Report 23: To Boldly Go Where No Wizard Has Gone Before
Dusting the sand out of my hat, it is time to head trek after the Spider and Melori. The most likely place is to the heart of the Spiral al la Empryea, a piece of the world so hidden and shrouded that not even the Spider and the Raven can touch it. Thus we must brave the storms of the aethyr and sail away in an Ark. Our first steps were to find a Sky Captain (I miss you Pirate101) that could reverse the skyways to Empryea. After a refusal from Captain Colledge, he directs us to the true captain who said out of the Aethyr-James T Pork and Doctor Beans. A bit of a ham but does know his stuff all things considered. Our first trek ends up a bit bumpy as a storm forces the ship to crash on Aeriel. Turns out Aeriel is a common place of shipwrecks for those straying too close to Empryea. This jungle environment is not the most spectacular place. We’ve seen jungles before…granted a lot less wet. But looking around there are a lot of different races scattered about Nowhere Town-humans, Marleybonians, fish people (?). Unfortunately, we are current stranded as the Lux Capacitor is damaged and we need a new Strom Crystal to keep the ship steady.
That’s where we must deal with the Beastmen and Master Kahn. Once we have convinced Kahn to give back the capacitor, he joins us on our way to Zanadu. Aeriel is not the most difficult place to work through but that could be from all the side quest grinding I’ve been messing about with…except the Beastmen Club. Meanie cheaters….
Using a pod, we have gotten ourselves to Zanadu where Shadow Creatures have taken over the city and the Alphoi live in ignorant bliss inside the Leisure Dome. Rallying these folks to fight by your side will not be easy as most have just given up and let the city be overwhelmed by the Shadows. None of them really believe that Kahn is their king now returned. Hey could be worse, guy, ye could be cursed into a dragon. The Bat has holed himself up in the palace along with Ziggy Stardust and Melori though the full scope of his plans is unknown. The environment has a bit of a retro futuristic aesthetic to it with KI doing what they can to still keep it in the fantasy palettes of the game.
The Alphoi are…interesting. Not the most varied of creature aside from Ziggy and Knightwing. Word is Knightwing is the Bat’s sidekick. Granted so far, we have not seen the other of Spider’s children really working in compliance with denizens of the Spiral so this is a puzzling one. Also, we shall be fighting the Cabal as they are also trying to snatch up Melori.
But wait, aren’t the Cabal supposed to be working with the Spider and his children? What strange puzzle is this? Anyhow Killer Krok is our first match where he mentions their leader known as Medulla. There is a LOT of back and forth going in this area. The city feels pretty small with enclosed instance battles to give a sense of a larger space. I’m not even too mad about that. It’s about the same scale as Polaris. The real challenge is ferreting out the Bat himself. But once we have caught up to him, Melori is taken away by a floating brain thing…and the Bat escapes.
Turns out Melori has been taken to be used to break the Paradox chains; the thingies keeping the Heart in place. Great. Now we have to make our way to the fire and ice chunk Athanor to try and get to the chain first. With another crash the ice dwarves blame your ship and the fact you’ve got Shadow Magic at your fingertips. Yeah, you messing with the Shadows has kinda marked you as a bad guy and you have to fight off the attacking citizens before Pork and one of the councilmen can calm things down.
There is rising tension between the already tense relationship between the fire and ice dwarves and it takes a lot of effort settle things. Athanor isn’t large like Zanadu. Unlike Zanadu this uses a bit of assets mostly the rocky golems from Polaris.
All this tension turns out to be a trap to leave the Temple wide open to attack. The Bat has snuck in with an essence cannon though the full scale of his plan is…confusing? But we might’ve messed things up as apparently the Bat is…on our side…kinda? Well, he doesn’t want Spider getting his heart-why? We don’t know. But brain guy has Melori under his control and she blows up the first Paradox Chain. We are able to stabilize the world but now it’s a race to get Melori out of the clutches of Medulla before that happens.
The Cabal has set up a headquarters inside a squid and with some bait we get into the gullet. With Bat more of less fighting alongside us, still don’t know his deal, we shut down various defenses before heading into the brain. But Medulla was playing us, forcing us to fight Spark, Pork, and Beans along with Medulla. Fortunately, we had some heavy hitters on the team. But then Bat says that Melori is a liability and tries to kill her. So…. yeah.
And to make it even worse, Raven is done with the conflicts and decides to wipe out the Spiral. Oops. Sooooooo looks like we’ve might have made things worse…like a lot worse…our bad. So, if this is the end of the Spiral, we’re really gonna take to the sky, my friends.













