forgot to make his head shiny

forgot to make his head shiny

Better one

This is the story of Zepharine, Celestial Sorceress and Hell Knight Enforcer, Demigod of Boccob. After her suicide at the age of 24 demigods with a godly parent gained the irresistible urge to kill themselves after the death of their mortal parent she became a glorified pencil-pusher for her father for around 200 years. During this time, she met quite a few other demigods, but never bonded too closely with any of them.

One day, the gods called all their hundreds of demigods together and told them to spread the word of their respective god across the continent. Far behind them were large beings, greater even than the gods. We think, anyway. The demigods were required to sort themselves into groups, and our party was essentially those kids who don't get picked for kickball. Since nobody wanted us, we all tumbled onto the Material Plane together.

The first thing that happened was the pirate lady, the paladin, and the necromancer all teleported out to the pirate's burning boat to try and save the crew. The gnome monk vanished and I never saw him again. Zepharine had a specific goal in mind the moment she arrived on the material plane - to explore the Moonlight Bog and uncover its secrets.

Though formidable in her own right, both through spells and as a demigod of Boccob, she enlisted the help of another party member, a demigod of Nerul named Artavian. Without a horse, they just decided to run from their entry point in the middle of nowhere to the nearest town. It took a solid week of running with no food, water, or sleep. We required none of these things, though we were capable of all of them. At the next town, Zeffie said, "Fuck it," and they bought a horse. Of course, since they were both poor they could only afford one.

That's the story of how a demigod of Nerul sat in the bitch seat behind a lady.

Anyway, the pair continued on to the Moonlight Bog. After agreeing to let some wizards at a nearby research tower scry on them, Zeffie turned into a dragon Form of the Dragon spell, let Artavian hop on her back, then flew to the bog.

Once inside, they walked around for a while before meeting some deer. These deer were similar to normal deer, but only in the ways that didn't matter. The deer looked like they were made of plants and pinged as undead. They also walked on the quicksand all over the bog. After waving down one of the deer, we played what amounted to an extended game of peekaboo before it fucking exploded plant-deer guts all over us. Gross. Two more deer of the same kind showed up after the first deer fucking scream/exploded. Because we apparently had a death wish, we both hopped up onto the backs of these second deer.

They carried us across all the quicksand pits. In fact, they never touched dry land, instead using dimension door to move from quicksand to quicksand. After about an hour, they took us to a tree and proceeded to throw us in some extra-bullshit quicksand. Both of us nearly died of suffocation, but popped out the other side. KING DEER OF THE SWAMP DEER, AKA SPOOPY DEER, proceeded to mind-rape Artavian. Vines and shit burst out of his body. I managed to distract the deer, but it broke the hold on Artavian's mind and he proceeded to immediately die of massive internal trauma in lots of pain. Then I had to sit through my own hallucinations and dying.

Once Zeffie popped back into the city of the gods, she got to watch how SPOOPY DEER turned their bodies into more shitty plant/undead deer. Instead of immediately going back to the bog, Zeffie decided to go start up a smithing company in some fancy city in the south. She signed on with a gnome, proved herself a better smith, so he signed the company over to her on start-up. After about fifteen years, she'd become famous across the continent. She also named her shop "The Zephyr Company" to let her team know where she was.

Then she started work on her base. Zephyr Point.

Zeffie wasn't playin' with this bullshit, no sir. She spent fifteen years so her base would be as perfect as possible. Placing it within a mile of the Moonlight Bog because no one ever went within five miles of the place and expending a shitload of money to haul the parts and workers there, she designed her fortress in a natural cove perfect for docking ships. The exact specifications were... Laboratory, Armory, Barracks (200), 25 living quarters, smithy, alchemy room and enchanting stations, 60 foot walls with a keep and an iron gate with a moat, a library/small school, three kitchens, a garden, a big dining hall, training grounds, and a dock . Once that was finished, she decided not to furnish the place and just paid for some people to occasionally come around and keep the place clean.

