This account grew far longer than intended, so I will summarize the key points briefly, though the full story has many useful details. The heroes of the Realms answered a call from Olivia Bishop, head of Research in a place called the Fortress of Doors. This Fortress is an extra-dimensional facility connected to almost any world or plane you could imagine. At her request, we entered a world of water, diving beneath the surface to recover, or at least find, a team of rangers. We found only one alive, the others possessed by an unknown corruptive force, and the survivor didn’t make it through the night while we were there. However, we did recover their data spheres with valuable information, including the location of a gargantuan well of Source deep beneath the waves. We killed the corrupted rangers and escaped the world with minimal loss to the party. For the rest of the details, you’ll have to read on…
Back in March of this year we received a communication from the Fortress of Doors, a place we thought we had left behind three years ago when we chased the corruptive Red out of the Fortress and reset it to remove the lingering corruption. This message was sent by The Board, the supernatural entity that looms over the fortress and directs its operations. It has a [UNIQUE/DIFFICULT] style of communicating and can be cryptic to the point of unhelpful. We were told that a group of rangers had entered a “Threshold” (read: door to another dimension/world) and encountered something incredibly dangerous enough for the only survivor of the expedition to have requested the threshold sealed with him inside.
Over the course of the months before our trip back to the fortress, we slowly received strange music from the fortress, spelling out the phrase “Head Under Water”. This would prove to be incredibly prophetic, though we didn’t fully know it at the time. A short trip into a tiny sector of the fortress in June led us to encounter masses of mold, a parasitic organism that was growing unchecked in the fortress. We were able to make moldicide in preparation, which led us to expect a trip into the molded over sections of the fortress.
How wrong we were.
Upon finally reaching the date of our trip into the fortress, we geared up, found the door that was conveniently opened for us, and entered the dreaded fortress once more. Once inside we immediately met Olivia Bishop, head researcher of the Fortress, who told us that in order to enter the threshold where the Ranger team was lost we needed an Object of Power, or OOP. Unfortunately, this OOP was buried under a mass of mildew and the Janitor was having no luck clearing it away.
As per usual with the mold, the mildew took an extreme amount of combat skill and coordination. It took us nearly an hour to push it back to the location of the OOP, and once there we found it lost behind curtains of deadly rain and lightning. YPNN, Ryu, and Liana found their way through the rain to attempt to clear the last bit of mildew off of the OOP while the rest of us fought back the mildew and attempted to find our own way through the rain.
Eventually they managed to break through the circle of power around it by lining up a lighting bolt with the circle and the rain shut off, allowing the rest of us to make it up to the OOP, which turned out to be an umbrella lined with glowing light. This was OOP-7, a large jump from our previous discoveries of OOP-1 and OOP-2. The umbrella was incredibly grumpy and wanted to eat a massive amount of Source (around 100!) before it grudgingly agreed to help us in the threshold.
Finally it was time for us to enter the threshold where the rangers had encountered the mysterious danger. On our way to the door, Olivia informed us that the threshold we were entering was called Deep Blue, and was mostly made up of water. The need for the umbrella quickly became clear as it was able to provide us with a source of water breathing in Deep Blue.
Olivia made a call to the board using a device called the Hotline and after a brief, tense conversation, the Board opened the door to the new world, and we took our first steps… or paddles, into the watery depths.
We were immediately attacked by schools of hostile fish which had Source inside them, something we later learned was a natural feature of this world. These fish came in three varieties: one which fought in schools, one more eel-like with poison barbs, and one that burst open, damaging anyone nearby when they died.
It took us a few hours to reach our destination: an island poking just barely above the surface of the Deep Blue. The climb up to the shore was steep and beset with rockfalls that knocked us back down frequently. The beach was also infested with incorporeal crabs. How they got that way I do not know, but it was far from the strangest thing we would encounter on the island.
Once we had all reached the top we found the sole remaining Ranger from the team sitting near a campfire. He was Ranger Webber, and he had been on this island for months since the rest of his team was lost in the deep.
He was reluctant to give us help in exploring the depths for the rest of his team, instead trying to convince us to simply get out. When we didn’t seem on board with that, he offered to make us dinner if we could retrieve some ingredients for him. We split into three groups, one to search for spiky tubers buried on the beach, one to grab fish, and one to harvest rice off the back of Rice-opods. We found most of the tubers we needed, and Jasper adopted some Rice-opods to bring back to the Realms. Upon returning to Ranger Webber he started making seafood paella. No amount of rain could stop him from making a delicious dinner.
After we ate he agreed to tell us about how the rest of his team was lost to the deep. The ranger team was exploring the threshold when they stumbled across an ancient building deep under the water. Webber was exploring the deactivated control center while the rest of his team was searching the outside of the facility when the controls activated.
He immediately lost contact with the rest of his team due to a mysterious corruptive force. Whatever had them, they were not themselves anymore; their eyes were pitch black and they appeared as “denizens of the sea”. They began to bang on the doors and attempted to get to Webber. They attempted to reach Webber but could not enter the control room. Eventually he caused a distraction in another part of the facility and rushed towards the surface, corrupted rangers in pursuit—too fast for a human. He had no memory of the escape, and next he knew he was washing up on the shore injured.
We have since theorized that Webber accidentally activated the building and applied a “Source Drain” effect to his team members. While we don’t know exactly what that does, it clearly completely corrupts a person and destroys their sense of self.
