The Grand Battle II! [Happy End!]

Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.

---

Clara was a softhearted and sentimental old woman, and it hurt a part of her to see something so ancient and meaningful destroyed with no apparent remorse; she ran a greying hand across the surface of the recently-marred stone, speculating aboutand mourning for the carving that was. Vyrm'n was much more apathetic and perpetually inscrutable; she showed no outward reaction to the thrashed room, simply hanging back and gingerly feeling the air. Gestalt, by far the most pragmatic of the three, simply slid through to the next room; by this point it had repacked most of its sundry limbs, leaving only the tattered glove out. The false hand motioned towards the next passage, encouraging the ladies to follow. Clara complied after a few moments, heaving a long sigh and sparing one last look at the carnage; it took even longer for Vyrm'n to leave the scene, half-committed and full of ennui as she was.

By the time the two joined Gestalt in the next corridor, the golem had moved a significant distance down it; not as far as one might have expected though, for reasons that soon became clear. It was again using its affinity for complicated objects and unique senses to their fullest potential, searching the trap-riddled corridors for potential hazards and doing its best to disarm the many and varied death devices. Clara was treated to the interesting sight of watching a trapdoor full of rocks drop its payload only to have every stone fall neatly into a pyramidal stack; as the crates slid down the tunnel, several similar events preceded its passage. Darts would launch themselves into the air then abruptly halt, arranging themselves inside a waiting box; there would be a snap as some mechanism suddenly unwound itself and a bladed pendulum would slide sheepishly out of the wall and rest itself on the floor. The group's travel towards the next chamber was slightly surreal, but fairly uneventful, especially as they passed the point where Maxwell's nearly-constant chatter could still be heard. Eventually, the meandering tunnel made a hard right turn, spat forth a not-unexpected spear trap, and opened into another chamber.

It was... smaller than others had been, but covered in an equal, or perhaps greater, density of carvings. The domed chamber, also unusually, had only one way in or out: the corridor through which the trio had just arrived. Gestalt settled himself in the center of the room, giving taciturn sweeps of his consciousness to the confusing walls; Clara took a few steps in and quietly marveled at the further craftsmanship displayed; Vyrm'n sulked in the doorway. A couple of minutes passed in silence, save for the possibly-imagined creak of living stone and the occasional indistinct blat of Maxwell being particularly emphatic on some word or other. Eventually, the golem broke the silence by tapping Rexxcer's laser pointer on the ground; the nun looked toward him and made an interrogative humming noise, but the faceless failed to respond. Gestalt proffered its notepad again, and begin to write.

i dont like to admit it but i can honestly make no sense of any of this

it frustrates me greatly that we have what appears to be some sort of record of the story of each of these fiendish battles and i can do nothing but boggle vacantly at it as though i were trying to make sense of a the trails of a spilled beverage

the sheer amount of information i am utterly powerless to find

Even without an ellipsis, the way the pen trailed off the page conveyed a fairly profound sense of frustrated impotence. Clara, a much more easygoing mind even under stress like this, wasn't as bothered by her ignorance, but identified with the sentiment. She'd recently come, herself, to the conclusion that the grandmasters had to be stopped, and having this sort of tantalizing possible-weapon dangled in front of her was a bit vexing. She moved to a wall and began tracing a random shape with a fingernail, running through divinations in her head and hoping some more mundane inspiration would strike. She talked idly to Gestalt, agreeing with him and asking him to give her a few moments to think, all the while pondering a solution. Tongues only applies to spoken language, and most script translations only apply to words. Some of them don't even work on pictograms very well. Maybe a planar consultation?... Then again, I don't really trust that I'd end up with the right sort of answering party, and this doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd bother a god with. I... wait.

An odd sort of half-smile, half-grimace floated around the old nun's lips. "I don't know how much either of you knows about magic..."Gestalt rose his pen as if to respond, then realized this was just a preamble."But there's basically, when you get right down to the most basic sense of it, two ways of going about it. There's magic you bring from out of yourself, and magic you bring from outside yourself and just allow yourself to be a conduit. Most people good at magic or knowledgeable about it are the first sort of magic users. Wizards and such who spend their whole life honing their skill and making themselves powerful. People with grimoires and dribbly candles and usually a bit of a hygiene problem. The other sort of people are, aside from the minority who try to harness spirits or otherworldly beings, mostly priests like me whose gods grant them some utilitarian measure of intuitive magical ability, usually commensurate with how "holy" the individual is and how powerful the god. The point is, I don't, in a truly technical sense, cast spells; no divine caster really does. You just learn to be a conduit for something else."

