"Good morning, elder," I greeted him, looking him right in the eyes as he inhaled and found absolutely no trace of fear on me, which to a big thing facing a small thing would be very strange, indeed. "Me and my friends are simply traversing your territory, moving from one area to the next. We have no intentions of claiming your land, disturbing your people, eating your food, killing your prey, or taking what is yours. If we may but pass in peace, we shall leave and disturb you no further."

He stared at me, grunting, but couldn't find anything suspicious about me. He pointed and huffed and grunted.

"We killed a lot of the drac-bloods." I pointed up, and his eyes turned to where the dragon and griffon riders were circling overhead. "They are our friends, and waiting for us to move along. They have no intention of swooping down and preying on your people." I leaned forwards. "They've been getting stuffed on drac-blood meat and are getting kind of picky..."

The behemoth of an ape hurfed under his breath, baring his teeth.

"Yeah, Mire Drac-bloods taste horrible, there's no accounting for taste," I agreed. "So, how about it? Can we just sidle through, no need to fight? We'll be out of your fur in no time."

He waved a tree trunk of an arm, paws definitely big enough to wrap around me twice, gesturing up on the sky. I looked up to the Wake punching through the brooding clouds, pausing above us.

"Oh, that's the world outside. We're going to break the grip of the Hags on this place. We already knocked over one of their Obelisks... we're going to collapse them all and kill them."

His amazed huff blew me back five feet in the air, like wind in a sail. "Well, if it was easy, I wouldn't need to bring friends along now, would I? You want us to show you some of our skulls? It's been a long trip, and we've still got a ways to go."

He sufficed for sniffing me all over, then bounding up and sniffing over Briggs and AA, moving down the line to inspect members of all the different races... who didn't have Vajra to clean themselves up like we did. He could smell the blood of a whole lot of things on us.

They all watched me handling this multi-ton ape with amusement. I really wasn't afraid of the big fellow. If things got violent, well, we'd be trying monkey...

He was getting a bit excited, calling out and stirring up the apes all around as he identified who we fought.

I watched him bound away, and several older apes who were actually wearing necklaces of crude beads and bearing carved staves came out to meet him. They immediately got into a hooting and jabbering raucous discussion with great animation.

I fell back down to ground level as Briggs and AA stepped up, and everyone waited patiently. The Whiskers of the Wild on my face were glowing slightly, and I had no trouble understanding any of them.

"I think the big guy wants to help," I murmured to them, lifting their eyebrows. "It sounds like he's seen the Obelisks, and they know there's bad magic involved with them."

"We should tell them what's going to happen if we succeed. That elder of theirs can probably save them without much thought."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." I screwed up my face. "If so, we're going to have to figure out a way to bring him with us, or he'll slow us down."

"What, Kong's cousins aren't built for marathons? Who would have thunk it?" Briggs was pretty amused, despite himself. "And okay, I give, you were right."

I sniffed at him. "You and him are gonna be buds. What pattern you want?"

"Hrm." He looked around. "I was thinking mandrill."

I lifted an eyebrow. "Interesting..."

"There's mountain apes back home in the tribe. We get along pretty well with them. Not quite as bright as these fellows, though..."

"Yeah, if they stick with us, they'll be completely ruined," I admitted cheerfully. "Haul could hold him, but we'd need to build him something to stand on, he's too big."

"Which would probably bend under his weight."

"Sixteen tons capacity. He probably masses ten or so?"

"So there's some room. He's gonna have to eat, though..."

"Like we haven't been passing by boundless light snacks for him..."

"True, I don't want to have to feed him a ton of bananas a day or whatever."

"Tusks. Canine teeth. Him ape, ape omnivore."

"Think he'd like a pair of battlefists?"

"If he can tolerate some armor, he'd be a great line breaker. And shouldn't a big monkey have a stick?"

"I think we have plans for the little fellow..."

"I'll boost his Int with a Mark. That should get him to around human average, at least."

"Just make sure they know to stick to their elder when things start going wrong..."

"This whole zone is probably 'close to their elder'. I don't think it will be a problem."

"Good enough for me."

=================

Author's Notes:

https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Behemoth_Gorilla

The toughest basic gorilla in D&D. And then you template him... Yes, he can straight up butcher a T-Rex in not much time at all...

King Kong from the 2005 Peter Jackson movie is about the size of a primordal gorilla. The most abusable thing is, of course, that he has 21 Hit Dice, which means he can reach post-Twenty in Skill Ranks... and take Legendary Feats...

================

---------------

Taking a day off and having a feast of fruits and nuts with the intelligent apes wasn't a waste of time, especially when you have a few dozen helpers assisting you with making a pair of battlefists for a twenty-foot gorilla.

Still, what really set them off was the Marks, and getting Opened to Soul Magic. Naturally enough, I couldn't stop at just him. He had over twenty Hit Dice, and as a Primordal gorilla his life force and vitality were astounding. He only had to gain Levels and start taking Feats.

He Shaped in his Lightning Gauntlets atop the battlefists we made him, and I swear the jungle almost exploded with the monkeys going off in excitement. Glowing Soulbound battlefists wreathed in green-white lightning, worn by a brute that big and awesome... what wasn't to love?

And, of course, the fact that mentally I towered over him like he did over us physically meant he was a puppy in front of me. Always good to have big friends and everything.

