This will likely not make much sense unless you read the introduction that says a bit about the characters and there current predicament, which you can find here.
Without further ado, here is the first part of Spirebound, beginning right where the prologue left off. I do hope you enjoy it.
So now our five heroes, clad in their finery and in their new assumed identities, had arrived in the Draxis system in the belly of a massive Imperial freighter and boarded a shuttle to take them to the spire of Draxis Hive Primus in search of....well something bad that they had zero intelligence on other than in implicated some of the highborn nobles at the lavish party they had been invited to.
Hive worlds are massive and ancient, where the inexorable march of time and demand for soldiers and material for the Emperor's wars spanning millennia have transformed the surface into a polluted radioactive wasteland. Over the countless years the cities have been built up into massive arcology spires expanding ever upward, with sections falling into disarray and being compounded far down into the earth's crust even as the tips breach the clouds. Countless tens or even hundreds of billions toil away in obscurity and poverty in the massive churning factories to earn the meager food they eat and air they breathe, never seeing the polluted surface or sky of their world while the upper crust lives in luxury and decadence in the tips of these cities in massive palaces. The party was headed for the most opulent of palaces in the hive world of Draxis, the home of the Planetary Governor Albertus Tarnell.
The shuttle landed on a gilded landing pad and our motley crew of heroes disembarked led by Caesar Morroe, who as Sinric was quick to point out found it incredibly easy to assume the persona of privileged blowhard. After presenting their digital invitations to an attendant and being waved through a checkpoint, the lot of them got their first view of the Tarnell palace interior. The floors were paved in gleaming polished marble, the walls adorned with gilded frames containing countless portraits of the family's ancestors and draping crimson and gold banners. A servant lead the group through a few hallways to a common area where many other nobles and their own attendants were milling about, seated on velvet couches or golden chairs around tables laden with the finest food and drink. Most were clad in the colors of Draxis, but a few sported clothing and insignia marking them as hailing from other Imperial worlds. Backlighting the party was a massive armorcrys window showing a bloated red-orange sun setting beneath the choking sea of smog that the spire was elevated far above.
Sinric wasted no time in helping himself, grabbing a glass of fine amasec and chatting up the fairest maiden he could find in easy reach. Caesar, not to be outdone, attempted to gracefully insert himself into the conversation with mixed success. She giggled at the antics and introduction and revealed herself to be a noble dignitary from Mordia representing her house. The two of them manged to glean some important information about the ruling family, namely that the house Patriarch Albertus Tarnell was beside himself with the opportunity to throw such an extravagant party. The pair did their best to hide their near total ignorance of the lavish party they had been invited to, with limited effectiveness due to Sinric's constant barbed comments towards Ceasar that were causing him to fluster badly. Even so the two of them gleaned that the event was celebrating Gothic Sector Grand Military Commander Thaddeus Hale, who would himself be attending a massive banquet in his honor the following day. Planetary Governor Albertus and his two sons Dimitrius (the eldest, a massive brute with an equally massive temper) and Sirus (The younger, well liked and pensive one) had been working tirelessly to prepare for the event.
While this was going on the rest of the party was enjoying the sights. Alcyone busied herself peering at every small bit of technology in the room, clearly not impressed. Tancred stomped around awkwardly, making a show of being Caesar's bodyguard but constantly glancing at Alcyone, who's safety was paramount in his mind at all times. He drew no shortage of astonished glances due to his massive physiology and archaic armor from the nobles at the party, clearly envious that their own designer bodyguards were not nearly so striking. The psykers were just sort of awkwardly hanging around, Demios making some attempt at small talk but Yarrow bristling visibly at the irritating nobles.
The party's preliminary investigation was interrupted by another announcement from the same group of servants that paraded their own entrance, announcing a new fresh arrival. The honorable Aleri De Vicarius, head of Rogue Trader house Vicarius. In walked a woman with shoulder length white hair, fancy but not ostentatious garb and an ornamented cane. Trailing behind her was a crew nearly as motley as the party itself, an astropath, an elderly member of the Navis Nobilite and a clean cut bodyguard in military dress. Their arrival drew a new wave of gossip and sneering among the nobles as the woman sat at an empty table with a look of utter disinterest on her face.
