GM Journal - GURPS: Infinite Worlds (Session 128)
This week the party fled the collapsing volcano, but then went back to the worldline when they realized that Cthulhu was wreaking havoc there. They fought Cthulhu in a furious and drawn-out fight. Kale nearly died, and Valius stayed behind to mop up the rest of the evil creatures released from the subterranean menagerie.
As soon as the party reached the conveyor, where Algernon was standing by, they threw all caution to the winds and turned on the conveyor’s power. As they punched the “go home” button, the conveyor warned of a resonance cascade phenomenon in the caverns.
The jump home was perfect, and Gaius Quintilius informed the party that things had been very quiet around the Greenhouse since they were gone. Kale performed surgery on his own hand to remove the tiny little chalice from his hand. Valius took the tiny but surprisingly dense (nearly two hundred pounds in a centimeter-tall cup) into safe keeping. With those necessities out of the way, the party fell to arguing vociferously about various things, from the anti-demonic powers of Gray Knights to the presumed fate of the people around Popocatépetl.
Their bickering was interrupted, however, by a low, glum voice on the party communicators, “Testing. Testing. Sorry to interrupt..”
“You’re coming through loud and clear,” assured Kale.
“Oh. This is the computer in the lab. There’s something you might want to see.”
“Put it up on the conveyor’s screen.”
“No, you’ll want to see it in person. I’m sending Daneel Olivaw over to show you where.”
Daneel arrived and led the party along the long hallway that leads past the Greenhouse’s graveyard. Rounding a hairpin turn at the far end, he continued on and a bit down, to a new place that had grown in across from the observatory above the stairwell to the basement. There was a low, wide door leading into a vast, dark dome. Valius, standing eight feet even, had to stoop nearly to crawling to enter, but those closer to five feet tall had no trouble at all.
Within the darkened hemisphere, they found an enormous orrery. (“Like the one in Dark Crystal?” “Yes, but bigger, and awesomer.”) One of the hundreds of brass spheres was highlighted by a ghostly luminescence. On closer inspection, the party found that it had a little fire spitting out of one side, and a little greenish figure standing on its surface near the fire. Valius and Zack/Lilleithyn took a closer look, and found that the little green man was a grotesque figure with four arms, eight eyes, and a sickly but profuse green beard which actually turned out to be tentacles. Chloë estimated that the figure’s height was one to two percent of the diameter of the globe on which it stood.
As the party looked on, the little figure stooped to pluck something from the surface of the sphere and pop whatever it had picked up into its horribly betentacled mouth. Valius spotted glowing tendrils of energy rising from the charred surface of an isthmus between continents to vanish into the thorax of the minuscule fiend.
“It’s devouring the souls of the innocent!” cried Valius, convinced it was an Ancient Entity of great evil.
The next few minutes were a buzz of activity as three or four plans were hatched and then put into action. Chloë, Kale and Rhiannon hurried to the Utility Conveyor No. 23, planning a direct attack on the monster. The rest of the party were to take La Celestina to the Swedish-speaking nation in the north and retrieve Algernon’s Centrum conveyor.
The utility conveyor, taking off first, arrived behind the green creature’s massive left leg. External sensors indicated that the ambient temperature was 120°F, and the conveyor was rocked by powerful winds. Chloë took it up to a spot just behind the being’s head, dozens of miles up, well beyond the stratosphere. Even so high, the conveyor was still buffeted by hurricane-force winds. “Winds, up here?” mused Chloë, “ah yes.. ‘magic.’” Kale dove from the conveyor to make a difficult landing on the back of the creature’s scalp.
While Kale made the trek across the 2+ kilometers of evil noggin, La Celestina warped in, and Chloë took the conveyor back down to breathable altitudes (about knee high to the Elder Entity.) She and Rhiannon bailed out and Rhiannon shot the “go home” button with a rag-wrapped arrow. Rhiannon landed precariously on the beast’s kneecap, while Chloë stabbed Excalibur as deep as she could into the flesh at the back of its knee, using her weight to slice downward.
