Session 13: SNTR-1 Dreams of Electric Sheep, But What Do Gutters Dream Of?
General Summary
Closer inspection of the undead fought less session reveals they were indeed from one body, split into two undead spirits as a result of an attempted incursion by a fungal parasite of some kind.
Leaf brings Padme to Gern Tos to be healed and learns that the priest hasn't seen Kopala, who was supposed to be at the Temple of Kraa'thom to assist him with quarantining the Tower of Chelor.
Gherd sets up a meeting with Eunice Mince, a local harmless lowlife and Gutpunch partaker (aka -- a Gutter). He meets the Coast Guard at The Lodge and gives them information about how to get to the Gutter Party the following night, as well as information about a being called Spug who brews the Gutpunch. He explains vaguely how the drug feels, recalling a shared dream and an intense feeling of hunger the morning after.
Leaf hangs out with Klaus for some bro time, and maybe is making the Baron's haughty son a better person in the person. Maybe not, though. Only time will tell.
After spending the day prepping and eating, the CG heads into the caves to the Gutter Party. Along the way, they notice the once smooth cavern floors are turning into gravel, and Leaf sees lichen on the walls that spell "Ylmyo-Aldon" in Druidic. The group decides not to bother avoiding getting Dusted with spores, thus gaining the emotional connection and 15ft tremorsense for the duration.
Upon reaching the cave, the CG is sized up by who they assume to be Kyrion, a half-elf half-Triton with facial tattoos indicating his exile from Triton society. He seems ill and ill-at-ease, but lets them through without any fuss. Inside the cave are several Gutters, some who seem totally at ease, others more nervous. Eunice Mince is there, as well as a scrawny-looking dragonborn man who is tending the various flames in the cavern.
A being who can only be Spug tends a massive cauldron. He brews the Gutpunch by throwing un-exploded Sporelings into the cauldron, adding a familiar sparkling cobalt-blue dust, and "searching" with his eyes closed, a low drone eminating from his chest.
Leaf and Emelia both partake in Gutpunch. They understand the chant Spug drones, which ends with "Ylmyo-Aldon" twice. They then experience a terrible but somehow beautiful (to them) dream about an otherworldly machine of flesh, metal, and fungus. Meanwhile, SNTR-1 is able to Identify Gutpunch and finds that in addition to narcotic properties it faciliates an exchange of psychic energy -- something is broadcast to the Gutters in the form of their shared dream, but something is also taken from them in the process. This manifests physically as an actual lessening of the weight of the Gutters over the course of the four-hour dream. Spug morphed into a statue-like mushroom state and seems to be a focus for this psychic energy.
At the end of the dream, the Gutters each recite the words "Ylmyo-Aldon", some multiple times, others just once. It's likely those who have been doing Gutpunch longer are the ones who repeat it more. Leaf notices that the Tremorsense gained from the spores has extended to 20ft. Leaf and SNTR-1 decide that shit is fucked up enough that they should probably just kill Spug to stop the Gutter parties, and loiter around when the Gutters trickle out in search of eggs. At the end of the session, only the Coast Guard, Spug, Kyrion, and the dragonborn remain in the cave.
Spug's Chant
The Dream
Leaf brings Padme to Gern Tos to be healed and learns that the priest hasn't seen Kopala, who was supposed to be at the Temple of Kraa'thom to assist him with quarantining the Tower of Chelor.
Gherd sets up a meeting with Eunice Mince, a local harmless lowlife and Gutpunch partaker (aka -- a Gutter). He meets the Coast Guard at The Lodge and gives them information about how to get to the Gutter Party the following night, as well as information about a being called Spug who brews the Gutpunch. He explains vaguely how the drug feels, recalling a shared dream and an intense feeling of hunger the morning after.
Leaf hangs out with Klaus for some bro time, and maybe is making the Baron's haughty son a better person in the person. Maybe not, though. Only time will tell.
After spending the day prepping and eating, the CG heads into the caves to the Gutter Party. Along the way, they notice the once smooth cavern floors are turning into gravel, and Leaf sees lichen on the walls that spell "Ylmyo-Aldon" in Druidic. The group decides not to bother avoiding getting Dusted with spores, thus gaining the emotional connection and 15ft tremorsense for the duration.
Upon reaching the cave, the CG is sized up by who they assume to be Kyrion, a half-elf half-Triton with facial tattoos indicating his exile from Triton society. He seems ill and ill-at-ease, but lets them through without any fuss. Inside the cave are several Gutters, some who seem totally at ease, others more nervous. Eunice Mince is there, as well as a scrawny-looking dragonborn man who is tending the various flames in the cavern.
A being who can only be Spug tends a massive cauldron. He brews the Gutpunch by throwing un-exploded Sporelings into the cauldron, adding a familiar sparkling cobalt-blue dust, and "searching" with his eyes closed, a low drone eminating from his chest.
