Session Nine:
Fight, Die, Repeat

"I've got all the time in the world."
                                            - Luckums

“If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.” 

                                                                                                                      - Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
                                                                              - Terry Pratchett, Lords & Ladies

The Inordinate Amount passes back into the temporal anomaly created by the detonation of the shard of time crystal that Connor secreted away from Asteroid B. The stage is reset for the Kyton infestation that the heroes brought back from the Ylfen ghost ship to overwhelm the crew once again. However, this time is different. Luckums has seen Time. She remembers everything that has already happened. She struggles to make her friends understand, and they struggle to comprehend what she is saying. Soon, a mad hunt for Blaine begins on board the ship. The puzzle box that had latched onto him is the key to the hellish fate that befell them so many times before. Eventually, they corner the possessed pyromaniac in the gravity plane crawlspace where he has begun operating on Charlotte. They defeat the puzzle box, detach it from his head, and only just manage to rescue the tiny brawler. Coiling demonic chains had already begun to twist their way out of her vivisected chest, but Shroktath finds his inner Paladin and saves her with healing light. The Kyton menace defeated, the heroes now have time to study the time phenomenon. In the process, they find at least six more Inordinate Amounts adrift inside the anomaly, attesting to the number of times they were previously defeated. Basile seems particularly affected by the proximity by one of the doppleganger ships. They decide to explore and find it full of his own traps. Eventually, they come face to face with another Basile - one who had somehow managed to survive an infestation and reset of the time loop three months before.

Brail's Gifts

Khlaid: Brail gives you a medal that he was given, the first he ever received, from the Village Council of Algail. It was to thank him for clearing the Main Road of a band of goblins that had been harassing merchants. He let one live. Mauveen’s great, great, great great grandfather. He never told the Town Council. For the courage and vision of what you did on the Inordinate Amount – no one may ever recognize it. But he does.

Shroktath: Brail gave you a book on Thri-Kreen Spear Arts – a sort of spear dancing martials arts of a four-armed preying mantis people. The Way of the Multi-Articulated Limb. He heard you talking about your passion for your chosen weapon, and he thinks you’ll find it interesting.

Basile: Brail gave you a masterwork alchemy set.

Luckums: Brail gave you a timepiece. He made it himself. It may or may not have certain qualities. You can hear it ticking when the door opens to your room and light falls across your body. Because of course, you haven’t been sleeping. You are paralyzed in bed…

Would You Rather...?

You awaken in your darkened cabin with a goblin standing over you. You are exhausted, and the faint memory of a nightmare you can’t remember troubles your mind.  It was filled with the rattling of chains and slow wet drips, but otherwise, try as you might, you can’t remember what it was about.

• Luckums: WYR be accepted or acknowledged? 

• Basile: WYR be ignorant or afraid?

• Shroktath: WYR be a clerk or a merchant?

• Khalid: WYR be or do?

• Dakota stands over you. “Would you rather I let you sleep or tell you that Shilynn wants you in the Bridge?”

Previously, Luckums placed one hand on the Helm while the other held the Time Crystal Shard and she channeled the force of a spell from one to another. The crystal exploded, but not before a vision of everything that ever was and everything that ever will be lit up her mind.

Luckums you have had the most exhausting dream. You have seen everything. The thread of every possibility in your life stretching from where you are now back through the bramble of might have beens and forward into the future of still could be’s. You remember everything that happened last session, but all of it is fading fast.  

NO ONE ELSE REMEMBERS A DAMN THING

Luckums, what do you do?

Freed from the menace of the Kytons, the party has an opportunity to lean more about he time loop anomaly

• The anomaly is shrinking

• The smaller it gets the faster it shrinks

• It will keep shrinking until someone resets or it disappears

• The anomaly is not bound to the fate of either Connor or Shannon One, let alone their relationship. Connor brought the crystal on board because he thought it was pretty and o the occasions when the time loop was created, had accidentally connected it to the Helm

• The Helm is less a device created than it is an entity organically birthed; the crystal is filled with massive amounts of latent energy. The two were not meant to come in contact.

• When they did come into contact, the crystal accelerated and exploded, sending waves of pure time outward in every direction, starting the time loop

• The centre around which the anomaly is shrinking is the  surviving Time Crystal itself. If there were no time crystal inside the anomaly would it shrink? Would it continue to expand and dissipate? How would the paradoxes reconcile? Who knows!

• The other time crystals were destroyed to create the time bubble anew. The latest Inordinate Amount enters the time bubble because Connor has the crystal. That becomes to the new centre around which the anomaly begins to shrink

• When it collapses, we will all either be destroyed, or life will go one

• In fact, when the anomaly shrinks, all of the "time stuff" will crystallize further around the surviving time crystal as the excess time essentially “evaporates”

[...]

