Dear Diary: The Scrapbook of a Sorcerer's Apprentice

[Obsidian_Dragoon]

((The only time Blue is never lost is when he's looking at someone's butt. That day he lost sight of the rumpus. . . A sad day indeed.))

[Coyotedancer]

5 hours ago, Obsidian_Dragoon said:

((The only time Blue is never lost is when he's looking at someone's butt. That day he lost sight of the rumpus. . . A sad day indeed.))

(Ha! As I recall, when we ended up off in that tunnel full of Pantheon goons all on our own, Kai *was* actually following him... XD) 

[Coyotedancer]

Dear Diary…

I’m not sure who built Pandora’s Box or why, but if I ever meet them? I’m going to punch them in the nose. >_<

 

Awhile back, Positron asked B to help the Phalanx out with a very strange problem… Psychic disturbances and weird power eruptions were happening all over the place, and as a result goons who really should not have been a huge menace (Like Trolls-) were suddenly turning into a serious issue. All of which came to a head when we found Clamor, and her silly pink chicken feet, and her Freakshow friends and a whole bunch of Talons of Vengeance running around in Atlas Park.

 

Reading Clamor’s mind after we’d cleaned up her mess, Penny Yin told us that all of the complications were caused by an artifact called Pandora’s Box. We knew that SOMEBODY was going to have to go and deal with that eventually, but we weren’t sure at the time who would end up stuck with the job. In retrospect, we probably should have started making plans right then… Because, of course, those “someones” did end up being us.

 

This time it didn’t start with psychic disturbances, but with TEMPORAL ones…

Chronomancy has sort-of become one of my areas of study, so when Positron called B in on the time distortions, he asked me to tag along, too.

 

 

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got to the lab… But a horde of those creepy gummy monsters from Bloody Bay was definitely NOT high on the list of things I would have guessed. While they’re not as bad as Hydras (They don’t barf on you as a mode of communication, after all-), Shivans are still sort of gross. They tend to explode into vast waves of gelatinous goo when you punch them. 

 

Gelatinous, STICKY goo... 

Which really made me wish I’d brought along my motorcycle helmet.

Because it would have been MUCH easier to get the Shivan goo off of THAT than it was to get it out of my hair... <_<

 

 

I *also* didn’t expect to find Professor Echo wandering around the place...

Granted, no one ever really seems to expect to find Professor Echo ANYWHERE he turns up, but-

 

As mad scientists go, Echo’s not a bad fellow… He’s certainly more polite than his contemporary self, who’s a bit of a jerk, honestly… But he’s still a nut, and he doesn’t always make a lot of sense. In this case, he was ranting a bit about us not finding Pandora's Box, and messing with causality, and being violent, and living in a “savage time” and all that… and grumbling  about how we had completely missed the idea of looking for the Box in the past when that idea ought to have been obvious.

 

Which, once he mentioned it, was actually true. We *hadn’t* thought of that... Not until he said something about it, anyway... Which made him even more unhappy once he realized that *he* must have been the one who gave us the idea all along. And had never gotten credit for it. All of which reminded me a lot of my own boggle with Vermis, and the Book of Lineages and it turning out that I'd been a time-travelling book-bandit. 

 

After we’d finally figured out what Echo was on about, and cleaned up the rest of his gummy monsters (Ugh! I just do NOT see why he travels with those things... >_> ), we went back to Positron and explained the situation to him. We told him that according to Echo's history, we really were supposed to be the ones who found the Box somehow, and we mentioned his time travel idea. I sort-of expected to get a lecture about how messing with time was BadWrong and how we were going to "destroy the world!" if we kept doing it, but Positron seemed okay the idea. He seemed to think that time travel was a perfectly logical solution. It also turned out that while we were out getting covered in sticky Shivan goo, he had been doing a bit of research himself. He’d found the name of an archaeologist who had made something of a specialty of looking for, and collecting information and stories about, the artifact that we were after. The man's name was James Harvan, and Positron wanted us to go and talk to him at one of his dig sites.

 

 

Of course, Arachnos got there before we did.

Apparently THEY were looking for the Box, too, and had read more or less exactly the same wiki pages that Posi had. Which lead them to exactly the same conclusions about who they should get to help them. Which lead them to the same dig site that we were there to visit.

 

 

They tried to kidnap Harvan and his students, but we and a few of the Phalanx members who had come with us refused to let them get away with being rude like that. It turned into kind-of a giant brawl, and the students all paniced… But I got to punch Arbiter Sands (again) and we all got to laugh when Synapse knocked Nocturne right on her butt, so it turned out well in the end. The professor agreed to work with us.

