Expedition 140: Mountain of Loose Ends

**Expedition 140:** *Mountain of Loose Ends*

**Date:** 2nd of Monova, The White Week

**Roster:** Bea’savac, Confidence, Ellie, Fi Falcon, Ranag Uln

Report filed with the Ironwood Adventurer’s Guild of Port Vrall

**Filed by**: Uula Fourfinger, in lieu of Boris Vadislav, in lieu of Finnjamin Falcon.

Report of an expedition into the Mageline and Mountain, undertaken on the 2nd of Monova, AoP 366, to explore Mountain and recover a dagger held in the Bastion of Empire supposedly desired by the God of Order, Auton.

Contents of the Report are relevant to these ongoing threats to the stability of the East:

* The Warden Flegh’do
* The Time-Weft
* The Goddess Sarenrae’s Imprisonment
* Tyrrunphal the Sleeping Giant, who apparently is prophesied to end the world yet the Compact isn’t killing because Gilgamesh didn’t get the point across.
* The Skeleton Thief of Mountain, who was created by accident with Everglow on this mission, and who the Compact also decided to not kill

Summary of mission events:

It was revealed. Apparently. To Finnjamin Falcon in a dream that the God of Order, Auton, would offer aid to the Compact to free the Goddess Saren’rae if they recovered a dagger held in the Bastion of Mountain and buried it in the sea. Nobody has told me why the knife was important and I don’t think they know either.

Finnjamin, Passion, Ellie, Ranag Uln, and Bea went into the Mageline and traveled to Mountain. They got through the Badlands door just fine, since Boris destroyed its hinges a while back.

In the Mageline, the members of the Compact that had previously entered Nexus reported that they felt a strong urge to re-enter it when they passed by. Because wizard obsessions with horrible deathtraps are contagious now, whoo. Passion and Ranag felt that the urge would become harder and harder to resist as time went on, to make amtters worse.

Further along in the Mageline, the Compact encountered a wizard construct of Drakehall. Finnjamin called it “half earthen, half ice, the head a mirror with a human face glancing around warily as it moved.” Gonerton Bergs said it was probably an Earth and Water elemental joined and controlled remotely. Which sounds really unpleasant for the elementals.

Passion tried to talk to the construct, but it moved to attack, and Finnjamin stalled it with a weak enchantment spell. The rest of the Compact, led by Ranag Uln, wanted to fight the creature. Pay attention: this will be a theme.

The Compact moved so that Finnjamin, Bea, Ellie, and Ranag surrounded the construct. Initially, they seemed like they would be able to handily win the fight, even if the construct made attacks quickly and brutally.

The Mage in the mirror used a Wall of Force to divide the Compact, trapping itself with Finnjamin. Finnjamin was able to avoid the Elemental’s attacks even in close quarters with his ludicrous acrobatics, but was overwhelmed by the water elemental, as he didn't have the strength to keep his feet. The Elemental then beat him up, the Mage used necromancy to sap his strength, and he almost died.

Finally, Ranag and Bea hacked through the Wall of Force and slew the Elemental in a surge of acition. Bea claims she drank it to death. I would believe her stomach is bigger on the inside than out, it would actually explain a lot. Finnjamin healed himself, the Compact took a sack of wizard ink from the Elemental’s body--I’m not sure why the wizard wouldn’t just mix the ink with the water?--and continued forwards.

The Compact found a few notable location in the Mageline, including a possible entrance to the Wailing Leagues, an Innkeeper and the Hall of Contrition, which had dead guards outside of it. The Compact says it’s never gone into the Hall of Contrition, and there’s probably a joke there somewhere,

At the entrance to Mountain, the Compact encountered a squadron of spectral pikemen, who Passion convinced to stand aside by pretending to be servants of Torr’s Empire (Finnjamin cast Tongues on him). Apparently the Empire really had it out for Refuge; Passion only had to mention the name to get the guards antsy. He managed to persuade them he worked for Otiluke, and got the group in.

