The Prison of Demons

By Michael Beck


Ask any secret warrior what the worst part is about fighting demons, and they'll tell you the problem is that you can't get rid of them. No matter how ballistic you get on their eyeballs and no matter how much gunfire and lightning bults you pump into their slimy bodies all you manage to do is send them back to the Underworld for a little while until someone summons them again.

About six hundred years ago, in an alternate 2004, a now-extinct faction of masochistic commandos who trained for combat by dividing themselves into groups of a hundred and locking themselves in gulags with food for fifty sat down and decided to do something about this. They entered the Netherworld and shaped the most escape proof prison they could come up with, then began not killing demons but instead wounding them severely. The almost-but-not-quite dead demons were carted back to the Netherworld, where they were locked into a jail cell. This went on for eight years, and quality of life everywhere improved significantly, until a critical shift occurred and the next thing anyone knew a bunch of guys with a bad case of sibling rivalry calling themselves "The Monarchs" were running things. Cut off from support, the commandos tried to keep the demons inside the cells but there were a whole lot of sorcerers who wanted those demons. The battle in the caverns raged for two weeks, and it seemed all hope was lost.

Then, something incredible happened. The Netherworld rabble took independent action. It occurred to them that having thousands of pissed-off badass named character demons rampaging through the Netherworld might have an adverse affect on their life expectancy, and they formed a few hasty angry mobs and took the attacking sorcerors from behind.

There were only five surviving commandos, and they realized that they would never be able to hold off another attack by themselves. They began to train the surviving rabble, those who were willing, in their arts of brutal endurance training and massive willpower. Today, the Prison of Demons still stands in the Netherworld, guarded by the descendants of these people.

Description

The prison is located on the third level of the Netherworld, in the center of huge cavern which has been Shaped to be perfectly smooth on every surface. Anyone with even one point of police, leadership, intrusion or appropriate info skill will take one look at it and think :"Killing ground". The entire inner surface of the cavern is covered with high powered lasers (11 damage), at least four can fire on a character each round. Unnammed characters are killed on a role of three or more. Assuming you get past all that, the prison has no walls to scale or gates to crack. It is a huge globe of metal two feet thick, the only way to get in or out is to Shape your way through against the determined will of plenty of high-powered Shapers within. If you get past them, the interior is defended by several hundred products of one of the toughest schools of combat in existence. The demons themselves won't be much help, the guards regularly torture them to make sure the demons aren't in any state to do much of anything (treat them all as severely wounded).


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