[GM'S NOTE
As the story proceeds I will probably dump a few of these in and around to let you peer behind the curtain of game mastery. I love to pull little surprises on my players, and Aleri De Vicarius was actually created by Sinric's player as part of a Rogue Trader campaign I ran a long time ago. It was really fun to see how surprised he was at this callback. His player was the only one to know that Aleri was obsessed with the collection of warp-related relics, but kept said info handily out of his IC dealings. In reality he was hesitant to go chat up his own OC but it was deemed a better course of action/more logical in character to do so.]
Caesar and Sinric disengaged with the lovely Catherine Forscythe of Mordia. Sinric insisted on chatting up the striking new arrival while Caesar resolved to cut through the tightly packed group of sycophants surrounding governor Tarnell and hanging off his every word.
Aleri was standoffish and disinterested, if not slightly intrigued by Sinric's apparent sharpness. She insisted she was at this event at the behest of her seneschal and had no interest in being here at all, eager to leave as soon as possible. Sinric had a feeling her presence was too strange to be purely coincidence, but could not seem to glean anything from her impossibly inscrutable demeanor.
Meanwhile Yarrow had started into the free beverages and Alcyone had switched gears to "accidentally" fondling party goers with her optical metachandrite to check them for anything untoward, finding nothing but a few concealed handguns. Caesar managed to cut through the crowd around the governor and make a good first impression by showering him with flattery, but did not get much farther before to pompous noble excused himself to make an announcement. He declared to the room that the Sector Commander had arrived, but was exhausted from the travel and would not be making an appearance until the gala the following day around dinner time. Quarters had been prepared for all guests and festivities would be held all night. He also advised that any looking to leave the spire to the higher class civilian areas of the hive would need to be back by around the local equivalent of 8pm for security reasons.
At this point the party had gleaned a little bit about their surroundings and the key players but had no leads on the shadowy cult they were ostensibly here to find, or what even they were planning to do. The governor himself had done nothing untoward and his two sons had yet to be seen. As such the party did the classic scooby do maneuver and split up to look for clues before their pyromancer could drink himself into a stupor.
Caesar ran into the Tarnell brothers and made an introduction. After a rather brutal snub by the elder one, who was indeed quite massive and brutish in appearance, he chatted a bit with the younger. Siris Tarnell was just as pensive and well-mannered as the rumors claimed. Nothing unusual in sight, other than Dimitrius being a bit of a shithead they seemed to be a relatively normal family of Imperial Nobles.
The rest of the crew dug up some rumors. Namely that Dimitrius had earlier in the day nearly broken a servant's arm for bringing him the wrong drink. The word around was that it was suspected his father was considering naming his younger brother to be the successor to the rulership of Draxis rather than him.
Finally Alcyone and Bram found the first major break in the case. A pair of guards were stationed in front of a large tapestry at the end of a small dead-end hallway. Upon questioning they seemed uncertain as to why they had been stationed there, as far as they knew the tapestry was of no specific significance. Alcyone ogled it with her eyeball stalk and found a small hidden lock and latch on one side. The gang regrouped and after Caesar managed to convince the guards they had deserved a little R&R Alcyone picked the lock and the six of our brave heroes descended into a darkened passage with metal walls beyond, making sure no one saw them enter and closing the door behind them.
The passage was dull metal with very dim overhead lights interspersed. It seemed to be tilting downwards and occasionally had sharp right angle turns. They walked along this single-route tunnel for quite some time, getting what they estimated to be quite a bit of distance from the palace. Eventually, they saw a slightly brighter light ahead in the tunnel, hearing the sounds of dripping water and light shuffling. The party drew their concealed weapons, Caesar with his laspistol, Sinric with his crackling powersword and Bram with his massive fists. The gang crept up carefully, attempting to make as little noise as possible. Surprising everyone including himself Bram managed to carefully creep along with grace and silence completely at odds with his grotesque muscled physique. They reached the base of the tunnel to see quite a sight.
