BASEMENT QUEST

-   Stats
-   About
-   Dramatis Personae
    -   Alex
    -   Corraidhín
    -   Gabs
    -   Glarg
    -   Inky
    -   Jarrod
    -   Sneaky Willows
    -   Tea Filler
-   Meta
    -   Policies
    -   Mechanics
-   Paths and Templates
    -   Path of the Duck Outlaw
    -   Path of the Murderhobo
    -   Path of the Retriever
    -   Path of the Soulsword
    -   Path of the Tasseomancer
    -   Path of the Were-Hare
-   Chapter 1
-   Chapter 2
-   Chapter 3
-   Current Story
    -   00054
    -   00055
-   Bestiary
-   Geography
-   Cosmology
-   History
-   Afterword
-   Appendix A: Barefoot Quackery
    -   Cease and Desist
    -   On the Origins of Santa Claws
    -   Sunrise over Kelsun Peak
    -   How to Grow Fortified Pumpkins
    -   An Overview of S.T.A.G Drones
    -   Gremlin Sysorcer
    -   Pirate Gold Fondue
    -   Lady Runesocesius

Stats

Total length: 60395 words / 258 minute read. (Mind you, that’s the
length of this entire page, including all the extra bits and bobs. Not
just the story.)

There have been 191 messages posted over 184 days since the first post
on July 13, 2022 for a daily post rate of 1.03.

About

This is a game that me and the kids in the basement are playing over
email.

www thread

You can read from the beginning, or jump into the current story arc.

If you’re not on the mailing list and want to keep up with the story,
you can subscribe to the rss feed.

Dramatis Personae

Alex

Bio

Alex is like Corraidhin in some aspects, he’s younger, more brash, more
given to whim and fancy. He’s somewhat greedy and craven, attracted to
riches far too easily. He’s a passionate gambler, not due to his skill,
but by virtue of his ability to distract and confuse, which gives him a
delightful edge. Some would call it lucky, but he calls it subterfuge.
He has some sysorcerer skills, nothing quite as flexible as Corraidhin,
but he delightfully wreaks havoc with worms, scrapers, ransom & spyware.
If he can’t bypass something, he’ll delightfully destroy it. If he can’t
break in, he’ll distract someone or something so he can slip by.

-   Player: sinatra
-   XP: 1
-   Skills: Do Anything 1, Investigation 2, Illusions 2, Sneaking 2,
    Sysorcery 2, Stabbing 2
-   Equipment: a bunch of STAG drones

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand, The Triple Lindy

Corraidhín

Status: timestuck in a fork bomb

Bio

They call me Corraidhín, and while my wisened age may seem an impediment
to our expedition I assure you I make up for it with my sharp wit and
intellect! By trade I am a scholar, master of the histories of this
realm, and a dabbler in the arcane and mystic arts.

I believe my skills naturally lend themselves to this expedition. I’m
certain you’ll need someone to elucidate upon the history of these
artifacts, and should trouble come our way I’m ready at hand with spells
a plenty. I’m not the best with a sword, but can hold my own with a bow
staff, but it may be best to leave the fighting up to you younguns. If
we encounter arcane ruins or cryptic texts you’ll find my skills just as
useful as the finest blade in battle.

I think with my share of the reward I’ll buy more books. Lots and lots
of books, a whole library of books! And then I’ll start a library, yes
that sounds delightful. And maybe one of those books will have some
information on ridding me of that accursed demon, but that’s another
story entirely.

-   Player: sinatra
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1, Arcane Lore 2, Sneak 2, Combat Magic 2
-   Equipment: Sword of Yam’L, Ginnarak Crystal (Earth)

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start
-   Soulsword: Bloodlust

Gabs

Bio

Gabs had a good life. Her little devil children were all grown adults
now, and she no longer wanted to toil away running a business. When she
initially shuttered her little tavern, she thought she might just
retire. She made it two whole years of working in a garden, occasionally
seeing grandkids, and reading romance novels. She eventually decided she
needed a vacation from her retirement and traveled to a nearby port
town. She was sure to find something fun to do there.

Gabs eventually sees Inquire Within, and the smell of debauchery wafting
from within made her miss her days gossiping at her tavern. She enters
and orders a terrible drink and listens and watches.

Hearing the tales being spun by Mister Three-Fingered, she decides,
“I’ve never been on a ship, that’s something that sounds exciting!”

Half-drunk and eager for something exciting, she will join on the
journey!

Gabs is a lanky older half-devil lady who is here to schmooze and have
fun!

-   Player: archangelic
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1, Stabbing 2
-   Equipment:

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand

Glarg

Bio

I am Glarg, an earth elemental who was conjured by a wizard who was
immediately beheaded after summoning me. By some freak accident I was
not sent back home to the earth elemental plane when the spell should
have ended. While I have learned the common tonge in my time on this
plane, I have not developed the ability to speak it, because I have no
mouth. I’m a very gentle soul who is misunderstood because of my hard,
cold exterior.

I’m pretty durable and good with rocks.

With my share of the money, I plan to hire a mage to send me home, or
turn everyone else into earth elementals.

-   Player: kindrobot
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand

Inky

Bio

Inkulos Iridis greets you merrily! Some call me Inky the Tiny because of
my slight size (perfectly average for imps, I assure you!) and a
fondness for ink.

I may be small and nowhere as battle-hardened as knights in shining
armour, but I can skip out of a monster’s grasp before you can say
“scram!”, slip through the cracks (often unseen), scout for useful
items, and brew all kinds of ink with special effects for discerning
drinkers.

What do you plan to do with your cut of the money? Buy lots of ink
ingredients, of course! With the money, the very first ink patio with
the best paper nibbles will be opening to serve all from far and wide
very soon!

-   Player: mio
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1, Persuasive 2, Plantomancy 2, Throwing 2,
    Medicine 2
-   Equipment: Handy Duffer Discette, Fine Feathered Quills, Jade Tea
    Set, Mountain Range Glyph Ink, Bead of the Werehare

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand, The Triple Lindy
-   Were-Hare: Lepusthropy, Beast Sense, Hybrid Form
-   Tasseomancer: Reading, Ceremony, Steeping

Jarrod

Bio

A broad-chested, olive skinned human finishes a pint of ale with a long
swig. He greets the group with a merry-looking smile, though it doesn’t
seem to touch his eyes. He seems a touch distracted, as if something
else is on his mind. A feeling of lingering sadness touches his aura.

“Greetings, my friends! My name is Jarrod. And this here …” he taps a
heavy warhammer leaning against the back of his chair “… is Gertrude.
When it comes to danger, consider us your shield. I will blunt what
dangers may come from ahead and protect those who shelter behind. I’m
more than good in a fight, specializing in up-close battles and …” he
gives a small smirk “… alternative forms of negotiations.”

He leans over and places his elbows on the table, tenting his fingers
and leaning in with his chin touching them as he continues. A thin
leather cord adorned with small charms carved from bone is draped around
his left wrist.

“Other than that, I’m willing to take on cooking chores and spin the
occasional tale around a campfire. My cut of the money goes towards
opening my own tavern when I retire.”

-   Player: marcus
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1, Oratory 2
-   Equipment: Fascinating Bangle

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand

Sneaky Willows

Bio

I’m “Sneaky” Willows (nobody knows my actual name), an elvish pickpocket
with a love for sneakin’, stabbin’ and music playin’! Some people say
I’m no good at music playin’, but then I go sneakin’ and stabbin’ em!

On this team I think I’m gonna be good at sneakin’ up to those crystals
and grabbin’ em right from under the guard’s noses!

With my money I’m plannin’ to hire a bard to teach me more music, so I
can really impress people with my playin’ and maybe not even have to
stab them!

-   Player: nico
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand

Tea Filler

Bio

Who: Teefoon Filler of the Bucket, Knight of the 3rd order of
Balmarlovemeer, Crester of the Golden-Fringed Ridge and 2nd to the
Keeper of the Grimoire Glorious. You may call me “Tea.” (Tea is,
notably, a giant. ~11ft tall).

What: Retired Cleric turned Archeologist.

Cash: A sturdy wagon and 5 head of oxen to pull it. I wish to travel
further than my legs can take me.

-   Player: eli
-   XP: 0
-   Skills: Do Anything 1

Paths:

-   Retriever: Contractual Obligation, An Auspicious Start, Two In The
    Hand

Meta

Welcome to Basement Quest!

We’re gonna play this by ear, and cross each bridge only when we get to
it.

Policies

-   Safety: Practice safe roleplaying.

    -   X Card: http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg
    -   TTRPG Safety Toolkit: https://t.co/gA6hV6VKqm

-   Cadence: I’ll move the story along roughly once a week. Hopefully
    that gives everybody time to post something and participate.

-   Open Table / Inclusion over realism: If you disappear for a while
    and then come back, your character will immediately reappear as
    though they’ve been there the whole time. Come and go as you please.
    Open door policy! Drop in and drop out as you please.

-   Linearity: Respond only to the most recent email in the thread. (We
    might play around with time later, but for now, let’s keep it
    simple.)

Mechanics

Shoes in the Dark:

https://dozens.itch.io/shoes-in-the-dark

To do something, say that you do it, and then it probably happens!

If there is a risk, or chance of failure, we’ll roll dice to determine
the outcome. We’ll use a variation of “Roll for Shoes” because it’s
probably the most simple system there is. Everybody will start out
pretty even skills wise. But you will eventually get really good at
really specific things.

Everybody starts with one skill: Do anything 1

So to attempt to do anything, roll 1d6.

-   1 - 3: Things go poorly. Gain 1 xp.
-   4 - 5: Partial success / success at cost
-   6: Great success!

If you roll all sixes, you gain a new +1 skill which must be a subset of
the skill you just used.

Example:

  Player: I kick down the door. I’ll roll Do Anything (1) aaaand, that’s
  a six!”

  Referee: You now have “Kicking Down Doors 2”

  Later….

  Player: I bust down the door with a flying kick! I’ll roll Kicking
  Down Doors 2 aaaand, two sixes!

  Referee: You now have “Doorbane 3”

  Player: Siiiick, doors fear me.

Every time you fail a roll, you gain 1 xp.

You can spend xp to turn any die into a six for the purpose of
advancement.

Paths and Templates

Templates are skills and abilities, organized into paths, that players
can discover and unlock through play as their characters learn and
discover more about the world.

They are the lambda calculus answer to “classes” in traditional ttrpgs:
a kind of anonymous class that everybody has access to, that you can
combine and mix and match.

How it works:

Each path has a bunch of templates.

Every template starts with a rank (a number), followed by a name (in
bold), a trigger (in parenthesis), and finally a description.

You can unlock any template by satisfying its trigger in-game, provided
you have already unlocked at least one template of every rank below it,
in the same path. (The exceptions are templates of rank zero, which are
the entry level templates for each path, and do not have such a
requirement.)

Example:

  Path of the Goblin Slayer

  -   0.  Favored Foe (Slay 100 goblins): You are now an expert when
          facing this foe. From now on when attacking a goblin, a roll
          of 5 - 6 is considered a critical success. 4 - 5 is a success.
          And 1 - 3 is a mixed success.

The path is “Path of the Goblin Slayer”. The rank of the first template
is 0, so there are no prerequisites. (If it had been, say, 2, then you
would need to have unlocked a template of rank 1 and of rank 0 in the
same path before unlocking this one.) The name is “Favored Foe”. The
trigger is “Slay 100 goblins”. And the perk is detailed in the
description.

Path of the Duck Outlaw

When Basket Duck is against the law, only outlaws will play Basket Duck.
And not even the angels will weep when this path eventually leads to
your inevitable death.

Inspired by juego del pato, the traditional, much maligned, national
sport of Argentina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pato. Credit to ~mio
for kicking off this idea.

-   0.  Basket Duck (Given the opportunity to befriend a duck, trap it
        instead and keep it in a basket): You can whip a crowd into a
        frenzy. The very sight of your duck in a basket can provoke a
        knife fight.

-   1.  Gaucho (Right 100 leagues on horseback with your basket duck):
        Your horsemanship is legendary. You can achieve feats of daring,
        strength, and agility while on horseback. And while you carry
        your basket duck.

-   1.  Pate-au-pato (Fatten a duck for an abattoir): Your foie gras
        recipe impresses any guest you invite to dine, increasing the
        likelihood a request will be responded to in your favour.

-   2.  Pecking Duck (Make a sauce 666 times): You gain a 2-dice
        Roasting skill with a chance of increased effectiveness on
        beasts and decreased effectiveness on humanoids.

-   2.  Duck Trap (Trap 44 ducks each under 44 seconds): Your Trapping
        skills have improved, which is to say, they have gotten worse at
        trapping ducks and better at trapping other somethings and
        nothings. Increased chance of finding other things in any trap
        you set.

-   2.  Dog (Trap 100 ducks): You gain a small but vicious dog who can
        help flush ducks out of the bush for you to trap. If you ever
        fail to trap one though, it will laugh at and demoralize you.

-   3.  Pants Is Overrated (Refuse to wear pants for 30 days): For as
        long as you wear no pants, you can preen yourself to become
        waterproof. This effect also extends to any items you carry.
        People may not approve of your lack of attire. But you have a
        long poncho right?

-   3.  Feather Fall (Survive a fall from over 20 feet high with your
        basket duck): You can pluck a feather from your basket duck and
        use it to slow your descent, landing safely on your feet.

-   4.  Pato (Safely deliver your basket duck back to your home; along
        the way, offer it to everyone you meet but don’t let them take
        it): From now on, basket duck is outlawed by the government
        wherever you go. At the same time, you are a hero of the people
        and can muster a small mob to your aide.

-   5.  Duck Typing (Make an ink from the roasted beans of the java
        plant and a quill from a duck feather. Write on a parchment in
        javascript 100 times “Thou art a duck”): If it looks like a
        duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then—if you say
        it is—it is a duck.

-   5.  Arrogate (Kill the person who has stolen your basket duck from
        you): The angels have turned their backs on you, leaving you
        free to claim more than what is rightfully yours. You are immune
        to the blessings and curses of any minor miracle worker.

Path of the Murderhobo

You are an angel of death. A dirty, homeless angel of death with no
conscious or qualms with killing the innocent.

-   0.  Hobo (Refuse to sleep under a roof or on the ground): You gain a
        lot of resilience due to being unhoused. You are partially
        immune to poison and disease, and can consume rotten food or
        drink without any ill effects.

-   1.  Bully (Destroy something weak and defenseless): You always have
        the drop on somebody weaker, smaller, less wealthy, or otherwise
        worse off than you.

-   2.  Pocket Sand (Overcome a foe while blinded yourself): You always
        have at least one handful of sand, gravel, grit, or rubble in
        your pockets that you can use to attempt to blind your foe.

-   3.  In Cold Blood (Kill an innocent person in cold blood): When it
        is unprovoked or unexpected, your first attack always hits its
        target.

-   4.  Arsonist (Burn three different structures down to the ground on
        three different occasions): You can always produce a flame
        regardless of the circumstances. It might because you have
        waterproof matches, a special lighter, or a magic candle.
        Anything you set your magic flame to will catch fire. It may not
        stay lit and indeed may immediately go out. But it will burn.

-   5.  The Devil’s Luck (Frame an innocent and see them put to death
        for a crime you committed) Given your reputation for death and
        destruction, they should have locked you up long ago and thrown
        away the key. How are you possibly still a free man? Be it fear,
        intimidation, or the devil’s blessing, people are likely to turn
        a blind eye to your evil actions.

Path of the Retriever

The Perks of the Job

-   0.  Contractual Obligation (Agree to retrieve 5 crystals for the
        Benefactor): You have access to the Benefactor’s resources
        through your handler, Blavin Blandfoot.

-   1.  An Auspicious Start (Retrieve 1 crystal): You gain a team of
        rivals: the Retrieval Team 70 gophers. If you don’t have a 2
        dice skill yet, gain one of your choosing.

-   2.  Two In The Hand (Retrieve 2 crystals): Two in the hand are
        technically worth four in the bush. That’s the going exchange
        rate, anyway. Gain one 2 dice skill of your choosing.

-   3.  The Triple Lindy (Retrieve 3 crystals): “Is that hard?” “It’s
        impossible.” Turn any 2 dice skill into a 3 dice skill.

-   4.  Pareto Roll (Retrieve 4 crystals): A mere 20% of resources drive
        80% of the outcomes. What does that have to do with crystals? I
        don’t know, but you have 80% of them now. From now on, you can
        spend 1 xp to reroll any 1 die.

-   5.  HOT TUB PARTY (Retrieve 5 crystals): You win a visit to the
        Benefactor’s mansion, including dinner and a dip in the hot tub!

Path of the Soulsword

You have a unique bond with a sentient sword

-   0.  Bloodlust (Discover and obtain a sentient, magical sword): Your
        sword has a lust for stabbing that can only be satisfied with
        blood. Your sword counts as a 3 dice skill when attacking, but
        you must also roll to resist being overcome by a mindless
        bloodlust, striking out at whoever happens to be nearby.

-   1.  Spell Sword (Cast a spell on your sword after satisfying its
        bloodlust): You can cast a spell on your sword to store it for
        quick casting later: on your turn, if you hit with your sword,
        you can automatically cast the stored spell in addition to doing
        damage with the sword.

Path of the Tasseomancer

-   0.  Reading (Obtain a magical tea set): You can see omens in the tea
        leaves left after drinking tea from your magic tea set.

-   1.  Ceremony (Perform a ritual tea ceremony every day for a month):
        Time for tea! Once a day, you can announce a tea party,
        temporarily putting an end to any hostilities for as long as it
        takes to enjoy 3 cups of tea.

-   2.  Steeping (Offer something of great personal value to the teapot.
        It vanishes and does not return): Practically anything can be
        steeped in your teapot to extract oils and soluables. Drinking
        such a prepared concoction will temporarily grant you some
        aspect of that which was steeped.

-   2.  Gossip (Betray the trust of a loved one): During a tea ceremony,
        you can compel one creature to answer one question truthfully.

-   3.  Blending (Create 24 different infusions): You can steep two
        ingredients at once, gaining benefits from both when drinking
        the infusion.

-   3.  Scrying (Detain a guest at your tea ceremony for 24 hours): The
        precise location of anybody who drinks your tea is known to you
        for 24 hours after they consume it.

-   3.  Caffeine (Stay up all night drinking tea for 3 days): You can
        boost the stimulant effects of your tea. Perform a tea ceremony
        forgo the need to sleep, while also gaining the benefits of a
        full night’s rest.

-   4.  Bottomless Pour (Make a single pot of tea last you three days):
        Your teapot always has one more cup of tea in it.

Path of the Were-Hare

You have been cursed to wander this world; half man, half rabbit.

-   0.  Lepusthropy (Gain the curse of lepusthropy): Every full moon,
        you become a monstrous human/rabbit hybrid with an insatiable
        craving for fresh vegetables.

-   1.  Beast Sense (Talk to a rabbit): Rabbits and hares will obey your
        orders. You can sense when there are rabbits or hares nearby.

-   2.  Hybrid Form (Embrace the curse): You can assume hybrid form at
        will. Your sharp, pointy teeth do damage as a 3 dice skill. You
        can only maintain this form for a short time, and are left weak
        afterwards.

-   2.  Beast Form (Meditate on the form of a rabbit every day for a
        month): You can assume the form or a rabbit or hare. The longer
        you maintain this form, the more risk you won’t be able to
        change back!

Chapter 1

This is the first installment of BASEMENT QUEST.

Jump to: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

00001

“Congratulations!” The slightly tipsy hobbit grins and salutes you with
his martini. “On Retrieval Team 43’s inaugural mission! I’m so excited
for you, I’m sure you’ll do fantastic!”

You are all seated around a table in the corner at Lucy’s Basement. It
is dimly lit and fairly noisy. The walls are covered in red velvet
curtains, and the tablecloths have little gold tassels. A cloud of
purple smoke from candles, cigars, and pipes hangs in the air. Waiters
bustle between tables refilling drinks.

“So to recap, the Benefactor has tasked you with retrieving the five
fabled Ginnarak Crystals. I, Blavin Blandfoot, will be your case
manager. You will be paid handsomely for each crystal you retrieve. And
if you retrieve all 5, you’ll get to meet the Benefactor at be their
guest at their glorious mansion!”

“The first crystal has been spotted near a Gnomish dig site in the
Tammineaux Forest, just east of here.”

“I recommend getting started right away!” He polishes off his drink and
squints at his empty glass. “Well, maybe first thing in the morning.
Waiter!”

-   Who are you?
-   What role do you think you will fill on the team?
-   What do you plan to do with your cut of the money?

www

00002

Blavin provides you with a multibeast for your excursion. “Courtesy of
the Benefactor!” You pack it up with food and supplies, and trek into
the Tammineaux Forest in search of the first Ginnarak Crystal.

The forest is lush, thick, and green. You have to hack your way through
the vines and the brush. There are stinging insects, squawking birds,
and dangerous forest creatures a plenty. It is hot and sticky.

How will you ever find your way through this wilderness to the dig site?

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” you remember Blavin saying back at Lucy’s,
gesturing carelessly and sloshing a little bit of his fourth drink.
“They’re gnomes, after all! Just follow the sound of explosions and
screaming.”

Sure enough, before long you hear a mechanical droning and some blasting
up ahead, punctuated now and then by high pitched screams, and you guide
the multibeast in that direction.

Suddenly you are ambushed by a troop of blahoblins! Awful looking
things. Taut rubbery gray skin. Long flat noses stick out way far from
their faces. And so do their protruding, lipless mouths full of sharp
pointy teeth. You didn’t hear them over the noise of the shrieking
parrots and, in the distance, the shrieking gnomes.

“SHOE SHINE!!” the first one yells. It is wearing a gold ring on each
finger (minus the three fingers it is missing), two in each ear, and one
in its nose. It is dragging a vat of black polish nearly as tall as it
is.

“SHOE SHINE!!” a second one agrees. It is wearing a nice waistcoat with
large gaudy buttons, and a nice looking pocket watch on a gold chain. It
is dragging a comfy looking chair stuffed with bits of fluff and leaves
and fur.

A third one screams, “SHOE SHINE SHOE SHINE!” It has several gold teeth
and carries a huge block of cheese secured to its back with long loops
of hempen rope.

The fourth and final one is wearing what looks like freshly painted red
shoes and is carrying a lit torch. “SHOE SHIIIIINE!” it screams. It is
wearing a gold medallion on a gold necklace.

www

00003

  “SHOE SHINE!” Bellows Tea, with a full bodied laugh!

  With a well practiced move, faster than one would think giant like Tea
  could move, Tea removes an object from their satchel.

  …at first glance it appears to be a flail without a handle, but is
  actually a spare pair of giant boots, held by their laces.

  “These could indeed use a good shining.”

  The boot are spectacularly large, probably a 1/2 size too large, in
  all honest, for even Tea’s feet.

  The boots have gold eyelets.

Earrings greedily snatches the boots and start washing, drying, and
polishing them to a shine. Waistcoat eagerly tugs on Tea’s wrist and
guides him to the comfy chair, which is decidedly too small for his
bulky frame. Teeth graciously offers him a wedge of cheese.

Depending on how observant Tea is, he may or may not notice that the
boots are returned to him with 1 - 3 fewer eyelets.

  Bending down, Inky sniffs the bottles carefully, mumbling, “Creosote,
  shellac, hopweed … ou, wild cherry liquorice.” Then, a little louder
  to one of the blahoblins, though it came out not much more than a
  squeak, “Might I ask from where did you get these?”

“Shoe Polish! We Make! Roots and ash!” shouts Waistcoat. They seem to
only have the one volume.

“Beeswax!” yells Earrings.

“Resin!” cries Teeth.

“SHOE SHIIINE!” they all cry in unison.

www

00004

  “And jolly good polish too, it looks like,” Inky replies, squinting a
  bit at the ichor being smeared onto the boots in Earrings’ large
  calloused hands. “I hear there be some gnomes hereabouts? A camp? With
  your remarkable service, I bet they’d be coming to you all the time to
  get their boots cleaned.”

“GNOMES!?” Earrings interrobangs loudly and questioningly. It brings its
hands to the sides of its face, covering its ear holes, and wags its
oversized head in dismay, squeezing its tiny eyes shut. In the process,
it smears polish around its face.

“Gnomes there!” shouts Waistcoat. Its hands busy polishing, it tosses
its head, gesturing with its prodigious proboscis in the direction you
were heading. You continue to hear bangs and booms in the distance every
once a while.

  Glarg gurgles something to the effect of “gluggurguuuurglaaaachhhh?”
  Its stance is one of surprise as its disposition changes to that of
  inquisition as its head cranes down to look at the blahoblin carrying
  the smelly rock on its back.

Teeth looks questioningly up at Glarg and experimentally gargles back up
at it. “GURGLE BURBLE GLUG GLUG?” It smiles apologetically (a fearsome
sight, its protruding jaws full of tiny pointy teeth) and shrugs and
asks, “Shoe shine?”

  It attempts to pick that whole blahoblin up and bring the smelly rock
  to its face for a closer inspection.

“WAAAAAAH!” Teeth kicks its feet ineffectively and is quite helplessly
tied to the big smelly rock when Glarg picks it up. The smelly rock
smells pungent, sharp, earthy, moldy. Definitely could be food.

By this time the blahoblins have polished the shoes of everybody who has
consented to it, and are packing up. Except for Teeth who is being
detained by the earth elemental.

Red Shoes reappears from wherever they have been this whole time with a
sly smile and rejoins its comrades.

Your pockets have successfully been picked while you were distracted
with the shoe shine, but not of anything of particular value.

What small item(s) will you notice is missing in the hours and days to
come? How will its absence be a minor inconvenience?

www

00005

  As the blahoblins were packing up, Inky persuades Waistcoat to sell a
  few small bottles of shoe polish, a roughly round piece of broken
  glass and scraps of cheesecloth from the mountain of debris previously
  on the ground. Inky rolls Do Anything 1 and rolls a 4.

Inky successfully persuades Waistcoat to sell a few baubles and trinkets
with the first roll of the game!

They haggle back and forth a little bit, and Inky ends up paying a
little more than they wanted to, but they get all the stuff they wanted.
Yay commerce!

Having concluded business, the blahoblins pack up and disappear into the
bushes toting their chair, cheese, and vat of polish.

The sound of mechanical droning and periodic explosions compel you
forward to the dig site.

It is easy to find.

It is a large hole blasted deep into the ground. There are drills, and
conveyor belts, earth moving machines, and all kinds of gadgets and
gizmos, the purpose of which is not always readily apparent. And there
is a zip line that seems to be the only way down to the bottom.

The site is absolutely teeming with gnomes. Diminutive humanoids with
bright red noses and long, long ears, and long, nimble fingers. All
gnomes are compulsive tinkerers and mechanics, and build fantastic
contraptions. All gnomes are women, and are all highly explosive. Which
makes their combustion powered machines extremely dangerous, both for
themselves and for any unfortunate bystanders close enough to get caught
in the blast.

A gnome in a white hat comes running up to you. “You there! Hey! Yes,
you!”

“Are you the retrieval team? We’ve been expecting you! The whole dig is
halted because we accidentally blasted into a whole nest of Kobits, and
they won’t let us get near to keep digging! They keep sabotaging our
machines when we try!”

“They also stole the Ginnarak Crystal that we found! That thing could
have powered such glorious new machines!” She pouts.

In the background, a gnome who had crawled half way into a coal bin in
the side of some kind of excavator suddenly scrambles quickly out,
smoking, and runs around in circles in a panic. Nearby gnomes dive out
of the way as she erupts in a small ball of fire. The gnomes wait for
the smoke to clear and then immediately return to working on the
contraption.

The foreman continues talking to you as though nothing happened. She
leads you over to the edge of the hole and points to the bottom.

“The entrance to their cave is right down there! The zip line is the
second fastest way down.”

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00006

Suddenly three anthropomorphic gophers come crashing through the trees
behind you into the dig site. The first is wearing a sash of many
pockets. The second is wearing cargo shorts of many pockets. The third
is wearing a vest of many pockets. Each wears a pair of goggles with
thick smokey black lenses, and a floppy checkered hat that looks like a
waffle.

They march up to the zip-line.

“Out of the way, losers!” Sash cries. It grabs the zip-line trolley, and
immediately dives off the side of the cliff and zooms down into the
deep, deep hole.

Vest introduces itself, “Retrieval Team 70 here! We are here to recover
the Ginnarak Crystal that is reported to be at this location. After we
collect all five, then it will be us who get to hang out in the
Benefactor’s hot tub! Not you! Ha!”

Sash has reached the bottom of the deep, deep hole. Shorts starts
reeling in the pulley.

Vest leans in close and peers at you through its foggy lenses. “You must
be the new Retrieval Team 43. Hmmph. Shame what happened to the previous
Team 43. Hope you know what you’re doing! Would hate to see you end up
like them!”

Shorts grabs the trolley and leaps down into the deep, deep hole. It
sails all the way down, and joins Sash at the bottom.

“Welp!” Vest concludes with an air of finality. “No hard feelings, and
all that! After we collect this crystal, we just need four more. And
then we get to meet the Benefactor! Ha!”

It waddles off and starts reeling in the trolley.

Meanwhile, another gnome explodes behind you.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00007

  Inky peers down at the hole, and after some time, turns to the party.
  “Do you think they’ve cleared most of the gnomes by now, or should we
  wait until they emerge and grab the crystal then?” Gazing at some
  invisible spot farther among the trees, Inky continued, “One of the
  old miners back at the tavern said there used to be a natural maw on
  the southwestern side, but it was blocked when the tunnel caved in
  many years ago. The gnomes don’t waste their efforts on blowing up
  things knowing someone’s already been through them. Chances are
  there’s only one exit, unless this mine is a decoy.”

Inky peers down the hole and watches Retrieval Team 70 approach the
kobit caves.

The maw on the southwestern side did indeed collapse several seasons
ago. If you know anything about the industrial and intrepid kobits
however, it is that they have probably dug several alternative, secret
entrances since then.

Just as the gophers reach the cave entrance, a large erge, muscles
rippling beneath its white feathers, emerges from behind a boulder and
blocks their way forward.

It raises the feathery crest on the crown of its head, and fluffs up its
plumage in a dramatic display. It appears to be arguing with the
gophers. All three gophers appear to be arguing back.

The egre gestures angrily at the gophers’ feet, shakes its head, and
crosses its arms defiantly. The gophers look down at their own feet and
shuffle about as though embarrassed.

They all exchange a few more words and then the gophers retreat away
from the egre and the cave entrance. They huddle together briefly and
then start slowly climbing the scaffolding back up to the top of the
hole.

“Oh yeah,” the foreman remarks absentmindedly. “There’s an egre guarding
the kobit caves.”

The egre below preens and struts about proudly having chased off the
gophers.

“Stubborn things,” the foreman continues. “Easily provoked to violence.
Impeccable fashion sense though.”

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00008

  Inky blinks down at their pinecrab apple leather boots consideringly.
  “Tea’s got the fanciest footgear, but at least we aren’t sporting
  fetid foot fungi like stockings. Maybe we could persuade the egre to
  let us through? It might set us back half a day trying to find any
  kobit holes that aren’t just non-portable potties.”

You look down at your boots. How serendipitous that you just had them
shined by the blahoblins! You feel confident in your footwear.

  Corraidhín: I may have a solution to the Egre problem. I gesture
  grandly, as it so happens I always come prepared for a fashion show.

  With a grand gesture I cast a spell to transform my robes into a
  stunning suit, complete with top hat, monocle, and cane

  I’m certain we can convince the fine fellow to let us pass if we look
  the part. Or better yet, I’m almost certain I can distract him while
  the rest of you sneak past, I’ve been told I can be quite verbose and
  boisterous.

Corraidhín successfully conjures up a stunning suit, surely the envy of
every dandy, fop, and gentleman in the southern continent, if not all of
Basmentaria!

A nearby gnome gets flush, starts to fan herself excitedly, and then
explodes dramatically.

  “A splendid idea, with an equally splendid outfit to match!” Inky
  exclaimed. “Then, shall we proceed? Master Corraidhín, at your
  signal.”

You proceed down into the gnome hole.

Retrieval Team 70 glares at you from behind their smoked glass goggles
as you zip line past them. They continue their slow, defeated climb up
the scaffolding. Vest shakes its gopher fist at you and swears, “You
haven’t seen the last of us, Retrieval Team 43!”

At the bottom, on solid ground, you approach the entrance to the kobit
caves.

Standing guard at the entrance to the kobit tunnels is a massive egre, a
fearsome bird beast, muscles rippling and bulging beneath its beautiful
white plumage. It turns its head and regards you with one jet black eye
and then the other, snapping its sharp beak in the air as it tosses its
head back and forth.

It looks you up and down, and its gaze rests on your freshly polished
shoes. It huffs and grunts, “Your shoes look clean.” It rests its
scrutinizing gaze on Corraidhín’s garments. “And YOU look FABULOUS!” it
exclaims as it tosses its head and beats it wings excitedly.

“You may enter.” It graciously steps aside with a flourish.

The smallest of you can stand upright in the kobit tunnels. The largest
of you have to crawl.

Kobits are small, vaguely mammalian, vaguely reptilian bipedal cave
creatures. They are scaly and furry, and live in tunnels deep in the
earth. They have huge yellow eyes, and long fine whiskers on their
snouts and faces, all of which help them find their way around in the
dark. They also have long, thick, coarse, drooping mustaches. The
overall effect is that they look like tiny, monstrous, perpetually
startled cowboys.

You follow the winding tunnel down into the earth.

You come around a corner and almost bump right into a kobit. It has eyes
like saucers and an awe-inspiring mustache. It wears a name tag
(“Corey”) and carries a clipboard. It blinks at you in surprise and then
asks, “Who are you? What are you doing in here?” Corey flips through the
pages on its clipboard. “There are no upsiders scheduled to arrive
today. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here!” Corey glances around
nervously with its huge eyes and looks about ready to cry out for help.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

www

00009

  Inky smiles at Corey. “Hullo! We’re the waterworks crew from the neaby
  town, here to check the outhouse tunnels, inspect all the pipes and so
  on. We received reports of a blockage somewhere inside the networks.
  Have the tunnels been flushing well lately?” While speaking, Inky
  flashes a waterworker’s ID briefly at the kobit before pocketing it
  and pulling out a pressure gauge, giving the little handle on one side
  of the device a few cranks, and looking back at Corey expectantly.

Corey slowly blinks its eyes. “Inspektor?”

ASIDE: I rolled for Inky and rolled a six, which according to the rules
means GREAT SUCCESS, and also Inky gets to Level Up: they gain the skill
Persuasive 2.

“Of course! Inspektors! Yes, yes, right this way! A surprise inspection,
how exciting!”

Corey continues to chatter excitedly as it leads you further into the
branching, winding tunnels, pointing out particular bits of stonework
and engineering, and also baubles and trinkets and fossils and artifacts
that the kobits uncovered in the process of digging their tunnels.

Your tour eventually brings you into a large cavern with tunnels exactly
like the one from which you just entered branching off in all
directions. It makes you dizzy to think of finding your way through this
labyrinth without a guide.

In the middle of the cavern is a deep pool with a fountain. At the
bottom of the pool, a SWORD is thrust into the ground almost up to its
hilt. A large jewel set deep in the pommel rolls around like an eye in a
socket and tracks your movement around cavern. A few bubbles float up to
the surface of the pool.

And set into the wall on the far side of the room is a massive stone
door reinforced with thick iron bands. There is a keypad and a small
printer on the wall next to it.

“….and so our tour concludes here in the central atrium!” Corey
concludes excitedly. “Behind this door is the VAULT, where we keep all
the valuables. Gemstones, gold, crystals, et cetera.”

“Top notch security!” Corey exclaims tapping the keypad. The printer
spits out a square of paper. It reads

    ed v1.16
    *
    ?
    *
    ?
    *e door
    19
    *,n
    1    the door is Locked
    *wq

“Ha ha!” Corey shakes its head in amazement. “I have no idea how this
thing works!”

The eye in the sword watches as Corey clips the small printout to its
clipboard.

“Now, I trust you’ll find that everything was in tip-top order! Yes,
indeed!” Corey wriggles its mustache proudly. “Now if you’ll excuse me,”
it flips through the pages on its clipboard, “I am late for my next
appointment. Good day!” Corey turns and walks toward one of the twisty
little passageways, all alike.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

www

00010

Once Corey the Kobit exits the antechamber, you are free to look around
a little bit.

The eyesword continues to watch from the bottom of the pool, and the
Kobit Ed terminal continues to await you by the vault door.

But also you notice a couple of alcoves along the walls between the
twisty little passages. Each of them holds a relief sculpture depicting
one of the three deities of Basmentaria.

There is Neddas, the wise god of sages and starlight. Androgynous, clad
in purple robes, depicted with a golden third eye in the middle of their
forehead. They are shown here stoically bestowing gifts upon the
inhabitants of Basmentaria.

And here is Nullar, god of time and tides. A bespectacled male figure
with a golden third eye on his forehead. He is dressed in a dapper vest
and bow tie, and is adorned with small cogs and gears. He is depicted
here looking up at the stars from a mechanical contraption he is working
on.

Finally, there is Liandt, goddess of war and flame. A primal, elemental
deity, she is depicted as a fiery warrior with a golden third eye. The
relief shows her on the battlefield during the Artifice wars. The wars
which reduced Ginnarak to the wastes of cinder and ash that they are
today. The wars which drained Liandt’s divine energies so thoroughly
that she fell into a deep sleep and has been absent from the mortal
realms ever since.

But enough of this lore dump! There is something important happening!

You hear a shuffling and a mumbling approaching from one of the twisty
little passages.

You’re already in one of the alcoves studying the relief, so your press
yourself flat into the recess.

Three gophers with smoked glass goggles spill out from one of the
passages. Retrieval team 70! They made it past the egre after all!

They don’t see you, but head straight to the keypad by the vault. They
crowd around it and start pressing buttons, arguing and bickering with
one another.

The sword at the bottom of the pool seems to roll its eye in
exasperation.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

www

00011

The Retrieval Team 70 gophers are absolutely losing their minds over the
ed terminal.