Zack/Lilleithyn took the helm of La Celestina, much to Don Enrique’s delight: “Ai. I never have let a cat to drive the ship. Sounds dangerous!” They swooped in to the military compound at Chattahoocheeborg where Algernon’s conveyor was impounded. As they approached the city, they saw numerous plumes of smoke all over the place, and fog and mist that seemed to indicate atmospheric disruption. The roads out of Chattahoocheeborg were clogged with massive traffic jams of departing cars and trucks.
The depot was manned by two nervous and bedraggled-looking soldiers. They had barely gotten to the point of yelling, “Hey You!” in Swedish, when Valius jumped down from La Celestina and ordered them to lie down on the ground, and Eric/Thane snatched their rifles from them. Already frightened half witless, the soldiers tried to inform Algernon that the party wouldn’t find much in the compound: all the food, weapons, and vehicles were gone already. Zack/Lilleithyn, with good intentions, popped into the soldiers’ brains and told them that everything would be all right, and that they, the party, would take care of everything. Algernon took both rifles and the helmet of one of the soldiers. Stepping on to where the conveyor was being kept, he found it standing lonesomely in a massive garage that had previously held dozens of jeeps and trucks.
As Kale was making his way across the expanse of Elder Badass’s melon, he noticed great pustules or bubbles rising in the swamp-like skin. One of the bubbles burst as he passed, and out flew a great snake-like thing with leathery wings, a metallic skeletal body, and what appeared to be the still-writhing body of a human in its jaws. Steeling his nerve, Kale continued on to the forehead of the beast.
Meanwhile, Rhiannon was pouring mana into a Heat spell on the monster’s left knee. Chloë’s downward progress had slowed and stopped, and the blade of Excalibur, from the ricasso onward, was glowing a bright orange with heat. Seeing that the immense creature seemed to be taking no action to swat or itch at the gash she had cut, Chloë called for reinforcements. Both Algernon in his Centrum conveyor, and the rest of the party in La Celestina popped in to aid in the fight.
Having reached the front of the head, Kale drew his force sword and laser carbine and proceeded to burrow into the eye of the beast. Just as he had hollowed out a couple dozen cubic feet, a great tentacle whipped up towards him from behind. He shimmied into the niche he had carved from the creature’s massive cornea, barely avoiding the hideous suckers that came up and slapped the eye around him. More tentacles came whipping around as Algernon performed a daring taunt, popping his conveyor to a spot right in front of the monster’s face, and then popping out at the last moment to let it flail at its own face.
Valius began frantically searching his memory and his holo-books for ways to contain or banish a creature of this type. None of the accounts he could find told of anyone ever having successfully dealt with an Ancient Entity. However, he was able to retrieve some universally-effective runes from the vast Imperial texts. He showed the Terathians a rune of sealing and a rune of destruction, and then set about invoking a divine ritual. The Emperor must have been listening, for divine forces began to swirl around him and coalesce. The form of a twenty-foot tall angel appeared and drew from its garment a five-yard-long sword of glorious vengeance. Unfortunately, Cthulhu swatted it like a bug and then licked its crushed form, sword and all, from his horrendous palm.
Kale, continuing his tunnel into the eye of the beast, came to a bony wall that even his force sword could not cut. Working in a space-filling cloverleaf pattern, he searched for an opening where an optic nerve might come through. Eventually he found an aperture many yards in diameter, with a bundle of tissue passing through. With one stroke of his indigo force blade, he severed the nerve. Whether by virtue of sudden release of tension, or some diabolical inner volition, one of the severed ends thwocked Kale square in the chest. It was a powerful blow, but did not penetrate Kale’s armor or do any lasting damage. Kale estimated where the monster’s medulla oblongata would be and pressed onward.
Mildly dismayed by the inefficacy of his first invocation, Valius set about an exorcism not of encapsulation, but of rending and destruction. He began petitioning the divine for gates to The Warp, eight of them at the points of a Chaos Star. Meanwhile, based on the holograms he had given them, Zack/Lilleithyn, Eric/Thane, and Chloë formed themselves into a stylus for carving the rune of destruction into Cthulhu’s back. Zack/Lilleithyn produced a small canister of nanites salvaged from the crystalline beings on the dodecahedral world. Upon hearing that the creature on which she stood was about to be inoculated with all-devouring gray goo, Rhiannon asked Algernon to come pick her up, which he did obligingly and with great alacrity.
