The elevator reached the ground with predictable ease, and the travelers embarked. Kole immediately had an uncomfortable sensation wash over him. He looked over at Kalisse, and she nodded, acknowledging his feeling. Theirs would be a dangerous job this time.

Kole and Kalisse made their way toward the operation center, where the guardians gathered. Kole surveyed the smoothed ground between he and the domed building that housed the gateway. As the exiting party walked toward the dome, a shimmering shadow seemed to appear behind them. Kole started to move toward it, but another guardian was on top of it in seconds. The guardian took a breath, closed his eyes and whispered the well-memorized chant. The shadow evaporated, and the party of travellers never became aware of his or the shadow's presence.

Kole and Kalisse exchanged concerned glances and continued toward the operation center.

This yellowed structure was the original building used to guard the gateway, and it held within its walls the dull hum of hundreds of heroic experiences, and many more tales of terror. The entrance tunnel gave way to a checkpoint, where the other guardians gathered. Kalisse and Kole were not the first to arrive. Saka was there to greet them, along with Jek, Bal, and Dasart. Saka was checking her arm blades when Kole and Kalisse arrived, she stood to acknowledge them both. "I was glad to see that you two would be here. It's bad down there," she said. Kalisse nodded, "We saw a shadow outside." Bal looked up from her meditative stance. "How close to the outer wall?"

Kole guessed that it was about 100 feet from the wall, and she scowled for a moment, then returned to focus on her stance. The shadows had never before manifested so far from the gateway.

Jek was a warrior-shaman. Meditating in the corner, he spoke without opening his mouth, "There has been some rich energies passing through the gateway recently. We should begin to regularly clean more frequently." Dasart let out a grunt of agreement as he sharpened his blades, his dragonscale helmet set beside him. "We'll need to assign more of us to go down there."

Kole considered using Jhebon Metit's connection to the Gnosis to ask what a possible long-term solution to this problem may be. Surely other fallen worlds like Earth had found more efficient ways of maintaining active gateways other than cleaning them out in increasing frequency. That, however, was a question to ask afterwards. After they came back. "Who are we waiting for?" asked Kalisse. "Bannute and Trest," volunteered Saka. The checkpoint room was large enough to allow the guardians to stretch out, train, exercise or meditate, whichever means they chose to prepare for their descent into the caverns. Kole unsheathed the bonesword and began to practice his Shinn movement magas. Kalisse took his cue and began to go through her exercises, a defensive form of Tavak Dav. Soon the room was filled with the rustling of cloth, the muted grating of armor, and sharp shrills of blades searing through the air. Soon enough, Bannute and Trest arrived. Bannute carried his railgun over one shoulder, with his levshield hovering one foot in front of his left leg. Bannute entered and surveyed the room. "Everyone ready to hack and slash?" he chirped. "You should approach this task with a bit less frivolity, Bannute, especially when we are summoned off schedule. The Elders have their reasons why we are here, and it is not to be taken lightly." warned Jek. Bannute promptly rolled his eyes and returned, "Of course, you're right. We should approach our task with pity and respect for the creatures that... must I remind you... feed on fear and create chaos? Jek, you do things your way, and I'll do it my way. We both get the job done, don't put your dogma onto me."

Jek rose slowly. All eyes were on him. "Fair enough. Apologies. Shall we?"

The guardians sheathed their weapons and gathered into a circle. They all looked at each other one by one, acknowledging the strength and determination in each other's eyes. The room dissolved away, and all that remained was the guardians, and their focus. Pride, ego, vanity and mistrust vanished. They were one force. They were one creature.

That done, they took three deep breaths and said, " For the good of the city, for the good of Earth, for the good of the Macrocosm. We descend."

They walked to the back of the checkpoint room and took the stairwell down. The steps continued down deep to another room. There, they checked their armor and weapons. Clicks, scrapes and rattles of buckles and steel filled Kole with a tang in the back of his throat. This is the flavor that he was very familiar with while preparing for battle. When the sounds stopped, everyone looked at each other again and nodded. The last door was opened.

Locked by an intricate coding system that is entrusted to two of the guardians of each party, it creaked open with seven hundred years of use. Veterans of these caverns can accurately divine just how difficult their task will be by the scent that emerges from that open doorway. The putred wave that struck their faces was sharp and ripe - that sweet scent of rotted meat to the extreme,
like a sea of concentrated mildew and bile, threatened their constitutions.

