Desecration and Blasphemy

Back in the arms of work. Ugh! Man, it’s really quiet here. Lots of people must be burning vacation time.

'Twas the day before Solstice,
when all through the office
Not a drone was stirring,
not even a something-or-other

It actually feels like winter now. Today is supposed to be relatively warm but it will cool down as the week progresses. Highs in the single digits, lows that are below zero. Luckily I have my Doctor Who scarf to keep back the cold. Thirteen feet of hand-knitted, warm, colorful goodness.

Holy bejeezus is ConsoleOne slow today! I mean, normally it’s a lumbering leviathan but today she’s even worse. Hey! Looking through my bag here, I see my Xmas present from Pete. He threatened to punch me if I didn’t say, “Thank you baby Jesus” before opening it. What I have here is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition. The Illustrated Edition and in hardback, no less. The first third or so is dedicated to pictures and anecdotes about the series while the rest of the book consists of the novel. Marv too was given his gift: a copy of Complete Warrior. It was wholly appropriate as A) Marv hoards D&D accessories and B) our party can use the new info to kill, Kill, KILL! Speaking of which, we finally came up with a name for our band of merry adventurers. (We have 2 males and 2 females.) It’s only taken us a year but we did it. Ready for this? We are:

Crimson
Killbox
Consortium
& Concern

I think Pete may have gotten all fancy and used K’s instead of C’s but I cannot recall.

Yesterday’s adventure was quite eldritch in a very sick way. We’d cleared Darlan’s Keep of those brutish ogres and found a trap door in the jail which revealed stairs leading downwards. We were told before we took back the Keep that the leader of the band of ogre brigands who’d taken over the joint, Grimulak, spoke of “the ones below” and visited with them. Ergo this had to be the profane passage he used to go visit creatures unknown. We rested overnight and descended the stairs…

I got secrets then you know that.
You've got secrets I want to know about.
But if you want to know what I know
That you know then, we got to start talking

I have a few secrets and I dearly wish I could blather on about them here but, alas, I cannot. Nothing life-or-death, fortunately, just a bit of fear & anger along with a lot of sadness. One should be a secret no longer fairly soon, thankfully. As for the others, they’ll probably find there way onto these pages somehow. Perhaps not stated directly but they’ll be there. Kinda like a Da Vinci code – but different.

As we traversed the stairs, things grew immeasurably darker. At the bottom of the stairs was a short hallway. Following it, we came to a room whose inhabitants gave us the merest hint of what we would soon encounter. Unfortunately, none of us understood the clue. However, even if we had, it still would not have prepared us for obscenities that laid before us.

The room was occupied by six vaguely humanoid…contraptions. These…these…mechanical men, shall we say, were mishmashes of wood and metal. Broken pieces of floorboard, scraps of iron, cooking pans, and the like were conjoined and animated! I’d seen many an undead creature but never anything like this. Someone, a man or god I could not know, had somehow breathed “life” into debris from the keep. They did not speak but we heard the squeaking of metal on metal as they lumbered towards us. While we dispatched with them soon enough, I was left wondering if they had some form of intelligence for how would they know of our presence. They had not eyes or ears. More likely there was magic afoot. Their creator must have been alerted to our presence or perhaps we triggered something as we descended the stairs.

To one side of the room was a door. Juris and I listened carefully but could only make out a faint, rhythmic throbbing. It was too muffled by the thick oaken door to discern what it was. The door was unlocked so I made my way inside. My eyes were ill-prepared for the blasphemy that awaited. In the center of the room was a table upon which lay a young man – one of the soldiers of the Keep, no doubt. His eyes were wide open and staring blankly at the ceiling. His torso had been cut wide open and his entrails removed. They sat in a large bowl atop another table against the wall. In their stead was this hideous machine with valves that let out puff of steam opening and closing in rhythm. Cogs and springs moved in dark symmetry to keep this man alive against the will of Nature. He fell off the table with arms outstretched as if he were lunging at me. I helped him back to the table and started to investigate the foul machine in his chest when the rest of the party entered. Mystina, seeing the man’s condition immediately severed his head thusly ending his horror and also rendering his corpse unusable for any further experimentation by the devil behind this. I, however, had hoped to investigate the machine more fully and found myself irritated by Mystina’s action. There was so much to be learned amidst the depravation. Looking at the entrails in the bowl, I found them to be in rather good condition – the man had been eviscerated rather recently.

Two doors led away from this chamber of horrors. We listened at one and heard nothing so we entered and beheld a sight of such desecration and blasphemy that words almost fail me...