The Fourth Level of Carceri: The Smugglers Maze

The Ringbound began to cautiously make their way through the rooms they found themselves in. The doorways in all the rooms would appear blank until the party tried to go through them; then, after a period of 15 minutes, a room would appear with something or someone inside it. The rooms also slowly disappeared after the party had traversed through them, reforming in new configurations with new contents.

Despite Larkspur's advice to the contrary, Cribbins gleefully took every object that he could carry that the party came across. He insisted, though he couldn't/wouldn't answer how he knew, that the party wouldn't be punished for taking anything. There also seemed to be moments were his personality would die out to give way to someone or something much colder and analytical. Concerned with his behavior, Larkspur began to ask questions, trying to get an idea of the shape of the problem. Cedatatu was also eyeing Cribbins uneasily, although she didn't explain to Larkspur why. Larkspur did ask if Cedatatu could detect multiple minds in a body and after staring a Larkspur for a long minute, she decided that she could, though she couldn't count high enough to tell Larkspur how many people, exactly, were running around their mind.

It should also be noted that Cribbins also gifted Cedatatu a knife, further cementing his status as favorite adult. Eden also started training Cedatatu how to use the knife.

As the party continued on, they encountered a group of dancing zombies, a man selling seeds to strange plants, a gibbon, a bomb with a 10-mile radius and unknown effects, a sentient shadow, 339 puppies that Eden promptly recruited into an army, a gibbon, several bears, and Cupio the Singer. Cupio agreed to travel with the party in the hopes of escaping Carceri.

They then fell through a portal to a strange marketplace called a "mall" populated by nothing but humans that didn't seem to register the party's presence. There was however one man who could see them and hastily shuffled the group off to a staff room. He had apparently created a loop of a specific day in the mall, resulting in a fragile reality he inhabited rather than Carceri. He offered the party a place to rest until the portal reopened up in a few hours, with no time having passed on the outside. Cribbins, Eden, Argent, and Cedatatu when to see Ponyo at the theater, while Larkspur settled in to meditate and try to deal with the Hemlock partition.

Things almost immediately went wrong for Larkspur when they found not Hemlock or Linnea in their subconcious, but rather a malevolent mechanical entity called Mechaziel. It tried to drown Larkspur in a collection of clockwork parts, but Larkspur managed to use their memories of personhood to drag themselves back out, where Hemlock pulled them back into the control room/conscious mind. They told Larkspur that Mechaziel had taken Linnea and they hadn't been seen since. It was unclear if the two minds were safe in the control room, so Larkspur decided to sic Euphrasia onto Mechaziel in the hopes of eliminating at least one of them. To empower the hag, Larkspur fed it a bit of their empathy and even temper, which they realized too late was more power than they intended to give it.

After the movie, Cribbins took Ceda to the side to teach her base 10 math, after which the party went on a shopping (stealing) spree to get Ceda some new clothes. Cribbins also raided the Taco Bell for more food supplies, and Argent the jewelry shops for gold, diamonds, and cubic zirconium.

When the Ringbound and co. exited the mall, they discovered that they had stood a little too far apart from each other and the party was split into two groups. Eden, Ronald Whizzifer I, and the other hangers-ons the party had picked up (other than Cedatatu) where shoved into another random part of the maze than the rest of the party. A quick phone call via sending stones revealed that they were okay, although the connection fizzled out before any useful information could be relayed. Without much by way of other options, the party continued on.

Larkspur did alert the rest of the party to the cage match going on in their subconscious, giving the full run-down of everyone currently in their head. They also mentioned Cribbons seemed to be fluctuating between two very different personalities, one of which seemed to have admin privileges for Carceri. It was then that the party found that Cribbons was in denial or literally couldn't noticed the other personality that occasionally stepped in.

As the group wound their way through the smuggler's maze, encountered various dolls (of which Cedatatu took a Hatsune Miku figure), a collection of Jane Austen books, a likely cannabilistic rust dragon named Kineater, a salesman named Reginald Vanderbucks, and a malevolent, eldritch McDonald's that tried to trap them. Cedatatu traded her Miku doll for a 3-foot long toblerone chocolate, a bag of peanut m&ms, and a starfish. She originally asked for Reginald's soul; Larkspur stepped in and explained that she shouldn't trade in sapient beings.

Twice, Cribbon's other personality stepped in. Once, when it looked like the party was going to be trapped in a maze loop that would run them past Kineater again, Other Cribbins forced a new corridor to generate. A second time when █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

After the malevolent McDonald's, Cedatatu also (temporarily) stole Hemlock from Larkspur's head because she wanted someone else in her head too. Larkspur made her put Hemlock back.

Meanwhile, the other half of the party began to work their way through the maze towards the rest of the group. Whiz

hit on the idea of finding a mono-polar magnet to use as a compass to meet up with the rest of the party at the pole of the plane. Along their way to locating one, the party ran across a Pathfinder cop who confiscated most of their goods and confirmed that Primus was letting "Engenium" remove goods from the maze. They also encountered a strange eldritch angle guarding some fruit of the tree of knowledge that Whiz and Eden both promptly stole a fruit from, an unknown aggressively growing plant (kudzu), and a collection of blood vials. The collection included samples from a drow, smoke mephit, animated book, red slaad, sphynx, young red dragon, revenant, warforged oil*, and a strange mix of human, celestial, and fiendish blood** (half of this vial was missing).

The Ringbound portion of the group wandered their way into a room with three smugglers that were unsure where they were- but when they left the room they were in, they wound up hunted by a metal man, killed, and respawned back into the room. One, Daisuke was selling counterfeit godly artifacts. While obviously fake, he did use the correct names for all of them; curious, Larkspur asked if there was anything for Greg and discovered that the god of chaos had a tower. The other smugglers were Shinji and Tobby Lobby. Tobby Lobby was from a version of Faerun just shy of the one the party was from- it involved a small city called "Brooklyn" on the outskirts of Baldur's Gate.

The two halves of the party continued to wind their way through the maze, slowly approaching each other. The half of the party with Eden in it found a diamond pickaxe and car that they began to drive through the maze. They also encountered Garfield the Deals Warlock, who was apparently the source of the blood collection- though he had no useful information about who had taken the blood that was missing. Garfield is also apparently the brother to Joey Malone. The Ringbound half encountered an extremely powerful necromantic severed hand they decided to leave alone, a magic mirror named Forelorn Hope and a sentient evil sword obsessed with killing things. Larkspur took the sword. The hand was left well enough alone.

Finally, right as the two parties were about to reconnect, the Ringbound found a crystal-laden spiral room with two Inevitables in it. The mechanical celestials tripped some backdoor program in Cribbons that forced him to start returning to some base to be "reset". Alarmed, Larkspur tried to reach out to stop him, only for him to trigger the trojan horse program he had installed when last they faced off against the Inevitables. This forced Larkspur to freeze as the two Inevitables dragged them both through the floor of the maze and towards the next portal down. Forced to choose between his two party members and Cedatatu, who had made the mistake of touching the crystals in the room and was being overtaken by them, Argent chose to save the child.

Just then, the two halves the party reconnected. Hearing what had happened, Eden grabbed the diamond pickaxe and broke through the floor so the party could chase after their friends and the retreating celestials.

*Larkspur's oil from pre-Regaclith
**Lux's blood from pre-Regaclith