Gestalt had known a bit, although not all, of this, but kept its thoughts to itself. It wasn't an expert on body language or vocal inflections, but time spent in a blended mind with a human had left some cues. Clara seemed to be steeling herself for something rather than simply explaining a concept no-one had asked about, so the golem simply sat quietly and listened, pad unmoving and pencil deferentially laid beside it. It calmly watched as she began pacing and gesticulating more emphatically than the subject matter really warranted.

"So, as you can probably imagine, most such channelers won't be able to compete in terms of raw magical power with magic-users who cultivate and strengthen their own abilities; even a very devout servant of a very powerful god can only use the tiniest fraction of divine power, both because the gods mostly prefer to see their followers do their own work, and because channeling more than the merest iota of divine energy would be very hard on any material body. Saints who move mountains or slay dragons tend not to have particularly long lifespans.

It made enough sense, but still didn't seem to have any relevance to the situation at hand. Still, Gestalt was prepared to wait for as long as the nun was ready to talk if it promised to have some sort of helpful bit at the end; until then, it merely sat in the center of the room with an air of great patience and interest. Or, at least, as much of such an air as a bunch of featureless and unmoving crates could hope to exude.

"There are a few things, of course, that my magic does better than the other sort; anything inherently divine, especially the creation and maintenance of life, comes significantly easier to a holy mage than to an arcane one. Wizards make notoriously poor healers, necromancy is ninety percent the domain of clerics and priests, and knowledge of things unknown is most attainable by those who can part the veils normally only gods can see through. That's not to say wizards simply can't do those things, it just takes a lot more effort and study for less result, and even the best will likely never be able to compete with the best divine magic users."

"There's really only one thing that we can do that they'll never be able to, and... It's something most of us never do, and even those who choose to only do rarely and with great reluctance." Here, Clara swallowed and stopped pacing, tapping her foot and cane on the ground and pulling her face taut. "A divine channeler has to open themselves up to outside forces to use their power, and learns to recognize which forces to tap and how to control how much power they take or let in. That means that there's the potential to let in more, or attempt to use more power than you usually do, or... Or, let something all the way in."

"So, uh, I guess what I'm thinking is this. None of us know anything about these carvings, you two can barely see them, and even those two... Geniuses back there will probably take days or weeks or who-knows-how-long to learn even the barest shred of information from these things. None of my usual divinations are useful here, and I'm not sure I'd be able to get the kind of planar consult I usually can in this sort of situation. So, maybe the best plan is to let me find someone or something who does know what they mean and bring them here to let you guys talk to them. I honestly don't know how it'll work out but... Well, I don't really have any better ideas.

The pad hovered up to eye level and the pencil tapped itself on the spine for a moment before ponderously drawing out a few lines.

if i am to understand the plan and your explanation this involves some not insignificant personal risk to yourself as well as the distinct possibility for failure or worse

i am of course leery of such dangerous actions but

it is true that i am unable to come up with anything better nor can i truly be of much help in terms of gathering and gleaning information

in the end i suppose you are free to do whatever you think is best to further our goals and i am in little position to offer advice about things i know little

i wish you the best of luck insofar as that is possible

The old woman smiled and patted the closest box on its lid. "That's sweet of you to say. One way or another, I figure we'll get something out of this. If you think it's worth trying, I'll get started right away; it might take a bit to find an appropriate intelligence, so I guess you should find something to occupy yourself. Can you even get bored?"

the concept is different for me than i understand it is for more organic beings but your point is noted

i will find something to occupy myself

there is something incongruous and very much interesting to me that i had earlier dismissed as insignificant and suspected i would not get the chance to explore and this delay gives the perfect opportunity to tinker

Clara nodded, and Gestalt moved back to the corridor and a few feet into it, the still-silent pillar of the faceless moving aside to allow him passage. The crates fanned out by one wall and sat there; it was impossible to tell what, if anything, the schrotgolem was doing. The nun, for her part, moved into the center of the room and sat crosslegged on the ground. She pulled out a piece of chalk from her sleeve and drew just two simple sigils on the ground: one in front of her, the other behind. She closed her eyes and began concentrating, her breathing slowing and mind leaving the material world behind.

