Doll and Alpha made quick work of clearing the bulk of the imps and hellhounds out of the way. The fiery bodies of the hellhounds were hot enough to burn, but not hot enough to cause serious damage to either Alpha or Doll. Ice Queen's precision strikes ensured that even the imps that retreated were not given enough time to regroup and strategize.

The efforts of those three gave the other three the opening they needed. With Mirage granting invisibility and Sea Witch providing support, Runesmith was able to navigate her way close enough to the portal to drop her inscribed matrix in.

And down it fell, into the fiery circle that was the planar nexus.

For the first few moments, nothing happened. Then the flames around the nexus began to bend toward its center, as if a force were physically pulling them inward. The air pressure in the room rose significantly, causing ear pain for those sensitive to such things. And just as the pressure felt like it was going to be too much, it released, and the floor around the nexus lowered several feet. The very ground bent inward, as if it were starting to slide down a hill. Which was particularly bizarre because the nexus was on a platform and the underside of the platform hadn't moved a bit. The stone floor cracked and rumbled as its stones fractured.

Then demonic hisses ripped through the air as the air itself, well, ripped. In seemingly sporadic places the air around the nexus split apart and black hellfire began to spew out. Doll, with her 4D senses, would see that the air was actually ripping apart in intricate four-dimensional shatter patterns that originated at the nexus's center. And the black hellfire was HOT! Even Alpha, Doll, and Ice Queen would need to take caution when touching these flames directly.

During all of this, Mirage would feel a sudden surge within her as her more demonic side swelled. Through the terrible hissing, she would hear a whisper, which seemed impossible in and of itself. A hellish language beckoned, "Help pull me through, little one. I am almost here." And the worst part was, Mirage felt a compulsion to obey.

Sea Witch, perhaps a bit more sensitive to natural magics than the rest, or maybe just more observant in general, would notice something else peculiar. The nexus surge caused a surge in the local leylines as well. The ones that converged on this volcano. At the edge of the tears in the air, a new elemental was forming. It looked to be a large fire elemental, born of the exposed hellfire. It was... a hellimental...

---

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
Summary: The inscribed matrix was thrown into the nexus successfully. It might be starting to close, but if so, not gracefully or quickly. The air is ripping apart at the seams and hellfire is erupting from the rips. Doll can see their 4D pattern. Mirage is being beckoned by something still trying to emerge from the nexus, but only she can hear/understand it. Sea Witch sees a new large fire elemental beginning to form out of hellfire.

---

"Something's coming!" Doll's voice boomed from around the cavern.  This was bad, no question about it-- she could try to hold the gate shut, but she'd probably be badly burned in the attempt, and hellfire, she was learning, was no joke.

...but it might be worth it.  No, it was.  There were people present who were too vulnerable to this kind of fire, and while Alpha and the Ice Queen might be all right, they couldn't perceive or manipulate the fourspace structures that might make it possible to stop this, or at least delay it.

"Trying to hold it," she added, and in fourspace, her vast limbs reached out and gathered material unimaginable to those in threespace.  It wasn't that it was especially strong, as these things went, but she could use it as insulation to hopefully protect herself enough... well, enough where she could stand it.

And hey, she'd died once.  This couldn't be worse than that, right?

In fourspace, her tremendous mass flexed and she forced alien material to compress all around the opening portal, trying to press it closed-- or at least make things very, very uncomfortable from whatever was trying to squeeze through.

"Can't hurt, thank you," Klythie said to Amelia as she took the end of the tool that was offered. She accompanied in watchful quiet for a while after that; the brutal treatment of the imp prompted a grimace but no reproach. She used her own magic mostly to fend off errant or accidentally-accurate shots, and in a couple of cases redirect aggressors elsewhere.

"It's an elemental of hellfire," she called out after Doll, sounding alarmed. "This is a bigger threat than the others, be careful!"