 

While he and Positron started putting together all of the information that they had, B and I decided to look into the time travel angle that Echo had inadvertently suggested. Neither Prometheus nor Silos were particularly helpful… Not that we really expected them to be… But at least they let us use their crystal to visit one of the potential time periods Harvan had mentioned.

 

 

I’ve written about the ancient world before. About Cimerora, and its people and all the times I’ve been there. I think I’ve even mentioned Romulus, who’s kind of a big, overly-opinionated jerk. Well, when we went back to look for Pandora’s Box? We ran right into him. He’d gone out looking for it, too… and I THINK I now know why he *really* wasn’t happy to see us in that valley where we destroyed the Talons’ army. We… sort of kicked his butt. It was a very bad day for Roman generals... And he thought that maybe WE were the ones who had taken the Box, because it sure wasn’t there, where we all expected to find it.

At least my magic didn’t get all messed up on that trip, which was a nice for a change…

 

I think I may have been back to Cimerora often enough now to be… I don't know... Maybe acclimated to that time period somehow? It's a mystery. There isn’t much information on Chronomancy in the Temple library, or in our own books in the Sanctum. Studying temporal magic just hasn’t been as simple as picking up a new Force spell or designing a ward… There’s a lot of trial and error involved, and not a whole lot in the way of documentation or proper arcane instruction. Maybe once I have a really good grasp of the Art, I should write a book on the subject myself?     

 

Anyway, while we were off embarrassing Romulus (Which he completely deserved-), Positron and the professor had come up with a way for us to possibly track the location of Pandora’s Box in the present time. The thing had a companion artifact that Harvan called the "Antikythera". We asked Azuria about it first (After we had to rescue her. <_< ) but, OF COURSE, she was clueless… and sort of rude. Eventually, it was the professor who figured out that *my* people probably had it.

 

 

I really, really didn’t like having to invade one of the most used, most solid, best-preserved parts of the old city just to steal one of the very few important artifacts that we Oranbegans had actually managed to hold on to, but to find the Box I didn't have much of a choice. Harvan was completely fascinated by our architecture, though, and seemed content to just stare at the walls while the rest of us went searching. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the “Fabulous and obviously very important, perhaps even sacred!” inscriptions that he was so fascinated with were nothing more than our version of street signs. ‘This way to the Grand Library’… ‘Main Gallery ahead’… ‘Beware of Falling Ceiling Stones’... But he'll probably find out eventually.)

 

Making our way to the Assembly Chamber, we found not only our Antikythera, but a stray Fusionette (Who was glowing like the Trolls back in Skyway-) and that Demon Queen, Lilitu. (She had the artifact, and seemed to want to use it on Fusionette to “absorb her power”? Which I assumed meant the glowy bits.)

 

I really enjoyed sending that one right back to the Abyss... 

Lilitu is arrogant, Diary, and she made some rather inappropriate comments to B. I don’t care whose queen she is… She doesn’t get to do that. <_<  

 

Anyway, we got our artifact... Lilitu got sent packing... and  Fusionette got to go home and apologize to Jimmy for being an over-powered nitwit.

That was only the beginning of finding and dealing with the Box, though.

 

-k

Edited June 17, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Coyotedancer]

{{OOC Note: Kai is taking part in Terminal's 'Self-Conceit' server story-arc on Everlasting. This is her summary of the first day's events. XD}}

 

Dear Diary-

Who knew that college would be SO MUCH WORK!

Between classes, and papers, and exams and projects (and still being Scirocco’s intern when I’m NOT trapped in the university library in Founder’s Falls-) I haven’t had time to do anything else! I’ve really missed being able to go out and bash things with my friends, a little spider has decided to live in my camera drone and my Capebook page has lost all of its followers. Not that I really mind that so much. I was getting tired of dodging all of those pervy questions about what kind of pajamas I like to wear, anyway. (Did they think that I was going to post video or something?! Social media is just *weird*.) I haven’t even gone shopping for any new boots. <_<

All of that changed yesterday, though.

 

Something REALLY STRANGE was going on, and I kind-of ended up walking right into the middle of it… A bunch of men from the mafia decided to take over the Midnighter’s Club while I was on my way there to borrow one of the Librarian’s books on extraplanar cartography.

That wasn’t the first time that someone had taken over the club. It… It honestly happens more often than you might think. The Rulushin. Unbound demons. Animate spells… Uncle Deafie… The place has a long history of invasion. I think this is the first time that the Family had done it, though, and they made a very big mess. They’d taken hostages, and looted the archives and no one was supposed to go after them, but… I sort of DID because I was worried about them trying to steal Tommy’s skull, like the Rulushin did.

