[16e04] TBD

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Callie’s Journal

All HP and spell slots NOT restored!

Bec is just settling down to rest when she hears bang-bang-bang on the door, baby. Eff that noise, I’m asleep already. I put my pillow over my ears.

Freki notices Bec staring at the Celestial And Not At All Cursed Hand of Vecna. She’s kind of jerking her head in time to the knocking sound.

Bec goes to investigate – not leaving the Tiny Hut – and finds a little storage room with a conspicuous crate. She uses Mage Hand to move it aside. It’s heavy, so it shouldn’t move, but it does. That’s fine, probably. Under it is a symbol of two ravens and a grate set into the floor. A voice from under the grate says, “Hello! I’m in here!” It sounds like Vondal.

Freki can hear the voice now, too. He is wearing a cloak given to him by Hugin and Munin, and feels connected to them through that. He asks them if the dual birds in the symbol are related to them, but they aren’t aligned with those other black birds. He calls out to the voice, “Vondal? Is that you?”

Vondal (or ¿Vondal? as the case may be) is overjoyed to hear Bec. He doesn’t seem to be able to hear Freki. He wants help getting out from under the grate. Bec challenges him to say something only ¿Vondal? would know, like the secret he told in the mirror room. ¿Vondal? answers that he said Freki is a werewolf. Huh, that IS what he said! I didn’t remember until he said so.

Bec asks how he got down there. Freki thinks doing something stupid. ¿Vondal? is like “Hey!” But he understands that we need some time.

I can’t sleep with this ridiculous racket, although Cassandra and Audreth are both asleep. I get up resentfully. Bec leaves the Tiny Hut, which dissipates. Now she can feel Wild Magic kind of eddying around. She uses Mage Hand on the grate and pulls it out of the way.

Audreth feels like a giant eye is…eyeballing him. It normally feels as far away as a twinkling star, but not now. He lurches out of sleep, flooded with adrenaline and ready for a fight! Everyone is awake except Cassandra, and they’re all looking at some little storage room.

¿Vondal? climbs out of the pit and steps across the threshold of the storage room into the consecrated area. He’s very happy to be out of the pit, unsurprisingly. Freki thinks he smells more like the Flux than normal. Freki asks where he’s been, and he says there’s a tunnel down there. He didn’t go exploring, just tried to get out.

Oz thinks going down there is the way, since this place resembles an upside-down SPI headquarters. We could also take the stairs up, although Freki thought there would be more of those horror-dogs that way. Bec says going down would “take us to another fractal dimension away from home,” and Freki agrees. Fair enough, I didn’t really want to go in the smelly hole anyway.

Expecting an ambush, Cal and Oz want to go sneaky feet up the stairs. I need a minute to heal up, so I do that.

We turn back to check on Cassandra, but she’s now kneeling over my mother for some reason. Cassandra says, “There’s a seed growing inside her. I can’t stop it.” My mom is sprouting fish parts. One arm is a flipper and there’s something growing out of her eye. The thing in her eye needs to be pierced with an item with power over aboleths.

Bec tries casting Dispel Magic on the general fish situation. I feel something seep into me and I feel…changed. Awakened, maybe? Suddenly, I’m sure I can use my Trident of Fish Command to pierce the thing! As I raise the Trident I hear in my mind’s ear, “YOU SHALL NOT DO THIS! ALL IS AS IT MUST BE! SHE IS ONE OF US! YOU ARE ALL ONE OF US!” Everyone hears some echoey screaming, but the others can’t understand it. This is my burden alone. I discard the aboleth’s thought and stab it. I feel like everything is okay now.

Audreth sends the aboleth a telepathic double-deuce, and it sends one right back. “YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW.” The aboleth slithers away to wherever they go. At least it isn’t here.

My mom disappears. Cassandra stands up and says, “Nice. We learned something today.” Bec asks what, but she just shrugs and says, “It’s a shame about his face, though.”

