Part 19: Temporal Anomaly

Last time we made it two-thirds of the way through the Nether Realm, a really awful place. When we left off, we were kind of surrounded:



So let's just take the stairs back up, then down again.



Much better. Sure, we're next to a pack of wraiths, but those we can handle.

We could actually use this technique -- of going up and down stairs -- over and over again until a down staircase spawns in a convenient location, to rapidly and safely dive through the Nether Realm. We're not, but we could. I feel like it's kind of cheesy. Then again, see Figure 1: Mitch the Mage. Cheesiness is kind of our MO here. Well, we'll finish the dive "normally" anyway, at least to the extent that our tactics resemble anything like normal play.

The game kindly gives us three downstairs in a row with a minimum of fuss...



Uh, make that four stairs, though we do have a horde of Dreads bearing down on us. Level 691 involves a running battle with two gigantic packs of Ethereal Hounds, though, who can phase through walls and breathe nether (naturally, for maximum damage). We spend an awful lot of time holed up in little prisons of rock, the better to focus our Black Hole, before we finally find a staircase in a small vault.

Level 692:



You may have noticed that there's an awful lot of demons, undead, and hounds around here. The dungeon generator is biased towards those monster types in this dungeon; they aren't the only types that show up, but they're more common than everything else by a significant margin. Naturally, demons, undead, and zephyr hounds tend to be the most annoying enemy types to deal with.

We genocide the demon posse on this level, again. Now both our junkarts of Genocide are recharging and unusable. Just north of the demons' former home is a staircase; we entomb ourselves there and then camp out for awhile to let the junkarts recharge. While we wait, we chain-cast Adrenaline Channeling and Character Armor, two our of mindcrafting spells. They both have stacking durations, so we effectively have an indefinite combination of haste+berserk (Adrenaline Channeling) and shield+temporary elemental resists (Character Armor). The shield effect is +50 AC -- not very much, but better than nothing, as our base AC is a measily 131.

Also at this time, I discover that the Mindcrafting detection spell, Precognition, actually does show staircases on the map briefly:



I wish I'd known this, oh, 40-odd floors ago! Would've saved a lot of blind wandering! From now on we should be able to find staircases much more easily. It struck me as odd that Precognition would reveal stairs when our Divination spell Reveal Ways does not, so I did some experimentation, and it turns out the secret is how many messages the spell causes and how wide your window is. Precognition detects everything, viz:

You sense the presence of traps! You sense the presence of doors! You sense the presence of ways out of this area! You sense the presence of treasure! You sense the presence of objects! You sense the presence of invisible creatures! You sense the presence of monsters!

It's a practical guarantee that your window is not large enough to show all of these messages without a -more- prompt. Angband requires you to manually acknowledge every line's worth of messages with a keypress if there's more than one line to show, and while the game is waiting, the stairs are visible. Meanwhile, Detect Ways just does this:

You sense the presence of doors! You sense the presence of ways out of this area!

which easily fits onto my window, unless I shrink it down on purpose.

Anyway, we sit around our staircase in the middle of 200' of solid granite in the middle of the depths of Hell itself until our junkarts have recharged a bit, then move onwards.



Oh man, this is so much better. There's a staircase, right up there! So easy! In no time at all, we reach the bottom of the Nether Realm, level 696.



And we spawn in right next to its guardian, too!



Tik'srvzllat sounds like something out of Lovecraft, and while it's an ungendered enemy for some reason I keep thinking of it as female. It's decently powerful: 18000 HP, melee that disenchants gear, drains all stats, and causes significant amounts of insanity, plus all of the more powerful summoning spells and nether and disenchantment breath. Plus it's been level-boosted to 150, though its "natural" level is 127 so the effect there is comparatively minor.

Our first priority of course is to prepare the battleground. We throw up a Time Out and then cast Blast - Wall Destruction ("Time In", I guess). Tikky can move through walls, and it spawns awake, so we can't do our usual tactic of just digging to her.



Hey Tik'srvzllat, have a free hands-on demonstration of special relativity!

Tik'srvzllat shrugs off the attack. <21x. Tik'srvzllat starts moving slower. <3x> Tik'srvzllat summons special opponents! Fasolt the Giant hits you. Fasolt the Giant misses you. Fasolt the Giant touches you. You quickly protect your money pouch! The thief flees laughing!



