. There was a fwzap next to us, and one of the little golums that spawned all over the second island, this one a sandstone variant, materialized next to us. There was a crack-crack as two blows hammered into it and promptly reduced it to rubble.
I turned my eye towards the relatively pristine cottage on the hill in the distance. “The, ah, dwarf?” I had to ask skeptically.
“Well, he were obviously a bit o’ a nutter, calling himself Ulgrim and thinking he were. Even sorta looked like the drunken sot, but half-sized. About the only thing he did was drink and give ye Ulgrim’s Casting Stein, as it were, if ye could get ahold o’ Ulgrim’s own home brew from down in the cottage Dungeon.”
“Anything else down there of interest?”
“Well, he had quite the wand collection, although ye couldn’t take samples back then. Now…” the Mick trailed off. “Come to think o’ it, he had quite a bit o’ bric-a-brac down there, including a lot o’ books,” he remarked thoughtfully.
“I think we’re going to go see this little Ulgrim fellow. It sounds like an unsuccessful Clone or Simulacrum. How powerful was he?” I asked.
“Not very,” the Mick replied, clapping as Rogar and Hundig collapsed a whole section of wall with a roar after a series of carefully placed chops into the coral.
“Clones are possible here?” Kris asked, coming up next to us.
“Who knows. Ulgrim were erratic at his spellcraft at the best o’ times, an’ even better when he were sodding-off drunk an’ didnae know what he were doing. Kinda reliable that way. Heard that when he died he were so sloshed near two hundred undead died forever when he collapsed the Portal t’ Freehold.”
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“Chaotics with style,” Kris smiled slightly, shaking her head. “One last long draw for the road, as it were.”
“Aye, the universe upped an’ swallowed ‘em all. Quite a ways t’ go, it were.”
“And likely the only place we’re going to find any clues, although I do wonder what a keg sitting out in the middle of nowhere is for…”
“He were a weird bloke. Probably had t’ have a beer handy during his morning constitutional, or whate’er.”
“That somehow makes perfect sense…” Kris nodded, and I had to agree.
------
“Intruders! Surrender now or be blasted where you stand!” a rather shrill voice demanded of us.
He did indeed look like a half-size human, shrunken, not even similar to a hyn in build. Aluvian, brown hair, florid features… and a few scars on him, and rips in his orange robe, while a perfectly functional sapphire Energy Crystal Orb, a pyramidal thing we’d only heard rumors about since the Fall, glittered energetically in his fist.
He was also wearing bunny slippers. A set of boots made from the heads of a fish were sitting by the door, too.
“We surrender!” Princess Kristie said promptly, raising her empty hands above her head.
Everyone blinked, then grinned, and we all raised our hands above our heads, too.
The little fellow’s Orb wavered, clearly not expecting us to say that so readily. “What? Could you repeat that?” he asked, a little shocked.
“We surrender to the mighty Ulgrim!” Kris repeated more loudly and carefully, and the rest of us nodded along.
He puffed himself up quite proudly then. “Well, of course you do! What else could you do when confronted with my magnificence and the danger I present? Those stinking fishmen soon learned to be more respectful when I turned them into more boots, hmmph!”
“It’s good to see you alive and well, sir,” Princess Kristie said calmly, lowering her hands as he did his Energy Crystal. “The years have treated you well,” she said diplomatically, giving me a nod.
I waved my hand, and Mended his bright orange robe, cleaning it up and fixing the rents in it.
“Oh, say, that’s a useful spell!” he admitted, polishing the robe that was now free of tears and more than a few beer stains. “Oh, I know what you can do for me! I haven’t been able to get downstairs because of all the fish-men sneaking around, and I’ve a powerful thirst for some of my beer! Go down into the cellar and fetch me a stein of the stuff, will you?”
“Of course, Mighty Ulgrim,” Kristie bowed to him, and he fairly glimmered with self-important expectations.