By that time, Kale had found what he believed to be the medulla (or at least some thick bundle of nerves), and planted two pounds of C4 explosive on it, aiming a shaped charge towards the forebrain. He set a thirty second timer and then burrowed down to the spinal column. Thirty seconds later, the charge went of with a satisfying thump followed by a jiggling rumble, like thousands of tons of very angry jello. Kale squirmed his way through the passages of the spinal column. As he was passing through the third or fourth vertebra, there came a massive SQUEEZE, crushing his carbon nanofiber suit like a beverage can. Nearly all his bones were crushed, and he suffered massive systemic hemorrhaging. However, he clung to consciousness with grim determination, and pointed his sword and carbine downward, trying to slide out.
Algernon, in a fit of overconfident gallantry, came to the rescue by popping his conveyor nose-down into the spinal fluid below Kale. The last hotshotted round from Kale’s carbine blew a sizzling black hole through the main console, but Kale himself dropped neatly into the open back door of the conveyor. Thrown into flashbacks by the warning beep of his empty power cell, Kale feebly began reloading so that he could fight the horde of Forged he believed to be surrounding him.
Kale rounded on Rhiannon blearily, slapping home a new power cell through the shock and pain that had surprisingly still not blacked him out. Just in the nick of time, Algernon lucked into a perfect disarmament and arm lock, preventing Kale access to his weapons. Still Kale clung to consciousness in pain, never having ordered his suit to administer any medication. Rhiannon pulled out a handful of herbs and crushed them in some water, creating a potent draught that would calm Kale’s nerves, dull his pain, and even start the healing process on his wounds. Just as she turned to give it to him, though, he finally passed out. Frustratingly, neither Algernon nor Rhiannon were able to open Kale’s suit, as it was still powered on in battle mode.
The series of gates called forth by Valius was nearing completion almost simultaneously with the rune of destruction inscribed by Chloë’s nanite-smeared Excalibur. Cthulhu had fallen to all sixes, and then prone, after the explosion in his brain. Several minutes before the ritual was complete, a wave of intense improbability brought reinforcements. An X-Wing, piloted by Neutral, popped into orbit above the planet. Newt and her copilot Mutara briefly greeted the party, got the lowdown on the situation, and concluded that the destruction would not be complete unless they shot a couple of proton torpedoes into a 2-meter hole near Cthulhu’s tailbone.
Newt had her astromech droid, R3M1, do a quick alteration on the proton torpedoes to incorporate the high-efficiency hyperdrive fuel as an extra explosive agent. Then, vectoring in for a perfect approach, she turned off her targeting computer and bullseyed the aperture as though it were easier than breathing. As she climbed away from the target, she asked Mutara to keep an eye on the rear sensors in case any fragments blew clear in their direction.
With the simultaneous completion of the surrounding gates and the destruction rune, and the detonation of two augmented proton torpedoes, Cthulhu’s massive body was rocked by an even more massive series of explosions, and his vile flesh was rent in eight different directions. The Terathians and Chloë fled to La Celestina, as did Algernon, parking his conveyor on the foredeck. Valius was able to super-jump to the deck, but realized that there were still more daemons to be fought and contained, and requested that he be airdropped by the edge of the explosion. First, though, he used his superior strength and knowledge of battle suits to free Kale from the cybersuit. Just as Zack/Lilleithyn steered the parachronic airship for home, the last burst tore Cthulhu to tiny pieces which slithered into the hungry gates surrounding.
The party patched Kale up as best they could, getting him to a stable but comatose state. Zack/Lilleithyn went back in the utility conveyor to rescue Newt and Mutara. Newt left the X-Wing, which no longer had sufficient fuel for hyperspace jumps, for Valius to use as an energy source and weapons platform. She and Mutara piled into the conveyor, bid Valius farewell, and headed home with Zack/Lilleithyn. As the conveyor jumped safely home, Zack/Lilleithyn saw a warning message on the console indicating that the jump origin had experienced a quantum shift, with delta-Q equal to 4.