...well, okay then. That spell is supposed to pull in unique monsters, but in addition to Fasolt (now AWOL), all we got was Quaker, Master of Earth (a souped-up earth elemental) and Sarko, Rider of Gold Foronth, a unique, friendly dragonrider, plus a few Black Reavers, a Monastic Lich, and two low-level wraiths. Sarko drew a few monsters' melee attacks in that first round, but we don't want to anger her with our next Black Hole, so we just dismiss her and she vanishes. The others can stick around; we're about to render them irrelevant anyway.

Our second Black Hole destroys the Monastic Lich and Quaker, nearly destroys the other summons, and leaves Tikky half-dead and slowed into insensibility. It takes four more castings to kill Tikky -- a testament more to the poorly-constrained battlefield than to its durability.

Tik'srvzllat is destroyed. You feel the urge to pick up the Flame Imperishable.

And just like when we killed Ar-Pharazon for the One Ring, we've had an item stuffed into our inventory:



Well, that sounds interesting. Let's give it a shot!

You activate it... You have no objects to imbue.

Oh. Well, while we wait on figuring out what to do with that, let's check out this other neato item we got from Tikky:



Just in case you'd been suffering through using the Phial of Undeath as your source of voidbreathing all this time, the Ring of Phasing is here so you can take off that awful, awful item. For our part, the other powers are more interesting -- in particular the incorporeality and nether immunity (the best you can do normally is just nether resistance). This ring can replace our old stolen Ring of Speed (+19); we won't miss the 4 points of speed.

With incorporeality, we can just up and walk right through walls. This can come in handy, though we want to be careful that we aren't caught out somewhere that has no valid targets for our Area spells. If there's literally no open spaces then those spells just fizzle, which puts a real damper on our offense.

And that's all there is for the bottom of the Nether Realm. The Flame Imperishable is a plot coupon, in a way; we need it to reach Melkor at the "bottom" of the Void. So now we just have to climb back out of the Nether Realm. En route, we stairscum shamelessly, because honestly, fuck the Nether Realm.

We keep an eye out for monsters that use the "caster" drop pool, which includes spellbooks, rods and rod tips, and Mage Staves, because we need a Mage Staff. We find one, from a Nightcrawler -- weird, wouldn't have expected gigantic undead worms to be mages. Fortunately, it's merely magical, as opposed to an ego-item or, like our current staff, an artifact. That means we can imbue it with the Flame Imperishable, resulting in...



In a game full of patently ridiculous artifacts, the Mage Staff of Eternity is more ridiculous than most. But that's fine because it's in the postgame. As the name suggests, there's two other possible Eternity weapons: the Longsword of Eternity and the Heavy Crossbow of Eternity. They're similarly silly -- the Longsword gives +200% health, for example, on top of a number of other great powers, while the Heavy Crossbow gives you a 9x multiplier on every shot as well as letting you fire at least 6 times per turn. Weirdly, though, both of them also ban the use of magic, while the Mage Staff bans the use of melee. Losing magic as a character that mostly relies on melee or shooting is awful, though, while very few casters mind losing access to melee.

In short, the devs are still biased against melee characters. There's simply no way you're going to make it to the bottom of the Nether Realm without either relying on spells or else being an alchemist who has scummed up so much ridiculous equipment that you don't want the Eternity artifacts because they're worse than what you've already ginned up.

Ironically, wielding the Staff of Eternity actually loses us immunity to cold, but it's easily worth it for the near-doubling of our mana pool (all the way up to 2397 SP!).

Oh, and there's one more Eternity artifact: imbuing Power Dragon Scale Mail (c.f. Great Wyrms of Power) gets you the Power Dragon Scale Mail of Eternity. Naturally it provides every resistance...but no immunities, only a few extra powers (protect against experience drain, regeneration, and ESP for dragons), and no stat boosts. You'd think it'd at least give extra hitpoints, but no. Reason being, they just took a previously-non-plot artifact, named "Bladeturner", and turned it into an Eternity artifact without giving it any boosts to bring it into line with the others. Instead it sucks. Sure, Bladeturner was one of the most powerful artifacts...in Vanilla. In ToME it's not in the top 10 even without considering the postgame.

Oh, all of the Eternity weapon artifacts (but not ersatz-Bladeturner) give precognition. What does that do?

You enter a maze of up staircases. Arena level. Lesser Vault Ego-item (Light War Axe of Slaying) Ego-item (Indestructible Silver Amulet of Adornment) Unique (Beorn, the Shape-Changer). Ego-item (Hard Studded Leather of Resistance) Ego-item (Two-Handed Sword of *Slay Giant*) Ego-item (Hard Studded Leather of Vulnerability)...