We try to look at Oz, but he’s stealthy and we can’t all see him. He steps out of stealth. Audreth doesn’t recognize him at all. Bec does; he looks like he did in Elyria in the dream world when we all looked like other people. Freki and I think it’s still Oz, even though we can’t place the face.

Oz somehow senses that we are in a quasi-real composite plane under the HQ composed of not only the material realm but also Flux. It’s something like a corrupted Astral Plane, with the Faewild also spilling in. There’s also another layer, like the Faewild is on top of the Faewild somehow. More importantly, he’s tall now, and he doesn’t like it one bit.

Oz flails his huge clumsy body around like an apprentice puppeteer. We all hear, “The sun in your kingdom shall not shine again on this face.” Now Oz is really freaked out because he thinks we can hear his thoughts. But no, we aren’t all cursed. He realizes he can fold time back on itself to make something right that was previously done wrong. He can use this power for great justice and only great justice! He comes to this realization because he feels, to his bones, that karma has gotten him good for trying to weasel out of his oath.

Bec points out that attempting to walk up the stairs has gotten us nowhere, and maybe we should try to use the properties of this place to get to the top of the tower.

While everyone is in general disarray, Cal notices that my trident is rainbowy now. He doesn’t know what it looks like. I try to remember, but I can’t. Bec hears a whisper saying that none of us can remember what it looks like, because “she won’t let you.”

While Oz, Cal, and Freki are stealthy, Bec and I try to brain our way up the stairs. We pull everyone along the story, seeing things that didn’t happen, but also have happened at the same time. At the fourth floor, we meet Yrollam. He says “The living are not welcome here. You should leave, agents.”

Oz whispers to us to ask whether we should kill Yrollam, breaking stealth. Cal and Freki are still hidden. Bec says we need to rescue Lorelai, because she’s trapped here. Yrollam says she’s right where she needs to be, but we are not. Meanwhile, Cal slips past Yrollam and up the stairs. Lorelai is upstairs in the throne room staring vacantly.

“Why are you here?” Bec asks. “Aren’t you living?”

“I don’t have time to argue! Get out of here!” says Yrollam. It’s not very convincing. Freki wonders if he’s dead, undead, alive, or what?

Cal! Don’t you have gaydar for deadness?

—Michael

In the throne room, Cal senses undead spirits (ghosts?) waiting in line to petition Lorelai on the throne. But why would spirits be undead? They also seem to be moving extremely slowly, almost frozen.

¿Vondal? says, “I hate to do this boss, but we have to get through here.” He starts casting a spell, which Bec recognizes as banishment.

“Wait just a mi—” Mallory vanishes.

When everyone gets to the top of the stairs where Cal is, the scene starts moving normally. One of the spirits is on his knees, begging. The woman on the throne has turned her back on the petitioners, full of contempt for them and their plight. But then there’s a cracking and the woman turns back into the Raven Queen, Lorelai. She says she’s merciful when she wants to be, so she grants the petitioner’s request.

Lorelai looks over us all, then at Cassandra. “Mother?” she says, but then shakes her head. “Why are you here?” she asks us all.

Bec explains that we’re here to rescue her and asks if she recognizes Audreth. She says Audreth is her servant and she is the Raven Queen, who is going to restore this place to its former glory. Oz tries his panache on her and tries to convince her to get out. Audreth agrees that this place sucks.

Freki feels like he lost connection with his birds momentarily. Then when they come back, they say that they are where they need to be and we need to complete the Raven Queen’s quest. The Furies don’t belong here and maybe we can get rid of them. They can’t be killed directly, but they can be enticed to merge with something corporeal.

“Give me the monkey!” says ¿Vondal?.

Freki’s ravens fly off his shoulders and land on the queen’s shoulders. This all feels very wrong to Freki. She isn’t the real Raven Queen and what they’re doing doesn’t make sense. When he looks harder and more skeptically, he sees that this whole place is wrong! The wrongness suffuses the whole place like fog. The Flux isn’t helping, but this is a different effect, more like a hallucination.

