Mindflayers 3

"So we proceed." Velendo casts a flexible wall to make his own bridge next to the dangerous existing one, and the group slowly crosses over the chasm of fluid.

As he crosses, Galthia glances up at the looming brain-like sentinel. Doing so creates a feeling not unlike an electric shock. Reality tumbles away with a hideous lurch, and Galthia suddenly finds himself in a psionic mindscape. He is perched on the side of a huge underground mountain, arrayed for psionic battle as his flesh is stripped from him and he is reduced to a shimmering entity of willpower and purpose. Ahead of him is the huge creature that dragged him here, the loathsome essence of the brain golem: twelve or fifteen different personalities all crammed into the same body, all aligned to one fell purpose. The mark of the mindflayers is all over this creature, and Galthia senses that one of the interwoven personalities was once a githzerai.

"Oh, lovely."

And then the brain golem attacks. It uses empathic multiplier, taking Galthia's own thoughts and rebuilding them, bouncing them from personality to personality to personality before reflecting them back to him ten-fold. The psionic attack shatters the acumen screen he's quickly constructing from hardened thought, and his broken defenses open him wide to any damaging power that his opponent may choose to manifest. Gasping, the monk drops from the mindscape back into reality.

"We may be about to be attacked." His normally yellowish skin is pale.

Velendo's face twists into a mixture of fury and fear. He demands into the mindlink, "An absolute absence of hostility is one part of this deal. Is that understood?"

"Proceed." The sentinel takes no further offensive actions as the group nears it.

"Is that understood?" Velendo is insistent.

He gets no answer.

"I want a yes. You will not attack us. That is part of the deal!"

The voice in his head sounds like it is belaboring the obvious. "If you know this, why do you ask?"

"I don't know. I want to hear you say it!"

A hint of superior amusement slips into the toneless voice. "We know."

An exasperated, long-suffering sigh huffs from Velendo. "How shall we pass this creature?"

"Proceed."

One by one the Defenders cautiously slip past on either side of the brain golem, Malachite being forced to turn sideways in order to squeeze by without touching it. Behind the immobile creature the ground begins to rise into a near-vertical cliff face.

Mara pats Priggle on the back. "Priggle, check it out?" Before he can, Galthia rises upwards with levitation. He sees a series of highlands, and past these he glimpses a huge valley with dozens of giant ectoplasmic tendrils dangling above like candles from a chandelier. In the faint greenish illumination he can see a source of water to the left, and off to the right the cavern bends out of sight a quarter mile away. He seems to be standing in some sort of guard area; more than a dozen indistinct figures float slowly across the highlands, and to Galthia's eye they appear to be levitating illithids.

Below him in the huge valley is nestled an unnatural city.

Stone Bear spirit guide indicates that the correct path is forward, so the rest of the adventurers are ferried up to the rocky highlands by magic or Mara's flying warhorse Luminor. From the heights the group looks down onto the distant roofs of illithid buildings. They sport odd angles, each structure hooked and triangular and round and twisted in ways which are just not attractive. From here, the structures seem to be made from a mixture of stone and crystal fluid. One large dome seems to shine like liquid diamond.

Agar beams at the sight. "Fascinating! This is new and different!"

Mara tears her eyes away in order to give him a look. "They don't look physically possible, do they? But they must be, because they're down there and they clearly exist. How could it be otherwise?"

"How indeed." Galthia leans down to whisper to Agar. "Those buildings? That's what illithids do to your mind."

"Eww. Less pleasant." Still, deep inside Agar still finds this place comforting; there are no insects in sight at all, for example, and that's a wonderful change. Proty's happy squirming echoes his mood.

From their excellent vantage point, everyone studies the area more carefully. They see liquid dribbling down into a small lake, and Priggle notices at least three illithids observing them dispassionately from hundreds of feet away. Luminescent ceiling globules dangle down over the rooftops, each slightly trembling as if actually alive.

Velendo looks at them distastefully. "Mindflayer suns."

The heroes descend to the floor of the valley. The ground isn't fully solid. Each person trying to move sinks up to their ankles in some sort of translucent sticky fluid, and as each foot is pulled up from the sucking ground the viscous fluid freezes in place, stretched out in tiny pinnacles and strands for a moment or so before collapsing back down into the ground. Walking is somewhat like trying to navigate deep mud or fresh caramel.

Velendo lifts up one foot and examined the clear strands of fluid dripping from his boot. "Agar, can you check that and make sure the fluid isn't doing any harm?"