As Amelia swung away from the hellgate, she hissed in frustration; annoyed, but not surprised that the first attempt to close it had failed. "Thanks for watching my back," she said, addressing Klythie once they had settled on a ledge above and to the side of the gaping maw. It seemed she was about to say more, but as the hypersurface flexed, her throat constricted as her animal instincts once again surged on a fresh wave of terror. Her eyes locked on the center of the gate, and a whining growl squeezed its way from her chest as reason momentarily gave way to the madness of feral instinct, dilating her pupils and dropping her to all fours. Yet, with her back literally against the wall, there was no easy path of escape from the malevolent intellect clawing its way toward them, a realization which allowed her cerebral side to once again take command.

You and I are going to have a reckoning when all this is through, she swore to herself as she began to formulate another new strategy. As Meg stated her intent to hold the gateway, Amelia arrived at a concurring idea. If imploding the gateway from within wouldn't work, then perhaps it would be best to loop this end back into the tunnel and force a feedback; effectively turning this gate into a cul-de-sac to nowhere. Unfortunately, preparation for this plan would take even more time than the previous one, and would require the assistance of someone who could see the actual structure of the tunnel.

"Doll, I'm gonna give you some help, but I'll need to see those hands-er, tentacles!" she called out, lashing a nearby spike of magical ice with a pair of Chains and, after anchoring herself in place with her boots and Willing her jacket to reinforce her physical strength, snapping it off at the base. As she reeled it in, she wrapped it again with another set of Chains, squeezing it at her best guess of stress points to shatter it into dozens of smaller fractal shards. Once done, all three of her Hubs scooted out from beneath her jacket, a pair of Chains assigned to each, and took up position on the walls above the ledge to automatically defend against anything attempting to interrupt her. Should a creature try and attack her or Klythie, the Chains would first ensnare, then invade its body through any available opening, before knotting around their insides and ripping their way back out through the path of greatest resistance.

Out leaped her tools and she furiously began to Inscribe a MOVE, LOCUS, TEMPO, and LISTEN matrix into each. When activated, they would convert the shards into anchors and drive whatever they were embedded in toward the barycenter of the entire group. "Plant one at every spot you're grabbing, and when I say when, just imagine really hard at them the idea 'go!'," she instructed the multi-dimensional being, tossing each shard into the air as she finished it without even waiting for confirmation. Given her own lack of ability to transcend spacetime, she could only hope Meg would be able to catch and utilize the anchors. "We'll just do a little higher-dimension stitching to shut this ugly wound."

That thing was hot... and not in the good way. Alpha could feel the heat pouring off the new elemental like he was being blasted, and the thing was still just standing there. He didn't want to know what an attack might feel like. And he certainly didn't want to know what it could do to him.

He'd been destroyed before. It was not pleasant. He didn't want to deal with that again, ever. So it was probably best to stay out of the thing's reach. Hefting a large chunk of rubble, Alpha flung it at the hellfire elemental, aiming for dead center. It was the size of a small SUV, so Alpha was fairly confident it would hold together until impact. What that impact might do, though, was anybody's guess.

Fraejia heard what was called out about the tear and could sense the way reality was ripping apart at the nexus in a rather vague way.  She could continue to keep teh imps at bay, those that were left, or she could try to help.  It seemed the others had things in hand at the moment and were trying to close up the breach.  When she heard about the Hellimental though her mind was made up.

Fraejia ceased her attacks on the scattered imps for now as they had a much bigger threat to deal with.  She began to skate through the air well above the forming tears and as she did left a frigid pattern in the air.  She had heard stories of others in her family line being able to pull this off but had never done so before, she wasn't even sure she was able to right now, all she could do was try.

The pattern she was creating quickly reveled itself to be a complex design with multiple runes that Runesmith would not recognize in her native Esperish language.  While the others continued their work she continued the diagram, beginning to rise and fall making it go from two dimensional to three the whole while Fraejia "sang" in her native tongue.


