Monolith: The Final Fight
The Final Fight:
We’re going to go right back into it! Read last week if you want to catch up.
The Knights have snuck back into the city during the middle of the night and just thrown a bomb at the monoliths. It exploded and created a massive spike of sonic energy that has split their skulls and awakened all of their enemies. The giant king of the mound is leaping to his feet far faster than his acromegaly should allow, and while the girls are doubly affected due to being psionic, Carlisle is protected because he is quite thick headed.
Carlisle draws a bead with his rifle and chambers a round and fires on the king. Despite the fact that he is sure he hit the giant center mass there is no hole and no scream. The giant head swivels around and looks directly toward the hole in the wall that Carlisle is hiding behind.
Sasha grabs her companion’s arms, and asks them to wait, she wants to look into the future and give them an edge. She tries to foreshadow the future, and immediately disconnects, becoming a cavewoman staring at them in confusion before she lumbers off along the wall.
Kimiko curses, crawls through the hole in the wall and rips off a rapid-fire blast from her bio-blaster, a gun she picked up in the Alien Dome.
Alone in the Room
Kimiko is the only one inside the wall. The King sees her and charge across the clear space around the monoliths. He drags a massive ten-foot long sword behind him as he runs toward her and his hands start to glow as he grunts and coughs like the white apes the day before. The glow in his hands traveled up the blade of the sword as he shifts it into a two-hand grip and brings it around in an arc that would cut a car in half.
The blade is more of a dull bar instead of a razored edge and it smashed into Kimiko’s armored form and bounces her off the wall of one of the makeshift teepees. Bleeding and with broken ribs, our j-pop electric samurai is not out of the fight yet.
Most of the king’s caveman followers, all over 7-foot tall and just as muscular as their king, are cowering and clutching their heads as the sonic scream is still emanating from the monoliths. But four of them manage to shake it off, retrieve bronze machetes and start heading toward the fallen girl.
Better Late than Never
But then suddenly Sasha comes over the wall. Apparently having reconnected to her personal reality, she comes over the wall in her bio-armor suit and runs in toward the enemy. The sudden appearance of the bio-armored woman upsets the cavemen and the tunic-clad priests.
Kimiko uses the disturbance to get back to her feet and shakes off the haze of the pain. But then realizes that the haze to her vision is actually part of her psionic talent interacting with the wall of sound coming from the monoliths. She can see a bunch of tendrils, formed from soundwaves, attached to the king. She opens up with full auto from her blaster and the king falls back. The wounds instantly disappear again, but she does have the satisfaction of seeing the tendril of sound sever from the King.
It only lasts a second before the tendrils reach out and attach back to the king. Kimiko quickly realizes that the monoliths are altering reality around them, and giving this power to the king and the priests. They need to change up their tactics.
Monster Hunter
Carlisle climbs in the hole in the wall and then uses the teepees and other buildings as cover as he moves around the main fighting and gets into a position to attack the king from the rear and the priests from the flank. He lines up another shot.
Carlisle takes a deep breath and readies himself and then pops up, taking a shot on the fly, jacking out a round and loading another and taking a second shot all in rapid succession. He is rewarded for his flurry of activity with only two red cuts across the king’s bicep. The lumbering giant slowly turns to look back at Carlisle.
As the king turns away from Kimiko she dives to the right and charges into the four cavemen armed with the machetes. She drops her blaster and switches to the electric katana and in a stunning flash she opens bloody gashes across all four men. But the brutes merely enraged.
Sasha reaches up to her chest and pulls open the armor plating, revealing the chest cannon between the plates. She unleashes a massive blast of energy three meters wide. The beam slashes across the king, burning his robes off his body and go beyond him knocking down the cowering cavemen and bursting the priests’ tunics into flame.
It is madness but it is far from lethal damage.
Kimiko starts to yell about the monoliths, but her voice is lost over the ringing noise.
Making Headway
Carlisle aims at the king’s knee and blows it out with a well-placed shot. The giant falls to his knees with a scream and seems confused by the burning beam and the bullets that keep stinging him.
The four men with machetes each take brutal chops at Kimiko, but she is a small, lithe and well armored target and she manages to escape the worse of it. Kimiko yells again that the monoliths are protecting the king and this time Sasha and Carlisle both pause in their actions to try and figure out what she is saying.
Luckily the monoliths decide to show off their power. A glowing nimbus surrounds king’s head and his fear and confusion disappear and he surges back to his feet. The hole in his knee closing. He shoulders his three-meter-long sword and rushes into Sasha, screaming about burning beam no good! The nimbus around his head flows into his hands and then along his blade and he smashes the sword into Sasha.
But the monoliths are not the only ones that can change reality and Sasha swaps to a reality in which she was three feet to the left of the sword strike and she pirouettes away from the attack.
Nobody Expects the Tunic Inquisition!
The priests manage to put out their smoldering shirts and get to their feet they form up in a small circle beside the monolith and they start to chant in unison. The tone of the ringing monoliths shifts pitch.
Outside the walls the city starts to wake up and hundreds of people start yelling and calling. Banging on the walls and the hammering on the gates. Our knights are about to be out numbered 80 to 1.