The passage opened up into a large room. There were several passages leading elsewhere, a few of which had foul liquid runoff of some kind flowing into the grate on the floor in the center of the area. There was a large vault door of some kind off to the right. However most striking was a trio of horrific looking creatures that appeared to have at one point been human, each attached to a metal chain anchored to the floor
[GM'S NOTE
As this game was completely text based from start to finish, any time I had to describe a monster or creature I would write a detailed little blurb. Throughout these tales I will likely drop more than a few of them to help set the narrative and this is one such time.
Three horrific creatures are present here, each chained to three metal posts anchored to the ground. They appear mostly humanoid, but their flesh is hardened to some kind of carapace, their arms elongated unnaturally ending in sharp claws, and their features fuse or warp at seemingly random]
It was at this point our hapless heroes luck ran out. Demios, slightly off-kilter from the high-proof libations he had consumed, stumbled as the group approached the doorway and grabbed one of Alcyone's head-anchored metachandrites for support. This caused her to emit an angry burst of curses in binary from the surprise, after which Caesar saw fit to loudly shush the both of them.
This obviously alerted the creatures in the room, which started to give a terrible undulating cry and strain against their chains. They nearly immediately broke and the beasts bounded towards our heroes, leaping at Bram and Caesar who happened to be in the front.
Bram was in his element, taking the scything talons of one on his sturdy chestplate even as he shot out a massive arm and intercepted the blow meant for Caesar. Sinric took a half-step forward and decapitated the gnashing monster in front of Caesar with his power sword as Bram set into the other, punching a hole through its chest before pulverising its head with a downward hammer blow.
All of a sudden there was a terrible screeching of metal from the grate at the center of the room, and a massive, even more horrific creature ripped its way up from the depths.
[There is a sound of sharp talons scraping across steel, echoing around the room. With the terrible crunch of buckling metal a horrifying monstrosity tears its way through the floor grate. It appears to be made from an amalgamation of human bodies, but sports countless talons, graspers and maws. Its shrieking makes your teeth itch and causes a small voice in the back of your head to start gibbering in fear]
Undaunted by this massive new foe, Yarrow the pyromancer raised a hand and channeled the warp through his outstretched arm. With a flicker of unreality the monster burst into white hot flames, its mouths screaming in fury as it continued its assault. There was a half-moment of stunned disbelief at how easily the massive beast shrugged off Yarrow's warp blast despite the inferno that now consumed it, and then the party laid into the lumbering monster. Alcyone's autogun attached to one of her metachandrites rattled with automatic fire and Caesar's laspistol cracked, tearing chunks of flesh from the creature. Not to be outdone, Demios conjured his own darker energies and directed them towards the monster, causing black-purple flame to meld with the yellow-orange and ashing off several flailing limbs. Unfortunately, as often happens, the abyss gazed back and Demios felt himself sucked somewhere far away before slamming back into the hallway feeling most peculiar. His head buzzed and rang with static, and it took him several seconds to realize he had somehow managed to enter the body of Caesar Morroe. Caesar, who was now in Demios' body to match, began to scream and shriek in alarm and fell to the ground. Off to the side, Sinric shoved off the remaining smaller creature and scythed it apart with his blade.
Finally the tortured, burning monster closed the distance between it and the party as Bram assumed a defensive stance to intercept the charge. The two giants slammed together, Bram undeniably taking the worst of it as his armor dented and rent and ribs fractured, yielding but a single step. Roaring in pain and rage, Bram shoved the massive burning creature backward and pulverized the top half of its mass of flesh and tearing out a sizable chunk with a powerful uppercut. Not waiting for it to regain its footing, he grabbed either side of its torso-flesh in his massive gauntleted hands and pulled outward, tearing the creature in twain with a gristly sound of ripping meat and high pitched screaming that turned to gurgling and then silence.
