Session 22

We start out by following up on this invitation:
 
https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T10DSNA2Y-F012X00JFGD/screen_shot_2020-05-02_at_12.31.34_pm.png
 
On Limerance Street, we chat with Axon a bit. He has never seen the sigil and believes that the house there is empty. It is in pristine shape. We poke around, eventually finding an iron door in an alley across the way which has that sigil on it. It had a padlock on it, but Gwyn killed it with his gun.
 
We go down some stairs into a storage room. There's another door there, which is locked. On the other side of the lock is a tunnel which goes under the street into a glass door and a room beyond.
 
When we pass through the glass door, it becomes the rose window in the garret room in the house, where we now are. There's normal sort of attic stuff in here. We go down into a guest bedroom, where I find a hidden door in the closet, behind which is a hidey hole with a creepy white girl's doll. Fynlan gets cursed by the doll.
 
We go through that into the upstairs hallway. At one end of the hall is a magic clock which is constantly decaying but never disappearing. We explore a bunch more rooms (I get a cookbook from the library) find a diary in a bedroom that talks about a metal heart in the main room.
 
In the main room, we talk to the house, via a bunch of chalices shaped like mouths. The house tells us that the house and heart were separated. The heart, apparently, is in the kaleidoscopic void.
 
In the dining room, we find a trap door under the table and go down, into an idyllic wooded glen. It's a half world, fueled by magic leftover from the heart, and works like a No Room.
 
In the half world, we do the Astrolatry ritual together. :) This gives us a +1 Joy.
 
We go back and search the rest of the house. We find a silver disk that expands into a cube that's 6' across with a 2' hole in it. Arms reach through and grab Gwyn; I try to grab him but miss, he's pulled in.
 
I leap in afterwards. There are floating sphere of gold guarding a door. Surprisingly, it's not violent.
 
Simone and Fynlan come in after us. Simone commands the orbs to stand down. I inspect them; they are called Tiberians. We pass them, and open the door.
 
Gwyn uses a key he found earlier to unlock the door. (+1 Acumen to party). On the other side is a room that stores 20 ephemera objects, and renders Objects of Power inert.
 
We finish exploring the house (+5 Acumen to party), then leave it and go to talk to Axon. Axon says that he moved everything to Nowhere, not to the Kaleidoscopic Void. The heart was sent there by the contradiction of both existing and not existing.
 
We leave and go home. I chat with the Blood Prince and get their advice. They confirm what I already know about the Kaleidoscopic Void, and provide the idea that maybe only someone insane could do the necessary magic.
 
I use Reach Into Chaos to try to retrieve the heart, but can't. Instead, I find out that there's a ritual known by very few, in fact, only Palintalinosh. We ambush him, I eat the ritual out of his mind and write it to a monograph. We untie him and I eat the last five minutes of his memory. I buy some drugs from Palintalinosh erase his memory and we go.
 
We go back to my house, with some madmen that Fynlan bought from a demon, and Heinronymous to read the ritual from the monograph. I use Monograph Twin to make a copy.
 
In the ritual, we must each a statement of the contradiction which defines us.
 
Locke: "My life is now dedicated to healing a universe I have spent my entire life trying to leave."
Fynlan: "I am alive, but not alive."
Simone: "I am not real."
Gwyn: "I am not real."
We separate from our bodies. For a moment, we experience each other's minds, and are then in the Kaleidoscopic Void. We see the heart in the distance, float to it on wings of our will. The metal heart has a panel covered with sand; I draw the glyph from the house on it.
 
The heart starts beaten, we are teleported back to the house. A box appears and gives us a business card for an address in the Brickhouse District. The organization is called The Sodality of the Secret, which is magically protected. We are now a part of it. They are fuckin' cool.
 
+1 Joy for going to the Kaleidoscopic Void and back. +1 crux and +5 acumen for story completion.