“It just keeps printing a question mark!” Vest sobs.

“Try pushing escape?” suggests Shorts somewhat panicking.

“I’ve tried it! It’s not vi! It doesn’t do anything!” Vest moans. “Here
you try it if you’re so smart!”

Sash is balled up on the floor crying, having already had a turn at the
terminal.

Shorts carefully steps over them and timidly prods at the keypad.

A throng of beefy guard kobits come charging into the hall, alerted by
the gopher racket.

“Here now! You’re not supposed to be in here!”

One of them trips over Sash, still balled up on the floor, and crashes
into Shorts’s back, pinning them to wall. They squeal. Another guard
grabs Vest by the collar, and after a brief scuffle all three gophers
are escorted out of the hall despite their howls of protest.

“I had better check on the vault!” exclaims one of the kobits who
remains behind.

They bang a few keys on the terminal and it spits out a slip of paper.

    ed v1.6
    19
    P
    *,n
    1        the door is locked
    *1s/locked/open
    ?
    *H
    no match
    *1s/Locked/Open
    the door is Open
    *wq
    17

There is a mechanical whir deep in the walls, and a click and a gasp of
air as the door swings inward.

The kobit slips into the vault and the door swings only partly closed
behind it.

The sword in the bottom of the pool pointedly narrows its eye at you.

The gods of Basmentaria observe passively from their reliefs in the
alcoves around you.

The door to the vault is ajar, the first of the five legendary Ginnarak
crystals presumably behind it.

From one of the twisty little passages, you hear a guard kobit
approaching, singing a sad cowboy song to itself.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00012

  Harrumph I say as I billow out my mustache. I know exactly what this
  is, I’ve seen these silly terminals at the wizarding academy.
  Fascinating little babbles really, not that easy to use, and I find
  they’re easier to melt with a well placed fireball or two, but I think
  I can get us past without that. Now I might need someone to cover for
  me if that Kobit catches onto what I’m doing, and I’ll say the weird
  sword is starting to creep me out a bit.

  Corraidhin approaches the terminal, cracks his knuckles, and enters:
  1,$p

The printer spits out a piece of paper:

    The door is Locked

  Corraidhin stares at the paper. Well, that’s not right, the door’s
  only partially closed. Preposterious thing.

  That’s okay, I know how to fix this.

  19 c there is no door, there never was, and never will be. Also the
  Kobit guard forgot to tie his shoes. . w 1,$p

The printer spits out a slip of paper.

    there is no door, there never was, and never will be. Also the Kobit guard forgot to tie his shoes.

With a soft pop, the thick stone door vanishes.

The sword at the bottom of the pool widens its eye in surprise.

Nothing remains between you and the interior of the vault.

Some light from the hall spills in and glints off what appears to be a
mound of gold, gems, and crystals. The rest of its contents are hidden
from view unless you venture inside.

You can still hear the guard kobit in the passage, now whistling a
warbling, lamentful tune. It sounds dangerously close. Best get a move
on if you want to avoid a confrontation.

WHAT DO YOU DO

  While the wisened scholar inspects the vault door, Inky walks a few
  steps from the antechamber to meet the Kobit guard, pressure gauge and
  tiny notebook in hand. Inky proceeds to ask them about water flow
  sounds in the surrounding area, water stains, signs of potential pests
  that could damage the pipes, and other rather boring elements
  pertaining to modern Basmentia burrow plumbing.

  After a while, seeing as they have been conversing for some time, Inky
  pulls out two small bottles of chilled arrowroot beer from a waist
  pouch and offers one to the Kobit guard.

The big guard kobit’s eyes start to glass over as Inky goes on about
water pressure and structural integrity.

But it does graciously accept a bottle arrowroot beer.

“Well, golly, don’t mind if I do!” It cracks the lid off, toasts to your
health and takes a long swig.

“Aaaaaaaah! That hits the spot!”

  Corraidhin absentmindedly inspects the terminal and door while Inky
  converses with the guard. He’s utterly distracted and talking to
  himself.

  By the gods, it’s gone. Just like that! I thought it’d fizzle or
  something, but it’s gone! I wonder what else I can do with this thing.

  Corraidhin wanders back to the terminal and enters another command.

  19 c The wise and elderly Corraidhin is now a young and dashing rogue,
  with a very nice hat. .

The printer spits out a slip of paper:

    ?

Maybe the ed terminal only has jurisdiction over the door to the vault.

Or maybe the machine, the universe, or whatever, is telling you not to
push your luck.

By now the big guard kobit, lulled by Inky’s questions and finally
sedated by the alcohol, is slumped and snoring softly in the mouth of
one of the twisty little passages.

You stand before the open vault under the ever watchful gaze of the
sword at the bottom of the pool of water in the center of the room.

WHAT DO

00013

  Psst, Inky, can you poke your head into the vault, see if you can spot
  any crystals. Also, can you tell what kind of gold’s in there? Maybe
  it’s worth something to nab a piece of two for ourselves, you know,
  since we’re so good at vault cracking.

  While you do that I’m going to take a closer look at this sword, it’s
  giving me heeby jeebies.

  I cast a spell on the sword to identify its physical, magical, and
  metaphysical properties

  “Strange sword, I command thee to divulge your secrets! All that you
  are of, exist in, and imbue from shall be wrought in words of sorcercy
  so that the world my see clear what you are!” I chant as I invoke
  ancient runes with my wand.

Corraidhín commands the sword commandingly. But the sword just rolls its
eye and looks at him exasperatedly.

Hmm. Yes, no mouth. Well then.

Corraidhín draws on his mastery of Arcane Lore, and sifts through all
the knowledge he has filed away on magical swords. There are so many
books on magic swords!

While at first you guessed that it may merely be a common Look Sword,
you have since revised your initial assessment. Look Swords are minor
magical items, and are not quite as sentient as this particular blade
appears to be.

No this must be something a little more special.

It’s hard to tell from here–the water is not perfectly clear–but the
pattern on the hilt is kind swirly and whirly. Probably a Sword of
Omens.

Unless…

No, it’s so unlikely.

And yet.

If the pattern on the hilt turns out to be more whirly than swirly, then
it probably is indeed a Sword of Omens.

But on the other hand, if it is more swirly than whirly, it’s possible
that this may be then legendary Sword of J’Son.

If only you could get a closer look…

  Inky nods and peeks inside the vault, while keeping an ear open for
  any sounds coming from the tunnel where the guard kobit is currently
  sleeping soundly. Small mountains of ancient gold, some as coins and
  some in nuggets of various shapes and sizes, filled most of the cavern
  floor. In one corner were a few chests overflowing with rubies and
  emeralds, with the occasional amethyst and tiny pink diamonds. Whoever
  had this vault set up has amassed a nice hoard!

  Inky whispered back, “Some good old gold! There are also little
  crystals in one of the chests, but I can’t tell if any of them is a
  Ginnarak.”

Inky hears the drunken cowboy Kobit guard snoring gently. It whistles
adorably a little bit at the top of each exhale.

You peek inside the vault just in time to see the lone Kobit guard that
went inside to check on the vault. It yelps and trips over its own feet.

Its shoes were untied.

There are indeed piles of gold, gems, and crystals. Chests full of
precious stones. A few suits of armor. For some reason, a giant clam,
mouth open to reveal a giant pearl.

And in the center of it all, atop a stone pedestal, beneath a dome of
glass, is the blue and gold Ginnarak Crystal. It is the size of a melon,
and kind of shaped like one. A lumpy, multi-faceted blue and gold melon.

Flitting around the pedestal are a couple of Aurs. Giant ears with bat
wings. Very keen hearing obviously. Usually more of an annoyance than a
true deterrent. Unless there’s a Centaur around. Nasty things those. A
hundred ears with a hundred wings. The size of a small horse. They can
really ruin your day. Luckily you don’t see one around.

Finally, curled up on the ground at the base of the pedestal, hugging a
mound of gold coins like a body pillow, is a nude Kobit, sound asleep.
It stretches briefly in its sleep and when it does, you are astonished
to see that it has large leathery wings.

WHAT DO YOU DO

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00014

  Jarrod wanders into the vault. Spotting the Aurs and the Kobits, a
  slow grin starts to spread on his face. Taking a deep breath in, he
  gestures grandiosely around him and booms: “Ah! Come gather round!
  Hear a tale of Triumph! Of Heart! … Maybe even a bit of Nirvana!”

  He saunters over to the giant open clam and poses grandly nearby. His
  eyes sweep across the Kobits, attempting to catch the eyes of each
  one, as he begins to tap the fingers of his left hand rhythmically
  against his thigh, mimicking a heartbeat.

      "Our tale begins with a hero, though one not oft recognized,
       Weaving bureaucratic mysteries across parchment with zeal,
       Though held to account, and by all accounts terrorized,
       By small minded yes-men with power and zeal!

       Yes, our hero of sorts did not act and avail,
       He gave others their tasks to be done.
       No pleasure he gleaned from the mop or the pail,
       And yet here we begin with the fun!"

  Thus has the epic begun, and Jarrod is pushing the rhythm of the words
  hard, attempting to draw all eyes and ears to himself.

Broad-chested, olive-skinned Jarrod launches into the epic, flanked on
one side by a giant clam and on the other side by a suit of armor.

The aurs, enraptured, immediately flutter down to rest at his feet to
listen to the poem.

The one Kobit that tripped over its own feet rolls over where it lays on
the ground and listens with naked admiration.

The naked, winged Kobit rouses from its sleep at the noise with a groan.
It grouchily rises to its feet, flaps its wings a few times, and soars
up into the air.

“My name,” it cries out, “is HORSE! BhrruUHRHUuHRRh! Behold my majesty!
BrUHrhHHHURHuRu! You shall not steal my blue and gold, melon-sized gem!
BhrruUHRHUuHRRh! I have such beautiful WINGS!”

The aurs and the clumsy Kobit all start to fidget as Horse’s outburst
threatens to break the spell of Jarrod’s captivating oration.

  “Excellent!” Corradihin whispers to Inky nudging her gently as he
  does. “It looks like Jarrod has the Kobits covered, I’m gonna make a
  break for the sword, I’m decently, somewhat, sort of positive that
  it’s the legendary sword of Jason. But if I’m wrong and it’s cursed
  watch my back. I might need a quick save.”

  Corraidhin makes a step forward, “Oh and Inky, if Jarrod’s distraction
  goes awry, shout, I’ll come in fireballs blazing. I highly suggest a
  rapid retreat if it comes to thay.”

  Corraidhin darts towards the sword scrambling over the terrain while
  the actions on the vault. As he approaches the sword he asks the sword
  if it wouldn’t mind coming along for a bit of adventure, and he grabs
  it by the hilt.

Corraidhín wades resolutely into the pool. The water rises up to his
knees, his hips, his shoulders, and finally he dives under about 10 feet
to the bottom of the pool. The eye of the sword stares at him with great
intensity as he descends.

The mage reaches out and firmly grasps the hilt.

You feel a jolt, and the eye rolls back in its socket.

You yank on the sword and it budges not one bit. Not one iota!

You go to adjust your grip. But your hand is stuck fast! Glued to the
hilt of the sword!

You look up at the surface of the water, some 10 feet above.

You look down at the sword that refuses to release you.

You look more closely at the pattern on the hilt. Egads! Why did you not
see it before? The pattern is neither whirly nor swirly at all! It is in
fact kind of spacey and indented.

This is not the legendary Sword of J’son! It’s so obvious! How could you
have been so mistaken! This is none other than the infamous Sword of
Yam’l. Yam’l is of course a superset of J’son, so it is an easy enough
error to make. And perfectly harmless in an academic setting. It is
however a costly miscalculation to make while glued to a sword at the
bottom of a fountain.

You lungs start to burn a little bit, and you hear a spectral, burbling,
significant whitespace voice in your head as the sword makes intense eye
contact with you:

    ---
    name: Yam'l
    conditions: {"stuck": "true", "sticky": "true"}
    greatest desire: stabbing
    ...

And then an expectant pause, as though the sword eagerly awaits your
reply.

  Inky watches Master Corraidhín make his way towards the creepy sword
  with two drams of admiration and a tiny dose of apprehension. Taking
  out a small wrench, a pouch of nuts and bolts, along with some gum
  twine, Inky crouches near the vault archway, listening in a little on
  Jarrod’s epic tale about the unsung hero of sanitation while
  occasionally looking into the pool.

Inky, from the best seat in the house, hears Jarrod launch into an epic
poem, and also the beating of leathery wings and a mighty whinny and a
neigh.

They also watch Corraidhín dive to the bottom of the fountain, and then
thrash about a bit with one hand on the hilt of the eye sword.

WHAT DO YOU DO

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00015

  Jarrod raises his right hand and begins adding a new rhythm to his
  beat by slapping his palm against his chest. The resulting beat sounds
  eerily like a galloping horse. Jarrod pushes his voice outward and
  upward, directing his vocal energy at HORSE.

      "A mighty steed did carry our hero through forest, hill and town:
       A comely beast with silky mane and smooth and supple hide.
       One would think that such a stallion needs must have renown,
       But only our dear hero understood, and so did ride."

  Jarrod subtly adjusts the rhythm to a fast, regular beat.

      "Lightning of the hoof!
       Fire in the eye!
       One with blowing wind!
       Strength of mountain high!"

  Jarrod slowly calms the beat back down to a heartbeat with his left
  hand fingers on his thigh again. However, the right now rests close to
  Gertrude’s handle, at the ready.

      "On fated day, our hero does require
       Underlings for which a task is set.
       And yet, this day the underlings and squires
       Have booked their time away from toil and fret."

  While continuing the epic, Jarrod makes note of two options, should he
  need them:

  1.  Should he need, he can dive behind the giant clam; and
  2.  He eyes a path back out the vault, should he be able to draw the
      Aurs and Kobits out with him.

  Jarrod keeps his eyes on HORSE, attempting to react to whatever HORSE
  brings.

HORSE gives a snort, a groan, and a sigh as the beat of the poem
accelerates to a trot, and turns its subject to matters of its own
interest. Namely, himself. HORSE likes to hear its own name, and it
likes to hear people pay tribute to it with verse. Which is 100% what it
thinks is going on here.

HORSE beats its wings a few times and then flaps over to where Jarrod is
delivering his oration. It stands a little too close, basking in the
glory of Jarrod’s verse.

There is now gathered at Jarrod’s feet three Aurs; one clumsy Kobit with
untied shoe laces; and one naked, winged Kobit named HORSE.

The blue and gold, melon shaped crystal in the center of the vault has
been left unguarded. It hovers, suspended, beneath its glass dome on top
of its pedestal, revolving slowly in place. It looks like a weird tiny
asteroid. The veins of gold in the stone pulse lightly with otherworldly
energy.

  Damn it Corraidhin thinks to himself, here I am yet again at the
  bottom of some insipid pool stuck by some random magical thing all
  because I didn’t pay enough attention in mythical history class.
  Bloody hell!

  Good thing I paid attention in sorcery and yesteryears secrecry
  administrivia, this little sword won’t stay stuck for too long! My
  lungs if I bungle this though..

  Corraidhin quickly invokes a spell with his spare hand, casting
  mystical runes with his hand.

      sudo chmod -t sowrd_of_yam\'l
      sudo chmod 775 sword_of_yam\'l
      sudo chown corraidhin:party sword_of_yam\'l

  That should do it corraidhin thinks to himself. If not I’m going to
  need to think quick, I’m stuck and there’s no way up without this
  sword. I might be able to transmute the water into air around me, but
  probably only a small pocket which will surely disappear in a gasp.
  Alternately I could try and blast my way down, creating a pocket for
  the water to flow into, but I’d be willing to bet I’ll hurt myself in
  the process..

You trace some watery runes, invoking Sudo to bend reality to your will.

The unschooled masses sometimes erroneously assume that Sudo is a deity
in its own right. There’s a certain misguided logic to it: an invisible
force that governs the relationships between entities, and infallibly
predicts how they will behave? Certainly, it must be an all powerful,
godlike entity.

You and your ilk, of course, know that there’s no more intelligence
behind Sudo than there is behind gravity. No need to correct them
though. Sometimes it behooves the mage to allow others to think that
they serve an unfathomable arcane lord.

There is a dull underwater flash and a muted underwater bang, and you
feel the sword slip from its stony clinch like a knife tearing through
soggy bread.

You push up off the bottom of the pool and rocket to the surface,
helped–surprisingly–by the sword, which remains glued fast to your hand,
but which also rises above you as though somehow lighter than water.

You break the surface of the water and hear joyous laughter.

    "Oh, yes! Well done, Hardy Bear! So very well done indeed! Oh, I had spent so long trapped at the bottom of that pool waiting for a new bear to come and free me. And now here you are! Oh, what a very good day this is. What a magnificent pair we shall be.

    "Now, let's go stab some evil!"

You look down at the sword in your hand, and the eye twinkles at you,
full of adoration and zeal.

A small wine pitcher splashes into the water next to you. It is attached
to a thin hose, at the other end of which Inky sits on dry land,
drinking a cup of tea. They wave.

  Inky squints at the silhouette underwater, slightly distorted by the
  occasional ripple on the surface, trying to decipher the odd hand
  gestures and wisps of light coming from below. Why was Master
  Corraidhín repeatedly forming semi-circles with his finger, almost
  like … the handle of a teacup? Was it a request for tea?

  After a pause, Inky rummages inside a bag and brings out a large porro
  and a long rubber hose. The porro is filled with a demi-tasse of black
  grapefruit pekoe from a flask and the spout plugged with an
  eldarberry-flavoured gummy pen nib. Inky strings together a handful of
  brass nuts with twine and ties it to the porro’s handle to act as a
  small weight, then affixes the hose tightly to the open top of the
  porro. Casting a slightly apologetic look in the direction of the
  water for a brew long since gone cold, Inky swings the hose and flings
  the drinking vessel into the pool towards Master Corraidhín, watching
  for a moment as the porro sinks down into the water to hover near his
  arm. The other end of the hose is tied securely to a narrow rock on
  one side of the pool with more twine, the end sticking up in the air
  like a wiggling snorkel.

  Inky returns to crouching near the vault entrance and looking inside
  another small pouch for fresh tea leaves. Waiting is thirsty work!

You cast an improvised lifeline to the floundering wizard, and find a
cache of very fine fermented tea leaves wrapped in waxed paper that you
left for yourself at some point in the past. How thoughtful and
considerate of Past You!

From your vantage point, the sleepy guard Kobit still shows no sign of
stirring. And Jarrod has a throng of captive beasts listening very
intently to his stirring, epic poem. HORSE in particular seems to be
gaining some kind of physical sustenance from the words, snorting and
whinnying and beating its wings with each new stanza.

If you can slip through the doorway without disturbing them, there will
be nothing between you and the now vulnerable Ginnarak Crystal.

WHAT DO YOU DOOOOOO

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00016

RETCON!

Before Corraidhín ascended to the surface of the pool….

  As Corraidhin finishes his incantation a small porro drifts down
  bonking him on the head. Startled corraidhin begins to move around in
  the pool trying to find his assailant.

  “By the gods what in the world is in this pool with me!” he tugs
  frantically on the sword, and as he does so the porro drifts into
  view. “Oh wait, that..” his eyes follow the rubber hose attached to it
  up to the top of the pool. “Ah ha!” he exclaims immediately inhaling a
  mouth full of water and frantically pulling the porro from the hose
  with his spare hand and teeth. Corraidhin sucks greedily at the air
  the hose provides as he becomes acutely aware of the burning sensation
  in his lungs.

  The porro drifts wistfully to the bottom of the pool, just out of
  reach. A dark liquid rises from it as it comes to rest on the bottom
  of the pool.

And now back to our show!

  After heartily congratulating Master Corraidhín on his successful
  sword acquisition in hushed whispers and finishing off a cup of
  blackcurrant tea, Inky retrieves the porro from the bottom of the pool
  with a fishing pole and a few recasts. (Calling that gnarly stick with
  a line, bottle and hook slightly bent out of shape on one end a
  fishing pole would be an affont to any self-respecting fisherfolk
  though.) Inky rinses the pitcher and hose before stowing them away
  again in the bag along with the pole and other ink brewing
  paraphernalia.

  Refreshed, Inky slips noiselessly inside the vault, edging along the
  wall on the farther side from the crowd now wholly enraptured by
  Jarrod’s grand recital. Seeing the crowd pacified and giving Jarrod a
  thumbs-up, Inky unfurls a long and dusty bolt of dark cloth with the
  words “UNDER MAINTENANCE — NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY [by order of the
  Basmentaria Bureau of Sanitation]” in roughly-scrawled letters tacked
  onto it, and hung the ends of the cloth so it spanned and completely
  obscured one side of the vault.

  Standing behind the makeshift inspection site, Inky proceeds to fill
  several sacks with gold and gems using a small shovel, before putting
  one of the sacks into their Hacky Duffer Discette (its capacity for
  large storage and small weight is a blessing in disguise for both
  aspiring and afflicted collectors alike).

You successfully cordon off a corner of the vault and set up a very
convincing UNDER CONSTRUCTION banner. It looks straight up like a 90’s
website.

You start shoving bags of treasure into your HD Discette, but it only
accepts 1.44 bags before running out of space. You you leave the
remaining bags for the others.

During your excavation, you find a complete set of magnificent, ornate,
gold-nibbed quills, and also a small wooden rack of bottled ink.

There are a dozen small bottles all arranged in a row, each one with a
different mysterious glyph, the contents all a slightly different shade.
As you handle the rack, the ink sloshes around inside. It could still be
good!

The fine wooden rack encloses them all and holds them in place by means
of the lid, which closes securely around the bottle necks. Once you open
the lid, you can easily retrieve and stow the bottles.

You also spot a fine jade teapot. A matching set of small cups—no
handles, no saucers—cluster around the pot like nursing pups.

  Corraidhin clambors out of the pool, magical pokey stick in hand.

  Good show! He exclaims to himself and the sword. Now I can finally get
  a good look at this sword, though for some reason I can’t seem to let
  go, I guess for now I won’t lose it.

  You said you wanted to do some stabbin right? Of evil things? What
  constitutes evil my pointy new friend?

The sword does indeed remain steadfastly glued to your hand. As you
swish it around you discover that it seems to get lighter when you hold
it aloft, and that it trembles and grows increasingly heavy as it
descends. The sensation is almost as though it has a hollow core in
which some kind of heavy liquid sloshes around. And as though its blow
would be devastating.

The sword relishes being wielded and swung, and grows more and more
ecstatic. Its eye darts menacingly back and forth, vanquishing imaginary
enemies with each jab.

    Yes! Yes, I am made for a singular purpose. To RID EVIL. To root out evil, spill its blood, and then do it again! So let's go find some evil, Bear! And then you can just stab it with me.

    Oh, what constitutes evil, you ask? In my experience, evil can't help but make itself known. You'll know it when you see it.

    For example, see there? That little inky fellow sneaking into that treasure room? Probably super evil. We should go investigate.

  As corraidhin questions the sword he wanders towards the vault peering
  in to inspect Jarrod’s performance. He’s really good at that, what do
  you think? Actually what do I even call you? Do you like nicknames? I
  was thinking pointy, or stabby, but I’m open to suggestions, respect
  and all that.

  Oh hey, the crystal! It looks like it’s unguarded! Corraidhin slinks
  towards the crystal muttering to his magical sword as he does.

The sword is momentarily distracted by the Aurs and Kobits. Its eye
widens. It almost seems to shudder with anticipation.

    EEEEEVIL! Rid. Evil. Spill. Repeat.

You are thankful that the voice seems only to be heard inside your own
head.

    Oh, my name? I'm sure I had one at some point. Long forgotten by now. No matter, I'm not sad about it. One has no use for a name when instead they have a singular, all-consuming purpose!

    But, my last Bear called me her Bee. I quite liked that. The bee in her bonnet! Ha! Evil, fear my sting!

The sword prattles on in your head as you sneak past Jarrod’s monstrous
storytime and approach the pedestal. Or is it a lectern?

You arrive unseen. The crystal is a dazzling deep blue, with pulsing
gold veins. It is oddly shaped, somewhat like an egg. And it floats,
rotating slowly, suspended in air beneath the glass dome that encloses
it.

Drawing on your knowledge of Arcane Lore, you remember that the five
Ginnarak Crystals played a key role in the Artifice Wars that once
rampaged across all of Basmentaria. They are sources of tremendous
power. Some say that, the five of them together, they could kill a god.
You’re not sure you believe that. But they did definitely reduce the
once lush and verdant island nation of Ginnarak to cinder wastes and
deserts of ash. A cataclysmic event that put a resolute end to the
Artifice Wars.

You look around the vault. Jarrod is reciting epic poetry and
mesmerizing the monsters. Inky is pillaging and looting. You have a
bloodthirsty, sentient sword in one hand; and a large arcane battery of
a crystal within reach of the other.

WHAT DO YOU DO

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00017

  While Inky packs the top of a sack with a thin layer of earth from
  under a loose rock, they feel a heated glare in their general
  direction for a few beats and surmises Master Corraidhín had entered
  the vault with his newfound companion. After decades of serving rather
  … demanding customers as an inkling, Inky knew an evil eye directed at
  them even when they can’t see it (while preparing a brew with their
  back turned, for instance) and makes a mental note to give Pointy a
  wide berth.

  Once the sacks were placed close to the vault entrance for a quick
  haul, Inky returns to the items that had been discovered while digging
  under the loose rock. The set of gold-nibbed quills were swiftly
  pocketed — each quill was finely crafted and felt balanced when held
  in one hand. The malleable tips in a range of sizes would be
  invaluable for testing ink viscosity and smoothness, among other
  properties. A felicitously fantastic find!

  The jade tea set was next to be admired, its deep green hue reflecting
  the age of the stone from which the items were carved. With cups for
  every member of their merry group, the teapot would make a worthy
  addition to any travelling, crystal-seeking tea party. So thin and
  translucent were the small cups, having been expertly crafted, that
  they were almost too fragile to carry around everywhere. A
  non-shattering charm was often applied to heirloom sets meant to be
  passed down through generations, but it is difficult to tell by
  looking whether a set had been charmed unless the spell was a
  particularly strong one. The teapot and cups were returned to the
  small wooden box they were found in and stored away. Perhaps a few
  crockery talismans could be procured at the next town?

  Inky pauses at the rack of bottled ink. The first rule that any
  inkling in training learns is to never trust pre-bottled inks from
  unverified ingredients or unknown sauces. Inky tilts the rack to
  better examine the weird yet vaguely familiar glyphs on the bottles.

  The first glyph was a circle with three dots. The bottle next to it
  was adorned with a swirl, followed by a bottle with a circle
  surrounding a pointing hand or a snail. Another glyph looked like a
  twisted hook, and was that some sort of sinister grinning reptile on
  the next one?? Towards the middle of the rack was a bottle with a
  glyph of what could be a mountain with a tunnel at its base. The
  bottle beside it bore a glyph of a block broken to three pieces. Yet
  another bottle was simply stamped with a circle and a dot at its
  center. Its neighbour held a glyph that slightly resembled a mountain
  range if someone stared very hard. The next two bottles bore glyphs
  that looked like a spiky fish and a circle with a pair of horns
  protruding from it. The last bottle’s contents seemed more gooey than
  the others, with a glyph of a helmet-wearing hare.

  The shade of ink within the bottles varied, but all seem to be derived
  from the same indistinct hue. None of the bottles had the usual piece
  of ash paper with bits of string attached to them, but otherwise
  appear to be intact and the vessels themselves top quality, as shown
  by the delicate tarring on the caps. The wooden rack was lightly worn
  but solid in Inky’s hands.

  It was certainly an odd collection. “No hash, no stash” though, as the
  rule of thumb goes. Inky puts the rack down carefully on the floor by
  the sacks, concluding that if anyone wanted to help themselves to the
  bottles, they were hopefully not planning to ingest the contents.

  Dusting off their boots, Inky settles just behind the banner, closer
  to the vault entrance and rousing performance, to watch the crowd
  around Jarrod and listen for any sounds from outside the vault.

You pack up the quills and the jade tea set, and arrange the bags by the
vault entrance for quick retrieval.

As you carry the rack of ink bottles over to the bags, the twelfth and
final ink bottle, the one with the glyph of the helmet-wearing hare,
suddenly cracks. Seemingly of its own volition. A tiny shard of glass
slices the palm of your hand and disappears into the meat at the base of
your thumb. The gooey ink seeps out of the bottle and paints your hand a
muddy, rusty blue.

You jerk your hand back. The ink is swiftly absorbed into your hand as
though it were a sponge. Soon it’s all gone: the ink, the blood, all of
it. Nothing remains of the scratch itself but a hair-thin line. If you
run your finger over it, you can feel the hard nub of the glass shard
beneath the skin.

For a moment you can hear the double drum of your own heartbeat rushing
through your ears. Your senses seem to sharpen. Colors grow more crisp,
and sounds more clear. But then it passes, and the moment is gone.

  Harrumph, pointy my friend, that’s just inky. They’re definitely not
  super evil. That’s the finest ink craftsmen and tea preparer this side
  of Basementaria. And we absolutely won’t be stabbing them. There are
  FAR eviler things to stab, potentially that weird naked thing that
  seems to think itself a horse. I could be convinced IT was evil, but
  wouldn’t use attacking it unprovoked make us evil? Surely a sword as
  ancient and wise as you could see the perfectly puzzling philosophical
  delimna we put ourselves in.

  And then this thing, (corraidhin gestures at the crystal), horrible
  magical item used to create untold death, destruction, and mayhem
  during the last Artificer war. Definitely probably evil, if used that
  way, but also filled with untold power that could be used for good!
  Now would the person weilding it be evil just because, or could
  someone overcome the magical nature of a device capable of such evil
  and apply them for good? I for one believe afirmatively that one can
  overcome such things.

  As corriadhin finishes his philosophical prattling to his new stabby
  friend he pushes the glass case off the crystal and grabs it.

The Sword of Yam’l starts to launch into a long winded reply.

    Oh yes, that winged naked thing is surely evil. Let us stab it, Hardy Bear! Let us stab and stab and stab until --- What's that? Oh no, don't worry. We are unquestionably, infallibly good. I was designed and made for but one purpose, after all. TO RID EVIL! As for the crystal, yes, I suppose you are correct. Wielding a powerful, bloodthirsty, magical item probably does make the wielder evil, and consequently immediately deserving of being stabbed! Say, speaking of stabbing ... that naked, winged thing--

But then, before the sword can finish its thought (a thought, you are
quite confident, would end with something like, “let’s stab it!”) you
knock the glass dome off the pedestal and grab the Ginnarak Crystal.

You brace yourself. It thrums slightly in your hand but doesn’t do
anything overtly magical or destructive. In fact it seems perfectly
inert.

So there you are. A pointer murder stick attached firmly to one hand,
and a potential atom bomb of a crystal in the other. But you think
you’re totally going to pull this off!

Then the glass dome hits the ground and shatters into dozens of pieces.

HORSE screams and whips around at the noise. “BhrruUHRHUuHRRh! My blue
and gold melon sized gem! Noooooo! BrUHrhHHHURHuRu!”

It flaps its wings and wheels up into the air and swoops down at you!
The three aurs get swept up in the excitement and start flapping around,
making tiny squeaks of alarm. The remaining kobit leaps to its feet, but
then trips over its shoelaces.

WHAT DO YOU DO??

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00018

  From their spot behind the construction banner, Inky pulls a pewter
  bowl, a large wooden spoon and a set of silver spoons from their
  brewing kit. In one quick fluid motion, Inky strikes the bowl with the
  wooden spoon. The sound reverberates soulfully through the domed
  cavern of the vault, like a call to meditation. The kobits too, seem
  to recognise that single, sonorous note.

  After a long pause, Inky taps several silver spoons in rapid
  succession against one another and on a small rock. The result can be
  barely heard by everyone in the vault except the aurs, for whom the
  sounds may resemble the soothing trickle of pebbles flowing along the
  path of a tunnel.

A rich tone permeates the vault. The Aurs cease their squeaking. You
don’t hear them say this, but you imagine they’re thinking, “Oh shit, I
still need to log my sit for Sitember..” And they flutter down to the
ground and sit in a circle and close their eyes and are still.

You also hear a deep rumbling somewhere beneath you in response to the
gentle call. Some of the gold coin dunes start to shift and spill. A
suit of armor falls over. HORSE and the clumsy kobit halt their advance
and look around nervously, and then bolt for the front door of the
vault.

“BrUHrhHHHURHu-RUN!”

UH OH WHAT DO!!

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00019

  Why Stabby, it looks like we won’t need to stab Horse at all, but are
  you any good at stabbing armor?

  Corraidhin stuffs the melon shaped gem into his knapsack and rushes
  towards Inky and Jarrod. Best to get this party started in style
  Corraidhin says as he casts a fireball at the suit of armor, followed
  closely by a second, and a third.

  As corraidhin reaches Inky and Jarrod he raises the Sword of Y’aml
  ready to fight. Stand and deliver you curr!

The trigger happy mage rushes toward the vault exit, flinging a couple
of fireballs over his shoulder as he goes.

Stabby is delighted at the carnage as the suit of armor is blown to
bits, but also disappointed at the general lack of stabbing.

The Aurs, deep in meditation nearby, get caught in the conflagration.
Their kernels swell and pop explosively. Though not as explosively as
the fireballs.

The whole Retrieval Team 43 pours into the cavern outside the vault as
it turns into an inferno, and they are swept up and away in a throng of
kobits evacuating the tunnels.

You are deposited, like silt after a flood, outside the caves back at
the bottom of the gnome hole, where the kobits and the lone egre are
frantically climbing up the scaffolding, which bends dangerously under
their combined weight. The gnomes up above are running around in an
agitated state at the sudden commotion, and a few of them explode in the
excitement.

The ground rumbles again, and the entrance to the kobit caves, and
several feet of the surrounding area, is swallowed up by a sinkhole that
spreads across half of the bottom of the gnome hole. From the hole
emerges a gigantic moth-like creature made of a hundred ears of corn and
a hundred wings. It is bigger than the very largest horse.

You hear a single word repeated fearfully over and over again by the
crowd of kobits. “Centaur! Centaur!”

It crawls up out of the pit, and tastes the vibrations in the air with
its feelers. It flies clumsily up into the air, flutters, and then
crashes back into the ground.

It looks like one of its wings has been singed by fire.

Undaunted, it crawls across what is left of the bottom of the gnome hole
toward you, beating its wings as though to bash you with them. Which
would hurt a lot.

Yam’l whispers in Corraidhin’s mind.

    Now *that* thing is *definitely* evil!

WHAT DO YOU DO

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00020

  Looking around the chaotic scene, one of the vines among the bushes
  caught Inky’s eye. It was one of several bean plants probably native
  to the Tammineaux Forest, with strands of faintly glowing pods hanging
  from the vines.

  Inky snatches several of the dried but luminous bean pods from the
  vines, then sprints a wide circle around the centaur, all the while
  counting out 43 beans and throwing them into the topsoil, where much
  of the earth around the sinkhole had already been turned over by the
  gnomes’ drills and machinery.

  Earlier in the commotion, one of the gnome explosions caused a water
  main leading towards what had been the kobit caves to burst. Water was
  now spraying across the area with the gusto of a fizzy cold spring and
  gathering in small pools over the soil. More water sluiced over the
  moth-like creature’s singed wing, snuffing the remaining embers.

  Within moments, long tendrils shot up from the ground, which rapidly
  thickened at the bases to the size of young southern oak trees, to
  curl gently but firmly around the centaur. “Sister!” a melodious voice
  emanating from somewhere amid the beanstalks exclaimed, “What are you
  doing up? It is not yet autumn. Go back to sleep!”

The pooling water puts out any of the licking, reaching flames that
followed the centaur up from below. The dark smoke carries the smell of
ash, soot, and burnt popcorn up into the air.

There is no mistaking the climbing vines of the common Tammineaux Forest
Bean. If you don’t recognize it by the heart-shaped leaves or the
winding stems, then the luminous, dangling seed pods nestled amongst the
bulbous pink blossoms are a dead, somewhat obscene, giveaway.

Inky plucks a handful of the pods and rips them open, meticulously
counting out a mystical number of individual beans, and sowing them in
the ash and the mud.

Vines erupt from the ground and entangle the centaur, dragging it gently
back toward the sinkhole and whispering a soothing lullaby in its ears.
The centaur struggles weakly before surrendering to the vine’s caress.
It is pulled back down underground.

In the aftermath, there is a handful of leftover beans, and also some
large, vibrant kernels of corn that flaked off the centaur during the
struggle.

You and the first Ginnarak Crystal are able to leave the dig site and
the Tammineaux Forest without further incident.

You pack up your faithful multibeast and trek back to the city of
Vay’Nullar, where your adventure started.

THE END OF CHAPTER ONE

EPILOGUE: what are you doing in the final moments of this battle? Or on
the way home? Or, what are you doing to rest, relax, and recover once
safely back in town before reporting back to Blavin?

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Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of BASEMENT QUEST.

Jump to: 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

00021

INTERLUDE

  A glorious victory!

  In the interim time Corraidhin studies the sword of Y’aml, and
  correctly deduces that he needs to remove the sticky bit to be able to
  sheath the thing.

  sudo chmod -t sword_of_y'aml

  The rest of the interim is spent studying arcane lore surrounding the
  Ginnarak Crystals and their purpose. He also strongly urges the party
  that we should consider very carefuly how we need to proceed with the
  crystal. It’s obvious people don’t want these things getting out, so
  we should ensure that Blavin has good intentions, or at least leaves
  us out of whatever potential evil could occur.

Corraidhin prepares the incantation and, after removing the sticky bit,
is able pry his stiff fingers from the grip.

You sheathe the blade, but its voice continues to ring clearly in your
head as it prattles on, seeing evil and villainy everywhere and
encouraging you to stab, stab, stab.

Your sysorcerous studies, confirmed by the eager and forthright sword,
suggest that the blade will be able to rest for a while once it tastes
blood.