Bec suggests that Freki take out the mirror shard he picked up outside and make her look at it. Fast as a flash, he slides back to hybrid form, whips out the mirror and shoves it in her face.

She flinches, but then says, “That is not helpful. Put that away unless you wish to see my less magnanimous side.”

“This is not your truth. Your truth is in the mirror,” says Bec.

“I was sure you were the heroes of legend, but if you will not help me, then leave,” says the queen.

Freki makes the case that this whole place is terrible, which is admittedly true. It’s also true that the Furies are pretty bad, but Freki isn’t convinced that they’re even the real Furies. He asks why I lost my gods. I feel like I’m missing something here. Why do people keep saying I’m godless? I’m like the opposite of that!

Bec hears someone whispering to her from behind: “You need to wake up.” She turns and sees the Fae Queen’s servant who she dispeled back in case 12 while we were in the Feywild.

The Raven Queen shoves Bec aside with telekinesis to reveal the servant behind her. She starts casting something that Audreth recognizes as similar to banishment. The servant disappears. Audreth notices that there’s no popping noise. The lack of noise indicates that she belongs to this plane. He realizes that Mallory also did not pop, when he was banished earlier.

The Raven Queen says, “If you do not believe in this place, then begone.”

Audreth is like, “Whatevs, I’m gonna talk to the giant eyeball.” Pushing through the feeling that this is something that shouldn’t happen, he invites his patron. The eye zooms in close and overshadows everything.

“No matter what happens, this is less fucked up than it was a minute ago,” says Audreth.

Audreth wakes up and sees everyone else around him on the floor, apparently having seizures. Flux tentacles are connected to everyone, including ¿Vondal?. ¿Vondal? is like, “Oh, hey.” Then he smirks, says “thanks” and disappears. Audreth casts off the tentacles from his own body first, smart. Pelor empowers him with extra strength so he can heal me. Despite all this, I think we can safely say his prophecy from two minutes ago was accurate.

I see lives flash before my eyes. I am momentarily insane. But then I’m shocked awake and see the scene as Audreth did. I try to use dispel magic, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel like Avandra. Or Erathis. I look down and my pin has my own face on it! What does that even mean??? I have a feeling that I could make up a spell right now, whatever I want. I decide to try a modified zone of truth: zone of REALITY! It pierces illusions and shows only reality nearby.

Everybody wakes up screaming. You’re welcome, everyone!

When ¿Vondal? wakes up (screaming, like everyone else), he vanishes. Audreth hears a light “Thanks,” though gratitude is not exactly what he’s expressing, more like satisfaction that things happened the way he wanted. Also, this is definitely not Vondal.

Since we’ve been forced to see the truth of the situation, we realize we aren’t in the Underworld, not the real one. We’re in some tunnels, under the SPI headquarters, in the very heart of the Flux.

A̸̡̻̲͂̅ṅ̶̨̨͓͔̏̉d̷̮̈͠ ̵͉̙̓̾̃n̶̛͔̪̍̈́̕o̷̮̟͈͌ẉ̸̓̕͜͝,̷̧͍̥͉̇̿ ̴͙́̒t̴̛̪͊̀ȟ̶̻̣͙̔̄e̸̝͆̓̅ ̶͇͓͋͊À̴̹̽͒ń̴̜i̸̞̩͗̈͝m̶̛̗͚͊̒̔ả̴̺͠͝l̷͓̜̥̀̽͂͘ ̵͔͖̀H̴̲͔̗̆o̸͚͍̱͋̈̽̚ṻ̴̖́ś̶̳̽́̂ȩ̸͉͔̃́̚ ̴̬͙̓̅̕c̵̺͒l̸͉̋ơ̴͕̪͈͉͛ṡ̴̹̮̉̌ͅe̸̙͝