Time Zero

==Season Ten, Episode Nine==
Preceded by: Season Ten, Episode Eight: Our Destinies Were Foreordained, 1441
Followed by: Season Ten, Episode Ten: Sirius Business
==Summary==
::Sending to Ethan Dragonslayer: Gauve wasn't guessing. He found Xenteroth's phylactery. Now we have it. It does science with the lantern. Whargarbl. Oh, and epic loots.''
: It's time to get down to business and do what can be done to bring back the dead party members. Cicero holds the Hand still while the healing starts. Leilah uses some of her experience to trade to her mother for spell slots, then takes the two diamonds Ashra offers her from party loot. She first raises Avimeus. Ashra greets him, says it's been a while, and asks how he got himself captured by Xenteroth on Mechanus. 
: Avimeus explains that he was exploring Xenteroth's Tower in search of the Crown of the Goblin King. He was working with some highly skilled hirelings to excavate the tower. He found the famed room with the discs shifting, then woke up chained in the force cage. Ashra asks him if he saw how close to ending the discs were, but he didn't. 
: Ashra looks to see if Aether is wearing an amulet; she is not. Leilah raises her. Ashra takes Eleven's manual and fixes him so he's conscious again. 
: Ashra wants to use her cure wand on one of the Inquisitors in the force cage to test it, since a Two tied a knot in it and she doesn't know if it still functions normally. Leilah insists that she use it on her, since she doesn't want to risk killing the Inquisitor. Ashra grudgingly agrees; the wand works as it should. Ashra uses the wand's remaining charges to heal the party until everyone has at least 40 hit points. 
: Leilah and Avimeus go down to check out the inquisitors; both are tagged with levitation. One inquisitor is a blond albino aasimar in a loincloth, the other is a very dark desert human in robes with a symbol from a splinter sect of Pelor.
: First Leilah brings up the albino. When Cicero wakes him, he opens blind eyes and asks where he is. He is surprised to find himself on Mechanus, and had been captured eight days before. He introduces himself as Keamel, of the order of Holy Seers. They're a subset of Inquisitors who predict the future. He can tell where people are from by their voices, and hears Ashra twitch when he refers to mind flayers using that slur. 
: He explains that he was working on a massive influx of drugs in the Eventide District of Nyasa City. On the night of November 7th, one Inquisitor went missing and everyone was brought in. The missing Inquisitor had been trying to monitor a deal between Brutus Fairlan and some locals. He spotted an illithid who had disguised himself as human, then was disintegrated by a robot. The last Keamel remembers is the sound of a door shattering. 
: While here, he heard at least four illithids watching him. 
: The party asks him to help, and he asks for a bow and a holy symbol of Pelor. The party gives him a +2 mighty 1 composite shortbow, which he appreciates. Ashra asks him as a favor to say a few words for the fallen Zaphodel, and offers her holy symbol in return; he agrees. He does not react to Ashra's slimy, three-fingered hands passing the symbol, and goes to pray over Zaph. 
: The second prisoner is less friendly, as he can see. When he wakes up he is very suspicious of Ashra, disbelieving everything she says and constantly asking what she really wants. He is stunned that she does not detect as evil; she is both affected by Undetectable Alignment and herself Lawful Neutral. Leilah and Ashra argue, mostly telepathically, over whether Ashra should back down. 
: Leilah is almost getting information out of him when he notices Avimeus and very respectfully apologizes. He is still surprised that Avimeus's Malvont strike force has an illithid, but answers the questions Avi and Leilah ask. 
: This man's name is Forfax of Port Nyasa. He was in the Nightshade District on the seventh to sell some items he happened to have and was in a club with his money when he felt a sharp pain to the back of the head. He wants his own gear back. 
: While rescuing the Inquisitors, Leilah had found a secret door with the mirror. Aether isn't up to picking the lock right then, so the party takes out their portable ram and Eleven and Cicero bash down the door. Inside is a room with a vat and nine chests. 
: Aether is willing to pick the locks on the chest, or at least to try. She fails on the first, breaking the lock, so the party decides to wait on that for now. The second opens and reveals a series of surgical tools which could be used as makeshift torturer's tools. Leilah recognizes that these could be used to create a Voidmind. 
: The third chest contains Avimeus's stuff: potions, scrolls, and diamond dust. There is also a small golden ball which he does not recognize; it is a psi crystal of magic missile, and he pretends it's his own too and pockets it. 
: The fourth chest has Forfax's stuff: his mace, handy haversack, and lots of Wolves Milk and drug money. Ashra asks Aether telepathically to help play a prank, and she has her swap out one vial of Wolves Milk for a vial of The Green Liquid. They then hand him back his stuff. 