Dakarday Eoweek Verisa in the 49th Annum Independencia -Day 160

Dakarday.  I had a brief dream of when Havelock gave me his medal but that joy did not dispel the gloom.  Suddenly Dakota was standing over me talking about Shilynn.  She needed Luckums but Luckums was not around.  Shroktath found her in bed, obviously not well.  We gathered around her and she explained a series of events from her past, our past, a past, I was not sure.  None of us remembered any of it.  It was a tale of chains and terror like we had seen on the Cygnet Terrace.  Our encounter with the Cygnet Terrace on Selunday had not been a nightmare after all.  It all began to raise a sense of dread that had passed from me as I woke from my nightmare I realized was not a nightmare.  The truth of Luckums and Basile pulled me out of my dread.  It felt like being pulled out of a dark lake.

[Placeholder: dark female with chains]

We called the crew together and some of them were missing:  Blaine, Lewis, Connor, Coalman and Charlotte.  We began a sweep of the ship and in the galley found Lewis.  Connor and Coalman had been playing cards.  This allowed Luckums to secure the red time crystal from Connor.  The last place to look was the central crawlspace along the gravity plane.  It was pitch dark and we heard chains on the pipes.  Shroktath entered from the hatch on the opposite side while Basile and I entered cautiously on our side.  It was dread and darkness and Basile was particularly apprehensive.  I put on an encouraging face and was able to motivate him forward along the pipes with me.  While he did move forward, it triggered a memory of my failure to lead on the Cygnet Terrace and the battles that followed.  My leadership, my decisions, my commands were pushing him towards risk, danger and possibly death.  My stomach was filled with bile and it felt like I had a rock around my neck.  I was able to break the doom slightly with magical light and we saw Blaine.  He was twisted by a metal box embedded in my head.  It came flooding back to me just as Luckums struck it with his scorching ray.  The puzzle box!  Shroktath had seen and avoided it on the Cygnet Terrace. During the final battle I remembered when my whole crew was torn apart by chains, my one success was to destroy it before my own death.  I took aim at it (again? for the first time?) and hesitated ever so briefly.  It was not to guarantee a good shot; my right eye did that.  I thought for the slimmest of an instant that I might forever be in a loop destroying this object.  As it shattered, we immediately found Charlotte; breathing her last, a victim of torture and chains.  Shroktath reached her first and for just an instant the space filled with light.  It was the light of his faith in the crew from Hieroneous and it was enough to save Charlotte.

[Placeholder: image, goblin with foot on skull]

We took her and Blaine to our sickbay and Alexsis worked to heal them further.  We ignored the ongoing brawl between Connor and Glenn.  We would sort the consequences of that out later.  We went to the helm and examined the puzzle box in detail.  The foul creature involved was a Kyton:  a deeply evil creature of limitless depravity.   It was the key to this crisis.  We then came up with a plan.  Over the course of the next week, we explored the Anomaly.  It always felt like we were on the edge of tomorrow.  Examining our library and exploring the Anomaly, we found six other ships.  It was a joyful time since I could distract myself with talk of arcana, time and Wildspace that then turned into exploration.  I could see that Armaily islander Chenwulf in my mind’s eye laughing at sailing the winds of heaven. We learned and quantified the horror and madness around us.  It was like a surgeon using science to cleanse an infection.  My stomach felt better even if the rock was still around my neck.  On Dakarday of Clairweek, we decided that to close the Anomaly, we needed more information from one of the fouled Inordinate Amounts.  As we approached, Basile collapsed and we saw that it was covered in traps.  When we boarded, Shroktath and I were injured by one while, up in the sails, a pitiful copy of Basile watched on.  This sole survivor of that copy of the Inordinate Amount had survived by his wits.  His spirit was broken and he was starving but we were able eventually to communicate with him.  On the 170th Day of our journey, we took on this newest crewmember to our ship and watched as the Anomaly collapsed into nothing.

Would you rather? Not my favourite of the goblin games. Not my favourite way to be woken up. Especially not this time, for some reason. Weird. Would we rather sleep or go see Shilyn about some problem on the bridge. Why are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck? Why do I feel a gnawing in my guts?

We all start bleary-eyed shuffling towards the bridge… except not Luckums. What the hells. That ain’t like her. So we go to her cabin, and she’s lying stiff as a board, staring up wide-eyed at the ceiling of her cabin, and blabbering on something that sounds like a nightmare. I’ve never seen her like this before. I place a hand on her shoulder and listen, but it’s freaking me out. “We’ve been here before.” “The ship is in danger.” “The creatures come out of the ship.” Why was this making me angry? I swallowed hard and brought Luckums some of her writing stuff so she could write it down. It seemed to be what she wanted. Basile starts getting involved and talking about… Weird shit. Time magic and disruptions. It was frustrating trying to follow those big brains. I looked over at Khalid at one point, and I could tell he felt the same. But they eventually got it through my thick head.