Jek closed his eyes slowly and reopened them, finding a place within himself to disconnect from the defiled air. Saka activated her symbiotic helmet, as did Kalisse. Kole envisioned a protective bubble around his face, and the rest prepared to enter the stench in their own way.

The stairs were old and flaking concrete from the age before. Ancient tunnels beneath the city that used to exist here transported people in mechanical vehicles. Now, the vibrations from the gateway created miniature distortions - small gateways that allowed the passage of creatures from the raw element of chaos into this world. "Bogen," as they are called, are the unformed cousins of the Earth-entity called Naraka. These cousins, biting at anything they can find, cause havoc in the ordered world. They generate fear and paranoia in all beings, then feed off of that, excreting the imbalanced vibrations that break down the order of reality. In essence, they are to the gateway, what predatory animals are to flora. The gateway thrives off of the passage of energies from one world to the next, and these creatures, the Bogen, paracitize the gateway. Normally, the Bogen have the ability to appear outside of the vicinity of the Gateway, but only as intangible ghosts. Bogen that use the gateway, however, are very real and very dangerous. They are violent and unpredictable. The walls of the caverns were crusted over with lime deposits in some patches, mushrooms and phosphorescent fungi in others. The fungi generated almost enough light to see, but the caverns were extensive, and the fungi did not reach into every section. At the first landing of the stairs, Saka opened a panel in the wall and pulled out the `phores - headbands attached with photophoric gelpaks that glow with a light just bright enough to illuminate about 30 feet without being blinding. Many of these guardians, however did not need them - either their symbiotic gear had sight enhancement, or they had other means of seeing into the dark. Trest took one, as did Dasart and Bal. They massaged the gelpaks to stimulate the photophoric reaction and soon their heads were ringed with a blue-green halo.

As they descended the stairs, the air became denser, more saturated with chaos. The untrained mind would be threatened by insane thoughts, but these guardians, instructed by Damir and other magans, had learned how to crystallize their inner truths - the essence of who they are - and protect themselves from these forces of nature bent on breaking down the structure of their reality.

At the bottom of the stairs, it seems as though they are as far away from the city as the moon, or on the sea floor. The dust they kicked up formed a wake of glitter to either side of them - an unexplained effect of the concentrated chaos. The sounds of their footsteps were enhanced in the dense air. Another danger of this environment is the amplification of sharp noises into harmonics that shatter eardrums. A blade striking bone may chime and cause a magnified ripple of sound, becoming a piercing screech in a matter of seconds. The guardians wore patches of sound absorbant cloth that muffled most of these potential hazards.

The guardians separated into pairs.

Jek, Kole, and Bal established a mindlink between the group. This way, all of them could sense what the others were experiencing. The mindlink allows each one to be aware on different transparent layers - shifting freely between the layers, ideas can be exchanged, tactical plans can be communicated, and physical abilities can be at least partly transferred - all without endangering oneself by becoming oblivious to one's own surroundings.

At first, there is hesitation from all of the participants to settle into the mindlink, personality vibrations need to readjust, which takes place on a subtle psychic level. In a matter of moments, all eight of the guardians were one mind.

The crunching echoes of their footsteps were all that could be heard for a long time. Eight sets of eyes examined the dark corners and recesses of the tunnels for movement - inhuman movement. Architecture from a civilization long passed framed many hiding places, and each one had to be investigated. Any of the many crumbling storefronts and disintigrating hygeine stations, closets, and machine rooms could have hiding one or several creatures armed with claws, teeth, venom, spikes, horns, darts, and vapors. Dasart flinched. Something on his periphery fell from the ceiling and ran the way they had come. With one practiced fluid motion, Dasart unsheathed a small blade from his forearm and threw it underhand at the fleeing creature. A sharp pitched croak marked a hit. Bal reached out with her vision and confirmed the creature as a physical Bogen and that it was dead.

Dasart walked to the creature and removed his blade from the carcass which was even now beginning to decompose into jelly. "Dasart gets first kill!", Trest announced with overt enthusiasm. "He's buying the drinks tonight!" Despite himself, Dasart smiled as he wiped the blade off on a cloth he carried in his belt.

"Okay, everyone stay sharp, the Bogen know we're here, now," Kalisse suggested. The party moved on, deeper into the caverns.

End Part 13