It was at this point that Zepharine switched from focusing on her research on the bog to her research in golemancy. After all, she wanted the best damn lab assistant ever. No matter how hard any mortal worked, they weren't capable of coming close to her physical aspects. After asking the pirate's crew to go buy her some golemancy books, murdering the paladin he requested to die so he could return to the city of the gods , and doing a bunch of reading, she started on her project. After only a few months of research, she knew that she needed human test subjects to further her research. This wasn't an obstacle, in her opinion.

Before creating her first golem shell, she decided to go check out the hellbog one more time. The wizards in the tower scryed on her again. This time she went into the bog, saw a horrible monster made of pure arcane energy and pain, and touched it. Very soon afterwards, her body rotted and her heart stopped. Once she'd died of cardiac arrest, she popped back into the Material Plane ready for some more research.

Once she went to talk to the guys at the wizard tower again, they all flipped their shit. Not only did they see her walk through the bog without eating or sleeping for weeks, but now she'd literally come back from the dead. In that world, nobody had ever heard of a demigod. After explaining that she was a demigod of Boccob, a bunch of the wizards asked to be her interns and work with her at her fortress for... basically the rest of their lives.

Hell yeah. With the work of unpaid interns, she managed to cut her research time in half. It only took 16 years, with her working 24 hours a day, to create 18 golems. Each one was slightly more advanced than the one before, capable of more complex commands and capable of understanding more. Soon enough, she learned that it was because the soul bound imperfectly to the shell. By making the metal more accepting to the soul, the golems became much smarter. From 16 and on, they were capable of both somewhat well-articulated speech and complex commands.

The first golem, after she'd created about 16 of them, she asked to go into the bog. It got stuck in quicksand like an idiot. After she built her 19th golem, it was the closest to having sentience out of the lot. She named him Deryn. Asking him questions about what he wanted and what he thought, she eventually learned that he wanted to paint. Cool, right? It didn't have any soul to it, though. Later, she took him to the mage tower to show off her awesome creation. The wizards collectively shat their pants. She even proved that Deryn understood the concept of love, even though it was incapable of feeling it.

One of the wizards asked him to paint something he couldn't see. To use imagination. After Zeffie explained what imagination was, and what art was, Deryn flipped out, broke one of his brushes, and said that he wasn't a real artist. Then he did something... odd. Asking all the wizards to pose like they had for the first picture, he proceeded to paint it again, but as a night scene.

He created the first piece of true art made by a golem.

Deryn, having promptly caused everyone to freak out a little, tossed his brushes and paints aside. He no longer wished to be an artist. The head wizard of the tower hung the picture up in his office, though. Deryn expressed interest in becoming a surgeon of some kind, healing the sick, "malfunctioning," creatures of the world. That's part of the reason that Zeffie is guilty of so many counts of torture. She let Deryn open up the captured humans she kept so that he could study their anatomy. Later she went out, kidnapped, and killed someone so that he could perform a fresh autopsy.

Sometime during this period, she ordered a massive wench, got a few of her robots to carry it into the bog with her, and they lifted the first golem out of the quicksand. Putting the spirit inside into stasis, she managed to refurbish the shell. Using what she learned from that, she managed to upgrade all of her earlier robots to the level of the 8th golem she'd created. #3 was destroyed by the necromancer of her group (Trax) and she threatened to murder him. After refurbishing #3 and putting a new human soul in it, she re-named it WAR and ordered it to go to the capitol and tell the pirate to fuck up Trax if she ever saw him.

It was then that she noticed one of her golems, #2, was acting very strangely. Sometimes he would stop his task, then start to count the bricks of her fortress. At first, I passed it off as an autistic robot. For... some reason. She decided to bring it to the wizard tower and ask the head wizard his opinion on it. He asked her if she asked the golem why it was doing weird shit. At that moment, she finally realized that was a question she could ask.

So she did.

AutistBot opened its jaws. A clanking, grinding sound came from its head, like metal squealing on metal. It stayed silent. She asked again. The grinding came back, but this time #2 opened its mouth wide and stuffed its entire hand and arm up its mouth and through to its head. The Archmage was suitably freaked out. I was freaking out, both in and out of character. It ripped its hand out of its mouth and held a pin there.