Leaf and Emelia both partake in Gutpunch. They understand the chant Spug drones, which ends with "Ylmyo-Aldon" twice. They then experience a terrible but somehow beautiful (to them) dream about an otherworldly machine of flesh, metal, and fungus. Meanwhile, SNTR-1 is able to Identify Gutpunch and finds that in addition to narcotic properties it faciliates an exchange of psychic energy -- something is broadcast to the Gutters in the form of their shared dream, but something is also taken from them in the process. This manifests physically as an actual lessening of the weight of the Gutters over the course of the four-hour dream. Spug morphed into a statue-like mushroom state and seems to be a focus for this psychic energy.
At the end of the dream, the Gutters each recite the words "Ylmyo-Aldon", some multiple times, others just once. It's likely those who have been doing Gutpunch longer are the ones who repeat it more. Leaf notices that the Tremorsense gained from the spores has extended to 20ft. Leaf and SNTR-1 decide that shit is fucked up enough that they should probably just kill Spug to stop the Gutter parties, and loiter around when the Gutters trickle out in search of eggs. At the end of the session, only the Coast Guard, Spug, Kyrion, and the dragonborn remain in the cave.
Spug's Chant
: “Mother of Soil…
We invoke your name this night with both Love and Fear.
O Great Unmaker,
That fear moves both heart and tongue
To feed the festering masses of slimes and spores
who let the darker hours pass unseen.
We hear you call in the deepest night,
The Rot that Calls,
An earthen tremor that grants us speech;
They hear your call in the voices of their dead.
The dreamers follow us into darkened earth,
Yearning for the churning of their minds.
O earth blessed by hyphae and mycorrhizae
for breath and battle and burial and rebuilding,
They will bleed and die and rot and return for you
although you were never theirs.
(Speaking to the Gutters)
This dark and loamy ground
asks for the sparks that race behind your eyes,
Asks for the breath that quickens your lungs,
Asks for the blood and the gristle and bone
To build the gates that will unite all realms,
And you will give it.
You will give it all.
Until you have nothing.
Are nothing.
Hollowed out to be churned into dirt,
Waiting to assimilate for the Matriarch of Decay.
Ylymo-Aldon. Ylmyo-Aldon.
We invoke your name this night with both Love and Fear.
O Great Unmaker,
That fear moves both heart and tongue
To feed the festering masses of slimes and spores
who let the darker hours pass unseen.
We hear you call in the deepest night,
The Rot that Calls,
An earthen tremor that grants us speech;
They hear your call in the voices of their dead.
The dreamers follow us into darkened earth,
Yearning for the churning of their minds.
O earth blessed by hyphae and mycorrhizae
for breath and battle and burial and rebuilding,
They will bleed and die and rot and return for you
although you were never theirs.
(Speaking to the Gutters)
This dark and loamy ground
asks for the sparks that race behind your eyes,
Asks for the breath that quickens your lungs,
Asks for the blood and the gristle and bone
To build the gates that will unite all realms,
And you will give it.
You will give it all.
Until you have nothing.
Are nothing.
Hollowed out to be churned into dirt,
Waiting to assimilate for the Matriarch of Decay.
Ylymo-Aldon. Ylmyo-Aldon.
You dream of something that almost feels like a machine, but doesn’t quite feel right. It is organic but also metallic, housed in a massive cavern. You feel it and hear it before you see it, humming and grinding and bellowing. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. You see its inner workings and are struck by the awful carnality, for they are feeding it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined in a latticework of polyps and filaments and strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. At eye level, a row of white worm-like bodies curled inside the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep, but with faces that look like Spug.
You cannot help but look closer. You notice two things: they dream, twitching reflexively; and they are not truly curled within the machine but into it, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh, spinning almost soundlessly as they whir.
As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out even though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance – as far as you care to see – millions of them, caught and transfixed into the machine. And they are all dreaming and their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.
The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not, while the machine itself is silent. The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much to take in without going back, that you do not want to comprehend the crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life but form a permanent overlay on your waking sight.
You decide maybe movement will save you – that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up next to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language., your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.
For a long time you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you… but eventually you move away with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart. You feel the millions of eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.
You cannot help but look closer. You notice two things: they dream, twitching reflexively; and they are not truly curled within the machine but into it, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh, spinning almost soundlessly as they whir.
As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out even though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance – as far as you care to see – millions of them, caught and transfixed into the machine. And they are all dreaming and their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.
The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not, while the machine itself is silent. The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much to take in without going back, that you do not want to comprehend the crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life but form a permanent overlay on your waking sight.
You decide maybe movement will save you – that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up next to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language., your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.
For a long time you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you… but eventually you move away with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart. You feel the millions of eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.
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