The walls of the hallway was carved with Emperor Torrson’s idea of his history: a glorious crusade of conquest bringing noble cities to his side, and such. He's Gilgamesh but shorter, basically. He also had some laws he cared a lot about, numbered one through seven, that nobody on the mission could read but which were scrawled in big text along the wall.

The Compact did get more sense out of a map: Mountain’s organization is fairly simple. The City is done in the dwarven style, with wealthier people and more important structures built deeper. At the bottom is Emperor Torrson’s palace, above it the Cathedral of Torr. Above that is the wealthiest district, with fine homes and parks lit by the Everglow the Empire produced so much of. Great pillars support a series of tenements, of decreasing quality, going further up; water and sewage is transported through the pillars. The city’s West is dominated by agriculture, and the East is dominated by the Bastion of Empire, which housed much of the city’s military, prisons, and armories. The Compact also determined that the exit to Otiluke’s Teleportation gate was below the Mageline entrance to the city, in the wealthier district.

The Compact set out for the Bastion, walking along a walkway covered with pools of leaking Everglow. The guards of Bastion were, predictably, dead, and the Compact took the Bellringer Hammer, symbol of the Defender of the Bastion, and his very shoddy whistle. Why do you need a whistle with a magic thunderclap hammer? To tell people there isn’t a fight going on?

The Portcullis of the Bastion was a shoddy design, made of gold and silver, for show as much as efficiency. Passion wiggled through the bars, along with Finnjamin’s familiar, and they managed to find the Earth Elemental that controlled the gate and persuade it to open the portcullis.

Inside the Bastion, the group found the prison, barred with a stupidly large lock that was so massive Ellie and Passion could pick it with rapiers and daggers, very easily. It didn't do much to keep anyone out, though behind the door was a wall of skeletons, so the Empire might have been being clever with that one.

Skeletons began streaming out of the Bastion Prison, flooding the Compact, crushing them down, and then savaging them. Many left for the city, but those that got engaged with the Compact stayed, trying to eat their flesh. As skeletons do.

The Compact described the experience as more of an annoyance than anything. With that weird Nexus Key they have, they carved a big hole out of the wall and all hid inside to avoid the horde. Except Finnjamin tried to be acrobatic about it, and swung off a chandelier to get into the hole and knocked the Everglow in it onto a skeleton, and that skeleton grew like a thousand eyes and began speaking in a hundred voices. Apparently it got turned into a *celestial,* though, not a Beholder. I don’t buy it. Unless maybe celestials are beholders, which would explain a lot.

Well, the Superskeleton was apparently pretty stoked to exist, and it mind-controlled all the other skeletons into not attacking the Compact and said it wouldn’t eat their flesh today, “but there will be more flesh in the future!" Then it left. And all of Mountain is just covered in massive stocks of the stuff that lets *that* happen if you dip anything into it, being used as an alternative to freaking torches because why not. Wizards are a menace.

Well, the Compact had no more problems going through the prison, though apparently there were more skeletons locked into some cells. In an empty one, just like in Finnjamin’s supposed dream, there was supposedly a dagger and two gold pieces buried under the stones. And a crumbled note that apparently got lost in the administrative shuffle. No idea what it said, there’s just references to its existence in the expedition reports. It seems like one of those things that’s critically important context that nobody bothered to follow up on because half the Compact has the memory of a goldfish.

On their way out, the Compact saw their new skeleton friend cheerfully mind controlling the undead of Mountain into a terrifying army under its maniacal command. On the plus side, the skeleton apparently was quite confused: couldn’t remember its own name, knew about Liefsend somehow, didn’t have a plan of what to do next, thought it couldn’t break promises and didn’t like that at all. It also “quite liked being unique,” and claimed not to be planning to use the Everglow in Mountain to make more like itself. Apparently the skeleton was of a thief, and a lot of that personality is still around; the Skeleton Thief was mostly concerned with looting Mountain with its newfound existence instead of going on a conquering rampage. Small blessings.

The Compact was also quite fond of looting, and got to it. They robbed a cushy Mountain manor of all its jewelry, a Glamorweave Tunic, and a set of Wellride Tack, without trouble.

