Episode 41

Episode 41: Shielded By Fate 

Morning comes, and Gemevieve wakes up with a jolt, more panicked than usual. She spends some time by herself, frantically writing into her journal while everyone else stirs awake. Callisto joins Ganymede while she cooks some fish with Analai to apologize for his outburst the previous night. They feed a very hungry, ravenous Scrungus, who gobbles up most of their fish before Callisto brings his attention to Gemevieve, still writing in the corner. Gesturing to her notebook, he tells her it seems she’s got a lot on her mind and asks if she’s going okay. Gemevieve, making sure no one else is listening, opens up to him, explaining that she documents her nightmares in this journal. She has the same nightmare every night, with some subtle changes throughout them. She’s had the nightmare every night ever since the circus was destroyed: she is running, being chased, and falls off a cliff while someone, usually her former kidnapper, Sterling, watches. Sometimes, this person is different, and has appeared as others like Methandi, Ganymede, Rasmesus, and Callisto himself. They will proceed to say awful things about her until she falls off the cliff, plummeting into a pool of water below and drowning. Callisto assures her that her friends would never do that to her, and that Sterling is dead and gone now. Callisto brings up that Sterling was even killed by Gemevieve herself, something that still seemingly haunts her. Callisto tries his best to ease her worries, telling her that Sterling can’t hurt her and that the circus is gone. Feeling a bit better, Gemevieve makes sure that everyone else is also up to the task for the day ahead. She offers her unlimited rock crystal candy to Toraleth, who doesn’t seem to be eating, in order to give him a boost of energy. She also gives a good chunk to Scrungus, who’s still hungry even after all of the fish he ate. With that, the light pours in from the windows and opens up a passageway for everyone to head down to the next floor.

The party heads down some steps and enters into a closed-off room with twelve stone pillars forming a circle around another shorter crystal spiar. Light pours in from one side, striking through one of the pillars and hitting the pillar in the center. Noticing how the light refracts, the party experiments with it. Gemevieve, being too translucent to reflect any of the lights, has Callisto, Ganymede and Scrungus try it. Using Sunspot, Callisto is able to reflect some light beams to other pillars from the center. Ganymede does the same with Corona, and Scrungus uses his metal skin to bounce some of the light beams around as well. With some working, a wall opens, and Gemevieve finds a prism object at the end of the dead end hall that opens up. Using the prism with the light beams, another wall opens up, with another prism located in the hall behind it. With both prisms, the last of the walls open up, and leads to a hall that brings them forward.

Moving onward, the party comes to another room, this time without a puzzle. This room, instead, shows wall art and depictions of the life cycle of creatures from Lah’Tekai and Leshtah. The first wall shows the crystal frogs, how they are born from crystal and are able to merge into crystal walls. Another side shows some birds, not yet seen by the party, and shows a similar life cycle as the frogs. One wall depicts the extinct Crystal Dragons, coming from an egg and going to the mountain. Next to them is a depiction of Crystrons, the race that Gemevieve is from. However, the Crystrons here are hulking, rocky creatures with no facial features whatsoever. No mouth, no eyes, no definition. Gemevieve comments on how she is supposed to look like that, much to everyone’s concern. However, there is one more wall depicting another race. This one shows a more humanoid looking race, starting with a Crystron and a magic kit used for something called modeling magic; a specific arcane power that allows the creation of children from materials. It shows the recipe for modeling magic, and then a child below it, strikingly similar to Gemevieve’s makeup. Gemevieve attempts to decipher the language in the wall’s notes, only able to gather that it loosely reads, “Crystal Aphines”. Another drawing shows that, like Gem, the arms and legs of a Crystal Aphines can be broken and reformed due to a hardening agent that occurs when the skin is hit with heavy force, but the skin is actually almost liquid when no force is applied. Gem panickedy tries to wipe away the dust from the rest of the wall, realizing she has been lied to her whole life. There’s no doubt about it; Gemevieve isn’t actually a Crystron, but instead a Crystal Aphines born from modeling magic. Even the handprint on the wall of the Aphines matches up perfectly with Gem’s hand. Gemevieve takes a moment to get her frustrations out, screams loudly away from everyone, and doesn’t say anything else to anyone. Feeling defeated and isolated, Gemevieve tries to trudge forward, with no amount of comfort from her friends helping her feel any less devastated. Ganymede charcoals the modeling magic recipe before they head down.

They are led down another set of stairs, and go through a large hallway, being shown another depiction on the walls as they go. This one shows a dragon, familiar from the statues at Kahlessi, wielding a large shield with 8 points on it. Feeling this is a sign that Cryactum is near, they head down another hallway and end up in a large, empty alcove. Shrouded by fog on the other side, the only visible thing in this room is a large set of stairs in the center. At the top of the stairs rests a crystal shield, radiant with orange, red, and yellow hues and an opal center. Gemevieve climbs, the steps twinkling and glittering as she goes up, ringing out a soft and beautiful melody. Cryactum sits on a pedestal at the top for Gem to take. She musters up some confidence and takes the shield, holding it close. She straps it to her arm, and feels her wrist and Cryactum beginning to fuse together. The shield has strange abilities from the start, able to shrink and fuse inside of Gemevieve’s hand, and then enlarge and blossom outwards with ease. She does notice that this shield only has four points on it, while the one seen with the dragon champion has eight. She tries to shake this thought off, not thinking much of it, and walks back down the stairs, hiding the shield inside of her hand. She even pranks her friends, telling them that she didn’t find the shield, only to joke by pulling Cryactum out from behind Ganymede.

The stairs crumble down as she meets back up with her friends for a moment, most of them in awe of Gem’s beautiful shield. Gemevieve, realizing her friends may have had a harder time getting their Divine Weapons than she did, offers to talk to her friends and have some fun with them to distract them. However, there might not even be time for that. Callisto and Analai stare into the fog, noticing something coming towards them in the mist. From the other side of the room, they see the large, hulking form of the Godslayer, slowly coming towards them. A dark grey energy surrounds their fists, forming heavy stone gauntlets around their hands. They reach down into the mountain and begin to tear the ground apart. The party has no choice this time but to go head to head with the Godslayer in combat.