The rest of the party was only slightly horrified at this terrible display of violence, more grateful for the creature's demise. Yarrow once more touched the empyrean to put out the smoldering remains of the monster and Alcyone set about repairing her massive bodyguard. Despite the ferocity with which he had killed the monster he was badly wounded. Caesar and Demios violently returned to their own bodies, the latter falling near comatose in a daze and the former panicking badly.
Caesar did not take the horror very well. He immediately began ranting and raving about having to call in the cavalry they did it they found the heresy fuck this time to leave bring in the guardsmen. It took Sinric and Yarrow all but slapping on the face to convince him that attempting to tell the authorities that were controlled and paid by the very family they were (probably) investigating with out any actual proof implicating said family was a terrible idea and tantamount to suicide.
Meanwhile, Alcyone had sewed Bram mostly back together and roused Demios from his warp trauma-induced nap, relatively certain he would mostly recover. While Bram piled the corrupted corpses according to the customs of his homeland and convinced Yarrow to put them alight once more, Alcyone switched her attention to the massive vault door in the wall. A cursory inspection of its arcane machinery showed that the vault was sealed with powerful servos and a biometric scanner lock, and with the proper rights and prayer she could coax the machine spirit into compliance within a half hour.
It was a very tense time, the party waiting with weapons drawn and jumping at every creak and sound as Alcyone and Bram attended to the massive machine with tool and prayer. After only 20 minutes Alcyone gave a static burst of joy as the machine accepted her biometrics and the massive vault unsealed itself with a hiss of hydraulics and whirring of heavy machinery.
Inside the door was a small vault, not more than five meters a side. Off to the right was a table adorned with maddening iconography that made the head ache at but a glance, strewn with sinister looking cutting implements, suturing tools and other medical implements stained black with ichor. On the left a small unlocked chest, filled with quite a bit of Throne Gelt currency and local hive scrip, a small fortunes worth. But at the back sat the strangest of all, a meter-wide metal cube ominously unadorned.
Yarrow Able, curious as he was, swept the area with his psychic senses. The table and medical implements ached dully with some foul corrupt essence, but the cube at the back was something else entirely. It had the essence of the warp's touch, but unlike the medical tools it did not feel corrupt. Indeed it felt, clean. Pure somehow. Yarrow probed deeper, the first of what would be a long and troubled list of inquisitive acts towards warp artifacts. As his mind approached the strange sensation it grabbed him, like a fish on a hook and yanked him into a violent premonition.
As Yarrow shuddered and convulsed slightly, jaw slack and eyes rolled back under his antiquated helmet, no one noticed. They were all more preoccupied with the sound of footsteps approaching from the very same tunnel they came in through. Aleri De Vicarius and her entourage strode down the corridor, meeting the raised weapons of the party with her own adorned cane, and demanding to know what the hell had happened as she eyed up the pyre of burning mutants.
Part 1 End
Thank's for getting this far, assuming you have. Expect the thrilling conclusion to Spirebound sometime in the next couple weeks!
Sinric wasted no time in helping himself, grabbing a glass of fine amasec and chatting up the fairest maiden he could find in easy reach. Caesar, not to be outdone, attempted to gracefully insert himself into the conversation with mixed success. She giggled at the antics and introduction and revealed herself to be a noble dignitary from Mordia representing her house. The two of them manged to glean some important information about the ruling family, namely that the house Patriarch Albertus Tarnell was beside himself with the opportunity to throw such an extravagant party. The pair did their best to hide their near total ignorance of the lavish party they had been invited to, with limited effectiveness due to Sinric's constant barbed comments towards Ceasar that were causing him to fluster badly. Even so the two of them gleaned that the event was celebrating Gothic Sector Grand Military Commander Thaddeus Hale, who would himself be attending a massive banquet in his honor the following day. Planetary Governor Albertus and his two sons Dimitrius (the eldest, a massive brute with an equally massive temper) and Sirus (The younger, well liked and pensive one) had been working tirelessly to prepare for the event.
