Season 9, Episode 5: "Don't Call It a Comeback" Report
General Summary
Demons poured from every crevice of the Abyss, the tide of them pushing back Crow and the remaining two Horsemen of Abaddon, as others grabbed the Dream Team and pulled them to relative safety. The group didn't pause to make friends, moving further away from the conflict to get a breather, and the remaining Demons dove into what would soon escalate to an all-out war.
The party exchanged some pleasantries, but Mist's new senses alerted him to the scouts of the Abyss waiting in the soil, and the crew decided it was time to return to the Material Plane. After some quick investigation, they discovered a Window at Mist's original landing point, at a runestone that seemed to bear some ritualistic significance to Lamashtu. Isra was able to utilize the Window to take them to the Midnight Isles, where Tesin contacted Zelophedad for aid. Soon after, Seraphina arrived in a boat from the shores of Night, which could be steered by a Scythe to move back upstream. Tesin navigated up the River Styx back to her homeland, where an entourage of Night's citizenry cheered to find her alive and well.
Curiously, they referred to Tesin as MaMa, and considered Tesin to have passed on in favor of their queen's rebirth. They spoke similarly of Flay, calling her only Desna, with Vega acting as if the two had never met before. While they spoke of Mist by name, even Ilvarti — an on-and-off friend of the dashing Ysoki — seemed to treat him warily, even threatening him when he spoke too plainly to their monarch.
Tesin warned them to back away, and the group decided it was time to address Mist's sanity before going any further. Using her psychic knives and the Scythe of Memory, Tesin dove into Mist's mind, attempting to cut away some of the trauma he had experienced in recent days. However, instead of a raw memory, Tesin found a hollowed-out Night Apple, the very same given to Mist by the Pyric spirit of Lod Coster. A Cagn wyrmling rustled within, chewing happily at Mist's lost sanity, just as its attention turned to its new visitor. Not willing to risk an encounter with the thing, Tesin summoned the mighty spear of the Hunter into her hand, smiting the thing in a flash of cosmic power, which radiated across all of the galaxy.
Mist regained all of his lost sanity, which had been sitting in the wyrm's belly, and the crowd around them gasped in alarm. Curious about the weird link between Coster and the Cagn, Lockette dove back into his old tablet, finding several pieces of information under the name of "Edge Worms", which he had encountered in a reality of the Sideways Steps. He claimed that the Cagn lived at the edge of all Petals, eating away at reality before its natural death, often creating paradoxes in the process. After years of study, Coster believed that it was in fact the Cagn that had created the Sideways Steps (somehow causing a Zero Sum on an entire region), and that they had convinced the Lost Children to enter the Steps so that they could feed. He also claimed that larger Cagn could core out planets, and that one's presence could be detected by regular, inexplicable seismic activity (leading Mist to think of Akiton)...
When the crowd faded, Tesin demanded to know where Aggy had been taken, and so Ilvarti guided them to the dungeons under the Rookery. They found her impaled in the stomach by the Hollow Blade, keeping her powers over White Flame and Piranesi in check, surrounded by wards that now affected Aggy, having lost her citizenship in Night. Tesin tried to reason with the woman, refusing to execute her as she demanded, but unwilling to let her go. Aggy proudly claimed that she would hunt MaMa down if she did the latter, perhaps even joining forces with Charon, and that nothing could convince her to forgive MaMa for her crimes.
After seeking the counsel of Zelophedad, the shadow spirit bade Tesin to reread A Memoir of Night, this time from back-to-front. Within those black pages, Tesin recounted a new story of her days with Agatha of the White Flame, and their history as lovers-turned-enemies. She learned that the current form of Rufus Geldenleaf was actually a Kinder, and that MaMa had created the body to act as a prison for the Creator God's powers. A little startled by the sea of memories, Tesin decided it was best to retreat for the moment, leaving Zelophedad to watch over Aggy and the Hollow Blade until her return.
On the way out of the Rookery, the crew encountered Skittles and the Girl Thrice-Abandoned, who warily accepted Tesin's welcome into Night. The duo claimed that they were going to start finding other Kinder that had survived the ages, and to bring them to safety at the Rookery. Skittles in particular wanted to rescue Lalantha, but promised Tesin that he would wait to engage should he find her.
Then it was time for the gang to return to Ezorod, where Tesin was alarmed to find that she was no longer the Master. But this fact was overshadowed by the arrival of Qwerty and Wonton (fully-bounded in casts and a wheelchair), who confronted Isra and Cornelius about the latter's behavior three weeks past. In the end, Qwerty challenged Isra to a formal duel to settle the matter, and Isra agreed.