As the pattern began to come to completion it was a magnificent structure of connected runes made of filaments of raw power that resembled ice.  Fraejia floated higher, no further lines trailing from her intricate dance, and when she was high enough her song became louder and harsh as she unleashed a blast of power into the matrix to energize it and though no one could understand her native tongue it was almost like it was projected into your mind when the matrix triggered, a concept as irresistible as glaciers themselves seemed to vibrate through reality around them, Absolute Zero

Since I will be gone in a couple of weeks for an extended time for Gencon please have this post count as whatever happens in the interim and take as long as it needs to.

The air began to cool around Ice Queen as she began to work her magic, but whatever she was doing would take time. In the meantime Doll struggled to hold together the shattering reality around the portal with brute force. And to be fair, it was working. Kind of. It was at least helping. But stopping the fractures entirely was proving to be a lot like holding back a wall of sand that was being splashed with water. Not to mention the leaking hellfire was giving Doll some pretty serious burns wherever it touched her flesh directly. She wouldn't be able to keep her hold forever.

But hopefully she wouldn't have to. Runesmith tossed the inscribed ice shards to Doll and the only thing left for her to do was follow Runesmith's instructions and see what happens.

A few imps and hellhounds try to attack Runesmith and Sea Witch while they work on the runes, but Runesmith's chain guards dismantle them in gruesome fashion. A couple hellhounds wise up and keep their distance, but still lob streams of their fiery saliva at the duo from afar.

While all of this is happening, Alpha threw his large chunk of rubble at the hellimental. The debris would have been enough to reduce a normal fire elemental by at least half. And it seemed to do the same to this one, at first. The rubble pinned the fire elemental against the wall of the volcano, discorporating some of its black-flame body. But then its flames surged, melting (and consuming!) the very material of the rubble that had been thrown at it. It stoked its own flame with molten stone, then leapt at Alpha in an attempt to grapple the hero. As it got close, Alpha would be able to feel the immense heat of this living hellfire creature. It was perhaps even hot enough to make him doubt whether or not his natural resistances would be enough to protect him...

As Doll continued to squeeze the portal in four dimensions, Mirage continued to hear that same voice calling to her. Tempting her. "Aid me, sister. Your false allies hinder my ascent!" Not only does she hear the compulsive voice from the portal, but Mirage (and only Mirage) also understands what the few remaining imps are saying now as well.

"The Scorned One approaches!"

"This world may still know her wrath!"

"I give my life for you, mistress!" That last imp shattered horrendously midair as it attempted to penetrate the icy aura surrounding Ice Queen, who was still hovering above the portal.

It wasn't really the time to explain that Doll couldn't just move her entire limb structure into threespace-- certainly not without breaking something important in either her body or possibly causality-- but hopefully she could move something near enough to Runesmith to matter.

Thus, next to Runesmith, forming a twisted ring of red-blue strands easily a yard thick, a ring perhaps teen feet across.

A mouth said "Here's me! It's all connected-- do what you've got to!"

Alpha dove into combat with the hellfire elemental, trading blow for blow with little or no advantage gained on either side. He was weak versus magic, and that's all that these 'creatures' were. Still, he was impossibly strong, and could punch like a small nuclear device going off. He was confident he could still win.

His fist went right through the elemental. He grunted with satisfaction, until he drew back a stump. His left arm simply ended at the elbow, like it had never been there.

"Son of a—" The elemental whacked him across the face, cutting him off mid-swear. "I hate when this happens."

Klythie just gave a quick, acknowledging nod to Amelia's thanks, as there was too much going on to leave much room for conversation. On the plus side, Amelia's automated defenses were so effective that she wasn't urgently needed for a bit, giving her room to defend against and counterattack the artillerist hellhounds with repelling and sense-scrambling spells. While she wanted to help the others too, right now Amelia was probably too busy to ensure her own safety, and that safety seemed pretty critical for the overarching plan.