As soon as the party reached the conveyor, where Algernon was standing by, they threw all caution to the winds and turned on the conveyor’s power. As they punched the “go home” button, the conveyor warned of a resonance cascade phenomenon in the caverns.
The jump home was perfect, and Gaius Quintilius informed the party that things had been very quiet around the Greenhouse since they were gone. Kale performed surgery on his own hand to remove the tiny little chalice from his hand. Valius took the tiny but surprisingly dense (nearly two hundred pounds in a centimeter-tall cup) into safe keeping. With those necessities out of the way, the party fell to arguing vociferously about various things, from the anti-demonic powers of Gray Knights to the presumed fate of the people around Popocatépetl.
Their bickering was interrupted, however, by a low, glum voice on the party communicators, “Testing. Testing. Sorry to interrupt..”
“You’re coming through loud and clear,” assured Kale.
“Oh. This is the computer in the lab. There’s something you might want to see.”
“Put it up on the conveyor’s screen.”
“No, you’ll want to see it in person. I’m sending Daneel Olivaw over to show you where.”
Daneel arrived and led the party along the long hallway that leads past the Greenhouse’s graveyard. Rounding a hairpin turn at the far end, he continued on and a bit down, to a new place that had grown in across from the observatory above the stairwell to the basement. There was a low, wide door leading into a vast, dark dome. Valius, standing eight feet even, had to stoop nearly to crawling to enter, but those closer to five feet tall had no trouble at all.
Within the darkened hemisphere, they found an enormous orrery. (“Like the one in Dark Crystal?” “Yes, but bigger, and awesomer.”) One of the hundreds of brass spheres was highlighted by a ghostly luminescence. On closer inspection, the party found that it had a little fire spitting out of one side, and a little greenish figure standing on its surface near the fire. Valius and Zack/Lilleithyn took a closer look, and found that the little green man was a grotesque figure with four arms, eight eyes, and a sickly but profuse green beard which actually turned out to be tentacles. Chloë estimated that the figure’s height was one to two percent of the diameter of the globe on which it stood.
As the party looked on, the little figure stooped to pluck something from the surface of the sphere and pop whatever it had picked up into its horribly betentacled mouth. Valius spotted glowing tendrils of energy rising from the charred surface of an isthmus between continents to vanish into the thorax of the minuscule fiend.
“It’s devouring the souls of the innocent!” cried Valius, convinced it was an Ancient Entity of great evil.
The next few minutes were a buzz of activity as three or four plans were hatched and then put into action. Chloë, Kale and Rhiannon hurried to the Utility Conveyor No. 23, planning a direct attack on the monster. The rest of the party were to take La Celestina to the Swedish-speaking nation in the north and retrieve Algernon’s Centrum conveyor.
The utility conveyor, taking off first, arrived behind the green creature’s massive left leg. External sensors indicated that the ambient temperature was 120°F, and the conveyor was rocked by powerful winds. Chloë took it up to a spot just behind the being’s head, dozens of miles up, well beyond the stratosphere. Even so high, the conveyor was still buffeted by hurricane-force winds. “Winds, up here?” mused Chloë, “ah yes.. ‘magic.’” Kale dove from the conveyor to make a difficult landing on the back of the creature’s scalp.
While Kale made the trek across the 2+ kilometers of evil noggin, La Celestina warped in, and Chloë took the conveyor back down to breathable altitudes (about knee high to the Elder Entity.) She and Rhiannon bailed out and Rhiannon shot the “go home” button with a rag-wrapped arrow. Rhiannon landed precariously on the beast’s kneecap, while Chloë stabbed Excalibur as deep as she could into the flesh at the back of its knee, using her weight to slice downward.
Zack/Lilleithyn took the helm of La Celestina, much to Don Enrique’s delight: “Ai. I never have let a cat to drive the ship. Sounds dangerous!” They swooped in to the military compound at Chattahoocheeborg where Algernon’s conveyor was impounded. As they approached the city, they saw numerous plumes of smoke all over the place, and fog and mist that seemed to indicate atmospheric disruption. The roads out of Chattahoocheeborg were clogged with massive traffic jams of departing cars and trucks.
