Episode 38: Out of the Frying Pan...

Xeno didn’t remember much after the big bang. There was a flash of fire then… Myxlplyx? Really? It was so brief, and hazy. But the pain—the pain was crystal clear. Pain, and a feeling of melancholy as, bewildered and naked, he crawled out of some odd armor onto the deck of a ship that wasn’t Der Chelonian. He found a hatch and slumped into the hold, perhaps to die, naked and burned, clutching Dave like an ape with its cloth mother.

But he didn’t die. Hours later Xeno awoke to some sense of commotion above decks, and with a small cry of pain, forced himself off the deck. He was no stranger to waking up on the floor severely burned, but there was always something to show for it, for good or ill. This offered only agony, confusion and loss, no more. Xeno considered lying there some more, but the pain drove him to seek succor, which he found in a series of potions from a suspiciously (and now formerly) well-stocked aid cabinet.

With relief came clarity of mind, and confusion. First, what had happened? Gradually, an answer presented itself. Something had malfunctioned, dramatically, yet again.

“Why?” thought Xeno. “Why does everything go so horribly wrong? Every time? For everyone? Is there a group somewhere that drifts through life on clouds of rose petals, everything going right to balance it out? Why? Why us? Why me?”

In a flash, it came to him. “All I ever wanted to do was create fiendishly complex devices and occasional weapons of unearthly power, and use them for fun and personal gain. Yet every time, every time, something goes horribly awry. That’s not coincidence. It can’t be.” Looking back over he life, Xeno saw the pattern, again and again: any time he tried something complicated; it failed in the worst possible way. The SnakeStik. Reversible Automatic Armor. Electro-gloves. And, Gods, the horror of the Marshmellator. So much burning sugar. It was as if something in him introduced a chaotic element into every complex system he interacted with. And that was it: chaos.

“It’s me,” he said breathlessly aloud. “I…I am the chaos. It is in me. Disorder and randomness flow from my hands. I’ve always blamed failure on anything else, but all the time, it’s been me. I am the grit in the machine,” he said, louder. “I am the cat hair floating in the potion, the earwig in the trousers of destiny that pinches your inner thigh while you're pouring coffee, the pancake, syrup side down, that lands on your important parchment that just that minute after you sneezed off the table and onto the floor. I am the ruiner of diplomacy, the destroyer of agendas, the foiler of plots. I am chaos. Chaos!” Buckling on his last piece of mismatched gear, an eldritch energy began to crackle purpley about his still-singed skin, and a smell of ozone wafted from him. And burned hair.

“CHAOS!” he screamed, sprinting now for the stairs to the deck. “Ye Gods, Hear My Call,” he called, once under the stars. “Xeno calls You! What fools these mortals be, their machinations, their puny plans, their ideas of greatness, all no more than mayflies. Come, let us pour down upon them a great Disturbance, an unbalancing of that they have the nerve to call “life.” Ha! I am Xeno, and I have seen Beyond, and all there, is Chaos! Come, brothers; come, Dave; come, those who Listen, Above and Below, I call again upon Thee! I seek a righting of the scales, and then an explosion of the scales that couldn't possibly just have happened, because what part of a scale could conceivably explode? A third time now I Call, heed Thou my cry! I am Thy vessel, Thy vassal, Thy agent, Thy horse Thou may ride. Schemes shall be unmade, and those with the pride to make them shall be broken!"

"There is no justice. There is no vengeance. There are no great or small. There is naught, but Chaos, and I am he! It! Whatever! Aieee!”

Saladin woke the whimpering gnome. He was covered in a sweat that reeked of mostly apples.

"We've just entered the atmosphere of the Lizardmen's planet. Xoe's taken a couple of the others down on the Tradesman to check it out. We're hovering about 500 feet above them with all lights out. She said to tell you that if something goes wrong, she'll send up a signal and that you'd know what to do."

As Saladin left him alone in his cabin, Xeno looked around, somewhat groggily. He was wearing what appeared to be a loincloth made from some sort of purplish pinstriped material. His pointy hat lay on the floor, Dave leaning on it while emitting a dull red glow. As Xeno stood up the room spun; it was apparent he hadn't eaten in days.

Suddenly, he heard a cry from the deck above. "Xeno! Get up here! It looks like something's about to happen!'

Episode 37: Iryien Ascends...

The Gods don't like to be fucked with.

