So, there are six guys on a zeppelin, with a rope, a winch, and a drilling machine...
From Telkoth.net
I don't think I've explained before, so I will now: our group came to the Hollow Earth, basically at the whim of our Son of Ether leader, Maxwell Harvey. He came to explore, learn, and possibly restore some of the wonder to the Sons of Ether which he sees now missing. I went along, a Euthanatos disguised as an Akashic, to protect another member of the group, and evaluate him for a position on the Council of Nine, which was reforming after many of its members died from The Reckoning (our game had been taking place a little back in time).
Well, among those that survived the turmoil in the Umbra was a large group of Nephandi. The various Dark Lords were having a blast saving people from The Reckoning at the small price of their souls, and one particular fleet of Void Engineers - now known as the Black Fleet - made such a deal.
The Black Fleet has come to Earth to destroy it, and so a new mission has presented itself. Other than Maxwell Harvey's impractical ideas of world-unity against the Black Fleet, he's also looking for a way to recreate the weapons of Atlantis and Lemuria to use against this Black Fleet. We're unfortunately running out of time, however we have acquired some of what might be likened to the Philosopher's Stone - Mu Stone. Acquiring this stone was the source of last night's adventure.
I'll skip all the inbetween conflicts and negotiations with mages more powerful than us, and skip to the discovery of a Mu Stone mine shaft just outside the Lemurian city of Jiran-Sherrak. It was clearly, from various methods of scrying, being guarded by some form of the Technocracy, so we developed a plan to get in and out as quickly as possible. Porter created a drilling device to extract some of the Stone while others created a strong rope and a winch. The idea was that we would lower ourselves down into the mine shaft - which is a vertical 50 meter drop - from the zeppelin, so that we could be easily pulled out again. Our Hermetic rigged us up with invisibility of the best kind - the kind that renders you invisible to even spirits, but not to each other. Meanwhile, I started to work on a focus for a new rote I've been wanting to use - the creation of phantasms.
So there we are: six guys on a zeppelin, with a rope, a winch, and a drilling machine :)
Porter, the Monk, me, and my spider descended into the shaft while the others stayed above to maintain various effects. Porter, having beefed himself up, was the only one that would be able to use the large drilling machine he had constructed. It was going to be up to me and the Monk to deal with anything else that might present itself. And present itself something else did! Others had the advantage of sight in the tunnels (either through echo location or other means... Life-mages are so weird...), but I had to rely on my other senses. Not far ahead we could hear a drilling sound, and at Porter's description there were two, smooth figures ahead. From my scans I could detect no mental presence, or even spiritual, but they were certainly, physically there.
What we eventually realized is that these were creatures of some kind made up of Primium - a perfect metal which is highly resistant to magic, and often used by the Technocracy. And here drilling for Mu Stone.
Porter created a hole in the earth below them, causing them to plummet, and after covering the hole back up, we dashed over to start our own mining. It was not moments later, however, that one of the things burst up through the earth, propelled by rockets of some kind in its feet, and battle began.
Porter still needed some time to drill anything out... all we had to do was distract a liquid primium golem... thing. I took this opportunity to create phantasms for the first time, and started to paint an ellipsoid rock with that effect. The monk took up a defensive stance.
We didn't know what form the golem would attack, so we weren't really prepared when it flung its fist at us, which easily disconnected. I dodged out of the way, tossing the stone as I had it painted so far. The monk dashed in the way and used a strange, Akashic attack-redirection technique with his spear. The arm splattered into liquid on to the monk at various points, leaving an uncomfortably-cold sensation, before re-coalescing as an arm back on the golem.
Bizarre.
My phantasm was a simple and unconvincing blob, and was obviously less menacing than a monk with a staff, and so was mostly ignored. I therefore picked up my stone again, and began to furiously paint more details on to it. I also ordered my spider familiar to curse the golem with bad luck. This was extremely useful to us on multiple occasions, as the effects of a familiar are not the sort of will-working magic of a mage, and therefore not resisted by primium.
The monk deflected another attack as Porter continued to drill.
It went on for a while like this, the golem's attention increasingly distracted by my forming phantasm, while attempting to make attacks which my spider would curse and the Monk would deflect. Finally the drilling was done, and Porter turned his attention to the problem at hand. With the liquid-primium golem blocking the way out, now with several mini guns formed on its body, Porter used a common rote of his which quickly tunnels through the earth (or anything else) and quickly carved a new exit. The golem followed us to the surface where the zeppelin waited. We grabbed hold of the rope and were pulled up more quickly than was comfortable to our ears, but more importantly more quickly than the golem could fly. It made one last attack, which fortunately missed, before sinking out of sight.
Once aboard the ship the monk noticed that where the primium had splashed him he had been turned into primium. Without a good laboratory, Porter simply cut the primium out of him as the monk regenerated the cut-out places. After being explained the properties of primium, the monk - who had very much saved our lives - agreed that he would, in fact, like to keep those pieces which came out of his body to take back to his people in Agartha.
And there more or less ended the adventure. There was some other stuff to finalize with the various parties we'd made arrangements with, but bla. I wasn't so much involved in those :)
