Difference between revisions of "The Storm Palace"

As humanity has begun expanding its interests into extra-dimensional spaces, particularly the Shadow Shard, peculiar psychological disorders have begun to infect those spending a large amount of time away from their home dimension. New categories of mental illness have been coined to give shape to the odd manias and delusions creeping into the minds of the people staffing the outposts in Firebase Zulu, and you too have had strange thoughts emerging unbidden from your own psyche. Yet you continue to engage this strange place in a race against time: either you will stand triumphant against the Shadow Shard's many challenges, or you will succumb to the madness that has claimed lesser minds.

The Shadow Shard hates you. You can feel its anger pulsing in the air around you and the very ground you stand upon, throbbing up through your feet. The wind is a roar of anger at your very presence, echoed by the Shadow Shard's twisted inhabitants. You steel yourself against this emotional onslaught, unbowed by this world's hostility. You will turn its hate and anger back upon itself; you will be an Acolyte of Anger who wields rage as a weapon against it.

Everything about the Shadow Shard expresses the danger it represents to your home dimension. This is not some mere foreign power that can be reasoned with or with whom a peaceful settlement can be negotiated. Its very existence is built upon a hostility towards anything other than itself; malice is ingrained into every particle of its being. But are you not just projecting your own human-born ideas of good and evil upon it? Is the wolf acting with malice when it devours the hare? Is it evil for the strong to dominate the weak?

The Shadow Shard is a prison created to house a powerful entity, an entity tormented by its imprisonment. Its sense of indignity, of injustice, has been concentrated here to such a degree that it has become part of the dimension. You can feel the entity's raw emotion flow through you; you have felt it from the very moment you arrived and it has been chipping away at your sense of self ever since. Remaining here risks making these emotions part of yourself; or worse, you risk being subsumed by the Shadow Shard, losing all identity and will by becoming one with Rularuu.

The hatred Rularuu feels is infectious. It radiates from him in waves, and coming from such a powerful and otherworldly mind you have to struggle to keep it from overwhelming you. Rularuu's minions are thought to be extensions of his will; it is easy to understand how that could be as you feel the urge to comply with that will creeping up on you in moments of distraction or weakness. Rularuu has engineered his minions into an engine geared towards releasing him from his prison, you must be mindful you do not become a cog in that machine.

You have come to realize that emotion is an elemental force in the Shadow Shard, that the storms that sweep through this place are composed of emotional residue. You have spent enough time here to gain an intrinsic sense of these emotional ebbs and flows. Here you can feel these warping concentrations of Rularuu's fury yet you are able to make them your own, adding your own feelings of anger at the danger posed by Rularuu. You summon images of Rularuu's minions running rampant upon your beloved homeworld and are filled with a rising fury.

Your destiny on the Shadow Shard is drawing very close. Everything you have experienced so far has been building to this point. You have suffered countless indignities, have had your body and mind abused and violated and the time of reckoning is here. Rularuu is a being who consumes and destroys and now you shall show him that such talents are not his alone.

Now you stand upon the apex of the Storm Palace, at the center of a vortex of destiny and mystical energy. So few have come as far, so many have fallen in the attempt that you deserve to be recognized as a master, of a sort, of this distant and inhospitable place. By now, words of your deeds have spread to even Rularuu itself and the threat you and your fellows represent should be apparent. Go now and strike the final blow that will confirm, once and for all, that the defenders of Primal Earth are not to be trifled with.

You have spent a great deal of time working with the military at Firebase Zulu earning the Dimensional Explorer Day Job. Logging out in the Shadow Shard will earn you a Jetpack power, when you log back in, for a short time.

Firebase Zulu has classified you as A.W.O.L., but they wouldn't welcome you if you showed up, either.