They will tolerate some cheekiness from the odd mere mortal - more to relieve the boredom than anything - but they get seriously bent when they perceive that things are being taken out of their hands...

The Yet-To-Be-Named Dragonfly sidled up to the Yet-To-Be-Named Tradesman so that the two crews could make plans without wasting potted plants. A day and a half had passed, and this apparently low-speed chase was beginning to fray a few nerves. A heated discussion ensued, and it was decided that Xeno and His Portable Arsenal would utilize Dave's powers of teleportation to transport Xeno and Iryien onto the Deathspider.

Salayashi attempted to part the veils of time by using an old psionic discipline - seemingly lost since his crystalline transformation. He looked up ahead to dot of light where the Deathspider was and... felt a sense of loss. "One of them is not coming back," he said to himself, but before he could speak, Xeno and Iryien blinked out of existence...

The next thought that popped into Xeno's head was "SHHHhiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiIIIIITTTTT!" as he and Iryien bobbed up and down in the Deathspider's gravity plane. But before thought could interfere too much with his reality, Xeno unleashed his Fire Finger at the cracked and exposed side of the ship. But an all-too-familiar 'ptwaang' sound let him know that his backpack had malfunctioned again. As he looked up at the crewmembers scurrying towards the dual ballista, he saw them freeze and turn to marble. "Ha! According to plan!" he cried triumphantly, as he turned to Iryien. He was hoping to see her readying her Shoulder Cannon to finish them off, but instead she was, quite worryingly, mumbling to herself.

"Wha- Wait a minute... what Ice? Back where?"

Xeno cursed under his breath and attempted to slap her back to reality, but she merely doubled in size whilst losing some of her precious opacity. He could see the stars through her limbs and face. He cursed once again and turned his attention back to the ship. He could see two large, hulking figures clambering up to the ballista deck - followed by a couple of the hairiest, leggiest creatures he's ever seen. He shuddered convulsively for some reason - and much to his own surprise decided that these vile things must burn forthwith.

Deciding that burning wasn't too good for them, Xeno shot off both his acid and fireball fingerwands at the same time.

The Gods chose this moment to 'get one back'.

BOOM.

Back on the ships, a flickering halo of blueish light whizzed away from the Deathspider and towards the crews. Saladin felt a tingle - akin to a potpourri-laced feather tickling his very soul - as the light raced past and headed back towards Ata'ri.

Ragnar spotted an orange object tumbling towards them, which turned out to be a spacesuit that contained the charred remains of a gnome. Everyone fell silent. I daresay a tear was shed. It was then that Xoe recalled that she was in the possession of a Ring Of Far Too Many Wishes, and took it out of her pouch , holding a slim hope that it could save the day and restore her brother to life.

As she held the ring over the tip of her finger, she whispered with a shrug of fatalistic pessimism, "Well, it could always get worse".

The Gods had a mighty chuckle over that one. And then suddenly, it did.

The crew was instantly thrust before Lord Mytzlplyk, deep in the recesses of his hellish castle. Saladin dropped to the ground in a frozen panic, Ragnar hit Mytzlplyk in eye with carp, and Aramis suddenly found himself encased in body armor made of his own flesh.

As the for-a-very-short-time-restored-to-life Xeno was plucked up by Mytzlplyk and dragged towards his slavering maw, Xoe found herself holding an ice cream cone. She took a lick and said "Next time I'll leave him dead". She rolled 20. The Gods stopped laughing.

Iryien returned to the ships as the drifted through space. There was a great net of hyperreality surrounding them, and she could see clearly that her former companions had gotten in over their heads this time. Her heart warmed for a moment as she thought of them. Some of them tried so hard to become something great, something immortal. She hadn't tried at all, and yet look what happened... Perhaps this latest catastrophe would be enough to convince them to slow down, to be a little more careful, to think before using an intelligent weapon of devilish origins to teleport a vastly under-researched arsenal into the depths of space in order to attack a quasi-living creature who is safely ensconced on a highly beweaponed battleship.

Or then again, maybe not.

Either way, she reasoned, they can't say I haven't repaid my debt to them...

Iryien inhaled, and although she no longer had lungs to speak of, she exhaled a sweet, invigorating air over the two ships. Gone was the spacesuit and the smell of rancid bacon. No more were the crystalline forms of Salayashi. And neither was there a transsexual priestess on tight-fitting monk's robes. There were just the members of Der Chelonian Mobile, Incorporated, intact and as whole as the day Iryien woke up on their porch, looking for a job.