Kris turned away, looked at us, and said, “Well, we’ve been invited. Let’s see what is down below.”
---
The Mick lifted the Orbs from their placement at the wall, fondling a bright red Energy Crystal that was somehow still intact, just like the one upstairs. “It must have burned out the magic making it hard t’ steal with the eruption, instead o’ being destroyed.” He looked at the array of Wands, Orbs, and Staves scattered around the room, at least a couple dozen in number. “Useful, aye?” He shook the red Energy Crystal in his hand. “This, this were rare as a celibate sow. I never actually seen one afore.”
“We’re going to take everything that is magical and useful,” Kris said, scooping up some Isparian Wands, while the Roaches liberated some odd Wands with miniature heads of monsters from the wall they were mounted on.
“This is definitely going to help out with some of the research,” I had to agree, staring at a fully intact Staff of the Mind and shaking my head at the completely intact internal Casting Structure. The lugians were going to cheer when I returned it to them.
---
Ulgrim seemed to have a lot of trophies in his place, some magical, some not. The Mick waxed poetic about a lot of them, relating Quests that could be undertaken in the past to gain them, although who knew what was happening with them now, likely gone forever from the world.
As curios from before the Fall, they might have been worth a lot, but pyreal wasn’t going to pay for them, everyone having more than enough of the former coin-metal now.
“What’s the story on the books?” Kris asked, pointing at the shelves, which somehow were still free of being chewed on by rodents and unaffected by mildew.
I evoked Mass Scholar’s Touch, and brushed my hand down the length of tomes of various sorts, some of them inexpertly bound and basically reams of folded paper tied between two slabs of leather.
“These are… histories and letters from Empyreans, of various groups and ages. Three languages, four different dialects.” The books shimmered as the magic read them at accelerated rates and dumped the contents into my memory, helping process them all nigh-instantly as the load was split between my thoughtstreams. “Much of this is historical information not covered in any of the archives I’ve had access to on Freehold. Did no one ever bother to catalog the things he’d found?” I asked in disbelief.
“We couldnae take them off the shelves t’ give them t’ the Translators an’ their teams, lass,” the Mick reminded me, while I brought out a Floating Disk and began to stack the books on them rapidly with Zeks’ Telekinesis.
“There’s some textbooks from the Halls of the Heiromancers here,” I informed her. “Fundamentals of higher-end Empyrean magic. If Ulgrim wasn’t ready to understand the concepts here, they might have blown his mind.” Another section of books lower on the end glimmered, and I actually flinched. “Ah, Mithar and Sylune! This is a Summoning Codex and its appendices! The things it mentions in here that they used to call on…”
“No wonder he was a drunkard?” Kris asked knowingly.
“And why he was a better Caster when he was sauced. Brains that are linked to Mythos entities work better when they aren’t very sane…” I had to shake my head, understanding where this Ulgrim’s reputation probably came from. “And he concealed the books here behind irrelevancy to hide them from others and save them from the same fate, but at the same time couldn’t bring himself to destroy them.”
“Doubtless standard reading for the undead, an’ rotten brains aren’t affected so bad?” the Mick asked, giving me a careful look.
“I’ve got buffering disciplines in place to deal with this stuff, it’s an aspect of Summoner Levels you need to have,” I replied to him, understanding his wariness. “I’ll be fine. It’s more like I’m getting a description of everything in the books, as opposed to reading them word for word. For instance, I know there’s a dozen True Names of lesser Entities in this book,” I held up a slender tome bound in extremely finely scaled green hide, “but not what those Names are.”
“So, you’d need deeper protections to actually read them,” Kris nodded.
“Yes. Like, being inside a Null or Source Aura. True Names like that draw power just for what they are. I imagine being exposed to this would be a nice way to expand a Heiromancer’s brain in some new and totally unexpected directions.”
“Corruption among mages. Never happened before, will never happen again,” Kris deadpanned, drawing chortles from everyone.
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