Chapter 8-217: Among the Ice and Snow

It was five hundred miles to the South Shetlands, famous largely for seals and puffins and penguins. It took about ninety minutes to reach them, skirt the edges while leaving access points, and then leisurely proceeding from one to the next to the next.

There had been research stations out here at one point, but after several of them mysteriously disappeared with all hands lost, and at least two supply ships checking in on them, too, the islands were basically vacated, the more accessible ones explored from time to time by military vessels to make sure no surprises were lairing there... which there often were.

In such a manner we proceeded down the border of the Weddel Sea along the Antarctic Peninsula, past the Larsen Ice Shelf, and heading for the Ronne Ice Shelf as the Palmer Land plateau loomed along the Larsen on our right.

It was late winter or early spring down here, and there was ice everywhere, floating on the incredibly blue waters in dangerous numbers... where the sea wasn’t completely frozen over, of course.

It wasn’t a problem for the unicorn motorcycle, traveling just above the chilling terrain, be it ice or water, and with Resist Cold 30 cast on him, able to operate perfectly well even if dry ice would be freezing out of the air. Who needed anti-freeze?

There were signs of life here and there, of course. There were occasional whales, orcas, seals, and penguins we spotted here and there, thriving without humans there to disrupt things. Sharks didn’t particularly like the area, being too cold, but the fish and plankton were rich.

It was already dark, of course, with the shorter days that would be quickly expanding to full daylight as the seasons shifted.

The driving winds that were the bane of existence down here didn’t bother us much at all, and there actually wasn’t much precipitation, as the air was too cold to hold much. Precipitation came when storms raged in from the south, bringing the moisture they had to dump as they cooled fast after hitting the cold air of the continent.

Dusk Renewal came a bit early as we’d shifted longitudes, but it didn’t matter... or maybe it did.

Yesterday’s had been Vizard/4, giving +1 Intellect and Dex, and with Nog Mastery improving my Strength to 17, improving my Stats to 42, 30, and 22. Another two thoughtstreams coming at 44. 22 Strength meant I was now stronger than an average ogre, which translated more to being very light on my feet than any feeling of physical dominance. I didn’t bulk up or anything, it was just more magical reinforcement.

The two Feats for the Class were both spent on getting my Extra Spells Known for Minstrel III and IV (Arcane Concordance and Legend Lore), the Purchased one was for ESK III/Binder (Haste), while the Mastery had been for Silver Fire/2, all my Fire Magic now doing half Divine damage.

Since with Sanctified Spell I could already do half Divine, and with Searing Spell I could do half Primal, I could mix it up or go pure burning some no resist, no immunity Divine damage to something. What made Silver Fire nice is it didn’t have a Valence cost at all, so it applied to all Fire spells, while the other two were only free with my Shards.

Today’s was helping wrap up my non-magical Classes, giving me Expert/4. +1 Int and Dex again, Nogging for 18 Charisma base, to 43, 31, and 32 Charisma. It again wrapped up my Feat with ESK IV/Binder (Teleport)... which was actually pretty damn sweet, able to Cast Teleport out of a IV Slot instead of a V. Binders were totally the best at mucking around with dimensions.

The Mastery was Silver Fire/3, Silver Smite. This wasn’t the +Cha to hit, +Class Level to damage of my other Smite from Holy Scourge, but a +50% damage, +4 Spell Penetration, -2 saves to Evil pure Smite one-shot made for a big opening hit on something, whereas the other Smite applied to all spells until my chosen target was dead.

Not bad for some Nova’ing. Were the Shroud-trapped trying to say something to me?...

When the unseen stars came out, the desolate landscape and icefields were breathtakingly clear in the clarity of the cold and dark. The air around me was thrumming with cold power, I didn’t need Einz to make it cold at all. Master Fred ignored it too, of course, being resistant to cold with his Heavenpact.

The Aura of the unicorn was enough to get the penguins to scatter out of Sleipner’s way, all of them watching us in quiet disbelief as we came in over the water, rolled right up on the ice, and kept on going with barely a hum and a whisper.

The icy slopes and snow that would test any normal machine didn’t bother Sleipner in the slightest, of course, and we zipped on up the windy slope to the higher stone without a problem, staying just above the ground.

I had my Ooze Baneskull out, and Detect Ooze scanning ahead of us. Nobody in their right mind wanted to spend time on Antarctica, even around the borders, and the main reason was believed to be the Shoggoths.

Shoggoths were the progenitors of all blobs and oozes. Unlike their cast-off, degenerated leavings, shoggoths were intelligent, limited shape-shifters capable of morphing into all sorts of usable forms, supposedly invented as beasts of burden/organic work machines of tremendous power, tireless energy, and great versatility, capable of assuming multiple different forms and functions as required by their tasks.

When and where they found the spark of magical resentment that caused them to rise up against their creators wasn’t known, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise in a magical world, where Chaos just loved messing up the slave/master paradigm in the name of fun.