The depot was manned by two nervous and bedraggled-looking soldiers. They had barely gotten to the point of yelling, “Hey You!” in Swedish, when Valius jumped down from La Celestina and ordered them to lie down on the ground, and Eric/Thane snatched their rifles from them. Already frightened half witless, the soldiers tried to inform Algernon that the party wouldn’t find much in the compound: all the food, weapons, and vehicles were gone already. Zack/Lilleithyn, with good intentions, popped into the soldiers’ brains and told them that everything would be all right, and that they, the party, would take care of everything. Algernon took both rifles and the helmet of one of the soldiers. Stepping on to where the conveyor was being kept, he found it standing lonesomely in a massive garage that had previously held dozens of jeeps and trucks.
As Kale was making his way across the expanse of Elder Badass’s melon, he noticed great pustules or bubbles rising in the swamp-like skin. One of the bubbles burst as he passed, and out flew a great snake-like thing with leathery wings, a metallic skeletal body, and what appeared to be the still-writhing body of a human in its jaws. Steeling his nerve, Kale continued on to the forehead of the beast.
Meanwhile, Rhiannon was pouring mana into a Heat spell on the monster’s left knee. Chloë’s downward progress had slowed and stopped, and the blade of Excalibur, from the ricasso onward, was glowing a bright orange with heat. Seeing that the immense creature seemed to be taking no action to swat or itch at the gash she had cut, Chloë called for reinforcements. Both Algernon in his Centrum conveyor, and the rest of the party in La Celestina popped in to aid in the fight.
Having reached the front of the head, Kale drew his force sword and laser carbine and proceeded to burrow into the eye of the beast. Just as he had hollowed out a couple dozen cubic feet, a great tentacle whipped up towards him from behind. He shimmied into the niche he had carved from the creature’s massive cornea, barely avoiding the hideous suckers that came up and slapped the eye around him. More tentacles came whipping around as Algernon performed a daring taunt, popping his conveyor to a spot right in front of the monster’s face, and then popping out at the last moment to let it flail at its own face.
Valius began frantically searching his memory and his holo-books for ways to contain or banish a creature of this type. None of the accounts he could find told of anyone ever having successfully dealt with an Ancient Entity. However, he was able to retrieve some universally-effective runes from the vast Imperial texts. He showed the Terathians a rune of sealing and a rune of destruction, and then set about invoking a divine ritual. The Emperor must have been listening, for divine forces began to swirl around him and coalesce. The form of a twenty-foot tall angel appeared and drew from its garment a five-yard-long sword of glorious vengeance. Unfortunately, Cthulhu swatted it like a bug and then licked its crushed form, sword and all, from his horrendous palm.
Kale, continuing his tunnel into the eye of the beast, came to a bony wall that even his force sword could not cut. Working in a space-filling cloverleaf pattern, he searched for an opening where an optic nerve might come through. Eventually he found an aperture many yards in diameter, with a bundle of tissue passing through. With one stroke of his indigo force blade, he severed the nerve. Whether by virtue of sudden release of tension, or some diabolical inner volition, one of the severed ends thwocked Kale square in the chest. It was a powerful blow, but did not penetrate Kale’s armor or do any lasting damage. Kale estimated where the monster’s medulla oblongata would be and pressed onward.
Mildly dismayed by the inefficacy of his first invocation, Valius set about an exorcism not of encapsulation, but of rending and destruction. He began petitioning the divine for gates to The Warp, eight of them at the points of a Chaos Star. Meanwhile, based on the holograms he had given them, Zack/Lilleithyn, Eric/Thane, and Chloë formed themselves into a stylus for carving the rune of destruction into Cthulhu’s back. Zack/Lilleithyn produced a small canister of nanites salvaged from the crystalline beings on the dodecahedral world. Upon hearing that the creature on which she stood was about to be inoculated with all-devouring gray goo, Rhiannon asked Algernon to come pick her up, which he did obligingly and with great alacrity.
