- The agents, including Cassandra and Audreth, proceed upstream.
- Five shadowy undead flux monsters attack them!
- One turns into shadow Oz, another into shadow Cal; both are destroyed.
- Two more flee downstream after being turned by Callie.
- The last one turns into a shadow copy of the monkey and flees upstream.
Madness
As madness begins to grip the agents, Vondal strains to influence the flows of the Flux to minimize the nightmarish impact.
-
(50 hours)
Cal suffers from partial amnesia. He knows who he is and retains racial traits and class features, but doesn’t recognize other people or remember anything that happened before the madness took effect.→ Cal loses the ability to speak. -
(2 minutes) Oz experiences vivid hallucinations and has disadvantage on ability checks.
-
(permanent)
Bec can’t take anything seriously. The more serious the situation, the funnier she finds it.→ Bec has discovered that she really likes killing people. -
(60 hours)
Freki regards the Flux with intense revulsion, as if affected by the antipathy effect of the antipathy/sympathy spell.→ Freki is under the powerful delusion that he can squeeze himself in anywhere, as though under the effect of a freedom of movement spell. -
(7 minutes) Callie does whatever anyone tells her to do that isn’t obviously self-destructive.
-
(permanent)
Vondal feels compelled to repeat a specific activity over and over, such as washing hands, touching things, praying, or counting coins.→ Vondal regards the Great Old One with intense revulsion, as if affected by the antipathy effect of the antipathy/sympathy spell. -
(7 minutes)
Whenever Audreth takes damage, he must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throws or be affected as though he failed a saving throw against the confusion spell. The confusion effect lasts for 1 minute.→ Audreth is unconscious. -
(50 hours) Cassandra is blinded.
Callie’s Journal
Well, we’re all awake and experiencing the same thing (probably). We seem to be in some sort of cave or tunnel. Or chunnel. Mallory wants to know what happened, but we don’t have a ready answer for that. Luckily, we will have done that sometime in the future, so we’re answering him now in the future. I guess all we need to do now is figure out how to get from now to then???
Examining our surroundings, there’s a large root with Flux gathered around it. Shapes poke out sometimes, as if they want to come out, but they can’t. It’s flowing in one direction. Freki wants to go downstream, on the theory that we want to be away from the Flux. Vondal wants to go upstream to preserve the element of surprise, which is…um…another option.
Bec reasons that our rescue mission is probably over, since we found Audreth but he disappeared. Vondal’s opinion is that was just “planar stuff.” Vondal asks the mirror Becs whether any of them know what he’s talking about. One of them responds, “Cerce says it’s the flowing pattern of dream.” The other one says, “Right! The ethereal plane! That’s where we were, or something like it!”
There’s a mirror Oz who looks very different—a tall rugged hunter-looking guy with a different face—that says, “That was no ordinary Feywild! It seemed like 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 Feywild also spilling in. There’s also another layer, like the Feywild is on top of the Feywild somehow.” Oz realizes that he has an improved understanding of these planar layouts, and Bec also has some knowledge from her planar duplicates.
More importantly, Oz is tall now, and he doesn’t like it one bit.
Bec thinks we should go upstream to get closer to our HQ and further away from this weird extra-planar situation we find ourselves in.
I decide to read my cards to see if it gives me an idea of which way to go:
- Hanged Man (upright) – suggests temporary suspension, take a moment to pause and reflect to get a better outcome
- Temperance (upright) – some processes need their own time to complete
- Seven of Pentacles (upright) – growth takes time
That doesn’t really explain which way to go, so I try to focus on the explanation we’re going to give Mallory.
Mallory: “So, you believe you encountered someone impersonating Vondal? Tell me exactly what happened.”
Audreth fades back into reality, cool! Audreth tells us that he asked for help from his patron (that eyeball) to wake up from the obviously fake Afterworld situation. It worked, but he peered into the Void a little bit and went slightly insane. Upon waking up, Audreth saw us all wrapped in tentacles, so he broke himself free of them. But then he noticed there were two Vondals—one awake and the other still asleep. The awake one looked at him and said “thank you” in an arrogant, un-Vondal-like way, then folded himself away somehow and disappeared. Since everyone else was still tentacularly asleep, Audreth decided to wake me up by begging Pelor for some extra mojo. After I was done screaming, I ad libbed a new spell I call zone of reality that set everyone else straight on what’s really real!
It’s not a sex thing!
— Allen
Audreth seems convinced that the awake Vondal wasn’t really (any flavor of) Vondal.
Audreth says the reason they set out on their journey to begin with was that Lorelei saw it in a dream. Mallory said HQ had been breached and wanted a Flux expert to look at. Lorelei’s dream said they would enter the Flux in a rift under the mountain and we’d have success. They started at the previous SPI headquarters to get into the Flux. Rubinia used Earth Gliding to allow them to move around underground. On the fifth day of the journey, they thought they were close. The Flux was thick. “How long has it been since we set out, anyway?”