While this was going on the rest of the party was enjoying the sights. Alcyone busied herself peering at every small bit of technology in the room, clearly not impressed. Tancred stomped around awkwardly, making a show of being Caesar's bodyguard but constantly glancing at Alcyone, who's safety was paramount in his mind at all times. He drew no shortage of astonished glances due to his massive physiology and archaic armor from the nobles at the party, clearly envious that their own designer bodyguards were not nearly so striking. The psykers were just sort of awkwardly hanging around, Demios making some attempt at small talk but Yarrow bristling visibly at the irritating nobles.
The party's preliminary investigation was interrupted by another announcement from the same group of servants that paraded their own entrance, announcing a new fresh arrival. The honorable Aleri De Vicarius, head of Rogue Trader house Vicarius. In walked a woman with shoulder length white hair, fancy but not ostentatious garb and an ornamented cane. Trailing behind her was a crew nearly as motley as the party itself, an astropath, an elderly member of the Navis Nobilite and a clean cut bodyguard in military dress. Their arrival drew a new wave of gossip and sneering among the nobles as the woman sat at an empty table with a look of utter disinterest on her face.
[GM'S NOTE
As the story proceeds I will probably dump a few of these in and around to let you peer behind the curtain of game mastery. I love to pull little surprises on my players, and Aleri De Vicarius was actually created by Sinric's player as part of a Rogue Trader campaign I ran a long time ago. It was really fun to see how surprised he was at this callback. His player was the only one to know that Aleri was obsessed with the collection of warp-related relics, but kept said info handily out of his IC dealings. In reality he was hesitant to go chat up his own OC but it was deemed a better course of action/more logical in character to do so.]
Caesar and Sinric disengaged with the lovely Catherine Forscythe of Mordia. Sinric insisted on chatting up the striking new arrival while Caesar resolved to cut through the tightly packed group of sycophants surrounding governor Tarnell and hanging off his every word.
Aleri was standoffish and disinterested, if not slightly intrigued by Sinric's apparent sharpness. She insisted she was at this event at the behest of her seneschal and had no interest in being here at all, eager to leave as soon as possible. Sinric had a feeling her presence was too strange to be purely coincidence, but could not seem to glean anything from her impossibly inscrutable demeanor.
Meanwhile Yarrow had started into the free beverages and Alcyone had switched gears to "accidentally" fondling party goers with her optical metachandrite to check them for anything untoward, finding nothing but a few concealed handguns. Caesar managed to cut through the crowd around the governor and make a good first impression by showering him with flattery, but did not get much farther before to pompous noble excused himself to make an announcement. He declared to the room that the Sector Commander had arrived, but was exhausted from the travel and would not be making an appearance until the gala the following day around dinner time. Quarters had been prepared for all guests and festivities would be held all night. He also advised that any looking to leave the spire to the higher class civilian areas of the hive would need to be back by around the local equivalent of 8pm for security reasons.
At this point the party had gleaned a little bit about their surroundings and the key players but had no leads on the shadowy cult they were ostensibly here to find, or what even they were planning to do. The governor himself had done nothing untoward and his two sons had yet to be seen. As such the party did the classic scooby do maneuver and split up to look for clues before their pyromancer could drink himself into a stupor.
Caesar ran into the Tarnell brothers and made an introduction. After a rather brutal snub by the elder one, who was indeed quite massive and brutish in appearance, he chatted a bit with the younger. Siris Tarnell was just as pensive and well-mannered as the rumors claimed. Nothing unusual in sight, other than Dimitrius being a bit of a shithead they seemed to be a relatively normal family of Imperial Nobles.
The rest of the crew dug up some rumors. Namely that Dimitrius had earlier in the day nearly broken a servant's arm for bringing him the wrong drink. The word around was that it was suspected his father was considering naming his younger brother to be the successor to the rulership of Draxis rather than him.
