"Games are the most elevated form of investigation."  - Tundar-Ka

"It is not so important who starts the game, but who finishes it." - Dohwar Proverb

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki 

“The way a man plays a game shows some of his character. The way he loses shows all of it." - Okkallappa Proverb

“Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.” – Braal 

Fortuna awakens the Command Team from their Mezsoul-induced slumber. The knock on the door leads them to a dead-drop. Okkallappa has been compromised. The Illithid Supremacy is tightening the noose. Tundar-Ka is coming. Today is the day that your weeks of barely remembered preparations—getting to know Mass Chain, learning the ways of the city—will bloom, like the quivering petals of an psionic amplifier. Okkallappa has provided a portal key, and the Team sets out to reconfigure the ever-shifting districts of the city according to their needs. Evading packs of intellect devourer hunters and sabotaging amplifier-detetcors; luring and eliminating a score of illithid patrols, and deactivating suppressor fields. The mission is to search the methane storm battered streets for a portal district and the means to move four psionic crystal districts around it. On the way, Hazel foments an uprising amongst the ratfolk thralls and Shorktath hunts illithid patrols, while Khalid and Fortuna puzzle out the city and locate one and then another configurator district. The Team uses the arcane devices to control the city’s confounding movement to their ends. But the Chief Inquisitor has other plans. After Tundar-Ka quarantines the Lesser Races District, the team quarantines his. Enraged, he charges forward recklessly to confront them, never realizing that he is in fact hastening his own doom. With Mass Chain left in the chaos of rebellion, and the required districts assembled, the heroes raid the black market to equip themselves before moving through the shimmering portal. towards the mysteries of Mezzennsine prison…

You’ve been lost in your thoughts.

It’s been weeks. It was supposed to be easy. Or at least, it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Okkallappa knew you were coming. It should have stood to reason that Illithid counterintelligence would know as well.

Hindsight is 20-20. It’s also one of the clearest signs that your mind has been tagged.

Tundar-ka is closing in and you still couldn’t find Suculus-Ra. Or was it the other way around?

Every time you seemed to make some progress on connecting with your contact in the Illithid Resistance, the Chief Inquisitor of the Lesser Races District got a little closer to finding you. A little closer to sending you to the cephalo-harvesters. Or worse. And as often as not, the leads were a bust.

Then Fortuna opened the door.

Something in the Brain Tea that made it possible to be here at all had you dreaming in one another’s heads. And who knows who else’s.

That’s what Fortuna found when she opened the door. She saw herself opening the door. Behind her, the rest of you asleep in a derelict tenement in the Lesser Races District of the city of Mass Chain. It took a moment for her mind to register that she was looking at herself.

Mezsoul. You were still on Mezsoul.

In a deep sleep. And your minds had been tagged. Broadcasting your shared memories for all in the district who cared to find them, to see.

Fortuna. You hold your head and wipe the dusty mycelium form the corners of your eyes. You are exhausted in a way you’ve never felt before. Your bones are tired. The door you opened is no longer there, but there is a gentle knock on the door to your flowstone hovel.

Someone wants in.

The knock on the tenement door reveals a message… that leads you to a dead drop… there you find a message and a package. The message: Okkallappa has been compromised! To reach Manzessine prison, you must find a way to navigate the city and assemble the crystal districts to power one of the portals on your own. The package: the key you need to attune an empowered portal to Manzessine!

Hazel: talking to Khalid about getting a better understanding of where the Thrall Warrens are.

Khalid: Supporting Hazel in finding the Thrall Warrens

Shroktath: centering himself and trying to understand the illithids as false gardeners

Fortuna: Considering which memories are more real. We’ve been studying the city for weeks. We now know how to get to Mazennsine. Today, leaving the Lesser Races District is a one-way trip

Tundar-Ka is the Chief Inquisitor who has dogged your heels for weeks as you explored Mezsoul. Seeing him so closely triggers fight or flight reactions in each of you that your minds struggle to contain.