The Tanuki revealed a new skillset at the start of the bout, capable of duplicating Isra's powers, but also her future potential. Isra fought against her own self, but reinforced by Qwerty's analytical mindset and trickery, the two going toe-to-toe with gravity spells and twisted time. Things began to look dark for Isra after her Gravity Boots ceased to function, which seemed to trigger the arrival of Fish in his hulking, monarch form.
He demanded an end to the fighting, pushing both his son and Cornelius to apologize to each other, and for Qwerty to apologize to Isra. He then declared the matter closed, and that Wonton would be further punished, conscripting him to service on the Aga Jain as Cornelius and Chamas' junior officers. All the while, even Fish seemed somewhat antagonistic to Mist, revealing that he had inherited the title of Master by sending Mist to his rooms repeatedly, although he eventually turned the title back over to Tesin.
Irritated by everyone's behavior, Mist decided it was time to get to the important matters, referencing the strange news they had received in their dreams (see It Won't Be Long - Season 9). He pushed the group to go to Noma, where TRAVIS had begun to craft a massive portal with the help of the Protocites, who believed their beloved mayor to be dead. While TRAVIS couldn't stop the portal from activating, the technological ritual he had crafted took him to the Dream Team, creating a strange sight of the ship entering through one portal, and emerging from another nearby.
The Protocites were then overjoyed to find Lockette alive and well, reinstating her as the Mayor, and pushing for her to give them a new directive. However, Lockette decided to send them a different direction, doubling-down on her opinion that they should be a democratic society, and sought a companion that could help them in that endeavor. After investigating the mainframe of Noma, she found a way to leave her Tinker Tools in the system, creating the artificial intelligence she dubbed Luna. Lockette told the AI she was second only to Junior Mayor SOL, and that she was to protect and maintain Noma first, and otherwise help the Protocites find a hobby. After scanning the Infosphere, Luna claimed to have found a hobby for herself, but decided to keep it private. As a last-minute directive, Lockette asked SOL to investigate the First Ones corpse in the center of the city, still troubled by the earlier discovery surrounding Lod Coster and the Cagn.
Then it was back to Ezorod, where the crew sought a gentle rest on the Aga Jain. But TRAVIS was acting strangely, forbidding anyone from entering his AI Hub, claiming that the area was under maintenance. TRAVIS was borderline insubordinate to Mist, following his commands with the weakest possible interpretation, slowly opening up his central core only as Mist grew more direct in his orders. After some deception among the crew, it was Flay that uncovered an illusion in the brig, uncovering a Lashunta frozen inside a cell.
TRAVIS finally admitted that he had been attacked in the crew's absence, by a group of cultists carrying a Gray in a cage. They used the creature to bypass his nanite defenses, cutting directly towards the AI Hub as if they knew its location, but all video feeds were corrupted as TRAVIS' psychic profile triggered an alarm. When the logs returned to normal, all of the cultists are sliced to pieces save the prisoner, and the Gray was nowhere to be found. Curious, Tesin attempted to infiltrate the woman's mind, but found her psyche to be incredibly resilient.
Then she woke, never offering her name, speaking in a dialect TRAVIS recognized as his mother tongue — a dialect of Castrovelian so old it might as well have been another language. After tuning a transcoder they were able to communicate with the woman, who identified herself and the others as one of the "Unclean". She said she and her group had arrived after seeing TRAVIS on TV (from the events of the Scoured Stars conflict), identifying him as a "Clean One" trapped inside a "Husk". Her memory of her crew's death seemed hazy, and she refused to tell any of her people's secrets, even under the threat of death. Other than TRAVIS himself, she seemed the most distrustful of Mist and Flay, recognizing them as natives of the Ikal Expanse.
This was the last straw for Mist, who returned to his rooms in frustration of the day's events, and the attitude of the people around him. The remaining members of the Dream Team stayed to speak with the woman, but they gained little progress before a shift in space shook TRAVIS to his core, and two dozen little Gray men phased out of the walls...
Rewards Granted
Tarot Deck
Loot
- Lockette embedded her set of Tinker Tools into the mainframe at Noma, creating the artificial intelligence Luna.
- Tesin discovered there are four ways to read A Memoir of Night — front-to-back, back-to-front, via her psychic knives, and through the "soul" of the book itself. She has yet to read the book using the latter two methods.
Created Content
New and updated articles for:
- Nada nada limonada
Notes
Some great roleplaying this session, with likely one of the biggest lore drops in the entire campaign. A few very interesting decisions made... We'll have to see how they play out! ;)
Flame in the Night
Tesin Movahesh
Thunder in the Mist
Lockette Endrinmaster 12 2.0
Isra
Report Date
25 Sep 2022
Primary Location
Secondary Location
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