Session Thirty-Five
Being a Ghost Story
of Life Day

The Command Team explores the aftermath of the site of the Kinori slaughter. The Brinkmanship, the Compact, the murderoids, and even Jennifer have all departed the scene. Together with some plucky dohwar and sailing their Kinori spelljammer, the heroes comb the site for answers and clues. In the process, they rescue a newborn Kinori, ripped from its mother's womb. Later in the wreckage of the Other Brinkmanship, they discover an illithid psionic amplifier and the undead Other Jennifer, clutching a strange artifact. The unusual statue, they learn, was in the possession of Monad, the Zealot of the One, and had long been the object of one of Jennifer's quests. Woven thick with dangerous chronomancy, it is an ancient portal to the other side of the Final Sphere - a portal to the One, designed by Fallen Gardeners. Through it, the One has worked its wiles inside the Spheres for uncounted millenia. The artifact transports the heroes to a Past in which they fight Cthulhu manifestations of the One alongside Another Basile on board one of many Kyton-infested Inordinate Amounts inside the temporal anomaly they'd once escaped and Thaliose recklessly exploited. It then transports them to a present, where the downbeat Life Day celebrations of the goblins of Lumberstar are interrupted by another swarm of Cthulhu-esque Old Ones. Finally, it transports them to the heart of the Shattered Sphere during a terrible future where Great Cthulhu emerges from the Twain Heart as the twin stars collapse in on themselves and the One's mightiest manifestation threatens to destroy the Spheres! In their moment of greatest need, Basie defuses the ultimate puzzle with the ultimate sacrifice. Holding the artifact before him in the bow of a makeshift skiff, Fortuna uses the Crown of the Lost Sphere to find the Final Sphere and to pilot Basile and the artifact through its non-Euclidean veil before abandoning ship. Basile and the artifact that had long served as a conduit for the Indistinction to leak into the Spheres had become One. Great Cthulhu triumphant will never come to pass. Gods bless us, everyone.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die"
                                                                                    - H.P. Lovecraft

"Somehow, Life Day always finds you..." - Klaus & Krampus

"Take that, story!" - Jennifer of the Unspoken

‘Twas the Night Before Life Day

But in Shattered Space, sadness

As heroes tried to reckon

With Thaliose madness

Kinori’d been murdered

On a scale hard to fathom

Despite heroic success

Good cheer was abandoned

Dohwar colonies saved

Most kinori moved on

The Crown was retrieved

The Psulron all gone

What remained of the day

Was to sort through the wreckage

Of Jennifer’s departure

And Basile’s reflections

But fear not gentle players

All’s not foregone

It’s a Life Day adventure!

What could poss’bly go wrong?

At the time of the battle with the Psulron, Jeniffer had used the REGINALD drive to drop you off near the Crown and then disappeared and went somewhere else

There are two other sites with Psulron “battle scars” on your Kinori’s back. All the party has to do is say they are looking.

Shroktath CAN track the echoes of the Helezhad’s movement through the battlefield

·        The surviving Brinkmanship was severely disabled. It escaped, but you could tell that it had trouble achieving Spelljamming speeds.

·        The Compact of Steam and Steel Ship

Three murderoids (adult and two juveniles) chase after the surviving Brinkmanship. One more was destroyed in the attack on the second Brinkmanship and subsequent explosion 

Pirate bodies are floating dead… a few surviving spacefarers cling to larger pieces of flotsam, their air slowly dwindling

o   You learn from them that there was Illithid infestation on the Brinkmanship you destroyed

There is an Illithid Psionic Amplifier among the wreckage. Interestingly, like the Psulron… there’s no echo of them appearing in the Base Code. Perhaps if you had time to search, you might find some trace; perhapsan indicator of a race’s power is its capacity to conceal itself in the Base Code

Shroktath, something is becoming very clearer to you – something that Luckums and Fortuna realized a while ago. Chronomancy is a threat to the fabric of the Spheres.

o   To be more specific, the Base Code was never meant to be harnessed a wielded to create the multiple storylines that Chronomancy creates. threatens the Base Code, and therefore the structural integrity of the Spheres. Time Travel is a wonderful tool for fiction, but every one of its multiple possible pretenses simply break reality.

o   Multiverses break stories.

o   Looking through the Base Code, you can see evidence of this fundamental tension.