And there were now two pairs of Pants.

Episode 36: The Return For Takemiya's Head, Pt. 2

Takemiya sits at the helm of a Tradesman, in pursuit of both Fundus and the mysterious Black Silhouette, a being he largely suspects is the notorious Chang Kai Eel, Lord of the underworld of Undermountain.

Conflicting feelings raged all about Takemiya at this time - for although Eel has tormented DCM with his wicked machinations over the past few weeks, it was a mind-to-mind confrontation with the underlord that had freed the monk's soul from the Helm of Telepathy and deposited it (through a convoluted string of unlikely die rolls) into the body of an orc who has had his legs pulled into taffy by Salayashi and consequently cauterized into two gleaming lumps of green crystal. He couldn't help but feel a little grateful, even if the orc he was currently inhabiting does seem to be flatulent and riddled with fleas...

Iryien sits in a stateroom, surrounded by her new entourage - Sulians that have travelled to Lungfish Isle to bring her the news that the TEMPLVS IRYIENS has been completed. While slightly unnerved by her elevation to 'Hemi Goddess', she had to admit to herself that her skin had never taken on such a healthy glow in her life. She was certain that somehow, some way she had altered the flow of reality around her in the cavern, and had had been able to make things go rather nicely for herself for once...

Xoe stands behind Xeno as he sits in the helm of a scorched and sooty Damselfly, humming softly to himself, piloting the vessel from an elaborate titanium helm. Xoe rather enjoyed the surge of magical energies that she unleashed from the Wand of Fire; she felt a little thrill at being able to wipe out the vestiges of Fundus' guards and almost fry the big jerk himself. Theivery was nice, but that - that feeling... hmmmm...

Salayashi looks out at the stars. From the deck of the spelljamming ship he could see the tiny prick

of light that they were persuing. The Mindspider had a good head start, but he had two ships, and that HAD to be an advantage, if and when they caught up to Fundus and that thing... He forgot how much he had enjoyed Wildspace. Everything seemed simpler, clearer, more defined.

And now he could see in all directions at once.

Ragnar retched and roiled in the hold of the ship. "There's no air!" he screamed - or would have done, if he hadn't been so convulsed with fear, terror, horror and the screaming heebie jeebies. He rolled around, clutching his throat as the stars spun around him. Aramis sidled up to the twitching dwarf, eyeing his trousers and sizing up the situation.

"Haven'ta you been onna sheep before?" The sound of Aramis' voice - so close, so near his nearly defenseless pants - snapped him out of his panic attack.

"Why, yes," he huffed, pulling himself upright once again. "I do this stuff all the time."

The two ships stayed on course behind Fundus, Eel and the Mindspider. Holth seemed rather anxious about facing the ship in combat. Salyashi seemed rather anxious that Holth was anxious about combat. And Takemiya seemed just a tad worried that he didn't seem to be able to steer the ship...

Episode 35: The Return For Takemiya's Head, Pt. 1

Well, not an overly successful raid as of yet.

Our intrepid adventurers headed back into the mountain lair of Chang Kai Eel in order to retrieve Takemiya's soul-infested Helm of Telepathy only to be ambushed by a raiding party of orcs.

Where are all these orcs coming from? you might ask. As well you might, as they put a little hurt on DCM, Inc.

Holth took a rather nasty blow to the vitals from, oh wait, that was Xeno... Well, he was ALMOST skewered by a couple arrows from, oh wait, that was Iryien...

Well, at least Salayashi gained a new Crystal Minion - The Ruby Orc, if he gets out of here alive, looks to be the foundation of a promising art/theft scam that could rake in millions - or at least minions, if the die rolls keep coming in as they did on Tuesday night.

Speaking of die rolls, Salayashi has gained a stunning bit of 'double vision' after a roll or two went haywire. Perhaps you should consider purchasing the Union Suit of Many Colors?

I won't give any details here as I want to be there next week when the group explains to Peter what actually happened - DM

Episode 34: "Depends" On How You Look At It...

It wasn't supposed to be like this (thought Iryien, thought Xoe, thought Saladin, thought the DM...)

You make something, create it, you control it... right?

"NOT ON THIS NIGHT", saith the gods...

