BECMI Chapter 139 – What is Locked Within

We had come out inside the defensive walls of a fortified compound, higher up, and one of the big warbots was actually directly below us. Armored plates gleamed duly, the mechanical head replete with visual, heat, and radar-guided motion-detecting sensor arrays, none of which were going to register us with unless these were living Constructs with a soul… which they were not. Lifeless, programmed things, although I would not risk the complexity of their AI. Beyond, out past the walls, cut a hundred yards back in a perfectly sheared-through and leveled-off area of glassed earth, was an underground jungle, full of life and sounds of birds and insects, with swinging branches, garish flowers, mossy elder trees, and great vines hanging here and there. An underground paradise that the beastials would have given anything to seize and take for their own. Heck, the shadenelves would have done so… I juxtaposed positions on my mental map, rotated them… Yeah, in the future, this had become one of the primary living caverns for the orc tribes. I’d never gone through it, but my of the area had not sensed any of this technological stuff, which would have stood out like black blots. It appeared the Doom of Darkmoor had made some extra changes in the world, with the Immortals likely behind a bunch of them. Well, this alternate timeline was going to get some changes of its own. -Forward slow,- I /told Duum, who just inclined his wings and took off, silent and invisible, not making a sound as we passed beyond the perimeter of the compound here, past the defense turrets, and glided off into the very thick tree cover here, which he glided through with the ease of a bat who maneuvered between stalactite pillars all the time. -We are looking for something, Mistress?- he /asked easily, largely unafraid… although he wisely didn’t want to mess with the giant warbot on tank treads made out of durasteel, at least without or something in place on him. -What the automated defenses are guarding against.- I considered the scale of time passing. -There’s a strong artificial intelligence guiding the whole, with a pretty robust self-repair system in place to keep this thing maintained for all these centuries. I can only guess the Immortals didn’t find this place and just wipe away all of it. But they are clearly guarding against something, and the design of these things falls within human aesthetics and engineering designs. They don’t look elven or dwarven in concept.- Elves almost helplessly had to go to the artistic, nimble, speedy glass cannon concept, while dwarves loved them solidity, sureness, toughness, and lots of armor. It was why they worked so well together, while good generalists could take them apart individually. Combined, the two extremes made for a dangerous combination. Duum’s gentle squeaks of sonar were enough to get most of the insects out of the way of him, the bugs feeling the quiet power behind those sounds and wanting nothing to do with it. There wasn’t a lot of room to spread his wings without going above the trees which came within a couple hundred feet of the sun lamps above, but since he didn’t actually need them with the spell active, he just tucked them in and used them for casual maneuverability. It was a magical world, so there were monstrous things here, without a doubt. I saw a spider-web a couple hundred feet across, and its weaver, legs splayed out to form a twenty-foot blob, sitting motionless in the middle of it, waiting. A snake over a hundred feet long moved through the underbrush, along with dozens of others of all sizes winding up and down the trees. There didn’t seem to be birds as such, but the number of varieties of bats was impressive, none anywhere near as large as Duum, and their own ears heard his squeaks and moved hastily out of the way. I’d never seen bats with such bright plumage displays in all colors, either, although many of them seemed to be fruit and flower bats, not predators. Many, not all. Those others cowered back out of sight as he glided unseen past them, sonar warning them away, as it did most of the things that could hear him. Frogs, locusts, rats, salamanders, scorpions, centipedes, lizards, ants, beetles, moths/butterflies, at least some animated vegetation and magical plants, but nothing like a treant tripping my awareness, so no magical forest-keeper. More hyperaccelerated magical evolution than someone caretaking the place. No sign of anything intelligent as yet… There. A sapient Aura, although not much of one. Brown as they come, basically little more than an animal. Duum noticed it in our bond, and silently swooped along a tree of no breed that ever grew on the surface, as much fungus as plant, with long, trailing tendrils instead of leaves. More Auras came into view, an even dozen of them: a hunting party of some kind. Duum went quiet and glided up close, incidentally pausing thirty feet above a pig-sized wolf-spider that seemed to be studying the same thing. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. They were humanish, but… devolved. Skulls reinforced, squarish, incisors and canines extended, jaws more developed. Their nails were grown into actual claws, slouched posture, smaller and more apish builds with longer arms, a couple even having vestigial tails active behind them, with larger feet with prehensile toes that could grab and climb far more easily, somewhere between chimpanzee and orangutans in size. They were hunting a fifty-foot centipede moving slowly through the underbrush below them, it looked like. It had ridges up along its backside, and the long and overdeveloped mandibles up front were snapping through thick fronds and ferns without much effort. The last ten feet of its body didn’t have legs, but the tail was built like a segmented whip of some sort, serrated spines that pinched and chopped through anything caught between them. I noted the crude spears and barbed clubs the creatures had looked to be tipped by spines similar to those of the centipede below, and crude pieces of armor tied to their limbs looked to be of carapace parts. My swept gently across them. I glanced at the insect below. That… was an extremely dangerous target for a bunch of Three’s to be hunting, although the leader appeared to be a Six. They had devolved to a racial Hit Die paradigm, but had kept enough intelligence to at least cultivate the Warrior Class and keep it active. If they could pin the bug and swarm it from all sides, they might have a good chance of killing it before it could start taking them apart. Likely instinct would have the bug coiling up tight, and that tail sweep would plow through them, while the poisoned bite would grab, hold, and kill rather quickly. Netting it down would be the proper play, crushing it to the ground and holding it while they worked spears underneath its armored plates. “Huh,” I whispered to myself, staring at them. Nine will get you ten they were another of the genetic stabilizers used to stop the wild generational mutating of the beastials. They likely tested the defenses of the fortress, maybe even with stampedes of beasts, but had never broken through. Odds were there was another fort or fortresses defending other egress points. They’d be notable as some of the few areas without vegetation growing on them. -Altitude.- I was tempted to intervene on behalf of the morlocks and simply snuff the bug for them, or even send down Duum to kill it, test out the meat, and just leave the corpse for them. Certainly nothing was going to readily eat it with those spines without dismembering it first. Instead, Dumm fluttered his wings and sent us wafting up a couple hundred feet from the undergrowth below, where the hunt would continue as long as it would take. Stalking was actually a very inefficient style of hunting, unless you were supremely skilled. It was usually better to lure and corral, and much safer, especially with megafauna. Well, that was what it was. We came up above the canopy, made up of trees and massive shroom-trees that had no problem with the sun. I inhaled the wet air, the high humidity presaging regular drops of water dripping from the ceiling or even out of the very air, held at bay by on my finger. -Testing,- I /sent to the Markspace. Something woke up, and I shut up instantly. Duum politely dropped below the treeline promptly. I shut down the Marklink, everyone on the far end knowing to shut up when I did that. There was something here that was telepathic, psionic, and powerful. It couldn’t see us if I was psilent, but if I started broadcasting, it could doubtless home right in on me. And it was located thataway. Inherited Divination mastery and the Ward to let me know about that stuff, being very good at using and improving Had to be, in a place with nosy Immortals casting about looking for stuff. --- Duum hovered over the top of one of the giant mushrooms, what looked like a cap of giant cones mottled with holes like a fleshy sponge defying the sunlamps with their liveliness, the mold and moss growing on them ignoring their nature. My Familiar naturally shared in my defensive Buffs when close to me or touching, so I wasn’t worried about being Detected. It looked like about a half-mile clearing of yellowish mushrooms and caked tendril-roots, with a nasty crowd of floating spores up above it, except for two things. One, it was mounded up incredibly high, at least twenty feet thick. Two, hundreds, if not thousands, of zombie-like morlock corpses shambled about the place, keeping any psi or spore-resistant creatures away from the thick mass of the fungi there. The thing was rippling subtly, not even really visible without elevation and being able to perceive the whole mass of it. also read the energy about it very clearly, indeed. I looked down at the mushroom cone beneath me with an . And it was the only thing surrounding this mass of Yellow Musk Fungi. I rapidly deduced that it was the only thing that had managed to survive in this area. The fungal intelligence of the Yellow Musk had likely infected or destroyed any other plant life, adding them to its biomass, but the Quilifer were immune to psionics and if the zombies were directed to cut them down, they’d be doused in acid, liquefied, and become food for the roots from the trees, some of which were definitely extending into the mass of the Yellow Musk, although not far… likely the distance it could spray acid to prevent the zombies from ripping those roots apart. Magical nature, coming up with something, or a sign of something else? The didn’t say if this was some form of bioengineered life form that had, one way or another, been designed to contain the psionic-capable lifeform they were guarding and likely feeding upon. It was plain the yellow fungi had quite the reach with its telepathy, and likely culled the morlocks regularly to create its servants, probably keeping a certain number around and replacing them with living morlocks when they fell apart from use or if something else came along with an appetite for Yellow Musk creepers. The thing was an odd mix of fungal tubers and root balls, interspersed with winding vines that bore oddly bright yellow flowers. The flowers also boasted spore bulbs that were slowly releasing the hazy yellow spores in the air as a constant presence, crackling with imbued psionic energy.