She did, at least, find time to call out "Come to me if you need healing!" It sounded like some of her teammates did at this rate.

Mirage had been stood, transfixed, paralysed for a long moment. The raging turmoil inside her was almost unbearable. And as the demonic influence in the area grew, so did she. She was at least two feet taller now, and most traces of the sweet young woman she usually was had been warped, her face too angular, her teeth too long, her horns, too sharp. Her hands ended in talons. Her eyes were like infernal pits.

She lashed out with her hands, and two huge replicas appeared over the focus of the portal. They reached down, and started to smash at everything in the way - rock, ice, imp, forcefield, it did not care what it attacked. And those hands were strong. Not just physical in form, they were fuelled by magic, a magic of the very worst sort under the circumstances. They actually seemed to be making some progress at making the portal larger, at least in some of the visible dimensions.

Even as her hands worked so feverishly to open the portal, Mirage's mind was fighting back. Tears like flame stood out on her cheeks, and she screamed out, almost incoherently, "Somebody stop me!"

That awful voice, the presence in her mind, was growing stronger by the moment. It would not be too long before she was totally in its power.

What was up with Mirage? She was looking kind of... evil. And the portal was getting larger. This was not good.

"Okay," Alpha said, flying over to where Mirage stood. He held out his one remaining hand for her to take. "Maybe it's time you take a break?"

Doll heard, of course, and this was one of those times when having a very large body and a large number of limbs was helpful.  Blue-red rings formed around Mirage's waist as she stood by to back up Alpha's attempt, or, if necessary, yeet Mirage across the room to stop her.

Amelia quickly adjusted to the target given her, tossing crystals into the ring as soon as she was confident their Runic matrix was properly formed and aligned. Apart from that, she purposefully did not look up from her work, trusting her safety to both her Guard and the Sea Witch; going so far as to pin her ears to the back of her head to block out as much sensory stimulation as possible. Even as flaming spittle spattered around her, she kept to her work, scooting away from the napalm-like patches as she forced her brain to maintain tight focus on simply getting the next shard done; keeping it from devolving into mad, animal panic by sheer force of will. As she worked, she considered how each Inscribed crystal would interact with the rest, calculating their cumulative effect and plotting how that would affect the local spacetime. She quickly arrived at the conclusion that, for maximum effect, there would need to be a set of anchors placed in normal space in positions that would create their own Runic matrix, an overlapped MOVE and TEMPO combination that would compound the effect of the anchors mounted in Doll's hyperspace area.

Twelve anchors in total were provided to the multi-dimension jellyfish being, a set of three for each of the three axes of space and a fourth for the time vector. As the twelfth one was tossed in, she gave a new set of instructions, "Define four circles encompassing each motion axis and the time vector, please, with the barycenter as close as you can make it to the center of the anomaly! Wait for my mark to engage the Runes!" All the while she continued her work, 'Scribing the matrix over and over again on the dwindling pile of viable shards until she had another set of seventeen, each one vanishing into unseen pockets within her jacket as soon as it was complete. Each time she opened her jacket, she was blasted by the intense heat from the volcano and the raging hell flames; and even though the scalding air was diminished by the presence of the ice, it was still enough to leave her completely drenched in sweat by the time she finished.

Standing, panting, she took in the scene again and realized things were even worse than she had feared. The Ice Queen was occupied in creating an incredibly complex matrix of her own and Alpha seemed to have sustained a grievous injury, and though his continued ability to move and respond was awe-inspiring, such impressive feats were overshadowed by the presence of Mirage's constructs tearing at the edges of the portal and the unholy monstrosity forcing its way into their dimension. Ok look, I'm going to need you to help me here, she cajoled her other side as he struggled and bucked to be free. Surprisingly, addressing him directly seemed to have an effect, as his animal rage momentarily subsided. I know you're faster and stronger than me, and you know I'm smarter than you, but right now just having one or the other isn't enough. There's nothing we can do individually to get out of this, and if we don't stop this thing here it'll probably burn the whole world. There'll be nowhere to run to. So we need to work together here. I need you to handle the moving while I handle the Runing. Can we do this?

