SESSION TWO. Fell Stronghold of Snetch

Thanvas 2, 7005

After the trouble with templar, the Company and their allies hastily packed and prepared to leave. Fourteen people for the narrow-hipped airship plus supplies for food and a little water, camping gear, weapons, armor, a writing desk, papers, books, and personal effects. Perched on mounds of strapped-down gear, Crazy Bear began contemplating a net slung under the ship to hold gear, and the crowd in the boat worked on hanging some of the supplies over the sides. As dawn pierced the horizon, they soared into the sky.

Air Foiled

They headed north over the Thrushknell Woods, planning to cut east to cross the river where there was little traffic, trying to stay over forests rather than trade roads to minimize the odds of being spotted. Kail helmed the ship, leaving the others little to do; Ty attempted to spar with Crazy Bear, but in close quarters that was difficult. After an hour of flight nerves were a bit frayed in the cold rush of winter flight at high altitude. Then the power died and the ship dropped like a stone.

Kail yelled at the others to come to the helm so he could channel some of their life force into the ship to get emergency power, enough to land safely. Crazy Bear lost his grip and spun away into the empty sky, refusing to grab at Cassowary to try and hold on; she was freaking right out. Ten the Tackler grimly held on to the mast with his mutated tentacle. Ty and Rhys made it to Kail, Rhys summoned some life energy in addition to his own, and Ty grimly volunteered his essence, and Kail channeled their offering into the dead ship systems. As he connected their lives to the ship in this highly risky and untested procedure, he accidentally channeled that incoming energy through his own life force, burning him out and fusing part of his psyche to the ship as he collapsed, energy flickering along his bones and burning him internally.

Rhys tried to take the helm, but could not manage the grit to focus the red-lining power to fend off gravity. Ty stepped in and managed a last-ditch desperate and stuttering glide, angling their approach to the ground and crashing through some trees, wiping out some of the mast and splintering limbs and trunks on the way to a jarring landing. He found a desperate need to live that was enough to manage the descent before the canopy tore the last energy from the hull, and the ship lay steaming in a trail of debris that fell from the open-air craft.

Meanwhile Crazy Bear tested out his safety blanket from an unprecedented height, and the device slowed his descent enough for him to batter through the limbs of the trees and land safely, even though it was destroyed in the process. Enlisting the marines, he hunted for his armor; it took an hour, but he found it up in a tree, and they retrieved it for him; this was a terrible environment for Crazy Bear's phobic distrust of trees. The armor was dented, so rather than trusting its shape-shifting capabilities, Crazy Bear took the arm greaves and left the rest with the ship.

The Fell Stronghold of Snetch

Kail expelled the waste from energy burning in his body, and discovered his hair was now shocking fiberoptic white. He and Rhys also sensed that the cosmic energy that fueled the Matrix (which was totally inert) was off to the north. Ty climbed a tree and spotted a ramshackle but tall tower nearby, and they mustered camp around the fallen ship, leaving Terrafin and Ten in charge of defense (and Cassowary needed some recovery time; her terror of falling out of the sky had happened against all odds.) Maeve was feeling battered and stayed with the ship. Lesandara took up sword and shield and went with the Company.

On the way they encountered a couple clusters of skeletons clawing up out of the ground; they were easily dispatched, and while there was necromatic energy, Rhys sensed they had never lived. The part of the skeleton that didn't climb up out of the ground wasn't bones below ground, the skeletons were more like summoned constructs. The Company came to an arch inscribed "The Fell Stronghold of Snetch" and Kail remembered a tale about a possibly fictional character named Snetch the Snatch from his endless store of legendary about the fey; a ragged wizard who stole fey to experiment on them. The story was at least 50 years old. 

The tower was about five stories tall, standard Caligarian construction techniques evident but no support buildings for servants or a supporting village, so obviously magic was involved. They easily broke into the unsecured tower, seeing a guest lounge and lab combo, and spotting some fist-sized white mushrooms scurrying here and there.

Ambush in the Music Room

Hearing a hiss upstairs, they ascended to the second level. Crazy Bear and Kail were raked with a couple mind blasts; Kail's disciplined psyche was well armored against the attacks, and Crazy Bear shrugged them off as he charged through what looked like a music room, charging through a harp to crush a mutated lizard warrior. The fight was short and sharp, wiping out a scouting party of six, the rest of the Company holding on the stairs against the threat of mind blasts.

Rhys examined the corpses and discovered they were mutated lizard people, with pink patches, odd gauntness and strength, almost freeze-dried flesh in places, and vestigial tentacles. He wondered if they might be the source of cosmic legendary he read about in the Maze of Tyvakian, of other-planar traveler threats whispered in rumors or included in lists reeled off by insane scholars, the Flayers.