 

So, I snuck in. And… I punched them. A lot.

I found out that they had already taken some of the artifacts, including the Dream Doctor’s dagger (The one he called the Dagger of Jocsa. It’s kind of a Big Deal.) AND they had kidnapped Percy! Because of course they had.

Getting kidnapped again probably serves him right, though. He usually does something to deserve it… Ashley said that she was sending someone named Darin and someone named Shrike to get him back, so at least I don’t have to go and find him this time.

 

Anyway, one of the mafia jerks told me that the Family was just being opportunistic, and taking advantage of everyone being distracted by a big riot at the Zig. Someone named Upstart (He’s with the Freakshow, I think?) had broken out of jail and let a lot of other prisoners out, too.

There was no way I was going to get my library book with the Club locked down and the Librarian making statements to the police, so I thought that maybe I ought to go help out in Bricks… It was either that or get grumped at by Mister Castanella for sneaking in to deal with all of those Family guys on my own.

 

When I got to Brickstown, it was a huge mess, too. There were prisoners and Freakshow guys with metal hands all over the place! Some of them were fighting with other groups, or with the police, and it all seemed to center on the sewers. (It’s strange, Diary, but EVERYTHING in Paragon City eventually seems to come down to the sewers… I still haven’t figured out why that is, exactly, but it’s true a statistically improbable percentage of the time that the solution to any problem will lead you there.) A swordsman named Rapier Wit had come to the same conclusion, and we decided to go in together.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time in the sewers, Diary. Enough to have perfected my Cleansing Rituals, anyway… But I’ve never seen them so crowded with so many different people. Nemesis soldiers, Praetorian revolutionaries, Council goons, one of those Crey Death-stalkers (Which *still* crunched like it was made of soda cans-), a Carnival Ring Mistress, some rogue Vanguard rangers… Mantis was even there with a few of the spider-bots, though I’m preeeeety sure she didn’t recognize me. I was dressed as White Thorn, after all. (Secret Identities, for the win!)

Things got dicey for us quickly, though. The whole place was shaking like crazy and coming apart all around us, and when one tunnel caved in Rapier and I got caught on opposite sides. He said to split up and head back up to the street.

I was looking for the exit when I met Apallos.

 

He’s a Ruin Mage and was trying his best to talk a bunch of Freaks and patrol of Khedian PPD officers into NOT trying to bash each other, but no one was listening to him. That wasn’t really a surprise. No one in Paragon EVER listens to us… It’s like they see the glowing eyes and the spikey armor and they just tell themselves that whatever we’re on about is probably Something Questionable.

This time? It was that the shaking (Which turned out to be centered on the prison-) and the chaos that was destroying the sewers was ALSO threatening to collapse our tunnels in the old city! That was a very Not Good thing. Archmagus Tya’s crystals are strong, but they weren’t made to handle Zig-breaking earthquakes!

 

I didn’t go back to street-level. Apallos and I went back to Oranbega.

I don’t know anything about Earth magic… just Void and Force and Light… But I know there are people at the Temple in Primeva who DO, so I summoned Laertes and sent him to ask Amtes if she could send anyone to help here in Bricks. Apallos’ coven is a little short-handled (It sounds like they’ve had Hero-troubles), but maybe if Primeva pitches in they’ll be okay. We don’t need to lose any MORE of our city. Not after what happened to the bits under Astoria.

 

Since all this started with the riot at the Zig, I said that I was going to see if I could find out anything there to stop the shaking.

All I found were more escaping prisoners and Freakshow guys. <_<

The PPD officers and prison guards seemed to appreciate the help… They even gave me one of their machine guns for some reason. (Diary, I have no idea how to use a gun. I probably ought to give it to Jordan or to someone else who does.) We didn’t quite manage to catch all of the escapees, though. I had to chase them all the way to Steel Canyon. And I didn’t find out anything about the earthquake.

 

I *did* find out that the Hellions were the ones who had the network of tunnels for getting out of the prison, though, and that someone called Tempter had asked them to collect a lot of… well… JUNK, really… for someone they just called “the patron”, but I have no idea yet what any of that’s about. Looking at the things they had on their crates? It didn’t make much sense. I mean, what would the patron of a demon-summoning fire-cult want with a box of lightbulbs, some hand-tools, a broken hair-dryer and a frying pan?

 

I think I’m going to skip my early lecture tomorrow and do some looking around.

-k

 

 

Edited June 15, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Badger54]

It pleases me so much to see your characters shenanigans again.

