Iconoclasm

Chapter Three: Pioneers In Magic

Our cultlets, under Tiliwo's seafarer tutelage, agree to hit up the nearest Generic Port Town to buff out the mermaid scratches off their ill-gotten boat, and stock it for several days' travel on the high seas. They also opt to get the boat painted in kickass red and black, vetoing Evangeline's repeated requests to rename it the Merfucker. Merfucker or Wavepuncher or any other appellation-options are moot, when considering a professionally-done paint job is going to leave the crew grounded for a couple of days. The crew acquires accommodations and heads for the town slums to do various ablutings and lootings, Nanda and Evangeline kept out of ostensible trouble via a buddy system with Tiliwo and Zed respectively.

As we discover the night after disembarking, this was a great idea in theory save for possibly pairing off the wrong people.

The party's resident wizard and token dwarf Klein walks into a bar one night, doing an impressively bad job of looking innocent and inconspicuous as he takes a seat across from Our Only Sensible Cultist, Tiliwo. The local coven chapter of wizards were apparently more comfortable company for him than our gaggle, and they even mentioned some nearby extra credit sidequests potential leads in the acquisition of the kind of artifacts our cultly superiors back at Sanctum might be hankering for. There's an abandoned tower, under previous ownership of some kind of magical sect, rumored to house a capital-t Tome with pages made of skin and the screams of a dying universe if you open it and lots of other fun features. Its original owners were possibly an apocalypse cult of the wrong kind, namely; the kind that wasn't yours, and the book could be another piece of your personal apocalyptic deity. The gang figures it's as good an excursion as any, and set off early the next morning.

En route through hill and dale and forest, while Evangeline fruitlessly searches for drinkable mammals (all of which are repelled by the more... repulsive elements of Zed's animal magnetism), Klein tells anyone who's listening about what kind of horrific traps may await in the tower, because he knows wizards but he doesn't know, specifically, what kind of wizards these ones are. The whole tower could be enchanted and out to kill them, though considering the state of disrepair it's in Klein is at least confident he's not dealing with dwarven traps. Zed suggests scaling the tower and breaking in on a higher floor, assumption being that the treasure lies nearer the top.

Upon encountering the tower, Zed, Nanda, and Evangeline get to clambering up the sucker. About fifty feet up, a substantial chunk of wall breaks off under Evangeline, who barely regains her grip. After coming a hair's breadth of crushing Klein and being oddly-easily tossed back tower-ward by Tiliwo, the rock starts hauling ass back up the tower before slotting itself back in. The resulting ripple across the tower's surface dislodges Evangeline, who fucks up the landing from five stories up and breaks her arm. She walks it off.

Zed and Nanda, meanwhile, break in at about two thirds of the way up the tower, finding bookshelves galore, and are pelted by assorted belligerent books sending them strongly-phrased letters (they're literally letters of the alphabet, laid out on blank pages) to get out. They escape through a different door, get badly pranked by falling bookshelves and hallways that spin around and spit them out where they started, before upgrading to carnival-style barrel-rolling hallways which threaten to tenderise Nanda like a squid in a brick-filled washing machine. (Zed's been dodging most of the hallways by kobold-freak-leaping from junction to junction). Nanda catches up to Zed, and the junction splits off into corridors ending in a door and a mirror. The mirror appears utterly mundane and proves the one thing Nanda is unwilling to punch; the door opens to a featureless black void.

Zed leapfrogs full tilt into the darkness; Tiliwo, Klein, and Evangeline watch him launch himself full tilt out a door and over a balcony, stretch a limb too slowly to grab the tower, and settle for wrapping himself around a merciful spruce. Nanda steps out a little more placidly, onto the balcony; the door slams shut behind him and opens once for good measure to see if it can't knock him clean off the tower too. The two clamber down and rejoin the party, bringing their findings that detail the tower is an asshole.

Klein, who has been jokingly offer to unsummon Evangeline's broken arm so she doesn't have to deal with a broken arm, starts seriously entertaining the possibility of unsummoning the tower's foundations, or otherwise messing with them through earth magic, now that there's nobody inside. Warning the team that it'll be highly experimental spellery, he borrows a stick of charcoal and emblazons the tower with runes and gets the spell working without further incident, because he's an NPC and not cosmically inclined to fuck up at everything he does.

All they get for the first twenty minutes is ominous rumbling, and Evangeline musing how awesome it'd be if the tower's magic and Klein's interact and the tower sprouts massive earth legs and becomes ambulatory. Klein is very insistent that that is the opposite of awesome, considering how much the universe seems to hate Evangeline and/or love making her eat her words. The geo-jiggling ascends into a deafening roar, and even Klein can't say how but the tower begins to descend into the ground, dislodged stonework pushing itself back into place as it goes.

Everyone except Tiliwo heads closer to examine it; Zed offers to climb up first as soon as the tower's peak is a little more accessible. Nanda follows, and Evangeline gives Klein a hand up (just one) and proceeds to chillax at the base of the tower. She's reckless, but not foolish enough to climb a tower with one good hand.

Zed scales the last couple of windowless floors, then finds a single trapdoor in the roof. Opening it up reveals a ladder made of tiny bookshelves, leading into a small room with the ostensible Grimoire sitting on a plinth. Zed grabs the Grimoire, the stepladder whirrs into antagonistic motion as a downward escalator, so the kobold leaps for the trapdoor entrance, misses, and probably barely avoided being decapitated as it snaps unyieldingly shut. Nanda and Klein try tackle it from outside, but it reappears as fast as Nanda can punch it into submission, and jamming Klein's staff and some supportive magic in the gap only gets it wide enough for Zed to slip the Grimoire through.

Klein is close to a panic attack at this point, but performs admirably under pressure and doesn't suggest leaving Zed for dead, even though we all know he was considering it. He instead leaves Nanda on door-levering duty and, for lack of any better ideas, goes to see if he can haul Evangeline up to help out. Evangeline's acquired some rope from Tiliwo, and she ties her pack to the rope as a counterweight and biffs it, missing Klein and braining herself because she's that awful at everything. Klein suggests she inscribe the pack with a rune of Recall, then unhelpfully reminds her it looks like an upside-down rune of Sending, which she also has no clue how to write. Klein proceeds to give the vampire a step-by-step drawing guide for a Recall Rune; Evangeline's efforts look like a shirtless, judgmental ogre hiding behind a comically-narrow pole. The pack vanishes in a fireball as Klein activates the newly-designed Exploding Rune of Recall, but the rappel arrives on the rooftop intact if somewhat on fire.

Evangeline starts walking up the wall as Kleine's dwarven stoutness helps pull her up, until the fire-damaged rope snaps, sending Evangeline plummeting a further twenty feet. Evangeline decides for now that the ground is ok. Tiliwo, meanwhile, has coverted her engine into some kind of rotary shovel, and does some hasty trigonometry to figure out what angle to power-dig at to rescue the others, mistakenly assuming they're all trapped inside the tower.

Klein, with only some encouragement from Nanda, makes an executive decision to open the book.

Everything goes white, the session and possibly the entire campaign is wiped off the face of existence. Whoops!