Chapter Text
Aster is unfortunately going to live forever. She wasn’t always doomed to that fate, but as life would have it, that’s where she’s ended up. But even considering the fact that she’ll have plenty of unexpected experiences in her long life, being abducted by mindflayers from the road between the forest and Baldur’s Gate was not one she had guessed. But here she is, on a mindflayer ship, watching as a mindflayer does something to a githyanki woman. Then, it turns to her.
She blinks, twice, as if testing her eyes to make sure they still work after whatever it was crawled behind them. The ship is shaking and she can see more pods filling up. Gith, tieflings, elves, humans… gods only know where the ship that abducted her is now. And then suddenly her world goes dark once more.
When she comes to, a few things are different. One, her pod is open. Two, and possibly more alarming, the ship seems to be on fire. She sighs. She may be a druid but fire is her least favorite element. Something about its volatile nature is unsettling to her.
She carefully and slowly climbs out of the pod, taking in her surroundings. She seems to be alone, though many of the pods look busted, so maybe she can find some other survivors. But more than that? She has no idea what to do.
Aster isn’t dumb by any stretch. She has years and years of survival under her belt. She’s charted stars, she’s scouted forests, but this? This is an entirely new frontier. She glances around for anyone else that could be of use, but she only sees the mindflayer, dead on the ground. She looks over at the pool of liquid in the center of the room. She approaches it hesitantly, assessing her every step for fear of mistake. The pool holds a few shrivelled up parasites, and as tempting as it is to blast the thing to bits, she decides to leave it in favor of checking out a weird, blue, glowing contraption in the corner.
She reaches a shaky hand towards the mindflayer device and immediately feels better. Yeah, this is definitely among the top three weirdest days of her life. But with her energy restored, so is her fight or flight response, so she nimbly walks out to the next room of the ship. She sees another weird contraption and hears an even weirder voice saying “here, we are here. Help us.”
Perhaps against her better judgement, she figures out how the weird elevator contraption works and makes her way toward the voice. She sees a man on some sort of operating chair with his brain exposed. Every instinct in her body screams to turn away, to mind her own business. But one thing Aster’s never been good at is keeping her nose where it belongs. She carefully walks over to the man-brain, and the voice calls for help again.
“Um, hi?” Aster says to the man.
He doesn’t move, but she hears the voice again. “Help us!”
“Who am I talking to, a man or a brain?” her voice feels scratchy from hours of not being used.
“A newborn, born from this husk,” the brain shakes.
Ah, so the brain is sentient and the man is likely dead. Lovely. But maybe an ally who knows the mindflayer ways wouldn’t be such a bad idea… no, she decides. Removing the brain would actually be a terrible idea. One less mindflayer servant in the world is a much better idea. She readies a beam of radiant energy, but before she lets it fly, she sees the brain shiver and immediately feels bad. Long ago, she promised to give everyone the same second chance she’s been offered. This brain hasn’t even gotten a first chance. Besides, she’s never been one to judge someone on who they are. If the brain makes a misstep, she’ll deal with it then, but for now, she carefully pries it from the skull.
It hops to the ground and sprouts four grotesque legs, and Aster sighs at herself. “What’s your name?” she asks, dejectedly.
“Us,” the brain sends a telepathic message to her head. “We are ‘Us.’” A sentient brain that’s part of a hivemind… Aster simply walks away.
Us follows her outside where she sees devils, gith riding dragons, and all sorts of other hells that this ship has dragged along. She skirts along the wall and sees a gith, the same gith who had a weird tadpole inserted in her eye prior to Aster’s own. She’s about to wave to indicate friendly intentions when the gith launches into an impressive flip through the air, landing on the other side of Aster, sword poised to strike.
Aster sighs. So much for friendship.
“Abomination,” the gith snarls. “This is your end.”
Aster is about to open her mouth to ask what the fuck the gith is talking about when a weird, uncomfortable squirming behind her eye happens. She doubles over in pain, and in her peripheral vision, so does the gith. Flashes of other gith, a hive or whatever the gith call their headquarters, and the astral sea dance across Aster’s vision before suddenly everything returns to normal. She glances up at the gith, who, to her credit, looks horrified.
“ Tsk’va , you are no thrall. Vlaakith blesses me this day. Together, we might survive!” the gith looks at Aster.
“What on earth made you think I was a thrall?” Aster furrows her brows. She likes to think she’s friendly looking enough.
The woman explains about the mindflayers parasites infecting their brains and turning them into mindflayers themselves, and Aster has to count to ten to not black out.
She’s never liked mindflayers, to be honest. They feel very unnatural . She is not about to become one of them.
“There must be something we can do!” she cries.
“We can do nothing until we escape – that must be our priority,” the woman says. She motions Aster to follow her a few paces ahead where a couple of infernal imps are feasting on some fallen mindflayers. Aster nearly groans like a child.
“First, we exterminate the imps. Then, we find the helm and take control of the ship.” the woman says, and does not wait for Aster’s input before launching herself at an imp. Aster sighs dramatically, and sends moonflare towards another imp while adding a false cheeriness to her voice as she sings, “yeah perfect, let’s go team.” because, honestly, what else can she say? It works, though. Aster sees the inspirational magic take root in the gith woman.