Back to our expedition, the night was quickly falling, and we needed to investigate further under the water. Ranger Webber wasn’t looking too good, but we left him on the island while we dove deep into a dark cave full of eels and fish. At the bottom we found a blindingly bright light surrounded by bones, which we at first suspected to be the lost Rangers, though that was later revealed to be false. Some of our group investigated the light and discovered a powerful Source battery connected to it. The darkness away from the light revealed an anglerfish lurking behind us, lure and teeth at the ready. However, this fish was quickly deprived of its meal as Bogen the Unseelie fae cast a Disrupt Light directly at it.
At the same moment, without consulting the group, people unplugged the Source battery from the light, plunging us into darkness. There was confusion in the group, and the anglerfish began swimming closer and closer. A group of fighters immediately rushed the fish and took it down before it could eat us.
Upon seeing the Source battery the umbrella OOP immediately perked up. It wanted to eat it, while most of us were reluctant to feed such a powerful object to an umbrella, we realized it was going to be necessary if we wanted to reach the facility that Webber had mentioned.
Upon returning to the island we found space to camp for the night and crashed quickly into sleep, knowing we would need to dive very deep into the ocean the next day.
Waking up in the morning we found a shocking sight in Webber’s shelter: a pile of bones with his hat where the head should have been. It appeared he had died in the night, possibly even before we set out to the cave, as we didn’t see him any time after dinner. On further examination, there was not a complete set of bones present for a corpse, and we began to theorize that Webber may not have survived his time on the island after all. Perhaps the Source that permeated the area had sustained an image of him long after his physical body had died in an alien world. Led by Fern, we held a short funeral for him and buried what remained of his body on the island, which we named Webber Island.
Once we had laid him to rest and prepared for the expedition, we set out back under the water to seek out the facility in the deep. On the way we found many more hostile fish, and a threatening darkness that surrounded us.
As we approached the facility we felt something approaching us. We grouped up, ready for anything, and a giant squid loomed out of the shadows. It grew back its arms nearly as soon as we cut them off, slowing our progress to a halt. After minutes of no progress against the massive cephalopod, Grarr drew his sword Last Stand, stood forward, and charged the monster. Once inside the mouth of the beast, he pulled a tassel from the blade, and exploded both himself, and a full half of the monster in a burst of bubbles (as fire doesn’t burn very well under water). Grarr unfortunately did not leave the monster with the explosion and we still had a full four arms and head to deal with.
We slowly pushed the squid back to a choke point, and finally cut and pinned its arms down until they stopped regrowing. At this point we were able to dig what was left of Grarr out of the stomach of the beast and put him back together. With the squid dead the path to the facility was clear. A few schools of fish later we reached our goal: a looming structure in the oceanic darkness.
Most of us piled into a small control room from which we could see the objects of our search: the rest of Webbers’ Ranger team. They circled what seemed to be a containment tank of sorts with shadowed eyes and a vacant stare. As we watched, a few fish swam into the tank through a small crack in the wall. The lights in the tank shone an ultraviolet blue, and the fish was forcibly drained of its Source, killing and corrupting its corpse.
We sent someone as quickly as we could to warn the other group not to enter the tank, but it was too late. Jasper and Timm entered the containment tank, Jasper unaware of the danger lurking within.
Seconds later, Timm disappeared, but Jasper was warped and twisted away from himself, and was soon pacing the tank with the same vacant stare as the Rangers. Fern and Ryu immediately started trying to get magic together to restore Jasper, while most of the rest of the group was working on assembling pieces of a control board that could be connected to the tank.
Once assembled and connected, the control board required Source inserted, and once done, the lights in the tank flipped to yellow-green. The fighters geared up to enter the tank, but before they could reach the entrance, Bogen used his magic to force open the door to the tank, releasing the corrupted Rangers and Jasper out into the water outside the facility.
As the fighters dealt with the corrupted, I ran into the tank and poked around. The Source-draining power was no longer active, but there were shards of something on the floor that appeared not as a glowing Source of power, but as tears in the fabric of reality (at least it did to my true-sight eyes).
Once the corrupted were defeated, the other Rangers were left behind, but we had to bring Jasper back with us. We couldn’t find a way to bring him back, and instead summoned his soul back to temporarily put it back into a half-complete body. Upon our return to the Fortress of Doors, Olivia was reluctant to let us take Jasper’s corrupted body back to the Realms, instead putting it in containment in the Fortress while we took his soul back with us.
While that was going on, YPNN, Nestra, Azimuth, and myself had left the facility early with the secondary goal of our mission: the Ranger’s data spheres. All but Webber’s had been corrupted, with the attached Source warped like that found in the tank. Olivia was very happy to have those recovered, as well as getting some of the corrupted Source to study in order to determine that it was safe. YPNN had found time to test with Webber’s sphere and discovered data indicating a well of Source deep below the water that dwarfed every other well we had ever seen—including the original well inside the Fortress of Doors
At the end of the two days, we escaped the Deep Blue with all but one of our party intact, and with so much learned about the world and the threats within. We also left with more questions that we started with. Who made that deep-sea facility? Why was it set up to drain Source from the creatures? Why is there so much Source under the ocean of Deep Blue? We hope to return to investigate these questions, though we first have to fix Jasper, and prepare better for the dangers that lurk below.
Until next time
Kalashai
Information and editing provided by YPNN and Jasper.
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