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itsbenedict · 2 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 29

Questgivers

A conwoman disguised as a noble and the delegation of university students studying her have arrived in the jungle city of Thunderbrush, ruled by ancient dryads and organized crime. Will they manage to stay uninvolved in shady conspiracies? (No.)

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party got back together after brief encounter with Greg, one of Oliver's friends and secretly an Ashtray informant. They promised Greg they'd meet up with him later to try and clear things up with the Ashtray (so there's no manhunt for an evil vampire lord), and then went to fill Tonnera in on what they'd discovered.

The next step is to kill two birds with one stone- clear things up with the Ashtray as promised, and use their deal with the mysterious bird conspiracy to spy on the dead drop location and follow the conspirators back to their base. Cue Mission Impossible theme.

So, to review:

The Ashtray were spotted going in and out of Dead Jane's territory, which was weird because it was a desolate field of death radiation.

It turned out they'd been sent there to extract a large volume of "black mana" from a device deep underground, and put it in crates.

Once they had the crates full of black mana, they were supposed to leave them at a dead-drop location to be picked up.

The party defeated the Ashtray and took the crates and mana for themselves, scaring the bajeezus out of them.

The party remanded the crates of mana to the Ecumene of Joy, in exchange for assistance with their resurrection-rescue op.

The party still technically owns most of this mana, but must clear its use with the ecumene first.

So there's a few moving parts to this scheme. First... they don't want to actually let the badguys have the crates of death essence. It's valuable! And dangerous! They want to fake it, instead. It's all in these big crates, so they can fill those with fake black mana, right?

So, to review (again):

Black mana is a normally-intangible non-newtonian fluid, which "splashes up" from the extradimensional Thanatic Sea when something dies and falls into it.

Black mana has physical weight- it's about as heavy and dense as blood, and is naturally pulled both down by gravity, and "downwards" towards the Sea by a force equivalent to gravity.

Black mana sticks to dead matter.

Black mana can also be manipulated via arcane magic- spells crafted with epistomantic symbols, like any other branch of arcane magic. Magic can be applied to physically move it, or to change its viscosity and other properties. This is called "necromancy".

When dangling "down" Seawards, black mana is invisible.

Black mana storage involves filling a weight-bearing structure with dead material for the mana to adhere to. The crates are not fully hollow, but are crisscrossed with support beams for the mana to stick to.

So... these facts immediately rule out a subset of plans. They can't just deliver empty crates- they'll notice the weight is off. They can't hide inside the crates- there's no room. They can't fill them with fake black mana with pneumancy- if anyone opens them to check, they'll be able to tell because it's not intangible to the living like the real stuff.

Ultimately, the plan is... they'll take the crates, fill them with fake pneumantic liquid conjured by Oliver, and then apply a thin layer of the real stuff on top. If someone pops the crate and tests it, they'll find the surface passes the test. Meanwhile, Saelhen will turn invisible and just walk alongside the crates, following whoever takes them to their destination.

One other wrinkle- the Ecumene of Joy won't allow them to just take these crates and enough black mana to cover their surfaces totally unsupervised. They need an escort from the ecumene to keep an eye on them- but luckily, they've got a contact. Sam Sweethoney, Oliver's oblivious crush who works as a tattoo artist and helped with the vampire surgery earlier. Technically a cleric of Karou!

So. Before the party can pull this plan off, they first need to get the Ashtray's cooperation. Remember- they think Looseleaf is an evil necromancer who just raised a vampire army and is trying to take over the city! And they're the only ones who know where the dead drop is supposed to happen.

So, the plan is... Saelhen, in her guise as Sumiko Doe, will go back to the Ashtray's territory and test the waters. Or the fires, as the case may be. Get him thinking about how maybe the birds aren't trustworthy, so if Looseleaf suggest the same, they might be on the same page. Then, she'll discreetly drop one of Looseleaf's enchanted telepathy coins on Will-O's floor, and Looseleaf can have a sort of phone call with him.

Before that, though... Tonnera notices that Saelhen's bracer has an arrow coming out of it that keeps pointing at her ground floor. What's with that?

Oh! Right! Technically the entire reason they're here! That is, Provost Hamori Los of Blacksky University sent them to research the bracer!

The party explains the situation- and Tonnera asks them where, specifically, the original "portal to infinite bats" incident took place, on a map. Apparently, Yoshimimoto Plaza, the site of the incident, used to be the site of a place called the Yoshi Link Temple 273 years ago, and the arrow is currently pointing at a plaza inside her trunk where she used to house a Link Temple- the transit gates through which the cities of the world used to be connected before teleportation magic died.

The party makes their pitch- it's possible that the bracer could reopen the teleport gates, which would be beneficial to Tonnera for a number of ways. She zones out and starts having a bunch of conversations with people elsewhere, and...

Okay, so now, officially, the quest is "stop the conspiracy/civil war type stuff, and you can continue the bracer questline if you want". That was basically the assumption, but now we have it from the questgiver's mouth. Great!

Quest 1/3 obtained.

With that, they proceed to deal with Will-O. Saelhen dons her disguise, and goes to report in as Sumiko Doe. She meets up with Will-O, and starts planting the seeds of doubt.

Saelhen also pitches the "use the dead drop to figure out who we're really working for" idea- which he's receptive to, but there's a couple problems.

The crates got stolen! How are they going to get them back?

How are they going to follow whoever-it-is unnoticed?

Saelhen chooses to confess her bracer powers, and demonstrates her invisibility. Only... she rolls a mixed success. When she does so, she rolls a d100 on a big table of things-that-can-go-wrong-with-bracer-invisibility. In this case, she rolls an 8. More extreme outcomes on either end have different sorts of results- and this one's bad.

She's lost time- it's as if she spent hours, if not days, lost in the abyss. Her fingernails have grown to jagged points, she's dirty and starving and exhausted, and her mouth is full of weird black sand.

That's kinda fucked! She's going to go take a shower afterwards, and get some sugar in her system, before rounding up some kids to find some appropriate fake crates for the dead-drop idea. She asks if they've got candy- both to bribe the kids and to sate her hunger- and Will-O directs her to a secret stash in his basement.

While there, she surreptitiously drops a coin on the floor.

The conversation continues in this vein for a while- Will-O doesn't like being made to feel stupid, and Looseleaf offering perfectly reasonable explanation after perfectly reasonable explanation for her actions sure makes him feel stupid. The bonfire at the top of his stump flares violently, and the more he fails to get a word in edgewise, the angrier he gets. Looseleaf rolls Find the Right Words, and pivots to try to make him feel more in control of the situation. Gives him another target for his ire.

Quest 2/3 obtained.

Meanwhile... Oliver has headed back to Thunderbrush Metropolitan University to report into Evelyn- who, if you'll recall, has prevailed upon him to spy on the party for her on the basis that it's weird that they got mixed up with the Sounds earlier.

He recaps the situation, and tries to argue that the party are probably on the level, and not spies or gangsters or secret Kanzentokai assassins or anything. And he... confesses that he lied, earlier, about the Sounds attacking them totally unprovoked. Describes the situation with Dall and Gelly, and the shakedown thugs attacking.

Oliver, missing her subtext, jokes about her being a big ol' softie and goes on to tell her all about the Dead Jane adventure.

Evelyn is particularly keen on hearing him tell her about spirit magic- especially once she hears that Jane's death field situation was powered by it. She presses him to spill the beans- and then asks if Jane left behind notes.

An agreement is reached- if Oliver can find and bring back Dead Jane's notes on spirit magic for her, she'll tell him what she knows about spirit magic, and how it connects to her ghost dryad immortality. Oliver rolls Something's Fishy to see if she's hiding something sinister, here. With a 33...

Oliver also lets slip everything about Saelhen's bracer, reconnecting teleport gates, and turning invisible by slipping into a nightmare dimension. Probably Evelyn can be trusted with this info and nothing bad will happen as a consequence.

Anyway, all he's gotta do is go pick up some notes from a place that's been cleared out and is no longer dangerous! What could go wrong?

Quest 3/3 obtained.

Next time: the sting operation commences!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 3 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 28

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, Saelhen went undercover and interviewed various conspiracy members, and Looseleaf and Oliver conducted a huge search-and-rescue operation that left them totally exhausted. Having finally had a moment to rest at Oliver's mom's house, it's time for them to head to Tonnera Mighty herself, and inform her about the attempt on her life.

The Ashtray, in response to "Sumiko Doe"'s cover story, have called together a team of ragtag vampire slayers from their ranks and the Sounds'. The very next morning, they move out to Dead Jane in force.

On top of the disappearance of the corpses, it seems the slow unavoidable death field surrounding Jane is gone- stolen by the vampire lord, no doubt!

Saelhen attempts to parlay this totally unexpected disaster oh nooooo into contact information for their conspiracy's ringleaders... but they don't have any. The birds in question show up to negotiate and give orders whenever they feel like it.

With the failure of this operation, though, they're forced to mobilize- Red draws pretty-good likenesses of the party, and starts distributing them to be turned into wanted posters. The city's whole underground (metaphorically- the actual underground is largely uninvolved) is about to be on a massive manhunt for Dark Lady LuSleeve and her army of vampires.

Saelhen, of course, relays this development to Looseleaf and Oliver via telepathy, who've just woken up and started eating breakfast at the Selby plantation. Concerning news! Saelhen starts hoofing it over to their location to unsplit the party.

But Looseleaf is undaunted. She's ready to take action against the Gentle Chains, the slaver gang that Cabana Jim and Miriko used to do business with.

Miriko tells her her best bet for widely disseminating information is the Bird's-Eye View- but she recalls that the editor there, Verda Glye, seemed to already know they were slavers, and hadn't yet broken the story. Their next best bet- beyond hoofing it to the main temples of every ecumene and reporting one-by-one- is to get in touch with Tonnera Mighty herself, whose diary/blog/newspaper gets enough eyeballs on it to ensure the story won't get buried.

Meanwhile, Oliver is filling his mom in on everything that he's been up to lately.

Great! Except, rather than sensible advice, Grace Selby's reaction to being told that her son has been fighting gangs and doing vampire surgery and raising the dead and uncovering an assassination plot... is to bluescreen.

Her advice, such as it is, is to go and tell his father about all this, and then stop being involved in something so dangerous as soon as it's been put into the hands of the proper authorities. This more or less lines up with what the party wanted to do anyway- so it's off to town to talk to a tree.

On their way out the door, they run into a friend who recently came running from the Ashtray.

No, not Saelhen! It's that weirdly-tall goblin informant who was at Will-O's Ashtray meeting!

One of Oliver's "Eg gang"- there's Oliver (powder-Keg), Begg, Meg, Egg, and Greg. Bosom chums, fond of pranking Tonnera and blowing shit up. Greg always had a tendency to mysteriously disappear without warning- and it turns out that's due to his many part-time jobs serving as an informant for various informant-needers.

Greg is in a state of panic, because his friend Keg is standing right next to the EVIL MOTH NECROMANCER who they're all searching for. He's a pretty trusting guy, though, and Oliver is able to persuade him that, no, he hasn't been brainwashed or vampirized, and that this was all a misunderstanding. He's very forthright with him- to the point of blowing Saelhen's cover, even, whoops. But he's willing to keep that a secret- and later, escort them to the Ashtray to explain themselves.

But first, they've got a date with a date. Palm. Actually Tonnera isn't a date palm. I dunno, tree jokes are hard.

Looseleaf gives Greg a soul-linked coin to contact him with later (he panics, on trying it out, because apparently he's bad at telepathy). They finally meet up with Saelhen and head into the city center, to talk to Tonnera and Oliver's dad, Basil Highhollow.

They head inside and find Tonnera. Several of her, actually. She's enormous, and capable of sustaining multiple projections of herself for hundreds of parallel conversations. It makes her distractible, but great at multitasking. They flag down the nearest one, and Oliver casually strikes up a chat.

(See that there? That's what we call "Not Foreshadowing". Don't even worry about it.)

Oyobi introduces herself, pulling her usual elven impropriety shtick:

Oliver says he wants to have this conversation with his dad present, so Tonnera directs them up to the 18th floor, where he's busy working on the HVAC for the Sky Hotel. They go up in a fancy basket, which ascends and descends the wall via a strip of branches on the wall which alternate up and down like light-switches to hook onto loops in the basket and lift and lower things.

He brushes off the indignant hotel owner (one Ileron Lowbough) to make time for his son's visit. He also suspects this is a prank, but Oliver drops an F-bomb to convince him he's serious. Oh dang!!!

Looseleaf, tired of pleasantries, just puts her moth claw to the wall (made of Tonnera) and initiates telepathic contact.

Oh! Oh she is very alarmed by that.

