Brain Trust

The heroes wake up with pounding wine hangovers. And there is a tapping. Tapping. Andru Prince, CEO of Bral’s Board of Directors stands above them in a place that looks like the bookstore but isn’t. His spokesperson begins to explain the situation. The portal Jennifer opened into the Cradle of Creation using the bibliomancy latent in the Steel Fenris books left a hole into the Dreamspace – the demi-plane that exists between the Elder Brain and every citizen of the Rock. It is the space that allows that allows Bral to be governable. The Imperyion seemed to be waiting for just such an opportunity and immediately transported some its Inevitables, golem enforcers made of pure law, to begin scouring the space in search of a path to the Elder Brain. The Spine of Worlds has poured into the Dreamspace, transforming into a labyrinth of tumbling piles of books and shifting shelves. With the Elder Brain’s assistance, they trap the Inevitables inside the shifting halls, or so they thought. As they attempt to close the rift, weaving a narrative tourniquet, the most powerful of the Inevitables, the Marut, tears its way through, climbing out of the open book. Following the battle, the heroes make their way to the docks to find the Inordinate Amount getting a full re-outfitting courtesy of the ACLU and the Board of Directors. They are waylaid by Thaliose Hothex, conniving Captain of the Brinkmanship, who has an offer for them that they feel they can’t refuse...

Tap-tap.

The hour is late in the Spine of World Bookstore.

Tap-tap-tap.

The hour is later still on Bral itself.

There's that tapping again. 

You are not sure when you drifted off to sleep, but you must have for you awake with a start in that senseless state of having been pulled too soon from an incomplete nap.

You are in the bookstore. Right. The Spine of Worlds. Yet you have a sense that it is not the bookstore. Jennifer continues to snore on a stack of books. Several empty bottles of wine are arranged around her.

Andru Prince looks bored. Wait. What's he doing here? His cane stops tapping when you stir. He sighs.

Standing next to him, the spokesperson for the CEO of the Board of Directors of the Rock of Bral clears his throat. 

"Crew of the Inordinate Amount," he says. He is the same human you saw with Bral’s de facto leader before. Human, dressed extremely well, though not nearly as stylishly as his boss. Andru Prince examines his impeccably manicured fingernails. 

"The CEO again finds himself with a dilemma. Spacing you off the Rock or retaining your services to save it. Fortunately for you, recent changes in the Board of Directors has seen your sympathizers and sponsors ascendant. They have spoken on your behalf.

As your red wine hangovers wake up, you realize that Prince and his spokesperson are not alone. He is accompanied by none other than the woken mindflayer revolutionary, Perry Loman, (“My dudes!”) and none other than Crumnubbins Willybits of the Alternative Citizenry Lenders Union, who is waving madly at you and can barely contain her excitement.

“We are not actually here. We are projections into the Dreamspace, into which someone seems to have torn an opening, allowing their surroundings to pour in.” Andru Prince casts a baleful look from his fingernails to you.

His spokesperson continues, “And the Imperyion in turn, has walked right through. It is an absolutely unprecedented move against the Rock of Bral. It’s almost like they were waiting for something like this to happen. You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you, Book Merchant?”

All eyes to turn to Jennifer.

“The Dreamspace exists between Elder Brain Bral and every inhabitant of the Rock. It is the place of the awe filled by the auditors, and now it is filled with Imperyion Inevitables. Mindflayer. Explain Inevitables.”

Perry seems to have been dozing. “O, fer sure. Inevitables were totally built for the Imperyion’s war against the Illithid and are entirely immune to brain attacks. They’re like BLAH, and WHATEVER. HAHA… I MEAN… YEAH… HAHA… They’re weird.”

“The CEO has changed his mind, mindflayer. Stop speaking now.”

“Fer sure.”

“Inevitables are golems of a sort, but imbued with an uncanny creation, manifesting the will of the Imperyion to dominate. And now they are inside after you somehow opened the door. built to resist every Illithid manipulation and they are beyond the Elder Brain’s reach. At best, Bral can shift the walls of the Dreamspace to delay them. However, it is only a matter of time before they discover the existence of the Elder Brain, and perhaps even destroy it."

Basile, through Hazel’s eyes, you notice a verminfolk in the street outside the bookstore. She is staring intently at the door. When you exit she seems startled and approaches you humbly. “Father,” she says in an almost unintelligible dialectic, 

“They said a Pack Lord had arrived on Bral, but I didn’t want to believe it.

"Please,” she holds a bundle of rags up to you, “She is the runt of my last litter, yet she is dear to me…  I…” all of her confidence drains out of her at once and she begins to weep.

Bral is the Spheres as it might be. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Gently ordered. Nudged ever away from the destructive conflicts that breed ever more destruction and conflict.