The experience would be impossible to describe to one who has no personal experience with magic or the multiverse, but it can be approximated visually. Imagine the world fading to black then again to nothingness; like being blind and having no concept of the idea of black, there was simply emptiness around the mental presence of Clara Jungfrau. From that presence extended gossamer threads, growing and winding, splitting and searching, each tasting the aether and looking for a particular faint signature. This web of thought and energy continued branching and spreading, crossing invisible universal barriers and pushing forcefully through more stubborn impediments.

The search was long and for the most part fruitless; most sufficiently-powerful entities appeared to lack the capability for the task at hand. In the end, only thirteen beings that the spell could find were judged acceptable; one by one, these beings were probed and approached, each time being rebuked. Sometimes the threads were simply waved aside, others attacked and broken, still others knotted around themselves and dispelled; it appeared the attempt would be for nothing until... One being originally shied away from the approach, but after a moment returned, curious. It examined the magic, growing more and more interested and amused; it reached out metaphysically, stroking and reading the spell as it thought, then bubbled with silent psychic laughter. It liked what it had found. It wrapped around the thread and let the web wrap around it.

---

The temple was ancient. Pre-prehistory ancient. It had been around, apparently, almost as long as this planet had. Gestalt could feel this instinctively, and his probing of the stones' history confirmed this fact. Everything about this place felt old. Except... It didn't. The stone, and even the carvings themselves, were truly ancient, but there was the taste of the present and even of the future on the surface of the rocks; it was possible for all the golem knew that this was typical for prophecy or time loops or whatever had allowed these carvings to depict things so recent and even yet to come even though they themselves were created eons ago, but... Then there were the traps. They were, simply put, out of place. They didn't have the same elegant melding with the tunnels that the carvings did, to say nothing of the fact that mechanical traps like pressure plates and compressed air and blades would certainly not have weathered this much time and still been functional. It was baffling, but it wasn't exactly vital.

Still, Clara's casting gave Gestalt the time to work on the problem, even if it was just a silly little thing. It moved to one of the most recent traps they had passed, a combination pressure-plate and pit trap that would have taken a considerable effort to install and oughtn't have lasted a decade under the pressure and tectonic drift. It fanned itself out by the wall, and sent its consciousness into the walls and mechanisms. After spending some minutes familiarizing itself with the intricacies of the trap itself, it began looking through the object's history. It was... Astonishingly brief, and extremely uneventful. Unless there was some sort of effect clouding Gestalt's reading, it appeared to have been here for mere hours and was never put[/] here or installed; it simply wasn't here, then suddenly was. The components had no history from before being part of the trap, and no-one had ever put them here. They'd simply arrived. There was–

There was a noise from back in the chamber. Panning its "sight" back around, the golem saw that Clara had fallen over backwards and her chalk symbols were glowing with a fading light. It moved a bit closer to the room, and the nun sat up, looked directly at Gestalt and Vyrm'n, and blinked; after a moment of staring, her eyes rolled back in her head until nothing was visible but the whites. She stood up slowly, and took a few steps towards the chamber entrance, her eyes growing darker the farther she moved; she suddenly cocked her head to the side and furrowed her brow. There was a soft 'hmm', and she clicked her fingers; a purplish fedora appeared on her head (on top of the wimple) and her face brightened up, making the tiny stars dotting the blackness of her eyes more obvious. "Ahh, that's much better."

Clara, whose voice had sounded exactly the same as before but as though she was saying everything in stereo with herself, smiled at the other two. And did nothing else. Just smiled broadly and rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. After a few awkward moments, Gestalt brought out his notepad and began to write:

i can only assume that you are whatever entity was selected by or perhaps selected our friend clara

i am g–

Clara waved her hand and Gestalt found itself unable to continue writing. <font color="#4000ff">"I promise, I know all about you! And why you searched for me too. No need to go around explaining things all the time, I've got a handle on it. Besides all that..." Here she scowled for a moment. "Reading earthly languages gives me a headache. This should be much more convenient for everyone."

The nun waved her hand and a small device appeared on the lid of one of Gestalt's boxes; it was a speech synthesizer, much like the one The Sunset had used, but more compact. After a few experimental bursts, of static, the golem found it very easy to use and far more reliable than the last one it had used. "I suppose I should thank you. This device will doubtless prove helpful." It also appeared to switch every so often from a sultry feminine voice to a deep, smooth masculine one.