They begin to explain- but first, they're a little worried about potentially sending a giant on a murderous vengeance rampage against some people who might not even be all that culpable. Saelhen pleads for clemency, and tries to convince her to take things slow and investigate properly.

Oliver succeeds and is pretty sure of the former- Tonnera's always taken his many pranks in stride, and is aware that great power means great responsibility. While she's very invested in not being assassinated, she's not the type to flip out and start exploding the ground beneath people on a whim.

Looseleaf tells her about the gangs involved, which helps clarify a few things. In particular, Tonnera is surprised that the Gentle Chains are slavers. She thought they were just art thieves! She wants to see Looseleaf's proof- and Looseleaf's proof is mainly based on conversations with Miriko on the subject. Miriko, who wants to sell her the information for 2400 gold.

I do my best to sow doubt, but the party's conclusion is ultimately that they don't think Miriko could've faked that encounter with Jess Chainer when they entered the city. Sure, Miriko can hypnotize people with vampire mind whammy powers- but they ran into Chainer like immediately after getting off the boat, with no time for Miriko to sneak off and hypnotize someone into helping with a cover story. And as long as it's impossible for her to have contacted a confederate to play that role in advance, there's no chance it could've been a setup.

Looseleaf, then, goes on to tell Tonnera about the rest of the plan they've discovered.

In conveying how they know about all that, it comes up that Looseleaf is a practitioner of spirit magic- a subject of as much immediate interest to Oliver's dad as it was to Oliver.

While Oliver shows his dad the disinfecting pendant with Jane's Death inside, and they nerd out together, Saelhen and Looseleaf put together a plan for next steps.

See, while with the Ashtray, Saelhen learned that the birds had specified a dead drop location for the black mana crates, if they managed to fill them up and extract them from Jane. Saelhen proposes a sting operation- take those crates, deliver them to the dead drop location alongside the Ashtray, and see who comes to pick them up. They've even got the black mana, to help sell the illusion, if the Ecumene of Joy will permit it.

It sounds like a plan is coming together- next time, we'll see how they execute on it. Looseleaf and Saelhen are going to need to make peace with Will-O, and Oliver is going to report into Evelyn, the school dryad, about the situation.

#twofaced jewel #tfj log

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itsbenedict · 6 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 27

Undercover & Dead Recovered

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, Looseleaf and Oliver recruited the Ecumene of Joy to help with the search-and-rescue operation of the soul-tethered inhabitants of Dead Jane, while Saelhen went undercover with the Ashtray to dig up dirt on the conspiracy to attack the school. Now it's time to execute on that operation- and start talking to the Ashtray's various allies- though "allies" is a strong word for it, it turns out.

Bishop Regretless sends Looseleaf and Oliver back to Dead Jane with a couple of clerics in tow to secure and disinfect the scene, while he works on organizing a task force of clerics to come in and do the heavy lifting. They get back to find that Say and Busy-Hands were able to get the black mana pump working, and... there's some complications with their plan to move it.

Looseleaf's original plan was to just stick the stuff to a dead rat using the same "tether" approach used for all these corpses- but as it turns out, death essence is heavy. It has physical mass, and there's 400 gallons of the stuff. It's self-adhesive to an extent, but it wouldn't be able to hold its own weight if suspended from a rat.

Luckily, they've got these mysterious crates the Ashtray brought, and... it turns out they're full of honeycomb latticework which itself is full of dead bugs. Takes a corpse to stick black mana in place! That's why the pump was made out of wood, specifically Dead Jane's body, so it could physically interact with the stuff at all. The crates presents a large surface area to attach the black mana to, but... well, moving it that way, there's no hiding it from the clerics.

Looseleaf's call here is to... just not hide anything, at all. What would they even do with a massive amount of black mana? The clerics should take care of that stuff- she's not planning to, like, raise a vampire army or anything. They can just have it!

Honesty ends up being a pretty good policy, once Bishop Regretless gets back and Karou can sit down for negotiations. His call is that the party can have half the black mana, but it'll be held in trust by the Ecumene of Joy, to be withdrawn under supervision if they really need it for some reason. They basically open up a bank account for it, and they agree to pay them a decent fraction of the going rate for the amount that the church takes for themselves. Karou doesn't want to disincentivize people to be honest with him!

And this deal ends up being pretty spicy, because they discover a massive amount of black mana, not just the 400 gallons or so from the spell array. They discover Dead Jane's own tether- snapped, but still huge enough that you could use the leftovers to resurrect like thirty people!

This is horrifying to the clerics.

Why? Well, normally, they get this stuff from special adventurers with church ties, who have equipment for harvesting the thanatic splashes when they go out and kill monsters and their souls fall into the thanatic sea. But you get a lot more of the stuff when people die than when monsters die, so there's some nasty incentives for thanergy farmers. Only takes a few human sacrifices to resurrect someone, compared to months of monster-slaying or years of passive swamp-tapping.

And this is a ridiculous amount of the stuff. Like, equivalent to thousands of people dying. And Curly Fry, conveniently, has careful records detailing exactly where they got it from:

From the Mementos, piecemeal, over the span of years, at a truly exorbitant cost that frustrated her to no end when Jane refused to explain the justification for those backbreaking line items and could not estimate any sort of ROI.

Still! Not the party's problem! The ecumene is going to look into their supplier's potential indiscretions. In the meantime, the party's cut is worth 18,000 gold, which is like, house-buying money. A gold is like, ten bucks in this setting's economy. The party is pretty dang loaded, now!

In the course of negotiating this deal, a few bits of trivia about the gods come up, which I should probably note here for the sake of reminder even though they're not directly relevant:

Gods don't fully inhabit their clerics- a channeling cleric only knows what they know, plus a comparatively small payload of memory and crucial divine information. Anything extra they know on top of their host must be extremely crucial info they can't afford to not know.

Karou has consistently recognized Looseleaf and Saelhen across different clerics. Hmmmmmmm.

"Divine avatars" exist- or existed, as a matter of history. Artificial people with a minimum of personality, designed for gods to inhabit as fully as possible as sort of self-inserts for extended meddling in the mortal world.

Divine artifacts, such as the bracer, were created in the bygone times of avatars as crutches and tools for the work of creation, or for convenience in the time the gods walked the Jewel to go on adventures when they weren't bored of the place yet.

Resurrection needs to be performed through the church because souls in afterlives are generally happy, and ripping them out without their consent is usually bad. Gods can negotiate these things directly, and trying to go around them is risky.

...According to Karou. Apparently different deities have completely different stories of why nonclerical resurrection is verboten, and it's not clear whether Karou's telling the truth.

In the course of all this resurrection and necromancy work, Looseleaf and Oliver gain some new abilities!

Oliver has a cool idea- you could route drinking water through a field of Jane's Death, sterilizing it by killing the microbes inside! Hook that up to the city's water system, and eliminate waterborne illness! That's a pretty cool idea! Except it's politically impossible for reasons the party doesn't know about yet! Whoops!!!!

Still, it's a useful way to sterilize and clean stuff otherwise, and he'll be putting that to some good use later.

It's time to start the actual recovery operation- but before that, let's see how Saelhen's doing!

First off, she goes out with Zeego to talk to the Sounds, Fallen's gang. And it turns out... they, uh, had no idea about these black mana boxes or the Dead Jane job. They just kind of assumed, because Fallen is the one who's big into stopping Tonnera and has the resources for this kind of thing.

She gets them to explain how they got caught up in the conspiracy- apparently, a bird showed up and told them that the Owls would be easing off on their attacks, and that they'd be working together to take down Tonnera. After comparing notes, they have what they believe to be a complete list of everyone known to be involved in the alliance! Score!

Fallen and the Sounds

Acacia and the Owls

Dionysia and the Oaken Casket

Naberia and the Lichen

Kudzu and the Gentle Chains

Redmaple and the Saplings

Will-O and the Ashtray

And who's not involved, because they refused or weren't trusted with secrets:

Comare and the Green Hats

Philia and the House

Sycamori and the Mementos

Ana and the Watchwood

And who the birds are reaching out to but haven't decided yet:

Manga Love and the Jumoku Jaguars

Dogwood and the Underdogs

Roselei and the Thorns

And who're complete ciphers, because no one's seen anyone contacting them for this stuff:

Coco and the Beech Boys

Danger Danger Danger

Ivy

Sawdust

Saelhen gets the down-low on those last three from Zeego:

Ivy is the dryad who grew into the wall and was imprisoned and experimented on by the city guard to try to find a way to kill her. No one's heard from her in years and they suspect the city guard succeeded.

Danger Danger Danger lives outside the walls- she runs an emergency safehouse/neutral zone where you can pay for protection if you need to disappear or lay low when you get in big trouble in the city. She has a small informal gang of total outcasts, and a larger force of jungle animals and monsters she's somehow enthralled into her service.

Sawdust- it's not her name, it's just what everyone calls her because that's what she'll be if anyone ever gets their hands on her. Apparently- and Zeego doesn't know the specifics- Sawdust did something to sell out Ivy to the city guard, told them some sort of secret or gave them a magic thing or whatever that allowed her to be subdued. He doesn't know the history there, but he knows the only reason she's not dead is a) ghost dryads are hard to kill, and b) she lives out in the jungle beyond the walls, where no one's super interested in going out there to try it.

Intel obtained, the Ashtray also secures the Sounds' agreement to assist with stopping Dark Lady LuSleeve and her vampire army. They apparently have a blackmailed cleric, some stake-launching devices, and a vampire of their own to help counteract domination. All useful for this fight that will definitely happen!

Next up... it's time to visit the Lichen. Who are... less friendly.

Saelhen, unfortunately, immediately gets recognized by one of the goons that jumped them when they first arrived in town, threatening to blow her cover instantly. She attempts to use her makeup kit to disguise herself, but...

...huh. It's running low on makeup for some reason and she needs to buy more. That's probably not related to anything.

Saelhen is a good liar, and manages to at least convince everyone else that this guy is racist and thinks all elves look the same, even though he's still convinced he knows her, and demands to know where she took Rundum.

(This was a while back, but after the party trounced these guys initially, one tried to run- only to get pulled into an alley and kidnapped by some shadowy figure. Wonder what was up with that! I think the players still haven't connected the dots there, actually...)

Eventually Naberia shows up, and she... is a mess. She's acting, like, drunk, though you don't know what ghost dryads can get drunk on. She's loud and angry and half of what she says doesn't make sense. She makes implausible threats at random, verbally abuses her gang members, and more than once orders them to attack Saelhen before telling them to stop what do you think you're doing you idiots. She seems to take a weird, sadistic glee in jerking their chains and hers.

Eventually Zeego gets sick of this and they rough them up and make some threats- but as they're leaving, Saelhen catches one of the defeated Lichen signing something at her in Thieves' Cant.

The only intel they really get from all this- besides Naberia's weird and erratic behavior- is that the means by which these cloaked avians control the different gangs vary. They're not all on the same page, and they're being fed different info and different stories about why they should cooperate and what the goal is. The whole thing seems a lot more rickety than it first appeared.

Lastly, Saelhen meets up with Red and goes to visit Dionysia, dryad of the Oaken Casket.

Dionysia is a font of pretty nice wine, and not a font of information. Apparently her gang- which mostly just deals in smuggling booze and party drugs to people whose ecumenes forbid that sort of thing- was already planning to put on a big exciting concert on Saturday, and the bird who contacted her was just like... weirdly interested in that? And just said, okay, your mission is do that thing you were already going to do, and in exchange we'll have the other members of the conspiracy not attack you for a while. And she was like... okay, cool! Sounds good! Why not?

Saelhen heroically resists peer pressure to do Drugs while on the job, after being offered some- but she does get some really nice wine! Dionysia apparently ages it in casks of her own flesh! Total control and monitoring over the conditions, for the perfect end result! Not gross!

After that, Saelhen goes to the store and replenishes her makeup kit, a detail that is probably unimportant.

Anyway! Looseleaf and Oliver were going to resurrect a bunch of people! How's that go?

Well, first, they have an 87% success rate on resurrections- they do lose a few because this is delicate work and the souls holding onto the tethers sometimes don't react well to being pulled back up. Considering how precarious it is, 87% is pretty good! They save 79 of 91 intact corpses- and it's exhausting. It takes all day and an extreme exertion of magical power. Whoof.

It's also exhausting emotionally.

You spend the day bringing people back from the dead- and you notice the pattern of it. These are all people who had some attachment to life so strong, something they couldn't allow themselves to let go of, that they held tight to a tether of mana for over a hundred years. They cared about something in life- and most of what constituted their life is now gone.

They also run into... one person who comes back nonverbal and laughing uncontrollably. Karou is able to determine that... her tether had her dangling into his afterlife, which accidentally wireheaded her since the background radiation of pure painless bliss has deleterious effects when you're there by accident and you're not being carefully paced on the hedonic treadmill. They end up killing her and letting her go back, to be tended to by Karou directly. Eesh.