Its crowded streets are bustling and chaotic, filled with adversity and struggle. However it's a chaos of creation. Beginnings, not endings.

As you perceive the streets, your senses are jostled by the throngs of people moving in every direction, pushing past each other in their haste to get to their destination. The narrow passages are lined with an impossible array of stalls and shops, with vendors shouting and hawking a bewildering array of wares to passersby.

The air is thick with the smells of fresh produce, meat, and spices, intermingling with the stench of garbage, sewage and sweat from every creature imaginable. The cooking smells from every corner of the spheres. It’s the smell of life. Draft animals and carts and bikes and trikes make their way through the crowds. On the cobblestones, hooves clatter, claws scrape, paws pad and drivers shout and ring their little bells to warn pedestrians of their approach.

The streets are activity and commerce, people gossiping, sipping coffee, smoking fragrant water pipes in clutches friendly and suspicious, vendors and buyers haggling over prices and goods, competing with the sounds of music and street performers trying to draw the attention of the crowds. The noise is deafening. Magnificent, even.

Bral! Vibrant and colorful! Chaotic and dynamic! Energetic and exciting. The audience and the spectacular, all in one. The spheres perceiving themselves. 

The port bustles with the activity of spacefaring vessels, their masts reaching out in every direction like sentinels bristling with polearms. The distinct tang of Bral’s air mingles with the pungent mixture of scent of tar and oil and every imaginable cargo and crew wafting from the ships. The clank of metal against metal echos across the docks as spacefarers secure lines and hoist cargo.

From a distance, the port always appears chaotic and disordered, but the approach reveals a synchronous system of timing, muscle, ropes, pulleys, and rigging that keep the vessels and their handlers in patterns that appear uncanny in their harmony. Amidst the hustle and bustle, captains bark orders, and crew scurry to complete their tasks before the next change in Bral’s trajectory.

Spelljammers, sleek and elegant, jostle for space alongside sturdier shipping vessels, their hulls creaking and groaning as they rock gently as Bral adjusts, lurches and lists otherwise imperceptibly in the currents of Wildspace. The sailors move with practiced efficiency, their space-tightened faces etched with the lines of solar winds.

A peg legged pirate, dressed in a tri-corn hat and deep shades of blue, almost black, swaggers towards you, moving in way that is almost hypnotic. His bleached beard appears both perfectly sculpted and growing in a devil-may-care manner. A kind of sinuous grace makes him seem almost untouchable. Smiling impeccably, he calls out, “Ahoy, me hearties!” Thaliose Hothex.

You can’t help but think that even his enemies must love him.

Yet you do not see the Brinkmanship in port. Interesting.

Turns out the whole weird thing with Jennifer, and fake-Luckums, and the Cradle of Creation was some kind of a dream. I don’t know if I really got all of it, to be honest. Bral uses the power of its mind to make some kind of dream space that connects all of the Rock? Something like that, and we were in it. In this dream space, the power of stories ruled (makes sense). But stories also kinda compete with each other, or could. And we weren’t finished with the whole thing yet. We were still in dream space.

And we weren’t alone.

The Ylfe had managed to get in a team of golems to try and track down the big brain. I think the plan was to eliminate the Bral big brain, cut the connection of everyone, and basically defeat Bral. Pretty clever, I’ll give the Ylfe credit. 

A dream version of Andrew Prinz and some others from Bral’s board (Hi Crumnubbins!) arrived in what was (surprise) still the dream space to tell us this. Oh, and some of these golems (Innevitables, I think they called them) were damned tough. If we wound up in a fight with some of the big guys, it would get ugly fast. But if we wiped out the little guys, the big guys would start losing their ability to function. Only problem was, this team of golems wasn’t just sitting around waiting for us to pick them off. As we went deeper into the dream, we were all together with them in this strange, shifting space that reminded me of one of the corn mazes they used to have on the fall fair days on the Wine Dark Coast. Only this maze was changing. Our story was in a struggle with the golems’ story, and as we moved and tried to will the maze, the story, into what we wanted, they’d move and shift the maze into another shape.

It all made me feel a bit wobbly, tell the truth. But our team worked really well. Jennifer had a great idea to pool our efforts, our stories, and make big changes to the maze, and we hunted down the little scout golems, and so, eventually, “junking” the big nasty ones (or so we thought).

Ready to move on in triumph, Basile was trying up this part of the story in a very clever way, when the biggest, baddest golem refused to be ‘the-ended.’ It clawed it’s way out of the closing dream space leaving a ripped up hole of story threads flapping about angrily behind it.

Scary? Yep. I could tell my mates felt the same - instantly real focused, like a gang of hungry orphans trailing after an overfull gujamellon cart. They sprang into action and hit that creature with everything they had. Khalid blasting away, Jennifer launching a streak of lightning from her hand, and Hazel (how many times now has Hazel saved the day?) casting a powerful spell that forced the golem back to its home. 