The imps are dealt with easily, and Aster sticks her hand towards the gith. “I’m Aster, by the way.”
“Lae’zel,” the gith says and moves onward without taking Aster’s hand. Aster sighs and follows.
They reach a room with two people operating beds and a third person trapped in a pod. Aster makes to rush towards the woman in the pod, but Lae’zel grabs her arm and yanks her back. “Are you going to stop to help every person we meet along the way?”
“Yes,” Aster replies flatly, before taking her arm back and continuing her haste towards the woman. She frantically looks around at the pod, but even her magic trained eyes can’t tell what is going on.
“Try the contraption over there,” the woman nods her head to the side. Aster obliges but still, nothing screams “eject button.”
“I’ll look around. Something has to work,” she says. She trains her eyes on a nearby door, and Lae’zel groans as she slips through it. To her credit, though, Lae’zel does follow her, sword ready. There’s another woman in a pod in this room. Aster looks around and sees another contraption near this pod. There’s some arcane rune carved into the button, but Aster can’t figure out what it says. She’s used to more natural magic… This is straight arcana. Deciding to leave the suspicious button alone, she begins to loot the corpses in the room. She doesn’t love doing that normally, but these are not normal circumstances. She manages to find a weird rune that seems like it just might fit in the mechanism near the other pod. She rushes back, and to her delight, the machine hums to life after the rune is inserted. The weird squirming appears again, and she finds herself able to will the pod open
The woman falls out and grabs her pack. “I thought I was going to die in that thing,” she shudders. She glances up at Aster and Lae’zel. “I’m Shadowheart,” she takes Aster’s outstretched hand and stands up.
“I’m Aster,” Aster smiles at the sudden, warmer company. Lae’zel rolls her eyes.
“You keep dangerous company,” Shadowheart nods towards Lae’zel.
“Helpful in fights,” Aster shrugs.
“Wonderful, we’ve all been well acquainted. Let’s get to the helm,” Lae’zel says, marching off.
Shadowheart spares Astyer a sideways glance before they follow Lae’zel. The next room contains another one of those restoration mechanisms, so they top off before the inevitable fight to follow.
“We are nearing the helm,” Lae’zel turns to the other two. “Once inside, do exactly as I say.”
“Who died and put you in charge?” Shadowheart narrows her eyes. Lae’zel says something in a different language.
“Let’s just go,” Aster sighs, before Shadowheart can rile Lae’zel up.
Once inside the helm room, things go about as well as expected . There’s a devil fighting a mindflayer with a few imps and hellboars scattered around. The mindflayer says to connect the transponder, and while Aster honestly has no idea what that is, Lae’zel says they should do it, so do it they shall. Lae’zel launches into action, taking on one imp with her sword and shooting another with an arrow. As if not to be outdone, Shadowheart sends a ray of radiant energy streaking towards the hellboar. Aster pushes forward, careful to avoid the devil’s peripheral vision, but before she can make it to the transponder, a few more imps and hellboars block the way.
“Oh for the love of…” she groans. A familiar sensation washes over her as her freckles alight in a pattern that resembles the archer constellation, and she begins shooting arrows of pure starlight towards the infernal beings. By the time Shadowheart and Lae’zel catch up, she’s made quick work of the imps, and with one final arrow, she finishes off the hellboar as well.
“Not too bad in a fight,” Shadowheart almost sounds impressed.
“I just really want to get off this fucking ship,” Aster stomps towards the transponder… thing. Now if only she could figure out how it worked. As if sensing her uncertainty, the tadpole fills her mind with a vision of the weird tentacle things connecting and transporting them to another realm. So she does just that. As she connects them, she thinks about what the fuck has been happening for the past day and is filled with a sense of loss. She just wants to see a tree. Or maybe a beach, yes, a beach would be nice.
The ship lurches sideways, and Aster loses her balance. She falls, but manages to tuck herself in a nice little nook of the ship. She makes eye contact with a mindflayer, and in that moment, she decides that all creatures are perhaps not born with goodness in them. She doesn’t mean mindflayers as a whole, of course. But this specific mindflayer who glares at her with beady red eyes and seems to be trying to connect with her, despite her successfully saving him from a demon probably has no capacity for goodness.
She tries to look around for Shadowheart or Lae’zel, but before her eyes can find them, she’s hit with a flying piece of debris and gets sent soaring off the ship. She should be scared, falling through the air. Maybe she should try and teach herself a spell that could break her fall in the thirty seconds she has left. Isn’t there one? Feather Fall or something? But no survival instincts come. It’s as if the years and years of gleaning information for various employers through sheer adrenaline and charm never happened. As if the years and years of pure terror and horrors she’s seen mean nothing. She hasn’t lived in a while, merely survived. So now, hurtling towards certain death, she’s filled with the urge to live .
She braces herself for the impact. As a cruel joke, the universe did send her to a beach with a forest nearby. And the sandy banks look like a nice final resting spot. But the universe has other ideas. Just as she’s about to hit the sand at top speeds, a force stops her, and she lands on the sand softly before passing out.