...Also, you can apparently physically dangle into afterlives by a necromantic thread. Is a thing. That's a little weird.

After a fraught and exhausting day of tampering with the forces of life and death, it's time to go home for the night. Specifically, Oliver has a house, and he brings Looseleaf and Oyobi over to stay the night.

Whew! Okay!

After all that... next time, we're finally going to actually meet Tonnera Mighty, the ruler of the city who this conspiracy was formed to depose! She should... probably know about some of this stuff!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel #this one's long because the session itself WAS a recap basically #we zoomed out a bit to handle all the resurrection logistics and mafia hobnobbing quickly

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itsbenedict · 7 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 26

Dark Lady LuSleeve's Evil Vampire Army

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, Saelhen infiltrated the Ashtray (which wasn't hard because they didn't suspect or scrutinize her in any way), and got the lay of the land. She's now been invited to a secret powwow of Will-O's inner circle, to discuss what to do about the evil moth necromancer who foiled their plans, and organize some sort of operation to stop her from taking over the city.

Meanwhile, the evil moth necromancer and her half-halfling wizard minion have gone off to the Ecumene of Joy to plan a... humanitarian rescue operation. Hopefully these two planning sessions don't cause any trouble for each other!

First off... Looseleaf and Oliver, with Lydia captive, head to the city's main Temple of Joy to deal with the whole "there's a ton of dead people with their souls dangling from tethers in this dead Stump" situation. Looseleaf and Oliver know enough necromancy to pull people up, but doing that for dozens of people and actually healing their bodies afterwards is a little too big of a lift for them to do. They need a small army of clerics- so they go to where a small army of clerics is.

The temple of Karou sits by the riverbank, a short distance from the Ankle Bracelet- the largest and most opulently-decorated bridge in Thunderbrush, connecting the well-to-do residential district to the city center. It finds its place amidst a part of the city in which you haven't spent much time- a dreamlike corridor of elaborate garden-work and lush architecture. In contrast to the crowded port, the eclectic university, the wilds of the Stumps, or the perpetually-under-construction Welcoming Trails, this part of the city seems to have been optimized for beauty. It's a slice of utopian solarpunk stabbed awkwardly into a hive of scum and villainy.

The temple's a huge entertainment center, with an open-air amphitheater, a hospital, and a pleasure house, which are all sort of the same building. They've got to push their way past the partying crowds to find, like, civil functionary types. And the civil functionary types are a little overwhelmed by all this talk about "black mana" and stuff, so they have to wait on the bishop, who's busy performing in a play.

Negotiations with Karou are a little weird. Necromancy is de facto illegal under Joy, since it's too easily used to bind and mutilate people's souls into doing your bidding and necromancers are typically bad news, but he understands the party's position and doesn't really give them a hard time about it (particularly since, like, none of them are citizens of Joy.) And also... apparently he's got connections with necromancers in town? Who he's not mad at? He gives them a couple options- either Looseleaf can personally come along to help with the necromancy, or he can tap his contacts and have them help, at the cost of them claiming a bunch of the black mana for themselves.

The other issue is what to do with the people they bring back. They're going to need to come up with a holding solution for a lot of these people, since many of them are members of an infamously territorial and rather violent gang. If Joy had such a thing as "statute of limitations", they'd be past it, but the special circumstances here mean that, yeah, a lot of these people are still going to be dangerous criminals who need to be carefully evaluated and/or rehabilitated before being released. They've got ecumenical prisons, but they're a little packed already.

Looseleaf opts to go in person, as soon as possible- and leaves the question of what to do with the Does to Karou. They remand Lydia to their custody, and gear up to head back to Dead Jane one last time.

(One last time. Right? There wouldn't be a third time.)

Meanwhile: Saelhen's got a meeting with the top.

Saelhen climbs to the top of Will-O- unlike most stumps, he was burned, not chopped down, so there's still a vertical element to his corpse. She reaches a constructed rooftop where a bunch of benches surround a "bonfire" where the tip of Will-O continually burns.

Saelhen Sumiko Doe is given the floor to explain the situation, and she recaps her supposed resurrection and impressment into the evil moth's crew. She describes her crew and their capabilities- including Oliver and his smokeless, flameless bombs that hit you with air pressure and shrapnel.

There's a weirdly tall goblin there, who reacts with some alarm to this description of the moth's "Mad Bomber", but doesn't say anything.

The Ashtray get to theorizing. This crew- maybe they're from Kanzentokai? They have a weird amount of elves with them- Miriko, Vayen, Oyobi- and they apparently picked out Sumiko, an elf, to join their crew. But the moth seemed to be in charge, not the elves, so what gives?

Saelhen's having to roll Through Your Teeth a bunch to sell her various lies, but she has some ridiculous +14 bonus to that, so she has no trouble getting them to believe her. But that doesn't stop one of them- Caria Yard- from questioning her about the glowy arrow coming out of her sleeve.

Rrrrright! Her bracer! Sumiko claims that she doesn't know what it does and just picked it up at a secondhand store, which gets a -15 penalty to the lie because it's made of stone and studded with gems and has a magic arrow coming out of it. They don't sell these things at secondhand stores.

Saelhen doubles down and spends Luck. It's elves, man! They're rich as fuck! She grew up in Kanzentokai, and even pickpocket's wages can fetch you a pretty bauble over there. They buy that story, more or less, and move on to devising an action plan.

The cleric, Sid, claims he can do up to ten anti-death-field blessings, if they paid him well enough, which puts a cap on how many people they can send to deal with the necromancer. Caria is apparently on the crew, since she knows some fire magic, and Zeego is the best muscle they've got. But as for how else to prepare... Will-O asks the goblin if he's got any more info. And... apparently this guy is pretty well-informed!

Luckily, there's a perfect patsy- Miriko. They assume Miriko is the Lady Noeru from the newspaper- she was dressed fancy enough for it, in that hotel concierge outfit of hers!

...And then, based on the fact that LuSleeve is in the news asking around about vampires, and trying to claim a large amount of black mana, the Ashtray come to the conclusion that she is trying to raise a vampire army to take over the town. And Dead Jane is full of dead bodies! Holy shit!

Huh! So an avian hired them, and they're not completely sure who they actually represent.

Since they're dealing with what might be a vampire army, they consider talking to Bettyanne Longthistle and getting her to recruit the Ecumene of Harmony to help, but... Will-O vetoes calling in the cops.

Then Saelhen brings up the possibility of dealing with vampire mind control.

Huh! I wonder why Green-Leg feels like he needs to urgently go do something when presented with the possibility of vampire mind-control! Weird.

The possibility of setting off the bomb is floated- after all, a huge amount of fire should stop a vampire army! But Saelhen talks them out of it- if they do that, they don't get paid by the bird, and also Sumiko Doe is really concerned about giving all her dead friends a proper burial. Their demolitions expert is laid up in bed now, anyway, so that's a no-go.

The direction Saelhen steers this planning session is... convincing them they need to get intel and backup before making a move. Talk to all their collaborators in this mysterious conspiracy, and scout out the enemy to be better-prepared to launch an attack to save the city from a vampire army.

It's risky, of course! Dark Lady LuSleeve might have time to raise a vampire army before they finish preparations! But it's better that than send their strongest fighters on a suicide mission and letting the city get taken over.

So, next time-

-wait, next time? Oh, this one was really short. Should I just move on to the next one?

...No, the next one is really long. Okay this one will just be short. Next time: Looseleaf and Oliver go on a resurrection spree, and Saelhen goes undercover to interrogate this Stump conspiracy from the inside!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 8 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 25

Undercover at the Soup Kitchen

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party disarmed a large bomb, and set to work trying to take apart the big magical apparatus powering the death-field whosiwhatsit surrounding Dead Jane. This being difficult, they called in some outside help, who're set to arrive soon.

While Looseleaf and Oliver work on necromantic cleanup logistics, though, Saelhen- as "Sumiko Doe"- has infiltrated the Ashtray, and needs to solidify her cover and get the lay of the land in their territory. Let's see what she's up to!

Will-O tells Saelhen they're going to have a powwow discussing what to do about the EVIL MOTH NECROMANCER later that night- so in the meantime, she's got the run of the place due to Will-O's complete lack of regard for anything resembling operational security. What's she going to do first?

She starts by asking for directions from the nearest kid- who happens to be draped motionless over a fence because he's high and sick off some kind of weird bug he found in the woods. She administers some impromptu first-aid, and with a mixed success manages to empty the contents of his stomach all over her face. Great! Gross! Grea-oss! Gro-eat?

She asks for directions, and is led meanderingly around the place. As they walk, Saelhen notices that the kid, Too-Skinny, is not unusual vis-a-vis getting high on random psychoactive jungle lifeforms- and there are very few adults around supervising this Neverland-ass delinquency zone. There's a drug problem, and a hygiene problem, and a kids-throwing-dirt-at-everyone-in-sight-constantly problem.

Too-Skinny, leads her to a farmhouse slightly less ramshackle than the other ramshackle farmhouses around, covered in rude graffiti. It's got a sigil of Ccorde over the door- which is weird, because Ccorde is the goddess of Harmony. Hyper-lawful types you wouldn't expect to find on an anarchist commune.

There's a line outside the door, made up of slightly more serious-looking kids carrying baskets of fruit and grain. She gets in line to find out what that's all about.

Meanwhile, the backup Zzaiya rustled up for Oliver and Looseleaf has arrived!

The goblin, Busy-Hands, is majoring in hydraulics, and he's excited to get his hands on this ancient magic-pump situation. He's brought a small horned lizard with him that is apparently vital to the process. The dark elf, Say, Oliver recognizes as one of his classmates- an Epistomancy specialist who doesn't talk much. (She bears an uncanny resemblance to Vayen, besides the outfit, hair, and piercings. Some relation?)

As they head underground to the pump, Say begins casting a bazillion Epistomancy spells by incantation under her breath. The party doesn't take me up on the offer to roll Epistomancy to try and decipher what she's doing, so whatever it is she's up to, she does it unopposed! I smile about this.

Once they get down to the pump, and Busy-Hands has his lizard survey the situation (to unclear effect), it's time to bust out the tools and get to work turning this pump back on. The dice on these Fiddle With It rolls are extremely kind to them (plus big bonuses from calling in specialist support), so they pretty much identify all the problems.

One is- they were missing less than they thought, earlier, when they couldn't get it to work. Turns out this pump just sucks and is very slow even if you do get it working, because it's made of wood and wood is a terrible material for pipes. Black mana only sticks to dead stuff, by default, and is otherwise intangible- so the whole pump had to be made of a substance that its fluid adheres to. It needs a large power source to force this stuff through the tubes!

They identify the missing power source, which is almost dry of mana. There's just a little bit left to tell the death spell to be "on", since epistomantic array plus mana equals spell, even if the spell itself somehow doesn't consume the mana. Hypothetically, they could turn off the death field by just draining the "make the spell be active" mana without actually extracting the death goop itself.

Problem is... again, as soon as they turn off that death field and microorganisms show up, the bodies will begin to rot. So... they're going to need a plan if they want to resurrect people here. As soon as they do it, the clock begins ticking.

...But do they want to resurrect people here? Oliver is not bullish on the idea- after all, they resurrected Lydia and she tried to blow them up, and he's not expecting the rest of this criminal gang to really be worth the trouble to save.

That's about when Curly Fry shows up and collapses to the floor, out of breath. Has she been... running around the place in the death field without healing? She was supposed to be with Orluthe, right? Regardless, Looseleaf heals her.

Oh, right- the stumps aren't just gangs. They're also landlords, with lots of residents who pay lifeforce in exchange for a dry place to live. Looseleaf and Oliver leave the TMU people to work on the pump while they do a survey of the bodies to see how many lives are at stake here, exactly.

Their stamina rolls for this exhaustive search of a bunch of underground tunnels don't go their way, but they can make some estimates.

Ultimately, their decision is... this is a bigger job than they really have the time and willpower to do. But, they don't have to do it all themselves- again, they can call in backup. In this case... they have right here a very large amount of death essence, which the ecumenes need to do resurrections and will pay through the nose for. They could use this windfall to hire a small army of clerics to come in and do the resurrections for them.

They cut the power.

So that's mostly figured out! There's some more logistics to work through, still, but while they hash those out... what's Saelhen up to?

The line's made it inside the farmhouse, and Saelhen sees a lot of kids who look bored. With abundant farmland around, it's not hard to find things that are technically edible- but if you want an actual meal, you need someone with a kitchen who can cook, and those are in short supply. So the line is long, and kids don't have a lot of patience.

She spots the head of this operation- a halfling woman wearing weird stilt-boots to tower over the kids, wearing official Harmony clerical garb denoting her rank.

