Whispers of Lanaru
| Whispers of Lanaru | |
|---|---|
| The Storm Palace | |
 | |
| Type | Tour Guide Tip |
| Place | The Storm Palace |
| Available to | Heroes, Vigilantes, and Rogues |
| Level range | 1–50 |
Overview
Introduction
Storming the Palace
Exploration Mission
This place gnaws at your sanity relentlessly, like hundreds of maggots digging into the soft flesh of your mind. It causes a pounding sensation in your skull that makes it hard to focus. Anxiety claws at your throat like a specter bent on your demise.
You catch glimpses of things that should not be, violations of the laws that govern reality. These contradictions make you question concepts that you trusted to be absolutes, threatening to let slip away the very foundations that anchored your comprehension and ability to reason.
How certain can you be that all meaning is not already lost forever? Or perhaps, such concepts never existed to begin with...
- Confront the influences of the Storm Palace.
- Attempt to ignore the whispers.
Too Busy
The burden of responsibility from the many tasks you currently have would make it dangerous to confront these influences now.
No More Missions
After spending a potentially dangerous amount of time in the twisting and tenebrous space surrounding the Storm Palace, you can feel your mind's eye focusing. Having navigated the labyrinth of its maddening influence, you have steeled your mental fortitude and are able to turn away the formless whispering that assailed your psyche.
Accolade
You've obtained this Accolade by earning every Exploration badge within The Storm Palace.
Missions
Courting Madness
Briefing
Thinking on the scope and incomprehensible existence of the formless abyss stretching before you brings with it the feeling of needles in your mind. They strike with pinpoint accuracy on the surface tension of the bubble that encapsulates your sanity.
Suddenly you feel this yearning, a powerful urge, to throw yourself into the void below. The more you consider the idea, the better it sounds. <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>Perhaps the Path of Madness has already claimed you.</color></scale>
- Contemplate Courting Madness.
The more time that passes, the harder it becomes to ignore the irrational compulsion to give yourself to the emptiness below. The concept of madness is a tenuous one. Perhaps by accepting this illogical derision within yourself, you become a more complete being?
Why impede yourself any further? You know what must be done.
Mission Objective
- Acknowledge the possibility of madness
As humanity has begun expanding its interests into extra-dimensional spaces, particularly the Shadow Shard, peculiar psychological disorders have begun to infect those spending a large amount of time away from their home dimension. New categories of mental illness have been coined to give shape to the odd manias and delusions creeping into the minds of the people staffing the outposts in Firebase Zulu, and you too have had strange thoughts emerging unbidden from your own psyche. Yet you continue to engage this strange place in a race against time: either you will stand triumphant against the Shadow Shard's many challenges, or you will succumb to the madness that has claimed lesser minds.
Acolyte of Anger
Briefing
As you move through the bizarre landscape, an unease digs into your chest. Maybe it is your imagination, but it feels as though whole of this environment does not want you here. The rocks, the grass, even the very air itself is protesting your presence.
Your mind's eye can sense this concentrated anger pressing down on your psyche. Reinforcing yourself against its influence, you push towards the source: The Lock of Anger. <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>You are determined to turn this malevolence back on itself.</color></scale>
- Become an Acolyte of Anger.
Perhaps Rularuu's anger at being imprisoned within the Shadow Shard is immense, but you are not to be underestimated yourself.
You have refined your rage into a potent weapon to be wielded against those foolish enough to trifle with you. This pressure simply serves to better compress your anger into a diamond-like strike to deliver to those unlucky enough to stand in your way.
Mission Objective
- Confront the influence of anger
The Shadow Shard hates you. You can feel its anger pulsing in the air around you and the very ground you stand upon, throbbing up through your feet. The wind is a roar of anger at your very presence, echoed by the Shadow Shard's twisted inhabitants. You steel yourself against this emotional onslaught, unbowed by this world's hostility. You will turn its hate and anger back upon itself; you will be an Acolyte of Anger who wields rage as a weapon against it.
Malice Aforethought
Briefing
You perceive a malice that encroaches with every step taken. Creeping ideas attempt to wedge themselves between your thoughts, questions of morality and the justifications of the strong. You have broken countless foes as you pursued your ideals, but not necessarily out of malicious contempt; they merely stood as obstacles on your path that had to be overcome.
Regardless, Rularuu is not a foe who can be rationalized, these thoughts only serve to cloud your focus. You press onward towards the Lock of Malice in the face of these influences, <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>but the question remains in your mind.</color></scale>
- Defy Malice Aforethought.
The Shadow Shard would delight in compromising the system of reason by which you operate. Every doubt is a weakness that can be maliciously exploited.
The god-like Rularuu knows your limited mortal reasoning is an avenue by which he might undermine your will to resist. He thinks too little of you, and you will prove how grave an error that is.
Mission Objective
- Challenge the pretenses of malice
Everything about the Shadow Shard expresses the danger it represents to your home dimension. This is not some mere foreign power that can be reasoned with or with whom a peaceful settlement can be negotiated. Its very existence is built upon a hostility towards anything other than itself; malice is ingrained into every particle of its being. But are you not just projecting your own human-born ideas of good and evil upon it? Is the wolf acting with malice when it devours the hare? Is it evil for the strong to dominate the weak?
Tormented
Briefing
As you make your way through the writhing, scarlet void, the unrestrained anguish of its prisoner assaults your mind. You strain to repel it, driving you to your knees as you gasp for breath. Mortal minds are not conditioned to process the magnitude of emotion experienced by a veritable god.
<scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>You focus on continuing your journey onward.</color></scale> To remain here any longer than necessary, exposed as you are to these primal lamentations, would be to risk losing your sense of self and succumbing to Rularuu.
- Endure the cries of the Tormented.