Zeffie put those pins in the minds of her golems to forbid them from speaking of their creation. She also gave them standing orders built into their programming to keep them from talking about it, the pin was just a failsafe. The golem explained that he was counting the bricks of my fortress to count how many would be left.

Left after what?
After nature falls.

At that moment, everything I thought I knew about how the world would go evaporated. I asked #2 to tell me what he meant by "when nature falls." He consulted with Deryn, and Deryn painted up a fucking meteor. Now I had to deal with a meteor large and powerful enough to obliterate an entire city in the center of the continent in a single moment, that would create a shockwave powerful enough to destroy most of my keep.

I named him Oracle after that. The first two years, he spent all day every day plucking every piece of organic life out of the ground for two miles outside my keep, then salted the earth to keep anything from growing there. He then told me that the bog itself had to be moved further away from my keep. The trees of the bog were hundreds of feet wide and tall. To get over this problem, he built the largest fucking chainsaw ever. This was the first chainsaw to ever exist. I brought the archmage out to see it. He shat bricks.

I asked Oracle how he'd invented it. He said that he hadn't - he just saw a vision of it used somewhere else. He proceeded to spend the next 150 years doing nothing but clearing trees from the bog.

During this time, Zeffie deduced what it would take to create a sentient golem. A soul completely willing to be transferred from its body and into a metal shell for all eternity. This leads us to the last leg of our journey.

Of course, her interns never learned any of the human soul use. What she was doing was highly fucking illegal.

Her first attempts at finding a willing human soul involved seducing a wizard from the nearby tower. A year after she began, he loved her as much as someone possibly could. She created an advanced golem shell for his soul, then told him that she could make him immortal by stuffing his soul into a golem. He refused. She ripped his soul out and put him into the golem anyway. Golem #20 had something none of the others did. A true emotion. That emotion was love. He loved Zeffie, even if he didn't know why. The process of binding an unwilling soul to a golem removed its memory.

She promptly sealed him away in the forge and ordered him to do nothing but make golem shells for the next 150 years while Oracle worked on chopping down trees. He didn't complain.

Deryn asked to travel the world in search of sicknesses to document. Zeffie agreed on the condition that she was allowed to go with him. They traveled to the central city of the continent for a while, and she kept her eye out for a rogue-type kind of man to make the perfect utility golem. For the next 50 years, she'd be looking. I haven't actually reached that year in the campaign yet.

Returning to Zephyr Point, she paused in her golem research to mess around with one of the pirate lady's crewmembers. He'd elected to stay behind in her fort instead of continuing to pirate shit. His hand turned into living metal sometime during this clusterfuck of years. She snipped a piece of it off and liquid started to drain out of it. Long story short with that, the liquid was pure arcane energy. Let me repeat that - pure energy given physical form. A lightning spell cast on a single drop of the most concentrated solution was x100 more powerful than normal.

She was also looking into how to replicate the guy's living metal for use in a specialty golem, but I never got to finish doing that either. I should be able to finish it in the next session.

I also finally remembered why the paladin asked to die. This crewmember had some weird shit going on, because he'd made a deal with something he couldn't remember to avoid dying. Zeffie, being the curious little sorceress, linked hands with the paladin, the pirate, and the crewman, then they entered the crewman's soulscape. Following a chain for what felt like hours, they came to a barrier of pure darkness.

Once they crossed it, what they discovered was... insane. Unthinkable. A force beyond the gods themselves. It was not a god of death, it was the very concept of death itself. Sentient, lurking through mortal agents. It entertained a few of our questions before kicking us all out of the crewman's soul. We refused to discuss it with him, and instead questioned what to do among ourselves. The paladin asked me to kill him so that he could go back to the city of the gods and inform Heironius of what we found. Heironius told him never to kill himself again or he would revoke the paladin's demigod status and murder him.

And that, thefirespike, is all I can really remember of the story of Zepharine for now. And through all this, she never did a single action to increase her own power or the power of others. She was motivated by a single desire - the desire to make her dad, Boccob, proud of her. There was nothing more she wanted than his praise.

acting like moral authority on FJ... the home of autists...