Saelhen offers to help, but this woman is not about to look past the fact that Saelhen is currently covered in goblin vomit, which is bad for working in a kitchen. Saelhen tries to talk her way past this, but the woman gets distracted by more kids making a mess pretty much immediately.

She opts to demonstrate her helpfulness via some child-wrangling, surveying the situation and trying to figure out the dynamic.

The kid apologizes and gets to work- and Saelhen then makes her dex save against getting whacked on the head with a ladle, because despite being helpful she is in the kitchen while covered in goblin vomit GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT. She's directed to a hose in the back, and makes an attempt to get clean.

Still, apparently having a ruined exploded sooty dress is also not kitchen kosher. Saelhen kowtows expertly with an effusive apology and a sob story about all her friends being dead, and the woman sighs and gets her a smock to cover up with.

Having infiltrated this nerve center of the operation, Saelhen sets to work both cooking and spying, trying to get everyone's names and figure out who's important.

Bettyanne Longthistle is the cleric of Ccorde here, who set up shop specifically to try and civilize these ungovernable rapscallions who keep causing trouble. She's not really on good terms with the Ashtray, who she regards as the source of all the chaos and strife in the area. Still, she's committed to building bridges, which means her strategy for combating them is to patiently serve the community and show that Ccorde's approach is superior to theirs.

Sid deWisp, a middle-aged halfling man, is the Ashtray's cleric of Eman. He's the one that provided the blessings that let them get into Dead Jane, and seems to have showed up just to argue with Bettyanne about liberty and authoritarianism. They have some kinda weird blackrom thing going on.

Caria Yard is a human teen with more acne than face, who's been self-studying a little bit of thermomancy- making her one of the Ashtray's few mages, since magic is mostly beyond self-taught teens.

There's a few others who in retrospect didn't really matter so I'm skipping 'em.

As Saelhen schmoozes, she's interrupted by Caria running in carying a body- some kid's been stabbed, because apparently the Lichen have attacked! (The Lichen are those guys who first ambushed the party when they made land in Thunderbrush- small-time thugs.)

Saelhen then meets the goddess Ccorde face-to-face, as Bettyanne channels to heal the kid. Ccorde is happy to heal the kid, but seems unhappy with the Ashtray for failing to figure out a diplomatic solution to their tensions with the Lichen. If they're being attacked, it's because they've failed to find common ground! She's kind of a dick about it.

Saelhen offers her negotiating services as Ccorde departs, and Caria briefs her on the complex political situation:

They're dickheads

They see kids who have stuff and want to take it

So they attack them and take it

Because they are huge assholes

Saelhen suggests a show of force- but apparently that's a no-go, because the actual complex political situation is that the Lichen are supposed to be abiding by a non-aggression pact as part of the mysterious conspiracy agreement they're supposed to both be in on. Counterattacking would break the agreement, and apparently this Tonnera-stopping plan is more important than taking revenge on the Lichen right now.

Why the Lichen are breaking the pact... might have to be investigated. But next time!

#twofaced jewel #tfj log

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itsbenedict · 9 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 22

Two? You Are Like A Little Baby. Watch This:

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party finally ran into the Ashtray butts they came to investigate- and it seemed like they were there to scrape a bunch of death essence/thanergy/black mana out of some big room-sized magic spell array, and box it up for unknown purposes. After scaring the everloving piss out of some of their noncombatants, the party moved to go take on Zeego, the group's terrifying tiger-man muscle. So it's time for an epic boss fight, right?

Well. Maybe.

After Ember and Scrap-King flee topside, the party sees Miriko and Curly Fry standing at the entrance to the west hallway. Miriko's holding up a shimmering barrier to protect the two of them and Oyobi, who's firing arrows down a dark hallway at an ongoing melee between Orluthe (as the ALPHA DOOMHOUND) and Zeego.

The party prepares to deal with this. Orluthe fails a strength check to throw Zeego off, Oliver prints a pneuma-sword, Miriko takes down the barrier, Looseleaf readies to fire off Soul Rend, and--

--Saelhen rolls double twenties on an attempt to throw a knife and stun Zeego. Yes, on the heels of Oliver rolling double twenties to investigate the spirit array powering the death field. What Oliver got out of that was a new skill for scribing spirit magic arrays. What Saelhen gets out of this is...

Saelhen didn't know she knew how to do that. Something in her just knew, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Ha ha! That's weird! Weird that she knows how to do that somehow!

Everyone is pretty alarmed by Saelhen paralyzing this guy with a single nerve strike- particularly Miriko, who begins to suspect that Saelhen is secretly affiliated with the Thorns, Thunderbrush's premier shadowy cabal of assassins.

Looseleaf runs to treat Orluthe, who was down to 6HP before the rest of the party even got to the fight. Zeego was going to be a pretty fucking scary boss fight! But now he's completely immobilized.

The party moves to cleanup step, and starts healing and restraining the fatally injured foes- plus interrogating them a bit. Zeego had a couple halfling goons with him (the players never asked, but the goons did have names- Hearth, Mason, and Roland deWisp), who mostly died. The party's able to heal them just fine, though- thanks to the field here creating necromantic tethers on people, they don't need a cleric to perform a resurrection. Just grab the hanging soul and use it to heal normally!

Unfortunately, none of them know that much about the purpose of the mission. They turn to interrogating Zeego, instead.

What follows is some discussion of the politics of Thunderbrush. Tonnera Mighty, notably, is a giant tree that towers over the entire city, which means she casts a shadow. This is bad for growing crops inside city limits, and because the jungle is an untamed nightmare of dangerous wildlife that must be constantly fended off by a fortified wall, inside city limits is really the only game in town for agriculture. It's hard to feed a populous city that way! Tonnera can shift her boughs a bit to give specific areas more light, but you need to be well-connected (like Oliver's family) to have the sunlight privileges necessary for agriculture.

What this means is that there's some social stratification to the basic means of feeding yourself, here. You either need to own a fishing boat and a place to store it (and risk your life fending off aquatic monsters), own land on the productive floodplain to the north (and get sunlight favors from Tonnera), or attempt to farm in the Stump-held territory to the south, outside Tonnera's shadow (and contend with inter-mafia turf wars). Growing cycles for crops on the Jewel are considerably shorter and more productive than those on Earth, which means it's possible to sustain a city's population on less farmland than residential land, but Thunderbrush is still a place running up against its carrying capacity.

There are also other concerns with Tonnera- a high-profile incident forty years ago where she apparently massacred a student protest, dubiously in self-defense, and an "accident" where a young girl belonging to a politically vocal family was killed in a scheduled building demolition.

Zeego believes that "fire will set us free", and that destroying Tonnera will solve all of their problems. There's a few issues with that, though- chief among them that there's a whole second city in her branches. It's not clear he's thought this through all the way.

Zeego also mentions that Red, the infernal teenager, is technically "in charge" of this mission, and might know more about how the black mana relates to the overarching goal- but also threatens the party that they'll be in serious trouble with "the boss" if they hurt his kid.

Vayen and Lydia went after Red! Uh-oh!

The party heads down that third hallway, resurrect another goon, and and find...

Looseleaf cheerfully explains the situation vis-a-vis killing all their friends and resurrecting them with necromancy, and offers to sit down and talk things out. It goes swell!

They let the kid out from Vayen's fucked-up tentacle trap, and try to have a civil conversation, but they're not having it. They do let on that they know something important about the plan that the rest of the butts don't know, but getting it out of them... it's not going well. There's a long conversation attempting to reason with Red and Zeego, but the fact of the matter is that they're a couple of angry anarchist teens who see the party as a bunch of bootlickers who can't be reasoned with.

Saelhen, realizing this, decides to take another approach. She signals to the team that she should be left alone to interrogate Red, and the party obliges. Looseleaf has an inkling of what Saelhen's planning, and plays it up.

Saelhen, finally alone with Red, starts signing in Thieves' Cant- pretending to drop the mask.

Her cover story is that she's been coerced into service. Her name is Sumiko Doe, just recently resurrected by a mysterious bug necromancer and her posse of miscellaneous scary elven freaks (plus Oliver and a werewolf). She brags about how easy it was to trick them into thinking she was on their side- which she had to do, because of how scary this evil necromancer is.

Red eats this up, excited to have a kindred spirit and an ally who can help them get out of this jam. They ask if she's "with the bird". Saelhen rolls a mixed failure trying to read into this, and just gets...

Yeah, Red is spilling. And recruiting! Wants "Sumiko" to join the Ashtray, now that her gang is dead. Even volunteers some useful information- apparently they're planning to replace Tonnera, take control of her through someone else. That's what the death essence is for.

Unfortunately, that's all they know as far as details- but their dad, Will-O, should know more, if Sumiko wants to escape and come with them back to base.

They rejoin the party, considering how best to engineer this "escape" back to Will-O to get information...

...when Lydia comes up the stairs nearby. And says there's a bomb.

A bomb?!

Yeah, a bomb. A really big bomb, downstairs. And everyone needs to run for their lives right now or they'll all explode and die.

Saelhen is skeptical, and rolls Something's Fishy.

Oh boy! Well that's a problem for next session, huh?

#twofaced jewel #tfj log

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itsbenedict · 11 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 20

Dredge the Lost

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party made it through a moderately deadly wasteland of zombie parasite bugs and magical spirit deathification... into the corpse of Dead Jane, a mysterious ghost dryad mafia donna who's been killing everything within over a hundred meters of her for 102 years. Surely searching this place for criminals will be less dangerous!

They first find themselves in a hallway which has been pretty thoroughly stripped down. They aren't the first people to acquire magical protection and try to loot the place, and there's not much to find in this first floor. All that's left are things too broken to be worth stealing, like some smashed firefly lamps or furniture. A quick once-over doesn't reveal all that much, so they turn to Miriko for more information.

Not getting much from that, they check out the rooftop.

Rooftop's also pretty bare- looks like it was a garden, a hundred years ago before everything died and the place was looted.

Still nothing of value up here, so the party start getting serious. Earlier, they spotted a staircase in the floor going down, which was covered in a heavy iron grille with a padlock. Guessing that a place that was still locked after a hundred years wouldn't have been looted, they give it a shot- Saelhen popping the lock, and the party's physical fighters straining to lift the heavy and rusted grille.

On their way down, they hear a CLUNK from upstairs.

They go up to investigate, but don't see anything- the grille's still open, and they're not trapped or anything. They suspect they might be being followed, but they proceed back downstairs anyway. And at the same point on the stairs... the CLUNK again.

This time, Saelhen goes up to investigate alone, hoping to stealthily catch their pursuer off-guard. She again finds nothing... until Orluthe takes a couple steps back down the stairs, and she nearly gets pushed over by some large invisible rectangular floating object.

A little investigation later, involving a splash of ink from an inkwell and some risky climbing, they discover... hey, this is their garden box! The one they got from that vampire gardener, all the way 24 sessions ago. Apparently the way the "shrinking" works is that the "shrunken" box is an illusory projection, linked to the real box which normally floats in the air above, invisibly, just out of sight. (Since... spatiomancy no longer exists, and I needed to justify the existence of a shrinking garden box.) Mystery solved, they proceed into the basement level, leaving the box to clunk against the stairwell invisibly in a futile effort to follow behind.

Through a closed door, they find themselves in an armory, well-stocked with all sorts of conventional weapons. Anything made with wood is dried out and brittle, and anything made of metal is rusted, but it's all intact- as are, apparently, some corpses!

Looseleaf botches the roll to scan them with spirit magic, so Saelhen attempts a more manual autopsy by cutting them open. And she finds that... these corpses are infested with revenant bugs, but those bugs died somehow, leaving the bodies mostly untouched except on the inside. Gross!

After Oliver takes a pneuma blueprint of one of the armory's shields, they proceed deeper via a secret passage Oliver finds hidden under a rack of axes.

Inside is... a secret treasure room! Full of boxes of gold! Each box of gold has a label a name attached, each with the surname "Doe", followed by an amount and a brief description of the source. Some just say "won", others mention names of victims or descriptions of grifts. Each is signed off underneath by the same "Curly Fry Doe".

The party divvies up the old blood money, collectively 2400 gold. Not a bad haul!

They leave the secret room and head into what seems to be an old meeting room, with filing cabinets and a table covered in maps. There's a conure avian slumped over the table, differentiated from the other corpses by a weird distortion effect surrounding her.

Saelhen pops the file cabinets, and goes through some of these ancient documents, protected from rot by the death field, and finds a bunch of records on all the inhabitants of Jane's corpse. Names to put to the dead faces!

Looseleaf inspects the maps, which seem to describe a number of contradictory battle plans- some sort of big attack was being planned when everyone died, but it doesn't seem like they could agree on a target. She consults Miriko about them, trying to see what she can glean about who the Does- Jane's gang- were in conflict with.