Shroktath, you can read the Base Code the way that Luckums and Fortuna could follow Timelines and Jennifer could follow Storylines. Reading of the Base Code of this Battlefield, the way a Ranger might read the trail sign gives you a much deeper understanding of what happened here – but also holds three big surprises:

• First, incredibly, something is alive inside the Blood Clouds

• Second, the Psulron’s presence at this battle no longer reads in the Base Code the way it did when you entered this site through your Wormhole. Even the echo of their presence, which exists even after a creature dies, is gone. However, the disintegrated remains of the two fought by Khalid and Fortuna left clearly visible marks on your Kinori’s back that you can see with your eyes.

• Third, Jennifer’s remains are floating somewhere in the wreckage of the destroyed Brinkmanship.

• Fortuna, the whale you are piloting, wants very badly to go to the Blood Clouds. Wearing the Artifact, your will dominates. However, she strains against you mightily, and you can feel her despair.

• It is clear to you now that the Kinori themselves put up quite a fight. The Brinkmanships, the Void Stalker and the murderoids all took damage during the melee. Besides their body slams, they seem to emit low frequency sounds capable of considerable damage when they find the right levels and even more when they emit them as a herd. While they were panicking, they could not find their common song.

• As you approach the blood cloud, you can all hear the plaintive cries of a lone juvenile whale. 

• Born on the Battlefield

  • • You find a very small wehale, covered in blood. It’s nudging at pieces of whale corpse and seems to be tied to another.

    • In fact it’s an umbilical cord pulling is still attached to pieces of its mutilated mother

    • Fortuna, your kinori cannot resist its parental yearning and is straining desperately against your control

    • It begins to emit low frequency sounds. 

• Undead Jeniffer is searching through the wreckage.

o   Shroktath, she’s no Reaper, but you feel a certain kinship with Zombie Jeniffer

• When the party comes across her she is pulling Monad’s body out of the wreckage

• Shroktath, Basecode is being deleted around Jennifer. Slowly. Wait. Not “being deleted”. It is becoming One!

• The ARTIFACT

o   Wait, not Jeniffer… something she is holding.

o   It is Old. Crafted of Steel Stone. It is a portal of some sort, but to what you do not know.

o   There are three empty facets on its base with something indecipherable written on each…

o   USE MAGIC DEVICE: It has been activated, and it is letting something in!

• She raises her shirt and reveals that there a tattoo of the artifact. – Her version of the base indicates with three tattooed words what is written: past, present, yet-to-come

• She hands the party the three pieces.

• Undead Jennifer cannot speak – her mouth has been sown shut… she tugs at your arm to get your attention. – tattooed on her body are the three “indecipherable” words and their Ylfen translations: Past, Present, Yet to Come and Open to Close

\\Speak with dead:

• The Brinkmanship you destroyed was being controlled by Illithid

• Monad was carrying this artifact. He intended to take it to the Illithid – for what purpose I don’t know.

• I’ve been hunting for this artifact

• There is Chronomancy built into it

• It is connected to the One – but it is old beyond reckoning. Older than the Monotheocrat Order. Older then the Ylfe.

• It’s a portal to the One. It is one of the ways by which the One has been entering the Sphere for millennia.  

• When the One enters the Spheres its appearances is affected by the conduit. This artifact has the feel of the Great Olde Ones... the first Gardeners to fall victim to the siren call of the One, and to lose faith in the immensity and absurd futility of the Architects' plan to preserve reality

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. - Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

LIFE DAY PAST

You are transported to a track of Wildspace wracked by unravelling Chrono-storms. In the distance is a sight you’d never behold again. Tis the Inordinate Amount and it’s covered with chains. Basile, Hazel… somewhere on board, you are fighting for your life and you know in your bones that whatever you need to do to close the portal will happen on that ship.