Mostly it results in a lot of message spam. The game now tells us a lot of information about each level as it's generated. The problem is that there's zero filtering on this stuff, and there is a crap ton of stuff on every level around here. Seriously, here's one page out of five that I had to page through to get to the new level:



Handy I guess if you want to find all the non-randomized artifacts, but what're you going to do with them now? Also note the "Generation restarted (too many objects)" message. You can get that a half-dozen times in a row in the Nether Realm, because there's such a huge chance to get vaults.

We actually end up using Forochel instead of the staff of Eternity while climbing back out of the nether realm, because it's seriously taking 5-10 seconds of holding the spacebar down (to clear messages as fast as possible) before a level gets generated.

Alas, things don't go quite perfectly for us. While walking towards a staircase, we get in a fight with some wallwalkers, and I cast a Blast - Wall Destruction spell after a Time Out to give us some room to work with. Unfortunately, this cracked open a vault that I hadn't realized we were standing next to (due to the map-amnesia effect around here), leaving us in line-of-sight of a Greater Rotting Quylthulg. It summoned greater undead (including at least two Monastic Liches with powerful melee attacks), and those greater undead killed us, from around about 1000 HP, all in one turn. I don't even have a screenshot.

I'm not going to let this end the LP, because a) we've already won, technically, b) fuck doing all this again, for serious, and c) we're already cheating to get this far; remember the Cloak of Air? Dying in the Void still classifies you as a winner; the goal of the game is to kill Morgoth, not Melkor (and yes, I know they're the same guy, shut up). But we've come this far; we're going to finish the last bit of content. Just imagine that the repeated castings of Black Hole created a temporal warp and returned Mitch to a point from before he died.

I take some solace in that we made it to the bottom of the Nether Realm and killed the boss there without having died previously. Everything after that point ought to be a formality. You would think.

Anyway, we stairscum shamelessly on the way up, bopping up and down stairs until we detect a nearby staircase in the right direction. This isn't really any faster than what we did on the way down, but it's a lot safer. Many's the time we enter a level and are surrounded by monsters, next to an open-air pit of 95 nasty undead monsters, in line of sight of a pack of Zephyr Hounds, etc. Lots of unpleasant encounters that we'd just as soon not deal with! Like this one:



I don't want to see that shit! Back down the stairs we go.

Somewhat more scenicly:



There's an up staircase in the vault to our east (but it looks to be a Great Checkerboard Vault, so fuck that). And to our west is a level-150 Gray Mold. These stationary, melee-only enemies have 1d2 HP, a 1d4 melee attack, and are normally only level 1...which means this thing has received a whopping 149 level boosts. I bet it can deal 600 damage in a single turn of melee. I'm not about to experiment though.

At the Nether Realm level 678, a bit over halfway there, I see what I think is a pack of Fire Hounds, among the weakest hounds in the game, even if we weren't immune to fire:



But it's a pack of visually-identical Water Hounds instead. In Vanilla Angband, Water Hounds breathe acid, and are annoying but not very dangerous. In ToME, Water Hounds cast Whirlpool instead, which makes them probably the most dangerous hound type in the game. Whirlpool stuns, confuses, and damages you, and the damage scales with the caster level far beyond what breath weapons are capable of. I spent a single turn casting a detection spell, looking for stairs -- and got nailed by six whirlpools, which a) knocked us out (an unresistable paralysis, caused by accumulating too much time on the stun timer), and b) killed us again. Sigh.

Mitch says: We perish, we disappear, but the march of time goes on forever. Appropriate, bucko, because we're going to rewind time and march your ass right back up. Get a move on!

In hindsight, we have the Blood of Life; we can totally survive being killed -- once. So I didn't need to kill the ToME program before it could rewrite our savefile. In penance, I go ahead and spend six turns standing next to an angry pack of gigantic dragons before they finally manage to do us in.

The Dracolich claws you. *** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! *** The Dracolich misses you. The Dracolisk claws you. Ugh!

That "Ugh" is Mitch's much less poetic and much more disgruntled dying words. I think he's getting tired of this.

You have been saved by the Blood of Life! You are full. Looks like any other level.



The Blood of Life, when activated, gives you a full-heal and fixes anything wrong with you (including filling out the hunger meter), and then generates a new dungeon level. I was worried it'd dump us back in Lothlorien, but fortunately we just stay where we are. In Hell. This sucks.