[Coyotedancer]

{{Thanks. XD It's been quite awhile since I've played around with Kai.}}

[Coyotedancer]

All of this business with the Family is just getting stranger and stranger, Diary…

It turns out that the Midnighters Club wasn’t the ONLY place in the City that those mafia jerks decided to take over yesterday… Not long after I went to Steel Canyon to help the PPD round up all of their escaped Hellions, I found out that the Family’s goons had *also* taken over one of Portal’s buildings in Peregrine Island. AND the City Hall in Atlas Park!

 

I have to admit that it seemed improbable that a bunch of everyday mobsters like the Family… the same fellows who are always getting beaten up by the Council and the Tsoo… could manage to successfully organize something so ambitious. But after seeing with my own eyes the mess that they had made of the Midnighters’ archives? I guess anything is possible with enough laser-guns, targeting drones and angry Singularities.

I left the rest of the Hellions and their crates of random junk (No, I still don’t understand what all of THAT was about, either…) to Artemian and the other heroes who were starting to arrive and went to find Unai instead. Some of the Family goons had already kidnapped Tina and taken her SOMEWHERE, but there were still a lot of them loose in the building.

 

 

 

They were ransacking the place, trying to steal all kinds of equipment that they really shouldn’t have.

I know that there’s a whole dimension out there where the Family took over the world… I went there to repair some temporal ruptures last year… But that doesn’t mean OUR Family goons ought to be allowed to get any ideas about visiting. >_<

 

 

 

They had also captured a few of the scientists who hadn’t gotten out of the building fast enough, but Portal’s scientists seem to handle that kind of thing better than most people. I think they’ve sort-of gotten used to weird things happening to them on the job, and being captured by the mob is prooooobably less concerning than being split in two, turned into a tentacle monster or body-snatched by a Thorn Caster.

 

 

The Family weren’t just taking equipment and harassing scientists, though. They were also trying to pull information from Portal’s computer network. I was curious what they were looking for, and they had no clue I was there… so I might have spent a few minutes reading the file over their shoulders.

That just raised more questions than it answered, though… They were reading about power transferal across dimensional thresholds and looking up reports on Reichman’s empowerment machine.

 

After I’d punched all of the goons at Portal into next week, I decided to go to City Hall. I kind-of had a bad feeling about them sacking MAGI’s vault, and what they might find. I mean, I KNOW some of the things that are in there... The Wheel of Destruction. The Scroll of Tielekku. The Gambler’s Stone… All kinds of stuff that it would be really, really bad for the Family to get ahold of.

Sometimes I hate being right, Diary…

 

 

The Family goons had taken off with Brighid Moreira and with Azuria. (No surprise there. Azuria is even worse than Percy about getting into trouble. <_<) They had also grabbed Gregor, though, and UNLIKE his boss, he doesn’t deserve that. I may dislike the way Azuria does her job, Diary, and the way MAGI catalogues their books and their artifacts, and how often they send heroes to “borrow” something of ours and then refuse to return it, but Gregor is an okay guy. He shouldn’t have to put up with being kidnapped by jerks who’ll threaten to stick him in a bucket of cement.

 

 

The Family were stealing artifacts and equipment from City Hall, too, just like they had from the Midnighters and Portal. They were taking all kinds of things from the Praetorian War, and had searched the records for files related to Tyrant and something that was referenced as “power suppression” by the IDF… I’m not sure what that’s about, exactly. But given what I’d already found at Portal and the Midnighter’s Club, it lead to some disturbing thoughts.

Tracking down their leader did not make me any happier, Diary. The jerk had decided to try to loot the memorial… Their memorial. HIS memorial.

 

 

I… might have punched that one a little harder than was, strictly speaking, necessary to arrest him.

Anyway, at the end of all of this, I have a lot of guesses and a lot of questions, but not many proper answers. Power manipulation isn’t something that I know much about. Void magic, Force magic, wards and barriers… yes. This? Not so much, Diary. I am, as Sig would say, out of my depth. I need to speak to someone who understands these things better than I do. I think I’m going to try to find the Dream Doctor. And Sheridan.

-K

Edited June 17, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Coyotedancer]

Dear Diary-

 

I wonder about Manticore sometimes…

 

Surely, a person who has so much experience in the hero business and who’s been a member of the Freedom Phalanx for so long must be good for *something* other than his cosmically large expense account… But I admit that I have yet to figure out exactly what that might be. Every time I’ve had to work with him, I’ve found myself asking “Why couldn’t Numina have come with me? Or Penny? Or Brawler? You know… Someone USEFUL??” I keep hoping that someday Manticore and I will be assigned a task together and he’ll show me why he deserves to be taken seriously.