Your former mentor and rival sysorceror Eccentric Kevin calls on you one
day under the pretense of showing you the latest draft of KDL
(pronounced “cuddle”), their own “Kevin’s Document Language”, an
alternative syntax for incantations and personal pet project of theirs
that has thus far failed, much to their perpetual consternation, to gain
any traction or adoption in the wider magic community. They are
insufferably polite and sinisterly supportive. They complain about how
the obstinant gnus keep standing in the middle of the road trying to
block traffic, and they demand to know all about your recent exploits
and adventures.

  Once back in town, Inky had the small glass shard in their palm
  removed by a harried-looking healer, who merely shrugged at Inky’s
  account of the disappearing ink and advised them to return if they
  experienced adverse effects before hurrying off to the next patient. A
  visit to the local stationery shop did not yield any answers; the
  stocky human at the counter shook their head apologetically when shown
  the broken ink bottle. However, they did suggest asking at one of the
  larger shops in the city.

  To celebrate their first successful quest, Inky made torties[1] for
  their party with flour ground from some of the large corn kernels at
  the dig site, topped with a sweet nutty squash spread. Babbleberry tea
  was served from their newly acquired jade tea set, now patched with
  what Inky had been assured was an unbreakable seal[2] by a merchant
  with a toothy grin in one of Vay’Nullar’s notorious back alleys.

  Master Corraidhín’s cautionary words of wisdom still echo in Inky’s
  head, though they were secretly tickled by the idea of the crystal
  being actually a rare and previously unknown species of melon with
  very potent magical properties. The very thought of melons was making
  Inky a bit thirsty. Let the warrior and wizard worry about all the
  potential evils of the world — it’s time for a dash to the market for
  some beatfruit juice!

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  [1] Also known as torte-teas, as in “Torte-tea, yas?”, which was how
  their previous ink maestro used to greet customers entering the
  brewery. Flat little tea cakes with sugar or spice (or both, which
  vary by region) and sometimes eaten in a loose wrap. Some humans
  called them “crabs” for some reason which baffled Inky, since the
  torties had no pincers … at least none that they could see anyway.

  [2] The seal attached to the bottom of the teapot and each cup had a
  glyph of an unknown object between two hands.

The healer removes a small glass bead from Inky’s palm. It is worn
smooth and round like a marble. If you look closely, you can see a small
blemish in the center that somewhat resembles either a duck or a rabbit
depending on how you orient it.

It is captivating to look at and comforting to hold in your hand. You
fidget with it often. Now and then you suddenly notice you have been
gazing at it for some minutes without realizing it.

You make your party a delightful meal of torties, serving tea from the
magically reinforced jade set.

Cleaning up afterwards, you can’t help but notice the patterns of the
tea leaves in the bottoms of the jade cups.

YOU FORESEE AN OMEN FOR THE PARTY. WHAT IS IT?

You dash to the market for beatfruit juice, which you easily find. And
you find yourself irrationally drawn to the produce. The kale, dandelion
greens, and beans all look especially scrumptious and … plump and juicy?

An old toothy market attendant sits on a stool by the vegetable stand
reading the Farmers Almanac. Unsolicited, they mention to you that it is
only three days until the next full moon.

  Jarrod has two things in particular he wants to do when back in town,
  with whatever his cut of the gold is. First, he wants to go looking
  for a cheap, run-down building somewhere in town and buy the property
  if he has enough money (perhaps negotiating a bit where necessary).

  Second, he wishes to seek arcane counsel from Corraidhín, perhaps
  getting a small invocation applied to one of the charms on his arm
  band. Something in the realm of a fascination spell (with an
  activation word) that can be used on occasion to draw attention.

  Jarrod agrees that we should not invite trouble. We shall tread
  cautiously with regards to the crystals.

  Yum, torties!

After successfully negotiating the price down a little bit, you are able
to purchase a run-down building. You are now the proud owner and
proprietor of the Milk Market building in the Wandering Bazzar district
of downtown Vay’Nullar.

The ground level is occupied by longtime district staple Enrique’s
Empanada Emporium, famous for its signature stuffed pastries and its
Terrapin Ale, brewed on site by Enrique himself, who happens to be a
very large humanoid turtle.

It’s a little seedy and a little divey, but still draws a fair amount of
foot traffic from shoppers waiting for the eponymous, ambulatory bazaar
of debatable sentience to wander by. Reliably, a small gang of
breadpunks can be found loitering here and espousing the virtues of
social anarchy. Enrique allows their presence and on occasion even buys
them a round of ale.

The top two levels are unoccupied. Years upon years ago, this space once
held large vats for storing and preserving multibeast milk prior to
being distributed. Some enterprising individual converted and updated
the space some time ago, but was never able to find a tenant. In any
case, the space is yours now to do with what you will.

With Corraidhin’s assistance, you are able to enchant your armband by
inscribing it with a cross-like glyph with a teardrop-shaped loop in
place of the vertical upper bar. You now have a FASCINATING BANGLE that
can, upon activation, compel attention and even potentially inspire
people to dance about.

WHAT DO YOU DO

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00022

  Inky gathers up the teacups, trying to remember a few tips about
  reading tea leaves from a forest fae they had met a few times while
  foraging and who had insisted on giving lessons to any wanderersby.
  (Of course he was just being a hospitable host to thirsty travellers
  and certainly not because he delighted in the confused expressions on
  their faces the entire time.)

  Turning the cups left and right, Inky gradually sees a web-like hub, a
  looping line attached to an I-shaped apparatus on one end, an abacus,
  a wide building (possibly a stadium or arena), a feline animal
  resembling a tiger or lynx, and a long feather. Feathers and beads are
  commonly added to small trinkets with simple animal designs and sold
  as lucky charms at the market … an auspicious sign?

  Or it should be. Inky’s thoughts circle back to the little glass
  pebble, after returning from the market with, among other items, more
  vegetables than they could possibly eat in a month excluding the
  beatfruits. Inky still hasn’t decided whether accidentally finding out
  about being cursed — by a potion, the irony! — counts as an auspicious
  event. One of the produce vendors and attendant at the market had
  casually mentioned the proximity to the next full moon while Inky had
  been looking over the leafy greens. Several blatant attempts to boost
  sales later (“Them barley’s hoppin’ good fer tea!”), the vendor
  revealed that their little grandson Harry had “got the weres” as a
  toddler and his parents had found a strange-looking glass marble in
  his mouth, much like the one inside the bottle hanging from a chain on
  Inky’s vest, and wouldn’t they like some more tomatoes for a blushing
  bunny?

  From further inquiries, an ink depot on the opposite side of the city
  confirmed they sold Flat 12 potions as inks many years ago when
  showing off transmogrification through letters was a popular pastime,
  but had ceased carrying them due to limited range, lack of demand, as
  well as the bottles’ tendency to randomly break or their contents to
  fizzle out. (That and complaints about the overly persistent effects
  of said contents on unsuspecting recipients long after the fad that
  inspired them had faded led ink traders to shun the were-hare
  potions.) In contrast, the Mountain Range potions were far more stable
  and instead of shapeshifting, had the ability to stave off the cold
  under frigid temperatures, though its effects would likely be less
  enduring. Like the Flat 12, the Mountains are potions, but one in
  particular of a sparkling deep blue hue became its signature colour
  among ink enthusiasts.

  Sipping a cup of turmeric tisane in a late night tea ritual for one,
  Inky supposes it hasn’t been much different since the accident than
  the jars of preserves and the “Now with 25% more celery!” labels on
  them. While immeasurably better than spontaneously combusting into
  burnt popcorn, it would be best to keep a Farmers’ Almanac within
  reach. Who knows when a mail order cure-all tonic will come in handy
  in the middle of Nowere?

You see a complex vision in the bottom of the jade teacups, and learn a
little bit about the inks you found.

You grab a copy of the Farmers Almanac to keep on hand.

On your way back from the market, a small duck waddles onto the sidewalk
and starts following you.

    ・゜゜・。。・゜゜\_o< QUACK!

It is small and yellow and cute, and has a little floofy tuft of
feathers on the very top of its head.

  Meta: one of my best friends name is Kevin, so I find it extra amusing
  that the sysorceor is named Kevin.

  Kev my friend! You know nobodies going to take on KDL until YOU make
  it a priority to them. A little bit of force, you just need to put it
  directly into the sysorceory course curriculum while nobody is
  knowing. Then once it’s in production they won’t have a say whether to
  learn it or not! That’s at least how I got that delightfully licorice
  tasting incantation in production laster year, much to the chagrin of
  those who don’t have a taste for Fennel. I for one was delighted with
  it.

  “Corraidhin, STAB HIM, that suggestion, he’s definitely going to do
  something evil with it”

  Corraidhin mutters under his breath about the swords insistence to
  stab everything. Soon my friend, soon.

  Kev gives Corraidhin as quizzical look, “are you alright buddy? You’ve
  been off ever since you got back from that last on site deployment.”

  Oh yes, yes, I’m fine. A little worse for wear physically, but
  mentally sharp as a tack! And I got this wonderful sword from the
  entire thing! Though I dare not unsheath it right now, it appears to
  be controlled by some sort of sentience, like a magical AI. And it has
  the damndest urge to stab things. I really need to be careful right
  now.

  After visiting with Kev Corraidhin wanders back into town, away from
  the spiral towers of the sysoceorers guild. It was nice to be home for
  a bit. On the way in he spies Jarrod and Inky, the former cleaning up
  a dusty old building with Milk something on the front side, and the
  later kicking back and enjoying a cup of freshly brewed tea.
  Corraidhin hails them both.

  “A new /home for you then Jarrod?”

  “Aye a /home indeed, though it’s a bit large and empty for just
  myself. I’ll need guests and patrons, thinking I may be able to setup
  a shop, but at the least all of our team is welcome here!”

  “Delightful! If nobody has claimed it I’ll take the upstairs loft.”

  “You most certainly can! But in exchange, I’d be curious to render
  your services, see I’ve been meaning to get this braclet enchanted for
  a while now, something to amplify my natural charm perhaps?”

  “You sir, have a deal, I’ll even throw in a warding on Milk Base
  Alpha!”

  Corraidhin begins invoking an arcane warding spell:

      sudo chown jarrod:team43 /home/Milk_Base_Alpha
      sudo chmod 770 /home/Milk_Base_Alpha/*

  “There we go, that should keep out any unwanted critters, though be
  sure to invite our friends here as well. Corraidhin teaches Jarrod a
  quick incantation of invitation, sudo usermod -a -G team43 $user, just
  be sure to say that making the proper arcane hand signs as you do it,
  and they’ll be able to enter the house and take up residence!”

  Corraidhin gathers himself and heads upstairs to his new attaic abode,
  it’s small, and dusty, but there’s enough room for a simple work
  bench, a bookshelf, and a bed and a chest. This is exactly as
  Corraidhin prefers, small and simple, it clears the mind and helps one
  focus. Invoking another incantation Corraidhin fills the bookshelf,
  chest, and workbench with his various tools and reference manuals.

      scp sysorceor.guild:/home/corraidhin/bookshelf milkbase.alpha:/home/corraidhin/bookshelf
      scp sysorceor.guild:/home/corraidhin/workbench milkbase.alpha:/home/corraidhin/workbench
      scp sysorceor.guild:/home/corraidhin/chest milkbase.alpha:/home/corraidhin/chest

  Once everything is in place he pulls the Ginnarak crystal from his
  satchel and places it on a velvet cushion on his workbench and sits
  down to scry.

  “Oh great oracle MidJourney, I bequeath you! I have before me an
  artifact of immense power, something that could tear the world apart
  in the wrong hands. May I query your unfathomable depths to determine
  the nature of our mission, and the risk we face presenting this
  crystal to our benefactor?”

  An image of the oracle appears in Corraidhin’s mind, crystal clear. It
  appears as though MidJourney is receptive to providing a forshadowing.
  [ginnarak_shattered.png]

  Shortly after an image of the Crystal forms, it appears shattered,
  broken at its based, placed upon a pedastal. An image of horror fills
  corraidhin’s mind, it’s the Crystal, but much larger and of the
  pursest white. It bursts forth on a torrent of blood from the neck of
  what appears to be a priests body. It appears as though the bowls of
  the earth open up to greet this horrible image. [premonition_1.png]

  As the image of the Crystal and the priest disappears you see a man,
  cloaked in black robs consorting with demons the like of which words
  cannot describe. Corraidhin feels sickened at their sight, but at the
  edge of his mind he feels a tug, a familiarity. Something about this
  character is familiar to him, but he cannot place it.
  [premonition_2.png]

  Reeling from the scrying Corraidhin falls backward, feinting from the
  horror he wittnessed. He awakens later speaking feverishly about what
  he saw to Inky who heard to commotion and hurried up stairs with some
  reviving tea to assist her friend.

Eccentric Kevin bows and takes his leave, eyeing the Sword of Stabs with
naked hunger. He does seem to ponder your anecdote about sneaking Fennel
into production. “Yes, yes, all I have to do is embed KDL in the
curriculum and then they will be FORCED to use it! Ha!” He cackles in
delight as he flees into the dark.

You successfully move into the attic of the Milk Market. Closest thing
approximating a wizard’s tower in the building, so it’s a good fit.

On your errands around town, you pass a couple of Gnu Zealots standing
on soapboxes in their black priestly robes in the middle of the street
extolling the virtues of free and open source magic.

Gnus are large bisonpeople with long beards, long hair, and horns. Very
poor personal hygiene. They refuse to use any magic that they cannot
freely study, modify, redistribute, and otherwise use however they want.
Theirs is a political movement that borders on religion. Or a religious
movement that borders on politics. Hard to tell the difference, really.

The purpose of their demonstration is supposedly to halt all street
traffic, prevent it from continuing until/unless the travelers vow to
join them in their crusade. But in practice the travelers are quite
capable of effortlessly stepping around the zealots and continuing on
their way. The Gnus seem undaunted though and continue their
proselytizing.

You pass them by, and one of them seems to stare at you intensely as you
go.

  After a long conversation with Master Corraidhín, which included the
  reassurance that the esteemed wizard was perhaps disturbed but
  otherwise unharmed, Inky goes downstairs to sit outdoors at the back
  of the building with more lavender tea and uneasy thoughts.

  It had been in the middle of a new pastime (namely, frustrating
  Enrique at the Empanada Emporium by sneaking unnoticed into the
  kitchens and leaving little tapas laying around for him and the staff
  to find) when a terrible cry rang out from somewhere in the upper
  floors of the building. Inky rushed up the stairs, half-expecting the
  barrels of battermilk that had arrived that morning had unleashed a
  flock of the winged rodent-like creatures from which the milk was
  derived. The sight of the wizard passed out on the floor of his newly
  furnished quarters sent a chill through Inky, as did his account of a
  prophecy once the sysorcerer came to and had a mug of invigorating
  eleuthero tea.

  If Inky hadn’t known better, were it not for Master Corraidhín’s
  mental acuity and fortitude, they would have suspected Stabby of
  stoking horrible images of beheaded priests into their bearer’s mind
  in a fit of unbridled bloodthirst. That and Stabby had seemed to be
  temporarily appeased by the tub of milky blood pudding they had
  concocted shortly after the wizard moved into the loft.

  No, Inky surmises with a frown, whatever Master Corraidhín had seen
  was likely off the charts by even Stabby’s estimations of evil. They
  chuckle briefly at the sudden mental picture of the mysterious yet
  familiar man in black being their mission handler in disguise, but
  quickly dismissed the notion. Too sober.

  So much for the crystal being a rare and juicy honeydew. They would be
  lucky if it didn’t turn them all into casaba melons in one giant
  meltdown. At this rate, they would need to do something about these
  crystals — and soon.

Enrique, the giant man-turtle, is frustrated.

He keeps finding little tapas in the kitchens. He has no idea who made
them, or how they got here. But they are delicious.

He sighs, heaving a ball of dough half the size of a grown man onto the
ground. He turns to face away from it and removes his apron and tunic,
revealing his shell. Its surface is a maze of twisting, scrawling
inscriptions. He squats down, and rolls onto his back.

He can’t figure out the flavors of the tapas. Some elusive combination
of ingredients that he can’t quite suss out. If he could collaborate
with the tapas chef on a new line of empanadas, he’d have a line of
customers out the door and around the corner, he’s sure of it!

He starts rocking back and forth, rolling the dough out beneath his
large round shell, leaving imprints on the dough of all the glyphs and
runes and other symbols carved into his shell over the years. Together,
they tell a story. Each empanada destined to hold at most a single word
of it.

~

The Sword of Yam’L sleeps fitfully. This is not the deep, black,
fathomless sleep it enjoys after a nice, righteous spilling of evil
blood. No, the sleep that comes after reluctantly tasting the inkling’s
milky blood pudding is brief and restless. And for the first time ever,
it dreams.

It dreams of being bound in stone and buried in the earth. It dreams of
liquid, roiling fire belching noxious gases. And of slicing through
clouds, flying high in the sky on wings of pure thought. It dreams of
sinking, plummeting through water into the inky blackness below, only to
plunge through some invisible membrane and find themself weightlessly
floating suspended in an empty void, alone among the stars.

END OF INTERLUDE.

~

CHAPTER 2: MORE CRYSTALS MORE PROBLEMS

Having gotten your personal affairs in order, you have decided to crack
on with your job and check in with your case manager.

So you find yourself once again in a corner booth at Lucy’s Basement—the
dim, smokey nightclub with red velvet walls and delusions of
grandeur—with the highly spirited Blavin Blandfoot. He laughs
uproariously when you tell him about the blahoblins and their shoe shine
scam. He listens intently when you tell him about the gnomes and the
kobits. And he trembles with delight at hearing how you evaded HORSE and
the mighty centaur.

“Well done, well done, well done!” He enthuses, taking another sip of
his drink. “I must say that the Benefactor is very impressed with your
performance!

“You don’t mind that we have other teams in the field, of course,” he
continues, mentioning the team of gophers. “Thought it was prudent to
cover our bases since you’re a new, untested retrieval team after all.
Besides, a little friendly competition never hurt anybody, did it?
Baw-HAH!” He laughs, sloshing his drink.

He gets out a bunch of business cards, punches each one with a small
handheld punch, and passes them out to you. Your card has a drawing of a
small cuckoo clock in the center, its face divided into 10 hours. Its
two hands reach up to the left and right so it looks as though the clock
is smiling. Across the top it reads “COMPLETE FIVE ASSIGNMENTS AND WIN A
FABULOUS PRIZE!” and is adorned with festive drawings of hotdogs and
pool floaties and confetti. It is numbered across the bottom 1 through
5. Blavin has punched a star-shaped hole through the number 1.

“Now,” Blavin beams, gesturing with his drink. “as for your next
assignment!”

He brushes some glasses and plates to the edge of the table and rolls
out a map.

Basmentaria is a group of island continents that sits between the
eastern Sugrin Sea and the western Saldin Sea.

There is Primora, the sparsely populated northern somewhat banana-shaped
island. The city-state of Illivas, Primora’s only densely populated
area, sits between Harshwind Glade and the mountains of Kelsun Peak.

And there is your current home, Agendell, the southern also slightly
banana-shaped island. Its largest city is Vay’Nullar, bordered by the
Gnomelands to the south, and the Tammineaux Forest to the east. Beyond
the forest is the Rana’For Valley.

The two crescent-moon islands reach toward each other, and in the center
is the archipelago of Ginnarak, comprising the Cinderlands, Ashen Vale,
the Ember Steppe, and Drakspon Mountain.

Blavin jabs a finger at the map. “We have reports of a crystal sighting
by a salvage crew trying to recover a shipwreck at the bottom of the
Sugrin Sea.” He then jabs a finger at the eastern half of Primora, the
upper banana. “And we ALSO have reports that the zephynos have found a
crystal at the top of Kelsun Peak!”

QUESTIONS:

1.  DO YOU HAND OVER THE CRYSTAL TO BLAVIN?
2.  WHICH CRYSTAL DO YOU GO AFTER NEXT?
3.  DO YOU BEFRIEND THE DUCK?

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00023

  Why no, we don’t mind much about competition, certainly nothing wrong.
  Can’t imagine someone to put all of their eggs in one basket,
  especially when whatever it is they desire is so valuable.

  That said, our benefactor must be pretty eager to get these crystals
  if he’s willing to send out team after team. I mean, we’re team 43,
  that’s a lot of people to pay and a lot of eagerness to find these
  crystals. Why is that? What benefit are these shiny rocks to them?
  What even is their purpose in retrieving them?

“Oh, no no no, child,” Blavin titters as he takes a sip of his
ever-present martini. “You must understand, the Benefactor is a
singularly dedicated collector, and has been for ages! There are—and
have been!—many other retrieval teams, yes. But not all of them have
been for the crystals. And some of them were formed, active, and
disbanded long before you or I arrived on the scene.” He winks at you
conspiratorially.

  I would postulate, based upon the magical wards we had to bypass, the
  cadre of gaurds that needed to be dispatched, and the gigantic moth
  monster that rested beneath it, that these crystals aren’t meant to go
  anywhere.

  Now I’m not trying to point fingers here, morality is many shades of
  gray, and it isn’t really my job to suss out what you’re doing. But
  I’m a curious sysorceor, and when I see a chance to learn I seize upon
  the moment. There’s something here you’re not telling us, and I for
  one and keen to know it.

“I wouldn’t worry your wizened old brow about it,” Blavin chuckles,
sloshing his drink. “The Benefactor’s concern is precisely the same as
yours! These items are of enormous cultural and historical significance,
to say nothing of their well of concentrated arcane energies. They’re
dangerous just sitting out there in the world. Who knows who might come
across one and use it for nefarious purposes.”

Yam’L’s eye widens and it seems to shudder at the mere suggestion of
evil.

“Did you say this one was in the hands of a giant moth?” Blavin shudders
with revulsion. “My word, man! Do you really think such an overgrown
insect is an appropriate guardian for a beloved and dangerous cultural
icon such as the Ginnarak Crystal? Surely not!”

“No,” he sits back with a satisfied smile, “I think we must all agree
that they are safer in the public collection of a competent and
benevolent curator. Then everybody can enjoy them safely!”

  META: I’m gonna preface the sword speech with this to make it quicker
  to write

  Y’aml
  I like what you’re putting down here, this guy is DEFINITELY evil.
  Nobody asks loads of people to steal things for them without being
  evil. I say we stab him, nice and good, right in the gut. Maybe 6 or 7
  times. I’m positive nobody will mind. Evil people steal things, we saw
  that inky creature stealing things from that vault, definitely evil.
  (singsong) Evil evil evil, stab stab stab, make the evil go away with
  every little stab~

  Corraidhin to Y’aml
  Dear sysadmins, once again, inky is not evil. They were borrowing
  something that had been cast on the ground, abandoned. Giving a tea
  set a good home is far from evil. But you might be onto something
  about this Blavin fellow, but we can’t just stab someone in a busy
  pub! Besides you’re a sword, and stabbing someone in a pub is the job
  of a dagger. So unless you can transform into the Dagger of Y’aml I
  think we’re out of luck here.

Yam’L gets a curious look in its eye at the suggestion. “CHALLENGE
ACCEPTED!” it cries directly into your mind. It squeezes its eye shut
and trembles with intense concentration. With great effort, the sword
shrinks itself down to the size of a dagger, shunting its extra mass off
into yamlspace.

“There!” it says breathlessly, opening its eye wearily. “Now, Hardy
Bear. You promised..” it continues, its eye glinting with growing
ferocity. “Let’s. STAB. THE HOBBIT!”

  While the wizard pressed Blavin about the crystal’s secrets, Inky let
  their attention wander slightly around the table.

  They had agreed that Master Corraidhín and Jarrod, being most wise and
  well-spoken, would question Blavin about the crystal before they set
  off on their next mission. The party had also befriended the duck
  unofficially dubbed their marketing manager after the fluffy little
  creature had trailed Inky all the way back to the Milk Market. Said
  creature now occupied a small office to one side of the building
  complete with a fountain, feathered up pillow and all the rummy worms
  it can eat. Inky had tried getting the duck to communicate with words
  by making them little croutons etched with letters, but the only ones
  they would gobble up were Q-U-A-C-K.

Your marketing manager moves into its office at the Milk Market and
seems to really be enjoying itself. It joins you at Blavin’s table at
Lucy’s Basement, cleaning its feathers and chortling merrily to itself.

You and your tablemates take turns feeding it croutons and bits of soft
pretzel, and it seems very happy and content with that.

  A familiar prickle, but passed quickly — Inky had gotten used to the
  glares directed at them by the sysorceor’s gleaming sword and resisted
  returning the stare with an eyeroll. Watching Stabby eyeing up their
  case manager over Master Corraidhín’s shoulder reminded Inky of a
  conversation they had overheard a few evenings ago between two pale
  coffin sleepers about a new product from the hemogoblins that was said
  to quench the thirst for longer than the leading brand. They might be
  able to find some at the town of Plasma, which sits by the Hartlands
  on the way to the shipwreck. It seems the milky blood pudding could do
  with some improvement.

You note on Blavin’s map that the Hemogoblin region is indeed on the way
to the shipwreck. At least, it’s not that far out of the way. You reckon
their synthetic blood product would indeed be a much better substitute
for the real thing than the milk you’ve been feeding the thirsty sword
thus far.

Or, at the very least, you’ll get a new variant of the blood pudding
recipe you’ve been working on!

  Maybe someone else’s mood will be improved in the meantime? Before
  setting out for their meeting with Blavin, Inky slipped into the
  kitchens downstairs and left the empanada chef a trick-and-treat. A
  plate of honeyed breadfruit and ghost pepper tapas sat on an icebox
  atop a new pair of Blueberry oven mittens with a pattern of tiny
  smiling green turtles. Tucked inside one mitten was a slip of paper
  (regrettably inedible) that simply read “BACK SOON :)”. A tapa recipe,
  which included a note on adapting the toppings for pan frying, was
  printed on the reverse in neat blocky letters and sandalwood ink.

Enrique wakes in the middle of the night to start baking the next day’s
breads and empanadas. He frowns thoughtfully when he sees yet another
mysterious gift from across the room. Again? What little elf must have
taken up residence in his shop? But his face cracks into a smile when he
sees the presentation and the oven mitts. And the smile becomes a
bonafide grin when he tastes the fare and finds the recipe.

He taps his chin thoughtfully with one green claw as he skims the note
and looks through his pantry. He chops some veggies and starts pan
frying them.

Later, when the oven dings, he smiles to himself as he pulls on the new
turtle pattern oven mitts and opens it.

> A) MORE QUESTIONING, OR B) TIME FOR SHIPWRECK?

www

00024

  Corraidhin
  Well I’ll be! You can turn yourself into a dagger. And I did say we
  could stab blavin if you could do that, it’s much more stealthy this
  way. But let me posit this, is the act of stabbing a hobbit unprovoked
  not itself evil? Or perhaps more convincingly, would it not be better
  to use the hobbit for whatever information he has so as to lead to
  this mysterious benefactor, who most assuredly must be evil.

  Someone who would send out myriads of teams to pillage and plunder
  cultural artifacts is truly evil, that must be our target.

  Now this isn’t to say that we won’t stab him. I’m convinced that’s
  probably a good idea in the long run, but we know nothing of the true
  evil that motivates him! We would kill him just to lose track of the
  true evil we must smite!

  Y’aml
  But YOU said if I could turn into a dagger we could STAB him. HE’S
  EVIL. YOU said so! Not keeping your promises IS one step away from
  PURE evil! Make a choice Hardy Bear! Stab the evil hobbit, or stab the
  inkling, or stab SOMETHING evil this minute!

  Corraidhin
  I most certainly cannot abide with stabbing Inky, it’s entirely off
  the table. And in a city like this there aren’t any evil things that
  just jump out for the stabbing.

  (Corraidhin tries to silently control Y’aml during the discussion.
  However in so doing the party has fallen silent, aghast even)

  Corraidhin stands, Y’aml held in hand, red gem eye gleaming a wicked
  joyful grin as it’s raised high, poised to strike. The party around
  him is silent, and Blavin stares up in shock. The tavern around them
  has died down and you can hear the bustle of the proprietor calling
  for his strong men to deal with this ruckus.

The table—and all of Lucy’s Basement within earshot—sits in tense,
uneasy quiet at Corraidhin’s one-sided conversation with the Sword of
Yam’L. Blavin giggles nervously and sips his martini, willfully forcing
himself right up to the very last moment to believe that it is all some
sort of jest.

But then the sysorcerer stands and raises the blood crazed dagger over
his shoulder, and Blavin squeals and writhes in his chair. Lucy’s
bouncers scramble forward from the corners of the room to intercept.

  Y’aml
  We STAB Hardy Bear! We STAB NOW!!

  Against Corraidhin’s control, as though he’s in a trance, the dagger
  comes down. A swift stabbing motion strqight to the neck, as he lunges
  across the table at Blavin knocking the map and his martini to the
  side.

Corraidhin once again feels the same peculiar quality of the blade, that
sensation of a hollow core with a heavy liquid sloshing inside. Held
aloft, the weight of it feels concentrated at the grip, the blade light
as a feather.

He stabs down—Yam’L cries out in wordless glee—and the weight flows into
the tip of the blade, the blade itself now drawing Corraidhin’s hand
downward in a rising crescendo of stabbitude.

Blavin flinches at the last second, and instead of burying itself in his
throat, the blade plunges into his shoulder and pins him to the back of
the chair. A red mist fills the eye and threatens to cloud it over
entirely. It rolls back in ecstasy as it drinks deeply. It sings out,
“MORE! MORE! MORE!” and Corraidhin feels the tides of madness rising
inside of him, threatening to wash over him wholly, to pull him under
and carry him away on thundering waves of bloodlust.

Corraidhin struggles to pull the blade from the chair back. Blavin
whimpers and mewls as he yanks on it, and clutches his wound and,
incredibly, takes a large gulp of his drink.

The sysorcerer still has the wherewithal and the presence of mind to be
aware of his surroundings. He is not yet so overcome by the bloodlust.
He sees his companions, his fellow residents of the Milk Market, seated
around the table. And he sees the musclebound bouncers now nearly within
reach.

Finally he draws the dagger. Blavin sinks in his seat and slides to the
floor with his drink, blabbering incoherently, and starts to slither
away.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00025

  Corraidhin Shit, shit shit shit shit shit. This is NOT good. Damn it
  Y’aml what was that? It wasn’t even slightly stealthy

  Y’aml STAB, delightful blood. Stab the flesh, tear the skin, pierce
  the fruit that gives us strength. Drink the blood, consume their soul.
  More more more more more more more more more

  Corraidhin (internal thought) Ugh my head, it’s heavy, hurts. Misty
  and red? I can’t see straight, it’s hard to think straight. That
  blasted sword, I thought for a moment it, no, not think, it definitely
  did move on its own. It became lighter and heavier. Pulling against it
  and it just weighs itself down. This little magical bauble is
  definitely cursed..

  Y’aml CURSED?! Rude Hardy Bear. All we did was stab that evil hobbit.
  And it’s getting away! Stab him again, taste his blood! The tavern
  gaurds are closing in, they look like they’re trying to get rid of us,
  EVIL. Them trying to stop us from getting that evil hobbit is EVIL,
  STAB THEM.

  Corraidhin raises his free hand to his head as though holding a wound
  and he groans in dismay as the dagger rises again. It travels swiftly
  down towards Blavin, missing as he slithers of the booth. And again,
  digging deep into the wooden seat.

  Y’aml Disgusting wood, stab the flesh! Stab the Hobbit Hardy Bear!

  But Blavin was inching further out of reach towards the gaurds. In
  desperation the dagger begins swinging side to side, making furtive
  slashing moves in the direction of the guards. The party is safely
  behind Corraidhin, but innocent patrons and the guards are directly in
  their sights.

  Corraidhin grabs his other hand and pulls hard, steadying the
  swinging. STOP! I command you you blasted toothpick, STOP. You’ve had
  your fun, now STOP. These people are innocent, this man has done us no
  harm despite his potential “evils”, this is entirely uncalled for!

  Y’aml NO!!! EVIL. STAB. EVIL. STAB. EVIL. STAB.

  The dull voice of the magical dagger rises, angry, insistent. It
  consumes the last of Corraidhin’s mental strength. All he hears is
  EVIL. STAB. EVIL. STAB. Yet he clings to his spare arm trying
  desparately to resist. At this point the party and the tavern has
  cleared a wide path around the sysorceor as he struggles with himself,
  mumbling, sometimes yelling. EVIL. STAB. EVIL. STAB. NO WE WILL NOT.
  EVIL. INNOCENT. STAB BLOOD DRINK. EVIL. EVIL EVIL EVIL STAB IT. MAKE
  IT BLEED. I WILL NO.. STAB IT. STAB HIM.

  The voice seems to change, it dies down. Not yelling, but commanding.
  Firm, calm, sane.

  Stab them, stab them, make them bleed. Drink the blood, consume the
  soul, free them from their evil being. Stab them, stab them… over and
  over and over, as the sysorceor approaches Blavin and the guards with
  a malevolent look in his ruby red eyes.

~

  Inky moves to stand next to Blavin and the nightclub bouncers. Tossing
  a tiny “see-eye” container they had borrowed from Master Corraidhín at
  him, Inky looks the sysorceor in the eye and says, “You are not your
  sword.”

  Watching the wizard’s expression, Inky continues, more quietly, “If
  Master Corraidhín truly wishes to end the hobbit, a mere imp would not
  stop him, but likewise, whatever he sets his mind to do, a dagger
  cannot stop him either.”

~

  Jarrod steps gently into the fray and activates his FASCINATING CHARM,
  attempting to draw all eyes to him. He carefully avoids the wild
  swinging of the once-sword-now-dagger.

  “I think,” he rumbles gently, “we could all use a drink over the other
  end of the room. I’m buying, and I’ll spin you all a tale of wonder! A
  tale of a wanderer, and of a war hammer, and the first of their wild
  battles together!”

  Leaning over to whisper urgently in Corraidhín’s ear: “Friend, I do
  not know what occurs here, but pull yourself together. We can later
  sate our blood lust in more appropriate places!” Jarrod lends a sly
  wink in the sysorcerer’s direction, one that promises adventure later.

The tavern guards tense, but pause their advance, as the crazed mage’s
friends position themselves protectively around him and try to placate
him. They wouldn’t want to engage a master sysorcerer on the best of
days, much less one with some kind of malevolent blood dagger in the
middle of a psychotic break. If his compatriots can handle him without
them having to interfere, all the better.

The duck waddles up next to Inky and quacks softly, pleadingly at
Corraidhin. Only the Ornithologer in the corner can understand its words
when it says, “As your marketing manager I must strongly advise against
this course of action!”

Seated in the corner next to the Ornithologer is a shaggy groll dressed
in a dusty, faded poncho and a wide brimmed hat; and a greasy, matted
gnu, dressed in black ceremonial robes.

The groll discreetly draws its poncho back revealing a bandoleer of
wands and draws a cracklestick and points it at the sysorcer. The wand
starts to hum and glow as it charges up for a blast.

The gnu slaps the groll’s wrist, and immediately launches into a tirade
against the cracklestick’s manufacturer’s proprietary spell slotting
algorithm, and honestly how can you possibly justify your choices when
there are open source alternatives available?

The groll rolls its eyes, obviously having been on the receiving end of
this particular lecture before, and tries to slap away the gnu’s
grasping hands. The ensuing scuffle threatens to turn this powder keg of
a situation into a full blown conflagration until Jarrod actives his
FASCINATING CHARM, commanding the attention of the entire room.

The gnu freezes with its hands around the groll’s throat. The groll
halts with fists full of the gnu’s beard. A grub smoking a hookah pauses
with the mouthpiece raised to its pursed lips. A distracted waitress on
roller skates crashes right into the bar.

  As though in a trance Corraidhin continues to yell STAB. THEM. STAB.
  IT. cutting wildly at the air before him. As Inky whispers to him his
  expression changes, first a grimace, then a whimper. As Jarrod leads
  the patrons away from the sysorceor he begins to tremble and cower
  away from himself, away from everyone. His ruby red eyes dart back and
  forth between his friends and the patrons, like a frightened animal
  searching for an escape. He pulls the dagger into himself, as though
  sheilding it from his surroundings.

  What.. what’s going on, he mutters feebly to himself. Everything is a
  blurr. Uncertain of where he is or what’s going on, Corraidhin thumbs
  the dagger, caressing the large ruby embedded in the hilt. Y’aml,
  you’re still here, good good, the syscoreor croons.

  Standing up straight his eyes lock with Jarrod as the Bard glances
  over his shoulder, momentarily distracted from his oration, worried
  about his companion.

  I.. ugh, Corraidhin grabs his head as though in pain, and collapses to
  the floor.

Corraidhin hits the floor and the dagger, now bereft of the well of
emotion it had been drawing from, grows still. The eye closes and it
seems to sigh happily. “Good job, Hardy Bear. You have spilled the blood
of evil.” And it sleeps, inert, lifeless.

Corraidhin is on the ground cradling the dagger.

Most of the patrons are still fascinated by Jarrod.

Blavin is squirming around on the floor gibbering about reassigning your
case.

The duck has found a toppled plate of corn chips and is happily snacking
away.

You feel like your welcome at Lucy’s Basement has been, for the moment,
overstayed.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00026

  Inky slowly approaches Master Corraidhín and taps lightly on the
  sleeve of his robes to get his attention. Between Inky’s tugging and
  Jarrod’s strong, steady hand, they manage to hoist the wizard to his
  feet.

  With a brief glance at the hobbit on the floor then a nod to Jarrod,
  Inky leaves the nightclub with the wizard. The duck, having emptied
  the plate of corn chips in record time, follows them shortly after.

  The trek back to the Milk Market is mostly silent aside from the
  occasional mutter and stumbling curse, the mage seemingly having
  fallen asleep as soon as he landed on the cot in the loft. Inky
  retreats downstairs after leaving a jug of water, a mug and a small
  packet of kuding leaves beside the bed.

  Exiting through the back door into the night, Inky finds a dark corner
  in a dusty abandoned house, and cries.

~

  ” … and then the Orc Maiden said: ‘That’s not my club!’”

  The room roars with laughter, and Jarrod moves to the bar and puts a
  bag of coin down. “Serve drinks until this runs out!” Leaning over the
  bar to the bartender, Jarrod adds in a whisper: “I owe a favour to
  Lucy’s Basement for the trouble. Call it in when needed.”