The result is... the field seems very weak, being almost out of mana. It's projecting just enough of a field to protect her corpse from revenant bugs, leaving it nearly pristine- only barely different from an alive person.

All the other corpses are full of dead revenant bugs, and are of little interest, so Saelhen goes ahead and looks up this avian woman in the personnel records- a fairly new member with an exemplary combat assessment, fast-tracked to the Antler Division. One Lydia Glye, with a rough sketch matching the corpse.

Oh, sure! Why not do that last thing? They've recently learned some necromancy, after all! They carefully apply their knowledge and reel in whatever's on the other end of that tether- until it comes into contact with the body, which tries to eject it immediately. Luckily, they're holding tight enough to keep the cord from snapping- and they try again, after healing the body with Orluthe's divine magic. This time...

Lydia Glye freaks out, because from her perspective she was having a normal conversation with her gang and then suddenly everyone in the room was dead except for a bunch of strangers who appeared out of nowhere. They attempt to speedrun the exposition, which kind of overwhelms and confuses her for a bit- but she believes them, once she tries knocking on the wall and finds her boss, the dryad, isn't responding. Doesn't stop her from holding a knife up at them with practiced precision- she's ready to kill anyone at any moment if she decides she doesn't like what they're saying.

Saelhen rolls Something's Fishy to try to get a read on her motives, crits, and gets the sense that... she's not lying about being confused by all this, or being alarmed that everyone's dead... but she's also hiding something. She's worried they'll notice she's faking... something, but Saelhen has no idea what, even on a crit. She's worried this whole setup might be a trap to out her.

Lydia notices one of the nearby corpses has been cut open, and the party has to explain the whole revenant bugs situation- and Lydia, not quite trusting them, performs some sort of field autopsy on her own, to verify. Which... is not something normal that mafia thugs do! She's got some sort of medical knowledge she's not explaining.

Lydia claims she doesn't know anything about that necromantic tether on her, which Saelhen is pretty sure is true- but she does know that all of Jane's mages were busy working on some sort of secret project called the "cervix" deeper down, which she managed to learn about by tricking them into being a little more loose-lipped. It seems like she'd been doing some snooping on her own gang, prior to dying. Hm...

Also she doesn't like puns.

Lydia: "I'm holding a knife," she repeats. "I'm going to keep holding a knife." "It would be really dumb to murder someone over this." "So I shouldn't do it." Looseleaf: [I have come up with several ovary-themed puns that I refuse to make.]

Introductions are made all around once Lydia calms down, and she gives them a fake name- Erin Doe- which Saelhen immediately recognizes because she already read the dossier. (Oyobi also gives a fake name, which translates to "crotch fart", because she thinks that's funny.) Still, they agree to work together to try to find the cause of the death curse and put a stop to it. It takes some convincing to get her to let Looseleaf touch her to heal her, though.

They then proceed deeper, and find a sealed records room, which Lydia kicks down the door to. Inside, they find a corpse that Saelhen is able to identify as Curly Fry Doe, the quartermaster who originally wrote those dossier files. Her body is also intact, since the bugs couldn't get at it... and she also has the necromantic tether attached, which means the party can go ahead and pull her soul back into her body.

There's a crit 1 on the necromancy roll. At the last moment, the tether snaps- and they only have a moment to do something before the soul on the other end falls out of reach.

Looseleaf spends Luck on this last hail mary- and rolls a full success, allowing her to precisely euthanize the rat, ride its death-ejection, grab what's left of the tether, and bungee-jump into the Thanatic Sea after Curly Fry's soul.

Looseleaf returns triumphantly, with Curly Fry in tow.

With another poor innocent mafia henchman rescued, the session closes. Next time: the party finally runs into those suspicious Ashtray people they actually came in here to find!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 11 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 19

Let's Get Zombies Out Of The Way

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party made some preparations for a trip to Dead Jane's territory, a circle of land centered on a long-since-incommunicado ghost dryad who emits a field of magical murder radiation that kills everything in like a hundred meter radius. Why are they doing this? They got a hot tip from an evil vampire who works for a gang of shady mafia information brokers that said some people from a conspiracy would be there. This is a good enough reason to go on a deadly adventure!

Anyway the magical murder radiation doesn't technically kill everything, and the things it doesn't kill might also kill them, so they've got a few issues getting inside.

First things first is getting there- though it's not as difficult as their prep makes it out to be. They've got to pass through three Stumps' territories- the Green Hats, the Oaken Casket, and the Gentle Chains- but for the most part, this isn't a real obstacle. This wooded area is still part of the city, with a lot of these trees having buildings built into or on top of them, and the Stumps really only care about defending their territory from rival gangs. Civilians like the party are mostly ignored, except by the various oversized spiders and other unpleasant jungle fauna that occupy these woods. There's a risk of getting jumped, but the party's stealth more than suffices to cover the distance.

After securing a safe route, the stealthy and invisible members of the party call in their backup- mainly Orluthe and his clanky armor and heavy backpack. While they wait, Saelhen proffers AMAZING DEALS.

Saelhen happens to have right here... a jar of honey! A jar of honey containing a weird prickly vine (weird, where'd she get that from? hasn't come up before...) and a good deal of extremely deadly neurotoxin pilfered from some of the evil stuff that bit her in her bracer dimension and extracted by Looseleaf.

The deer moves with an unnatural gait- its legs don't move in sync with each other. It's like it's playing QWOP with its own body. It's pretty horrific, but not as horrific as the bevy of deer puns that happen during this brief combat encounter:

Saelhen: [I suppose it's time to get to the hart of the matter.] [Though I suppose we won't need to rack our brains for this encounter.] Oliver: [You could also stop with the puns, doe.] Saelhen: [Oyobi, I'm happy to give you free rein here, dear.] Oyobi: [Don't worry- I can... h'antler.] [Uh, him.] Saelhen: [Boo.] [Hiss.] [Pathetic.] [I no longer trust you to do incredible violence.] Oliver: [You're the one who didn't want to part with the poison without making a buck first.]

As they're dealing with this thing, Miriko shows up (she wasn't initially with the group) and helpfully informs them that this is a revenant.

Revenants are the victims of revenant bugs- colonies of tiny flat bugs that slip beneath the tissues of corpses and use them to try and kill more living things to lay offspring in and infest. They use silk strands and incredible teamwork to animate their hosts, acting as a sort of auxiliary musculoskeletal system! Nature is amazing!

Saelhen decapitates the thing with knives, which makes a zombie deer a whole lot less threatening.

With that out of the way, it's time to actually enter the zone- and as soon as Looseleaf takes her first step inside, she feels like she's dying. She can't point to specific damage being done- she just feels sick. She's queasy and her head hurts and it feels like she hasn't eaten in days.

On using her spirit magic... she's able to determine that what's happening is that her spirit has been turned into a corpse, and her body is just taking a while to catch up. There's a spiritual force being exerted on it, just like her own magic.

She's able to manually make repairs to her spirit, since the actual difference, physically, between being alive and being a corpse... not that big. The cells of her body are being screwed with just enough to make them nonfunctional, and she can put them back easily enough.

But having to constantly re-heal herself and all her teammates in this place would be a giant pain in the ass- so she tries employing her own spiritual force to push back against this effect and stop it from affecting her in the first place.

She rolls a crit fail versus the effect's crit success.

The force of it doesn't seem to be pushing as quickly as Looseleaf can, but she can't just completely repel it- she has to let it do its thing and correct the damage as it occurs. What this means is... she has to constantly heal everyone, and nobody can stray too far from Looseleaf (or Orluthe, who has divine healing available), or else they'll just run out of HP. Ouch.

A side effect of this, though, is that Looseleaf and Saelhen get to make a sort of knowledge check about another tree that might know spirit magic:

Hm! Dryads can do that, huh? That's! Concerning!

This has some pretty grim implications for how much they can trust Evelyn, one of the few ghost dryads who isn't running a crime empire- but they've got a job to do here. They've reached Dead Jane proper- and there's a bunch more revenants to contend with.

It's time for combat! We've got two revenant panthers, three revenant halflings, and a GIANT revenant spider perched up on the staircase that's been carved into one of Dead Jane's roots.

Saelhen opens by throwing knives and slicing off a revenant panther's dessicated legs, immobilizing the nearest one and functionally taking it out. Oliver pursues the same general idea, dumping a bunch of pneumantic goo on the other panther to keep it from moving temporarily (until the goo evaporates into pneuma, anyway). Big cats are definitely more dangerous than humans as zombies, right? Take them out first and don't give them a chance to attack! And don't provoke that giant spid-

Oyobi has other ideas, because she loves nothing more than Leeroy Jenkinsing at the biggest baddest monster available. She splits from the group and charges the thing to slash at its face.

Miriko uses Mirage Coordinator, which basically just means watching the battlefield and granting teammates free dodge attempts. Orluthe chops at the nearest human, and cleaves it from its neck to its waist... which doesn't kill it, because those were not the parts necessary for locomotion. It's about to counterattack... but then Vayen does something unexpected: Helping At All. He fries it with lightning.

On the enemy turn, the giant spider is about to punish Oyobi for her hubris, right?

ha ha ha no she rolls a crit success on dodge

The spider does have a second attack, though, albeit a lot less dangerous- it tramples her and pins her to the floor under its weight. Everyone takes damage from the death miasma, and then...

Well, Saelhen throws some knives, and Iska-via-Orluthe throws a divine fireball, and the spider is reduced to half health. Which... triggers a special ability!

Luckily, Oliver has the perfect solution to a swarm of tiny monster bugs: an AoE attack! His pneumantic pressure bombs make short work of the swarm of baby spiders, at the cost of dealing a little damage to Oyobi, too. He can't do that and keep up his stealth spell though, failing the roll to maintain it.

The party continues throwing damage at this spider while Oyobi tries to extricate herself, because this thing still won't fucking die aaaaaaa, but it's not enough to take it out.

not that oyobi doesn't KEEP MAKING EVERY SINGLE DODGE EVERY TIME SHE GETS ATTACKED THOUGH. the only way she's going to get hurt is if the party's least helpful party member does something about it!

The spider is finished off, and somehow Oyobi still hasn't lost all her hit points from that.

Oyobi shakily gets to her feet and limps over to Looseleaf, brushing a smoldering hair out of her eye. "Roomie," she says, "I'm invincible." Then she falls down.

The remaining halfling revenants didn't seem to aggro the party throughout all that- and the party's able to mop them up pretty effectively. Looting the corpses... they find unfamiliar antler tattoos on their necks, but the only actual loot is an ostentatious gold necklace with a picture of a cottage embossed on it. Oliver feels a vague tingle putting it on, which is scary, so he has Looseleaf scan it.

With a success... it turns out this thing was supposed to be a protective amulet of some kind, but it's apparently been damaged. Currently it's doing nothing but slowly leaking mana from its battery all over the wearer.

Oliver attempts to repair it... and fails the roll. But... there's a Luck mechanic in my new system, see. You can spend Luck before a roll for free to boost it by 10, or you can spend it after the roll to get the same boost but take a Karma, which lets me sabotage later rolls. He takes two to boost his repair attempt to a full success. So... now he has a magic amulet he can turn on to grant himself +1 Armor, which is a big deal when a baseline basic attack usually does 2. It's a little awkward, though, since it's not permeable to air and doesn't let you breathe- you have to activate it when you're expecting to get hit and hold your breath.

...Unfortunately, the amulet repels physical blows, and doesn't do jack shit against the magic death field, which is probably part of why it was found being worn by a shambling corpse. Whoops!

Still, they've made it to Dead Jane in one piece, more or less- next time, they'll be exploring the ruins of a 102-year-old mafia hideout in search of loot, magical lore, and criminal conspirators.

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 11 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 18

To Foil a Grave Heist

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party went to investigate the crime scene where Zzaiya's divine-energy-jamming orb thingy was stolen... but the investigation was inconclusive. And there are more pressing matters: a conspiracy is afoot between various ghost dryad mafia families, one of whom has been sent by the heads of the conspiracy to do... something, inside Dead Jane's territory.

Who's Dead Jane? Well, she's dead. Like, more dead than ghost dryads usually are. Like a lot more dead. Miriko will fill the party in on the details back at the boat.

Dead Jane used to be a ghost dryad like the rest... until one day, about a hundred years ago, she began emitting an instant-death kill field that killed everyone in her territory, including her entire gang and apparently her even though she was a ghost already.

Over time, the kill field has weakened, such that it's possible to venture inside briefly if you've got protection or a supply of magical healing on hand, but it's still a wasteland of unrotting ruins, populated by "revenant bugs" which form colonies and turn preserved corpses into zombies.