Fight-Die-Repeat: Help Basile battle Kytons on board a derelict Inordinate Amount.

-        Help Die Hard Basile fight Kytons

-        Fight a Cthulhu monster

Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: Something black that wasn't a tree. Something big and black and ropy, just squatting there, waiting, with ropy arms, squirming and reaching-it was the black thing of my dreams-that black, ropy, slimy jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms. - Notebook Found in a Deserted House, Robert Bloch

Dimensional Shamblers: Shuffling towards him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of a thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from side to side. Its forepaws were extended, with talons spread wide, and its whole body was taught with murderous malignity despite its utter lack of facial description. - The Horror in the Museum, H.P. Lovecraft

You breathe deeply of the distinctive air of the Smoke Glob. It smells like home. A shadow crosses the back of your Kinori, Your breath is taken away by the towering length of the Lumberstar as it moves above you. Khalid, you know in your bones that your crew here is in danger, whatever you need to do to close the portal will happen on that Integral Tree.

The Battle to save Far Out Station has only just begun.

The Goblins and Gnomes aboard the Lumberstar

-        Visit the Goblins and The Gnomes

-        Fight a Cthulhu Monsters

Flying Polyp: According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race... 

here were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them. - The Shadow Out of Time, H.P. Lovecraft

Elder Thing: They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches. - Dreams in the Witch House, H.P. Lovecraft

Hey –

Even after all I’ve seen, Plot Twists still have the power to surprise me. I know all stories come to an end. It’s one o the Ironclad rules of the Spheres. I just hadn’t expected that we would come to an end quite so soon. And maybe, just maybe, I was hoping for an Everly After. But I had to remain true to my character and my motives, even if there was an internal conflict.  

I got so caught up in your story, I forgot that I also had to be the Hero of My Own. Another Iron Clad rule.

Fortuna – You may be done with chronomancy, but chronomancy is not done with you.

Shoroktath – Thank you for restoring my faith. I’d been deconstructing narrative for so long, I’d forgotten its power to transform us.

Basile, Hazel – There Can Be Only One.

Khalid – You’re right not to trust the Unspoken. I just wish you had trusted me.

Whether you’re a part of the Crown’s story now, or it’s a part of yours is for you to decide. Just, don’t lose it. And please don’t use it to destroy the Spheres. It’s the only thing that can pass through them all.

You know, for all the time I’ve spent away from goblins I learned that wanting a thing doesn’t make it yours to take. Of all people, I had to get a reminder of what it means to be a goblin from Khalid. 

It makes me feel a little less guilty about commandeering your nifty skiff. Consider it a fair trade.

There are Other Tales Than This.

Love & Rockets,
Jennifer

It takes you a moment to realize where you are. In the deadly sky above you, you see twin stars orbiting one another. The Twain Heart! All around you, the great Cyclopean ringworld structure known as the Heart Ribbon stretches around them, seemingly into endless space. No sooner do you look at them, than do you notice that their light begins to fade. They are shrinking in on themselves and disappearing. Shroktath, you know in your bones… Open to Close. You’ve brought the KEY to the GATE where the One can enter the Shattered Sphere. To close the gate, you must banish the key, beyond the Spheres forever. 

-        Fight Cthulhu

-        Close the Gate

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. - Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

Basile is dead. 

Dead beyond the powers of any to bring him back, I think.

That he did the right thing, that he sacrificed himself to save all that exists, that I know Basile would have made the same choice a thousand times over - all that is cold comfort.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend. I sold him short at first. I remember how I first started to notice his true metal when we were held as rowing slaves by Skitterex. At one point, Basile bravely stood up and sang a fable of Aesop, one of the ratfolk heroes of old, to inspire us all. He took a beating for his efforts, but our morale was raised through his bravery.