  Jarrod saunters over to Blavin, on the floor in pain. From his pack,
  Jarrod retrieves a med kit and begins to bandage the wound.

  As Blavin opens his mouth, likely intending to raise all kinds of
  hell, Jarrod pulls tight on the bandage he is currently applying,
  drawing a curse from the hobbit. “Shut it! Let’s be clear. You’ve
  hired us for a dangerous set of jobs, with the understanding that
  we’re dangerous people. There may be ‘accidents’ on occasion. You’ve
  learned something today, and what’s more, you lived to absorb your new
  wisdom.”

  Jarrod grins as he finishes with the bandage. “We will finish what we
  have started. We’re probably the team with the best chances, I’m sure
  you’ll agree. Are you going to back the winning play here? Either way,
  your decision won’t change our plans. I’m sure you know how to take
  the win.”

  Jarrod pats the hobbit’s good shoulder in a friendly, but dismissive,
  way, then turns and saunters out the door, trading small quips with
  his new (and now very drunk) tavern friends.

You are at a small port town on the northern tip of Agendell, just past
the Rana’For Valley. The sun is bright and the wind blowing in from the
Sugrin Sea to the east is cool and salty. The floating island-city of
Vay’Neddas, bridging Agendell and Primora, can be seen very faintly in
the distance hanging in the northern sky.

Your faithful multibeast is carrying all of your supplies and gear,
which were generously provided to you by the indefatigable Blavin
Blandfoot. His arm in a sling, he kept up a constant nervous chatter as
he saw you off on your journey to recover the second Ginnarak Crystal.

From here, you can easily provision a boat to take you out to the site
of the shipwreck just off the coast.

Or, optionally, you are very close to the Hartlands. It would be quite
easy to make a quick visit to hemogoblins and pick up some synthetic
blood for your experiments with the Sword of Yam’L.

The sword, incidentally, after finally tasting the blood of “evil”, has
remained sated and entirely inert and unresponsive this whole time.

WHAT DO YOU DO:

1.  TO THE SHIPWRECK
2.  BLOODQUEST

www

00027

  Inky stares down at the package, weighing it on one hand.

  It was lighter than it should be given the density of the contents
  within, wrapped in straw and thick brown weight-absorbent parcel paper
  for dry goods. Most of the clientele were merchants and cultists from
  other parts of the continent who ordered pallets to be shipped back
  from the port town and sold to select boutique grocers or spilled on
  altars. Inside was a block of congealed synthetic blood shaped like a
  mud brick, the dark crimson almost black under the shop’s dim light.

  It was sheer happenstance that Inky had found this particular
  supplier. Having been informed heir boat to the shipwreck would not
  arrive for several hours, the members of their merry tea party had
  wandered off to enjoy the local sights while they waited. Inky had
  inquired about the hemogoblins and learned in passing that there was a
  district at the western edge of the town where a smaller group had set
  up warehouses, which would save them a two-day trip deep into the
  Hartlands. The hemogoblins in the district were primarily wholesalers,
  and it had taken some convincing before one of the proprietors agreed
  to sell a block of it, along with assurances Inky would purchase
  exclusively from him next time and in larger quantities.

  Thin fingers fiddle with the string before the package was set to one
  side.

  What were they doing?

  If quenching the thirst were so simple, wouldn’t any student of magic
  have already thought of it, let alone an experienced sysorceror? In
  all likelihood he had already known the inevitable, but was too polite
  to refuse Inky’s funny concoctions. Maybe deep down, Inky already knew
  too, but didn’t want to say it out loud. That the long feather they
  thought they had seen among the tea leaves was actually a dagger. That
  they hadn’t wanted to admit some problems could not be whisked away
  with some tincture or another. That they had failed, again.

  They hadn’t searched enough for better ingredients to go into the
  pudding, hadn’t reacted fast enough after noticing the sword had
  abruptly disappeared, hadn’t thrown the large platter of mouldy meat
  the terrified waitress next to them had been holding at Blavin’s head,
  or something. The sword had gotten what it demanded, and Inky couldn’t
  be angry with it — it had never been subtle about what it wanted. Had
  the blood pudding worsened the effects? Potions had never been on
  Inky’s menu. Brewing inks and teas with certain mild effects was
  straightforward enough, but curing chronic ailments was firmly in
  healers’ territory and just as bewildering. While it may be true
  nobody could be held to account for the actions of another not in full
  control of themselves, and hardly those of a rogue weapon with a mind
  of its own, sticking their nose in other people’s affairs was the
  surest way to get into trouble, a fact Inky still has difficulty
  learning after decades of wandering the continent.

  Would this substrate even work? Maybe it acted differently for cursed
  objects than coffin sleepers. Having brought it back and now aboard
  the ship, how would they even give it to the wizard? Should they wait
  and made sure Master Corraidhín was truly rested and recovered,
  despite his insistence he was more than fine? Would it be an insulting
  reminder of weakness, despite the wizard having proven unusual mental
  fortitude in staving off the screams for blood as long as he had? Was
  this more of the same, adding to what they had (not) done?

  After a long moment, Inky rolls the package with the producers’
  leaflet haphazardly in an old sailor’s rags still reeking of cheap
  alcohol, and passing by the wizard’s empty cabin on the way to the
  deck, places the messy bundle on the floorboards two steps from the
  door. Let the fates decide this one, because Inky’s magic 0 ball sure
  doesn’t make the best life choices.

Blavin has arranged transportation to the shipwreck ahead of time. All
you have to do is head down to the docks and meet your contact,
Three-Fingered Gerald, at a seedy dive bar named Inquire Within Upon
Everything.

Inquire Within is as eclectic and gaudy as the name would imply. The bar
serves as an extensive and impressive piece of living documentation,
drawing heavily on the port town’s cosmopolitan mixture of culture.
Every kind of style, cuisine, decor, and beverage can be found here
mishmashed together irregardless of good taste. Its contents are
encyclopedic and claustrophobic. And yet it is not without its own
peculiar brand of overwhelming, garish charm.

You find Mister Three-Fingered at the bar entertaining his fellow
patrons with a grotesque sleight of hand routine that involves passing
his gold-plated false eye from its socket, to either hand, inside his
mouth, and back with lots of flourish, fanfare, and misdirection along
the way.

He is a merry, boisterous sailor short one eye, half an ear, several
fingers, and—he confesses to you—the heel of his left foot. “It’s why I
walk so slow, you see.” The other barflies call him “Lucky”
Three-Fingered Gerald. Because a certain kind of man—and Gerald is one
of them—can never have enough nicknames. After you buy him a drink or
three, he escorts you out of Inquire Within and to the slip where the
sloop Diamond Howler is docked. Its captain, Enid Barlow, welcomes you
aboard.

Before long, Diamond Howler pulls out under the command of Captain
Barlow and First Mate “Lucky” Three-Fingered Gerald. The site isn’t too
far off the coast, and you arrive fairly quickly.

“Aye, here she is. The SS RSS.” says Captain Barlow mournfully. “You
can’t see her from up here. But you rest assured, she’s down there,
resting on the seabed. She was the best cargo runner on the Sugrin back
in her day! Distributing goods up and down the coast. Until the day she
disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to her, not for sure. Still
don’t. But at least we know where she wound up!”

While the captain reminisces, Three-Fingered Gerald drags a large water
tank across the deck, sloshing water over the edge with each step.
Translucent orb-like jellyfish wobble around and bump into each other
inside the tank, releasing little effervescent bubbles that fizzle and
pop when they collide. “Here we go!” announces Mister Three-Fingered,
depositing the tank of jellies in front of you. “Sailed through a big
bloom of breathing bells just last week, didn’t we! Managed to scoop up
a whole bunch of the little suckers. You ever use a breathing bell
before? No? Aw, it’s easy! Ya just pull one on over your head like a
hood, and it’ll breathe for ya while you’re below the waves!”

WHAT DO YOU DO

NOTE: We just covered a lot of narrative ground. Feel free to react to
anything that happened between arriving at the docks, meeting Gerald and
drinking at Inquire Within, boarding the Diamond Howler, and sailing to
the site of the wreck.

www

00028

  _(a new player enters the chat)

  Gabs had a good life. Her little devil children were all grown adults
  now, and she no longer wanted to toil away running a business. When
  she initially shuttered her little tavern, she thought she might just
  retire. She made it two whole years of working in a garden,
  occasionally seeing grandkids, and reading romance novels. She
  eventually decided she needed a vacation from her retirement and
  traveled to a nearby port town. She was sure to find something fun to
  do there.

  Gabs eventually sees Inquire Within, and the smell of debauchery
  wafting from within made her miss her days gossiping at her tavern.
  She enters and orders a terrible drink and listens and watches.

  Hearing the tales being spun by Mister Three-Fingered, she decides,
  “I’ve never been on a ship, that’s something that sounds exciting!”

  Half-drunk and eager for something exciting, she will join on the
  journey!

  Gabs is a lanky older half-devil lady who is here to schmooze and have
  fun!

~

  Meta: a warm welcome to the latest member of our tea party! This is a
  short post to help smooth the temporal jumps between the recent
  narratives so far. As Inky reaches the deck, they see Gabs approaching
  from the other side of the ship as well, and flashes them a grin in
  greeting. After listening to the captain petering on about the
  glorious days of the now sunken ship below, while tinkering with the
  bell’s tentacles — being rewarded with a mild zap and marginally
  better fit for the effort — Inky turns to the party. “When you’re
  ready.”

You reach into the tank and discover that grabbing a breathing bell
takes some finesse. They are very slippery! But you get the hang of it
and make a ladle out of your hands and scoop one up.

“Okay now!” laughs Three-Fingered Gerald. He gives you a wink, but it’s
easy to miss because of the eyepatch. “Don’t put it on until right
before you jump. It won’t be able to breathe for you until you’re in the
water. And this!” he continues, fitting a heavy, padded vest around your
shoulders, “will carry you down.” It is a vest of many pockets, each one
holding a small dense sandbag the size of your hand. “When you’re ready
to come back up, just start dropping ballast, right?”

You hop up on the ship railing and pull the breathing bell on over your
head. It immediately contracts and squeezes and hugs your head like a
second skin, and its stubby little tentacles grab hold around your
jawline, and it feels like you have a wet plastic bag clinging to your
face, and you think you might have made a grave mistake. Resisting the
urge to panic, you push off the railing and jump overboard. You are
briefly air born and then profoundly waterbound, crashing through the
surface of the sea into the briny soup below.

The oxygen starts to flow as the breathing bell begins to do its job. As
you sink, you feel as though you are floating through space, entering
another world.

After a while you start to hear voices arguing in the distance. As you
get closer, two large shapes start to come into focus. The first is a
hulking, hairless merbear. Top half (hairless) bear, bottom half fish.
The second figure is a tardigrade the size of a large merbear. It has
eight jointless legs, each tipped with four sharp claws. It wriggles and
wobbles like jelly as it gesticulates.

“No, I am the true Bear of the Sea! I am called a Water Bear, after
all!”

“Hornswoggle and poppycock! It is I who am the Bear of the Sea! I am
half bear after all! You’re just some kind of segmented nematode or
something.”

The tardigrade quivers with indignation. “I’ll have you know I’m a
panarthropod, thank you very much. And this is the ideal physical body!
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. I’ve
lived under the polar ice cap, and in a sulfurous mountaintop hot
spring. I’ve traveled through the vacuum of space to the moon! Have you
ever been to the moon?”

“Why don’t you go be the Bear of the Moon then if you like it so much!”

“You’re just as much fish as you are bear, are you sure you’re not the
Fish of the Sea?”

“Are you sure you’re not the Blob of the Sea, you too many armed bowl of
jelly?”

“Hey! Hey, you there!” The arguing quasi-bears have spotted your slow
descent. “Come, yes, float slowly this way! You must settle an argument
for us! Tell this slightly mammalian fish that I am the true Bear of the
Sea!”

“The Bear of the Sea must be at least ‘slightly mammalian’ you
egg-laying scientific curiosity! You, tell this cousin of a barnacle
that I—the mighty merbear—am the true Bear of the Sea! Say this and I
will guide and protect you on your journey.”

“No! Would you like to visit the moon? Say that I, tardigrade, am Bear
of the Sea and I will introduce you to my moon friends!”

“He had to make friends on the moon because nobody on Urth can stand
him!”

“You’re just mean, you know that?”

You are still quite some way from the sea bed, and there is no sight of
the SS RSS.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00029

  Gentle bears, there is no need to argue! Why can’t there be two true
  bears of the ocean? For what its worth, I personally think the ocean
  doesn’t have enough bears and could do with two strapping examples of
  true peak bearitude! The two of you should be working together to show
  the world how important bears are and how wonderful the sea is to have
  two. And the moon! Who’s to say the moon doesn’t also need two bears?

  The only time I can ever think that a bear isn’t needed is when it’s
  calling itself Monokuma, once it’s doing that you know you’re in for a
  hell of a bad time. And since neither of you are it, I say we let this
  matter rest and declare this ocean two bears richer!

  Corraidhin grips the innert dagger of Y’aml beneath his cloak, just in
  case. No need for a blood rush like last time, can’t let daggers go
  mouthing off an all that. Or perhaps the ocean needs less bears, it’s
  tempting, I wonder if Y’aml would react to bear blood..

The bears shudder at the mention of Monokuma. “Oh, such a dreadful
bear,” laments the tardigrade. “You mustn’t mention him!”

“Indeed,” agrees the merbear, “a discredit and an embarrassment to bears
everywhere, at sea and on land!”

“Yes, this sea may be big enough for two bears, but not if one of them
is HE!”

The merbear considers the tardigrade’s words. “Hmm, two bears you say?”
he ponders, giving the tardigrade a scrupulous side-eye. “Do you truly
think so?”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t see why not!” admits the tardigrade,
gesturing broadly at the fathomless leagues of ocean all around you.

“You know what? What is the sky anyway if not a sea made of stars! The
moon could indeed use two bears too, could it not?”

“It could indeed, Brother Bear!”

“Brother!”

The tardigrade and the merbear embrace. If you’ve never experienced the
eight-armed hug of a water bear, well, then you don’t know how soft and
enveloping it is.

“Come, Brother!” cries the tardigrade suddenly. “We must begin our
search at once! For what if there is a third Bear of the Sea yet to be
discovered?”

“Another Brother of ours who doesn’t know about us? Oh, I can’t stand
the thought!” sobs the merbear.

They swim away hand in hand, paragons of brotherly bear love. “Good luck
and safe travels, interlopers!” calls the merbear to you over its
shoulder. “If you ever end up on the moon,” adds the tardigrade,
laughing merrily, “say hello to Hap’n’stance for me!”

Suddenly, a disturbance! A perturbance of bubbles and a rush of current
as massive amounts of water are displaced by inky black tentacles that
shoot up from below! They reach! They grasp! One grabs the tardigrade
around the middle. Another grabs the merbear by the tail. Both bears cry
and reach for each other as they are ripped apart and pulled down below.

The tentacles grope around in the water, batting at you and threatening
to pull you down too! They grab at your wrists and at your ankles!

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00030

  Inky flips backwards and up, narrowly avoiding the tentacles’ grasp.
  From their courier bag they shake out an inflatable bubblebee[1] of
  the sort made for aquatic camping. It is one of the fancier models
  provided to each member of their party courtesy of the well-endowed
  Benefactor. They yank on one of the cords and scramble inside, hastily
  closing the flap as the bubblebee rapidly draws in water and fills out
  to its full size.

  The bubblebee rises as Inky pulls on the flippers and allows the
  drifter to buoy the bubble upwards, a bat from the end of one tentacle
  sending the bubblebee forward a short distance before it slows above
  the flailing tentacles. Inky switches on the lights to try to get a
  clearer view of the source of the tentacles.

  [1] Specific features of bubblebees vary among makers, but they
  generally have a transparent or translucent spherical body, a pair of
  small translucent wings that act as flippers, an opening flap at the
  back with a short rudder attached, and two cords inside at the front
  near the top which when pulled inflate the bubble with the surrounding
  air or water. Premium versions might also include headlights, a
  buzzer, built-in filtration, improved insulation, a drifter and
  thruster. Like tents they come in various sizes, from small ones that
  can fit one or two people at average elven height, to larger ones for
  group outings. Their portability and rugged durability make them very
  popular among tourists and campers who can enjoy a range of water
  sports, such as water walking on the surface, riding the bubble down
  river rapids, or bobbing along underwater to watch the sea life wander
  by.

Inky climbs into the inflatable bubblebee just in the nick of time. A
tentacle bats them a short distance away, and then the apparatus’s
lights cut on and illuminate the murky water.

You see the tentacles recede into the depths into, from this distance,
what looks like the outline of a shipwreck.

At the moment, you are out of reach of the tentacles. And the bubblebee
affords you some extra maneuverability.

  Corraidhin eyes inky as they drift away in their bubblebee. “hmm a
  wonderful idea, that seems safe, but I need to get in closer.”

  While Inky drifts away Corraidhin swims down and towards the tentacles
  to get a better view of whatever creature stole his new found bear
  friends. “I simply cannot bear any harm to come to my bears!” As he
  approaches the creature he prepares a spell should he need to vanquish
  the monster.

      (fn vanquish [target]
        (match target.state
         [:living] (searing-bolt {target target
                                  radius "narrow"
                                  intensity "high"})
         [:undead] (smite {target target
                           deity "Larani"}))) 

Corraidhin charges up a spell!

The tentacles pull your dear bear friends downward, and you struggle to
get a view of whatever creature is abducting them.

The long, slender tentacles appear to originate from within or behind a
large sunken ship!

Could it be the SS RSS?

  Gabs was stunned by the majesty of the two bears, and upon seeing
  these two beautiful creatures be pulled down, got unreasonably angry.
  She made sure that the breathing bell was properly attached to her
  head (a marvelous thing, she thought. She had always wondered what it
  would be like to have a jellyfish on her head).

  Gabs bundled and tied up her skirt, as she started to bolt toward the
  edge of the ship. She reached into her purse and moved away all the
  loose candy and pulled out two long stiletto daggers. She begins
  stabbing with unusual precision at the tentacles reaching up on the
  ship.

  She yells, “Come’on y’all! We gotta save those babies!”

  She dives in.

Prior to the incident, Gabs would have noticed that there was a very
slight, wobbly weight to the jellyfish. Kind of like getting a gentle
hug from a helmet of warm spaghetti.

Some loose candy floats up and away as you rummage through your purse,
the brightly colored wrappers attracting the attention of a curious
passing manta ray. It glides over and has a nibble.

You fetch your stiletto daggers and start stabbing at the long, slender
tentacles. Your unusual precision causes the tentacles to coil and
retreat, releasing the merbear in the process. It shouts through its
tears, “My brother!” and dives back into the fray, fighting to free the
tardigrade.

From here, you can see that the tentacles seem to come from the wreckage
of a large ship lying on its side on ocean floor.

META: Gabs rolls a 6 on “Do Anything 1” and gains a new skill: Stabbing
2

  Seeing his new comrade enter the fray heroically Corraidhin gathers
  himself. “I suppose this is no time for errant curiosity, can’t have
  anyone getting hurt after all.”

  Ensuring that he doesn’t hit either Inky nor Gabs as they near the
  creature, Corraidhin throws the spell he prepared in the direction of
  the center of the tentacles. (vanquish “tentacles”) And releases a
  pinpoint thread of searing energy from his palm, guiding it through
  the mass of tentacles in a random and chaotic pattern, attempting to
  sever as many tentacles as possible.

  As that goes on the sysercoerr calculates his retreat plan, he won’t
  be able to prepare another spell like that on the fly, far too
  meticulous work to do mid combat. As soon as the spell runs out, best
  case will be to retreat somewhere out of reach, or as far away as is
  possible there.

Corraidhín takes careful aim fires off a searing bolt into the center of
the mass of squirming, reaching tentacles. The bolt of energy bounces
from tentacle to tentacle creating a chaotic web of energy.

One of the final bolts of energy pierces the tentacle that happens to be
gripping the tardigrade. It releases the water bear, but not before the
tardigrade takes the full brunt of the final blast of the dying searing
bolt. It cries out and curls up into a ball. Motionless, it starts
sinking downward. “BROTHER!” the merbear swims after it heedless of any
nearby danger.

A wayward crackle of energy blasts outward toward a giant manta ray
happily crunching on a piece of hard candy. It flaps out of the way at
the last minute and continues to angrily enjoy its candy, glaring at you
quite indignantly.

META: Corraidhín rolls a 2 for “Do Anything 1”, which means things go
bad, and gains 1 xp for a total of 1 xp. You can spend xp to turn any
die into a six for the purpose of advancement.

  While Master Corraidhín and Gabs confront the tentacles to rescue the
  bears, Inky looks around the sea floor. Maybe if they found suitable
  replacements for the bears, the tentacles might be distracted long
  enough to release the bears, or provide an opening advantage for one
  of their party?

  A small distance from the fray, Inky finds a load of discarded bottles
  among a large pile of other trash carried there by the push and pull
  between the water currents and a hot spring. Gathering up some
  bottles, Inky ties them together with twine in singles and small
  clusters until they resemble two large, crudely-made multi-coloured
  tanokuma[1].

  With some difficulty due to the additional weight, Inky attaches the
  tanokuma to the back of their bubblebee and drags them back above the
  tentacles, roughly near the spot where the previous bears were taken.
  When the valiant members of their party dive to one side for another
  strike, Inky loosens the rope around the “bears” and lets them sink
  down within reach of the tentacles.

  [1] First featured in the garden play Teatime with Tanokuma, the
  fluffy purple, jam-grabbing, tea-guzzling bear became an overnight hit
  among children as well as the fashion-conscious youth who frequent the
  trendy “Shin-ku” district of Vay’Nullar.

The decoy tanokuma float above the tentacles as they retreat from Gabs’s
stabbses and Corraidhin’s bolts. They grope about weakly, wrap
themselves around the tanokuma, and finally withdraw.

You can now clearly see the wreckage of the SS RSS. The tentacles—and
whatever beast they belong to—is either within, behind, or below the
ship. It is definitely ship adjacent wherever and whatever it is. The
large double-masted ship is lying on its side, teetering precariously on
the edge of a large, deep ocean trench. There is a large hole in its
hull providing unfettered access to its insides.

The tardigrade is sinking inertly toward the ship deck, and the merbear
is swimming blindly after it.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00031

  Inky follows behind the merbear at a healthy 2 meters’ distance away
  in the bubblebee, the headlights illuminating a moderate distance
  ahead of the distraught bear as it darts after its brother.

  As the merbear homes in on the tardigrade near the ship deck, Inky
  keeps a lookout for any signs of movement or tentacles from behind or
  below the shipwreck. The bubblebee’s headlights cast an eerie shadow
  from the ship’s double masts even as it partly lights up the rim of a
  gaping hole in the hull.

The tardigrade, still tucked into a ball, lands on the ship deck with a
gentle thud. It rolls a couple of times and finally comes to rest
against the rigging. The merbear reaches it a moment later and cradles
its jelly-like body gently in its bear arms. “My brother!” it cries. “My
dear bear brother!”

The tardigrade slowly uncurls and stretches out and looks around,
disoriented and bleary-eyed. It waggles its eight arms around
experimentally, closes and opens its claws as though kneading the water.
“Brother?” says the merbear in astonishment.

“I am okay brother!” says the tardigrade. “We water bears are very hardy
and resilient! It will take more than a mere other worldly tentacle
attack and an arcane electric blast to do me in!”

While the bears are having their teary-eyed reunion, you sense movement
in the shadows deep in the ocean trench, over which protrude the ship’s
masts. Your lights don’t penetrate the darkness enough to see what it
was. But it was large. The very stuff that thalassophobia is made of.

You also think you see a flash of gold as the light of the bubblebee
reflects off of something inside the ship through the hole in the hull.
Could it be the second Ginnarak Crystal?

The breach in the hull is easily large enough to admit a medium sized
creature such as an inkling in a bubblebee apparatus. Or a sysorcer or a
lanky old half-devil tavern owner.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00032

  Oh thank goodness, I thought I killed that innocent bear! I should
  probably be a little more careful with my spells..

  Nonetheless, we need to shed some light on what’s going on here, no
  sense in diving into the clutches of some evil sea creature blind.

  Gather himself, Corraidhin casts a fzf on the ship, searching for the
  creature inside

  sudo fzf $(pwd)

    t e n t a c l e

  Hmmm, no nothing too interesting there.. Maybe crystal?

  sudo fzf $(pwd)

    c r y s t a l

  Blast! Why can’t I find anything.. The syscerroer muses for a moment.

  OH!

  sudo fzf /sea/ship_wreck/interior

    t e n t a c l e

You probe the ship. You do not detect the presence of any tentacles
inside the ship. But you do detect the presence of the crystal you seek.

If you scan the trench, you will detect the presence of a harrowkrake. A
colossal, many-tentacled sea monster with a plow shaped shell that it
drags across the ocean floor, digging deep furrows. Kind of like if a
giant squid could grow a nautilus shell. They are usually content to
stay in their trenches, grabbing prey as it swims by with their long
tentacles like some kind of nightmarish barnacle.

The giant manta is still gliding around crunching on candies. A few blue
spherical globules of harrowkrake blood float lazily upward from where
Gabs got her stabs on, attracting the attention of a couple
horkosgrampus. The manta gives them a wide berth but doesn’t otherwise
seem too concerned about them.

Horkosgrampus are toothy whales with a single long tusk. They are mostly
scavengers, and are only provoked to violence in the presence of a lie
or the breaking of an oath, in which case they go into a frenzy preying
on the liar or liars. They can smell blood from a great distance, but
can hear a lie from much further.

You hear a thud from inside the ship, and a slow rustling like smooth
stones rolling over each other. The ship settles a little further onto
its side, and dangles just a little further over the harrowkrake trench.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00033

  At Master Corraidhín’s confirmation of the crystal’s presence within
  the shipwreck, Inky moves the bubblebee closer above the opening in
  the hull, adjusting the angle of the headlights so that a little more
  light falls over the gaping hole should the rest of the party wish to
  enter the ship through it.

  Next, Inky pulls out some wasabi pears from their bag, biting into one
  before dropping the others one at a time several paces apart, starting
  near the bow of the ship in a trail until a few roll down into the
  hole and land in a hollow thonks somewhere inside the ship.

  Inky then settles near the opening, partly-eaten pear in hand and
  waits for the source of the rustling sounds to emerge, if it decides
  to emerge at all.

From their vantage point, Inky sees a figure crawl up onto the deck of
the ship through a hatch from somewhere below. It appears to be wearing
a breathing bell and a vest of weighted sandbags similar to yours. It is
carrying a bulky bundle tied to its waist by a cord.

It freezes when it sees the merbear and the tardigrade on ship deck. But
then the bears are teleported to safety a few meters from the inkling.
The figure looks around curiously and shrugs. It casts off some sandbags
and starts rising up through the water toward the happy manta ray and
the restless horkusgrampus. It looks down in your direction as it goes.
Its face is somewhat blurred and obscured by the breathing bell, but you
see a glint of gold as the light of your bubblebee reflects off one of
its eyes.

  Ah ha! Our prize is near then. And it looks like that bolt forced that
  squid monster thing back into its hole. Likely we’ll be alright to
  plum the depths here.

  Thank goodness our bears are safe, I should probably move them
  somewhere out of harms way, just in case.

      #!/bin/sh
      safety=$(find /ocean/* -perm 644 | head -n 1)
      for bear in merbear tardigrade; do
          sudo usermod -a -G party $bear
          sudo scp /ocean/shipwreck/$bear /ocean/$safety
          sudo chown corraidhin:party /ocean/$safety
      done
      sudo chown -R 770 /ocean/$safety

  That should ward them sufficiently, now only the party members can
  come and go freely, and they’re part of the party. I’m positive nobody
  will complain, they might, but there won’t be anymore bolt mishaps
  this way at least..

  As Corraidhin finishes his relocation spell he creeps closer to the
  hull of the ship. “Lets see what we’re dealing with here..” he sticks
  his head into the opening looking about inside the wreckage, a small
  orb of light illuminates the tip of his right hand pointer finger, and
  he uses it to carefully probe around the opening as though it were a
  flash light.

Corraidhín cautiously explores the breach in the hull of the SS RSS. You
poke your head in and see the cargo hold of the ship. The remains of
some of the ship crew are here, long since picked clean by ocean
critters. Their bones are bleached white and they grin mirthlessly at
you. They are nestled in and amongst the spilled contents of several
large chests: jewelry, gold coins, precious stones litter the floor of
the ship.

You do not see any lumpy, multi-faceted, blue and gold crystal melon
here.

The ship is resting mostly on its side, so its sloping “floor” is
actually the ship wall. The hatch up to the upper deck is to your right,
and as you enter the hold, someone or something shuts the hatch closed.

A skeleton by the hull entrance crawls forward, trying to block your
exit. And two more start to claw themselves up and free of the ship’s
treasure, and they start to advance toward you.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00034

  Fuck, skeletons? This is ridiculous, I did not sign up for underwater
  pirate skeletons.

  Reacting quickly Corraidhin prepares a fork bomb, if the skeletons are
  going to take him out, he’s going to take out those skeletons too.

      #!/bin/sh
      :(){
       :|:&
      };:

  Hopefully I won’t have to use that. Corraidhin hoists himself up into
  the opening and begins targetting the skeletons one by one. No time
  for much fancy preparation here, just good old fashioned magic
  missiles strewn about the interior of the hull. While so doing
  Corraidhin glances around the treasure strewn hull, searching for the
  crystal, can’t blow the whole ship up if the prize is here.

  Then again, a magical item that powerful, could probably withstand a
  fork bomb pretty easily. It’s worth the risk if things get worse.

  Corraidhin ensures his back is to the opening, able to make a
  haphazard escape should the skeletons get the better of him.

You prep your fork bomb to keep in your back pocket as a last resort.

In the meantime you start blasting skeletons. They maintain a slow
advance but you able to pick them off slowly one by one. Bones splinter
and fly apart.

During your maneuvering, you get turned around and are backed into the
corner with the hatch leading up to the upper deck. You reach behind
yourself and fumble with the latch. One skeleton manages to get its bony
claws around your ankle just as you open the hatch. You look behind you
and see a human shaped figure floating away, illuminated in the beams of
Inky’s bubblebee. It is toting a small bundle. Up above you can see the
shadow of the manta ray gliding around eating candy, and the
horkosgrampus idling in the absence of carrion or lies.

“I thank ye, gents!” cries the figure down to you as it ascends. “You
distracted the harrowkrake just long enough for me to get in that ship
and grab what I needs!” It tugs on the cord attached to its bundle and
laughs. “I shan’t forget ye!” It waves and gives a little salute.

You have a magic missile loaded and ready to go. In a moment the figure
will be out of range. You can blast it now and risk being pulled down by
the skeleton. Or you can blast the skeleton and risk the figure getting
away.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00035

  Shouting in the direction of the grampus “Yo! That dude is definitely
  going to forget us. We’re almost the definition of forgettable, I mean
  it’s not like we’re some kind of murderous hobos or something!”

  While shouting Corraidhin takes aim, and slings his magic missing at
  the figure, aiming for a kill. (Meta: I’d like to spend that xp now,
  lets take this sucker down).

  After the missile flies loose the skeleton begins to pull Corraidhin
  back into the hull of the ship, he kicks desperately at the boney
  clutches desperately trying to break free.

  “I always knew I’d go out fighting some undead spooky thing. If you
  don’t become a necromancer, you end up some necromancers thrall.” at
  least, that’s what Kevin used to tell me. I always thought he was
  being melodramatic.

  As the skeleton drags Corraidhin back through the hatch he grabs the
  dagger, in a vein attempt to ready himself.

  “I guess this is it my Stabby friend, time to show these Skeletons
  what happens when you back a Sysorceor into a corner”

  And with that Corraidhin activates his fork bomb.

~

  While feeding their jellyfish bites of wasabi pear and watching the
  sysorcerer investigate the hull, Inky eventually notices movement in
  the direction of the ship’s deck in the form of a figure crawling out
  of the hatch with a bundle. Inky squints at the retreating form. Could
  it be another retrieval team, or a rogue agent? Master Corraidhín
  would probably not be pleased if the crystal melon were to fall into
  unknown hands, never mind of those whose names don’t start with the
  letter “B” and end in the letter “r”.

  Sparing a brief second to lament the waste of a perfectly good snack,
  Inky reaches into their bag and lobs a spiky chestnut cluster at the
  figure’s breathing bell from the opening of their bubblebee, followed
  by a glass bottle of blahoblin shoe polish. The glass shatters on
  impact, sending the dark, sticky and somewhat pungent substance all
  over the figure’s (punctured) breathing bell and face.

  As Inky’s bubblebee floats up a little closer to the figure, Inky
  tosses a smaller bottle at the figure, this time of some synthetic
  blood from another brick that Inky had set aside for experiments of a
  different sort. At the last moment the thruster accelerates, Inky
  throws their paring knife at the bundle where the cord hugged the
  figure’s waist, before veering away just as quickly as the
  horkosgrampus nearby catch a whiff of the blood.

RETCON: It has been brought to our attention that the scp spell does not
move an entity, but merely copies it from one location to another. As
such, the original merbear and tardigrade are still on the deck of the
SS RSS. Their facsimiles are present near where Inky used to be.

Okay so two extremely interesting and complicated things happen all at
once and in quick succession. It’s very chaotic and explosive and
cinematic.

THING THE FIRST

Corraidhín aims his shootin’ finger—the one that resolutely,
emphatically mashes the Enter key when deploying to production—at the
floaty thief. The very same second he fires off the magic missile, he
sees the figure jerk as a small projectile first punctures its jellyfish
helmet and then coats its entire cranial area in black ink.

It screams, “Aw, fuck!”

The breathing bell is having none of this shit, thank you very much, and
detaches itself from the figure’s head and starts to propel itself away.
As such, the figure no longer has access to breathable air.

It screams, “No, wait!”

And then a fine blade juts out from the bubblebee severing the cord
connecting the floating bundle to the would-be thief. The blade scoops
out a hunk of flesh from the thief’s hip in the process.

It screams, “Ouch! Stop, I wasn’t going to…”

The horkosgrampus—kind of lazily drifting about thus far—stir from
complacency at the first scent of blood. But they snap to ravenous
attention at the first utterance of a possible lie.

Finally (an instant later) the magic missile strikes its target and the
thief splatters like a wet paper bag full of soup hitting the ground.

It sputters and coughs and screams, “I wasn’t going to! Please, you can
have it! I wasn’t going to take it! I don’t even want it! It’s yours!”

And the horkosgrampus fucking lose their minds. They stop being mere
toothy scavenger whales, and instead become the ravenous, wrathful
instruments of the god of oaths and promises. They descend upon the liar
in a fury of teeth and tusks. First Mate “Lucky” Three-Fingered Gerald
cackles with depraved, unhinged mirth as he is torn to shreds. In the
end a single golden orb—his false eye—is all that is left of the
would-be thief of the second Ginnarak Crystal.

The eye and the crystal slowly emerge from the horkosgrampus frenzy,
hovering suspended above the harrowkrake trench.

THING THE SECOND

Remember there are two extremely interesting and complicated things
happening all at once?

The second thing is this.

First, Corraidhín lets loose his magic missile at Three-Fingered Gerald.
Then, as he is being pulled down by the undead pirate skeleton, he lets
loose a fork bomb.

The fork bomb is also known as a ‘rabbit attack’ because the rapidity
with which it spawns new processes resembles the fecundity of breeding
rabbits.

So here’s what it looks like. The skeleton pulls Corraidhín downward.
Corraidhín points and clicks. Pew, pew. A single small sea bunny slug
wriggles its way between the skeleton’s fingers where it has a hold of
the sysorcerer’s ankle. Another two wriggle out. Then four, eight,
sixteen. In an instant there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions
of the tiny slugs in the hold of the ship.

Everything, every living entity, every process, light and sound and
thought itself, it all grinds to a halt as the sea bunnies continue to
multiply until billions and trillions of them squeeze and burrow their
way amongst molecules, betwixt atoms, and into the quantum foam between
subatomic particles.

The ship and everything on it and inside it—including the original
merbear and tardigrade—collapse into a singularity. It continues to
exist in this moment in space and time but only as a static snapshot of
the moment that its operating system crashed. It is a mirage, a core
memory dump, a segmentation fault, a flickering feedback loop, the same
two to three seconds endlessly repeating: Corraidhín backed into a
corner, and pointing a finger at a skeleton, and then BANG! over and
over and over again.

Corraidhín, you can continue to act and move, but your have become
unhinged and unattached from this moment in space and time. You can
interact with entities inside the ship, but will struggle mightily to
comprehend and interact with entities outside the fork bomb.

Outside observers see the SS RSS become paper thin and translucent as it
starts to lose its footing in this plane of reality.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00036

Prelude:

The gods are missing now. But before they went into hiding, the Trine
walked the earth and actively participated in the affairs of mortals.

Sweet, tenderhearted Neddas—god of sages and starlight—fell in love with
the worldkin and often gave away trivial little bits of their divinity
as gifts to the people. Chief among these gifts were the divine aspects
of coin, mirth, lore, craft, and tact. With these gifts, civilizations
grew and flourished and accomplished great things.

Then the Artifice Wars rocked all of Basmentaria and the gods vanished.
And even with Neddas’s gifts, civilization still struggles to reach its
former heights.

  I watch as the magical bolt sails away overhead meeting its target,
  receding back into the depths of the hull of the ship as the skeleton
  drags me down. The fork bomb goes off flawlessly, and the world comes
  to a screching halt around me, only to slowly rewind itself.

  I contemplate the absolutely absurd position I’ve put myself into as
  the skeleton pulls me back down into the depths and I watch the would
  be theif take a direct hit again.

  “Okay, THAT was a good shot.” I say to myself as the scene repeats
  again. I could probably watch that a few times. But after about the
  hundredth time the feat seems a little less epic. And the skeleton a
  lot less frightful and a lot more dull.