Will-O's gang, the Ashtray, has been sending people into Dead Jane's territory for reasons unknown to Miriko, apparently pursuant to some project that's made even this gaggle of belligerent teenagers call a truce with the other gangs. The same truce that involves sending slavers to attack the university. She doesn't know what they're doing down there, but the potential danger involved if they get their hands on whatever originally produced Jane's kill field... it can't be ignored.

It's a reasonable assumption- Miriko is assuming Will-O has access to a cleric who can provide some sort of divine protection against the effect.

Looseleaf asks a sensible question: how do we know that Dead Jane is actually dead?

Miriko doesn't have any maps of the interior, since the layout of a place where no one lives hasn't been a priority for her gang of information brokers- but she knows the epicenter of this effect is a couple dozen meters underground, and it's pretty typical for Stumps to have extensive underground root complexes. It's going to be a dungeon crawl.

Looseleaf assumes that the hardest part of this expedition will be crossing the gang-controlled territory between them and Dead Jane, but Miriko attempts to assuage these worries and steps on a bit of a landmine in the process.

"did you bring a lawful good kid to our secret crime war meeting??? what were you THINKING?!?"

Oliver isn't happy about the implications here, due to really hating the mafia, but Looseleaf assures him that Miriko isn't from one of the really bad ones, and while he presses X to doubt, he's willing to put that conversation aside for the moment while they have a common goal. But he and Looseleaf are definitely going to have a long conversation about this, later! Definitely! Nothing will get in the way of that!

The conversation turns to the nature of their opponent, here- who are the Ashtray, and what can they expect to be up against?

The party isn't too worried about the level of opposition they'll face, then- how dangerous could the most expendable people from an anarchist commune really be?

In putting together a team... well, there's no reason not to bring everyone. Orluthe, Oyobi, Oliver- even Vayen, creepily, offers his services, mysteriously changing his previously-stingy tune at some point. And the plan is to get moving as soon as possible- there's apparently a concert coming up during which the gangs are planning something, and they want this dealt with by then.

As Vayen opens up to helping with the mission, Oliver opts to push his luck- Vayen's very good at invisibility magic, and he'd like him to tutor him in it, to upgrade his skill. Vayen... is less interested in tutoring for free, and the best they can haggle him down to is 50 gold an hour, which is more than even a rich college student can casually throw around.

Vayen also floats the idea that Oliver's teachers should have taught him this stuff already- it's basic epistomancy- but that they must not trust their students with invisibility. Deliberately keeping them weak. It's a bit of a conspiracy theory, and Oliver (and the rest of the party, why not) rolls Read Into It to see if it's plausible, or if Vayen is just making shit up to troll them.

Hm. An ulterior motive for helping out with... a quest to stop a conspiracy whose immediate consequence is a truce that keeps the local gangs from pointless infighting? ...Naaah.

Anyway, back to specific tactics:

Looseleaf: "How many people can you keep invisibility up simultaneously on, Vayen?" Vayen: "...Without exhausting myself? One for each hand, for maybe an hour each before my mana shifted too much." "On a good day." "I'm better with myself. I know how I move." Saelhen: "...they're linked to your hands?" Vayen: "No. I need to maintain contact." Saelhen: "Ah. And we couldn't, for example, buy you something nice that exposes your shoulders or forearms, and 'hitch a ride', so to speak?" Vayen: "If I practiced channeling mana through my feet, perhaps I could raise it to four, for some sort of deranged invisible cheerleader pyramid formation." Oyobi: "I'm down for that!" Oyobi says. "I'll be on top!" Saelhen: "Someone write the cheerleader thing down." Oliver: "Wondering if I could just... use conduits." Vayen sighs. "Why is everyone stupid." Looseleaf: "It's entertaining!" Saelhen lifts a hand to conceal her smile. "My! Such honesty!" "Would you mind terribly if I said it was rather refreshing?"

As they discuss invisibility logistics, Looseleaf mentions to Vayen that she can use her spirit magic to stabilize his mana as he casts. Which he tells her is impossible, because you can't manipulate someone else's mana, period.

Except it's clearly not impossible, because that's apparently how Evelyn's magic lifeforce-draining membership tattoos work. Does that mean... she can use spirit magic, too?

On learning about this, Vayen excuses himself for unknown reasons, and naturally Saelhen turns invisible and begins stalking him.

Unfortunately, it seems like he's not speaking to anyone- just writing something, behind a closed door. She was quick enough to wedge an invisible knife in and keep it from closing, so she's able to peep...

After he finishes, he leaves the compartment, and Saelhen rolls a 49 to dodge some yo-yo tricks he subsequently does to ensure the coast is clear of invisible pursuers that he fucking knows are almost certainly on this boat because he's been adventuring with Saelhen for like forty sessions. False confidence achieved, he... holds his black paper up to the sky, pointing it at the moon, and wiggles it around at different angles. Weird!

Meanwhile, Oliver and Looseleaf are practicing this mana-stabilization technique Looseleaf proposed. They get some new moves out of it, which mainly amount to getting bigger number on magic as long as they're in physical contact and combo-casting. Notably, they can pool their Necromancy skill together this way, and get a large bonus on rolls for manipulating death essence. Probably going to come in handy when venturing into a necromantic death zone!

Next time: the dungeon crawl begins! I bet nothing will go wrong in the necromantic death zone!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel #17 was earlier today if you missed it

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itsbenedict · 11 months ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 17

A Locked-Room Mystery

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party had just returned from a harrowing mafia-fighting vampire-surgerying misadventure in Welcoming Trails, and received intel that a slaver gang is planning to attack the university in a matter of days. This is a problem!

But before they can deal with the problem... they've got an urgent call from Zzaiya, the waspfolk girl who's been helping with their research into Saelhen's magic bracer. Apparently, one of the divine artifacts they used while studying the bracer has gone missing- stolen by some sort of master thief! They've got to get to the bottom of this theft!

The first thing to check, when something goes missing, is to determine whether it was actually stolen, not just lost or misplaced- but there's ample evidence of that.

This was left on the tripod device in the corner where the divine artifact- an "isolation sphere", used to disable other divine artifacts and otherwise jam divine power- had been left. So it definitely seems like the place was broken into.

Oddly, the note was accompanied by Zzaiya's stolen keys, which is a weirdly considerate gesture for a thief with a grudge. Looseleaf opts to inspect this note with her spirit magic, picking up on emotional impressions. With a crit success, she gets...

So that's suggestive: the culprit had to have done this the morning of the Big Game- sometime after Zzaiya left with Looseleaf to head to the stadium, and before the game itself started. That might help narrow it down!

With that, the party takes a look at the actual crime scene, pictured up top. And, uh, here again, too, why not:

To recap the structure: the "lab" is a corner of the Artificing department workshop floor, sectioned off by six formerly-rolling wooden partitions that've been nailed into the floor by iron spikes. A canvas "roof" is anchored to the corner, and stapled to the top of these wooden partitions. It's not especially difficult to break into via the roof by undoing the staples, but it doesn't appear that this has happened.

Zzaiya explains her security measures:

Ball bearings scattered in front of the door, an idea Saelhen suggested, to determine whether the culprit used the door

A magic one-way barrier surrounding her desk, which lets things in but not out, to trap the culprit

Custom-scented flypaper strips hung up from the ceiling, to maybe pick up hair samples and mark the culprit

Translucent white gauze wrapped around all the artifact storage shelves to...

Saelhen pokes the gauze, and there's a bright flash- apparently this is photogauze, an enchanted film which automatically takes a flash photo of whatever comes in contact with it once it's been activated. The idea was to capture a photograph of the culprit as they attempted to break into the artifact storage shelves- but the only photograph it seems to have taken was one of a somewhat started white rat- likely the same rat currently trapped inside the blue bubble.

None of these security measures seem to have been especially efficacious. The barrier and the gauze only caught a rat, the flypaper strips don't seem to have been touched, and the ball bearings- though they reveal that the door was used- don't tell them much about the culprit. The only thing taken was the sphere from the corner, which wasn't protected by gauze.

The party's first suspicion is that the small white rat is the culprit, somehow- controlled by magic, or a Peter Pettigrew-type shapeshifting disguise. Their first move is to get Zzaiya to lower the barrier, and then snatch the rat before it can escape.

It never stood a chance. Saelhen nabs it, and Looseleaf spirit-reads it. As it happens... this is one of their rats. The ones from their box of lab rats for necromancy research, which they got from the Zoology department. A couple had gone missing- and now they know where this one ended up.

Apart from its origin, though, there's no hint of magic applied to the rat. If it weren't for having been suspiciously stolen from the party, it could well be written off as ordinary vermin caught up in a security system.

Looseleaf then opts to scan the partition walls with her spirit magic, to determine if they were compromised somehow. Sure, the culprit clearly used the door- but why not check to be sure?

She discovers something odds on the partition nearest the left wall. While most of them are ordinary wood, this one seems to have a large patch of... some sort of spongy material in the center, like it's rotted away. And this material seems to have been concealed, by some sort of gooey brown paint. The material seems... somehow familiar, but Looseleaf with a 9 on the dice can't place it.

Looseleaf and Oliver then check the ceiling, after Oliver takes a pneumantic scan of the spongy stuff for reference. The "ceiling" seems to have been pulled away from the wall a bit, its staples having been pulled out and the canvas sagging somewhat, like something heavy was on top of it earlier.

That's about all the evidence they're going to find- so they move on to discussing possible culprits.

The obvious first candidate is Vayen, who- around the time Zzaiya's keys were stolen- had turned invisible and snuck into the lab to eavesdrop on her and Looseleaf. (To little avail, since they'd conducted their conversation via telepathy.) But it seems clear he didn't steal the keys- he was in the room when they used their Locate Object wand, and the keys were more than 1000 feet away at the time. And since the keys were stolen, the lab couldn't be locked, so anyone could've used the door. He's suspicious as always, but nothing directly incriminates him.

Privately, Looseleaf asks Zzaiya if any of her colleagues in the Project might've done this. Zzaiya doesn't think so- there's a limited number of them who even know of her lab here, and none of them would've needed to steal the sphere. She'd have just let them use it!

They then turn to Evelyn- who technically has a part of her body in this room at all times. The large sink/basin on the right side of the room is made of her! Evelyn, though, wasn't watching the room last night- something would've needed to happen to draw her attention, like someone calling her name. She's not a night watchman!

And she also has no idea what the spongy stuff is.

The next thing to look into is... the source of the rat. It seems clear that the rat was involved in the culprit's scheme somehow, and the rat was stolen from the party's dorm room. There's a limited number of people who even have access to that- the party, Miriko, Oliver, and Evelyn herself. Evelyn, they're fairly confident is uninvolved, just from good Speech rolls when questioning her.

While it doesn't occur during this session, it happens in the next one: the party interrogates its NPC allies. Vayen, Orluthe, Oyobi, and Miriko... by a combination of high Speech rolls and Looseleaf's spirit magic, they establish confidently that none of them are lying when they say they didn't steal any of the party's rats.

So.

Players, and those reading along with the recaps: the culprit of this crime can be determined from the information available. At time of writing, the party has not solved this theft. Have you?

#tfj log #twofaced jewel #Are You Smarter Than A Moth Grader?

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itsbenedict · 1 year ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 16

People Learning At School (normal)

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, after wrapping up a magic surgery, the players took a little time to have some long-overdue conversations with each other and acquired some information on the ghost dryad mafia conspiracy. After a good night's sleep troubled-by-scorpion-nightmares night's sleep, the party (sans Saelhen, still sleeping off a tiring day and some scorpion nightmares because Farn couldn't make it that day) decides to get started on Doing Something about the ghost dryad mafia conspiracy.

The next day, Oliver heads back to his dorm room at Thunderbrush Metropolitan University to warn the university's ghost dryad, Evelyn, about the impending planned attack on the school Miriko uncovered.

Saves effort projecting a whole form!

Oliver decides to elide the source of his information, here, and subtly remixes the truth. Rather than hearing about this planned attack from Miriko's information-gathering, he claims that the party overheard the Sounds they encountered talking about the attack.

Evelyn has a few suspicions, but not that Oliver is lying to her. Rather... she's not sure why the Sounds would attack Looseleaf and Saelhen. They don't make a habit of attacking outsiders, which indicates that those two might be caught up in sinister mafia business that they're lying to Oliver about.

Oliver suggests they evacuate the school, in preparation for the attack, but Evelyn disagrees- she thinks the school is the safest place for them. It's already got a fence, and she can mobilize Long-Arms and the Twelve Black Saint Councillor-Generals.

Look, Long-Arms is a notorious drama queen and Evelyn is enough of a drama-lady-in-waiting to indulge his antics. It wouldn't be an anime if there weren't an implausibly powerful sinister student council!

...What's that, you say? It's not an anime? Okay. Point.

