The Deep Ether Campaign/Session 22

The party found themselves on a planet with virtually no ambient etheric energy, casting it in a deep twilight. The only sign of mobility was a group of six automata, who reacted threateningly to the party's attempt to align itself with the Foundation. Despite their hostility, the six automata that confronted the party scattered when confronted with a hologram imitation of the Foundation.

The party then explored various strange and unsettling structures across the surface of the world, all giving the impression that the entire planet had been arranged into some vast and dimly knowable machine. The surface of the world was coated with an inorganic, utterly inert dust, especially around the bizarre, seamless structures that jutted from the featureless plains. No winds blew, nor did any natural landscape break the monotony. The planet's surface seemed to have been stripped completely bare, but with no sign of tool use. The only variation other than the troubling monoliths seemed to be the occasional veins of industrial slag running over the planet, long-since dusted over.

Etherics on the world were not only muted but also wildly inconsistent, sending Hrymn and Garrel off-balance until a careful effort to re-calibrate them by Garrel and Allie. But most important was the only light that the party's lamps did not cast: the strange auroras that gleamed around a vast chasm in the distance, lined by what appeared to be Black Pyramids (no prior expedition had discovered more than one Pyramid in a given place).

Days of trudging through the dust brought the party to the edge of that chasm, which appeared completely artificial and, in fact, seemed to control the firing-in-series of a dozen Black Pyramids. One pyramid at the end of the chain fired, then some further down, then more in reply, until at last the entire chain was discharging unimaginable quantities of etheric energy against the gray backdrop of the planet's dark and listless sky. As soon as one Pyramid fell silent, others would take up their place in the cyclopean chorus. The aurora, it seemed, was a side-effect of directing the entire etheric power of the Black Pyramids through the chasm, resolving into a strange song of light and reality-warping.

After long contemplation, Garrel came to three conclusions:

1. The Pyramids were functioning like a vast musical organ, and the chasm as a pipe for their music. Their energy demanded the entire etheric atmosphere of the planet.
2. Garrel's recalibrated etheric sensors allow him to conclude that the "song" they produced followed no discernible rythm to a mortal observer under normal conditions, but was inescapably musical.
3. The song was resonant with reality itself, and perhaps reality (at least the laws of etherics) had been remade to make it so. Extending from his study of the ether and the soul: if someone wanted to allow passage outside the cosmos, or by a "soul-like" entity from outside the cosmos into this reality, one theoretical solution would be to obtain the resonant frequency of reality (or a small part of it) and resonate in such a way as to admit visitors.

These three facts and the broader context of the Mind Virus ravaging Naga Space brought Garrel to a troubling and all-too plausible theory: Selene Veer, or someone in her footsteps, had transformed this world to brute-force the resonant frequency of reality and bring the Unnamed into creation.