The chant rises to a shout and one of the tunic clad priests begins to glow, but the rest failed. The failures start to chant again, this time with an edge of desperation. Perhaps things are not as bad off as they appear. The king swings wildly at Sasha again, this time failing on his own to hit her. But two more priests gain glowing halos.
Gathering the Heroes:
Sasha dances away from the king, heading toward Kimiko, she opens her chest plate again and blasts the king. Burning a layer of flesh off his chest but not killing him. Still it is the most grievous wound he has taken and it would have killed a lesser man.
Kimiko cuts down the four men with machetes and moves shoulder to shoulder with Sasha. She attempts to tell her about the tendrils from the monoliths healing and taking care of the king and others. But before she can talk, two of the priests with the halos rush Kimiko and stack her with clubs and blades, respectively.
Carlisle puts a bullet through the king and finally drops the giant and then he rushes over to join the girls. He swings his rifle at the priests and they fall back, giving Kimiko an opening to open their guts. The men fall back trying to hold their bowels in, they should be dead but they are not. The king is trying to get back up.
The Plan:
Kimiko grabs her companions; “The monoliths are empowering them. I’m going to take it on, protect my body!”
With those words she telepathically contacts the monoliths and falls to her knees as she is overcome with the intelligence in the stones. She struggles to find meaning in the chaos of the sounds and then slowly begins to realize that the sounds ARE the entities. Creatures of pure sonic energy are alive within the last three stones from their world. They are altering reality in a different manner than the High Lords.
The low end sounds they emit are controlling the centers of human minds. Drawing them to the location and making them stay. Making them worship the sound. The radiation and after affects are then mutating those closest to the monoliths. They are literally a tuning fork of reality.
Now only Two
With Kimiko locked on the stone, Carlisle and Sasha need to protect her body. The priests holding their guts in pray and the wounds begin to close. One of the machete guys on the ground starts to get back up and the King makes his hands glow, but falls to heal himself. He mews on the ground like a broken thing.
A caveman jumps on Sasha and tries to push her to the ground but she kicks him in the right spot and he staggers off. Back to back with Carlisle they get a chance to breath as all of the priests and cavemen take a step back and start to pray, healing and readying themselves for a counter attack. IN the back of the camp there is a series of coughing barks and someone has unleashed the white apes.
The apes move forward but won’t be on the scene of the fight for a number of seconds. What will the knights do?
Sasha tries to use her foreshadow power again to aid Kimiko but the power shows her a million variations, broken up by the warbling sound coming from the Forks.
Kimiko can feel the urgency coming from her companions and in an all out effort she screams and throws everything her mind can handle into the forks.
Changing the Tune.
The noise dips for a second, easing on their ears, and then the stones break. First a series of cracks burst across the surface and then the sound rushes back to a crescendo. The screaming followers outside the walls go silent. Falling to ground or waking from living dreams. The white apes shriek and turn tail to run, the sound making their nose and ears bleed. The cavemen collapse, confused and lost. The priests scream in rage. The king is enraged.
Carlisle and Sasha stagger away, blood bursting from their own noses at the sound and they drop to the ground and roll around trying to protect themselves from the noise.
The monoliths explode and fall to the ground and only the priests, the king, and Kimiko are left standing in the wake.
Last Rounds:
The king rushes Kimiko and swings on her twice but misses and he also gets tripped up as all eight priests also try to dog pile in on the samurai. Kimiko shakes off her shock and swings back on the king and two of the priests. She misses the king but shreds the tunics off the priests.
Carlisle and Sasha roll to their knees and start to stand. Carlisle shoots from kneeling and cuts a furrow on the king’s side. This wound does not simply close back up. Sasha picks up a rock and bounces it off the king’s ear and he howls and turns from her. Not smart with a samurai next to you.
Kimiko rips open the king’s side and then on into one of the nearby priests. Both collapse. The king more from blood loss than anything else. With the King down and the stones shattered the priests suddenly realize that they are mortal. They flee before our heroes.
Aftermath
With the monoliths gone. Most of the people in the camp are going to wander away. But some of them are going to stay and try to make a community out of it. The knights recruit a number of people including the veteran who helped them out in the first place and several others who were either ex-military or police.
At this point the players wanted to switch away from the living lands and move back to the other part of the game. The plan was to turn south with all of the new recruits and travel back to the Brooklyn HQ and see about extraction, at least for some of them.
Over the next week or so they accomplish these goals and manage to get in contact with the Delphi who want the power crystal (discovered many months back to be brought out of the Living Lands and brough back to Greenland).
And with that we end the story of the Manhattan Knights… though these characters might see action again in a different realm.
What’s Next?
We will be starting our next adventure in the Nile Empire. This is a Cosm in Egypt and most of North East Africa and a large swath of the Middle East. The setting is locked in a Pulp 30’s novel complete with pulp superheroes, mummies, Egyptian gods, rocketeers, and math mages.
We’ll be meeting a trio of new characters and we’ll discover some secrets about the Power Crystal and the Ebon Wand (found in the Irish Knights storyline). Next week will be the normal GAME ZERO post where we introduce the characters, the setting, and the new storyline. It starts up around the same time that this story and Irish Knights both ended, day 165 actually.
