Session 37 – The Machine Elves

As the party prepared to leave by ship at dawn, their last night’s sleep at the inn was uneasy, filled with the subtle dread of the impending invasion. Their anxieties proved prophetic, for they found themselves waking not in their cozy inn beds, but in an unfamiliar, cold, white room, illuminated by a harsh, glowing ceiling.

Confused, each member took stock of the eerie surroundings, realizing with growing unease that they recognized the strangeness from a previous dream. The chilling familiarity of the place deepened as an unsettling figure turned towards them from whatever it was doing with their larger weapons on a table against the wall. It was a humanoid constructed entirely of metal tubes and gears, with bulbous, inexpressive eyes and no mouth with which to communicate.

The clockwork mechanical being began attempting to fasten straps over Jack, who, ever resourceful, managed to push the automaton away after a chaotic struggle. Murchad, summoned by the threat, jumped to Jack’s aid and gave the automaton a shove that sent it sprawling to the floor.

The creature responded with bizarre, jointed movements, rising again with a disturbing inhumanity. Then, in a startling moment, its fingers interlocked and shifted into twin blades.  It attacked with surprising ferocity.

The battle was a blur. Jack, separated from his main weapon, made do with what he had at his belt, while Vedica raced for the table where their gear was laying. Quick thinking and teamwork saved the day: Vedica and Jack landed several swift attacks, and the strange mechanical foe was destroyed, its gears and tubes clattering lifeless to the ground. The group retrieved their scattered items, wary but undeterred.

They needed to find a way out.

Moving through the antiseptic halls, the group encountered a labyrinth of doors and smooth, gleaming walls. Vedica, ever the cautious thief, diligently searched for traps and sometimes found them, deftly disabling deadly devices before they could harm the party. Her skills were put to the test when she discovered hidden floor plates and poisonous gas traps, one of which left her wounded but not paralyzed, as the party awaited the gas to dissipate before pressing onward.

In one chamber, the party discovered trays filled with glass "gemstones" and panels that displayed shifting images and maps. A message scrolled on the glass under the map in a language Jack could read: English. It read “Corex observes simulation cycle 1366.”

Jack, both scientifically curious and skeptical, experimented with the gems, unknowingly stirring simulated weather patterns on the map, watching clouds mass violently before dispersing with flashes of light. Their actions seemed to influence the map’s world, prompting speculation about weather simulation, and raising philosophical questions about reality versus illusion.

Discussion among the party turned to the shape of the world, reflecting the DM’s evocative presentation of reality -- round in their own knowledge, yet depicted as flat models throughout these recurring visions. The blend of familiar and alien devices like glass panels with pictures that move and models suspended with spinning heavens left Murchad, Vedica, and Jack spellbound, wrestling with questions of perception and the true structure of their world.

Soon afterward, they entered a room lined with metal figures connected to the walls by cables. As they stepped inside, the machines stirred to life. Detaching from their ports, they turned their blank faces toward the intruders. Their eyes flickered as they raised their arms in unison.

The battle was fierce. Vedica loosed her arrows, Jack fired with mechanical precision, and Murchad struck hard with his sword, the clang of steel against bronze echoing through the sterile corridors. The automata fought with unnatural coordination, their blades rising and falling rhythmically like soldiers in perfect formation.

Jack’s sword and Vedica’s daggers flashed under the white light, while Murchad, moving with grim focus, deflected blow after blow. When the last of the metal men fell, they stood amid piles of ruined bronze. Among the wreckage, they found gold coins and a finely crafted shield that gleamed with an otherworldly sheen.

After taking stock of their wounds and sharing healing potions, they advanced deeper still.

In the next chamber, walls of glass displayed scenes of history — moving images of battles and armies from ages past. Murchad recognized glimpses of wars both ancient and mythical, from the legions at Cannae to the Dragonborn campaigns of a century and a half ago. The companions watched in awe, uncertain whether they viewed the past, or a recreation made by whatever intelligence governed this place.

Beyond, another door opened to a chamber where a towering construct with mechanical tentacles exhaled a blast of scalding steam. The heat filled the air like a dragon’s breath. Vedica darted aside, Jack raised his sword, and Murchad charged, landing heavy blows. Tentacles of metal lashed out, striking Murchad before the group brought the machine down with a flurry of attacks.

Afterward, they found curious instruments resembling telescopes. Jack, the scholar among them, peered through the lenses. One was trained upon Mars, yet as he focused and zoomed in, he saw not a planet but a red whirlpool of light, a spiraling wound in the heavens. Another pointed at Venus, showing the same luminous vortex in a different hue.

The third instrument focused on the moon. At first it seemed normal, but as he adjusted the lenses, it appeared flat — like a shining coin, its surface etched with patterns that resembled cities. The discovery left them unsettled. If the world above was distorted, what did it mean for the one below?

They next entered a vast chamber dominated by an immense table, a model of the world itself. The lands and seas stretched across its surface in exquisite detail looking very much like the map Murchad had once seen hanging in a church in Hereford. Above it arched a great metallic hoop bearing representations of the sun, moon, and stars attached to it with metal wire. The celestial ring slowly turned, mimicking the motion of the heavens.  The hoop rotated slowly over the depiction of the Earth before descending under the table and back up the other side.

Jack’s attention was immediately drawn to the heavens. Mars and Venus gleamed like small red and white whirlpools, just as he had seen through the telescope. The Moon, too, appeared as a flat disk embedded in the firmament.  The companions watched in silence, awed by the craftsmanship and the eerie vitality of the model. Then a soft, disembodied voice echoed through the room, somewhat-ambiguously female -- emotionless, yet unmistakably alive.

“Specimen analysis incomplete. Return specimens to observation laboratory.”

