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MT 209 - The Plant Dimension
🕑 Added 2024-12-09 11:41:40 +0000 UTCMT 209 - The Plant Dimension
Using Coordinated Thinker to find a valid teleport location for Shortcut was a bit like groping about blindly with a big phantom hand. I didn’t ‘see’ the spaces I was searching through, but I could get a feel for their structure and dimensions.
It made me think of one of those sticky hands I used to get out of a gumball toy machine at the grocery store. There was a long, stretchy ‘arm’ that connected the appendage to my perception, with a hand about the size of my own body at the end, which slapped around and groped at stuff, sticking to anything interesting. It could move through solid objects, send feedback, and ultimately determine whether a space was safe to teleport to.
Searching for a way into Grotto’s bunker by using Coordinated Thinker to go strangeward was–believe it or not–much stranger. The phantom limb became something massive, expanding out into a new dimension. It was the same volume of growth as a thick line on a sheet of paper rising off the page to become an entire wall. The length and width were the same, but adding depth created something vastly larger than its flattened-out counterpart.
I could use this supermassive hand to run my fingers along all the surfaces of the Delve. Interior, exterior, it didn’t matter, since I could reach over any three-dimensional barrier. I could read the Delve’s compartments like braille, and theoretically find Grotto’s control center without much problem. I already knew where it was relative to myself, I just had to stretch out and stick my hand inside.
While I couldn’t ‘see’ what surrounded the hand, I could still use it to determine the bounds of objects around it. If I focused, I could get a general shape or texture, maybe even guess what it was I was poking at. When moving between the cathedral and basilica, the feeling I got from the hand’s strangeward dimension was of an incomprehensibly large hallway. I could more or less slide my hand blindly down a smooth wall until I got where I needed to be.
The ‘texture’ of the Closet’s fourth dimension was not smooth. It was ropey, fleshy, wet, and moving.
When I first reached out, a vine slithered through the phantom limb, and I immediately jerked my senses back. It felt like I’d reached out to grab a snack from the pantry without looking, and stuffed my hand into a pile of live snakes instead.
I didn’t have a problem with snakes, or plants that looked and felt like snakes, but I’d still jump if I encountered a snake-like creature in a place I wasn’t expecting one to be. I’d had a pet snake for about a decade. It was cute enough, if a bit bitey.
But if I’d gone for a midnight piss and found Albert coiled up in the toilet bowl, I’d have screamed like a bobcat.
Anyway, I took about three seconds to allow my heart rate to drop back below 200 bpm and reached in for another attempt. Unlike Albert, the plant couldn’t bite me. My hand wasn’t really there, just an extension of my perception. That didn’t stop my skin from crawling when carnivorous Dominion Ivy was the overwhelming majority of what I could sense. It also didn’t stop me from groping around until I found Grotto’s bunker.
“Stand close,” I said.
Xim and Varrin moved until they were shoulder to shoulder with me, weapons and spells ready. Xim had taken the time while I concentrated to grant Varrin the Blessings of Hunger and Pounding, giving him endless Blessed generation, along with bonus damage and life leech.
I cast Shortcut, using the Bubble mana shape to take my allies with me.
Aside from the several dozen mutilated vines that appeared along with us, we made it inside the control room without issue.
Varrin used Ghostwind Slash, I dropped an Elemental Barrier with the Cold damage type, and Xim cast Judgment. All three of us had abilities that allowed the skills to ignore allies, and the room was small enough that our AoEs fully encompassed it.
A spectral copy of Kazandak swept around us, filling the room with a cutting Spiritual wind that sucked a shadowy figure from a dark corner. The temperature dropped low enough to flash-freeze water, then erupted in a pillar of holy fire.
This resulted in the mystery figure being Slowed, Ignited, Feared, Slowed again–which upgraded it to Immobilized–Weakened, and Cursed, while taking a combination of Spectral, Elemental, Infernal, and Psychic damage.