I remember Basile’s wizardry with brewing up poisons and potions and so forth and so on. His amazing expertise constantly getting us out of jams. Like the mixture he came up with - on the spot, mind - that lifted the barnacles of the Gump’s back allowing us to ease his pain just after we’d taken control of the Amount. That’s the first time I remember him pulling off something like that, but it’s certainly not the last. The poisons he brewed up to cripple the Mindflayers ships. The masking smell he came up with to make the Ogre stench survivable. Most recently, the mixture added to the heart of the Reginald Drive. And many more besides.

The hardest thing for me to remember about Basile, was what happened to him on board the Cygnet Terrace and after. The sheer terror, the loneliness, fighting off hopelessness and the horrifying Kytons. We were just reminded of how many Basiles, how many of our friend, were out there suffering like that. I still feel guilty about it. Was there more we could have done?

I remember how Basile played such a key part in whipping our goblin crew into some semblance of effectiveness (order would be going too far), getting inside their heads, having them “hear footsteps,” and whispering about how he - Basile - always knew what they were up to. Got them to police themselves, really. 

Brilliant. Basile.

This powerful mind was central to who he was. I remember him and Luckums figuring out what was going on in the aftermath of the Cygnet Terrace. His masterful strategizing in the Battle for Talasantri, and in the Battle of Yessir. Basile - you would have been one of the greatest investigators that Scutland Yard had ever known if your life had taken a different path - the path I think you’d originally laid out for yourself. For his was an intelligence tempered by great wisdom. He saw through Thaliose from the first moment, I think. He knew exactly how to calm Khalid in the midst of his killing frenzy against the Illithids. He knew, and never seemed to question or doubt, what was needed of him to save the spheres.

Most of all, I’ll remember the steelstone character of my friend. Always true, always clear headed, always doing the right thing. Up til the end.

Actually, I’ll remember one thing more, and it’s what I’ll always treasure the most about Basile: his friendship. He wasn’t exactly a gusher about his feelings, but it didn’t matter. I knew that he had my back come the hells or high water. His affection was shown in the attention he paid to his friends’ welfare. Noticing details that we missed, and helping in practical ways. How you always felt stronger and better being a part of his “pack.”

In so many ways, he was my leader: my pack warden. I’m better for having known him. I’m going to miss him like crazy and for always.

Thank you, Basile, for all that you were and did. I will do the best I can to live up to your standard.

Freeday Claireweek Weegassa in the 50th Annum Independencia - The Day of Life

1. Basile of the Warren is hereby granted the rank of Brevet Warrant Officer, awarded the Unit Commendation and will be acknowledged in the Mention-in-Dispatches for his services effective this date.

2. The Officer of the Watch is ordered to read the following declaration after Reveille for the next ten days:

a.  "On Freeday Claireweek Weegassa of the Jubilee Year of the Federation, 50th Annum Independencia, Basile of the Warren, Brevet Warrant Officer of the Inordinate Amount, is awarded posthumously Mention-In-Dispatches for bravery far above the call of duty.  Sergeant Basile did act according to the highest standards of military duty to, without exaggeration, save all known Creation from the One of the Indistinction, without hesitation or doubt, and at great personal sacrifice".  

b. The Officer of the Watch will then ring the Ship's bell five times.

3. One year's pay, with interest, from the Ship's Company treasury will be placed in trust for the Warren of Basile and apportioned to it at the soonest convenience.

4. Ship's Engineer will install, at his earliest opportunity, an appropriate memorial plaque on the fo'csile in baraque star metal and integral lumber, paid from the ship's treasury.

5. Standing Orders will be amended to declare that annually, on Life Day, the Officer of the Watch will read the declaration in Paragraph 2 Sub-paragraph (a), to an assembly of the Ship's Crew, and its youngest member will ring the Ship's Bell five times.