: The fifth chest has the remains of an Inquisitor's things. There are a couple of wands, a potion, some scrolls, a magical buckler and mace, and a rod of silence. 
: The sixth chest's lock also breaks, and the party leaves it for later. 
: The seventh chest has a crown, many potions, some scrolls, and a sword with a ratchet on its handle. Aether picks it up and when she looks into the blade, she sees a tough man looking back at her. He greets her and starts hitting on her, she starts flirting back, and the rest of the party facepalms. 
: The eighth chest holds a greataxe, two immovable rods, and a mithril shirt. 
: The ninth chest has three books: a tome for Constitution in Sylvan, bringing some resolution to Ashra and Leilah's long-running theoretical bitchfight over the Giant Con tome; a tome for Strength in Common; and a tome for Intelligence in Celestial. 
: Ashra hands Aether a crowbar to deal with the remaining two chests. The first chest holds the seer's magic scimitar, bow, arrows, and crystal ball, which he reclaims. The sixth loses a couple of potions in the opening, but has a good assortment remaining. 
: The vat offers its own problems. It is a vat of cerebral fluid with seven illithid tadpoles in it; everyone but Ashra wants to destroy them, and Ashra tells the party to wait. Leilah recognizes that they're actually undead. Ashra knows that almost certainly anything they are used to ceremorphize will become an abomination against proper illithids. Even if they were proper, living tadpoles, the lives of tadpoles are usually cheap. Ashra has not seen any sign of a new generation for her people since the Mother's departure, however, and it's a hard decision. 
: She finally says that the tadpoles should die, but as it's a mercy killing, she should be the one to do it. She spends a moment thinking to her Mother, as though praying, that if she acts in error she would appreciate another message in her head before she does it. When no such message arrives, Ashra solemnly pours a flask of acid into the vat. In a minute or so the tadpoles float dead to the top. 
: That finished, the party heads back up and releases the hand. It crawls to the far wall and writes a series of almost-letters, then returns to Cicero's shoulder. The party examines them and begins trying to anagram them or, for that matter, be sure they're reading them correctly. Ashra notes that the end of the sequence could be construed to read "PELOR" backwards. The Hand then carves an ankh above the letters. Leilah remembers the ankh held by the paladin depicted in The Nautilus, and Cicero remembers the cleric with an ankh he ran into in the Elfwin Casino. 
: Ashra remembers Ethan tapping on an altar to Nerull to free her from its curse. She plays with the letters, then taps out "PRIME". 
: A secret door appears around the letters. Cicero offers to go first, as the Hand is kind of his pet at this point. He shoves the door open, and the Hand skitters down the resulting tunnel. The party follows, crawling single file. 
: Eventually he reaches a thin sheet of very cold metal. Leilah rejects Ashra's attempt to do thermal science to it by pointing out that the Shatterspike will be a lot faster and surer. She stabs the metal, which cracks and then falls. 
: The party goes through the resultant opening and finds themselves ... outside? It's freezing cold, up 20,000 feet on a high mountain. Everyone is in danger here, but only Leilah is sickened by the thin air. Ashra pulls on her coat and shares her other cold-winter clothes with Kruglor and Avi; Leilah puts on her winter clothes and shares her spares with Aether and Cicero. Ashra looks around and sees that they are about 25 miles away from Bisau. 
: The hand jumps from Cicero's shoulder and scratches at the ground. Cicero helps it reveal a large iron slab, which Kruglor, Aether and Ashra pry up. 
: Avimeus recognizes where they are instantly. This is the Mountain of Kings: a place where the Avimeus kings store things they never want seen again. Avi has been here only once, to drop off the phylactery. Only he and Ashra know what lies within; he leaves it to her discretion whether the rest of the party should know. 
: After some ridiculous equivocation which tells no one anything, Ashra finally spits out, "It might be Xenteroth's phylactery!"
: "... oh." 
: The Hand points inside. Only Avimeus can enter, and he'll need a light. He walks in and uses his Daylight ability, but it isn't enough. After extracting a promise to give it right back afterwards, Ashra hands him the Dark Lantern. 
: It gives him a field of illuminated darkness about ten feet by ten feet. Avi goes to the crate and inputs his own personal code. He climbs into the crate and pulls out a small music box. 
: Only he and Gauve have opened the box; he opens it now for the second time. In it is a shriveled, preserved heart and the letters "HRX". It is then that he realizes the function of what he holds. Only the lantern and the phylactery can affect each other. 
: He returns to the surface and hands the lantern back to Ashra. The Hand scuttles over to the iron and scratches a crossed zero. The party made their deadline by forty-five minutes. The superlich's undeath is in their hands.
Category: Episodes Category: Season Ten Episodes