For a heartbeat, it seemed that his spirit quaked, fear and anxiety leaping and snarling like a pack of rabid wolves; but by the end of that same breath it seemed as if he was willing to come to an understanding. Never before had Amelia attempted to actually communicate with him, as it always seemed as if intellect and instinct were diametrically opposed forces forever at odds with each other. Whenever danger too immediate for thought to counteract had presented itself, he had simply taken over and savagely delivered them from the threat, always leaving her feeling as if she were somehow incompatible with him and his bestial ways. This time, they were faced with a problem that neither one of them alone could solve, forcing her into a corner where her only hope was quite literally a prayer that both their minds and wills could come together for a common goal. He understood this, and with that understanding came an accord.

As if she had been struck by lightning, a surge of energy filled her entire being, flooding her veins with ice and setting her nerves aflame. Time seemed to dilate as Amelia's intellectual mind disassociated from her physical form, the effect giving an out-of-body sensation where it was as if she were an impassive observer watching herself from a position above and slightly behind her own head. At the same time, she could feel another mind connect with her own, merging his will to hers as he took control of motion and action, freeing her to handle thought and direction; suddenly, they were no longer two individuals juxtaposed against each other. They were one. Without thought, his will flooded their body, short-cutting their nervous system and quickening their ability to act, while her will directed their garments to move at a rate equal to one half the acceleration rate of Earth's gravity away from the center of the planet. Moving without conscious limitation, their speed and strength immediately multiplied, straining tendons and causing joints to pop in protest at the sudden pressure placed on them; but their conscious mind was beyond the ability of such mundane physical effects to hamper.

In one fluid motion, they ran along the wall at the back of the ledge, their hands leaping out to touch and Command two Hubs to Listen, before they flung themself into the air. The third Hub would remain behind to continue its job of protecting Klythie from physical assault, and would accompany her wherever she went should she move from that location. The other two swiftly positioned themselves at Amelia's back, one between their shoulder blades and the other just above where their tail joined their coccyx, Chains spiraling down their limbs to coil tightly above and below the joints. The compression helped alleviate some of the strain of moving with maximum potential, while the tight coiling also acted as an additional layer of armor. This served them well, as by this point the actions of the Guard in dispatching encroaching imps had drawn the ire of other hell beasts, and once the Hubs were no longer acting as autonomous defenses the otherworldly fliers descended on the beastkin.

Yet to the synchronized pair, such attacks were merely opportunities, airborne platforms that enabled them to scamper lightly through the air and reach the locations the Amelia-mind designated with ease. Acting as springs as much as armor, the Chains became extensions of the spirit-mind's limbs, granting them longer leaps and making them harder to grapple as they bounded from imp to imp. At each target destination, a crystal was extracted from its hidden place and buried into the stone deeply enough to not be immediately noticeable, obfuscating the goal the duo hoped to achieve. Given the freedom to not need to worry about movement, the Amelia-mind analyzed the near-complete matrix Fraejia was creating; allowing them to plant their anchors in places where they would overlap and resonate with the Ice Queen's own.

Seven anchors were placed in an array in the volcanic walls high above the hellgate as the pair dashed from ledge to ledge, imp to imp, before they catapulted away from such relative safety and dove past the hellemental toward the magma below. Out swept their Chains in a set of rapidly spiraling, nested circles; the Runes Inscribed within glowing brightly as they compensated for defining the material against the heat and the multi-dimensional forces at work in the area. Only at the last possible moment did they sweep forth and lash into the platform containing the portal itself, carrying the pair in an arc that nearly brushed the bubbling stone before swinging them out of view beneath the edge. Joints and tendons strained again at the forces of such a maneuver, but the Amelia-mind was unaffected and the spirit-mind was unconcerned as they impacted the underside of the platform. A pulse of will, instinctual as it was calculated, forced their clothing to carry momentum equal to one and a half times the effect of downward acceleration toward the top center of the platform, effectively inverting their own personal gravity and changing it from Earth to the platform they skidded along beneath.