Ranag Uln also wanted to keep exploring for threats while in Mountain, and there was a big unsolved mystery there: some creature whose snore apparently cut through the whole city, who slept somewhere in the Bastion. The Skeleton Thief called it “the Bunkmate,” and said it had been snoring for hundreds of years. Which maybe explains why the skeletons were so desperate to get out.

Well, the Compact did as it usually did, and walked towards the giant horrible monster like crazy people. Behind layers of defenses in Mountain, the sort of set-up you use to guard a Duke or some ancient doomsday artifact, the group found a massive iron cube, where the snoring creature slept. The cube was suspended with springs inside an even larger carved space, so that any shock would be absorbed. A set of rickety wooden steps went up to a door carved into it, a massive one.

The cube was carved in abstract patterns, and Giantish runes were carved on the ground below it. It was clear to the Compact that this chamber had been carved by Giants, and Bastion had carved its tunnel to it long after it was first created. How the Giants had arrived there, the Compact could not answer; there was no other entrance to the chamber at all.

The Compact, still like crazy people, made loud noises and tried to wake up the sleeping creature, and there was no response. Eventually, *even more like crazy people*, they pulled open the door and went inside.

Inside, there was a Stone Giant woman, sixty or so feet tall, in a simple dress with a long scar across her right cheek. She was snoring like a lumber mill, and would not awaken as the Compact shouted to her.

After much discussing back and forth, the Compact agreed that Finnjamin, who knew translation magic, could use a Dream spell to talk to the sleeping Giantess. Finnjamin entered her dreams and spoke with her.

The Giantess was, apparently, playing a great game with herself in her dreamscape, one of those resource management games that people play to give themselves a sense of progress in an uncaring world. She paused it and spoke to Finn.

The Giantess was Tyrrunphal, and she had not spoken to anyone else for centuries. She slept to “forestall the end,” which she described as a great calamity that would throw the elements into disarray and destroy the distinction between life and death. She claimed that it was prophesied that when she awoke, this disaster would come. The prophecy was made by “The gods above the gods, the stones from which the universe was made,” which I feel like the Gods would have some problems with. Because of the prophecy, Tyrr wanted to never wake, and she played games with herself in her sleep for all time.

Tyrr was once a “chieftain of great power” in the Eastern Mountains, born in the Age of Storms. She helped make the first Storm Giants, and ruled a great stretch of mountains. In the Age of Peace, when Torr first rose to the sky, she entered her sleep in Torr’s Mountain, and has remained there ever since. In her life, Tyrrunphal often felt uncomfortable in the male forms Giants have had since, she said, before “gender” existed. She reformed herself in the image of female mortals, and created her children in that image as well.

Tyrrunphal slept through Torrson’s Empire, who built further defenses around her cube and talked to her intermediately. She apparently slept through Gilgamesh, who was *also* a giant prophesied to end the world, so clearly both the “gods above the gods” have no originality and also we should really, really kill Tyrr in her sleep.

The Compact did not kill Tyrr in her sleep, but did ask about her defenses, which she assured them were sufficient to keep her sleeping. Her cube was extremely wear-resistant, and it was enchanted to polymorph any creature that entered it intending her harm into a marble (Seriously. Gilgamesh. I can’t be the only one noticing this?). The floor of the cube, terrifyingly, had a few marbles on it.

Finnjamin promised that others would contact Tyrr in the future, and then Tyrr ejected him from the Dream. With that, the Compact left Mountain.

The return journey from Mountain was uneventful, except for the one bit where the Compact encountered three Mageline Golems ready to slaughter them and the Compact had to drag Ranag away from trying to take on all three of them at once like a maniac. Man every Compact member is just insane in their own special way aren't they?

There, it’s finally done. Paperwork is hell.

**Expedition Result:** Success

**Expedition Level:** 10 (Benefits No Nation)

**Expedition Loot:** The Bellringer Hammer, 700gp in ancient gold pieces and the jewelry of a Mountain manor, Glamorweave Tunic, Wellride Tack, A Knife of Unknown Provenance Desired by Auton, a Mountain of Loose Ends