The words chilled them. They knew that they were the specimens.

Jack broke the tension by quipping that it might be fun to fly up to the moon and ride it all the way around to see what was on the underside of the flat world.

The comment prompted Vedica to look under the table.  Beneath the model, she found, to her shock, that it had an underside — a dark, cavernous pit carved from jagged rock, terraced like an immense amphitheater with a stone “ceiling.” The tunnel-like shape meant that the upside-down pit would not receive any light from the Sun or Moon when it went underneath, and anyone in it would never get a view of the sky or stars.  Jack wracked his brain. Vedica’s description vaguely reminded him of a book he’d been told to read many times, but as he had never gotten around to reading it, he couldn’t bring to mind any more specific details.

Before they could ponder the meaning, Vedica found a hidden passage. Unfortunately, her attention was so drawn by the elaborate model that she failed to find a trap. As the door opened, a cloud of gas hissed out, burning their lungs. Coughing and staggering, they pressed through into another chamber.

The next chamber had them beset by four-legged chomping automata, and other’s that looked like large insects with spindly legs. The chamber beyond that contained more humanoid automata in what appeared to be a repair or construction workshop for the machines. All were dispatched in turn.

The combats had left the diminutive party badly wounded and running low on healing potions.   Still, they had to press onward, if they ever hoped to find a way out.

Their journey deeper into the labyrinth was accompanied by a mysterious, disembodied female voice repeating:

“Specimen analysis incomplete. Return specimens to observation laboratory.”

The unsettling refrain echoed from unseen speakers, set the party on edge and heightened the feeling of being observed and tested.

At last, they entered a vast room where another mechanical horror awaited a towering machine that exhaled steam and struck with tentacled limbs. Around it, lesser automatons manipulated strange cylindrical crystals in and out of a long tray with hole capable of holding them, sticking up halfway.  In the center of the room, a glowing crystal sphere that hovered above a pedestal of sorts, like a miniature sun. A suit of armor stood in the corner, lifeless but strangely significant.

Vedica vanished from sight, striking from invisibility. Jack and Murchad engaged the construct directly. Steam hissed, metal screeched, and the echo of battle filled the chamber. The massive creature fell under their combined assault, crashing to the ground in a heap of smoking brass.

The victory was not without cost. Jack, battered and bleeding, drank a potion to keep standing. Vedica fought on despite her wounds. Murchad, grim and resolute, finished the last of the smaller machines with a final strike that left silence hanging heavy in the air.

Jack examined the suit of armor. Finding it was magical, and a good fit for him, he quickly donned it, saying that his red dragon scale mail armor would make a nice present for Ceangal.

As they caught their breath, the glowing sphere pulsed softly — light reflecting on their faces like dawn breaking in the mechanical gloom. Somewhere in the unseen walls, the same disembodied voice spoke once more, calm and distant:

“Specimen analysis incomplete. Return specimens to observation laboratory.”

Jack joked that since Mars and Venus appeared to be portals, maybe the glowing orb was a portal that would take them home.

The party experimented with the large, glowing, crystal orb, finding it immovable yet featureless, while Jack deduced connections between the glowing celestial holes and the portals referenced by the mysterious devices. They could touch it and tug on it, but they couldn’t move it from its place. They could spin it, but that was all.

Vedica uncovered the true purpose of the cylindrical crystals. She inserted some of them into holes as she had seen the automata doing. On a glass pane, cryptic journal entries appeared. Jack was able to read the language (the same “English” spoken by the sailors from the Eldridge). The entries were written by someone or something named Corex.  One of them was marking the “last human contact,” but its display of numbers counting ever-upward, second by second, implied millions of years of isolation.

Another entry read, “The creator’s voice echoes in silence, lost to time’s endless loop.”

A third crystal displayed a schematic of some sort, and Murchad’s engineering skill allowed him to make enough sense of it to see that whoever (or whatever) constructed this place had known how to make use of portals. It seemed that Jack’s notion that the luminous whirlpools of Mars and Venus might be portals to other worlds, rather than worlds themselves, was not far off the mark. What’s more, Murchad was pretty sure that Jack had also been onto something when he said that the orb itself might be a portal. It obviously wasn’t a portal, but based on what Murchad was seeing, he was pretty sure that breaking the orb was their ticket out of this nightmare.

Jack used his Horn of Blasting on it. It vibrated violently, but it did not break, and it did not move. Now, patches of a slightly more orange hue than the homogneous sun-yellow moved over its surface.

Next, Jack shot it with his strange arquebus. The ball smacked into the surface with great force. The orb did not break, and the ball ricocheted off of it and then bounced off one of the walls, skittering across the floor. The light on the surface of the orb rippled like the surface of a still pond that had been disturbed by a pebble hurled into it with great velocity.

Vedica tried to shoot it with an arrow next, thinking that the sharp point of the arrow might deliver more force than the lead ball. She got a similar result, with fewer ripples. The arrow shattered from the force of the impact, sending wood fragments across the floor toward the far side of the room.

Lastly, Murchad stepped forward with his rune-etched longsword, glowing with necrotic energy. He felt the blade bite into the surface of the orb, and in an instant, all three woke up back in their beds in the Corcaigh inn.  Their comrades were still sleeping. Jack made a comical sight, lying in bed, under the covers, in a full suit of armor.

Murchad looked down at the rune-etched sword that was still in his hand, lying in the bed alongside his right leg. The blade had a semi-circle of light fading upon it, a vestige of where it had sliced into the orb. The pins-and-needles feeling up his entire arm was fading, too, but what didn’t fade was the sense of increased strength he felt. Though the tingling began to fade, Murchad had an unmistakable feeling that hinted their experience, however dreamlike, had left its mark on the waking world.