Nate joined the game in December 2017.
In game time, we’ve known Oz for two months.
Bec answers that it’s been more than a month. In that time, we acquired the Cornucopia, went under the sea, and climbed the Tree of Life. We’re the hardest working agents in the SPI, is what I’m saying. From Audreth’s point of view, he was only traveling for five days or so.
We discuss where to go next. Bec explains that we’re trying to get back to HQ, so she thinks we should follow the Flux upstream, and several of us agree. Oz and Vondal want to get moving right now. Audreth says he’s uneasy moving forward without knowing what we’re doing. Cassandra argues that we’ll know more if we move forward.
Oz challenges whether this is the real Audreth and brandishes the Hornblade. Audreth stays calm, but he’s obviously not as used to this as the rest of us are. He chastises Oz for waving the blade around, and expresses his opinion that it is tainted by evil. Vondal asks if it detects as evil and Audreth’s body language seems to indicate no, not exactly… he says he senses malice from it, but directed elsewhere.
Freki grudgingly agrees to go up the river, since we have no real basis for going in either direction. He looks for tracks, and finds some going downriver. They’re all sorts of strange creatures, including some he doesn’t know. Audreth offers to help him investigate by extending his Flux shielding, like a human umbrella. Freki’s interpretation of the tracks is that they’re all going in the same direction, and they were moving fast. Except for one set of tracks, medium sized with some kind of lightweight shoes (maybe sandals?), striding purposefully toward our campsite. They don’t match any of us, at least not with our current footwear. He tells us that this person paused at our campsite, but then the tracks continue.
We set out, and Oz’s monkey, Corneluphagus, starts freaking out. Oz tries to calm him down, but he stays agitated.
Mallory’s voice asks, “How many demons attacked you?”
Vondal tries to explain that there was just one, and it was asleep, and its claws were broken. At the same time, Oz says there were 14 and we barely escaped with our lives. Hey! Maybe let’s push the slider closer to one weak one!
The slider lands in the middle: there are a few undead creatures.
They bubble up from the Tree roots…
…then burst upward violently!
And circle around to fly straight at us!
Bec throws a cloud of daggers at the creatures and then backs away. Audreth says “Be protected” and touches her shoulder, giving her protection even outside his aura.
Freki uses an arrow of tidal force. The creatures try to scatter, but it’s too late. Two of them get washed fifteen feet away and are lying on the ground helplessly. The other three get knocked around.
Oz leaves our protected bubble to approach one of the prone creatures and stabs it. It transforms into a shadowy version of Oz! He looks conflicted now, but quickly ducks back into the bubble.
Cassandra casts some kind of healing that hits Shadow Oz with radiant energy. Oz is damaged because the shadow was damaged.
Cal lashes with his whip and yanks one of the shadow creatures into Audreth’s aura. It sticks a little at the edge of the aura, but Cal is able to focus his will to pull it through, mangling it along the way.
With this bitey thing suddenly in our midst, Vondal flips out and attacks it.
I hold up my holy symbol and rebuke this evil creatures! Then I use my Spiritual Weapon to stab the one closest to me. Squish!
Two of the creatures up and run away. “Tell your friends about us!” Freki calls after them.
The shadow creature that Cal is grappling morphs into a CopyCal. Any action we take against the creature will happen to Cal too, like the Shadow Oz. It sends us a telepathic message to us. I have a Ring of Mind Shielding so I don’t hear it, but everyone else hears, “WE WILL EAT ALL OF YOU!”
One of the creatures wraps itself in shadows and vanishes.
Shadow Oz steps up to the aura barrier and taunts Normal Oz, drawing him into a mano-y-mano fight to the death! Oz obviously rises to the bait, but he doesn’t go outside the aura again at least.
Bec shoots an energy bolt at Shadow Oz. Both the shadow and the real one are bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzted.
Freki morphs into his wolf form and claws the hell out of Shadow Oz. It falls to the ground, unconscious, and so does the real Oz! Freki continues to rip into the thing and it dissolves into a (probably) gross-tasting goo. His head feels like it’s being twisted in various directions.
Cassandra casts a spell, squints into the distance, then points and says, “It’s there!” Presumably that’s the missing creature? Cal whips at it, but since he can’t see it, he misses. “So close!” says Cassandra.
It’s my turn, and Oz asked me to use my best healing on him. Okey dokey, Smokey! I also try to stab at the invisible thing, but miss.
The remaining undead creature shapeshifts in a shadow version of Corneluphagus and flies away! The way we were going. Oh, joy.
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