Down on all fours and free for the moment from opposition, they careened around the underside of the structure, planting the next set of seven anchors in the second array. Upon completion, muscles and Chain coiled tightly through all four limbs as they planted their hands and feet against the stone and launched out into space once again. This last part would be the most dangerous, so as they crested the edge of the platform and swung once more into view both Hubs and Chains swirled out to their shoulders and formed twin shields, links twisted tightly to repulse as much heat as possible. The Amelia-mind experienced a twinge of trepidation as their body howled in abject terror at being so close to both the living hellflame and the demonic constructs, but still she forced them to reach of the three final connection points and ram the anchors home right at the edges of the yawning rift; willing Guard, Hubs, and Garments all to shift their momentum and reference locus time and again to dodge flame and physical attack from all angles. To those watching, it was as if Amelia had become a puppet whose master had gone mad, jerking her form around at impossible vectors whenever a lethal attack seemed guaranteed to hit.

Joints dislocated and ribs cracked from the effort, but together the pair managed to hammer their anchors home; the last one slamming down just as the Ice Queen's song reached its crescendo. "MEG NOW!" she roared, a shriek that seemed to come from two entirely different beings at once as she was swatted bodily into the air by the hellemental. For a moment, her Chains and Garments glowed brighter than the sun as the Runes inscribed within reacted to the blow, and somehow the entire volcano became filled with a scent of copper and citrus. Then the glow faded, and Amelia smashed into the volcano wall above where she had left Klythie, half her Chains limply trailing behind and the other coiled to absorb as much of the impact as possible. Even so, the hit rendered her unconscious, and her small form bounced from the rocky wall to tumble across the ledge.

Mirage was not really in a place where she could be reasoned with. Alpha's overture, at any other time, would have been met with friendly thanks. This time, it was met with the opposite.

Another hand construct appeared, roughly the size of a decent family car. It zoomed across intervening space, and ran into Alpha like a decent family car with homicidal tendencies.

Meg was, in this moment, very glad that the had so many eyes, and so many hands.  Amelia had done everything that she could to help her, but she was down.  It was time for Meg to act-- but now Livvy was losing control, and Alpha hadn't been able to stop her!

But while it was time to act, and there was too much to do, too many things happening at once!

Well, too many things for Meg as she'd been a year ago.  But that Meg?  That Meg had been gone, consumed by the Hunger Queen, only her soul remaining.  New Meg was, although she hated to admit it, different than new Meg.

Different from Ql%t! Meg.

This Meg was quite large and strong, really even by Ql%t! standards.  And she had eyes enough to see everything abound her.  Limbs enough to reach across the entire cavern, skimming through fourspace to touch threespace wherever they were needed.  This Meg could see the big picture; this Meg was the big picture, in a very real way.

And many people needed help right now, and there was a lot to do, and little time to do it.

But that was fine.

Bluered rings gently enclosed Amelia, twirling her briefly through fourspace (an experience a conscious Amelia might have found fascinating or utterly confusing) and placed her by Klythie, who had, after all, offered to heal the others.  (And Meg might need that herself, in a moment.)  Alpha?  Well, he was about to get hit by a hand the size and speed of an out-of-control minivan.

He'd be fine, as long as his self-confidence held.

Livvy was a problem, and doing things the nice way hadn't worked.  Meg couldn't really spare much attention to her, but if Livvy kept that spell up, it might make Meg's job immeasurably more difficult, even impossible.  She couldn't let that happen, and unfortunately, the team was low on options.