Finally we make it back to level 666 of the Nether Realm. It seems like down stairs are 3-4 times more common than up stairs, but at last we find the stairs we're looking for:



You enter a maze of up staircases.



Home sweet home, back in the Void! No less airless, but the monsters are mostly under level 140 and there aren't 15 vaults / demon pits / graveyards on every level! This place is downright benign.



I mean, relatively. That gigantic horde of Spirits to our northwest would like to ask us our opinion about death. We're not a fan, speaking from experience. Fortunately they're incapable of walking through walls, so we just throw up a Time Out and ignore them.

A mere two levels later, we reach the "bottom" of the Void.

The power of the Flame Imperishable shatters the magical barrier. The way before you is free.

If we'd come here before killing Tik'srvzllat, we would have found that Melkor had put a barrier up around the stairs to his level. Thus the detour to the Nether Realm. We equip our Staff of Eternity, for form's sake if nothing else, and proceed.

You enter a maze of down staircases.





Melkor's here...somewhere.



Ahh, there he is. Hey Melkor, how's tricks?



Not so great, huh? I know how you feel. Dying sucks. But hey, we all gotta do it sometime! Some of us more than once, in fact. That in mind, could you do me a solid and just stay put?



Melkor, Lord of Darkness shrugs off the attack. <13x> Melkor, Lord of Darkness starts moving slower. <8x>

Awesome, thanks buddy!

Melkor has a little problem: he's a native to level 150. Thus he can't get any of the level-up bonuses that all of the monsters around him are getting. His speed is a downright sane +40, which we've just nuked into immobility. Contrast that to the nasties in the Nether Realm where we'd often have to hit them with three separate Black Holes before they dropped below speed parity, and this is a breath of fresh air.

Of course, Melkor is a dangerous monster. Here's a copy of his monster record, for posterity:



Notable entries include hitting to transform you into an abomination (which temporarily ruins your stats and skills), immunity to most common elements, all of the most powerful attack and summoning spells, a healing spell, and the ability to shriek for help (which hastes all other monsters in LOS). He also has a crazy 90,000 HP. Our first Black Hole didn't even crack a tenth of that.

I wish I could provide an actually interesting fight here, but intentionally not making use of our most powerful abilities is kind of against the ethos of this LP. We're here to crush insects into itty biddle bits, and if we have to expand our definition of "insect" to include "quasi-immortal demigod", then Phylum Arthropoda is getting a new entry.

Black Hole #2 doesn't do a whole lot visibly, though it does bring Melkor's health bar down a bit. The health bar has 10 sections, so he's below 81,000 HP now. But now that we've slowed him down, we can break out the big guns. We take a step back and wait for Melkor to move. It takes over 30 turns.



(Meanwhile, some level-130+ Dreads are periodically waking up and bothering us)

But now there's less open space to waste our Area spells into. Melkor, what's your favorite giant space rock movie?

Melkor, Lord of Darkness shrugs off the attack. <24x>

You don't like any of them, huh? Bad memories? Yeah, okay, I can see that.

One Tunguska Event takes off another 10% of his HP, and honestly it's all downhill from here.

Melkor, Lord of Darkness cries out in pain.

Not to worry buddy, soon enough you'll never feel pain again.

Melkor, Lord of Darkness cries out in pain. Melkor, Lord of Darkness screams in pain. Melkor, Lord of Darkness screams in agony. Melkor, Lord of Darkness says: 'So what?' Melkor, Lord of Darkness dies.



I continue to find it amusing how the game prompts us to commit suicide when we're done playing. That really is how Angband and its variants close out the game, but it's just such a bizarre way to do it.

Melkor's drop contains nothing interesting, except for a Ring of Speed (+0). I wonder what quirk of the item generation routines allowed that to happen? More relevantly, though, he "dropped" a down staircase:



Really leave the level?
You enter a maze of down staircases.





Back in Lothlorien! The pathway to the Void is gone, now, and Galadriel doesn't have any special words of thanks; nor do any of the other town leaders (though checking does at last give us a reason to use that stupid Void Jumpgate we established between Gondor and Gondolin).

Really, our only reward for defeating Melkor, aside from satisfaction, is our new status line. When we defeated Morgoth in the Pits of Angband, our title changed from Archimage to ***WINNER***. Now?



I guess gods in the Tolkein universe are a conserved quantity. Whenever one dies, the most powerful non-god entity is immediately inducted into the pantheon. I wonder what Tulkas would have to say about this?

Input: Q
Do you want to retire?











And that's it! We're done! Thanks for sticking with me through this, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.