Rularuu writhes and thrashes against the boundaries of his prison. To restrain a higher-being is an unthinkable concept, but one that has been made reality. His unbridled fury, humiliation, and indignity resonates within the souls of all who enter the Shadow Shard.
Rularuu's ire and malevolence permeates all things within this domain.
Mission Objective
- Resist succumbing to torment
The Shadow Shard is a prison created to house a powerful entity, an entity tormented by its imprisonment. Its sense of indignity, of injustice, has been concentrated here to such a degree that it has become part of the dimension. You can feel the entity's raw emotion flow through you; you have felt it from the very moment you arrived and it has been chipping away at your sense of self ever since. Remaining here risks making these emotions part of yourself; or worse, you risk being subsumed by the Shadow Shard, losing all identity and will by becoming one with Rularuu.
Hate Machine
Briefing
Abruptly, you are overwhelmed by an intense malice and you find yourself despising everything around you. You hate this disgusting maroon emptiness that surrounds you, the grotesque forms of Rularuu's soldiers, and the way everything here defies you.
You know this is unlike you, but as you approach the Lock of Hatred the intensity increases. The Shadow Shard is a machine that manufactures hate, and <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>you must not allow yourself to become a part of its workings.</color></scale>
- Understand the conceptual Hate Machine.
The raw energy behind this hatred is palpable. Rularuu hates that he was trapped, he hates the Shadow Shard, but most of all, he hates that you still have freedom while he does not.
Every moment is spent working towards his bid to shatter these bonds and escape into our world.
Mission Objective
- Perceive the threat of hatred
The hatred Rularuu feels is infectious. It radiates from him in waves, and coming from such a powerful and otherworldly mind you have to struggle to keep it from overwhelming you. Rularuu's minions are thought to be extensions of his will; it is easy to understand how that could be as you feel the urge to comply with that will creeping up on you in moments of distraction or weakness. Rularuu has engineered his minions into an engine geared towards releasing him from his prison, you must be mindful you do not become a cog in that machine.
Fist of Fury
Briefing
As you contend with the Storm Elementals within this sector, you notice that contact with them leaves brief imprints of emotion on your psyche. With some focus, you are able to siphon the emotions that strengthen your fighting resolve, filling you with righteous fury to strike down those in your path.
You ascend towards the Lock of Fury on your climb through the tenebrous void. Turning these lingering wills back on their host is empowering. <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>There is no means you will not utilize to ensure Rularuu does not break through to your world.</color></scale>
- Hone your Fist of Fury.
There is too much at stake to be concerned about the implications of utilizing Rularuu's own emotional energy. The tide must be stemmed to ensure the survival of your world.
Wielding the fury of the Shadow Shard's master against him is a weapon you are willing to take up in the name of securing your future.
Mission Objective
- Channel the power of fury
You have come to realize that emotion is an elemental force in the Shadow Shard, that the storms that sweep through this place are composed of emotional residue. You have spent enough time here to gain an intrinsic sense of these emotional ebbs and flows. Here you can feel these warping concentrations of Rularuu's fury yet you are able to make them your own, adding your own feelings of anger at the danger posed by Rularuu. You summon images of Rularuu's minions running rampant upon your beloved homeworld and are filled with a rising fury.
Eve of Destruction
Briefing
You have come such a long distance to reach this place. The devastation to Rularuu's soldiers at your hands cannot be disputed. It was a necessity, the means to oppose an embodiment of destruction meant becoming an avatar of it yourself. This is a task you would repeat a thousand times over if it meant the survival of your world.
The cluster closest to the vaunted Storm Palace claims the name of Lock of Destruction. The penultimate destination within the Shadow Shard looms before you, and <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>the devastation wrought by your hands propels you forth to continue your climb.</color></scale>
- Observe the Eve of Destruction.
The blood that has been spilled yearns for retribution. No destruction goes unnoticed; its indiscriminate path is littered with the bodies of the broken who cry out.
Theirs are the burdens whose weight you add to each of your strikes, driving down upon and shattering the aspects of Rularuu that dare to hinder progress on your path. Each blow in succession lending to the next, a force of destruction that perpetually accrues momentum and cannot be stopped once in motion.
Mission Objective
- Accept your capacity for destruction
Your destiny on the Shadow Shard is drawing very close. Everything you have experienced so far has been building to this point. You have suffered countless indignities, have had your body and mind abused and violated and the time of reckoning is here. Rularuu is a being who consumes and destroys and now you shall show him that such talents are not his alone.
Lord of Storms
Briefing
It looms in the distance, the sector's namesake the Storm Palace. The daunting shadow has been omnipresent in your travels within this place. The writhing scarlet void surrounding you pulses with malice and contempt. It attempts to repel you with dulcet deceptions and unspeakable threats.
You will not be denied. You have overcome much to reach this forlorn realm, and its final bastion will not deny you this triumph. <scale 1.1><color BurlyWood>Nothing will stand between you now in your bid to ascend to the apex of this malevolent structure.</color></scale>
- Conquer the Storm Palace.
To succeed in this task will establish you as an undeniable threat that even Rularuu cannot ignore. The Shadow Shard's master will surely recognize the danger you pose to his escape after this.
You will have to remain vigilant moving forward; to issue such a challenge to a god is not an act that should be taken lightly.
Mission Objective
- Rise to the apex of the Storm Palace
Now you stand upon the apex of the Storm Palace, at the center of a vortex of destiny and mystical energy. So few have come as far, so many have fallen in the attempt that you deserve to be recognized as a master, of a sort, of this distant and inhospitable place. By now, words of your deeds have spread to even Rularuu itself and the threat you and your fellows represent should be apparent. Go now and strike the final blow that will confirm, once and for all, that the defenders of Primal Earth are not to be trifled with.