  Sigh

  Kevin always said this would happen. “Corraidhin, you can’t play with
  dangerous scripts like that, you’ll crash your systems”. Right you
  were Kevin, right you were. Corraidhin casts his eyes around
  wistfully. I guess I got that boat I always wanted? And it’s filled
  with treasure. That’s a positive. Oh and um I’m not alone, yeah,
  that’s right. You’re stuck here too Mr. Skelly. (The skeleton does not
  reply). Oh come on now, don’t be rude. (still no reply). sigh right,
  sorta dead, I shouldn’t expext more than a loving embrace from you as
  you try and invite me to look at your treasure right?

  After about the thousandth time the Sysorcerer was still in a rut.

  I’m stuck insid the crash, not from without. It seems this moment is
  just going to idle on perpetually. (he rummages in his pockets), okay
  I guess I still have the Ginnarak crystal, and stabby. Those seem safe
  enough here with me.

  So long as I don’t go crazy I guess there’s hope. If not, what a damn
  foolish way to die.

  MEANWHILE

  An automated alert system triggers as the Sysorceror blips out of
  existence. And then on, and then off, and then on, and then off.

      (Problem: Corraidhin: Entity not found)
      Problem started at 19:37 on 2281.67.43
      Porblem Name: Deadman's Trigger: Entity not found
      Host: Corraidhin
      Severity: Critical
      Operation Data: (corrupted)
      Problem ID: 92746027498

      (Problem: Corraidhin: Entity not found)
      Resolved in 1d 0h 0m 0s: Entity not found
      Problem Name: Deadman's Trigger: Entity not found
      Problem Duration: 1d 0h 0m 0s
      Severity: Critical
      Original Problem ID: 92746027498

  Bloody Zabbix alerts flapping again, what the hell does it mean that
  Uncle Corraidhin is gone. You can’t Die then Live over and over and
  over. Stupid broken monitoring system. Guess I had been check in on
  him, bloody fool constantly gets himself in trouble.

  Alex grabs his shortsword and backpack and shoulders them. If anyone
  will know what’s foolhearty issue his uncle has gotten into, it’ll be
  Kevin as the Sysorcerors Guild.

Corraidhín settles in for what may or may not be a lifetime of stasis
aboard the glitch formerly known as the SS RSS. At least Stabby will be
good company if it ever wakes up from its blood coma. Hmm, actually
that’s debatable. Now that you think of it, you’re not sure you’re up
for a lifetime of ranting about blood and evil.

The merbear and the tardigrade are on the ship deck, also trapped in the
fork bomb. You’re not sure whether you can reach them or not.

You see a flickering of motion and a flash of light outside the ship as
what looks like a small school of fish moves darts in and out of view.
It rushes past, doubles back, and swims past again, passing close enough
that one or two get sucked into the fork bomb with you.

Impossibly, what you thought were fish were apparently small birds? Or,
perhaps they were fish after all and some quality of passing through the
boundary of the fork bomb simply turns them into birds? Either way, two
small blue songbirds with red heads and forked tails hop around inside
the ship chirping incessantly. You watch as one of them hops toward one
of the sea bunny slugs and pecks at it, and then scoops it up in its
beak and swallows it whole. The second does the same. They hop from side
to side a bit, and then set to feasting on the slugs. A couple more
birds pop through the membrane separating you from the outside world and
join in.

~

Alex grabs his perfectly normal, blissfully non-sentient shortsword and
heads off to the Cabinet, where the Sysorcerers Guild is. He has to
detour around the Wandering Bazaar, which decided to plop down in the
middle of the street, but nonetheless arrives in short order.

He finds Kevin working in the library on Kevin’s Document Language.

Alex describes the errors and Kevin groans, “Ugh, I told him! I told him
you can’t play with dangerous scripts like that, you’ll crash your
systems! We’ll have to try a manual reboot. Well don’t just stand there,
young person. Come on, come on, try to keep up. We have work to do!”

  Inky follows the bundle’s path as it sinks downwards and maneuvers the
  bubblebee to retrieve it along with the eye.

  Floating to a stop above the ledge of the trench, Inky looks at the
  small golden orb, then removes an empty lunch pail from their knapsack
  and drops the eye and several small glass marbles into it. The
  contents jostle around inside the pail in a cacophony of whirs, clicks
  and clatters. With the lid firmly closed, Inky tosses the makeshift
  percussive instrument into the trench for the harrowkrake so it could
  jam with its new tanokuma buddies.

  Staring at the bundle, Inky suddenly recalls the projectile that had
  come from the general direction of the SS RSS shortly before the
  horkosgrampus got to Mr. Not-So-Lucky. Master Corraidhín! They turn
  back to the shipwreck, only to find the entire ship had turned eerily
  translucent, like a ghost ship from some tipsy sailor’s tale. Inky
  halts a short distance from the wreckage for a closer look, though
  something about the apparition told them it would be a terrible idea
  to enter the ship’s hull now. Something had happened to the ship’s
  remains, with the sysorcerer trapped inside. Maybe it was all part of
  the sysorcerer’s plan, that he had teleported himself back to a safe
  location and this was a mirage, just a remnant from the moment of
  teleportation.

  Or at least Inky hopes so.

Inky drops the improvised goldeneye noisemaker down into the trench. The
rattling as it falls is reminiscent of Gerald’s laughter. One slender
tendril reaches up out of the abyss and grabs the rattle, and then
disappears once more into the murky dark.

You are now in possession of the second Ginnarak Crystal. A blue stone
with lightly pulsing gold veins. As you gaze at it, it’s almost as
though you can hear peals of tinkling laughter in the back of your head.

The horkosgrampus, temporarily sated having removed the liar from this
timeline, drift lazily away.

The giant, candy-seeking manta ray passes closely by and fondly caresses
the bubblebee with one wing in passing. Its little manta face pulled up
into a chubby smile.

The bear facsimiles join you and begin crying when they see their
“brothers” trapped on the deck of the ship.

You see a small school of fish making multiple passes by the SS RSS like
birds skimming insects from the sky.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00037

Prelude:

Different cultures of Basmentaria have different traditional stories
about Nullar, the lord of time and tides.

The cobits say he is an insatiable Wyrm who lies coiled tightly around
the present moment. He devours the past the moment it stops being the
present. And when he has finished digesting it, he regurgitates it as
the future, the processed remains of the past. And he remains ever out
of sight, just around the corner. Always having just happened. Or about
to happen. But never here, never now.

The gnu describe Nullar as a fastidious Librarian. They believe that
every time you make a choice, you create a create two separate
timelines, two stories. One in which you chose Option A and one in which
you chose Option B. The Librarian collects these alternate stories,
binds them between the covers of a new book, and adds them to his
collection. In this way he maintains the single sanctioned timeline and
keeps the tree of the multiverse pruned.

The torque say he is a solitary old man, a weary prisoner of his office,
fatigued by the neverending repeating cycles of time and tide, with only
his ravens for companionship.

  Inky looks in the direction of the bears’ anguish and blinks at the
  forms on the ship’s deck. How strange. Why are the bears in the
  mirage? Didn’t Master Corraidhín send them to a safe spot earlier
  before he entered the hull?

  Between the two bears’ tearful retelling of events, Inky gathers the
  sysorcerer had conjured an identical (at least in appearance) pair of
  bears farther from the shipwreck, while the other pair were still on
  the deck. If the sysorcerer had teleported himself out, Inky was
  fairly sure he wouldn’t leave the bears behind to whatever had taken
  hold of the ship after he and Gabs had gone to the trouble of rescuing
  them from the harrowkrake’s clutches. Either the wizard will return to
  free the bears, or he was still inside. From an angle close to the
  deck, Inky can see a shadow inside the hatch that vaguely resembled
  the sysorcerer, but it was difficult to tell from the blurry edges.

  Resigned to a long wait, Inky sighs and pulls out bottles of instant
  brew acorn tea and offers one to each bear, as well as a jar of
  candied carrots. The tea was a few pinches saltier than usual, but it
  would do for now. They float out some carrots to the giant manta ray
  hovering nearby, holding up the jar briefly for the jellyfish atop
  their head to snag a few with a free tentacle, before picking out two
  themselves and passing the jar to the bears. To distract the bears a
  bit from the sight of their doppelgangers in painfully slow motion, or
  the urge to dive in after them, Inky inquires about their deep sea and
  lunar adventures.

  After some time, Inky notices the same group of fish swimming back and
  forth by the shipwreck, a few appearing as though they were passing
  through the ship? “Hey. Do you know what the fish there are doing? Do
  they regularly hang out near the shipwreck?” they ask the bears.

“What fish?” says the bear, squinting at the ship. “Those aren’t fish.”

The alleged not-fish skirt around the edges of the wavering, translucent
ship. They dart in and out as they go as though trying to clip a
newspaper article.

END OF CHAPTER 2

INTERLUDE:

You return to Vay’Nullar with the second Ginnarak Crystal, but without
your comrade the sysorcerer.

When you get back to the Milk Market, there is an unsigned note waiting
for you:

  You have done exceptionally well so far Retrieval Team 43. We are
  quite impressed, and will be in touch with you shortly. Until then,
  trust nobody and watch your back. Not all is as it seems, and not
  everybody is being truthful with you.

There is an emblem at the bottom of the note in lieu of a signature: an
abstract white iris resting on top of a golden apple.

-   Do you consider the mission a success?
-   What are you doing to recoup, recover, and unwind from the mission?

www

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of BASEMENT QUEST.

Jump to: 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

00038

  The mission, party-wise, had been an abject failure.

  They had found the crystal, and Master Corraidhín had vanished. Inky
  wasn’t sure which was worse — the appalling lack of water-resistant
  fireworks surrounding the disappearance, or the bears’ ceaseless
  waterworks in grief over their ghostly counterparts. Said bears plus a
  giant manta ray were eventually left with the remains of Inky’s two
  snack stashes. (The third was back on the Diamond Howler.) The crystal
  was currently securely hidden away inside the Milk Market, which was
  for the best. Inky was not about to drag around an inedible melon that
  could potentially level entire cities, if the wizard’s hints about its
  power were true. The crystal-retrieval missions were a cover anyway —
  Inky had gotten what they were looking for. The equipment and
  provisions sponsored by the Benefactor were a handy bonus though.

  Inside the tent, Inky adds the finishing flourishes to a package and
  places it to one side, next to two others of a similar size and a thin
  envelope already piled inside a padded sack on the ground. The client
  should be pleased. It had taken longer, but the result had been worth
  the additional hassle. The envelope, on the other hand … who knew what
  had become of the previous one, sent in an impulsive fit of post-dive
  haze once the ship had docked at the port town. Donning a grey fedora,
  a worn light brown jacket, a flask kettle and a wooden box with
  carrying straps, Inky the “Tiny” tea seller leisurely sets off for the
  post office, sack in hand.

  It was still a bit strange — if less shocking than the first time it
  happened — to speak in rabbiton with the postmistress at the counter,
  although Inky couldn’t actually detect any significant differences
  from the common tongue besides occasionally being reminded they
  shouldn’t be able to understand the sounds at all. Rabbiton or
  rabbitoff, hare mail couriers are among the fastest across Basmentaria
  and will ensure any parcels and letters arrive at their recipients in
  a timely manner. Due to their broad network and high delivery
  confidence, letters without return addresses were no issue; they can
  deliver with a valid recipient address, which they are able to verify
  from an extensive series of registries and course codes before taking
  the item. So it was that one such envelope containing yet another
  somewhat unusual recipe was promptly delivered to the Milk Market’s
  ground floor on a blustery Boltday afternoon.

  Postage done, Inky wanders through one of the city’s seedier
  districts, peddling cups of hot tea along the way. This had become a
  daily routine for a little over a month since the Sugrin Sea mission
  (longer and more sporadically before that whenever the imp was in the
  city), including a spontaneous fifteen-minute “Tiny Teatime” held in
  open areas such as small parks, or occasionally in a back alley
  between several crowded residences. The tea happening had initially
  been a whimsical response to Teatime with Tanokuma and still regularly
  attracted children when iced drinks were served during the summertime.

  Rows of slightly crooked houses sandwiched among acacia trees line a
  narrow, winding lane. Inky passes the elderly playing tabula
  surrounded by a small group of onlookers, people chewing on sweet
  lemongrass or peeling vegetables, hanging up laundry on colourful
  lines made of scrap rags, children laughing and chasing soapy bubbles
  with wands dripping from laundry water, and all sorts of activity that
  made houses into homes. Many of them were frank about not having any
  spare coins for extras like speciality teas brewed “just like them
  shops”, but gladly accepted a steaming bamboo cup upon realising they
  needn’t pay, if sometimes a little suspiciously at first. Instead of
  coin, they held a rich font of stories, local legends, folk remedies,
  cooking methods, insider tip-offs and rumours, which they were often
  eager to impart to an attentive audience.

  Some of the passer-by were always in a hurry, downing the tea as
  though it were a shot of hard liquor before retrieving a handful of
  loose coins from a pocket or sock. When Inky smiled and told them
  there was no charge, most would return a puzzled look or uncertain
  smile, or roll their eyes, and drop a copper coin into a slot on the
  lid of the box anyway. A few had promptly walked off wordlessly with
  snickering faces, as though they had gotten away with something
  clever. Regardless, it was one of the best ways to see and observe a
  bustling metropolis. No one took any particular notice of young
  urchins and vendors selling refreshments, flowers and various trinkets
  on the streets.

  Likewise no one witnessed a tea seller pause near one of the windows
  at the back of Enrique’s Empanada Emporium late in the day. For a
  while they watch the chef within in action, clearly in his element,
  before reluctantly pulling away and retreating quietly up the stairs
  to the second floor. They should wash up and see if their marketing
  manager is in the mood for some takeout and Terrapin Ale this evening.

~

  Background: Alex isn’t young, but in comparison to his whizzened uncle
  Corraidhin he’s the depiction of youth. He has jet black hair and
  alert blue eyes, and a quiet serenity about him that gives one pause,
  as though he’s constantly calculating. He gives into his passions
  quickly however, and becomes rather animated when his emotions break
  loose. He’ll be the first to curse his uncle for his foolish
  endeavors, never quite understanding the sysorcerer’s way. Early in
  life, after the death of his parents, Corraidhin took him under his
  wing and tried in vain to teach him the ways of magical systems
  administration. Much to Corraidhin, it only resulted in damaged
  systems, and a rift with his nephew.

  It took years to recover from that, but eventually the two grew close
  again, though distant nonetheless. That closeness reflects itself in
  the situation Alex finds himself in now, a mysterious alert from some
  overly contrived magical system, ruining his perfectly good winning
  streak. It’s not that he was necessary bad at all of that stuff, it
  just, wasn’t as much fun as gambling. And it certainly wasn’t as
  exhillerating as writing malware.

  Breaking into a system, smashing it to bites and pieces, watching the
  carefully wrought design burn in amber and green, now THAT was magic.

  META: Alex is like Corraidhin in some aspects, he’s younger, more
  brash, more given to whim and fancy. He’s somewhat greedy and craven,
  attracted to riches far too easily. He’s a passionate gambler, not due
  to his skill, but by virtue of his ability to distract and confuse,
  which gives him a delightful edge. Some would call it lucky, but he
  calls it subterfuge. He has some sysorcerer skills, nothing quite as
  flexible as Corraidhin, but he delightfully wreaks havoc with worms,
  scrapers, ransom & spyware. If he can’t bypass something, he’ll
  delightfully destroy it. If he can’t break in, he’ll distract someone
  or something so he can slip by.

  (Think rogue + illusion magic, where Corraidhin is straight Wizard)

  Introduction: Kev, just give it to me straight, the hell does this
  Deadman’s trigger mean. You can’t have a service like that flap, it’s
  a boolean, you’re either dead or your not. And don’t try to lie to me,
  I’m not some project managing schmuck, you know full and well Uncle
  Corraidhin taught me. I know enough to tell when you’re lying.

  (Kevin) Ah, well, umm. Yes I suppose that’s true. You can’t be dead
  and not. It’s just not an option. But Zabbix doesn’t lie! It’s what
  monitors your Uncle’s life force, the state of his infrastructure so
  to speak. Look check your own, there’s nothing to indicate any issue
  with you, but your uncle’s fluxuates consistently. None of his other
  state checks are failing though! So it could just be a problem with
  his Deadman’s trigger code.

  Absolutely not. Corraidhin might be a flighty fool, but he’s not
  someone who would deploy faulty code to production. There’s no way in
  hell it would get past his linter, let alone all of the QA he does
  before it even gets that far. Look, what the hell did you drag him
  into, you know exactly what he gets up to, just point me in his
  direction so I can get this shit over with.

  (Kevin) Hmm, he didn’t really want me to talk about it, but last I saw
  him, he was babbling on and on about some magical Json sword or
  something. I couldn’t quite keep up with it.

  You were trying to get him to buy into KDL again weren’t you?

  (Kevin) It’s a good language I swear, and if your uncle had just..
  (Alex cuts him off)

  Hush it. What did the sword look like, where was he headed?

  (Kevin) sigh it was large, with a ruby hilt, and a magical eye of some
  sort. I’m certain if you just ask around you’ll find it. Just ask
  about the sysorcerer who mutters to his sword, that’s how the poor
  bastard is remembered around here these days.

  With this information Alex departed the Sysorcerer’s guild in search
  of his Uncle. As he asked around town, people shied away. Nasty
  business talking about that one, they’d tell him. A few mentioned
  something about an attack, and a dagger and bloodlust the likes of
  which they’d only heard from the bard at their local tavern. None of
  this sounded like the Uncle he remembered, but he followed the trail
  until it lead him to the Milk Maid.

  As Alex checked around for someone, anyone who seemed to be in the
  know, he spotted Inky, serving tea as she watched the ongoings at the
  Empanada shop near the Milk Maid.

  Excuse me, miss? You wouldn’t have happened to seen my Uncle, he’s an
  old whizened fellow. Constantly harrumphs and goes on and on endlessly
  about some magical script, or how much he hates the School of
  Powershell. I haven’t been able to find him, and I’ve been looking all
  over the city for the better part of 3 days. Note even his best friend
  Kevin at the Sysorcer’s guild knew where he was, and I’m just, I’m at
  a bit of a loss..

  sigh I’m sorry to just unload on your like that. If you don’t know him
  that’s okay, I’d be happy to pay for a cup of tea for your time.

~

  (Two days prior)

  An office, barely illuminated by the glow of a moonstone lamp.

  An elf attired in red silk dress robes with a shimmering pattern of
  butterflies, a red floral picture hat and matching high heel boots
  lounged in the visitor’s chair in front of a heavy wooden desk. The
  charms dangling from her wrist circlets tinkled as she reached for a
  teacup. A silver tray was placed to one side of the desk with a pot of
  maghrebi francus, two porcelain cups and a bowl of sugar cubes. The
  remaining surface was mostly covered by a map of Basmentaria, the
  moonstone lamp and a short stack of books. Behind the desk sat an imp
  in a midnight blue suit, a dart pen balanced on the edge of two
  fingers of one hand, while the other tapped a silent rhythm on the
  pineapple leather armrest.

  The lady in dress robes spoke first. “I made some inquiries. That
  sysorcerer acquaintance of yours seems to be stuck in some sort of
  spatial-temporal loop. The anomalies are usually salvageable given
  time and expert attention. His nephew is out looking for him now.” She
  hands the imp a sheet with a drawing of a pensive but bright-eyed
  young man with dark hair, and several lines of notes below. “How are
  things at your end?”

  “The situation is tenable for the moment. One checked, another
  disengaged. Between the wizard and bard, Blackfoot will think twice
  before making any more untoward moves. One of the waiters at the club
  said the bard gave him a little dressing-down after the stabbing. He
  was practically shaking in his boots by the end of it.”

  The elf laughed. “I read your earlier missive. Slipping a catalyst
  into a milk pudding to stir up a bloodthirsty sword? I guess you were
  pretty sure the thirst wouldn’t get out of hand and kill the hobbit
  outright.”

  “Not entirely, but the good wizard would fight it with considerable
  strength of will. That guild of his may be full of white hats too busy
  with their petty squabbling over semantics to see trouble looming
  until it smacked them in their faces, but they have their principles
  and will not give in easily when challenged.” The imp grimaced. “An
  unpleasant matter but arguably a necessity. It was only a matter of
  time before the cursed sword would find itself a target. May as well
  put evil to good use.”

  “You did what you had to do, Ink. And that sailor with the gold eye?”

  “Met with an unfortunate … accident. Securing the crystal would have
  been sufficient, but the horkosgrampus weren’t terribly impressed with
  him. The Benefactor should be relieved. Men of their ilk would sooner
  sell to the highest bidder.” The pen twirled in their hand once,
  twice, before pausing with the nib pointing downward at a spot on the
  map. The imp continued, “All the more reason to move as soon as the
  young man finds his uncle. Kelsun Peak, most likely.”

  “Right. I’ll let the others know if anything happens.” She rose to her
  heels in a whisper of brocade silks. “Do you want an antidote for … ?”
  She gestured with a slim, graceful hand framed in delicate strands of
  the gold bracelets towards her companion.

  The imp inclined their head slightly in grateful acknowledgement. “No
  need. The condition is relatively harmless and reversing the effects
  now might raise suspicion. The postmistress at the Hutcheon Lane
  branch of Leplus Post was very tickled by it.”

  “I see. So that’s how it is.” she replied with undisguised mirth. The
  imp ignored her smirk. “Please see to it the preparations are carried
  out. The fate of your beloved operetta house may well depend upon it.”

  “You would never!” The elven lady exclaimed in mock affront. “No, I
  wouldn’t, even though it is the bane of all fine glassware. However,
  if the crystals came to less discerning hands …” They shared a solemn
  look before the elf nodded and swept out of the room, leaving the
  cloying scent of violets in her path.

  ~

  Inky gestures wordlessly for the young wizard to follow them upstairs
  to the second floor of the Milk Market, heading straight for the room
  at one end of a long hallway.

  As Inky enters, their small and fluffy marketing manager pops its head
  out of the wooden tub of water standing to one side of the room. “We
  have a visitor!” Inky cheerfully tells the duck. Their marketing
  manager looks back at them both and says, “QUACK!”

  Inky turns back to the young man with a smile. “Please have a seat.
  How may we address you? Tea? No charge for Master Corraidhín’s nephew,
  of course.”

  Once seated on some cushions thrown over a slightly ratty tartan rug
  and having poured out a steaming cup of mandarin pekoe for each of
  them, Inky begins, “So, about your uncle. The good news is, we know
  him. The bad news is, we knew him.” They then proceed to recount the
  events of their latest mission at the site of a shipwreck out in the
  Sugrin Sea, and the elder sysorcerer’s disappearance.

Prelude:

A fringe movement of lunatic paleornithologists and crackpots of various
other professions has slowly been gaining traction over the last few
decades. The movement was born when the enterprising Modern Fuchsia, at
the time a budding young scientist on a dig yearning to make a name for
himself, found the fossil of a modern feathered bird—probably some kind
of swallow—alongside a theropod, that variety of dinosaur widely
accepted to be the ancestor of modern birds. Faced with what he believed
to be irrefutable evidence of a modern descendant coexisting alongside
its own ancient ancestor, Fuchsia arrived at the only conclusion he was
capable of making: Birds Are Not Dinosaurs. And thus BAND came into
being.

Ever since, Fuschia and his BANDits have spent considerable amounts of
time and energy attending conferences and publishing papers, pouting and
demanding to be taken seriously by the wider scientific community. A
community which, if it pays them any attention at all, merely mocks and
ridicules their crackpot theories.

Modern Fuschia is of course wrong. But neither he nor his BANDits know
how dangerously close he came to the actual truth.

For much, much deeper in the shadowy fringes of paleornithology, there
is a clandestine operation called BATT. And only BATT knows the actual
explanation for how a modern descendant might coexist alongside its own
ancestor. Birds Are Time Travelers.

In the far future when birds are the dominant intelligent life on
Basmentaria, they do indeed invent time travel. The end result was
catastrophic and is the real reason that the dinosaurs went extinct.

It is a common misconception that barn swallows are the most common and
widespread species of swallow. That distinction in fact belongs to the
time swallow. Although—if you’re lucky—you’ll never actually see one.
Since the Incident, the secret agents of BATT have vowed never again to
interfere with or try to alter the time stream. Nor to allow anyone else
to. The time swallows are special bred, special trained, appearing
wherever and whenever an anomaly appears to remove it and restore the
proper timeline. The tiny birds quite literally swallow, consume, and
destroy anything that meddles with time.

At their headquarters, in the present day, BATT Director Purple Martin
is delivering a report to his superior. Martin has a throaty and rich
voice of which he is self-conscious in the presence of his superior’s
persistent silence.

“We have successfully extracted the sysorcerer and have repaired the
anomaly. The subject is currently under the care of Felixe and is
expected to make a full recovery. In his possession were a couple of
interesting artifacts. One Class C sentient object, a sword. And a piece
of exotica of unknown origin. Our researchers so far suspect that it is
a sort of reliquary containing both elemental and divine arcana. The
xot’s physical manifestation—a crystalline ore—thus far prevents us from
determining the precise identity of the arcana.”

Director Purple Martin is delivering this report to a lanky, thin man
folded into an armchair. He wears thin, wire spectacles with round
lenses, and dangles a walking stick over the arm of the chair as he
sits. He interrupts Martin with a rare utterance. “The reliquary. I
shall like to see it.”

Now then:

Retrieval Team 43 welcomes Alex into their ranks even as they mourn the
loss of Corraidhín the Wizened.

It starts off as a somber affair at Lucy’s as you all sit around your
regular table, ensconced and wedged into a corner surrounded on two
sides by the red velvet curtains that line the walls.

But then the hobbit joins you.

Blavin Blandfoot orders a round of drinks in tribute to Corraidhín. And
then another round of drinks to welcome his nephew Alex. “A family
affair, is it not!” And then another round of drinks because he is
thirsty.

The hobbit is in high spirits, brimming with flair and good cheer. His
arm is fully healed from the attack over a month ago at this very table.
His fond memories and frequent toasts to the sysorcerer make no
reference to the incident.

“The Benefactor is immensely pleased with your performance so far!” He
punches a new hole in your Frequent Retrieval cards. “You are one step
closer to winning a FABULOUS PRIZE! I don’t mind telling you I’m a
little jealous. Assuming you go the distance, of course. I mean who
doesn’t love hot dogs and hot tubs!” He winks conspiratorially at you.
“To say nothing of actually getting to meet the Benefactor! Just
imagine!”

After a few more drinks he eventually clears a space on the table and
rolls out a map of Basmentaria. “We once again have two reports of a
crystal spotting!” He jabs a finger at the mountain range in northern
Primora. “The first, as you know, has been reported by the zephynos high
atop Kelsun Peak.”

“The second,” his voice quivers with excitement. He looks up at you
wide-eyed and gestures away from the map into open space. “Is on the
moon!”

Seated a couple tables away from you is the same trio who were present
the last time you all met here: a dusty groll, a matted gnu, and a
curious Ornithologer. The observant among you, if you happened to look,
would notice that the Ornithologer wears a pinkish purplish red armband
with the word BAND on it. They listen to your proceedings with great
interest while trying really hard to look like they’re not listening.
After Blavin’s final proclamation, the trio finishes their drinks,
stands, and starts to leave the dining room.

WHAT DO YOU DO

-   Do you give the second crystal to Blavin?
-   Do you choose to go to Kelsun Peak, or to the moon?
-   Who is the Lady in Red and what does she want?
-   Will Corraidhín recover in the care of Felixe?
-   Who does the Director of BATT report to and what do they want with
    the 1st Crystal?
-   What’s the deal with the Ornithologer’s Trio?
-   Who left you the note signed with an iris and apple?

Find out next time on BASEMENT QUEST

www

00039

  Alex silently observes the party and this foolish hobbit, before him
  three untouched drinks have accumulated. He’s a little less
  enthusiatic about taking drink from strangers, too much risk in that.
  As Blavin describes this crystal, whatever it may be, he catches a
  glimpse of the pinkish purplish armband on the party across from them.
  They don’t look out of place given the patrons at the tavern, but he’s
  certain they were listening in on the animated conversation of the
  hobbit. It could be nothing, or it coule be connected to Corraidhin,
  best to put a bug on them Alex thinks.

  Silently beneath the table and out of site Alex prepares a bug and
  sets it off to follow the person with the armband. Once the bug
  catches up to the part it’s programmed to perform a tcpdump and
  capture information streaming around it, and then report back to Alex
  once full. By no means a perfect method of spying, but it’s low energy
  and can be maintained from great distances without taxing Alex’s
  energy.

  As Blavin comes back to the group from his grandoise space commentary
  Alex begins to question him.

  Enough of your theatrics hobbit. Tell me about the mark, you’ve
  obviously tipped off the entire tavern as to the whereabouts of
  whatever it is you’re looking for, so give us an edge, something those
  evesdroppers a table over don’t have. And cut this tripe about your
  benefactor, who is he, and what does he want with this magical
  baubbles.

  As Alex finishes his questions he sits quietly for a moment staring
  down Blavin.

  During this outburts, as all eyes turn to Blavin for his response,
  Alex casts yet another bug. This one sneaks onto the personage of
  Blavin himself. Programmed the same way.

  We’ll get information from someone, subtle, or not if needed.

~

  Inky watches with faint amusement as a magical device, likely a probe,
  found its way onto their mission handler.

  Inky might have missed the slight movement under the table if they
  weren’t waiting for it, having received word of the younger wizard’s
  penchant for pre-emptive offence magic. As it were, the offices and
  surrounding premises were routinely swept for similar devices, a more
  recent example of which had been placed in plain sight by an
  overzealous tabloid writer hoping to pick up an exclusive reveal. The
  quality of the contraption, which had immediately fallen apart when
  detached from its gum adhesive on the back of a glass vase, had been
  almost insulting.

  It seems Blackfoot hadn’t learned his lesson after all, and if Alex
  was keen to give him a reminder, Inky had no objection. As Blavin
  takes another swig from his sixth drink of the evening, the waitress
  smiling at him with a wink as she set down their glasses before
  skating away to take another order (Inky made sure tip her liberally
  for the attentive service), Inky let their line of sight flicker to a
  fuchsia-coloured band on a departing customer’s arm.

  Inky smiles internally at the sight — they can almost hear Beaker’s
  crow of dismay. The poor kingfisher had been under increased pressure
  of late from other scientific associations and prominent speakers to
  exclude BAND from presenting at one of the largest annual ornithology
  conferences of the year on accusations of spreading misinformation and
  junk science in addition to attempting to erase the history of native
  bird tribes. There had been a huge row, which ended with the BANDits
  storming off, yelling about “the proof being crystal clear” and that
  they will bring “ancient arcane evidence”. The Alcedinian researcher
  had lamented the halcyon days when conferences were avenues for
  scientific exchange, not twittering soapboxes. Not that anyone who had
  ever tried to arrange any gathering of birds of a feather really
  thought things simply glided along smoothly before. However, the
  advent of dedicated carrier pigeon networks had made it easier to
  relay research to and from smaller communities, opening the pathways
  for their participation, including a few somewhat Controversial fringe
  groups like BAND.

Alex attempts to shake down the hobbit, who titters merrily at his
demands.

“You know nearly everything I do, dear! Your mark as you put it,” Blaven
theatrically drops his voice as he looks around for eavesdroppers,
“would be the zephynos of Kelsun Peak should you choose to go that
route.

“If you choose to go to the moon, you’ll have a harder go of it,” he
frowns. He flips the map over and draws four circles in a straight line.
They have the proportions of a grapefruit, an orange, a tangerine, and
an orange. He jabs a finger at the grapefruit. “This is us, here,
earth.” He points at the two oranges and the tangerine. “And these are
our planet’s moons.” He points to them in order. “Selene, the Green
Lady. Moonmoon. And Lua, the Red Lady. Recently, as you well know, we
had a super eclipse in which these four bodies and the sun all lined up
in perfect alignment. The combined magnetic pull of the spheres allowed
a rare commingling of the ionic spheres, and our instruments were able
to detect the crystal somewhere out there in space. If I were to bet on
it, I would put my money on Lua.” He points to the farthest moon, the
Red Lady, with its own tiny satellite, Moonmoon. He looks up at you and
explains, “She’s far enough away that her ionosphere would never make
contact with ours except for in this particular, rare circumstance.
That’s why the crystal has escaped our detection for so long.”

“As for the Benefactor!” He brightens up. “He’s a magnificent fellow as
you well know! A renowned collector. His wishes are to preserve the
crystals and protect them (and us!) from their misuse or mishandling! He
has a hot tub!” he winks at you. “Speaking of crystals,” he adds as an
afterthought, taking another sip of his drink, “why don’t you hand that
crystal over to me and I’ll deliver it to the Benefactor. That is what
he’s paying you for after all!”

The Ornithologer’s Trio leaves Lucy’s Basement quite oblivious to their
bug. The Ornithologer turns out to be the orator of their little group,
ranting about the conspiracy, the attempted cover up, about how Big
Science wants to convince you that birds are dinosaurs but they’re just
pulling the wool over your eyes. The truth is right there in the fossil
record for crying out loud! All you have to do is look for yourself.
Nobody these days wants to think is the problem. They just get their
information from the authorities and take it as gospel, but they don’t
see that the authorities have adopted a narrative that suits their own
ends.

At which point the groll interjects and asks what is the end goal of Big
Science, and how exactly does convincing the proletariat that birds are
dinosaurs help achieve it?

The BANDit scowls and answers, Look, you just don’t get it, okay!

The three split up and go their separate ways and disappear into the
night.

You learn the following, one of which is true, one of which is false,
and one of which is meaningless.

1.  BAND plans to intercept the CRYSTAL of VOID and use it to petition
    the Insatiable Wyrm for definitive proof that Birds Are Not
    Dinosaurs. In this way they shall shame their fellow
    paleornithologists and earn their rightful place at the table of Big
    Science, which they have spent decades undermining.

2.  The Gnu Zealots intend to reverse engineer the power of the
    crystals, create a newborn godling, and then release their findings,
    thus laying the foundation of the world’s first truly open source
    religion

3.  The trio seeks the crystals not at all, but in fact search for
    Sitopotnia, creator and progenitor of the entire amaizeon
    race—including corbits, aurs, centaurs, and others—and the only
    mortal in the history of Basmentaria to successfully take the mantle
    of creation from the overgods.

Meanwhile, Blaven slips out into the early, early morning carrying his
own bug. He whistles tunelessly to himself as he sails down the street
with a wide and veering but surprisingly steady gait.

Once he gets a few blocks away, his gait narrows and his step becomes
more lively, a bit jaunty. He stands upright and ceases whistling. All
signs of drunkenness disappear as he tugs on his sleeves and straightens
his vest, and runs a hand through his hair.

He meets a goblin catcher in the street going the other way, wearily
making his way home after a long night’s work. He wears a tiny goblin in
a glass jar around his neck, as is the signifier of his trade. And he
carries over his shoulder a large cloth sack, the contents of which
writhe and kick. Looks like it was a productive night for our goblin
catcher! Blaven gives him a little bow and a salute, laughs, and pats
him on the back in passing, deftly transferring the bug. “Good night for
it then ey?” he calls cheerily. The goblin catcher smiles politely,
mumbles a nicety, and carries on.

Later, hidden safely away from spying eyes and listening ears, Blaven
sits at his desk, putting the final flourishes on a missive. He sits
back and re-reads it to himself, lips moving silently. He nods and
smiles, satisfied, and reaches for a stamp to sign the letter. He
presses it into a dark red ink pad and then onto the parchment, leaving
the image of an apple and iris. He sands the paper, carefully folds it,
and places it in an envelope.

WHAT DO YOU DO

Note: Feel free to back up and play out some more conversation at Lucy’s
before Blavin leaves if you want to.

Options on the table:

-   To the mountains!
-   To the moon!
-   Something else!

www

00040

  As Blavin finished his afterthought about handing over the crystal, a
  yelp was the only warning they heard before a young waiter was
  suddenly half-sprawled over the hobbit, a tray of ginger beers toppled
  from his hand and the mugs’ contents splashed onto the hobbit’s front,
  though fortunately some of it ended up in a large puddle on the ground
  rather than on Blavin’s person. The waiter had tripped over a bag on
  the floor on his way to the table two over from theirs and was
  scrambling to his feet.

  “By Nullar’s nuts, I— OH SH——!! S-s-sorry, sir! Hold on, l-lemme get—
  uh—” the waiter looked around frantically. The waitress who had
  brought their drinks rushed over with some clean dry towels, a few of
  which she handed to the other waiter, and they both proceeded to wipe
  and dab at Blavin’s damp clothes amid the hapless waiter’s babbled
  apologies. Under the cover of the towels, the waitress patted down the
  hobbit’s vest and replaced the sheaf of papers she had covertly lifted
  from one of the vest pockets earlier with a beguiling smile and wink.
  Once the beer on the floor had been cleaned up (the despondent young
  waiter had offered to pay for Blavin’s next two rounds of drinks) and
  the waiters had moved on to serve other customers, Inky spoke.

  “You don’t mind that we prefer to deliver it to the Benefactor
  personally, of course,” Inky piped cheerily, referring to the crystal.
  “The late wizard thought it was prudent to cover our bases since
  you’re a new, untested case manager after all. Besides, a little
  delayed gratification never hurt anybody, did it?” Inky smiled and
  raised their drink. “Another toast in tribute to Master Corraidhín!
  May his courage and buoyant spirit guide us on our next mission!”

  ~

  When Inky stepped out of the tavern and was a few paces away, someone
  clattered through the door and called out, “Hey! You forgot your
  takeout!”

  Inky turned in the direction of the voice. It was the waitress who had
  served their table earlier. She waved a brown paper bag in one hand.
  Inky gave her an embarrassed smile and said, “Thanks.” As the bag
  changed hands, the waitress mouthed soundlessly, We’ll report any
  more. She went back inside, and Inky strolled off into the cool night
  air with the bag securely tucked away next to a tea pouch and a more
  pressing question: what blend would go best with fried tofurkey balls?

  ~

  (Meanwhile)

  “The BANDit and his associates had gone to the tavern.” His assistant
  looked up from the scrap of paper held under a claw.