Whew. I thought that was going to go a lot worse.

But the wounded opening to the dream space still hung in the air. The torn and ruined ending that Basile had tried to write was dead. Or was it? As we tried, and failed, to return to the ending, we thought we'd had, we realised we needed to fix the story the golem had wrecked. We couldn’t return to Basile's ending, but we could reframe it. It wasn’t an ending to the story, but an ending to a chapter. In OUR story. In which the golem had played a role - not as hero - but as villain. Not even the main villain. And so it’s defeat had been the end of a chapter in the story of the heroes in the Inordinate Odds. Thanks, villain, for providing an exciting end to the chapter! My mates are pretty clever.

Having closed up the boundary between reality and dream space (for now! I sure have a feeling we’ll find ourselves back here), we tied up a few loose ends on Bral. I felt like we needed to try and make things right with the Ogres. After all, they had risked their lives, and lost a few, just to help us. Turns out they gloried in the story of their battle and victory over the bugbears and slavers. How about that? No 'making right' needed. Khalid led the charge to round up a suitable sailors for our undergoblined crew, and with some success. We outfitted the ship for what was sure to be a damned dangerous mission into Illithid space. Basile and Hazel seemed to deepen their ties with the ratfolk (not totally sure what went on there, just something I felt).

And as our busy preparations were wrapping up, who comes striding up, bold as brass? Thaliose Hothex. I like that damned scoundrel. Was good to see him again, so I gave him a big hug. And he seemed happy too. I started to notice, though, as the conversation went on, that the rest of my mates were a lot cooler towards ol’ that ol’ pirate. I was confused. Thaliose was offering to help us get the Crown of Worlds. Sounded good to me. (Wait. Had he said he would help us, or we would help him? Damn that guy is charming!) Rest of our group seemed …thoughtful? Concerned. There was some strange, intense talk going on between Thaliose and Basile - I just picked up a bit of it - like some sort of chess game. I think Basile won, and in the process we agreed to work together to try and get the Crown. But, and I’ve never heard him  be so stern, Basile ended by telling Thaliose that if he double-crossed us, he’d pay tenfold. I was a bit confused, honestly. This was how we were going to start off our partnership?

But as we walked away, Basile said quietly to us all. “I’ve never met any being more dangerous than that. He’s a stone cold psychopath.” It was tough to take in. My buddy, Thaliose? But he told such great jokes, and was so much fun to drink with. Surely not.

Selunday Umberweek - Day 213

We awoke in the Spine of the World but we were not awake.  We were challenged by Andrew Prinz, Perry Loman and Andrew Willybits.  From them we learned that there was hole in the dream space and the Imperiyon would use that gap to attack the Elder Brain.  Perry spoke about the Inevitables; constructs that would search for the Brain and then destroy it.  As we ourselves had opened that Hole, the Spine had been pulled through it dragging us along with it.  The Spine had become distorted and turned into a bookshelf labyrinth.  Realizing this situation within the dream space, we understood that we could control the shifting corridors like a twisted nightmare.  As we moved ourselves and the corridors, we isolated and destroyed the scouts.  It was chaotic and terrifying as monsters frenetically whirled around their overlords.  Defeating all the scouts in the maze meant the Inevitables were forever lost in the dreams space.  As Basil closed the hole, the Marut clawed its way out of that portal from dream into reality; its story was not over.  Khalid had clarity of insight and blasted its leg out from under it.  Vulnerable and surrounded, each of us unleashed our best upon it.  Ever weakened, Hazel dismissed it from reality.  Wow worked our magic to trap it back into the Dream.  We re-wrote its story and made it a villain our ours, not the subject of its own. Its chapter ended; our story continued.

In defeating these Inevitables and displacing the Ylfe, the Board of Brahl paid for an extensive refit of the Inordinate Amount.  While that got started, Shroktath took us that night to the urges to honour their fallen and our victory.  We sang ballads and paens of the Legion and the Horde late into the night.  They honoured the heroic deaths.  Basile and Hazel went to meditate among the vermin warren folk because all can be redeemed.  Khalid spent the ten days of refit furiously recruiting critical crew and overseeing the installation of new engines, mounting new weapons and armour and confirming the revolutionary stealth cloak of Luckems.  Jennifer tied up her affairs on Brahl and joined our crew; a goblin hero to fill the hole left when Luckems left.

Sularday Eoweek Corellona- Day 223

We needed to make a Devil's Bargain to improve our chances of success for our next challenge.   After a long parley with the pirate Thaliose Hothex, we agreed we would quest for the circlet together.  Basile was perhaps the most concerned I had ever seen and that did not bode well as we stepped into the next void.