Tundar-Ka’s lateral tentacles arch up like striking snakes in a position you now recognize as an illithid sneer.

The Taunts of Tundar-Ka

His voice echoes in your heads: “Of course! You reeked far too greatly of the abominable Rock of Braal to be legitimate and appropriately humble tradesman! Know that the mewling Dohwar will suffer greatly having brought you here!”

• FORTUNA: “I can’t wait to taste goblin brain”

• HAZEL: “It disgusts me to speak in your mind. It will take months to rid the streets of Mezsoul form the stench of having had you drag your anal glands around the city as you have.”

• SHOROKTATH: “Blood of the Gardeners! Be honoured, Brute, for we will feed your cephalic tissue to our Elder Brain!”

• KHALID: “You are nothing, though you are very well dressed, human.”

MESSAGE FROM OKKALLAPPA ALLIES

• Sulcus-Ra approaches. Like Perry Loman back on Braal, he smells of patchouli.

• Since the Imperyion seized Braal, the Illithid have been doing everything they can to unify. Okkallappa’s ability to help Braal against the Imperyion is seriously compromised. Illithid Superiority diplomats have already approached the Imperyion to help them hunt down the last of the Free Braal Bootleggers and Privateers.

• Even so, Jormund Goss is too valuable to kill. To dangerous to set free. He and his cult have found a way to draw sustenance from thoughts rather than the actual physical stuff of minds.

• Okkallappa has been compromised. If you are to reach Manzessine prison, you will have to assemble the crystal districts to power one of the portals on your own.

• We will cut off telepacomms between the prison and the outside after you arrive. This will be buy you some time to get a head start on the authorities. You will have find your own way off Manzessine.

MESSAGE FROM DOHWAR ALLIES

• The Dohwar are leaving Mezsoul, including the trading vessel that brought you here. It has become far too dangerous!

It had all been a dream. A sickly (deadly?) dream brought on by this gross mind soup of brain-eater-land. We weren’t really floating back through time, but trapped in our minds. Thankfully, Fortuna woke us all up and we realized that, while we’d been trapped in dreamland, our situation had changed for the worse.

No Okkallappa contact, and worse still, the Illithid chief Inquisitor - Tundar-Ka - had sniffed out trouble in the city of Mezsoul, and he was scouring the city for it (and us). 

We had to force the issue, and break into Mezzennsine prison, make contact with Okkallappa, and push the Mind Flayer resistance forward on our own, if we wanted to get it done.

We pushed out from the “lesser races quarter,” connected but separated, with the goal of opening the portal to Mezzennsine. It was a tough thing for one of the “lesser races” to understand, honestly. Given the mind powers of the Illithid, their city responded to the power of thought. It could be “rearranged” in the right way to open access to the prison. We just needed to launch out into the city and find out how to do it. 

On the plus side - there were potential allies and items out there in the city that might aid our cause. We just needed to find them. On the minus side, the mind flayers weren’t just sitting on their tentacles.

I took a moment to center myself. I knew my friends were counting on me, as I was counting on them. And these false gardeners needed some serious pruning. I headed out into the streets of Mezsoul with such pure and clear purpose, that my movements felt almost poetic.

I did what I do best - I unleashed extreme violence. I took down mind flayer after mind flayer on the streets of Mezsoul. I felt almost like a flowing clockwork, almost out of my body and watching, as with cold, merciless precision I laid waste to illithid patrols and their pets and cleared the way for my friends.

Who were, meanwhile, having great success in uncovering the city, finding what we needed to find, and extra besides.

But eventually, Tundar-Ka managed to track one of us down: me.

I knew that my mates just needed some time to come to my support, and luckily, that’s just what Tundar-Ka provided. He (it?) arrogantly lectured me on my lesser status, and one how much he’d enjoy tasting the brain of another Gardener.