Shoggoths could be made, but they couldn’t reproduce themselves. Any cut-off parts of them that survived degenerated into the many types of oozes, puddings, slimes, or jellies, usually determined by the terrain they found themselves in.

In this terrain, that should be white puddings and ice jellies.

Both types were attracted to heat. Normal arctic-dwelling creatures, with their excellent insulation, didn’t radiate enough heat to attract them. Humans and their dwellings, on the other hand, and their vibrating and noisy machines, would draw them in steadily, get them seeping in through the cracks, and they would consume everything nicely hot and organic in the area.

White puddings just looked like snowbanks or snow drifts, very hard to spot without UV spectra lighting up the different albedo. Ice jellies just looked like slick exposed patches of ice, right up until they reached up and impaled you.

Both species liked it cold, had the usual ooze dislike for sunlight, and didn’t like water, either, preferring to be up on the high ice beneath a layer of protective snow or ice, away from the potentially wet storms coming off the water. That was what made the simple oozes hard to find... they generally just stayed away from the beach areas that humans searched around, or they were in caves or ice crevasses people didn’t want to go into, at least if they had any common sense.

That said, Detect Oozes was not on like any normal spell list anywhere, and you had to have the base devoted spell before you could finagle it as an option of a core spell like Detect III.

What fantastic stories were told about the shoggoth said they were centered on a forgotten city up in the Transantarctic Mountains somewhere. Nobody had ever been able to retrace the route of the fantastic story, nor even verify if the expedition in Lovecraft’s story had ever truly existed, perhaps in a different name.

Most thought it was totally a flight of fancy he had hooked into in his macabre mind, until the Shroud came and suddenly going to Antarctica became a death sentence that wiped out research stations and obliterated their very traces from the shores of the place.

Whatever had hit the stations had done so fast enough and powerfully enough that even Powered people hadn’t gotten away, but given the hostile environment and lack of long-range flight options to people under Seven, that wasn’t a surprise.

A Shoggoth was also a 20 Hit Die piece of work, with tremendous physical power, reach, and the speed of a rolling avalanche, as well as durability, physical and energy resistances, and almost total immunity to mental attacks not specifically configured for them. A shoggoth could totally take out a surprised Six in seconds, and a ready one in seconds more.

Sleipner wasn’t going to be ticking over any ground vibration senses, but the big thing here was finding them and validation.

There were ways to magically summon Shoggoth, which only idiots would use, and ways to make them, if you were even more insane. Moonbeasts and their enslaved Merchants of Leng sometimes used them, usually to their eventual regret.

In addition, I was also paying attention to the winds, because Shoggoths, in their disjointed insanity and forlorn loneliness, tended to call out in morose despair...

------

Teke-li-li-li...

It was pretty faint, but I invested in Perception Ranks for a damn good reason, so yes, I definitely recognized that sound.

Master Fred caught it a moment later, and with him Sleipner. We were moving at normal speed, i.e. forty mph, not in a hurry here, and the unicorn slowly coasted to a halt.

I’d registered six different oozes over the miles we’d come, and in the interests of cleaning up the place, had flamed them down and left them burning vivic behind me. Such an incidence of oozes on basically an open, lifeless and frozen-solid landscape was a key indicator all by itself, and naturally I was also painting a very detailed and up-to-date map of our immediate area and its topography as we cruised along.

The sound came in on the wailing of the ever-present wind, and if you didn’t know what you were listening for, it was easy to dismiss as a trick of the ear.

I turned to examine the cold black peaks to our right.

The size of the mountains here did not match those in the last survey that had been done decades ago. They were definitely larger than pre-WW II teams had reported, and were only growing larger as we moved further inland.

This wasn’t a small difference. A couple of peaks were already a thousand meters higher than the highest peak reported on Antarctica, the Vinson Massif at five thousand meters, jutting through the ice that should have buried them beneath it.

It was like they had come out of nowhere.

Doubters in the research areas were watching this out my eyes through Holos from Allegiance members. The mountains were right in front of me, they weren’t illusions, and I wasn’t delusional.

Master Fred had naturally read up on Antarctica, knowing we were going here, and the old airplane surveys from before the Shroud couldn’t possibly be that mistaken. -Explanation?- he /asked.

“My guess would be an extra-dimensional space that was suppressed and broken under the Shroud as part of its severing function from the greater multiverse. There was a massive dimensional barrier in place here concealing these mountains, and the Shroud shut it down or destroyed it entirely.”

The Mountains of Madness were indeed a thing. Even if Lovecraft had written pure fiction, he’d tapped into something somehow, and predicted this.

-Closer?- he /asked calmly, unafraid of Sleipner not being able to outrun things here.

-Sure.- Sleipner turned obediently, and headed towards the dark and looming mountains, carved by endless ages of wind and snow... and yet, beneath the cruel weathering of time and the elements, bore disquieting signs of having been shaped by other means and things, lifted up proud and defiantly into the sky to be close to the unkind stars beyond...