Iryien looked on in helpless exhaustion as SALAYASHI hovered over her dying Sulian. Even as he raised the glowing, crystalline syringe up over his exposed, bacon-scented chest she had the feeling that all was lost, that all was gone from her, that she was just watching a movie - a bad one at that - I mean, couldn't they at least have gotten Peter Jackson to direct it? Even as the syringe was plunged into (insert Sulian's name here)'s heart and he reared up, turned red and attacked SALAYASHI, she let it unfold, watched it dispassionately, she saw her grip on the situation slip, like pants over the hips of an Italian...

Xoe saw things slipping too, as Porthos' flesh bubbled into the stones, melting away into nothingness at the hands of SALAYASHI, (Healer??? Really? He's killed more of our party than the enemy, for Baldur's sake!) she watched her brother calmly strip two frames of their less-than-priceless contents. Umbertino's Two Sheep Humping? Really? I mean, not only is it the least of his works, but sheep don't actually do it like that - not modern, up-to-date ones, anyway - and the less said about The Painter Of Light the better... Did he have any taste at all???

At least she had Aramis left to, oh wait, where was he?

Hmm...

Well, her remaining Guido was dry humping the air at the base of the eel statue. At least that was within the bounds of relatively normal acceptability...

Now Takemiya, on the other hand - he was in complete control - control of the statue as it's crotch opened to reveal a secret passage... control of the eerily glowing sarcophagi containing the underdeveloped simalcra of the entire DCM crew (plus a dwarf???)... incontrol, in fact, of the naked dwarf that was released when Xeno shattered the glass above the growing Saladin's sarcophagus, setting off a chain reaction of explosions, untimely clone-deaths and releasing into the world an angry dwarf with no pants on.

Which brings us to....

Xoe gripped Aramis by the few threads of clothing he had left. He had been caught up in an illusory tryst - one involving the cheap, tawdry woman of his dreams (at the base of a creepy statue in a dungeon under the stronghold of his mistresses' sworn enemy, but whatever...) when Xoe slapped him (perhaps a little too hard) and called him back from the edge - called him back into his clothes - called him back into...

His Pants.

Somewhere in the Void, Trouseronomous, God of Pants, saw a 20 being rolled and smiled...

Aramis felt his legs become encased in 3 square yards of heaven.

Purple seersucker heaven.

In fact, now that his legs, his buttocks, and his $5 footlong had become wrapped up in what can only be described as 'dream trousers', nothing else in the whole world seemed to matter...

Except the naked dwarf who had appeared from below and was now suspiciously eying his pants.

A melee ensued. This multiverse's first 'Pants Off', in fact.

And when the dust settled, and the dwarf's buttocks stopped quivering, one thing was certain: DCM had a new (old?) member, he was wearing the best +5 Protection v. Fire purple seersucker pants imaginable, Aramis was now fully his bitch, and Aramis was now completely unclad.

OK, so that was 4 things.

I really need to regain control of this campaign.

Episode 33 - Really? Really??

You should never disintegrate a significate portion of any planet without expecting some... repercussions.

Saladin had become suspended midair in the recently excavated tunnel by a rising sonic turbulence - a turbulence that was now becoming more turbulent after the introduction of a guido who had improbably fallen into the tunnel.

Acting quickly and with heroics in mind, Kobayashi leapt to the rescue, proffering his extendable staff to Porthos. Unfortunately for Kobayashi, improbability reared it's ugly head again and caused the unlucky monk to be pulled into the tunnel as well. Xeno and Iryien started to get pulled towards the tunnel. As the third body entered the viciously thrumming space, flesh, bone, crystal and rock began to harmonize and echo all together, creating a clear, crystalline sine wave that bound the three bodies together in the air of the sonic microwave. It was at this point that Xeno disappeared. Iryien also noticed that Saladin's flesh was starting to melt off his bones.

Unbeknownst to the trapped individuals, atoms were whispering conspiratorially to one another now, shaken into sentience by the unlikely combination of crystal, flesh, and magical dragonscale armor. Molecules started to rearrange themselves, forming splinter cells along ideological lines previously unseen in the sub-cellular world. New substances were being synthesized. Old ones discarded. Something new and never seen before was about to happen...

Just under the molten surface of the tunnel, some red crystal of Ata'ri itched into a peculiar awareness, sensing something remarkable was about to happen...

Deep within Ata'ri, some rare green crystal, tucked away in scattered veins due to the introduction of a rather large meteorite to a very poorly-located prehistoric health spa, thrummed to life and started making its way to the surface, homing in on the life energies that were calling to it from a tiny space near the surface of the planet...