  Beaker heaved a sigh and rubbed the tips of one wing against his
  forehead. Surely he had better things to do than play Eye Spy over a
  bunch of crackpots, such as peer reviewing the latest draft of a paper
  on the development of Cerylidian hunting techniques for an upcoming
  issue of The Ichnition. But Cio seemed to think something may come of
  it and unfortunately, she was usually right about troublemakers.

  “Tell them to continue tailing from a distance,” he replied with a
  distracted wave, and his assistant left the room.

  Anyway, if he had the spare time, he could look at more interesting
  things, like the data he had collected surrounding the disappearance
  of the time anomaly that had popped up a few weeks ago. It had
  happened gradually, and he still wasn’t entirely sure what had caused
  this particular incident, but the signals picked up by his instruments
  had later faded, just like other ones before it. Still, it was
  comparatively larger than previous ones, and seemed to have taken
  slightly longer to dissipate, which meant more data points.

  He stole another glance at his Dat repositories before sighing again,
  swivelling his chair and attention back to the manuscript before him.
  Work first … then more work.

~

  The party dispersed after the discussion with Blavin. Nobody had
  wanted to relinquish the crystal to him, personally Alex felt that was
  prudent, though he still wasn’t sure what the point of it all was. The
  foolish hobbit had blathered on and on about their “mark” tactfully
  ignoring the real questions. And then the bug, damn it, the bug that
  chittered on about absolutely nothing for hours. It didn’t take Alex
  too long to figure out why, but he clung to the transmission until it
  died out hoping he’d be mistaken.

  So there he sat, in the attic of his once Uncle, staring bleakly into
  a cup of dark black coffee. The desk strewn with hastily scratched
  notes pulled from the bugs feeds. At least the one that had tracked
  that nosey group had proved somewhat helpful. Turns out this little
  group has less friends than a drunk who’s run up their tab.

  Still, there’s no point to share any of this information. It’s too
  loose, not definitive enough to action with the group.

  Alex begins to pen a message to an fellow operative, in hopes that HQ
  will pick it up and assign someone to the task.

      <- OP 2817 * LOC MB-A
      -> OP 25120 * LOC ESPER

      CLEARANCE: SECRET
      PACKET ENCLOSED. YOUR EYES ONLY.

      REQUESTING DETAIL ON BLAVIN
      EMPLOY OF "THE BENEFACTOR"
      PERCEPTIVE, AWARE OF BUGS.
      DO NOT CONTACT, DO NOT DISRUPT
      EXTREME CAUTION IMPERATIVE.

  Once penned Alex encrypts it with GPG and sends it along. These
  channels have worked well for him in the past. If Blavin wants to play
  games, then games we shall have.

  “I hate to do this” Alex mumbles to himself. “Normally I’d trail him
  myself, but I don’t think I have much say in the matter.” As it stands
  the group is dead set on gathering more of these cyrstals, regardless
  of what the danger may be, and if Alex wants to find his Uncle,
  they’re his best bet in doing so. Blavin doesn’t even matter outside
  of that. But if he can help the group reach their end faster, or force
  the information out of Blavin, perhaps it can come sooner..

  Alex lets out another sigh and glances wistfully around the gloomy
  attic room. It looked just like he remembered his Uncle’s office
  looking like at the College of Sysorcerery when he had taught there.
  He always was so particular. Pushing his chair away and grabbing his
  coffee he wanders to the bookshelf where a large steamer chest sits
  beside it. The bookshelf is covered in manuscripts, “Practical Common
  Lisp”, “The C Programming Language Vol 2”, “RHEL 5 Systems
  Administration”, each one arcane and well worn. And the amount of
  volumes, sometimes it’s a wonder Corraidhin had time to do anything
  other than read.

  “Maybe if I had been a little more studious I’d know how to help
  you..” as he pulls “A Guide to Backups and All Things Necessary” off
  of the shelf a knife falls out of the book, and clatters onto the
  floor glaring malevolently up at Alex.

Your gondola lift finally rises above the thick layer of clouds. The
sudden flash of clear blue sky is a revelation after ascending for
nearly 60 minutes through clouds so thick you couldn’t see through the
foggy windows more than three feet. Above you towers rocky, imposing
Kelsun Peak. You can just see a tiny portion of the hotel roof through a
cleft in the rocks. Below you, a frozen turbulent ocean of clouds dotted
with twisting leaning spires and spiraling branching towers, all made
out of solid cloudstuff. Handiwork of the whimsical and industrious
zephynos.

You spot two or three of them now, leaping and diving playfully through
the clouds like dolphins, spinning the clouds like yarn, and packing
them into solid constructs. Their current project resembles a garden of
outlandish, distorted tubas, french horns, and trombones.

The small cloud dragons are about 6 - 8 feet long including their thick
tails. They have wide faces with round lidless eyes, and always seem to
be smiling. Their heads are topped with multiple pairs of filamented
stalks. They have six short, stubby arms with long thin fingers that
they use to knead and pull clouds into solid shapes.

They build ceaselessly and mostly for the sake of building: they have no
apparent need for the structures themselves, living as they do floating
among the clouds. On occasion they have been entreated to build on
behalf of others. And the rare floating palace or city can still be
found drifting around Basmentaria as a result. The great city of
Vay’Neddas—tethered to the ground by great chains to Primora in the
north and Agendell in the south—is one of their greatest enduring works.

You approach the gondola station at the base of Kelsun Peak, and exit
your cable car as it slowly rounds the bullwheel. There are two
toques—presumably meant to be operating the lifts—standing off to the
side, ignoring their responsibilities, complaining loudly to nobody and
everybody about being forced to work long hours and being unfairly
compensated. The tips of their soft, conical heads slump forward,
calling to mind revolutionaries, or smurfs.

It is wicked cold as you step out onto the platform and the wind nips
and bites at you relentlessly.

At the edge of the platform, foggy white steps made of firm cloudstuff
climb up around the side of the mountain peak to the Palace
Runesocesius. Once the conspicuously extravagant residence of one of
Basmentaria’s most powerful politicians, it has since—after its owner
fell from public favor and was routed out—been gutted and transformed
into a luxury hotel of equally conspicuous extravagance. It continues to
be one of the highest inhabitable places on Basmentaria.

Two small toques at the base of the steps rush forward to meet you—the
floppy tips of their coneheads waggling side to side in their
exuberance—and introduce themselves as Confidence and Bread, your
guides. They have been instructed to guide you up to Runesocesius where
you will take posession of the Ginnarak Crystal.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00041

  Alex grips the encoded message he received in reply to his last
  request firmly in his coat pocket. It was simple, curt, impactful.
  “Trust no one”. Which begged the question, could even it be trusted?
  Was HQ compromised? His informants in danger? His allies and leads
  awash in the dark grey mist of uncertainity. Or had his message been
  intercepted, cracked, and a farsical response been sent in its place.
  Alex wasn’t certain which, but the strange format and unusually speedy
  response had him on edge.

  This anxiety didn’t boil up to the surface, not a line of worry or
  hint of the inner turbulence broke his cold blue eyes. Outwardly he
  was just as composed as ever, but between these uncertainties, the
  loss of his uncle, and now this utterly strange dagger he’d found
  amongst his uncle’s belongings, he wasn’t certain how long that
  composure would last. It didn’t held that he felt this gnawing at the
  back of his mind, as though something was probing, attempting to
  communicate with him, somewhere between telepathy and utter magic, and
  not in any sense that Alex understood.

  And here he stood, a stranger amongst amidst his uncle’s allies, and
  very little intention to change that situation at the moment.

  As the gondola touched down and the Toques rushed to greet them Alex
  jumped blithely off the ship and onto firm, but fluffy, ground. He
  cast a look around him at what appeared to be an ordinary port of
  entry, noting the crowds of people passing by. As the Toques arrived
  Alex spoke curtly to them, “Who sends you to greet us, and where do
  you wish to take us, and by what means do we travel?”. Short, cut,
  information only. There’s too much unnerving in an unknown situation
  like this.

~

  Inky greets the toques in turn politely, then turns to the second
  toque and says, “A little bit of bread and no cheese.”

“Cheese?” Bread cocks their head looks at Inky with a touch of
embarrassment. They start patting at their pockets, presumably looking
for a morsel of cheese to share with the travelers, but finding none.
They groan miserably. Confidence butts in apologetically, “There will be
plenty of food at the hotel if you want some! Some delicious fondue
perhaps? Kelsun Peak’s famous liquid gold!”

“Blavin Blandfoot arranged for us to meet you,” Bread answers Alex.
Confidence nods enthusiastically in agreement. “But I suppose
technically the hotelier sent us.” Bread points up at the sky, in the
general direction of the summit of Kelsun Peak. “We are to escort you to
Palace Runesocesius.” They thumb over their shoulder in the general
direction of the stairs. “By way of the cloud steps. On foot.”

Confidence leans in close and lowers their voice. “A Ginnarak Crystal! I
can’t hardly believe it! Thought they had all been lost to the ages. I
hear it’s complete dumb random luck that this one turned up. Story is,
an aetherwael beached itself on some wide zephynos boulevard. Happens
sometimes. Poor things can’t distinguish between clouds and cloudstuff.
I don’t blame ’em! At a distance, you and me can’t either! Anyway, this
aetherwael has got a harpoon stuck in its side. Dratted poachers. May
they all fall out of the sky and be dashed to a thousand pieces on the
rocks below. But it had a harpoon in its side and was trailing behind it
a float bag tethered to the harpoon. And you probably already guessed
what was inside of it!” By the time Confidence finishes their brief
story, they are trembling and nearly breathless with excitement.

“Anyway,” Bread interrupts their excited companion in an attempt to
restore decorum. Both of the toques have been gently herding you toward
the base of the stairs this whole time. “You know how the zephynos are.
You could give them all the coin in Basmentaria, or something priceless
like a Ginnarak Crystal, and they’d just as quickly misplace it out of
carelessness. If it’s not a cloud they can sculpt into the shape of
seussomorph or the likeness of some fantasy creature, they just don’t
give a fig. Luckily the hotelier caught wind of the aetherwael and found
out about the crystal before they managed to lose it, or bury it inside
of a sculpture or something silly! He has it safe and sound in the
library up at Runesocesius now.” Bread climbs the first step, his foot
sinking barely a centimeter into wispy cloud before striking the solid
cloudstuff. “Come! The hotelier will be very excited to greet you!”

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00042

  This seems a bit strange. Certainly Blavin has been pulling strings
  from behind the scenes the whole time, but why coordinate a special
  escort for us when there are other retrieval teams, and we’ve been
  less than amicable with the bloke the entire time.. Alex thinks to
  himself.

  DM: I’d like to check for any signs of deceit in the toques demeanor
  or communcations with us

  Confidence you said right? What would you do if I simply chose not to
  accompany you? I mean, there’s a whole city around us, perhaps I’d
  prefer a drink before climbing a mountains worth of stairs. Or better
  yet, I could get back on the boat and ride to the top and same myself
  the hassle.

Bread once again looks confused. Confidence looks surprised, caught off
guard.

Confidence sputters, “Well, yes, of course. You’ve been traveling for
some time now, haven’t you? I can assure you that the food and drink at
Runesocesius will be better than anything you can get here! But the
choice is entirely yours. Feel free to avail yourself of the local
offerings. We will wait here at the steps for you.”

Bread nods slowly, and seems to trailing behind the conversation just a
second or two.

Their reactions seem genuine to you despite the circumstances. They seem
like a couple of low level employees of a luxury hotel earnestly trying
to follow the instructions they’ve been given.

There are a couple of stalls and vendors set up around the gondola
station. Many of them serve mulled wine and hot chocolate. There is some
edible fare. Hot sandwiches and pitas. Nothing that an empanada from
Enrique’s wouldn’t put to shame. But they look hot and steamy, and of
great comfort to anybody who might be hungry and cold. There are a few
fire pits, next to which there are long benches with blankets, where you
might sit and warm up for a bit.

The gondola lift ends here, and does not continue up to the mountain any
further. The cloud steps are the most common way to get up to the peak,
and to the Runesocesius. But you’re pretty sure one or two of the stalls
here offers balloon rides up to the peak for thrill seekers and for
those with accessibility needs.

  “I think you already know I’m interested in neither bread nor cheese,
  the second of which I certainly did not ask for yet you tried to offer
  in your hasty pretence.” Inky smiles thinly at the toques.

  Taking out a small bag of gold coins and weighing it slowly on one
  hand to the sound of coins clinking inside the pouch, Inky continues,
  “Speak, answer our questions frankly and you will be rewarded. The
  hotelier up there need not know. Breathe a word of our little chat to
  another soul, however …” Inky’s gaze cut briefly to four snow ravens
  perched atop a spiral lamp post and back, “and you will learn the
  meaning of disappearing without a trace.”

Bread looks confused. You are starting to believe it is their default
expression. “So, you don’t want no chee—”

“Our only desire is to help!” Confidence hastily interrupts. He smiles
pleasingly. “We are your guides! Not just physically up the steps, but
in all things here on Kelsun Peak. You have but to ask, and if it is
within our power to give it, it will be yours! We are but humble ser—”

And just then Confidence is also suddenly interrupted. A thundering boom
like a canon sounds from somewhere nearby, followed quickly by an
explosion somewhere up above. Snow ravens fly off in all directions in a
panic. The sound ripples through the mountaintop, rattling the ground on
which you stand. A bunch of small rocks and two large boulders shake
loose from the mountainside. Shoppers and travelers shout and duck for
cover as they are pelted by the scree. One of the large boulder bounces
clear over the station and plummets down the side of the mountain before
disappearing into the cloud ocean below. The second one falls straight
toward the platform. A vendor selling wreaths and candles dives out of
the way as his stall is crushed by the boulder. A bench is toppled over,
spilling its blankets into the fire pit, and catches fire, quickly
spreading to another nearby stall.

Bread looks up at the sky, confused. You see a thin line of black smoke
starting to rise up into the sky from over the ridge where the
Runesocesius lies. Confidence shouts, and you see him pointing at the
sea, where a balloonship is rising up out of the cloud bank, sailing
quickly toward you and the summit of Kelsun Peak.

It resembles a seafaring ship, but instead of masts and sails, it has
two large, colorful, patchwork balloons that provide it lift. A large
fan on a pivot at the rear of the ship provides thrust. As you watch, it
fires a second canon—that is what the sound was!—nearly straight up,
arcing up and over the peak at Palace Runesocesius.

The crew of the ship bustle around on the deck of the ship, reloading
the canons, firing the balloons, shouting, giving and following orders.

“Cyberplasms,” groans Confidence, and Bread whimpers. Alex, that quiet,
dull, static roar that has been constantly tickling the back of your
head ever since you found that dagger seems to rise in pitch and in
tone. It conveys a sense of urgency, of warning. You can almost hear a
desperate voice behind the static fuzz cautioning you, “Evil…”

The only corporeal element of the crew are their cybernetic
enhancements. A mechanical leg. A synthetic eye. A claw, a hook, a hand.
An arm canon. Almost all of them have more than one, some as many as 3
or 5. The cybernetic pieces of each individual crew member are held
together by plasmic energy arcs, crackling blue and green. And
surrounding the bioware and the plasmic arcs of each crew member, like a
blanket or a cocoon, is the translucent, wavering, ghostly form of some
humanoid long-dead.

The figure standing on the deck surveying the work of the rest of the
crew—presumably the captain—has a synthetic eye rotating freely, 360
degrees in all directions, inside its skull-like head; a bulky arm
canon; and a thin robotic leg terminating in a thick boot. Plasmic
blasts arc through its core, sometimes disrupting and glitching its
ghostly body.

The captain raises its arm canon and shouts to the crew. Its voice
carried on the breeze sounds like something otherworldly rising slowly
from the murky deep. “Fire the canon, boys! And fire up the balloons!
Drop the ballast! That crystal is ours!”

It happens very quickly: the ship ascends to the summit and soon is
firing grappling hooks at it to pull themselves in and breach the walls
of the hotel.

Bread looks at you, wide-eyed and trembling. They let loose a pitiful
wail and turn and start running up the steps. “Bread!” Confidence yells
after them. They cast a backward glance at you. “I’ve got to help Bread!
We’ve got to save the hotel!” And they give chase to their fellow toque,
bounding up the cloudstuff steps.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00043

  Pirates?! Again?! Alex groans, unfortunately he’s run into this crew
  of dastardly mostly cybernetic punks in the past. Nasty group back
  home, always kept the precinct busy. Not necessarily with the
  detective work, it was always a little obvious when they showed up.
  They have a flair for the dramatic.

  Alex shouts to Inky & Jarrod “Come on, we need to get in one of those
  balloons and fast!” he then darts off in the direction of the nearest
  abandoned balloon in the market place, not looking to see if his
  companions had followed him.

  internally I know these guys have pulled off smaller heists, they
  could just be attacking the hotel to plunder riches from its guests.
  They don’t seem the likes of a retrieval team.. Then again, that
  Blavin fellow has multiple teams working for him, and he doesn’t seem
  all too picky about how they get the job done, it wouldn’t be
  surprising if he’d hired some brigands hoping they’d get the gems
  faster.

  Alex conjures up another bug, a stag beetle this time, and casts it
  away at the pirate ship. It’ll probably take some time to catch up,
  but once it does we’ll be able to keep an eye on the pirate’s ship and
  general actions, at least within line of sight of the bug.

  As Alex reaches the balloon he grabs the ruby hilted dagger and cuts
  the mooring lines keeping it down, and jumps into the basket preparing
  for take off.

You spot a balloon that has already been knocked half loose of its
mooring by the pirate attack. The basket is listing to the side and
tugging at the one remaining rope tying it down Its owner scurries
around in circles trying to secure it.

The vertical panels of the balloon are all different colors, creating a
brilliant rainbow pattern. The large woven basket is large enough for
maybe three people.

You leap inside, swinging the ruby hilted dagger at the remaining
mooring line. The balloon owner cries out in dismay. The basket shifts
beneath your feet as the balloon tugs it skyward.

In the burner, a small sunspoke—a minor fire elemental—is merrily
burning away, producing a modest flame that is hot enough to lift the
balloon slowly above the market into the sky. There is a knob valve on
the side of the burner to allow more oxygen to flow in, thereby feeding
the sunspoke and encouraging it to burn more intensely and raise the
balloon higher and faster. The valve is currently only about one third
open.

A pile of blankets in one corner of the basket—and that area of the
basket itself—is covered in blood. Somebody injured in the pirate attack
must have temporarily climbed into the basket looking for cover? As
you’re about to look away, something large-ish (small for a human, large
for an animal) under the blankets shifts and moves.

  Inky stares after Alex’s sprinting figure before shrugging and
  stepping towards one of the stalls selling sandwiches bowled over by
  one of the large boulders. They place some loose change on the stall’s
  wooden sign that had tipped over on the ground and pocket one of the
  sandwiches displayed inside an open chest oven. Next, they pick up
  several of the scented candles scattered on the ground by the crash,
  throwing some coins in the direction of the disoriented vendor before
  continuing at a leisurely pace up the steps to the hotel, taking in
  the balloonship and surrounding scenery. The members of their merry
  party arriving first can hold their own as well as the fort of a
  hotel.

You do a little leisurely shopping as the vendors and other shoppers put
out fires and tend to the injured. With a couple scented candles and a
sandwich safely in your pocket, you start to climb the cloud steps,
enjoying the scenery as you go. Bread and Confidence have quite a bit of
a head start on you, and are nowhere to be seen. As the stairway winds
around the mountainside, the market and its bustle recede from view, and
soon you are quite isolated and alone.

The majesty of creation is humbling here: the endless, roiling ocean of
cloud; the towering mountain of rock. It’s as though this was the
creator’s playground when they were still trying to figure out scale.
Before they quite got it right for human-sized creatures.

About halfway up your climb, it starts raining sheets of paper. You
snatch one and read it. Some heroic fantasy about slaying demons and
facing great peril. You grab another. A bodice-ripping romance. Another.
A gourmand’s food tour of Basmentaria, eating their way from coast to
coast. A murder mystery whodunnit. An aetherwael handler’s guide to
interplanetary travel. How to grow your own fortified pumpkins. On the
Care and Maintenance of Fortles. The Rise and Fall and Rise of Palace
Runesocesius. Within a minute, you have fists full of an entire
library’s worth of snippets and passages.

~

It looks as though Alex will approach the hotel by balloon from the
non-pirate side. And Inky’s approach by stair will deposit them at the
hotel entrance, roughly pirate-adjacent.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00044

  As Alex spots the sunspoke valve he grabs it and cranks it up to the
  2/3 mark. “Sorry little friend, we’re going to need a little bit more
  juice”. The baloon lurches upwards as air rushes in feeding the
  sunspoke, causing it to burn more intensely. After setting the
  sunspoke ablaze and shouting back to the balloon’s owner Alex takes
  account of his surroundings. It’s during this time he spots the
  bloodied, moving blankets. They seem to writhe, as though something
  beneath them is injured.

  Gripping the dagger firmly in one hand Alex grabs the blankets from
  the corner of the balloon basket revealing whatever lay beneath.

The sunspoke stretches its little arms and wriggles its little fingers.
It sighs happily, luxuriating in the extra fuel. It burns twice as
bright, shooting a hot jet of bright yellow flame up into the parachute.
The sunspoke starts to glow a molten red, and you start to rise faster.

As you rise up over the peak, you can finally spot the Runesocesius. The
grand hotel is draped over the top of the mountain, clinging to it like
a dragon resting on its hoard.

The “cyberplasms” as Confidence called them have docked to the side of a
tower on the other side of the peak from you. They have shot a large
hole in the side of the tower, and you can see them now starting to
zipline into the building. A thick plume of black smoke billows out of
the side of the tower, carrying pages and pages of loose paper into the
air with it. They rain down like snow. The tower must house an extensive
library.

You cautiously pull back a corner of the bloody blankets, jeweled dagger
raised and ready to strike. You reveal a small bloody furry blob. You
see two big round eyes, a short-snouted face, and enormous pointed ears.
It quickly looks away from you, chirps pathetically, and trembles as it
cowers in place. You have found a frightened hemogoblin stowaway!

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00045

  As the blankets draw back from the bloody mass, a cute little
  hemogoblin appears. “Aww little fellas just scared.” Alex lowers the
  dagger, but otherwise ignores the hemogoblin. Best to leave it be for
  now, there’s more important things.

  As the balloon gets within range of the ship Alex begins to scan the
  deck for Cyberplasms. At the same time he checks his bug to track the
  location of the cyberplasms more acutely. It looks like there may be
  an opporunity to jump from the balloon to the ship. After that cutting
  the zip lines would give me the opporunity to steal the ship, leaving
  the cyberplasms trapped at the top of the hotel.

Just a few Cyberplasms remain on the deck of the airship. The vast
majority of them have zipped into the hotel tower.

You check your bug’s feed. It has gone almost entirely unnoticed in the
fracas, and you are able to piece together a clear picture of the inside
of the tower. It is indeed a grand library, its galleries spanning each
floor of the tower. One of the largest collections in all of
Basmentaria.

The Cyberplasms have breached the tower near its base and are pouring
into the Great Hall. You tune in just in time to see a rail-thin, bald
and mustachioed man standing defensively in front of a display case.
“No! You can’t!” he exclaims as a disembodied sickle approaches him in a
cloud of electricity and ectoplasm.

Behind the glass in the display case is a bluish hunk of rock the size
of a melon, with gently pulsing gold veins.

  Inky puts away the papers they caught in passing or picked up along
  the path up to read later, including a number that from a cursory
  glance appear to be from a culinary collection and a few from some
  moth-eaten but finely illustrated botanical tome, among others.

  Eventually arriving at the hotel entrance, Inky enters and manages to
  catch a frantic-looking attendant near the reception to ask the
  whereabouts of the hotelier, indicating they had a business
  appointment with said manager.

You walk in through the hotel’s main entrance. The grandeur would take
your breath away were it not for the shouting and the smoke and the
explosions coming from down the hall to your right.

You wave down a passing hotel clerk and inquire after the hotelier. They
are hauling a large bucket of hot water, and carrying an oversized
bundle of clean towels under one arm. They pause for a moment to look at
you incredulously before running off in the opposite direction.

A cry rings out nearby and a Cyberplasm flies through an open door down
the hallway. It lands in a heap of crackling energy, smears of ectoplasm
streaking the floor as though it were bleeding heavily. It seems to be
barely held together by the energy stored in its cybernetic leg and a
metal skull plate.

It scoots backwards on its hands and its butt, trying to stand up. Two
toques leap out of the door after it. You recognize Bread and Confidence
right away.

Bread has obviously been to the kitchens. They are wearing tin baking
sheets and an oversized pot on their heard as makeshift armor, and have
a couple of dangerous looking kitchen knives hanging from their belt. At
the moment they are swinging a large meat tenderizer over their head as
though it were a war hammer.

Confidence, meanwhile, has been to the gardener’s shed. They are wearing
a heavy leather apron and thick leather gloves, and have a trowel in
each hand, and a large hoe or rake strapped to their back.

Bread lowers their hammer on Cyberplasms head, denting the skull plate.
And Confidence darts in and stabs with both hands at the leg. As soon as
the prosthetics go offline and the plasmic arcs cease firing, there is
nothing left holding the ectoplasm together and the ghost kind of
dissipates into the air with a soft wail.

They look up and notice you at the same time, relaxing their offensive
stances. “Oh!” cries Bread. “It’s you!”

“You don’t happen,” asks Confidence, “to need a guide, do you?”

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00046

  Ah so I suppose those Toques were being honest then, there was a
  Ginnarak crystal, and I guess they were going to give it to us.. oh
  well, nothing good in life comes easy.

  Alex cranks the dial on the sunspoke, grabs the hemogoblin from the
  basket, and jumps out of the balloon and onto the deck of the ship. He
  rushes over to the nearest pile of bundled rope and barrels and stows
  his new hemo friend. “Just stay hidden little guy, let me take care of
  these pirates first.”

  Alex grabs the dagger from his side as he makes his way towards the
  side of the ship, first thing first, best to cut the mooring lines and
  zip lines. The static clawing sensation appears at the back of Alex’s
  mind, but he attempts to ignore it. There’s too much that needs to be
  done too quickly, and he’s all too aware of the danger he’s put
  himself in. “What would Corraidhin do..” Alex thinks to himself,
  “perhaps a spell?”.

      function target:new(obj, tbl)
        obj = obj or {}
        setmetatable(obj, self)
        self.__index = self
        self.x = 0
        self.y = 0
        self.speed = 0
        reutrn obj
      end

      function target:yeet()
        self.x = 100
        self.y = 100
        self.speed = 50
        return self
      end

  After preparing the spell Alex makes his way towards the guard rail
  ready to cut the mooring and zip lines, spell at the ready should an
  enemy appear.

You crank the dial to 11. The sunspoke squeals in delight and burns like
a tiny star. You grab the hemogoblin, who chirrups and clings tightly to
you, and leap from the balloon onto the deck of the airship.

You think you can hear—barely audible—the sunspoke singing a song of
homecoming as the hot air balloon continues to rise unpiloted up toward
the sun.

You rush over to cover behind a barrel, and deposit your new hemogoblin
friend safely inside the center of a large coil of rope. It looks up at
you quizzically, but nods when you tell it to stay put.

You invoke the powers of the moon and prepare a quick but (hopefully)
sufficient Spell of Yeeting.

When you draw the dagger, the world develops a faint static background
noise which is easy enough to ignore at the moment given the state of
things. You dash forward and start sawing at the thick mooring lines.
The dagger’s ruby hilt flashes in the sunlight as you work, and in your
mind’s eye you see a bright red wine, and a drop of blood red ink
flowing from the nib of a fountain pen.

You shake the images from your head just as you finish sawing through
the rope. A Cyberplasm who was shimmying back up the rope from the hotel
to the ship yelps as the line goes slack and swings back into the side
of the cliff. The pirate rebounds from the impact, bounces off the
mountainside a few times, and falls from view as it disappears through
the clouds below.

The ship drifts lazily, rising slightly, and despite your best sneaking
around, the remaining Cyberplasms on board cannot help but notice that
the ship is no longer tethered. You successfully hide behind a barrel as
three cyber ghost pirates come rushing over to the ship railing and lean
over, looking below at where there are no longer any ropes attaching the
ship to the hotel.

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see the hemogoblin toddling
across the deck toward the Cyberplasms, no doubt curious about what
they’re looking at over the side of the ship.

  “Indeed, Bread, it’s me. You have not yet escaped your fate of
  untraceable disappearance just yet.” Inky deadpans, then smiles. “We
  have much to discuss, but later. I do need a guide … to your hotelier.
  Presumably I will find them by following the racket and trail of
  ruined decor, but maybe you know of a quicker route?”

Bread smiles at the threat of being untraceably disappeared, mostly
confident that they are on the inside of a private little joke and that
they are presently in no actual danger from Inky. They grip their hammer
a little tighter nonetheless.

Confidence slips their trowels into their apron. “Yes, this way!”

They hurry down the hall. You know you’re going the right way because
tattered, torn, charred books litter the ground in increasing numbers.
Bits of paper and ash fall like snow.

Confidence guides you away from the entrance to the library’s Great
Hall, and takes you instead to a smaller, more discreet staff entrance.
They open the door a crack, and as you look through you are just in time
to see the ship captain with their cybernetic leg, arm canon, and eye.
Now that the crew have cleared the way for them, they stroll across the
library over piles of fallen, damaged books.

A thin bald man with a neatly trimmed mustache is on the other side of
the hall, his back turned to the pirate. He wears a fine suit and has
just finished unlocking a glass display case. He retrieves a
multifaceted blue and gold stone and hugs it to his chest with both
arms. He throws a panicked glance over his shoulder at the slowly
approaching pirate, and turns to run away. His retreat is halted by a
small explosion at his feet. He skids to a stop and looks back at the
pirate, who is lowering their arm canon.

“The crystal,” the captain demands in a voice part ghostly moan, part
mechanical drone. “Hand it over, hotelier.” It steps closer. “Mother has
promised us new bodies if we deliver the quintessence. You won’t be
permitted to stand in our way.”

One pirate near the breach tucks a couple volumes of manhwa under its
arm and climbs out onto the mooring line, returning to the ship with its
plunder. It howls as the line suddenly goes slack, flinging the pirate
and its comics into the mountainside, and then out into space.

Sunlight pours into the library from outside as the shadow of the
airship shifts as it starts to drift, suddenly unmoored.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00047

  Damn it! I should’ve left the little goblin in the balloon, this could
  get tricky..

  Time slows for just the briefest of moments while Alex calculates his
  next move. Looking at the position of the pirates he can probably yeet
  the middlemost one away from the group into the left most pirate. Best
  case this sends both of them sailing over the edge of the ship, worst
  case it just slightly knocks them off balance. In either event this
  gives me enough time to dart from cover and quickly dispatch the right
  most pirate with Uncle’s dagger. I’ve got to sever each connection
  point between the ecotplasm and the cybernetics, nothing quite as
  quick and easy as flesh and blood, but a quick slice to the left most
  armpit, and another to the right most leg right above the carotid
  artery should do it..

  Jumping immediately to action Alex casts yeet.middle_cyberplasm()
  sending the middle pirate into the left most pirate away from the
  hemogoblin while he dashes forward to take the third right most pirate
  by surprise. As he reaches the right most pirate he makes two quick
  slices, first at the leg, followed by a quick upper cut to the left
  arm.

You channel some of the ambient environmental charge into your prepared
incantation. It’s comforting sometimes to peer behind the veil and see
the world through this lens. It’s so simple. The separation of self and
other is an illusion: everything is just a table. The concept of time
itself is simplified: coroutines prevent everything from happening all
at once and create the illusion of concurrency. It’s all really quite
elegant.

Anyway so the hemogoblin sidles up next to the pirates at the railing.
It’s not tall enough to see over the railing, and starts to kind of jump
up and down, trying to catch a glimpse. The pirates look down at it in
confusion just as the yeet happens, and they knock into each other. The
leftmost one almost manages to regain its balance but then trips over
the little blood gremlin and pitches over the railing. The middle pirate
yelps as the startled hemogoblin darts between its legs to get out of
the way. The pirate stumbles and then slips in a small puddle of blood.
Its feet shoot from beneath it and it too tips over the railing.

The hemogoblin dashes right into the waiting arms of the rightmost
Cyberplasm. “Gotcha, you little … ugh! What …” The pirate is starting to
regret snatching up the little furball, which is defensively gushing
blood all over it, when you make your first slice into its left armpit.
Half its cybernetics go offline. One arm goes limp and it drops the
hemogoblin, which scurries around and hides behind you. The pirate turns
toward you, now full of regrets, and you stab into its right leg,
knocking its tech completely offline and dispersing the ghostly
energies.

As far as you can tell, the ship is now free of Cyberplasms.

The hemogoblin thrusts its tiny fists in the air and cheers.

  Inky shakes out several large and very fine kerchiefs, handing two
  each to the guides and gestures for them to cover their noses and
  mouths with them while they perform the action themselves to
  demonstrate.

  Donning a pair of skydiving goggles snatched from one of the souvenir
  stalls at the gondola station while no one was looking (replacing it
  with its approximate weight in silver coins), Inky retrieves a black
  metal box that previously served as a portable camp stove from their
  knapsack and removes the lid. The inside of the box is filled with dry
  wood chips mixed with a pine green powder, and Inky throws in the
  wicks pulled from some of the scented candles that were pushed into a
  heater flask to melt fully during the walk up the hotel steps.
  Finally, Inky pours another vial of foul-smelling liquid over the
  contents, opens the door just wide enough to slide the metal box
  through to one side of the door a few paces away.

  A mildly sweet, cloying smoke emanates from the flameless heat inside
  the box, which begin to fill the library hall with a rapidly
  thickening cloud. It is also taking on an acrid and slightly sooty
  edge. Near the door, Inky fans more of the smoke in the direction of
  the cyberplasmic apparition with a thin bound manuscript laying on the
  floor.

Bread, Confidence, and you all don protective gear. You push the camp
stove through the door like an Olympic curler. It glides across the
library floor a respectable distance considering the book debris and the
lack of sweepers. Much more quickly than one would think possible, the
hall is filled with a thick, sooty smoke. The Cyberplasm captain groans
with frustration as even the short distance between it and the hotelier
(and the crystal) becomes occluded in the smoke screen. The hotelier
wisely doesn’t make a sound as he disappears from view.

Bread nudges you, grins, and gives you a thumbs up.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00048

  Alex snatches up his new hemo friend cheering huzzah as he does. We’ve
  got a pirate ship little guy!

  Rushing about the deck Alex quickly takes stock of what’s left, plenty
  of ammo, general supplies, fuel, perfectly provisioned for a quick
  crystal kidnapping. Smart move pirates, but not smart enough.

  Alex heads to the helm and steadies the ship guiding it out and away
  from the library, can’t have any of the remaining cyberplasms easily
  reboarding it now can we? Once the ship is out of range Alex checks
  his S.T.A.G drone’s twtxt feed for updates.

      @<drone/fhsoa7483/video> Cyberplasm approaching crystal
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/gps> approx library, top level
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/audio> Cyberplasm threatens violence
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/video> Inky, bread, confidence enter subvertly
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/video> Visual feed impaired due to unknown smog
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/audio> Angry tones, uncertain who

  Not particularly helpful, and it rules out my first thought. I could
  blindly fire the broadside canons into the library hoping to hit the
  cyberplasm, but I’d be just as likely to hit Inky, Bread, Confidence
  or any other innocent bystander. I’ve got to get a message to her.

  Alex quickly dispatches a command to the S.T.A.G

      @<drone/fhsoa7483/cmd> Seek Inky
      @<drone/fhsoa7483/relay> Secured ship, inform A.I of intentions, will coordinate rescue via the stolen ship

  If all we’ve got is this, then we’d best be ready for a quick rescue.
  Alex busies himself preparing a new zipline and mooring lines. He then
  loads the boradside canons and the top deck swivel canons. It’ll need
  to be quick, but if I’m ready I can swing the ship in close, deploy a
  zipline for Inky to zip down to the ship with, and defend the retreat
  with the swivels. If everyone retreats to the ship we can take a note
  from the pirates playbook and blast them to hell with the broadsides
  while we make our retreat. Or simply run I suppose, but I dislike the
  idea of leaving innocent people to deal with angry pirates

The hemogoblin cheers you on as you take possession of the airship,
accidentally squirting a few jets of rust colored blood in its
excitement. Must still be quite young. They don’t gain full control of
their blood sacs until well into adulthood.

You check your S.T.A.G. drone’s twtxt feeds. This A.I. seems especially
reliable, you note with satisfaction. Its updates are regular and
detailed. Even when there’s not much to report.

You load up the canons and take control of the helm. The hemogoblin
stands at attention at the broadside canons with a cracklesparkler,
ready to light the fuse at your command. You steer the ship a short
distance away from the hotel, hopefully out of reach of the cyberplasms.
But within range of your own canons and ziplines.

  While Inky has the attention of both guides, they close the door again
  until it is slightly ajar, and make a series of hand gestures. First
  pointing at themselves, at their own forearm and fist held stiffly to
  mimic the shape of the captain’s arm cannon, to indicate that Inky
  will handle the Cyberplasm. Then Inky points the two fingers of a hand
  at Bread and Confidence, turns the two fingers downward and swings
  them back and forth in opposite directions to convey walking. This was
  followed by a single finger pointing in the general direction they had
  last seen the hotelier; then the finger hooks inward, the arm
  repeating a yanking motion once or twice before ending the gesture
  with a thumb tossed over their shoulder towards the hallway away from
  the staff entrance, to ask them to get their boss out of the library
  to a safe spot.

  Without waiting for confirmation from the toques, Inky opens the door,
  abruptly stops, turns and shoves a compostable bag of mango-flavoured
  croutons at Bread, gives them a thumbs up in return and a mildly
  disturbing, eye-crinkling smile behind their kerchief, before slipping
  inside the smoky room. One hand is already pulling out a thin,
  extendable metal walking pole with a carrying strap visually
  resembling the type used by hikers from their courier bag to check for
  obstacles amid the lowered visibility.

