== VORTEX QUEST 1-15 ==
== THE VORTEX ==
"We gotta get moving," Chay said. "Get up."
Xane hadn't really napped. After the nectar bud high had mellowed out he'd still been too sexed up to fall asleep. His hole burned pleasantly from Goro's attempts at putting his fist in there. Better not think too much about where the sensation came from and just bathe in the afterglow.
"Five more minutes," Xane mumbled and made sparks dance between his motes that lazily fluttered overhead.
Chay stretched. "Shadowhand said we're not as safe here as we think. The Blood Feaster clan might regroup and lay another ambush. Hrailoth could betray us any second. We can't put this off."
Goro was leafing through a book, frowning. "I'd like some more time with this, too."
"We got the vortex' emergency shut-down codes," Chay said and slipped into his dark red fundoshi. "Xane can you carry the key stones again?"
"Sure thing, boss," Xane said and threw his legs up, right into a handstand, reveling in how magic enhanced his acrobatic skill.
"Also," Chay added, "can you give Goro another bald shave? And... since we're infiltrating, Marcus should get one, too."
"No way," the fake blond athlete said.
"We're infiltrating," Chay repeated. "We have to look like slaves and your hair is just too long."
"Not by much," Marcus said and patted his faux hawk, which the lack of styling products had left fairly messy by now.
"It's about the fate of humanity."
"Ugh, fucking fine. Doesn't mean I have to like it."
Xane could keep his head bald with a mere illusion, Chay's hair was passably short already, Marcus and Goro got magic cuts down to the scalp.
The pantheon dressed and left for Jheyr'Udd's most important location.
===***===
Dozens of crawlways as well as open streets led to Illt-Besh, a rare urban space in the pastoral hellscape.
At the center of a basin sat a dozen multi-story obelisks, rugged and serrated, dominating a busy bazar, from which stone houses sprawled like oversized mausoleums, tapering off into iron-supported clay and wood huts at the edges.
The aurora's dim sheen was supplemented by frozen flames in immense braziers atop dented stone skulls. The sounds of the city were kept quiet by a Muffling Bell, silently ringing from a central obelisk, keeping sound from traveling beyond a street or two.
There was artistry in the architecture, but no throughline save for bone as a material. Xane would have called some areas Gothic, Mayan, even Indonesian, each faction in Illt-Besh turning a block into a village unto itself.
The four men pretended to be figments -- slaves conscious enough for simple tasks but not unruly enough yet to need oversight at every turn.
They'd procured one of the ubiquitous chains and wrapped themselves into a line, chain around each man's neck. To cover their fundoshi, which they needed to keep their aegises hidden, they each carried a bunch of stolen leather, seemingly delivering it.
The streets were steep, random, often narrow. Hellions patrolled in groups of thirteen; eight-foot pillars of transparent jelly slimed along the paths; a Troll smoked blue leaves on a balcony while Kobolds made bets on arena battles below; a Fiend dragged a Wyvern corpse into a butcher shop where three many-limbed chimera got to work.
The pantheon's target was obvious.
A bright blue tornado, nearly reaching the ceiling, the vortex swirled strangely windless. Every few minutes its glow erupted into a sharp, white-blue flash, blinding if you looked right at it. Only the Muffling Bell kept it strangely silent.
Mashmorg had repurposed the town's Institute of Psycho-Arcane Infrastructure Planning for his prestigious project on Interdimensional Manifold Tessellation, better known as the vortex.
The pantheon passed through a wider street. On the left was an almost quaint view of Trolls and Kobolds in front of a tavern sipping some pale green beer. Opposite that was a stack of crude cages where sweating human hunks stood like sardines in a can, some drooling, some pissing.
A velociraptor-like Kobold in a leather jockstrap hit a heavy switch and an entire cage of a dozen men was executed by some invisible means, fading and seeping into the ground. Deep red sparks raced along wires above the building to power machines across Illt-Besh.
The slaves conscious enough to perceive the event, cried out and rattled their cages.
Xane suppressed a shiver and forced his eyes off the spectacle. There was no consideration given to comfort, but also none to torture. It was simply battery storage.
===***===
Infiltrating the institute was oddly easy. The Wraith at the entrance didn't lay one of its many hands on them, used to delivery figments wandering in and out.
Moving along the oppressively bulky stone walls of the interior, Xane's heart was beating so fast he was sure any nearby demon could hear it. He was desperate to check his aegis. He had a bad feeling about the whole mission.
"We're almost to the inner sanctum," Chay mumbled, head down. "It's obvious they don't expect an infiltration, let alone by slaves. We might be able to get in and out with no fight."
While some Hellions stood guard, the vortex control wing was nearly deserted. Security focused on the vortex *site* closer to the edge of the institute.
An open air courtyard, about the size of half a football field, allowed a view of the blue maelstrom shaft swirling upward. Machinery was everywhere, mostly in the form of pipes along the walls, rattling pumps and steaming valves.
The demigods were in the arcade corridor surrounding the yard, arches leading into the open space.
The far wall of the yard contained... a computer? A truck-sized machine of brass and iron with so many pipes it looked like an organ. Rune engraved brass knobs formed a keyboard of a hundred buttons. Glowing runes hovered above, like a holographic display.
The machine was powered by a dozen smaller soul stones, hanging in a network of twisting cables that ran along the walls.
In a corner, five human thralls knelt in silence, drooling.
"Jackpot," Chay mumbled. "Damn, that thing got a ton of weaknesses."
Marcus chuckled. "Held together by duct type and nectar?"
"Unattended," Goro said.
"But protected," Chay said, looking left and right. "The archways all have those invisible force fields. Here."
Chay took a look at the tablets set into every other arch. Wires and diagrams like a demonic fuse box. The wires were centered on deep blue gems, a black tadpole moving within.
"Soul gems?" Xane asked.
"Kinda," Chay said. "Psychaceous Cerulite. Subtly different. These are accessible because they're expecting an attack to come into the yard from *above*, not from *within*. Still... There's tripwires in the parallel psycho-polarizers. I'd bet my next cumshot we'll trip an alarm if we pull a fuse."
Goro gently hummed. "Just bypass the psycho-flux regulator *before* it reaches the polarizer."
Xane stared at the bald berserker, as did the others.