Whoever this was, they were almost certainly an enemy. There was a tiny chance they were a random person who was neither an ally nor an enemy and had snuck inside Grotto’s hideout somehow. Our skills would ignore allies, but not neutral third parties.
I wouldn’t lose sleep over it if they were the latter, though. Breaking into a secured facility inside of a Delver’s personal pocket dimension was an effective way to self-select oneself out of the gene pool.
However, our combination of attacks made it difficult to figure out who we were annihilating. Their soul was in chaos from Varrin’s attack, and they were burning with all the enthusiasm of dry kindling on a bonfire in the middle of a drought.
Once the pull effect from Varrin’s skill wore off, Elemental Barrier launched the burning figure away. Varrin flicked Kazandak, removing the person’s head before they thudded against the wall, crumpling to the floor in two parts.
I canceled my spell, and Xim willed the flames to die. I stepped forward to poke the person with my boot. They were a mutilated hunk of unidentifiable charcoal, and they were very much deceased.
“Who do ya think that was?” asked Xim.
I ignored the body and spun, looking for Grotto. I spotted him by the back wall, and for a moment I thought he was hovering in place. When I pushed past Varrin and took a step closer, I realized he was hanging from the wall. An arrow had passed through his center and buried itself in one of the dark slates he used to monitor information, pinning him.
I stood close and looked at the wound. From the outside, Grotto looked like a little c’thon that had been murdered. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, his tentacles were limp, and ocean-blue blood dripped from his feelers onto the ground, but no longer flowed from the wound.
I pushed down a flare of grief and anger. My Sight told me what I already knew through our Shared Fate connection.
His soul was weak, but the Core was alive.
“Grotto?” I said.
I raised a hand on impulse but dropped it without touching him. I had no idea whether trying to move him would help or hinder, so I deferred to Xim. The cleric stepped up next to me, a look of dismay crossing her features. An instant later her expression settled into something more clinical and detached.
She reached up, gently placed her hand along Grotto’s side, and closed her eyes. A soft pulse of Divine mana ran down her arm and through the Core’s body.
“His organic body feels like it's shut down,” she said. “But it’s hard to say how bad the damage is. Grotto’s c’thon body is–by design–missing most of the vital organs a normal living being needs. Still, there’s no blood flow or muscular activity, none of the things his core handles to maintain the c’thonic tissue.”
“His Delve Core body is alive, I know that much,” I said. “Can you get insight into how badly his chassis has been damaged?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” she said. “He’s a combination of mana weaves and machinery and… who knows what else. Nuralie would probably be our best bet. Even you or Etja would have a better chance at evaluating him than I would.”
I bit my lip as I thought over the situation. Varrin squatted next to the half-cremated corpse and tried to find anything of interest. The room hadn’t been spared our onslaught, but its contents were made of extremely durable Delve stuff.
The mini-obelisk at the center was untouched, and I could barely notice where Xim’s fire had burned. It was a bit more selective than normal fire, given its divine nature. Varrin’s attack hadn’t used a physical blade, so nothing had been cut into pieces, and Elemental Barrier had left a layer of frost behind, but the wave of force it emitted wasn’t very destructive on its own.
For how ruinous the three skills had been on the unidentifiable intruder, they’d gone pretty easy on the environment.
“He’s not dead, and from what I can tell he’s not getting worse,” I said. “But he’s incapacitated, and I have no idea if that puts him on a timer.”
“Why would it?” asked Xim.
“He needs to absorb mana to stay functional,” I said. “I don’t know if he can do that in this state.”
“How does he normally fix himself?” asked Varrin.
“He has automated functions that deal with wear and tear, but this goes well beyond that,” I said. “There’s a space for him inside the obelisk, like there was in his old Delve. He told me that if he had a major problem, I should put him in there.”
“You two did not discuss any other contingencies?” asked Varrin.
“You know how he is,” I said. “I don’t even know what intrinsic skill would be most helpful for fixing him.”
“I believe it would be wise to force that conversation,” said Varrin. “In case this happens again.”
I appreciated that Varrin was operating with the belief that we’d all survive for there to be a next time.