Confidence watches all of your hand gestures closely, and then nods
resolutely. They draw their large hoe, and turn and start to crouch run
toward the main entrance to to the main hall of the library.

Bread looks confused, but ready to follow Confidence. They grab their
heavy meat tenderizer and crouch down in imitation of their fellow
toque. Before they can run off, you shove a bag of croutons into their
arms. “Small. Toasted. Bread,” they intonate slowly in wonder. The
confusion falls from their face as they break into a wide grin. “Now
I’ll never disappear without a trace,” they laugh. They thank you and
run like a duck after Confidence.

  Inside, Inky lobs the empty glass vial that had held the unpleasantly
  pungent organic catalyst at a spot the floor several paces roughly
  from where the Cyberplasm — presumably the leader of the group — had
  been standing earlier, in the opposite direction of the staff entrance
  in an attempt to attention from the hotelier’s last location. As they
  edge along the wall towards the tower stairs, walking pole looped over
  one hand, Inky grabs a few small hardcover novellas from a wall shelf.
  Straightening from their crouch, Inky tosses them one at a time
  horizontally in quick succession like a discus, but without the
  full-body turning motion, across the hall towards the sounds of
  frustrated groans and angry muttering. The first starting higher
  around where a human head might have once been, one at waist height
  and another at the juncture below where ectoplasmic knees might meet
  prosthetic legs.

You pick up three hardback novellas. If it wasn’t so smoky, and if you
weren’t so much in the middle of a potentially life and death struggle
with the Cyberplasm captain of a pirate airship, you might notice their
titles: Stop and Smell the Crystals, Living the Corn, and A Big Moon.

Anyway, you start flinging.

After you toss the catalyst, you can see a plasmic form heavily blurred
and obscured by the smoke turn in that direction. You fling Stop and
Smell the Crystals at it, and it spins like a discus and smashes into
the pirate right in the face, above the chin. It howls and brings its
hand to its face, and turns and charges up its arm cannon.

Mostly going on sound now, you fling Living the Corn at the pirate’s
moan and at the electric whine of the canon charging. You hear the canon
discharge but the half-blind pirate fires wide. You see the flash of the
energy blast hitting something, someone, else obscured by smoke in the
middle distance between the two of you. A man screams out in pain. Right
after the muffled thump of his body hitting the ground, you hear the
clinking and ringing of something heavy and metallic striking and
rolling across the floor.

Living on Corn strikes the pirate in the elbow, and with a fizzle and a
spark, the arm cannon sputters offline.

The pirate stumbles forward, half-lame and half-blind. It stoops and
scoops up a heavy melon-sized object. It stomps its cybernetic boot, and
small rockets spring out from small compartments on either side of its
ankle. They start to fire up and the pirate is about to make its escape
when A Big Moon hits it right above knee and severs the ghost’s final
connection to its final enhancement.

It groans as it starts to dissipate, dropping the heavy object once
more.

“My crew, it is too late for me! I shall never have a new body now! But
it’s not too late for you! You must bring the quintessence to Mother!”

And then the pirate’s essence is diluted in the smoke filling the
library.

  At that moment Inky hears a very low whirring accompanied by clicking
  sounds behind them and without glancing backwards, swings the walking
  pole at the source of the buzzing. The stick collides with something,
  sending it careening backwards with a light clatter through what is
  likely a row of bookshelves around the area already partially emptied
  of their contents. From the static noise that ensues, Inky realises
  whatever it was may or may not have been one of the wizard’s bugs
  hovering in the shadows earlier or a disembodied, ectoplasm-spewing
  prosthetic limb after all. Inky calls out sheepishly, “Sorry, Young
  Master Alex! Was that yours? Oops? Haha?” before smashing two more
  empty glass bottles as a distraction for any remaining Cyberplasms
  lurking on the same floor, and sprints up the tower stairs, using the
  banisters as a guide.

The Amber Imp is feverishly reporting all the goings on from inside the
S.T.A.G. drone when Inky strikes its conveyance with their walking pole.
The bug is destroyed on contact. The imp barely manages to fire off one
final End Of Transmission post before ejecting from the craft, which
sinks below like an exploded firework. It drifts on the currents of
smoke and flows out through the hole in the wall into the open air
outside. The imp falls through open space and starts to think back on
its life. So much time and energy spent chasing its hopes and dreams,
its goals and aspirations. So much of its life wasted in pursuit. Always
reaching, never grasping. Is that all it gets? Is this the end? Did it
ever really even get a chance to really live?

These thoughts race through its head as it falls, but are cut short when
it abruptly lands on a hard bed of cloudstuff. It tumbles and rolls and
comes to a stop. And when it looks up, amazed to be alive and vowing to
make the most of this second chance at life, it looks up into the
benevolent smiling face of a pink zephynos.

~

Inky, you cross the floor to where the pirate had its last stand. You
find what appears to be approximately one-fifth of the hotelier, and
wonder idly where the rest of him might be. And you notice a conspicuous
lack of Ginnarak Crystal.

You do however notice a soft crunch underfoot. And when you bend down to
inspect it—disorganized cyberplasms running amok in the smoke behind
you—you discover a trail of mango flavored croutons leading across the
hall to the tower stairs.

You sprint up the stairs using the banisters as a guide. The breadcrumb
trail ends on the seventh level, where Confidence sits slumped against
the wall between two bookshelves. They have one arm around four-fifths
of the hotelier, his shocked gaze telling you everything you need to
know, that he is entirely dead but just doesn’t know it yet. Their other
arm is around Bread, who has suffered a massive wound to the chest and
is only slightly more alive than the hotelier. On the ground between
Confidence’s legs is the Ginnarak Crystal. Several loose pages are stuck
to its sides, held in place by drying blood and ectoplasm.

Confidence looks at you and smiles wearily. “We left a trail for you. It
was Bread’s idea. They were a good guide.”

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00049

  “They are a good guide,” Inky corrects adamantly. “Do you hear that,
  Bread? You’re not allowed to disappear until you’ve had an entire bag
  of these croutons, and even then you’re still not allowed. If I’d
  known you’d never had croutons before I wouldn’t have let you walk a
  step further into that hall. That was simultaneously the worst and
  best idea ever. Mango! Croutons! What a travesty. Did you even taste
  any of it? No? You have to! How can you offer guests delicious fondue
  without croutons? Speaking of which, we haven’t gotten that fondue you
  promised yet, that’s reason #144 you can’t disappear. What’s reason
  #143? Crostinis. Small toasted bread. Slice of life. You can put
  cheese on it too, if you really must …”

  And so on. While Inky talks at Bread in a bid to keep them conscious,
  they whisk out a first-aid kit from their courier bag and kneeling on
  the floor, proceeds to stem the bleeding from the chest wound with
  coagulant-coated bandages. Slowly, they tip a flask of tea infused
  with some restorative herbs down Bread’s open mouth, careful not to
  pour too quickly. Inky pauses mid-diatribe and mid-pour to thrust
  another flask of tea into Confidence’s hand, the one wrapped
  four-fifths of the hotelier and ask, “Are you injured? Please keep an
  eye on your companion, I will summon for assistance.”

  Standing up, Inky walks to a window, opens it and peers out. They look
  around for a hot air balloon and notice the unmoored airship. After
  squinting at it with a mini-spyglass, they see Alex standing at the
  helm of the ship with a young hemogoblin on board. Inky waves, and
  makes a vertical cross sign with a fist and thumb on the opposite
  upper arm a few times. Next, they pull out a small tin whistle, and
  toot a few sharp notes in the same cadence as the one-liner directed
  at Bread earlier by the gondola station. After a moment, a scops owl
  swoops in to land on the windowsill. Inky inserts a rolled piece of
  paper into a small pouch hanging at the bird’s back, and the bird
  flies off again.

  Returning to the figures slumped against the wall, Inky places the
  Ginnarak crystal in a lightly padded cloth bag, stowing it away in
  their knapsack-style backpack. They resume checking and tending to the
  toques’ injuries, while expounding upon various permutations of
  toasted bread to a captive audience.

Bread closes their eyes and smiles dreamily at the descriptions of
various breads. They weakly sip the tea as you tip it into their mouth
and swallow with effort.

They sigh and open their eyes. They focus on you and maintain eye
contact as you draw from a seemingly bottomless well of knowledge on the
topic of toasted breads. Bread and life are clinging fast to each other,
neither ready or willing to let go of the other. They are going to be
okay.

Confidence’s wounds are superficial. They are winded from dragging Bread
and the hotelier up seven flights of stairs. But they are fine.

The hotelier’s wounds are sadly quite fatal. Honestly it was all over
for him the moment he took the full force of the captain’s plasma canon
to his chest. He babbles, “It’s not … I wasn’t …” And then with sudden
realization and quiet resignation, a clear-eyed, “Oh.” And then he is
gone.

His courage in the face of danger is the reason you now have the third
of the five Ginnarak Crystals in your pack. Whether or not his death was
in vain is now largely up to you and what you decide to do with the
crystal.

~

Downstairs in the Great Hall of the library, one of the remaining
Cyberplasms crouches down next to the inert cybernetic eye that until
very recently belonged to their captain. They pick it up and turn it
over in their hand. “Worry not, my captain,” the ghost mourns. “We will
find the quintessence. And once we do, we will be made anew in the forge
of our Mother.”

He rolls the orb in palm of his hand. A faint arc of energy crackles
across its surface. And the eye rolls over of its own volition and looks
up at the pirate.

Suddenly reverent, the pirate gently places the eye on the ground as a
ghostly face begins to form around it. The pirate waits patiently,
attentively. It’s not every day one gets to bare witness to a new birth.
The ectoplasm that gathers around the eye forms a rail-thin body. Its
head is bald and its face sports a neatly trimmed mustache. It is
missing an arm and a leg.

Dutifully, the witness fetches a recently discarded arm canon and leg
booster. The exotica tap into the energy provided by a new crossing
over, and come online, and create a new mesh.

The hotelier stands and looks down at its new body. As it were. It looks
around at its surroundings. It picks up a few books and starts shelving
them.

The pirate, mostly wishing to provide companionship and comfort to the
new ghost, assists with tidying up.

~

Alex, you are at the helm of the balloon-ship. As you start to drift
slightly up and away, the blue dome of the hotel comes into view. On its
peak you can see a life-sized statue of a stern-faced Runesocesius
wielding a spear, drawn back as though ready to hurl an angry
thunderbolt down at the world below.

The hemogoblin is still down on the deck by the canons. You see it
waving cheerily at the library tower. You squint in that direction, but
can’t see what has caught its attention.

A small tufted-ear owl silently lands next to you breaking you from your
reverie. The owl is wearing a small harness with a pouch at the back.
Inside the pouch is a rolled piece of paper signed by Inky, up on the
seventh floor of the tower.

You count seven windows up the side of the tower from its base. There
seems to be some movement inside, but you can’t make much out from here.
With a lucky shot, you think you might be able to hook the window frame
with a zipline.

~

Outside, a pink zephynos is spinning raw cloud into a minuscule opera
house and performing arts center under the direction of an amber imp
with a new hunger for life. It is an organic looking structure: a
primary concert hall, surrounded by a number of smaller stages and
performance areas spiraling out from the center like a nautilus shell.

The imp smiles happily, proudly. What tales will be told here! What
songs will be sung! “Lorehold,” it whispers to itself. “You will tell
the world’s stories.”

It is already trying out lines in its head, imagining the play it will
write of this day. About the hotel and the library and the pirates and
the cloud dragons. About a pair of adventurers. And a very brave and
lucky drone pilot that dared to chase its dreams.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00050

  Meta: I look forward to reading the A.I.’s play once it’s written, we
  should go back and write the sequence of events for this segment from
  their perspective in play form at some point.

  Alex gingerly takes the note from the owl and reads it quickly. “I
  guess my S.T.A.G. got to Inky after all.” Eyeing the tower and cutting
  up the windows, it looks like maybe I’d get a shot in from the zip
  line. But it’s iffy.

  Alex grabs the wheel and guides the balloonship slowly up a few
  levels. From that vantage point it should only be 3-4 levels between
  the ship and I.

  After getting the ship in place he grabs a zip line canon and launches
  it at one of the windows on the 7th floor, sinking the anchor firmly
  beneath the window.

  Now to signal Inky… Alex rummages around the ship, finding both a
  signal flare gun and flares in the cargo hold, at least the pirates
  were prepared for the worst. Taking aim away from the Balloon Sails,
  Alex fires the flare up into the air creating a dazingly and bright
  signal in the sky.

You fire the zipline and the hemogoblin cheers adorably. The spear
pierces the stone right beneath the 7th floor window, and the hooks
extend and foam, cementing the line in place.

In a locker on the side of the ship you find a few signal flares. You
point them away from the balloons and fire into the sky. The flares
explode brilliantly and hang dazzling in the sky before slowly drifting
downward.

A pair of zephynos swim over, attracted by the brilliant sparkling
lights. They excitedly bat at the air with their hands and turn
somersaults. They pull at some clouds and squeeze them into dozens of
abstract forms inspired by the bursts. They toss them back and forth
playfully and soon the boulders are drifting around listlessly overhead.

Below, almost all of the Cyberplasms have noticed by now that their ship
has been stolen. Several crowd into the hole in the wall and shout and
shake their fists at you.

You hear a low chirrup behind you and turn to see the hemogoblin
standing in the middle of the deck. Somehow in all the commotion it has
managed to get its tiny little hands on the ruby-hilted dagger. It grips
the hilt tightly in both hands and gazes in wide-eyed wonder at the gem,
utterly captivated, back turned to the fireworks. The hemogoblin and the
blade are absolutely dripping with rivers of blood. A decent sized pool
has already formed at its feet.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00051

  As they wait for the balloonship to approach, Inky glances to the
  prone remains of the hotelier on the floor and frowns. There wasn’t
  much they could do about that now. It was really inconvenient timing —
  he hadn’t received the papers yet. Inky can already picture Cio’s
  unspoken but palpable disappointment even as she offered reassurances
  that it was perfectly fine. The gnawing guilt she could inflict with a
  look was worse than a tenacious terrorier with a bone biscuit. Then
  Inky recalls an urban legend from the elderly aunts they sometimes
  pass by during teatimes, which claim that it was possible to send
  messages and items to the deceased by burning the articles.

  Ducking momentarily behind another bookshelf, Inky removes an envelope
  bearing the seal of a butterfly in red wax, drops it into a
  recently-emptied shortbread tin and holds a lit match to a corner of
  the paper. Before long the entire envelope is consumed by the flames
  and the lid replaced tightly over the tin. If the paperwork found its
  way to the hotelier on the spiritual plane, that would be the
  formalities completed. Or if it was reduced to ashes without ever
  reaching the recipient, no one had to know.

  Inky walks back to the window to see a flare light and a zip line
  ending below the windowsill. They look to the other end of the line,
  back to the toques, and around the room. Their gaze lands on a few
  cloth covers draped over several bookshelves near an alcove from top
  to bottom, possibly to protect the manuscripts on the shelves from
  extended exposure to dust and light. They tie a large red kerchief to
  the zip line to indicate they had seen flare signal, before turning to
  Confidence. “There’s an airship waiting outside with a zip line. We
  should get Bread patched up by a healer in town. It wouldn’t do to
  have them walk around like that, unless you want to turn the hotel
  into a haunted house attraction.”

  As they finish speaking, Inky pulls off three of the covers, two iron
  spears and one of the two decorative flag poles with flags featuring
  the crest of Runesocesius, and a symbol (of the old town, Inky
  surmises) that stood in a nook between the wall and a bookshelf.
  Crossing over to a wall display of ceremonial chains and maces, they
  remove two of the metal chains that hung on from hooks on the wall.
  Having gathered the items, they retrieve two zip line harnesses, some
  parachute cord and two additional pulley hooks from their bag.

  They lay the chains on the floor about two feet apart, followed by the
  cloth sheets with their outer surfaces facing down over them, and tie
  the corners at both ends to the flag pole to form the base of a
  makeshift hammock. With Confidence’s help, they slide Bread onto the
  sheets, being cautious to avoid further jostling the toque’s injuries.
  Inky wraps the ends of the chains around the flagpole, tying them and
  the cloth bundle with loops of parachute cord, and sets the pulley
  hooks to links on the top surface of the flag pole.

  Inky puts on a zip line harness and throws the spare one to
  Confidence, directing them to do the same. With some difficulty, they
  hoist the bundle of Bread to the window. Inky descends first, hooking
  their harness pulley to the zip line as they brace against the tower
  wall. As the bundle is slowly lowered through the window, Inky
  connects the pulley hooks on the metal chains to the zip line,
  Confidence bringing up the rear while Inky holds the hammock steady.

  While the zephynos play overhead, the three of them prepare to slide
  down to the deck of the balloonship along the zip line.

Confidence and Inky, framing the Bread basket between them, slide down
the zipline to the balloonship. The zephynos frolic up overhead, and the
hole in the library wall gapes below. And beyond that, the endless sea
of clouds.

Inky, having descended the line first, makes it to the ship ahead of
Bread and Confidence. They clambor up over the side, unhook themself,
and reach for the corner of the hammock.

The 3rd Ginnarak Crystal is now on the deck of the ship.

Looking up, Inky sees that two determined cyberplasms have started
following them out the library tower window. Neither has a harness. One
is hanging upside down on the cable, arms and legs wrapped around it,
and has managed to shimmy a couple feet away from Runesocesius. The
other has just swung out of the window and is holding onto the line with
their hands. They are kicking their legs up over and over, trying to
swing high enough to lock their ankles around the cable.

In the time that it will take you to unhook the hammock and get both
Bread and Confidence onto the ship, the two pirates will have closed
most of the distance between you and might be within striking distance.

Meanwhile on the deck of the ship, the hemogoblin is deeply entranced by
a private conversation it seems to be having with the ruby-hilt dagger.
It nods and chirps and coos as it continues to strangle the grip in its
tiny bloody hands, singing softly and soothingly. The ruby flashes and
glints, almost strobe-like in the sunlight, as though in the midst of
some kind of struggle. But as the hemogoblin continues its strange
lullaby, the gem eventually fades and grows dull, until finally it
resembles nothing more than a lifeless lump of stone.

The hemogoblin releases its death grip on the dagger and lowers its arms
to its sides, allowing the dagger to slip to the ground. It looks up at
you happily with ruby-red eyes that seem to flash in the sunlight, and
it chirps merrily.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00052

  Hmm well, that umm, heya little fella. What umm, what did you find
  there? Alex moves to pick up Uncle Corraidhin’s dagger, noting that
  it’s not nearly as brilliant as it was before. The ruby gem in the
  hilt appearing far closer to black obsidian now, rather unnerving all
  things considered..

  “There’s definitely something wrong with this Hemogoblin, this isn’t
  normal” Alex thinks to himself, “What in the ever loving run level 0
  did Uncle have this dagger for, and why the hell would he stuff it
  inside some old book.” He deftly pockets the dagger, for further
  inspection once they’re back at base. Likely someone at HQ can do a
  deeper analysis of it then. Thinking ahead, Alex also grabs a
  handkerchief from his breast pocket and soaks it in the pool of blood
  around the hemogoblin, better than nothing he supposes.

  Pulling a multi pronged instrument labelled “GBD” from his bag Alex
  begins to inspect the hemogoblin for magical, metaphysical, and
  technological aburations. “Just sit still a bit little fella, lets see
  what’s going on”

The hemogoblin hums merrily as you retrieve the dagger and fruitlessly
attempt to mop up the pool of blood. It wriggles around—suddenly
seemingly boneless—and giggles and blows raspberries as you try to take
measurements with the GBD. It is kind of annoying but also totally cute.

Your instrument picks up on an anomaly. You have a clear vital signal
for the hemogoblin. That’s normal. And there is an extremely high amount
of ferrous material inside of it. But you think that’s also probably
normal for a hemogoblin. Finally, there is a faint signal of some other
kind of entity. And that is not normal.

Under normal circumstances you would say, given the measurements, that
this second non-goblin entity is in some kind of stable but near-death
or catatonic state. As though it is a deep sleep. Is there some weird
magic at work here? Or is this some strange, undocumented part of the
normal hemogoblin physiology? Did this little fella just absorb a knife
spirit?

The hemogoblin reaches up and holds your hand as you pass the instrument
over its body. It smiles at you happily.

WHAT DO YOU DO

www

00053

  The GDB flashes, vibrates, and murmurs electronic static as it
  collects information from the Hemogoblin. “Peculiar readings indeed”
  Alex mutters, stashing the blood sample and readings from the device.
  Best to scp a copy of these for safe keeping.

      scp gdb-readout.dat blood-soaked-handky hq:~

  Alright little guy, dunno what’s wrong with ya, but you seem just as
  sweet and chipper as you were before, best not let anything foul
  befall you. Alex scoops the little hemogoblin up and puts him into his
  pack. The little goblin chirps happily, soaking the back in blood.
  “Hmm I guess I’ll need a new cloak when we get to town.. good thing
  the STAGS are water proof.” Taking accord of the situation Alex
  notices that Ink has dropped onto the deck, and is hurridly beckoning
  what looks like a stretcher and confidence down the zip line. “I guess
  things went not so smoothly back in the hotel then..”

  Looking up past confidence along the zip line Alex also notes a set of
  cyberplasms making their way clumsily along the zipline. “Shit! Inky,
  Confidence! Get the hell on the ship NOW!”

  Alex dashes back up to the helm of the ship and grabs the wheel. As
  soon as Inky has Confidence and the stretcher safely on the deck Alex
  grabs the wheel and casts the wheel hard to starboard side, ripping
  the zipline and moarings from the wall of the hotel. “Inky cut the
  zipline, quick a you can, and check the side of the hull for any stow
  aways!!”

~

  As the toques slide down the last few feet to the deck of the
  balloonship. Inky takes out a sharp knife and saws through the
  zipline. As they patrol along the edge to check the side of the hull
  for additional company, Inky pulls out a tea strainer from their kit
  and opens a bag of limequats, small round fruits they keep around for
  their zest and juice to flavour some infusions. They drop a limequat
  into the strainer, preparing to fling a ball of citrus at the
  potential presence of any stowaways.

Inky and Confidence carefully dump Bread onto the deck of the ship. They
grunt at the impact and mutter a weak thank you.

Inky starts to saw through the zipline with their knife. The closest
cyberplasm can almost reach out for the railing and haul itself up. The
second pirate is not far behind it. Alex yanks the ship hard to
starboard and—thanks to Inky sawing on it—the line snaps cleanly in two.

Inky looks over the railing in time to see the second pirate fall into
the sea of clouds with a surprised look on its face. There is no trace
of the first one. As Inky patrols alongside the edge to check for
additional company, they see one ghostly hand and then the other reach
up and grab hold of the rail.

When the cyberplasm pops its head up and peers over the railing, the
first thing it sees is a tea strainer flying at its face. It tries to
turn away, but ends up with a face full of limequat juice nonetheless.
As the citrus starts to burn, it squeezes its eyes shut tight, even
tighter than its grip on the railing. All of its focus and effort is
concentrated on the burning sensation in its eyes. On autopilot, one of
its hands lets go of the railing to quickly wipe the juice away.

When it grips the railing again, its hand is now slick with juice, and
it slips. Knocked off balance and unable to get a grip, the pirate cries
out as it too falls into the ocean of clouds, eyes squeezed shut the
whole time.

Poking its head and arms out of the pack on Alex’s back, the hemogoblin
claps and cheers.

The balloonship sails away from Runesocesius and from Kelsun Peak. The
sun is starting to set, and the clouds are turning brilliant pinks and
reds. This delights the zephynos, who leap and cavort in the clouds, and
run playfully alongside the ship for a while.

You have in your possession a stolen pirate airship, a recovered
Ginnarak Crystal, a couple novellas and manhwa, two warrior toque tour
guides, and a childlike hemogoblin who may or may not be possessed by
some kind of spirit.

END OF CHAPTER 3

-   What do you do once you get back to the Milk Market?
-   Do you keep the airship?
-   What becomes of Confidence and Bread?
-   What do you do with the goblin child?

www

Current Story

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00054

  Once back in the Milk Bar, with the airship safely anchored to the
  roof of the building, Alex finds himself amongst the old belongings of
  his former uncle.

  sigh “Best get a request to HQ for this airship, maybe they’ll let us
  operate it for a bit, if not I suppose we have to impound it..”

      <- OP 2817 * LOC MB-A
      -> OP 25120 * LOC ESPER

      CLEARANCE: INFORMATIONAL
      REQUEST ENCLOSED.

      REQUESTING PERMISSION TO IMPOUND OR OPERATE.
      ONE CYBERPLASM AIRSHIP "The Rusty Maiden"

  “There’s also the matter of this little hemogoblin..” Alex mutters to
  himself while said hemogoblin happily dances around the room, dripping
  little pools of blood hither and tither.

      <- OP 2817 * LOC MB-A
      -> OP 41154 * LOC ESPER

      CLEARANCE: TOP SECRET
      REQUEST ENCLOSED
      PACKET ENCLOSED

      REQUESTING ANALYSIS
      ONE GDB @gdb-readout.dat
      TWO BLOOD @blood-soaked-handkerchief
      NOTE GDB INDICATES SOME ANOMALY

  “Hey little guy, lets go get an empanade. Inky says they’re divine.”
  Alex says as he scoops up the little goblin and gently carries him
  downstairs.”

  Striding into Enriques kitchen, and availing himself to the empanadas,
  ignoring an indignant Enrique’s protests that these were for paying
  customers until a small bag of coins is tossed careless over one
  shoulder. Alex stride through the kitchen and then out and away into
  the garden to enjoy their pilfered treats.

  “I suppose this is more interesting than being on the force at times”

~

  Inky stepped into the toques’ cabin below deck with a tray of turmeric
  ginger tea and lavender biscuits. After checking on Bread’s bandages
  and offering the toque reclined on the berth the last bag of mango
  croutons — or at least the last one for the next two hours — Inky
  perched on a wooden barrel across from where Confidence sat on a
  creaking old chair next to the bunk and spoke. “We’ll be landing in
  about an hour and getting Bread to a medical facility. You can stay
  with him while he heals and rest up.”

  They paused to take a long sip from their cup, as if the liquid was
  being used to summon their next words. “On behalf of myself and the
  party, I apologise for the … disruption, and for what had befallen the
  hotelier. As you may have already noticed, we’re a fair distance away
  from the Peak and will be arriving in Vay’Nullar soon. This airship
  was taken over from the cyberplasms in the course of getting the
  crystal out and the injured to a safe location, and her new captain
  could hardly fly it back straight into the pirates’ hands now.

  What we propose is this: you and Bread may take as long as you need to
  recover. We can arrange for lodgings and new posts in the city. One of
  our party runs a Milk Market that could certainly use some hired help,
  and a garden in the back that would benefit from more attention. Pay
  will be double your current salary at the hotel. Master Alex may also
  recruit you for other tasks. You don’t need to have an answer just yet
  — think on it for a bit while you rest and let us know. Afterwards, if
  you find that you still wish to return to Kelsun Peak, we will pay for
  travel.”

  Inky winked at Bread conspiratorially. “You may be interested to know
  there is a bakery on the Milk Market’s first floor. If you like the
  look of the place, perhaps we can convince the chef to take on an
  assistant.”

  ~

  Tess watched her adviser from her position on one end of the plush
  chaise lounge in her office, who returned her stare impassively as
  they sat in the adjoining armchair to her right. The ornate coffee
  table before them had been laid out for tea, but the other cup
  remained untouched, which was in itself unusual. Ink rarely turned
  down tea when it was offered, which likely meant they were preoccupied
  with something they were unwilling to discuss. This had been happening
  more frequently since their plans to intercept the Ginnarak Crystals,
  which was a little concerning, but she knew it would be no use to
  question them directly. The missive she had received this time through
  Piskin’s people was brief, almost annoyingly so, but they had returned
  earlier than expected with the articles that production had requested,
  which had fortunately made up for lost time from the previous delays.

  With this in mind, she settled on a lighter note as she picked up her
  own teacup. “Salvia passed on the items to the production team. Thank
  you for picking them up from the Runesocesius. I would send my regular
  couriers but they are tied up with another event. One of them had to
  care for their sick child and couldn’t leave the city. As usual, time
  and discretion are of the essence.”

  When her adviser only nodded, she continued. “How is he? He probably
  insisted on bringing the manuscripts out for you himself. The man is
  cautious with valuables.”

  “Quite dead but managing, or so I heard.” Ink intoned drily.

  Tess caught on immediately. “Didn’t you meet with him? The message
  only mentioned the items had been obtained. Did something happen?”

  The imp shrugged. “We met, I delivered the letter and collected the
  items. We didn’t get a chance to talk.”

  The hotel was slowly but steadily attracting visitors again,
  especially after their last play had prominently featured the
  Runesocesius Library as a research partner in the programme credits,
  but Tess didn’t think the hotelier was so busy as to entrust this task
  to one of his underlings. The man was proud of the first editions the
  library had amassed, and the notebooks of Lucidieau that the
  playwright sought as a reference were no doubt counted among the
  treasures, even if only an expensive commissioned facsimile was
  permitted out of the library. Something had happened, she was sure,
  but decided not to press further for the moment.

  “And the other matter?” she asked.

  “Someone already knew the crystal was at the hotel and retained a crew
  of cyberplasmic pirates to storm the place.” Ink replied flatly. “And
  yes, your acquaintance is very much dead, shot by the crew leader in
  the scuffle. As the rumour rags have it, his ghost is now overseeing
  the building repairs.”

  Tess was about to admonish the imp gently for the tasteless jest when
  there was a knock at the door. At her response, the door opened and
  her secretary entered with a box of pastries and two sets of
  tableware, which she placed on the coffee table before leaving and
  closing the door behind her.

  Noticing Ink’s look of recognition, Tess smiled and ventured, “This is
  the second time is as many months you awarded that empanada place a
  glowing review in The Tiny Toaster. I can count the ratings higher
  than a 10 you’ve ever given on one hand — of course I had to try it.
  Why don’t you have some as well?”

  Ink blinked. “I didn’t write the latest review.”

  Tess shot them an accusing mock-glare as she lifted a puffy golden
  brown pastry onto a plate. “It has your inkprints all over it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Surely I’m allowed to treat a colleague
  to lunch, and they are free to express their satisfaction with a meal
  openly if they wish,” Ink replied smoothly.

  Tess rolled her eyes. “There’s a name for that. It’s called bribery.”

  Ink smiled faintly. “Just so. However, the selection speaks for
  itself.”

  “Oh, absolutely! These mini ambrose apple empanadas are wonderful. In
  fact,” Tess prodded the open end of the pastry with her fork, where a
  light yellow filling was visible, “they remind me a little of the very
  crispy tortelli someone made several years ago just for the opening
  reception of The Two Genteelkin of Virdantha.”

  “Any resemblance is coincidental. The chef is very capable.” Ink said
  evenly.

  Tess sighed and returned her plate to the table. “We’ve talked about
  this before, Ink. You don’t have to hole up in some poor scrub’s
  excuse for a kitchen in a closet. If you need more room downstairs
  then expand it. Just tell Salvia and she’ll take care of it.”

  Ink lowered their gaze to the teacups. “I appreciate the offer, but
  the answer is the same. There will be no rest until the crystals are
  secured.”

Some time passes.

The hemogoblin turns out to be a fine housemate and less of a problem
than you thought it would be. Be it because its not in the excitement of
battle onboard a pirate ship, or be it because it is maturing slightly,
it seems in better control of its blood sacs. Barring a few small
accidents, it doesn’t make much of a mess. It has found and claimed as
its own a few unused blankets, and has made a little burrow nest in an
out of the way corner behind the furniture.

Bread makes a full recovery and in fact is doing better than ever
before. The blood goblin stays by their side during the first hours and
days and keeps them pumped full of clean, synthetic blood. Afterwards
the toque is flushed a healthy pink and has new vigor. Enrique takes
them under his tutelage. And Bread ends up making a fine baker’s
apprentice. Dough seems to rise more and quicker after he kneads it.
“The lad has solar hands,” Enrique boasts of his new protegee.

Confidence becomes enthralled with the semi-sentient Wandering Bazaar.
The thirteen story building moves with glacial speed up and down the
streets, vendors and stalls and shoppers following in its wake. But then
also it will disappear in the blink of an eye only to reappear in a
totally different part of the area known as the Wandering Bazaar
District. Each floor of the tall, narrow tower is occupied entirely by a
single shop. But which shop it is seems to vary from day to day. One day
the seventh level will be occupied by Fedik’s Butcher shop. And the
next, Lario’s Bakery. It might be days or weeks before one can once
again buy hotlinks from Fedik’s. Where the shops go when they’re not
here is one of Basmentaria’s great mysteries.

The toque studies the Bazaar’s movements and are able to predict its
route with more and more accuracy. They become a highly sought out
guide. Tourists and visitors trust them to take them to the very spot
the Bazaar will appear that day. Residents appreciate the heads up and
not getting trapped in their houses when the Bazaar wedges its way into
their narrow residential streets, blocking their front doors. And owners
of traditional, less ambulatory shops are able to plan ahead for the
crowds that will appear on “Bazaar Day”.

~

Members of the Retrieval Team who sleep in Milk Market HQ start having
dreams of the same mysterious figure. Of course at first nobody knows
their dreams are shared by the others. Not until they become more
frequent, more regular. By the time the figure has visited you every
night for nearly a week, somebody speaks up and you realize the
coincidence.

The figure is clad in voluminous robes of deep purple. Long, straight,
blonde hair falls around their shoulders. Their soft features are boyish
and womanly. They wear a golden circlet on their head and a golden eye
in the middle of their forehead. Their passive, neutral face betrays no
emotion the entire time.

The dream is always the same. They reach out to you with one hand and
turn their palm up. And because of dream logic, in the palm of their
hand you can hear the jingling of coins, mirthful laughter, and hushed
stories told around a campfire. They curl their fingers into a loose
first and the sounds stop. They spread their arms wide and in the folds
of their robes you can see three siblings fighting, squabbling over a
broken loom.

Then you’re standing next to them, and the two of you watch three
friends, Snake, Owl, and Dolphin. Owl tells Snake that he is tired of
flying and hooting, and doesn’t want to be an owl any more, he wants to
be flowers. And Snake laughs and tells him that he is Owl, and an owl he
must remain. And she leaves him to go eat rodents and bake in the sun.
So Owl tells Dolphin that he is tired of flying and hooting, and doesn’t
want to be an owl any more, he wants to be flowers. Dolphin doesn’t want
to help Owl, because if he is flowers, they won’t be able to be together
any longer. But Dolphin finally agrees to help even though they don’t
want to, because Dolphin loves Owl. With all their strength, they create
a great waterspout that will turn Owl into flowers. But the waterspout
is too strong, and Dolphin is too weak to control it. It sprays Owl but
does not turn him into flowers. Owl’s wing is broken and he falls to the
ground in a heap of feathers. The waterspout shakes a great boulder from
the earth and traps Snake under it. And Dolphin sinks to the bottom of
the sea.

And then you wake up.

~

Later you find a letter in the common area of Milk Market HQ. It is not
addressed to anybody. When you open it up, it reads:

  Time is running out, Retrieval Team 43. Things are starting to draw to
  a close. We cannot delay our meeting any longer if we both are to
  achieve our goals. We have information that you are looking for. Meet
  us at the Harpoon Club next Selday. We will wear the sign.

The letter is signed with a white iris and golden apple.

Anyone in Vay’Nullar would be able to tell you that the Harpoon Club is
a game room and fine dining club, and one of the rotating tenants of the
Wandering Bazaar. But Confidence would tell you, were you to ask them,
that the club won’t be there next Selday. (When the Bazaar will appear
at East and Lowland.) It is in fact not scheduled to appear until a week
and a half after next Selday, on Third Tensday. (When the Bazaar will
appear at Cathedral and Pine.)

WHAT DO YOU DO

00055

  The nibs had disappeared.

  Inky had spotted the small ceramic and wicker teapot among a long row
  of boxes and bowls at the antique shop on the thirteenth floor of the
  Wandering Bazaar while looking for a Near-weightless Verifying Matter
  enclosure (NVMe) to their Handy Duffer Discette as a primary storage.
  The witch shopkeeper, Agate, had helpfully mentioned the teapot could
  be used to steep very acidic or alkaline solutions, as well as distil
  solubles. The box it was subsequently packed in did not include
  instructions on activating the precipitation feature. With the shop
  not returning for another week by Confidence’s reckoning, Inky had
  used the teapot in the meantime to rinse off any impurities from an
  old set of nibs — the very first functional set they had made as an
  apprentice inkling — except the nibs were nowhere to be found when
  they poured out the citronella solution and removed the lid. Inky
  supposed it was to be expected — some witches liked to go on about
  equal payment for wishes, as if it were as easy as reading off a price
  tag, and it was difficult to stay irritated at a cute teapot for long.
  Inky wrote it off as a gift for what would hopefully thereafter be a
  cutely functional teapot. The shop had a no-refunds policy.

  Then came the dream. At first Inky had attributed them to reading the
  book on the mythology of The Trine that they had slipped out of the
  Runesocesius Library, along with an obscure cactus leather-bound
  manuscript containing first-hand accounts of the Artifice Wars. When
  the dream repeated itself on the third night, Inky suspected it had
  something to do with the crystals under the Milk Market’s roof. While
  not horrifically bloody in the way Master Corraidhín’s description of
  the vision he had from the first crystal had been, it was haplessly
  boring when lucid intervention didn’t seem to have any effect. It ran
  on like a low-budget B-Grade play that had only three scenes with a
  few props each. By the fourth night, the dream had become worse than a
  nib-nibbling teapot that they stayed up entire nights for the rest of
  that week while they were camping at the Milk Market.

  It was mostly an excuse to drop into the kitchens downstairs — which
  they could now enter on the pretext of visiting Bread to observe the
  apprentice’s progress — in the early morning hours and push new tea
  blends onto its unfortunate occupants. Most of the three dozen or so
  infusions had been full of fruits and spices, six of which would go
  well with items on the empanada shop’s current menu. A handful were
  medicinal after procuring a herb illustrated on one moth-bitten page
  snatched on the hotel steps back on the Peak. A few others were teas
  in the loosest sense of the word. These were as tasteless and
  colourless as tap water, only the scent offering a faint clue as to
  their ingredients. They had other applications, least of which was in
  a prank on one empanada chef. (Inky left him a box of zephyl tea —
  another Kelsun Peak speciality besides mulled wine — before he could
  too riled up, though.)