It wasn't the size of a family car, nor was it anywhere near as fast.  The limb extrusion that suddenly began to engulf Mirage wasn't any bigger than a Smart Car, and certainly wasn't going anywhere near as fast as even a speeding Smart-- it probably wasn't going more than 20 MPH, tops.  But it was emerging from a direction that, generally speaking, threespace people couldn't even imagine.  Meg's intent was either to grab Mirage and toss her hard towards a wall or possibly just batter her hard; either option ought to either disable her or, at a minimum, disrupt her activities.  But it might not work, and it wasn't, could not be what Meg's real attention was on.

The Doll jerked and thrashed in the air.  Meg wasn't putting any effort into doing anything with it, and she let it get thrown around by the actions of her own body.  This was the reason the Doll wore a mask; her facial expressions said more of "glitching video game" than "heroic struggle."

And that was closing the gate.

She didn't have any magic words, songs of battle or clever dialog for this.  But she did have Amelia's help, she did have the elemental concept of uttercold that Fraejia was creating-- not only valuable for suppressing the enemy's power, but also in reducing the amount of burns Meg was going to suffer while she did this.

Alone, it was unlikely that any of the three of them could pull this off.  But with their combined power... maybe, just maybe... It wasn't the first impossible task Meg had been involved with, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

In fourspace, Meg reached out to the anchors.  This was mathematically interesting, actually.  Having these projected into the space humans couldn't really perceive or usually understand was a powerful tool; she hoped that they'd be able to handle this.  And that she could, as well.

She guided the anchors into the vertices of a pyramidal polytope whose center overlapped with the Hellgate, and then, to the best of her understanding, activated the runes.

And then she pulled back from them; whatever this was, it might be spectacular.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:52, Sat 12 Aug 2023.

The fist took Alpha completely by surprise. Fortunately, he was not powered by foreknowledge of an attack, but by his confidence in how well he could resist it. Surprise attacks were almost a boon, in that they couldn't affect his confidence if he wasn't aware of them in the first place. The fist construct pounded him halfway across the inside of the volcano, but did no harm.

"Rude!" he said, picking himself up and brushing off small blobs of magma. He used both hands, despite the fact that one wasn't there anymore. Force of habit.

Mirage was not really in control of her actions at this point, but she was, sadly, the recipient of anything that happened to her body. When Doll did whatever multi-dimensional jiggery pokery that resulted in her, Mirage, being slapped across the chamber to hit the rock wall, it was her, Mirage, who received the resulting pain.

She bounced off the wall, and landed on a pile of formerly alive imps. They were not a comfortable divan. It was not a nice place to be. There was more... goo than she might have liked.

But whilst her brain was not her own, the damage to her body was more than enough to break her concentration. Her conjured appendages vanished, and it was going to take her a few moments for her various parts to get back on their respective feet, physically and mentally, so for a brief while at least, she was not doing anything to doom the entire planet to eternal subjugation by hideous enties from the very depths of Hell.

So that was a good thing, at least.

So much was happening at once that it was difficult for everyone to keep track of it all. Alpha was fending off attacks from both the hellimental and Mirage. Mirage was being mentally influenced by a being from within the portal, but was currently recovering from Doll and Alpha's intervening maneuvers. Doll was attempting to assist Runesmith with her rune placements and activations, helping to close the portal. Runesmith had made a temporary internal alliance between her logical and bestial inner-selves, and set up a system of runes that would hopefully turn the portal back on itself. Ice Queen was performing a feat of elemental magic that would hopefully reduce the hell-portal to absolute zero. And Sea Witch was offering support. Currently to an unconscious Runesmith. The ever-observant Sea Witch would even notice that a couple of mechanical drones were hovering at the very outskirts of the battle now. Surely sent by Ms. Nettle to get eyes on the situation now that the ash cloud elemental and imps weren't destroying them outright.

With the runes put in place and activated, the entire nexus chamber felt as if it... lurched. Not physically though. More like gravitationally. The fabric of reality was beginning to tie itself into a knot, and the side effects were not going to go unnoticed. Light was bending in strange ways, and a sense of balance was becoming less and less logical by the moment. Those that couldn't fly would do well to grab hold of something solid so that they wouldn't stumble into danger.