Oliver is once again assigned to tail the party, and figure out why they might be being targeted by the Sounds. Surely they're sheltering some sort of sinister secrets! Suspicious, certainly!

Before getting back to that, though, Oliver takes a brief detour to visit his friend Goldie Lightharvest and warn her about the impending attack. You might remember Goldie as the girl in charge of the Giant Crystal Scorpion research project, who was very upset with the party for inexplicably disappearing the subject of her thesis and refusing to explain. Oliver has to head down to the Zoology department to locate her.

On the way in, Oliver has to contend with a security measure- a sort of metal-detector apparatus, which- rather than detecting metal- detects pneuma, the intangible vapor that pneumancers like Oliver use to summon objects with magic. Not keen on checking his magic at the door, Oliver instead attempts to smuggle in a mass of pneuma by transmuting it into a dense solid cube.

Duly warned, Oliver heads down and encounters the head of Zoology, Dr. Ondere Groove- who doesn't do much besides direct him to where Goldie is cleaning up the shattered specimen tank. She complains a bit about her circumstances.

He warns her about the impending attack, but she's kind of at a loss for what to do. Not like she has a giant crystal attack scorpion she could use to defend the school or anything. He just exhorts her to stay safe, and that's that.

...Except she does invite him to a concert being put on on Saturday, two days from now. Apparently "Radiance", a super popular globe-touring musical act, is supposed to be putting on a "surprise" concert. And the venue... is the Oaken Casket, a Stump gang whose thing is trafficking booze and illicit substances. They throw huge parties with live music twice a month which are often frequented by the campus's party animals and music enthusiasts.

And they're one of the groups named by Miriko as being in on the same conspiracy intended to target the students. Hm.

Meanwhile... Looseleaf's studying up with that fun book she got from the library!

She pokes at it a bit with her spirit magic, trying to figure out what its deal is.

Looseleaf's roll to perform the necromancy exercises from the book goes poorly- she doesn't really have a strong foundation in the Epistomancy necessary to understand the rune diagrams, so all she can really accomplish is push around the goo a bit.

She dials Oliver on the telepathy she has, and invites him to come study necromancy! But Oliver's a little busy at the moment- he's gone to the Artificing department to get his hands on some blast shields. Artificing's penchant for explosive mad science means they've got plenty on hand, and he has a spell to scan and download blueprints- so why not have those on demand?

Oh, and a sword! Why not print a sword, too? Always good to have a sword.

Looseleaf heads over to Artificing to meet Oliver, and finds him at a workbench with a sword for some reason. It's not going well- but then he sees Oyobi's sword, which is cooler and better, and tries scribing a blueprint for that. Oyobi is slightly concerned about her sword potentially diminishing in coolness due to Nerd Interference, but her fears prove ungrounded after a good roll.

Looseleaf takes Oliver back to the yacht, the Two-Faced Jewel, to experiment with doing necromancy on the death essence they collected from Cabana Jim's.

Orluthe and Vayen are also there, chatting about something on the deck. Looseleaf notifies them about the crazy recent happenings- and the impending ghost dryad gang war situation. Vayen, uncharacteristically, is excited about what is being discussed by the party!

He is not happy about the constant gang infighting coming to a halt so everyone can work together towards a common goal, for some reason. He thinks that's terrible! And offers his help unraveling this diabolical conspiracy! Greaaaat! Fantastic! Thanks, Vayen!

Anyway, Oliver... also rolls like crap trying to get the hang of necromancy. He has the epistomantic background to understand the runes, but his control of his mana flow is a lot shakier compared to Looseleaf, who can basically cheat by using spirit magic to keep her own mana stable. Manipulating this stuff is no easy feat for either of them- but maybe working together, they can combine their strengths and master-

It's the isolation sphere!

The what?

The divine artifact of Lepichon that generates a jamming field that blocks other divine energy from reaching divine artifacts! The one she basically used as a lab instrument in magic item diagnostics! After finding her keys missing, she'd set up her lab with a bunch of booby traps to catch a potential thief, but somehow they evaded them all and stole the one artifact she didn't think to specially protect!

Next time: the party is going to INVESTIGATE THE SCENE OF A CRIME! Always exciting!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 1 year ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 15

Never Call It Piss Magic Again

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the players extricated themselves from an awkward situation with some ghost dryad mafia protection racketeers, and hurried off to the local brothel to go cure a vampire of her vampirosity. They did a bang-up job of it, despite some close calls- and now it's time for them to decompress after a job well-done.

Also grapple with the nightmarish implications of Saelhen's powers. And drive Looseleaf to the brink of a complete mental breakdown vis-a-vis backstory trauma. And receive extremely troubling news about the Stump conspiracy's agenda. And have nightmares.

So, first order of business: the party needs to flirt with some NPCs. Saelhen manages to apologize for all the craziness that's been going on during this sports-watching date... while also being the smoothest operator in the world somehow. This prompts...

After some further ruthless ladykilling, Zzaiya flees the scene in a fit of embarrassment, unable to process the idea of someone being romantically interested in her. Allegedly, her house is nearby.

Meanwhile, Oliver is trying to put the moves on the recently-shirtless Sam Sweethoney...

...but runs into a brick wall of total obliviousness. Sam Sweethoney is seemingly incapable of realizing that anyone is ever being serious about anything, and takes incoming flirtation as a hilarious joke that he's in on.

While Oliver is striking out with the world's densest shirtless halfling tattoo artist, Looseleaf and Saelhen try to have a serious conversation about... all that shit that just happened.

The thing is... Saelhen's invested a great deal of emotional attachment into this thing that lets her turn invisible- for reasons that she'd prefer not be discussed in mixed company.

While they're in the middle of discussing how dangerous their personal magic powers are, and whether it's ethically permissible to use them at all... Oliver shows up, very curious about Looseleaf's magic powers.

Looseleaf is set on edge by this question.

Oliver is surprised about the apparent deadliness of teaching spirit magic- and has a billion follow-up questions, none of which please Looseleaf to hear.

Oliver keeps pressing... and Looseleaf explodes.

Looseleaf: "I don't fucking know, okay? I'm not a specialist in this! I was supposed to be an anthropologist before everything happened and now I am a mage wielding a near-extinct line of magic because nobody else can do it and so I have to figure out how to do all the things that THEY were supposed to be responsible for doing!" "I don't know! I'm relearning this from scratch! You want answers but I don't have any!" "Nobody has answers anymore!" By the end of it Looseleaf's speech is seeming… weirdly discongruous and jilted, each syllable coming out jerky and staccato. "You know what, you want it so badly, maybe you can actually learn and then I can go do other things with my worthless life-" Oliver Highhollow-Selby: Oliver is stepping backwards and looking scared/worried/horrified as Looseleaf is basically suddenly unraveling. Saelhen du Fishercrown: "Okay, well, it appears that question time might be over, pleasure to meet you, Mr. Highhollow, I think we are going to get something in your stomach, dear heart, and perhaps a nice bath and — save everything else for later, yes? Sounds good?"

Oliver tries to apologize and calm her down, but it doesn't go well.

Saelhen diplomatically defuses the situation, drawing attention to her own role in today's debacle to reduce tensions. Looseleaf apologizes to Oliver for her outburst, an olive branch is proffered... and then Looseleaf remembers she needs to change the subject.

Right! That situation! Looseleaf still doesn't divulge how she knows this, but Oliver's on the back foot and kind of has to trust her about this. He intends to report in to Evelyn at his nearest opportunity.

Still- it's getting late, and they happen to be at a place that is technically an inn (and brothel and live music venue and bar and grill and lesser temple of Karou), and the Sweethoneys are happy to put the party up for the night. But first... dinner! Vampire surgery is hungry work.

At the bar, they meet Dall, who's beyond relieved that her girlfriend is alive despite the odds. She treats them to drinks, and- after Looseleaf invoices her to the tune of two hundred gold- begins explaining the Iron Section incident that led to this whole vampire issue.

The Iron Section, Dall explains, was a mining division. Specifically the iron mining division, as the name implies. Dall tells you, with increasingly slurred speech, about the Iron Section incident. They had a mineshaft that was going deeper than usual- the kind of dig that risks unearthing monsters. As a result, the mineshaft was completely sealed off, and the workforce quarantined to the dig site for the duration of the expedition- until the entire shaft was cleared out and warded and declared safe. This isn't that unusual for dwarven mining companies- it's akin to going out on a lobster boat for a while, you get paid handsomely for the long and arduous multi-day work shift. The dig site was sealed off to ensure no one would come or go, besides the iron carts- and because of this, there wasn't much oversight, besides the foreman in charge and his subordinate management. Which means when the foreman somehow became a vampire- and was the first to become a vampire- there was no one above him to countermand his orders. Gelly had explained to her- the foreman cared about his workers, he didn't want them to die, so he didn't feed on them to the point of exsanguination- but when a vampire feeds on you without killing you, you get thralls. And he wasn't as heartless as Cabana Jim- when his thralls hungered, he didn't starve them half to death to keep them compliant. He fed them. And so it proceeded until the entire Iron Section was vampirized- and then they were out of blood. And so they got increasingly hungry and desperate and left the quarantine mine, in a sudden attack on the surface. This got the attention of the Ecumene of Harmony, led by bishop Celeste Yonder. The ecumene led a cleanup crew and killed them all.

Yeesh.

The party asks a few questions about the monster issue- which Dall isn't super knowledgeable about. Apparently if you dig deep enough, monsters can just spawn in the depths, in any sufficiently large hollow space deep underground. There's ways to block this from happening, but Dall can't quite remember what kind of magic is involved.

Afterwards, they hit the hay. Looseleaf, through a soul link, detects that Oyobi is coincidentally also in this establishment, upstairs in a private room with someone. Weird.

Looseleaf also takes some time to contact Miriko Watchwood via telepathy. Apparently, Miriko has "disposed of" Jess Chainer- by which she means, locking her up in a cell underneath the ghost dryad Ana, to have her life force fed upon. Miriko's met back up with her employer, and everything seems hunky-dory for her... but Looseleaf detects a wrong note.

Like... shouldn't Miriko be mad at her boss? The one who knew she was enslaved at Cabana Jim's, and used that as an opportunity to extract information from rich tourists instead of, say, rescuing her?

Miriko denies this.

Looseleaf gets a crit roll on Something's Fishy.

Trauma aside, the party tucks in for a good night's sleep.

Looseleaf has a dream.

Looseleaf has this same dream for the next few nights- each time a bit less obscured and difficult to remember. There is a last time that she has this dream, later on- at which point it is fully revealed. She's yet to discuss it with anyone, though.

Saelhen, by contrast, has this same dream, revealed from the very first time- but she can't remember it when she jolts awake in panic.

:) :) :)

Next time. Looseleaf and Oliver go to school and have a nice time and learn some things! That's all! Don't worry!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel #i love it when my players write my horror for me

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itsbenedict · 2 years ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Season 1 Recap

Sometimes I post session logs from Two-Faced Jewel, a formerly-D&D tabletop campaign I've been running for my friends @eternalfarnham and Zero. There's like a lot of them now, though! Maybe you thought they were interesting but didn't want to catch up on 20-odd longposts of someone going on about his D&D game. Wouldn't blame you! So I'm gonna do you a solid and compress the entire first "season" of the campaign into one cliffsnotes summary, so when I start posting the second season you can just pick up on the middle. Here goes!

This is Looseleaf! She is a magic moth, and she's going to school!

This is Saelhen! She is half-elf, half-crime, and she wants to steal from school!

School has a magic arm thing! Saelhen pretends to be a Fancy Lass Indeed, and gets the school to give her the magic arm thing!

But uh-oh! Now it's stuck, and she can't flog the magic sleeve for Loads of Money! Also, the school thinks someone should follow her around to study the magic sleeve, so now Looseleaf is following her! This is bad news for crime!

The magic sleeve says "go over there", so they Go Over There, and…

…oops! It opened a hole and made infinite bats from nightmare hell! Maybe this magic sleeve is bad news.

The school says "pshaaaaaaw, naaaah, it's fiiiiine", and when the sleeve says "now go over here!" the school sends them to do that again! Cool plan!

Problem is, this time "go over there" means "go really far away to a dangerous jungle", so Looseleaf and Saelhen need help! Let's meet help!

This is Orluthe! He has a halberd and is friends with God! Or, one of the gods! But secretly, he's not friends with that one! He's friends with a different one! Chicanery is afoot!

This is Oyobi! She has a bow and arrow and is friends with Looseleaf! But secretly, she's RUDE. Elf rude! It's like an invisible kind of rude only elves know about.

So they leave town to follow the sleeve and go over-

-Oh, hey. Uh… this guy's coming too, I guess! School says so! His name is Vayen, and he's friends with [NOBODY]! But secretly, he's, uh… he's secretly… he's definitely secretly something. I guess… that's fine…

So they go follow the arrow!