Agar squints his eyes. "Wow, that is fascinating!"

"Can you stop being fascinated by it and actually do something about it!"

"Sorry. It's some kind of incredible fluid that responds to the steps of anyone who steps in it." He checks to see what his looks like, and is gratified that it vaguely resembles a burst of octopoidal tentacles. "Look at this! Look at it! It's a reactive psi print that you leave behind, unique to each individual person!"

Velendo checks his. They look disturbing. As he stands there, the fluid tries to creep up his leg, so the group decides to keep moving. As they slowly proceed across the valley floor, they see dark shapes underneath the solidified ectoplasm. The shapes are a foot or two deep and may easily be rocks or even creatures, each entombed in the fluid like long-dead insects in amber. The fluid bulges in places.

"That'll be us if we don't keep moving." Galthia looks around. It's clear to him that this area has been the site of numerous fights. The githzerai can see signs of psionic residue where vast mental powers have blasted the buildings and the ground underneath it, along with more traditional signs of battle and the faint stink of ghoul.

Malachite clears his throat. "You know the theory I had that it would take just one surgical strike into the uber-brain in order to infect it with ghoulism? This may have been the vector they came through. I've checked; there might be ghouls, but I can't detect them. It smells old."

Velendo shakes his head. "Don't trust everything you are told. This could be a trap." Squelch, squelch. They continue towards the dome. The hum of psionics is almost constant at this point, a mental constant static that thrums in the back of everyone's head.

The group intends to stop at the entrance to the crystal dome, but there is no obvious doorway or arch. Then the wall rips open like a wound, separating itself like a mouth with strands of fluid and crystal streaming across it. They watch the strands snap back, and by the time the group gets within thirty or forty feet there is actually a circular door there beckoning them inside.

"Amazing!" Agar's eyes widen. Velendo's close with evident pain, and his voice is filled with resignation.

"And that of course will close behind us. This is feeling more and more trap-like all the time. Nevertheless, no hostile actions unless they force them upon us."

Agar waves the caution away. "This whole thing is psi-active. It responds to conscious thought on a massive scale. Incredible." To others, however, the walls remind them more of strands of mucous and phlegm, and Mara's stomach does a slow frontward roll.

"Proceed. We await."

"How many are there of you?"

"We are all."

"Ah."

Squelch. Squelch. Half the group stays outside and the other half enters the dome, stepping into a half-darkness and onto a raised platform. Eight or more illithids float above a pit, but with no visible signal the ceiling irises open and every one of the mind flayers float silently upwards out of sight. Their huge milky eyes gleam with reflected light for just a moment before they move out of sight. Then doorway and ceiling openings both close simultaneously, and the heroes inside the dome are abruptly cut off from any allies.

There's something in the pit before them.

Lying in a pool of psi-active mucous, glistening with its own faint greenish light, there is a 30' long pulsing brain. Most of the right-hand side of it goes from pink to almost a greenish black, and the smell of rotting tissue is horrible. Malachite can see short grasping tentacles trying to grow out of the necrotic tissue. They twitch at the approach of life energy.

The psionic background hum drums against their ears. The brain flesh ripples, and the Defenders of Daybreak try to take in what is in front of them.

Velendo shouts mentally to the diseased elder brain. "Is it safe for me to descend and take a closer look?"

"We do not know. We will not purposefully attack you."

With true seeing active, Agar can see an incessant battle of psionic energy flaring up along the borderline between healthy and diseased brain tissue. There is destruction and creation happening simultaneously.

Velendo has to yell over the noise in his head. "We may be able to help, but we don't want to risk destroying the ghoulish part yet! I have to probe the extent of the damage, but I'm afraid that I will be attacked. If I am, we'll have to defend ourselves, but we will try to minimize harm to you."

"We accept this. It would be unwise of you to attack us."

"I don't want to attack you, but there's - "

"We are it. This is the problem."

They see little tiny white things darting around the fluid surrounding the elder brain – a little like tiny baby trilliths. They're mostly on the healthy side.

"I'll say it again. There are active pseudopods flailing out from the diseased part of you - "

"Do not let them touch you. You will cease to be of use to us."

"What will happen if they touch me?"

"You will cease."

Velendo rubs his temples. Galthia has a wry expression on his face as he controls his disgust. "Then you won't be of much use to us, either."

Agar speaks slowly, thinking hard. "If you get touched by an elder brain that is undead, it will probably just annihilate your brain." Velendo lets out another frustrated noise, lifts his head reluctantly, and the group begins to formulate a plan.