Which is exactly what happened to the hellimental. It had been charging toward Alpha for another attack, but it stumbled into the nexus instead. A clawed hand at least three times larger than a human's lashed out and grabbed hold of the elemental's black-flame body. The elemental flickered, then was absorbed by the being that had grabbed it. "No! I am too close! I will break free!" The being spoke infernal syllables of the abyss, but her voice resonated in everyone's minds and allowed understanding of the language. Her body flared with the hellfire it had just absorbed and rose further out of the nexus. She was up to her waist out through the nexus, and the heroes could see she was a fiery female form, as beautiful as she was horrifying.

But even as the being rose, Ice Queen's magic was nearing completion. The flames around the edge of the warping nexus were sputtering out. Frosty mist was creeping in. The very air itself was becoming sludgy, getting closer to becoming a liquid than a gas. The emerging being's flames were struggling to stay lit. "No, you cannot win! You do not scorn a Fury and get away with it!" Through sheer fury, the Fury's flames got brighter, fighting against Ice Queen's magic. "Hell hath no Fury like a-" And then the being's flames went out as she froze in place, and the air around her solidified into a solid crystal. A moment later the warping nexus finished tying itself into a knot and winked out of existence on this plane of reality.

The heroes had won.

With the nexus sealed off, the magic from the hellish plane was quickly dissipating. Mirage would feel it most keenly, but everyone would take note. Because whatever magic had been protecting the area from the effects of the volcano was quickly evaporating. The architecture was beginning to crumble, the ambient heat was increasing drastically, and the smells of ash and toxic gasses were increasing exponentially. The heroes would be wise to exit and return to the ship at their earliest convenience.

Klythie had mostly contributed in a secondary sort of way, but to her thinking, that was still a contribution. It wasn't like she'd just been a spectator - she could join in the victory. "Marveille!" she exclaimed once the intensely dramatic show of the enemy's defeat had concluded. "Well done, mesdames et-- But, let's be off," she interrupted herself hastily when she realized they were now standing in a self-repairing volcanic oven. "Can everyone else see themselves out?"

A wave of her wand lifted Amelia up, and Klythie used her two main tentacles to take the girl's weight before she turned toward the exit. She could handle the temperature fine herself, finding hydrothermal vents just as comfortable as the freezing depths, but that didn't mean that the unconscious girl could. "Pauvre petite," she murmured to herself as she took off running.

With the removal of the hellish influence, and having taken something of a pummeling, Mirage had slumped into unconsciousness herself. No longer awake, she reverted to her human form, a pretty blonde woman in a badly fitting bikini. It did not look like she was going to stir herself any time soon.

Alpha zipped over at super-speed, catching the blonde that had only a moment earlier been Mirage before she could hit the ground. With the mystical dangers now past, the volcano itself was still a hazardous place to be, and probably due to get worse.

It would be difficult to carry her with only one hand, but far from impossible. Satisfied that the team had done their job, Alpha scooped her up and flew back to the ship.

"Leaving now!" said Meg.

Departure for her was easy, of course.  What were mere walls in Threespace to her?  But she was worried about her allies, and the environment was becoming unstable.  She took some time to make sure that she could pull all of them free from the environment as they made their escape.

Fraejia saw the effects of her spell and was more than pleased with the results.  She had not been sure she could pull it off but sometimes it took such a situation to make such things possible.  As the creature was trying to come from the portal and yelled about how unfair it was Fraejia yelled back, "This world is under Esperish protection now demon!  Your kind would do well to leave it alone!"  When the creature finished being sucked back in and the volcano began erupt Fraejia suddenly started to drop, fortunately onto the platform that once housed the portal, like a puppet with her strings cut.

...and Meg caught her and dragged her along.  Why risk her life?