The Third Level of Carceri: The Mists

The party did not wake up as themselves in the third layer. Instead they were all convinced that they were long-standing members of a town named Plasuldir. Larkspur, now Hemlock, was a schoolteacher with a foster child named Dash (Cedatatu). Argent was a jeweler named Aisimi, Gira a apothecarist named Azora, Cribbins Robinson, a bar owner, and Eden now Atlanta the town guard. Ronald Whizzifer I was Colby a cheesemonger and Joey Malone Tommy Cena. There were other various inhabitants of the town,Rems, Baron Valdausue Bobuous, Fzoul, Birdsong, Sizaar, Neptune, and Morshu. There were also some disconcerting towns folk, school childs, horse?s and dog?s.

The party quickly found themselves lost in small town life, participating in a jousting and archery contest, a boar hunt, and a craft festival and roast of the Baron. For the craft festival, Robinson debuted a new kind of food called nemar. Colby introduced some cheese golems that cut themselves up to form charcuterie boards.

Though some characters began to prod at the edges of the illusion, uneasy. Everyone in the town was forbidden from going out at night due to the mists that swept through the town. The School Childs kept popping up in lockup, despite having no clear way to get there- and when Atlanta stayed up to outside to catch them in the act of sneaking in, she found them before chasing them into the woods and finding herself sucked beneath the earth by grasping hands.

She woke up the next morning back inside.

Hemlock was increasingly confused and disturbed by the behavior of both the School Childs and the Farmer Towns Folks who did everything in a trio and seemed incapable of actual thought.

Neptune chatted with Girazora about the fish in the lake getting smaller and smaller for no apparent reason.

Aisimi was confused by a collection of silver that seemed to revert to its previous shape when he looked away no matter how many times he reshaped it.

Things came to a head at the craft festival. Sizaar was crying for Neptune, their spouse who Hemlock slowly came to realize they couldn't remember. Then Atlanta deliberately got herself blackout drunk to see past the illusion and succeeded. Seeing some illusion-hidden goop over one of her eyes, she began to try to take out the eye with a knife, spurring everyone around her to try to hold her down.

Meanwhile, Hemlock asked Dash to check her mind for any signs of tampering, accidentally triggering a connectiong with the Knowing. Freaking out that someone was tampering with her and Dash's mind, Hemlock grabbed Dash and took off running. In their mad sprint, they discovered that the town was a bubble world, where you would get looped back around to where you started.

Eventually Rems teleported in front of them and after Hemlock panic-punched them and kept running, he triggered the mists and Hemlock tumbled below the earth after tossing Dash up into the trees above. Some time later, Larkspur woke up in a fleshy cocoon and became aware the Hemlock memories still implanted in their mind. They managed to partition the memories away and suss out that they were in some kind of cavernous space with flowing water and a strange 10-faced creature.

In the meantime Dash ran to Robinson and tearfully relayed all that had happened. When Robinson realized that Tommy had already begun to forget Hemlock, that was enough to let him fully connect that reality was not what it appeared to be. Aisimi and Azora both showed up, and Atlanta had been dumped in Robinson's drunk tank after the festival, so the whole group sat down and began to plan. They decided that the next day they would cause some sort of distraction and get everyone who seemed real to the mines, the place Hemlock seemed to be running to. The adults all avoided sleeping since Robinson had noticed that the bigger memory resets seemed to happen overnight.

Dash fell asleep, but managed to avoid too much memory loss.

The next day, Robinson sent Aisimi to plant a bomb while everyone else stalled the Baron and Rems; then when the explosion happened, the party herded everyone to the mine with the excuse of it being a fire shelter. They got everyone past the mine guards by pretending to be ducks (facepaint was involved) and once belowground, everyone began to feel their memories return. Those who had been in the town longer than the party seemed to struggle more with recalling what was real and not.
Winding their way through the caves, the group eventually found themselves in a wide-open cavern occupied by a collection of mimics, the 55th Warden (a false hydra), the missing townsfolk, and piles of the the party's missing stuff. The party immediately set to work freeing the townsfolk and fighting the 55th warden.

The warden was defeated thanks in a large part to Joey Malone and, seeing Inevitables on the horizon, the party hastily gathered together whoever wanted to come and descended to the next level of Carceri via a passage in the fountain in the center of town. At the next floor they found themselves in an all white room; when the walls were touched some of them fell away to reveal rooms of black and white walls.