Legion was having that pleasant explorer-scout discovery thing going on, a world even bigger than Hyperborea unfolding about them.
My explorations were more of the merciless find and kill them all mindset, even if it all was VERY interesting, and The Map was getting filled out to a simply unbelievable amount of detail as I swept down the remaining coastline of North America and headed into the Caribbean.
The mineral wealth alone that I’d charted would keep Heavenbound Hall in money for ages. There were also many, many shipwrecks that I’d pinpointed for investigation, including at least two treasure galleons of one sort or another, which still had the gleaming heavy presence of valuable metals within.
Wavelocks in Florida were heading out quickly to secure those, although I did indicate that there was at least one giant octopus in the area.
I headed right out into the Caribbean, and the area that even in this world was called the Bermuda Triangle.
The Caribbean had a mixed bag of sahaug, locathah, merfolk, crabfolk, and various random magical beasts in it. Our main helpers there were a strong dolphin presence, but the stronger whales didn’t usually move about much out here.
It was shallow for a major sea, but also warm, so it didn’t have as much free-floating sea life as it did reefs.
Underwater skirmishes between the various races went on often, but enough sharks were present that the bodies basically never made it to shore. None of the sapient races had a good opinion of mankind, which was hardly surprising, and fought their wars against one another down in the bloody deeps.
A lot of ships had gone down in this area, even in the modern era, and the biggest area of mystery was the Bermuda Triangle.
There was a list of at least thirty ships and several flights of planes that had been lost in this area, including military vessels, and nobody knew how or why. The ships should have been able to weather a storm, and there hadn’t been a pure hurricane going at the time. Conventional wisdom was that they’d been boarded during the teeth of a storm and then scuttled somehow, but there’d been no debris or remains from such things found along coastlines anywhere, pretty much an impossibility... something should have floated free!
That meant the area was either a free-fire zone where a lot of dangerous things lived, or it was a major power base for some major influence.
I, naturally enough, was going to use my mapping runs to find out what was going on here, sweeping along the edges of the islands and laying down locations of sunken things, places where aquatic races dwelled, and the ruins and wrecks of many ships lost here over the centuries.
I did find some of all of the above, but nothing major, and notably, no plane wrecks as I ran up the Florida Keys past Puerto Rico, turned north to Bermuda, and discovered only one sahaug settlement in the deeper waters on the way. I turned back to Florida, filling in the triangle, and there was literally nothing in the northern part of the triangle... which raised my interest higher, because that included magical beasts.
Magical beasts would naturally fill in the gaps between the aquatic races, and there were none living down there...
I closed the triangle, turned, and aimed for the heart of the place, very interested now. The aquatic races seemed to be avoiding something down there...
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I didn’t find any ships, planes, or wrecks of any kind whatsoever there. The place was very suspiciously bare, with next to no animal life even down on the sea floor.
It was like they knew there was some really nasty stuff in this area, surprise, surprise.
There was dimensional magic, and a bunch of it. There was also a raging magical Formation down below, which was looking for a shot in the arm from elemental forces to power it up.
Interested in what would happen, I promptly Summoned up a storm in this area to pummel it with lightning. There was no shipping or planes around, and given the pounding I was going to be putting on the area, they weren’t going to be flying into this area, especially after Heavenbound Hall warned everyone a storm was going up out here.
The Haze thickened into rumbling darkness, hate lightning flared with unwanted holiness, and the winds started spinning and howling about a circle here that could generate an entire hurricane if I let it persist.
I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, as the water began to spin, too.
The sudden flaring of the Stillflight Field wasn’t a problem, as we were standing on the surface of the sea, Still Water keeping a small area around us calm. Still, any magical creatures would have lost flight, and when the maelstrom started below, and generating a whirlwind above it, I was watching very closely.
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Dimensional magic was reaching out along the cyclonic winds, bending all paths of travel into the dimensional funnel being opened up. Any ships or planes in this area were going into this thing, whether they liked it or not.
The big question was, could they keep ME in wherever it was? I frowned, and the Old Steed burst into motion towards the vortex.
Oh, and in the meantime, the coordinates of this place and what it was doing were going out to interested parties, putting the whole damn area into a no-go zone unless the pilot was a certified chucklehead. The winds generated by this vortex were indeed reaching out for thirty miles in all directions, making this the Bermuda Vortex, not a triangle... but it was close enough for our purposes.
I wasn’t particularly worried for one reason: any dimensional world had to be open under the Shroud, it couldn’t remain closed. The Felldeep caverns, the Hollow World, Hyperborea, the Mountains of Madness... all these ancient realms formed by extremely powerful beings had nevertheless been forced out into the open by the Shroud.