“You’re right. Regardless, that’s the best place for him until we figure out whether we need to do anything manually. The main obstacle to that idea is that someone is in there fucking with the obelisk as we speak.”
“You said it looked like the Wishborn,” said Varrin.
“I did,” I said. “But if their archer is in the obelisk room, then who’s that?” I nodded at the charred corpse. “It sure looks like that fuck shot Grotto with an arrow and then hid out, trying to ambush us.”
“We haven’t gotten any kill notifications,” said Xim. “If the System could tell us who’s dead, it would simplify things.”
“It is probably treating this as a single encounter,” said Varrin. “We will receive any combat notifications once the threat is dealt with.”
I furrowed my brow and looked back at Grotto. It was disturbing to see him like this. I knew intellectually that Grotto wasn’t a little floating feathered octopus, but that’s the form I’d known him as for the majority of our time together. Emotionally, it felt like looking at the body of a friend, murdered in cold blood. I tried to push down another spike of anger but only half-succeeded. I needed to keep a level head and stay rational, but there was a heat in my chest that wouldn’t go away.
“Maybe we can see the notifications,” I said, drawing curious looks from both Xim and Varrin. I pulled up my skills and re-read Dungeoneering.
Dungeoneering: This skill allows you to use System Insight concerning Delves, dungeons, and labyrinths. Higher levels improve the insights you receive.
System Insight was a term first explained to me by the crafter and merchant Seinnador, who used it to gain additional information when inspecting items. As far as I knew, it meant the System would grace you with some of its vast knowledge from time to time, if it felt like it, and only about the specific thing for which you had System Insight. It was one of those vague, bullshit ‘abilities’ that I had a strong distaste for.
It was also useless.
The information we got from Grotto was leaps and bounds above anything the skill could provide. Thus, Dungeoneering was a dead skill for me, and it was primarily a vessel for Grotto to provide bonuses to the Pocket Delve. The evolutions made the Delve more mana-efficient and made allied Fear effects more difficult to resist while inside.
The Delve was at best an indirect help to me. Grotto had promised to create automation chains within the Delve for things I wanted or needed, but hadn’t yet gotten around to it. I hadn’t pressed him on it, and we’d been busy, but it was a theoretical future benefit and not immediately useful.
However, System Insight was as close as a normal Delver could get to being able to make a System Call.
System Calls were made by Delve Cores and other System entities when they wanted something specific from the System that it wouldn’t automatically provide them. Grotto’s override codes were System Calls, and they could be used much more broadly than System Insight. The System Rep that we’d gotten from the Delve was a currency used when making a System Call, allowing the System to allocate additional resources via some kind of merit-based logic. Successful Cores got more support, while unsuccessful Cores had to nut up.
Grotto had his own pool of System Rep, but so did I. That was a point of confusion for Grotto and even Avarice when I mentioned it to her. Of course, my relationship with the System was unusual. After all, how many Delvers were co-arbiters of a Delve? I suspected the answer was one.
And, as co-arbiter of a Delve, shouldn’t I be allowed to make a System Call? If not, then what the fuck was the point of me having this Dungeoneering skill?
“System Call,” I said, crossing my fingers. “Update combat notifications for Delver Party: Fortune’s Folly.”
Varrin raised an eyebrow, while Xim peered up at the ceiling in anticipation. Several seconds passed with no response. I was about to try again when I got a notification.
Evaluating request…
Combat notifications are held in reserve until Fortune’s Folly has successfully navigated the current conflict. Advancing notifications will require an appropriate override code.
Xim saw me react to the message, but couldn’t see it herself. “Did it work?” she asked. I nodded. “No fuckin’ way.”
I searched through my memory for the codes I’d seen. I glanced back at Grotto as one came to mind.
“Override code 003: Preservation of Delve Core.”
Comments
Cornman
Between the holiday and some illness rolling around in my household I fell a bit farther behind than I intended. I've got another one coming out later today, just need to give it a final polish.