Since they weren't Zoned in and limited, the apes here actually raided other zones, and loathed them all. Having new weapons to do so, and the Markspace to talk to far more intelligent and learned outsiders who weren't trying to make slaves out of them, they looked at The Map and just gawked at how big the World Outside really was.

Naturally, I couldn't and wouldn't do all of them at this time. But any Int bonus was a major uplift to them, and just giving it to their leadership meant word surged out explosively to all the tribes in the jungle.

The times, they were a-changing.

---------------

Zone 14...

This was a containment zone, meant to hem in the monkeys and make sure they didn't stray too far.

It was filled with undead. Thousands of years of accumulation of undead.

The apes raided it regularly, because if they didn't, the numbers grew and grew until they pressed in on the great escarpment the jungle of the monkeys had ended up being built on.

But someone was always reinforcing these undead, be it priests outside the zone, or the undead inside the zone after being given new corpses to work with. Tied to the Obelisk, they couldn't leave, couldn't grow... except in the direction of the monkeys.

But Mithar and his mutt, there were a lot of these things...

It was pretty plain we weren't going to be able to run through this place. The number of undead here had to reach into the millions, and it was slowly and surely coming our way. Not just humans or humanoids, of course... most were non-human natives and beast-bones, particularly larger ones. The only thing holding most of them back was the fact they couldn't climb, and the winged apes secluded in the center of the plateau came out to take on any skeletal fliers.

Yeah, there were winged apes. I started humming Follow the Yellow Brick Road, and there were some knowing guffaws...

So, it meant we had to arm up. Since we had an enthusiastic army of monkeys here who were totally ready to fight, and we definitely needed the additional offense, well, why not put them to use?

And Baneskulls and Tokens could both be fed with Naming Karma.

Every Intellect Mark I made was a potential Smith, Bonecrafter, or someone with Spellcraft. If they were talented enough, they could directly become a Shaman recruit, and if not, they all wanted to be Soulshapers. Even if they couldn't get a big pair of battlefists, having Lightning Gauntlets Shaped, plus Banefire on top of them, made for a very impressive sight.

And so, we started killing undead, for hours and hours on end.

They were packed up, had killing instincts, and were commanded by the more intelligent among them. Said intelligent ones were hatracked by Token-bearing Archers, leaving some very big and stupid skeletons around to be mauled by ever-increasing numbers of monkeys with sparking fists.

The apes were enthusiastic, to say the least, and they really didn't get tired of exploding all these old bones that kept coming for them. Of course, they were rather lacking in tactics and strategy, so I didn't let them fight without oversight, and Elder Arg there to keep them in line. Still, apes with ghost-fired, crackling fists bouncing all over the place, wearing Baneskulls about their necks and Tokens at their hips, made for quite a sight.

The fact we could Cure them from basically anything short of death just utterly wowed them, even the Shamans were awed by that level of Healing ability. Apes go running out, flail around and kill a lot of stuff, come pounding back to get Healed, go out and do it again. Elder Arg was particularly enthusiastic about this tactic...

Which is about when Hazé returned for another night of quick power-up. She'd been gone only an hour or so in the outside world, but given a four hundred times temporal modifier... eh, it had been days here.

----------

Just inside Not-A-Zone 13...

I watched Amber, Verd, and Veis teaching a bunch of she-apes how humans danced, which was only fair, seeing as how the she-apes had been teaching the girls their own dances. Having toothy smiles, the apes took a big shine to us Hagchildren, and naturally Briggs was totally their own hairy buddy, especially once he got his Whiskers and could hoot and howl freely with them.

He was over there now, teaching them how to throw using sling staves. With their strength, and some Returning ammunition, they could wreak havoc from range with them, which the smaller apes, the champa-ka, were all for.

The chakon, the gorillas, were much more into the melee mindset, which was fine, because a lightning-handed gorilla can fight any way he wants to, thank you.

Errant was watching his sister and a champa-ka swaying to a waltz from a very straight-faced elf who had pulled out a lyre, while another ape nearby was deftly setting a drum tempo for them.

"So, I see Hazé is initiating the Shamans into the greater world of the gods," Errant mused as he sat down next to me, offering me a gourd of fruited water.

I glanced to the side, where a holy light was playing down from the stars, and some apish Celestials were discussing things over with a whole lot of awed Shamans who were completely bowled over by seeing monkey-ish Heavenly spirits.

"It's a magical world. They are going to evolve fast once they get out of here," I noted to him, clinking gourds and taking a swig. It wasn't booze, but not half-bad, really.

"And be part of Sama's growing empire?" he observed, silver eyes seeing all.

"Some will join me, sure. But like anything else, most of them are sedentary. I've been asking if there's some primeval woods at the heart of the Sidhete, and been getting good responses. The elves won't mind some decent neighbors with strong natural biases."

"You're going to have an entire race in your Marktell and practicing Soul Magic," he observed slyly. "Like, holy shit, Sama. Kingdom-building much?"

+++++++++++++++

Author's Notes:

The champa-ka are a variant of a Paizo/Pathfinder race of ape-men called the charua-ka under demonic influence, with great throwing ability.

The chakon are variants of a forgotten monster from the 1E Fiend Folio, the dakon. They are LG gorilla/chimp ape-men. They'd be bros to Tarzan. Inspired by Gorilla City.

Flying winged apes are statted up in Paizo, the derhii.

As the Void Brothers noted, no demonic influence here. Strange, that...