But he wasn’t facing a Gardener. He was facing a Reaper. I looked at him, lowered the point of my spear to the earth, and called forth the power of the Architects to cleanse the spheres of this unwitting agent of the One. I closed my eyes, and extended my powers to my mates. “For Basile,” I said softly.

Khalid’s bullets ripped into the powerful mind flayer with an added divine fury. And then Fortuna floated up and asked, “Do you feel lucky?” as she simultaneously provided the answer - a ray of death that struck Ka and obliterated the already battered body of the once mighty Inquisitor.

We mopped up the remnants of Ka’s troops, made contact with more allies, and before the illithids could recover and counter, we willed the city into opening the portal to Mezzennsine prison. As we briefly looked at one another, I smiled. Not without some bumps and bruises, but another heroic step for our band. I just wished that Basile had been here to see us stick it to the illithids.

At the crossroads of the waking world and the world of dreams, I lay there paralyzed by fear for I knew not how we had got here, nor how long had passed. A danger lingered near, you could sense it and even though time was of the essence, I could not move. I could feel my body and got a glimpse of the room we were in, but my mind was trapped in its mind prison.

FOCUS!

It was here that, both memories constructed by the mind, and real passed events, were indistinguishable and parallel. I called a door but was it real, was this real, and where did it leave to? Had we not been exploring the city of Mass Chain for weeks?

Knock… Knock…

Were we on the Lumberstar from weeks ago or still trapped in the Illithid city-world of Mezsoul? Perhaps both. I think I can still smell the methane sea and hear the city districts shifting.

FOCUS – FIND THE OTHERS!

Snip… Snip… Snip…

And here lies my problem, for you must understand that I am a goblin out of time and space. Do not look for me in the farther than recent past, for I was erased from there by a paranoid goblin called Luckums. When I first came to the current versions of my companions, I could still remember who I had been. But those memories have faded into indistinction and no longer ever existed. Only in fellowship does one truly exist. The here and now is all I have…

[Lukums] Take it… here is the last thread to your own story…

[Molator] All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us….

[Jennifer] We are each of us the Hero of Her Own Tale…

… there they are!

I opened the mind-door, said hello to myself, and let myself out. My companions!

Hello Fortuna….

… Hello Fortuna.

Come on out….

…Thanks.

We had lost our mind-link when approaching Mezsoul but now there was hope again, and the strength of friends. We were indeed still in the alien city, but we had failed to meet up with our Illithid resistance contact Suculus-Ra in time. Chief Inquisitor Thundar-Ka was closing in on us. Enough scouting and planning, time to burn the bridges and find the way to Mazzennsine.

With our minds linked again, we each set about searching the lesser races district. Shroktath turned the tables on our hunters. He lured various Illithid patrols to a deadly end. I spent most of my time sneaking around the city using tunnels and a JET PACK!. Thanks to the directions of Khalid, he instructed me to the location of an alien device we called the district mapper. Which, once brought to him, revealed much needed information to us. Hazel found the rat-folk, set them free, and started an uprising. By the time Thundar-ka caught up with us, we had figured out much of the shifting city’s secrets and turned them against it.

I could see the quickest path to our goal, and I tried to explain it to the others, but they had other plans. Use the configurators. That district there, this one over here, two that way for this one, the portal down and over, this crystal there and done. Hurry! I should have just closed my eyes and wished for the best. We were able to move the districts around, isolate certain sections, and eventually reconfigure the city to open the portal to Mazzensine. Of course, a battle with Thundar-ka couldn’t be avoided. Thankfully it was overconfident, and we still had some luck left on our side.

It was at this time that I got very worried about my companions. I could sense our luck had run out and the risks were growing by the second. But they insisted on searching for more treasure that might assist us in the next challenge. Too greedily, too long. I would consider myself a very lucky goblin (even if I am often un-goblin like), and I know foolishness when I see it. I obviously need to chill out and enjoy the scenery a bit more. 

Fools, the portal already!