By that time, Kale had found what he believed to be the medulla (or at least some thick bundle of nerves), and planted two pounds of C4 explosive on it, aiming a shaped charge towards the forebrain. He set a thirty second timer and then burrowed down to the spinal column. Thirty seconds later, the charge went of with a satisfying thump followed by a jiggling rumble, like thousands of tons of very angry jello. Kale squirmed his way through the passages of the spinal column. As he was passing through the third or fourth vertebra, there came a massive SQUEEZE, crushing his carbon nanofiber suit like a beverage can. Nearly all his bones were crushed, and he suffered massive systemic hemorrhaging. However, he clung to consciousness with grim determination, and pointed his sword and carbine downward, trying to slide out.
Algernon, in a fit of overconfident gallantry, came to the rescue by popping his conveyor nose-down into the spinal fluid below Kale. The last hotshotted round from Kale’s carbine blew a sizzling black hole through the main console, but Kale himself dropped neatly into the open back door of the conveyor. Thrown into flashbacks by the warning beep of his empty power cell, Kale feebly began reloading so that he could fight the horde of Forged he believed to be surrounding him.
Kale rounded on Rhiannon blearily, slapping home a new power cell through the shock and pain that had surprisingly still not blacked him out. Just in the nick of time, Algernon lucked into a perfect disarmament and arm lock, preventing Kale access to his weapons. Still Kale clung to consciousness in pain, never having ordered his suit to administer any medication. Rhiannon pulled out a handful of herbs and crushed them in some water, creating a potent draught that would calm Kale’s nerves, dull his pain, and even start the healing process on his wounds. Just as she turned to give it to him, though, he finally passed out. Frustratingly, neither Algernon nor Rhiannon were able to open Kale’s suit, as it was still powered on in battle mode.
The series of gates called forth by Valius was nearing completion almost simultaneously with the rune of destruction inscribed by Chloë’s nanite-smeared Excalibur. Cthulhu had fallen to all sixes, and then prone, after the explosion in his brain. Several minutes before the ritual was complete, a wave of intense improbability brought reinforcements. An X-Wing, piloted by Neutral, popped into orbit above the planet. Newt and her copilot Mutara briefly greeted the party, got the lowdown on the situation, and concluded that the destruction would not be complete unless they shot a couple of proton torpedoes into a 2-meter hole near Cthulhu’s tailbone.
Newt had her astromech droid, R3M1, do a quick alteration on the proton torpedoes to incorporate the high-efficiency hyperdrive fuel as an extra explosive agent. Then, vectoring in for a perfect approach, she turned off her targeting computer and bullseyed the aperture as though it were easier than breathing. As she climbed away from the target, she asked Mutara to keep an eye on the rear sensors in case any fragments blew clear in their direction.
With the simultaneous completion of the surrounding gates and the destruction rune, and the detonation of two augmented proton torpedoes, Cthulhu’s massive body was rocked by an even more massive series of explosions, and his vile flesh was rent in eight different directions. The Terathians and Chloë fled to La Celestina, as did Algernon, parking his conveyor on the foredeck. Valius was able to super-jump to the deck, but realized that there were still more daemons to be fought and contained, and requested that he be airdropped by the edge of the explosion. First, though, he used his superior strength and knowledge of battle suits to free Kale from the cybersuit. Just as Zack/Lilleithyn steered the parachronic airship for home, the last burst tore Cthulhu to tiny pieces which slithered into the hungry gates surrounding.
The party patched Kale up as best they could, getting him to a stable but comatose state. Zack/Lilleithyn went back in the utility conveyor to rescue Newt and Mutara. Newt left the X-Wing, which no longer had sufficient fuel for hyperspace jumps, for Valius to use as an energy source and weapons platform. She and Mutara piled into the conveyor, bid Valius farewell, and headed home with Zack/Lilleithyn. As the conveyor jumped safely home, Zack/Lilleithyn saw a warning message on the console indicating that the jump origin had experienced a quantum shift, with delta-Q equal to 4.