Finally Alcyone and Bram found the first major break in the case. A pair of guards were stationed in front of a large tapestry at the end of a small dead-end hallway. Upon questioning they seemed uncertain as to why they had been stationed there, as far as they knew the tapestry was of no specific significance. Alcyone ogled it with her eyeball stalk and found a small hidden lock and latch on one side. The gang regrouped and after Caesar managed to convince the guards they had deserved a little R&R Alcyone picked the lock and the six of our brave heroes descended into a darkened passage with metal walls beyond, making sure no one saw them enter and closing the door behind them.
The passage was dull metal with very dim overhead lights interspersed. It seemed to be tilting downwards and occasionally had sharp right angle turns. They walked along this single-route tunnel for quite some time, getting what they estimated to be quite a bit of distance from the palace. Eventually, they saw a slightly brighter light ahead in the tunnel, hearing the sounds of dripping water and light shuffling. The party drew their concealed weapons, Caesar with his laspistol, Sinric with his crackling powersword and Bram with his massive fists. The gang crept up carefully, attempting to make as little noise as possible. Surprising everyone including himself Bram managed to carefully creep along with grace and silence completely at odds with his grotesque muscled physique. They reached the base of the tunnel to see quite a sight.
The passage opened up into a large room. There were several passages leading elsewhere, a few of which had foul liquid runoff of some kind flowing into the grate on the floor in the center of the area. There was a large vault door of some kind off to the right. However most striking was a trio of horrific looking creatures that appeared to have at one point been human, each attached to a metal chain anchored to the floor
[GM'S NOTE
As this game was completely text based from start to finish, any time I had to describe a monster or creature I would write a detailed little blurb. Throughout these tales I will likely drop more than a few of them to help set the narrative and this is one such time.
Three horrific creatures are present here, each chained to three metal posts anchored to the ground. They appear mostly humanoid, but their flesh is hardened to some kind of carapace, their arms elongated unnaturally ending in sharp claws, and their features fuse or warp at seemingly random]
It was at this point our hapless heroes luck ran out. Demios, slightly off-kilter from the high-proof libations he had consumed, stumbled as the group approached the doorway and grabbed one of Alcyone's head-anchored metachandrites for support. This caused her to emit an angry burst of curses in binary from the surprise, after which Caesar saw fit to loudly shush the both of them.
This obviously alerted the creatures in the room, which started to give a terrible undulating cry and strain against their chains. They nearly immediately broke and the beasts bounded towards our heroes, leaping at Bram and Caesar who happened to be in the front.
Bram was in his element, taking the scything talons of one on his sturdy chestplate even as he shot out a massive arm and intercepted the blow meant for Caesar. Sinric took a half-step forward and decapitated the gnashing monster in front of Caesar with his power sword as Bram set into the other, punching a hole through its chest before pulverising its head with a downward hammer blow.
All of a sudden there was a terrible screeching of metal from the grate at the center of the room, and a massive, even more horrific creature ripped its way up from the depths.
[There is a sound of sharp talons scraping across steel, echoing around the room. With the terrible crunch of buckling metal a horrifying monstrosity tears its way through the floor grate. It appears to be made from an amalgamation of human bodies, but sports countless talons, graspers and maws. Its shrieking makes your teeth itch and causes a small voice in the back of your head to start gibbering in fear]
Undaunted by this massive new foe, Yarrow the pyromancer raised a hand and channeled the warp through his outstretched arm. With a flicker of unreality the monster burst into white hot flames, its mouths screaming in fury as it continued its assault. There was a half-moment of stunned disbelief at how easily the massive beast shrugged off Yarrow's warp blast despite the inferno that now consumed it, and then the party laid into the lumbering monster. Alcyone's autogun attached to one of her metachandrites rattled with automatic fire and Caesar's laspistol cracked, tearing chunks of flesh from the creature. Not to be outdone, Demios conjured his own darker energies and directed them towards the monster, causing black-purple flame to meld with the yellow-orange and ashing off several flailing limbs. Unfortunately, as often happens, the abyss gazed back and Demios felt himself sucked somewhere far away before slamming back into the hallway feeling most peculiar. His head buzzed and rang with static, and it took him several seconds to realize he had somehow managed to enter the body of Caesar Morroe. Caesar, who was now in Demios' body to match, began to scream and shriek in alarm and fell to the ground. Off to the side, Sinric shoved off the remaining smaller creature and scythed it apart with his blade.