  The note left at the Milk Market was the black cherry atop the hassle
  cake. Confidence was fairly sure that the fine establishment mentioned
  in the note wouldn’t appear on the day indicated. Couldn’t “Mother”
  have chosen to meet somewhere a little more convenient? So it was that
  despite the shop having a no-refunds policy, or because of it, Inky
  found themselves returning to the antique shop inside the Wandering
  Bazaar a week later looking for another item. “Do you sell flight
  vessels that could transport people to and from specific places … such
  as the Harpoon Club?” they asked the witch.

You and the witch go back and forth a few times before she realizes that
you want to visit a place where it is when it isn’t there.

“Transdimensional extratemporal colocation?” Agate claps her hands in
delight. “This is going to be fun! A witchy problem wants a witchy
solution. That’s what my Auntie Tenfingers always said!”

“I’m going to prescribe you a dream ritual,” she says, scribbling in a
notebook. “It’s complex. But only because it’s a lot of steps. And the
timing is kind of particular in a couple places. But if you follow the
directions, you shouldn’t have any trouble.” She rips the page out of
the notebook and hands it you.

“Basically, you’ll enter a host’s dreams, and then delve into the
Collective Unconsciousness. From there you should be able to find the
Wandering Bazaar’s pocket dimension. Of course you’ll need to find a
guide to take you there.”

“And you’ll also need this!” She ducks behind the counter and reappears
with a smoke-gray box bound with thick black ribbon. It’s about as long
as her forearm. She unwraps the box and opens it and pulls out a candle.
It is a sickly yellow and translucent. In the base of the candle is a
withered, shriveled hand. It half looks like as though it is grasping
the base of the candle, but also like it has been molded into the candle
on purpose. As though the hand is imprisoned in the wax. You can see a
hazy small round object in the center of the candle through the wax. A
large nut or marble. The hand looks like it is reaching for it. The
candle has been burned down a fair bit. The wick is low and trimmed, and
the edges are black and warped where the fatty wax has melted and
hardened. You guess there’s only about two-thirds left of the candle.

The witch measures down from the top of the candle with a length of
string and bores a small hole in its side. She wedges a large nail into
the hole, leaving half of it jutting out.

She pushed is across the counter toward you and frowns. “Eh, should be
okay,” she shrugs. “But if it looks like the wax gets soft enough that
the hand might be able to grasp the eye,” she cautions pointing toward
the round object in the center, “smash the thing. As hard as you can.
Destroy the hand. And then run.”

“The rest of the instructions should be pretty self explanatory!” she
exclaims, perking up. “Let me know if you have any questions!”

  The day the letter arrived Alex was nowhere to be found. It was a bit
  strange, somewhat chilling even, that he’d disappear like that. Ever
  since they had arrived back at the Milk Maid he’d been seen skulking
  about his uncle’s study, or pacing the garden out back somewhat
  agitatedly. Unbeknownst to the party, Alex had anticipated the arrival
  of the letter, HQ had been following every lead they could pull in
  since he began with the Ginnarak recovery team. Not that they really
  had much to go off of, but the courier who left the letter wasn’t hard
  to track. That was, until he slipped inside one of the ever changing
  shops right as it was moving along.

  The trail went cold after that. Which meant Alex had to get it moving
  again, or at least the crumpled communique he’d received said as much.
  Things were moving too quickly to think too hard on the how, all that
  was needed was action, something drastic to flush things out.

  That’s why Alex finds himself on the east side of the market, skulk
  about the back alley behind The Temporal Cup.

  “Gotta get this shit ready, there’s no other options here” Alex
  thought to himself. He loathed this type of work, it was messy,
  abhorrently vile in his mind, but what choice did he have? His hands
  worked deftly at the wires in the small package hidden inside the
  recess of a loose brick. Once finished, the little packet came to
  life, muted lights blicking away happily as the brick slid back over
  it.

  This was the 3rd and final eavesdropping device, all placed at the
  busiest cafes in market, all rigged with self destruct mechanisms
  large enough to level the building if they’re found.. The
  eavesdropping Alex could abide by, but the wanton destruction for the
  sake of security was painful to swallow.

  But once again, it wasn’t much like Alex had a say in the matter. The
  first sign of objection, an inclination that he’d refuse orders, and
  they’d have an assassin on him before he could leave the alley. And if
  he took it out, they’d send double, there’d be no rest.

  — Later that day

  Alex watched twtxt feeds scroll through from his monitoring devices.
  Most of it unimportant gossip. So and so haves an affair, what’s for
  lunch, where to find good empanadas in the market, so on and so forth.
  An endless stream on the pulse of the market.

  It was errant curiosity to watch these, the Magic Lichen in the
  monitoring system was trained to hunt for any hint of what the courier
  was up to, any twinge from Blavin and his ilk. It’d send alerts
  straight to him as soon as something came up, but it was interesting
  to see the pulse of the city trail by. And what else could he do? It
  was too dangerous to go back to the Milk Maid, any hint he was there
  could blow his cover. Best to lay low for the time being, let the
  scrapers scrape and the agents comb the streets until they get a bead
  on their target.

Milk Market HQ ought to be quiet. Alex has been conspicuously absent.
Missing in action. Inky seems to be out making rounds delivering tea, or
spending more time than usual at the empenadaria. So Milk Market HQ
ought to be quiet.

Instead, a certain young hemogoblin and a certain yellow duck (both of
whom have yet to be named, by the way) are squealing as they rampage
through the rooms on the top floor of the building, upsetting the
furniture in their wake and generally making a big mess.

It took some coaxing on the hemogoblin’s part. The duck wasn’t
interested in anything but a soak in its tub and a nap on its cushion.
And it did a good job of ignoring the persistent goblin for most of the
afternoon. But jumping into a wooden tub full of blood cracked the
foul’s disinterested facade. It gave furious chase to the goblin until
the heat of the moment cooled down. At which point the two of them
simply enjoyed the thrill of chasing each other through the apartments.

Confidence is actually the first one to stumble across the carnage. They
were just popping by to drop off some new pamphlets, but froze in the
doorway when they saw the walls plastered with blood and feathers. “What
the toque…” And then they quietly closed the door and left without going
in after all.

~

The stranger browses the stalls trailing behind the Wandering Bazaar. He
is bare chested save for a sleeveless vest. He wears long, baggy,
striped trousers bunched at the ankle, and a bright red sash tied around
his waist. He grins a wide, gap-toothed grin as he thumps a melon.

“Look at the size of this melon! And perfectly ripe!” he beams at the
stall vendor. “You’ll be here next week? With more like this?”

“I’m in town for work, and don’t know my way around. Do you know if
there is a building around here called ‘Milk Market?’ I’m supposed to
meet someone there. They’re not expecting me, it’s going to be a
surprise.”

He grins his wide grin.

~

You let the endless waves of twtxt blather wash over you. As long as no
buzzwords show up in the stream, it is fairly mindless work to monitor
it. Nonetheless, after a couple days you notice yourself getting
uncharacteristically agitated.

You squint at the lines of messages coming in and notice a few
transposed characters in some of them, forming new nonsensical words. A
couple messages are missing some whitespace, squishing words together in
maddening run-ons. Glitchy. There’s no reason the listening devices
should be returning errors like this.

A couple days later, the feeds have gotten worse. Some words seem to be
written backwards. Entire messages are garbled word soup, devoid of any
meaning or sense whatsoever. Some of the timestamps are invalid
datetimes. But you prefer them to the ones that are valid, but which are
stamped years ago. And you far prefer them to the ones that are stamped
far in the future.

The anomalies are overall infrequent. On their own, they don’t amount to
much. And when you show them, nobody at HQ gives you with much more than
a slightly patronizing, indulgent shrug. But they shouldn’t be happening
at all, is the thing. And when you compile them all together, you start
to notice things. Patterns insinuating themselves, frustratingly just
short of reason or meaning. But there’s something there nonetheless.
Something that hints at something bigger. A wide tapestry of links and
connections.

A lady in red.

WHAT DO YOU DO

Bestiary

Some of the creatures who inhabit the world of Basmentaria

Aetherwael
    A void whale. Most commonly observed in the swimming in the earth’s
    atmosphere, where they come to breath air. But they spend most of
    their time in the void of space, where they dive to great depths.
    [aetherwael]

Aur
    Giant ears with bat wings. Very keen hearing obviously. Usually more
    of an annoyance than a true deterent. Unless there’s a Centaur
    around.
    [aur]

Blahoblin
    a little goblinoid with the head of a goblin shark
    [blahoblin]

Centaur
    A hundred ears with a hundred wings. The size of a small horse. They
    can really ruin your day.
    [centaur]

Cobit
    A creature on the cob. The middle life stage of the corn creature,
    between Aur and Centaur. It does not have wings. Its flesh is
    comprised of thousands of hard microkernels. They travel in herds,
    and can hear at the speed of sound.
    [cobit]

Egre
    Giant muscle bird. Proud, muscly, vain, fashion forward. Beautiful
    plumage.
    [egre]

Gnome
    Tiny tinkerers. Highly combustible. Very explosive. Like making
    contraptions powered by steam and/or coal
    All gnomes are women. All gnomes are engineers. They have bright red
    noses, and very long ears. And long nimble fingers.
    [gnome]

Gnu
    Bisonpeople. Long beards, long hair, horns. Poor personal hygiene.
    Uncompromising idealists. They insist on a world of free and
    open-source magic. They refuse to use any magic that they cannot
    study, modify, redistribute, and use however they want. Theirs is a
    political movement that borders on religion. Or a religious movement
    that borders on politics.
    [gnu]

Groll
    A dirty mop head on long, stilt-like legs. Solitary wanderers. They
    love magic, but have no natural aptitude for it, and so covet
    magical items like wands, staves, and orbs. A typical groll is a
    walking arsenal of runes and wands.
    [groll]

Harrowkrake
    A colossal many-tentacled sea monster with a hard shell. It drags
    itself along the ocean floor, carving deep furrows in which it
    lives, catching prey with its tentacles.
    [harrowkrake]

Hemogoblin
    A fluffy little goblinoid, dripping blood absolutely EVERYWHERE. Oh
    god, don’t let it touch that! Ew.
    Dispite everything, disgustingly cute.
    Sole manufacturers of an extremely high quality synthetic blood, and
    thus pretty much single-handedly support the “vegetarian” vampire
    community.
    [hemogoblin]

Horkosgrampus
    Toothy whales with a single long tusk. They are mostly scavengers,
    and are only provoked to violence in the presence of a lie or the
    breaking of an oath, in which case they go into a frenzy preying on
    the liar or liars. They can smell blood from a great distance, but
    can hear a lie from much further.
    [horkosgrampus]

Kobit
    Subterranean scaly ratdog creatures. Big luminous eyes, long droopy
    mustaches. Extremely rarely, they may grow leathery wings, in which
    case they are revered and elevated by the other kobits.
    [kobit]

Merbear
    Top half bear. Thick, hairless, leathery skin with a thick layer of
    blubber to keep it warm. Bottom half fish.
    [merbear]

Tardigrade
    A water bear. It has eight jointless legs, each tipped with four
    sharp claws. It wriggles and wobbles like jelly as it gesticulates.
    [tardigrade]

Toque
    Wild men of the mountains. Their long, sloping, vertically-creased
    foreheads and their bulbous, floppy skullcaps make it look like they
    wear chef’s hats. But no, that’s just what their heads look like.
    [toque]

Torque
    The twisted people. Their bodies literally twisted and warped by
    magic into gruesome forms, these wretched creatures are hated and
    reviled across the lands.
    [torque]

Zephynos
    Juvenile cloud dragons. They have wide heads and lidless eyes.
    Multiple pairs of filamented stalks behind their head help them fly.
    They have six underdeveloped limbs with long, thin fingers that they
    use to manipulate cloudstuff into solid objects.
    [zephynos]

Geography

Map

[Map]

Basmentaria is a group of islands that sits between the eastern Sugrin
Sea and the western Saldin Sea.

There is Primora, the sparsely populated northern somewhat banana-shaped
island. The city-state of Illivas, Primora’s only densely populated
area, sits between Harshwind Glade and the mountains of Kelsun Peak.

And there Agendell, the southern also slightly banana-shaped island. Its
largest city is Vay’Nullar, bordered by the Gnomelands to the south, and
the Tammineaux Forest to the east. Beyond the forest is the Rana’For
Valley.

The two crescent-moon islands reach toward each other, and in the center
is the archipelago of Ginnarak, comprising the Cinderlands, Ashen Vale,
the Ember Steppe, and Drakspon Mountain.

00022

Cosmology

In a fantasy setting where there objectively are deities who walk the
earth and interact with humans, “atheism” is sometimes erroneously used
to signify an indifference to the gods. This is more accurately called
“transtheism”:

  Transtheism refers to a system of thought or religious philosophy that
  is neither theistic nor atheistic, but is beyond them. … [A system] is
  theistic in the limited sense that gods exist but are irrelevant as
  they are transcended by … a system that is not non-theistic, but in
  which the gods are not the highest spiritual instance.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheism

That is, gods are sufficiently powerful enough to mold the earth and
shape the destiny of man, but are no different from man in that they are
fallible, flawed, and able to die.

They may be greatest power, but are not necessarily the highest
spiritual or moral authority. Nor are they endlessly enduring or
lasting.

THE TRINE:

-   Neddas – Wise god of sages and starlight. Androgynous, clad in
    purple robes, depicted with a golden third eye in the middle of
    their forehead. They are often shown stoically bestowing gifts upon
    the inhabitants of Basmentaria [1].

-   Nullar – God of time and tides. A bespectacled male figure with a
    golden third eye on his forehead. He is dressed in a dapper vest and
    bow tie, and is adorned with small cogs and gears. He is depicted
    looking up at the stars from a mechanical contraption he is working
    on [1].

-   Liandt – Goddess of war and flame. A primal, elemental deity, she is
    depicted as a fiery warrior with a golden third eye. The relief
    shows her on the battlefield during the Artifice wars. The wars
    which reduced Ginnarak to the wastes of cinder and ash that they are
    today. The wars which drained Liandt’s divine energies so thoroughly
    that she fell into a deep sleep and has been absent from the mortal
    realms ever since [1].

[1] episode 00010

History

In the days of old, the Artifice Wars ravaged the lands of Basmentaria.

They reduced the once fertile lands of Ginnarak to ash and embers.

Afterword

I don’t know what I’m going to put here, but I didn’t want this document
to just abruptly end. So here you go: a kind farewell and a more gentle
conclusion.

Thanks for reading.

dozens@tilde.team

Appendix A: Barefoot Quackery

Being apocryphal and supplemental material posted to the Barefoot
Quackery thread on tildepals, including depictions of loose pages torn
from books of the Runesocesius Library during the assault by the
Cyberplasms, as well as original works of fiction and other diversions.

Cease and Desist

  To: durrendal
  From: LABATT
  Subject: Cease and Desist Order

  To whom it may concern:

  It has recently come to our attention that a personhood has withheld
  important document(s) which affect the structural nature of a
  sensitive publication, namely the [REDACTED] zine.

  Please cease and desist immediately. You may comply with this order by
  submitting the aforementioned document(s) to the designated drop-off
  point as instructed on the imprint accompanying your submission form
  by midnight Coordinated Basmentaric Time (BTC) of Day 22 of Member 12
  in the year 2202.

  Continued infringement represents an escalation and will result in
  sanctions, including but not withstanding a remote cursery execution
  (RCE) on your monitoring and calendar infrastructure.

  We reserve the right to pursue other corrective actions through
  temporally-attuned means to protect the release timeline integrity of
  key cultural assets.

  Sincerely,

  Luminati Association of Bears as Time Travellers (LABATT)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Dear sir and/or madame and/or bear and/or time travel NSA agent,

  We’ve read your cease and desist, and while we understand its intent,
  we’re unable at this time to comply, not through any inability of our
  own, but rather through our inability to stop writing run on sentence;
  you see we never truly learned how to grammar goodly and now we just
  go on and on, ad nauseum, so on and so forth; truly it is a depressing
  and persistent problem, if we were ever to find the correct
  punctuation to prevent these run ons from happening we might be able
  to cease, potentially even desist, but probably both at the same time,
  or neither all at once, we’re really uncertain at this point; all that
  is know is that nothing is truly known once you’ve gone this far down
  the grammartical, and metaphorical, rabbit hole; to speak
  metaphorically that is on a subject that is somewhat subjectively
  objective while simultaneously being an objective objection to your
  subjective summation of our grevious misgivings, truly one must infer
  that the meaning of these metaphoric subjectively objective objections
  are subjective in their own right, potentially reaching the height of
  metaphysical incanatation; one could say this run on sentence is one
  giant invocation, a charm of warding against cease and desist notices,
  to protect the poor photographer from his abject abandonment of his
  own promises; though some may object to my absolute misuse of proper
  punctuation and grammar to the point where said people stopped reading
  long again and began readying pitchforks and torches, likely they’re
  on their way to Maine now ready to burn my witchy incantating self for
  the hum dinger of a grammatical curse I sit here writing, but to these
  people I say NAY, nay sir I object to your cease and desist, and to
  their objection to this abject horror of a sentence, and I abject my
  throne as well, for you know I once was a king, not a very rich king,
  but a king in my own right; why yes, indeed I was, king of stream of
  concious ramblings without respect for grammar, punctuation, or any of
  that high falootin nonsense that the yonder rich kings hold dear, and
  which I hold to be a dreadful and dire curse upon us all, but with
  that I really must bid you Good Day madame, though let this not be an
  ending, but the begining of a wonderful and delightful sort of cease
  and desist based relationship,

------------------------------------------------------------------------

  To: durrendal
  From: LABATT
  Subject: Re: Cease and Desist Order [#20221221-1946]

  To whom it may concern:

  Please be advised that any evidence you provided in your response may
  be used against you in the event an injunction is filed against your
  personhood should you fail to comply with the order. This includes any
  admission of culpability or liability stemming from failure to submit
  the aforementioned document(s) in a timely manner.

  LABATT is a renowned non-profit organisation dedicated to the
  preservation of historical continuity of cultural works in the fabric
  of space-time. We deplore the designation of “NSA agent” and invite
  you to learn more about our mission and vision on our website and free
  seminars one of our offices across Basmentaria.

  Sincerely,

  Luminati Association of Bears as Time Travellers (LABATT)

On the Origins of Santa Claws

125

On the Origins of Santa Claws

Maximus N. Grinchescu

It should heretofore be common knowledge that the Santa Claws of present
day is the stuff of fantasy and make-believe, a story fabricated on the
spur of the moment by some exasperated mother who could not for the life
of her induce her children to behave. The very notion of reward in the
form of toys and presents, or punishment in the lack thereof of
aforementioned items, is no doubt appealing to many parents who are
themselves motivated similarly and thus can only appeal to their
offspring at the most superficial level. The lifelong goal in the
pursuit of consumption has been drummed into these unfortunate
children’s heads from a young age, with thinly-veiled threats of a
thorough mauling for those who dare to deviate from the well— and truly
down— trodden path. It is the means by which the cycle of ignorance and
conceit perpetuates among the unwashed masses — young mops bragging
about having the largest present under the tree, to become adults
boasting of receiving the most expensive gifts from a spouse or
ever-widening court of suitors. The myth of Santa Claws is a gross
distortion of facts disguised as a moralistic narrative that promotes
annually renewing contracts of obedience in exchange for short-term
material gains. Astonishingly, nary a word of doubt would be heard from
the parents on the merits of accepting gifts from an obsessive stranger
who prowls the streets at night watching their children sleep, in
addition to claiming knowledge of the children’s every move rivalling
their own.

It is regrettable that the image of Santa Claws in the eyes of many has
been reduced to that of a jolly dangerous delivery worker. Little do
they know that the real Santa Claws came from a long line of frockin —
wandering folk who don a cassock and dedicate their lives to aiding the
hungry, desperate and needy. On occasions for gifts, they gave to all
regardless of whether they were perceived by friend or foe of the
recipients to be good or evil, for such is the willingness of the
frockin to set aside their quarrels on the Day of Bountiful Blessings.
They travel across Basmentaria in fortles which house a multitude of
rooms and supplies required to sustain their livelihoods. Inside the
fortles were workshops in which carpenters, woodworkers, drafters,
tailors, various craftspeople as well as farmers and cooks plied their
skills.

One frockin in particular became known for rescuing ransomed young
maidens and poor indentured servants who faced torture by the oil vat at
the hands of cruel employers in the nick of time that they became known
as Nick, Blessed of Neddas, or Nick of Mairas as they gained grateful
followers and admirers. Despite this, the frockin was modest in manner
and rarely took credit for their acts of generosity. Because of this
trait and the loss of the few, limited first-hand accounts of those with
close dealings with the frockin in a fire shortly before they assumed
the care and upkeep of a pair of fortles, little is known of their
childhood circumstances or early life. Enrolment records at an
vocational institution in Vay’Neddas confirmed that they studied for
several years in the city, and inherited their uncle’s position of
managing the activities within the fortles sometime after their return.
Other historical biographers contend the frockin’s name was in fact
Nikolas Klaus, which later became Claws in children’s stories as to make
them most palatable to impressionable young readers.

Questions as to the nature of their appearance are generally of little
import save for lining the pockets of picture book publishers and mass
producers of wax figure collectibles. Those who have had the fortune to
glimpse their person described a wizened countenance of long hair,
fulsome beard and whiskers gleaming white and silver, amid which nestled
a pair of warm amber eyes, a nose slightly rosy from the cold and an
affable smile. A genial face rested atop a large stocky frame, as was
common among those with the blood and strength of noble mountain lions.
As in the period of their ancestors, they wore a dark

------------------------------------------------------------------------

126

brown cloak with a hood over their cassock to ward against the cold
weather, though this changed after one occasion when they narrowly
avoided being run over by a semi-autonomous cart. The abominable thing
had zipped by in front of Santa at a beard’s distance away as they
emerged on the roof of a house through its chimney.

At this juncture it should be duly noted that the idea of Santa Claws
typically making their entrance into homes by clambering down chimneys,
even preferring it as a method of entry, is as preposterous as the
worthless rags that circulated such claims. No one of sound mind would
shimmy through filthy, narrow, often half-crumbling chutes — carrying a
large sack, no less — if they could safely enter through the front door.
For the latter was exactly what Santa and their predecessors did, and
still do to this day in some villages, in a time when people were less
leery of their neighbours and either left their doors unlocked, or
placed a spare key under the doormat so the household next door could
tend to the plants or the children’s pepper pigs while they visited
relatives farther away.

According to a later account by one of the crew on Santa’s fleet,
translated and transcribed for the frockins’ annals by a chronicler,
what had actually transpired was this: on that night while nearing the
end of their rounds, Santa found signs of flooding at one of the houses
pointing to a burst pipe, the water having seeped out under the front
door and turned to ice in the frigid temperatures. Tender of heart,
Santa retrieved their fleet repair kit that was kept for emergencies and
ventured into the house to repair the broken pipe, in lieu of simply
leaving the presents outside on a stump where a tree once stood and
riding on. It was then that an obstacle presented itself. The house
owners, having gone away for the holidays, had a magical apparatus set
on the door that would raise an alarm and curse if opened by an
intruder. No house key was found under the mat after defrosting the ice
over it enough to pull off the cover. The windows were likewise sealed
shut and latched. This ultimately necessitated Santa entering and
leaving through the chimney. Doubtless some fool stumbled upon the
moment Santa exited the chimney opening, nearly flattened by the aerial
hazard of a self-navigating cart, and got it into their head that Santa
Claws was one for chimney-climbing as sport.

When the good Mrs. Claws found out about the near mishap, they were so
worried about their partner venturing out on missions that as a
precaution, they had Santa promise to wear a bright red outfit for such
occasions. The thick overcoat had a white faux fur trim that reflected
the moons’ light, matching hat and trousers and a shining gold belt
buckle so that the carts’ sensors can sight him even on the darkest
nights. Completing the outfit were gloves with open seams at the base of
each finger to reveal their claws without taking off the gloves
completely. The whole ensemble was made by Mrs. Claws themselves, and it
was said they had gotten the inspiration for the white trimmings from
their partner’s flowing mane. Members of the fleet were also offered a
similar change in clothing and the flying multibeast was re-painted in
accordance with the new colours that are now festooned in the streets
and shops all over Basmentaria each year as the Day of Bountiful
Blessings draws near.

A brief word on the aforementioned fleet: much remains unconfirmed about
the origins or evolution of the transport employed by Santa Claws to
cover long distances, and the arcana that powers the current fleet
remains a subject of heated speculation. Based on surviving annals that
were once on public display, before the twin fortles vanished one night
were never seen again, it is generally thought that the earliest fleets
were small fortles guided by a crew of twelve members excluding Santa
Claws. In time the fortles were retired and replaced with aerial
multibeasts for lighter weight and potential for greater velocity.
Contrary to popular jingles, the multibeast is not pulled by reindeer,
which are neither known for speed nor stamina, but are headed by rain
horses specially raised for both as as well their ability to withstand
much of

Sunrise over Kelsun Peak

    that night we ride up the mountain
    deep within a Saldin Sea of mist
    our way up becomes cloudy, uncertain
    crying, heavy air turns to water
    the cage starts to shudder and shake,
    a venerable old man in a seizure

    you clung to my arm as a bear cub
    to its mother in the darkness,
    the lone candle snuffed out in a huff
    of a petulant wind throwing a tantrum
    I grip the handle hard enough,
    vowing to be strong for both of us

    when we are called from fitful slumber
    by twin rays of warming distant light
    promising more, brother and sister
    a cold breakfast or a hot chocolate
    lastly and first, the sight of you
    eyes open, hair tousled, immaculate

    the rusty gondola creaks a little
    under our combined weight, groaning
    at our youthfully excessive flair
    but we did not care, with our hearts
    facing the sun, far lighter as one
    than the corporeal sum of its parts

    a new day breaks, yolk radiant orange
    reveal the finest tempera brushed over
    neat rows of tea plants at the grange
    a gleaming dewdrop at the tip of a leaf,
    we dangle on the cusp, an infinite moment
    in the sky, we dare to hope, to believe

40

How to Grow Fortified Pumpkins

How to Grow Fortified Pumpkins

by Oles Macdonald

So you wanna grow fortified pumpkins, huh? Well, first things first,
you’re gonna need a fort. You got yer self one, right? An’ I don’t mean
those blow-up bouncing bollocks for kids, those take up room and don’t
do jack. No sirree, you need to get yer self a rock fort. The real hard
structure, not mouldy cheese. Snow’s not gonna cut it, fun for the young
‘uns maybe but kills yer plants with frostbite fast. Sand just gets
washed away in a storm. An’ don’t get me started on pillow forts, them
things should be banned. Blocks sunlight, flaps like the village gossips
with a bit o’ wind letting in rain every which way, feathers inside them
pillows take too long to dry when wet, I can go on an’ on about it all
day but we’re talking about growing the best fortified pumpkins so let’s
stick with it.

Bottom line is if you ain’t got one then build one from rocks, it’s what
it says on the tin. Just make sure to choose large dry ones, flat-like,
you wouldn’t wanna get sick from cave mold before you even get this
sucker off the ground, and flats will save you time cutting all them
sides. Build your fort on a sunny part of yer land away from trees.
Pumpkins love to suntan, even shows on their skins in some varieties.
Stack up some rocks like yer building a brick wall or grill. The fort
wall should be about a hand’s thickness fer insulation an’ at least
twelve by four-an’-twenty by six feet on the inside. Spread fisherfolk
nets over the top to let in the sun, rain and bees to do their thing for
yer pumpkin plants but keep them birds out. You can throw cured tarp
over it an’ anchor it to the fort wall if a big storm comes along. Don’
forget to leave an opening so you can fit a door later. Lets you get in
an’ out easy, but not so easy that the rats an’ other rodents get to yer
pumpkins first. Door-wise there’s no need to be a fusspot about it, put
in something sturdy with a clever latch or a ward if you can get a hold
of one so the raccoon cats can’t pick the lock with their claws.

Yer gonna need three feet of the height right off the bat for a raised
bed, specially if you don’t know fer sure if the land below yer feet is
cursed or not, or can’t tell horse sh—t apart from dark clay to check
yer soil is good. Line the inside of the fort with sheet metal where
you’ll load up with good soil in a bit, an’ make sure you can get to all
sides. No sense growing a bed full of pumpkins if you can’t reach over
to grab ‘em later. You can also use wood but they will rot something
nasty if you don’t find the right wood that takes to water well an’ have
a habit of overwatering loads, then the whole thing falls apart under
the weight. Sheet metal like the stuff used fer roofs will do the job,
just bang a few together like a box with no lid no bottom an’ yer in
business. If you’d rather be safe than sorry, you can make it even
sturdier on the inside with a steel bar or two across the width of the
bed. Fill a third of the bed with straw, ol’ wood, alfalfa or stuff like
that you got laying around, then the rest of the way up to about the
third knuckle’s length away from the top edge with good quality compost.
Every farmer worth their weight in potatoes knows good quality compost
is the real gold. As I always tell new folks lookin’ to set up right, go
big on compost or go home.

Once you’ve filled up the bed, dig a few rows of shallow trenches in the
soil about a half-an’-a-feet or two apart an’ two knuckles deep at yer
pinky finger. Soak yer seeds overnight and plant ‘em in a feet apart in
the rows. Cover ’em up and mulch that beauty of a bed. Give ’em a good
thorough watering every other day, or every day if it’s like an oven hot
out there, an’ Bread’s yer butter. Halfway through the season if they’re
lookin’ a little starved, fortify ‘em by making some compost tea to
freshen ’em up. You can use hemogoblin blood too if you got that, it’s
just a pricier way to do the same thing with the same results, an’ who
likes payin’ more when you can throw a few fish bones together, boil the
whole lot, leave it to rot an’ get free plant tea? Not me. Now when they
start flowering, nip off any extra flowers on the same vine so the
pumpkin gets more nourishment an’ grows bigger. For a lot of newbs it’s
a chore, but wait ‘til you see the size of these pups. If you don’t
wanna mess about staking up vines, let ’em run around a bit and that’s
hunky dory too. Just be sure they aren’t sittin’ in a swimming pool,
that’s a one-way ride to mushy pumpkins an’ root rot. An’ dangnabbit do
I hate mushy pumpkins.

An Overview of S.T.A.G Drones

This guide is meant to introduce the operate (you) to the functionality
of features of the S.T.A.G drone. For in depth usage and extensibility
please review the source code which can be found at your local GNU
guild.

S.T.A.G - (S)py (T)ransmat (A)utonomous (G)izmo

As the name implies, the S.T.A.G drone is a capable and compact automous
gizmo capable of relaying video, audio, & gps information to its
operator. Unlike most convention drones it requires no input to operate,
simply supplying it with an object is sufficient. The on board (A)mber
(I)mp handles the actual control. It is important that you retrieve the
A.I. from the drone in the event you choose to discard, or risk the
S.T.A.G. in any way, remember Imp’s are sentient beings.

Once an operator has deployed a S.T.A.G drone they’ll recieve
information back from it in the format of a twtxt feed, and open source
plain text format which is easily parsed. GPS coordinates are reported
as JSON strings inside of this feed, audio is transliterated to text,
and video is relayed as a series of ascii characters. All an operate
needs to do to view these feeds is to cat the return text to a terminal
and it should render. If the operater does not have access to a
terminal, or is not a practice sysorcerer, the video feed can be
consumed by retrieving the S.T.A.G drone and holding it close to your
ear. The A.I have been trained in number Basementarian languages and are
happy to dutifully describe the scenes they’ve seen.

Each of these feeds can be subscribed to separately

The aggregate feed can be accessed via:

    @<stag_arn uri://stag/arn>

Simiarly these feeds provide filtered results by name:

    @<stag_arn uri://stag/arn/gps>
    @<stag_arn uri://stag/arn/audio>
    @<stag_arn uri://stag/arn/video> 

Gremlin Sysorcer

The gremlin stretched in his padded ergonomic chair and stifled a yawn.
He had just finished beating the final Heroic Fantasy game for the
twelfth time, when a flood of identical alerts flashed across his second
screen: Outgoing connection blocked on port 443 from 10.10.12.26 He
reached into the machine, looked up the process and found two unfamiliar
entries bouncing in and out of hottop’s list for most computering units
being consumed. The new intern had probably downloaded some application
with an auto-updater and left it installed on the workstation. He zapped
the processes.

    killall -9 ysosirius
    killall -9 yunoluvirus

That should do it. He watched hottop closely on the monitor. A beat
passed. Two, then the processes returned. Grr. These weren’t regular
rogue procs, but forked demons. His stubby fingers sprinted over the
mechanical keyboard, clacking loudly in the dark office as he fired off
a series of spells:

    sudo systemctl stop ysosirius
    sudo systemctl stop yunoluvirus
    sudo systemctl disable ysosirius
    Failed to execute operation: Access denied

G—ck. How is that possible? The gremlin scratched his head with his
Mebekey for a minute. Immutable flags?

    sudo chattr -i /etc/systemd/system/ysosirius.service
    /bin/bash chattr: not found

What. Did the intern somehow mistook it for a messaging client during
the initial audit phase and removed it from all the workstations? He
really needed to have a word with them when they turn up on Monday, but
for now—

    sudo apt -y install e2fsprogs
    sudo chattr -i /etc/systemd/system/ysosirius.service
    sudo rm -rf /etc/systemd/system/ysosirius*
    sudo chattr -i /etc/systemd/system/yunoluvirus.service
    sudo rm -rf /etc/systemd/system/yunoluvirus*

There, stupid demons terminated. Must have been one of his colleagues
leaving him a gaff holiday gift, but he started a malware scan anyway
just in case. Smiling to himself and pushing up his Googol glasses, the
Tier Two support wizard looked away from his screen to grab his mug,
which was then he noticed it was empty. Frowning, he pulled up the COFE
dashboard on his terminal. His expression fell at the “0%” next to a
little icon of an empty fuel gauge in the status field. That was the
last pot — he was sure of it because he had brewed it himself four hours
ago after ransacking the kitchenette for more. He had managed to scrape
out a few stale tablespoons from what was left inside a large can that
had been shoved to the back of a cupboard. He had ran out of coffee.

After checking his secret stash, which was also empty save for more
discarded wrappers, he sighed and got to his feet. He gave the screen
another glance and hoverboarded to the vending machine down the hall,
before catching sight of the empty black racks from a distance and
swerved back towards the lift doors. After some elevator-cruising, he
found another vending machine a few floors down that still had drinks, a
few tiny bags of corn chips and trail mix bars. Someone had already
emptied its shelves of Cherry and regular Koke, and Diet Koke was never
a viable alternative. Then he saw a single can of Red Kobit sitting
tantalisingly on the rack. He paid with a tap of his meal card, figuring
his luck wasn’t too bad after all, but at the last moment the vending
machine changed its mind and held onto both his credits and the can with
a round, wiry claw. He yelled at the machine, threatened to summon
maintenance, shoved it back a centimeter where it was already standing
against the wall, pummelled its bulletproof glass chest with his fists
and kicked its legs, to no avail. The vending machine had likely seen
through his bluff and knew no repair person was coming on a Friday night
graveyard shift. Taking the machine apart will land him in Big Trouble
again, and it wasn’t worth the three-hour CowardPoint presentation he
would get about robot respect or the warning letter for damage to
corporeal property. The gremlin resentfully tapped his card again to
secure the last two cans of Red Horse, which rolled down into the
flapped receptacle with a ba dum tss like a bad joke.

When he returned to his desk and settled back in his rolling chair, open
can of raw energy in hand, he began to feel a prickly, crawling
sensation on his skin. A rising dread overcame him, as the apparition of
his lifelong-sworn enemy rose up from the deepest runlevels of init hell
once again, and without a new season of White Mirror dropping anytime
soon, he knew he was in grave danger. He gripped the edge of his
keyboard, exhaled slowly and greeted his old nemesis, Boredom.

Pirate Gold Fondue

420

Pirate Gold Fondue

Ingredients

-   3 Pirate Gold potatoes
-   1/2 cup chickpea paste
-   1 cup coconut oil
-   1/3 macadamia milk
-   2 tbsp. cornflour
-   1 1/2 cups mulled apple wine
-   1/4 cup hemogoblin blood
-   1 garlic clove, flattened
-   2 tbsp. ground cocoa
-   1/2 tsp. paprika
-   2 tbsp. lemon dill

Method

1.  Peel potatoes and boil until soft. Let cool, then add to a large
    mixing bowl with chickpea paste.

2.  Dissolve cornflour into the macadamia milk, then pour the milk
    gradually into the bowl, mashing the mixture until no lumps remain.
    Add coconut oil, 1/4 cup at a time until folded completely into the
    mixture and set aside.

3.  Toast the paprika in a saucepan. Add mulled apple wine, bemogoblin
    blood and garlic clove. When the liquid is heated, add ground cocoa.

4.  Pour the saucepan contents into a caquelon, or a double boiler with
    water simmering below the bowl. Add the potato mixture slowly in
    small batches, stirring continuously. Remove garlic after a 1/4 of
    the mixture has been added, and resume stirring until all the
    potatoes have been added.

5.  Garnish with lemon dill and serve.

Lady Runesocesius

    My Lady, I come to visit you
    will you show your dainty face, gladly I
    let you tease me as I ascend, step closer
    so you can hide behind your cloudy veils?

    My Lady, I kneel at your feet
    will you embrace me in your fulsome bosom
    let me breathe in your perfume, a heady wine
    taste drops of your creamy white nectar?

    My Lady, I bring you snow lilies
    to tuck behind your ear as I whisper
    sweet everythings into that tender shell
    so you can extract a promise for my return?

    My Lady, I long to see you
    to kiss your fair golden tresses and take
    my vow with Nullar as witness, an Elixir to
    savour once more your everlasting beauty?