The ship was in danger. We were caught in some sort of loop in time that always ended in our ship’s destruction. Apparently we’d run into the wreckage of a number of our ships before. The theory was that Connor had stolen some sort of shard from the time ball the goblins had run into during their adventure on the Asteroid that we ran into a while back. He’d snuck it with him, and was going to give it to Shannon Two (One? Fuck) as a way to ask her out. But he hadn’t found the nerve, and so we had to get him to ask her out?

Okay.

We called the crew up on deck, but not everyone showed up. Charlotte, Blaine, Coalman, Lewis, and Connor were M.I.A. It didn’t take long for Basile, Khalid and I to round up everyone except Charlotte & Blaine. We’d covered nearly the entire ship, and the only thing left were the pipes running down the center of the ship. Great.

We open up the forehatch, and I’m pretty useless, as I can barely fit in. Basile and Khalid start to climb in, Khalid sets off some magic illumination, and there are sounds of movement… something’s wrong. I can feel it. I can feel it? I can feel something’s wrong with Basile. I can hear Khalid trying to reassure him, and casting some sort of protective spell. Something strange happened. I’ve been feeling a bit different since the Cygnet Terrace. More alive? Almost jittery? Happy? But I felt that energy move in me as Khalid cast the spell, and I closed my eyes and it’s like I felt my soul tap into the energy of Khalid’s spell and amplify it, and deepen the protection of poor Basile. I hope it helped.

Anyways, the two of them were in the pipes. I’m hearing sounds and movement, and I can’t do anything. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I head to the afthatch. I open it up, poke my head in, and find there’s blood leading in a trail down the pipe even farther away from my mates. Luckums is on her way, but I can’t wait. I try to get down the pipe to follow the blood, and I get stuck like a gujamellon seed in a thrustle’s neck! Thankfully Luckums arrived. I heard sounds of a commotion, a flash of light, and I’m helpless. Useless. Grrrr.

Luckums cast a spell that shrank me, and together we followed the blood trail to its source - what was left of Charlotte. One of these damned Kytons had gotten her bad. Big hole in her chest, chains wriggling about. I could sense she was breathing her last, and my heart went out to her. Almost literally, my heart went out to her. I was overcome with my feelings. The love I have for our crew, my comrades; the pride in how we’ve grown and the challenges we’ve overcome. I remembered Luckums’ fierceness in the face of our dead comrades back in the battle of Avigail.

Charlotte was not going to die. I was sure of it. I closed my eyes, reached out my hand to touch Charlotte, and I felt a warmth move through me. Strangest damn thing. I looked up to see Charlotte gasp, the wound closed, blackened pieces of chains scattered uselessly about. I looked down at my hand and it was glowing! I felt good, like this was all as it was meant to be. Something really had changed in me. But it also kind of scared the shit out of me.

We worked the problem. Well mostly the others, but I tried to help as best I could. We figured it out. The shard was the centre of the time loop-thing, but the destroyed ships, that was something else - these Kyton monsters. Somehow one had gotten onto the ship from the Cygnet Terrace. Every time the ship was being destroyed, Connor somehow made his way to the helm, and in a last desperate attempt, touched the time crystal to the power of the helm and… kaboom! Time loop. And one more destroyed version of the Inordinate Amount floating about through Wildspace. I guess they figured that we’d broken the cycle this last time by beating the Kytons before they could get going (thank the gods), and that the time bubble thing was collapsing for good. In a few days, we’d either be winked out of being or time would unite again in us. Not much we could do either way.

One more thing. We found one more wreck of the Inordinate Amount, different again. This one had traps laid out all over it. Tricky, nasty traps, like the kind that Basile can make, and as we approached he started to feel pukey, edgy. I could feel it coming off him, though he pulled himself together pretty well. And then - so weird - we met Basile. Basile two? Another version of Basile anyway who’d been holed up on this version of the Inordinate Amount for months, slowly defeating the Kytons. The victory had clearly come at a cost. Basile 2 looked wild, haunted. And you could tell that both Basiles were not dealing with this well - looking green, almost disgusted by the presence of the other. Well, what the hells? I wasn’t about to abandon any Basile. Back to our ship we went, but we had to keep the two Basiles separate, and await the collapse of the time bubble when things would either return to some version of normal or we would vanish from existence.

[Placeholder: images of Basile's journal]