Below, they heard more skeletons enter the tower, slowly climbing up behind them. Not wanting to engage, they proceeded up the stairs with caution.

Our Lady of Spores

They discovered a torture chamber, and a cage with a mound of fungus and a half-formed woman-like fungus person who spawned all the little white ones. She was a sporad, a dryad with a mushroom instead of a tree, from the deep caves of the fey where the sun was never meant to reach. Kail approached her respectfully, noting her cage of cold iron and ritual binding. She encouraged them to go on upstairs, for the Void Walker was coming, and she demonstrated they were all about to die by letting a handful of spores slip through her misshapen fingers like sand from an hourglass. (Via her spore-based psychic communication, they learned her name was Sarlatha.)

The Void Walker

The Company raced up the stairs, past a room of cages and whips, to the observatory at the top of the tower. (They passed a wall of niches with skulls in them, noting that the fungal servitors could climb into a skull and trigger the generation of a skeleton they could then pilot from relative safety; the servitors exchanged wary looks with the Company, but the adventurers had bigger fish to fry upstairs.)

Another scouting party of six mutated lizard people were concentrating on an active dimensional gate that had taken the Matrix power and was holding it, fueling the impossible energies to breach the barrier between dimensions. In the void, something was closing in on this reality.

Kail ran between the lizards and concentrated through his sword; in the battle with the Iron Boar he had plunged his blade into its dying heart, infusing it with the power to repel energies that were not native to the World Between. He now deployed that power with all his concentration, preventing the Void Walker from entering through the gate. It tested his resolve, and inhaled some of his memory into the void with it to learn about the force blocking his way, but he grimly held his resolve.

The Company leaped into battle. Crazy Bear swatted several of the mutated lizard scouts past Kail into the open portal. Ty grimly defended Kail as he concentrated, and Lesandara stood between Rhys and the reptilian assault as he raked the invaders with flame, igniting their flammable cancerous ichor. The scouts led with a mind blast but Lesandara was protected by the power of the Lady, and they cringed from the light the attack drew from her.

As the last scouts fell, Kail's resolve was pitted against the alien starvation between the stars, and he successfully leveraged home team advantage of being on the right side of the gate and managed to shut down its power.

Aftermath

The tower trembled with the strain. Rhys looted the nearby bookshelf that had records of the adventuring expedition that retrieved the gate from a Ring City in the Scavenger Lands (with the permission of a dragon?!) as Ty grabbed three spyglasses for his collection. Crazy Bear figured out he could turn the telescope, and position it to drop; with the weakening walls and prevailing wind, the tower would likely fall (as they wanted it to.) Time to go.

On the way out, Kail opened the cage of the sporad, opening the iron tree with the fungal core that symbolized her "tree." She reacted well to his efforts, and left, taking her servitors with her and drawing the fungal support that kept the tower's integrity bolstered out with her.

They got outside before the telescope dropped in its housing, and the tower teetered but didn't quite fall; Crazy Bear saw a little fungal servitor on his foot and it gestured, and the ground shrugged just a touch, and the tower fell. Satisfied, the Company returned to their ship. Sure enough, the Matrix regained its power, and they could resume after a short rest.

Dreams of Darkness and Light

Kail was struggling as he slept, drawn into the horrible void he sensed in the presence he confronted. Then his focus shifted, and he found himself gazing into an eternal depthless light that contained all meaning, all beauty, all truth--the Lady in her splendor, banishing all emptiness and darkness from his being. He offered allegiance to that light, and to its traces and remnants in the World Between.

This Session Requests

• Set sail east. (done, close enough)
• Fight. (done)
• Drink.
• Whore.

Typical Elements

• Combat. (done) (spice: psychic combat)
• Exploration of forgotten spaces. (done)
• Social interaction. (done, the sporad, various NPCs)
• NPC subplots. (done; Lesandara growing into her role, Cassowary wavering in the quest) 

Often Elements (this time)

• Daring Escapes. (The crashing ship was certain death, they cheated it.)

Plot Threads

Learn the cosmic secrets of architectural magic.

• Snetch's Tower relocated the Matrix function to power it, as soon as the power came in range.
• The Void Walker and its reptilian scouts; threats from beyond the walls of this world.

Most and Least Favorite Feedback

• Crashing the ship was great.
• Finding telescopes was great.
• Defending against the Void Walker was great.
• Kail being connected to the ship when Ty found the resolve to not die by tapping into his unexpectedly profound desire to have sex with a centaur (Lady Clover) before he goes, and sharing that psychic experience was great.
• (No responses to least favorite things except possibly traitorous dice.)

Leveling NPCs

• Simon leveled up Cassowary to 8.
• Shaun leveled Lesandara to 3.
• Michael leveled Lesandara to 4.