Finally the tortured, burning monster closed the distance between it and the party as Bram assumed a defensive stance to intercept the charge. The two giants slammed together, Bram undeniably taking the worst of it as his armor dented and rent and ribs fractured, yielding but a single step. Roaring in pain and rage, Bram shoved the massive burning creature backward and pulverized the top half of its mass of flesh and tearing out a sizable chunk with a powerful uppercut. Not waiting for it to regain its footing, he grabbed either side of its torso-flesh in his massive gauntleted hands and pulled outward, tearing the creature in twain with a gristly sound of ripping meat and high pitched screaming that turned to gurgling and then silence.
The rest of the party was only slightly horrified at this terrible display of violence, more grateful for the creature's demise. Yarrow once more touched the empyrean to put out the smoldering remains of the monster and Alcyone set about repairing her massive bodyguard. Despite the ferocity with which he had killed the monster he was badly wounded. Caesar and Demios violently returned to their own bodies, the latter falling near comatose in a daze and the former panicking badly.
Caesar did not take the horror very well. He immediately began ranting and raving about having to call in the cavalry they did it they found the heresy fuck this time to leave bring in the guardsmen. It took Sinric and Yarrow all but slapping on the face to convince him that attempting to tell the authorities that were controlled and paid by the very family they were (probably) investigating with out any actual proof implicating said family was a terrible idea and tantamount to suicide.
Meanwhile, Alcyone had sewed Bram mostly back together and roused Demios from his warp trauma-induced nap, relatively certain he would mostly recover. While Bram piled the corrupted corpses according to the customs of his homeland and convinced Yarrow to put them alight once more, Alcyone switched her attention to the massive vault door in the wall. A cursory inspection of its arcane machinery showed that the vault was sealed with powerful servos and a biometric scanner lock, and with the proper rights and prayer she could coax the machine spirit into compliance within a half hour.
It was a very tense time, the party waiting with weapons drawn and jumping at every creak and sound as Alcyone and Bram attended to the massive machine with tool and prayer. After only 20 minutes Alcyone gave a static burst of joy as the machine accepted her biometrics and the massive vault unsealed itself with a hiss of hydraulics and whirring of heavy machinery.
Inside the door was a small vault, not more than five meters a side. Off to the right was a table adorned with maddening iconography that made the head ache at but a glance, strewn with sinister looking cutting implements, suturing tools and other medical implements stained black with ichor. On the left a small unlocked chest, filled with quite a bit of Throne Gelt currency and local hive scrip, a small fortunes worth. But at the back sat the strangest of all, a meter-wide metal cube ominously unadorned.
Yarrow Able, curious as he was, swept the area with his psychic senses. The table and medical implements ached dully with some foul corrupt essence, but the cube at the back was something else entirely. It had the essence of the warp's touch, but unlike the medical tools it did not feel corrupt. Indeed it felt, clean. Pure somehow. Yarrow probed deeper, the first of what would be a long and troubled list of inquisitive acts towards warp artifacts. As his mind approached the strange sensation it grabbed him, like a fish on a hook and yanked him into a violent premonition.
As Yarrow shuddered and convulsed slightly, jaw slack and eyes rolled back under his antiquated helmet, no one noticed. They were all more preoccupied with the sound of footsteps approaching from the very same tunnel they came in through. Aleri De Vicarius and her entourage strode down the corridor, meeting the raised weapons of the party with her own adorned cane, and demanding to know what the hell had happened as she eyed up the pyre of burning mutants.
Part 1 End
Thank's for getting this far, assuming you have. Expect the thrilling conclusion to Spirebound sometime in the next couple weeks!
Very nice one!
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