Clara beamed and made a dismissive 'think nothing of it' hand gesture. "Least I could do, and so on. Now then, let's get started; you fellows don't have much time to waste, I think." She moved to an apparently-arbitrary point on the wall and jabbed a bony finger into the carvings. "It starts... [i]here[/]. Well, that is to say, this round starts here but I bet you'd already figured out that each of these rooms represents a different round of a battle much like your own. But yeah, this one starts here. See, what happened is, see this little squiggle? It means..." She broke off again, and began tittering slightly. She clapped twice then brought her hands up to her face, still beaming. "Oh, they are going to be so furious about this. Well, he is at least. Isn't this exciting? I'm really breaking new scheming ground here! All of them furtively whispering to each other, talking behind backs... Well, They just never took the idea to it's logical conclusion! This is so much fun! I wonder how she'll react? Probably–"

Gestalt's new voice purred out "What exactly are you–" before finding it couldn't go on. Clara's face, which had been so suffused with glee for most of the time since the channeling began, turned towards the boxes, expression completely impassive, eyebrows lowered very slightly. Cold, a concept the schrotgolem had understood but never experienced, ripped through Gestalt's being; a sensation like drowning in boiling ice suffused its existence, and it felt itself detach from its material portions before being pinned to a wall. "Don't interrupt.". It hadn't been pitched like a command or threat; it was simply a statement of how things would be. There was neither malice nor anger, just an intense certainty that no more interruptions would follow. Gestalt's spiritual self was released from the metaphysical grip and dropped to the ground. It slowly gathered its corporeal limbs as Clara turned back to the wall, once again all smiles and bubbly commentary.</font>

"Okay so basically what I'm saying is, and I probably shouldn't bother with all the details, isss... Well, so these two, that vacuum you saw earlier, the one with the bones and the knives, and a big guy with a magic weapon that could change form (his friend knew this nun person, by the way, interesting tidbit there), they made it all the way to the last round of their battle. That's this room. Set in a mental world, right? It responded to what they thought and felt and made it real. All their fears and doubts and hopes and all that. Lot of character development there, overcoming their shortcomings and all that. The vacuum got over the limits of being a soulless machine (even though it was full of souls, but you know what I mean), it was really touching and all that. They spend most of their time fighting each other like they're supposed to, but finally they get all touchy-feely and work together to fight The Director. Oh, and the memory of their friend who died in round six is there only she's not a memory, she's a ghost and she's not really a ghost either. Basically she kills herself again to let them go deeper into the mental world to find the Director himself, where he's holed up trying to recover from some damage that memory ghost girl did to him the round she died. He taunts them a bit and they fight, and it's pretty intense! Still, weapon guys makes a dumb mistake on account of all that squishy biology and the Director offs him real quick. Anticlimactic really, but it never could have gone any other way. Vacuum goes home, waits for All-Stars. Everybody laughs at how close Director came to getting his clock cleaned by a vacuum." Clara sniggered a bit at her pun. "Aaand, that's about the size of it in here! I mean yeah there's details and stuff but that would take ages and you got the gist of it. Okay, I can feel you wanting to say something and I guess I'm done. What's on your, uh, box?"

"So you are saying that not only were they able to confront their grandmaster, but that he was vulnerable to attack and was only saved through errors on the part of the attackers?"

Clara's borrowed face looked pensive. "Wellll, yes and no. I mean, yeah, they attacked him (gave him a bit of a beating too), and it was weapon guy's mistake that gave him room to counter, but... Well, I'll be honest I'd have eaten my–" Here there was a word that was not only unpronounceable with one human mouth, but sent lances of pain and fear through all those present; even Vyrm'n's dark surface rippled with discomfort. "–if they'd actually [i]gotten him. I mean, yeah, these guys aren't half the badasses they think they are, but you're still batting against the big leagues here, kiddo."

Gestalt sat quietly. It was at once sobering and elating to hear that another group had attempted a grandmaster coup, even if they had failed. That they had succeeded at least in damaging the tyrant was hope enough, especially given that a robot vacuum and a "weapon guy" had managed to do so apparently without much magic and certainly without Vyrm'n's bottomless supply of nothingness. There was a lot to consider. Clara's voices piped up again with a prodding tone. "You knooow, I just bet there's other rounds and battles you'd like to hear a bit about, right?"