That meant that wherever this vortex led also had to be opened by the Shroud, and was open Right Now. All this vortex was doing was opening another pathway, so there had to be another way in or out of wherever it was going, connected to the rest of the place.
I assumed that this dimensional leveraging effect was a way for the undead to spread into every little nook and cranny of a world and ensure that there were no hidden surprises anywhere, sacrificing every last little speck of life to Death so that they could abide forever in their own version of Hell.
With that in mind, being sent to wherever this crazy maelstrom, a roaring whirlpool extending over a mile down towards the sea floor while a whirling cyclone circled counterclockwise at the heart of it to drag down anything in the air, was going, didn’t bother me much at all.
The Old Steed was unafraid, and rather excited, instead. He leapt over the edge of the maelstrom and fearlessly headed right down the side of it, hooves burning as we headed for the churning heart of the effect below.
Gravity and space were going wonky, and we ended up sliding sideways to follow the flow of the effect, just moving a bit faster than it was designed to send anything down. I felt the dimensions stretching and warping around us, passing us right through the mantle of the world and plunging down and away as the storm howled madly about us, lightning crackled as dimensions protested against the treatment, and I ignored everything as we rode the hurricane-force cyclone to the end.
We shot out the far end, actually using the wind to outrun the wind as we shot out of any captivity or shackling effect pervading the vortex, and found ourselves out in new and dark seas, looking around in interest as a great waterspout extended up into the churning mass of a very unreal cloud cover above us, writhing and spinning with chaotic forces fueled by elemental rage.
I reached out and snuffed the storm I’d built up above.
It collapsed with incredible speed, and the vortex above us almost seemed to hiccup in shock as its power supply evaporated with speed every bit as unnatural as its own existence. The waterspout spun itself out, receding back into the sky, and then those clouds almost tore themselves apart, spitting themselves across the sky as if freed from imprisonment.
A sullen red sky peeked through the rapidly dispersing clouds, and we looked up at the world rising on all sides of us, far into the distance.
There was the black dome of a Shroudzone rising to the northwest of us, and another one in the distance to the south and east.
-Holy Shit!- Legion /exclaimed in the distance, a third of the way around the Hollow World from us at this point.
The Bermuda Vortex was an alternate way for large-scale entry into the Hollow World!
The seas here were calming down with supernatural speed now that the magical energy kicking up a fuss was all gone away. I looked around coolly.
Ships. This was a graveyard of ships.
The most obvious ones were all of metal: freighters, warships, and personal yachts crashed and broken onto the reefs and sandbars of this place, grounded and obviously unable to move. There were hulks and skeletons of other vessels around too, including a couple old bombers. Not far off the beaches and rocky cliffs I could see, the great trees of this place also started to rise to their improbable heights, which might well have claimed the lives of any airplane pilots not expecting to run into a tree when they were still a couple thousand feet in the air.
More to the point, I could see lights leaking here and there behind storm covers, hints of motion moving between dark little holes in the storms, and two ships that had been driven well up onto a beach seemed to have people moving over them.
More to the point, I still had Commune with Nature up, and bid the Old Steed get off the surface of the water.
He hopped a hundred feet into the air lazily, and the mosasaurus raging up to take a bite of him ended up a good fifty feet shy of the effort, glaring up at us sitting there beyond his reach before falling down to splash into the shallow waters. It swam away, disgruntled after watching us just sitting up there in place for a bit, realizing we didn’t have to come down and get eaten, and surged away, heading further out to sea.
I turned my attention to the ships and the people there, and the Old Steed began to move in that direction.
Shipwrecks probably meant survivors. Survivors meant people waiting to be rescued and return home.
Search-and-rescue was one of the nobler endeavors of the human race, and if there were people trapped down here, they had likely given up all hope of being rescued. On the flip side, they were possibly mobilizing to help out any newcomers who were hurled out of the Vortex, and so rescue any other survivors like themselves if possible.
Either that, or local scrappers were preying on the ships and crew who landed here. I’d find out soon enough.
Environmental damage had attacked all of these ships, and I couldn’t see any names or identification on any of them, the paint long since peeled and battered away by time and the elements. However, I could easily scan all them and send them off for comparisons to ships believed lost in the Triangle, and match them up that way.
In addition, accessing records of the missing crew of each of the ships was totally within my ability. Or rather, the abilities of the hackers in Heavenbound Hall, now on the job.
Thus equipped with the potential positive identification of survivors, I proceeded towards the ships closest to the rising cliffs and shallow beach there, wondering what I was going to encounter.
If I didn’t meet any survivors, well enough. I knew exactly where to go to get out of here, and I could certainly ride a Lived-Line through the place and see what was here...