Directly underneath the tunnel, a sizable deposit of blue crystal, sensing it was on the verge of being late to something really exciting, decided to exert what little psychic influence it could on the scene as it was unfolding in the tunnel above. If only there was something it could use, something it could focus on in order to step up its energies just a wee bit...

It was precisely at this moment where Aramis decided to save his brother.

Grabbing the Demonic Lacrosse Stick from Hell, Aramis hurled a ball of blue energy into the tunnel, introducing into the finely balanced superturbulence an explosive, if not malevolent element to the tunnel.

Some strange things happened.

Firstly, Porthos was expelled with some force from the tunnel, landing with a thud inside the portable hole (which shall now be known as the Porthoble Hole).

Secondly, as the rest of Saladin's flesh fell away, the red crystal in the surrounding rock arced into the tunnel and replaced, molecule for molecule, the bone of Saladin's skeleton.

Thirdly, with no guido acting as a buffer, Kobayashi and Saladin were hurtled together at the speed of light. The red crystal skeleton, acting as both a hammer and a sieve, stopped Kobayashi's flesh in it's tracks while letting the shattered bits of his skeleton fly through it before being totally vaporized against the back of the tunnel.

The poor monk's flesh, superheated into a gelatinous, living magma, clung to Saladin's bare bones and instantly began to cool. It reacted with, through a series of harmonics, the skeleton, the tunnel walls and the rapidly emerging node of green crystal to form a clear green skin that hardened as it cooled, creating a symbiotic being never before seen on this or any other planet...

Just another Tuesday, really.

Episode 32: Leaving Holes In Your Heart

It all began so pleasantly: sharing a nice mug of scumble with the man who's ruined your memories and has been of late trying to ruin your lives. Fundus was concussed and a little bit drunk, and more than willing to lead DCM to the meeting place where Chang Kai Eel lay waiting - the mastermind behind the ill-fated events on Lungfish Isle.

Fundus weaved his way up the narrow path that led to a man-sized rock covering a secret entrance in the rock face. The rock slides open, and a long chasm is revealed. Up ahead, two dozen orcs, a large ogre and the shadowy Eel himself await Fundus and his new 'bodyguard'.

Saladin, in bat form, flies ahead to scout out the scene, but has a turn of bad luck and meets the cave wall head-on. He then discovers that while bat urine does not serve as ogre repellent, guano can be an adequate fire starter...

Still feeling the effects of the blow to the head, the now-burning bat flees up the staircase at the back of the cave... transforms into his Saladin form... and falls down a dozen stone stairs and loses consciousness.

Somewhere above the planet's surface, the Gods of Ata'ri have a hearty laugh. "Don't you think the poor lad's had enough?" one asks. "No, not by a long shot," chuckles another.

Rushing to his side, Kobayashi helps get Saladin back to consciousness, before a flood of onrushing orcs chases him up and into what appears to be Chang Kai Eel's underground palace. As he watches, Fundus, Eel and the orcs emerge from the secret passage and disperse. But not before Eel sneaks up on Kobayashi and flattens him, knocking the portable hole open and causing the box of all pandoras to spew forth Xeno and the rest of the crew.

A melee ensues, and Iryien ("Doesn't she know how bloody dangerous that thing is?") opens fire with the Alien Bazooka, opening a tunnel-sized hole in the mountain. The sudden evaporation of thousands of cubic feet of rock cause a nearby vein of crystal to become unstable and start resonating at a high but audible frequency. This resonation fills the tunnel, and as it does so, the pitch climbs and fills the space, getting ever closer to fulfilling the equation E_ik = 8πG/c⁴ t_ik. The only thing that was needed was a mass object of suitable size and density to act as a focus for the building sonic energy. Once introduced into the tunnel (read High-Powered Sonic Oscillator and Matter Accelerator), this mass object would trigger the 8πG part of the 8πG/c⁴ t_ik equation, and cause either a chain reaction of sub-atomic explosions throughout all of the non-living rock (out p=2D/∞ (∆-4)/∫˚• π miles, where D= 2d6) or a transformation (at the most basic atomic levels) of any organic matter inside the tunnel.

At this point, Saladin appeared, swimming through the living rock, and came upon the fleeing Chang Kai Eel. Saladin grabbed at Eel's heel, but missed. Chang Kai Eel lashed out at Saladin with his foot...

...and didn't.

The last thing Saladin heard as he toppled backwards into the tunnel was the climbing resonance of a million angels singing.