 

Today was not that day.

 

I’ve already talked about the big riot at the Ziggurat in Brickstown, how something was causing earthquakes all around it and how I met one of our people when I was out helping the PPD catch their escaped prisoners… A Ruin mage named Apallos… Who told me that the tremors were threatening the entire district of Oranbega that’s underneath the prison. He and the other mages in his cabal were doing the best they could to keep the city stable, but sooner or later something had to be done to fix the problem.

 

I went to the prison to try to find out what was going on, but ended up having to chase down about a million Hellions and Freak guys instead. And then Unai needed me at Portal. And then I had to deal with the Family in Atlas, where they grabbed Gregor and Azuria and so I never did find out anything about the earthquakes…

 

Apallos kind-of had to take things into his own hands while I was running all over Paragon City. He talked one of the Freakshow guys that we had met in the sewers into going with him to explain to Manticore and Swan and the Brickstown PPD what was going on underground. Another Freak named Dreck was planting sonic bombs because he *wanted* to collapse everything! (Olm says that Dreck and that Upstart guy who started the riot have “a real beef” with each other, and that Dreck was super serious about not letting Upstart get out of jail… Wrecking the whole place to stop him seems like overkill to me, buuuuut “over-the-top” is kind-of the Freakshow’s THING, so-)

 

Anyway, Apallos sent over a spectral last night to tell me what he’d done… and to say that Manticore HAD A PLAN. I should have known it was going to be nuts. >_<

 

 

 

 

Manticore’s answer to the sonic bomb problem? He wanted to flood the sewers. All of them. The entire network of tunnels under the prison. To keep that from becoming a total disaster for us AND for Paragon City, *someone* had to go down there and manually set all of the proper sluice gates and access points to control the water flow. Guess who those “someones” had to be… We also had to take the Freakshow guy. (He’s a Super Stunner named ReVolting, and is that ever the truth, Diary. The guy is a total creep.)

 

And Manticore. To “keep an eye on us”. Sigh.

 

 

 

 

I think he ended up regretting his choice to come with along, though. It seems like he may not be as used to running around in smelly sewers as most of us in the hero business. We tried very hard to not to laugh at him, but it was hard and I was glad I was wearing my mask.  

 

The Freaks had sent a bunch of big guys with speaker attachments and awful taste in music to plant their bombs, and since we were there and they were there (and the Freaks really needed to be somewhere else before the place flooded, anyway-) we arranged for them to go back to nice, quiet jail cells.

 

 

 

 

ReVolting had wandered off on his own for some reason, and got into it with some of the other Freaks, and we had to rescue him. That was annoying. I used my Concealment cantrips on everyone after that, just to keep the big guys from seeing us and picking fights before we were ready for them.

 

 

 

 

Eventually we got all of the gates closed and the sluices in place and found the flood controls… And that’s when ReVolting decided to be an even BIGGER JERK than usual, and tried to stop us from flooding everything. It didn’t go very well for him, because Apallos and I had kind-of been expecting somebody to do something stupid… either Mister Freakshow trying to stop us or Mister Hero-guy trying to arrest us or SOMETHING.

 

We hit him really, really hard.

 

 

 

 

Or, I should say, Apallos and I hit him really, really hard. Manticore got caught up in the static field and spent the entire fight sleeping. He missed everything and didn’t even know what had happened until it was all over.

 

I’m kind-of glad he can’t speak Oranbegan, though… As we were getting ready to go, Apallos laughed and said “We really should have left him there. I’m sure the water would have woken him up.” It was tempting, Diary. It really was.

 

-k

 

PS: While I was running around the sewers and hopefully not flooding whole neighborhoods of the old city, Artemian was out chasing down the rest of the captives the Hellions had taken. He found out that this “Tempter” fellow we saw mentioned in their instruction letters is someone inside the Zig. We still don’t know why they want all that junk, but it seems to have something to do with the demons they’re working with.

 

 

 

 

I told him to keep looking into all of that. I need to find Tina, and Gregor and Azuria… and that Dagger, too… But one thing at a time, Diary. One thing at a time.  

 

 

Edited June 18, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Coyotedancer]

Dear Diary...

 

My boss has decided to learn Illusion magic.

 

 

Halloween is going to be really really REALLY strange this year. 

 

 

[OOC Note: Thanks for this. It made me (and Kai too, I suspect... in spite of the inevitable *facepalm*-) really grin. 🤣 ]

 

 

 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Coyotedancer