On the way, they stop by a town! The town's feuding with another town, because of murders!

Luckily, Looseleaf is magic! Her magic is really special, and she uses it to solve the crime! Turns out, this guy living in a torture wizard's evil torture tower did it! Huh! How 'bout that!

The guy tells them that a scary dragon was forcing him to do it, though, so the real problem is the dragon. But how are they gonna stop a dragon?! That's way out of their pay grade. They're gonna go call the fantasy cops instead.

So they go to another town, and they go grab a pack of high-level dragon-slaying adventurers, and have those guys do it. Very sensible!

(By the way: those guys apparently work for a shadowy conspiracy that's trying to hide from the gods themselves. So did the torture wizard! So does Looseleaf's long-lost sister, apparently! That's- that probably isn't relevant! It's fine! That plot can wait!

They go back to town, which has some monster problems to solve, and while the adventurers fight the dragon, the party… kidnaps a child! Rescues a child? She has a complicated relationship with her mom, which is definitely grounds to invisibly sneak her out of town to go adventuring with strangers! Yeah! Sure!

The party, plus a child, move on with their main quest- which means they all have to get on a boat! No, not this fancy boat- this other one. The fancy boat is way too fancy. They can't afford something like that! A different boat will be fine.

Guess what? The different boat gets attacked by a bazillion sea monsters! Including a dragon!

Luckily, they make friends with the dragon, who's really interested in the magic sleeve for some reason. This is yet another thing that's probably fine!

Finally, they reach Fantasy Bahamas Las Vegas, and it's time for a vacation while they wait for the ferry to their destination! They split up and stay at different resorts.

The next morning, oh crap! Fantasy Jimmy Buffett killed the other resort guy! At least, that's what the cops think, so Fantasy Jimmy Buffett hires them to investigate and prove his innocence!

Turns out, Fantasy Jimmy Buffett didn't do it! They prove that super good, by proving that he's a vampire and all his staff are enslaved vampire thralls and one of them did it to frame him as revenge for the slavery thing! Congratulations, Vampire Jimmy Buffett! You are innocent, and also, toast.

Now that Jimmy Buffett is dead, there are definitely no more problems ever- WHOOPS all those vampire thralls are now no longer under orders to not eat the guests. Oops. Better do something about that.

While fixing the vampire situation, they meet Miriko, vampire middle management, who turns over a new leaf and helps them wrangle the thralls and gives them all of Jimmy Buffett's stuff, under definitely no duress at all. The party offering to smuggle her off of the island to evade punishment for vampire crimes had nothing to do with it.

The little girl they kidnapped wants to go to the fashion school on the island, though, so… Saelhen pays for that! All kidnappings well that end well! It's very expensive, but they have all of Jimmy Buffett's stuff now, which includes a lot of money. And would you look at that! All of Jimmy Buffett's stuff ALSO includes that very fancy boat from before! So… now the party has that!

They re-christen their new boat the Two-Faced Jewel, after its secret smuggling hold and definitely not to squeeze in a title drop- and now, they're off to the very dangerous jungle!

Next: adventures in the ghost dryad mafia jungle city, Thunderbrush!

#twofaced jewel #tfj log

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itsbenedict · 1 year ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 14

Spirit Center: Under the Moth

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party answered the request of Dall Odegir, whose girlfriend somehow ended up a vampire, and who desperately needs Looseleaf's help (as advertised in the newspaper!) to cure her. Unfortunately, their house call was interrupted by a visit from some ghost dryad mafia goons come to shake Dall down for extra protection money- and the ensuing confrontation got way out of hand when Saelhen accidentally summoned toothy hellmonsters.

With the hellmonsters subdued, though, they're still left in a pretty awkward situation- and still have a vampire to treat.

Oh, right. They convinced the goons that they belonged to a rival mafia and were enslaving people. That, uh... Looseleaf figures the best solution to that little nightmare is to just come clean.

“Actually, uh, we sort of, made that up,” Looseleaf says. “We thought you looked like the type who’d be scared if we said we had protection from one of the other gangs, because gods know this place doesn’t have actual cops or anything. And then that didn’t work so, uh, we went invisible and doubled-down on trying to scare you off. Sssssssorry, but, look, more importantly, which of you needs healing.” “I mean, if you think about it, all we actually did was drop an alchemical smokebomb and then hide and shout spooky things at you. We really thought that you would be a superstitious lot that would run away if we were sufficiently spooky at you!” “…That obviously didn’t work, though. So, um, backup plan, will you agree to, uh, not beat me up, if I heal you.” “I’m literally just a university student, gods.”

It takes a Luck point on some convincing to get them to believe her, and she has to profess ignorance about where the nightmare tooth-dogs came from, but she gets through, and starts providing healing to the injured.

(One of the "injured" is the stone guy they called Radish, who passed out despite sustaining no apparent injuries. She spirit-reads him, and discovers his biology is unusual- he's just a weird sinewy endoskeleton running through solid rock. He's not hurt- he just seems to be totally exhausted and out of energy, despite not doing anything particularly tiring. One of the goons expresses confusion- "we ain't been underground that long!")

With the rest of the injured treated, though, the problem is... the mafia guys are still keen on doing their shakedown. The presence of witnesses and bystanders makes them keen to forgive and forget the attempted deception, but they still want their Dall's money.

(They ominously imply that they need the money for some major operation they're planning- one that should depose Tonnera Mighty for good! Hm.)

Oliver attempts to intervene with some cutting words, throwing his weight around as the son of the Mighty's chief medical officer- but it turns out that's not actually that much weight and one of the scarier ones chases him out with an axe. The bystanders aren't much help either- these sorts of shakedowns are routine, and they actually encourage Dall to surrender, not wanting to piss off the ghost dryad who rules this part of town and make trouble for them.

Looseleaf has a tactic for getting rid of these guys for the time being- her healing, which she just did to a bunch of them including their leader, is temporary. She's using her technique where she uses a copy of her own flesh to quickly patch wounds in combat for temp HP- but the body rejects that kind of thing quickly, so she emphasizes that they need to get to a real cleric, fast.

(Looseleaf could totally just do a better job healing and fix them for real, but why would she tell them that?)

The goons reluctantly clear out, fearing for their lives for the time being, but will eventually return. In the meantime... Oliver dumps some pneumancy-generated slime on Wide-Smile, their leader, just to annoy him out of spite. Thanks to a 1 on the roll, this causes him to, uh, trip down the hole left by his bomb blast earlier, injuring him further. Which is... absolutely not the party's problem! Fuck 'im!

Shortly thereafter, the party's backup arrives, a bit too late to be useful. It's Miriko Watchwood, and...

...Jess Chainer, that product-pusher for the Gentle Chains who they encountered on first arriving in Thunderbrush. This is alarming- but Miriko claims to have her "under control", not-so-subtly implying that she's got her under vampiric domination. She was going to bring her back to the Watchwood to be "disposed of", but she got the distress call in the middle of taking care of that, so she's just got this mind-whammied slaver hanging around. Troubling.

Dall shooes all the bystanders out of her forge (one asks if she wants them to report the monsters to "the Downmores", whoever they are), and Saelhen gets to work disguising Gelly's vampiric traits so she can be smuggled out to a cleric's place. She asks what the penalty to the roll to disguise her would be.

Huh. Has she been using a lot of makeup lately? Weird. Oliver is able to supplement this with pneumantically-conjured concealer, though.

Looseleaf and Saelhen introduce Miriko to Oliver... sort of. It's very difficult to do this and explain where her information is coming from without mentioning that she's a vampire working for a ghost dryad mafia, which are things Oliver is not a fan of.

Miriko opts to give her report to Looseleaf privately, via telepathy. Apparently... Fallen, dryad of the Sounds (those guys they just chased off) is planning some major attack on Tonnera in the near future.

The other thing Miriko tells them about is that the Ashtray- one of the dryad gangs known to be involved in this conspiracy- is sending people to explore Dead Jane.

Dead Jane is a ghost dryad who, about a hundred years ago, died. It's not clear how, exactly, but her corpse began emitting some sort of murder-radiation that killed everything in a radius around her territory. The strength of the magical kill-field has waned over time- and now, apparently, the Ashtray- a bunch of anarchist punk kids, mainly- have been roped into doing dungeon-crawls into Dead Jane's magically radioactive corpse for some reason.

There's also more bad news:

Fair enough! Reasonable decision!

Miriko emphasizes that this conspiracy seems to be largely built on blackmail and manipulation, which annoys her because blackmail and manipulation are supposed to be her gang's thing. The various parts of the conspiracy may or may not know anything about why they're doing what their doing, or the conspiracy's true goals. Getting to the bottom of this is going to be tricky.

(Meanwhile, Saelhen asks Gelly to take a look at the scrapes she got on her neck from the hellmonsters. Is that a good idea?)

Saelhen is very lucky Gelly kept making her restraint rolls, is what I'll say. This could have very easily not been fun a fun and flirty joke scene, and been something more difficult.

Anyway- they need to move quickly. Gelly is close to the point of no return for healing, and it turns out Dall's plan to get blood from people to feed her and wean her off... backfired pretty bad. Blood is what accelerates the transformation, and things are almost unrecoverable. They're going to need an experienced cleric- and Orluthe isn't going to suffice. Channeling Iska in combat is a very different thing from doing magic surgery.

Luckily, Oliver has a contact he can use, here! He knows a cleric of Karou, god of Joy, who's willing to work discreetly. The friend's mom's a cleric, too, and runs a place called Underbush Experiences, a bar slash music venue slash hotel slash brothel slash temple where discretion is necessary to stay in business.

They make their way across town to the place, keeping Gelly disguised and out of sight when possible. Eventually, they arrive, and meet Sam Sweethoney, Oliver's favorite tattoo artist.

(If you want to get a permanent tattoo done, you gotta have it done by a cleric, so that a god can deliberately make one that's magically very difficult for other gods to heal away.)

Sam refers the party to his mom, Saralee Sweethoney, just inside. They enter, and she is... not decent. She's doing some sort of naked meditation in a fountain under a huge mural of Karou, and doesn't seem fazed at all by Oliver walking in with a bunch of strangers.

Looseleaf explains their predicament to Saralee, and- somewhat alarmed- she begins channeling Karou to handle the situation.

Karou, upon seeing Looseleaf... has a sort of strange reaction. His projected face flickers and wavers, and he mutters "That's what it is..." to himself.

This illustrates... a couple salient things about gods. Firstly... when being channeled, they don't remember every single piece of knowledge that belongs to the god as a whole- just what their host knows, plus a little package of essential information and divine magic skill.

But... he's been consistently recognizing the party on sight, when they've met him, which is very strange. A god going in to be channeled has a very limited amount of essential information they can bring with them- and for some reason, who Looseleaf and Saelhen are is a piece of information he's opted to include every time someone here channels him, just in case.

That's got implications.

But he's happy to help with the vampirism thing, which previously had been pretty friggin' difficult. Even gods can't reliably cure it! Having some help would be great.

(Meanwhile... in Thieves' Cant, in this setting a sign language, Saelhen covertly signs something to Karou.)

Y'know, I forget if that went anywhere! Farn, you should let me know what you were thinking with that.

It's surgery time! The party helps get Gelly strapped down, which has both her and Dall looking kind of nervous. This is a novel and extremely risky medical treatment, and Gelly could easily die!

That's right- it's time for the SURGERY SYSTEM!

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The way this works is... Looseleaf, with the aid and advice of her friends, has to figure out- from scratch- how to cleanse a near-complete vampiric infection, by making Spirit rolls to get information and make changes. With Karou supporting this and performing general healing, they have a certain amount of insurance against making mistakes and endangering Gelly's life- specifically, they had an unknown number (secretly, six, and more secretly, seven) of fuckups in the tank before Gelly bit it.

The consequence of this bad roll is... I present an accurate picture of what's going on, and two possible approaches, one of which is productive and one of which is guaranteed to be disastrous. It's up to them to figure out which is which by reasoning it out.

The problem is...

There's a resource the party declines to tap, here- the goblin sitting outside is getting a tattoo indicating membership in the Thorns, a dryad gang of incredibly elite assassins. Since gods handle most healing, anatomy is a skill limited mainly to people trying to break someone's anatomy effectively, and he could have useful expertise. They don't take the risk of making that contact, though- it could be the guy is a fraud getting a tattoo to intimidate people.

Should've gone with your gut, Looseleaf!

She expunges the vampiric parasite from Gelly's blood, leaving... not all that much blood left, really. But they have Karou healing, so her blood supply recharges pretty quickly! They clean out her infected blood, replace it with fresh blood, and... now her vampire-infected circulatory system is full of fresh blood.

Saelhen twigs to the problem immediately:

Strike 1/6.

They consider completely stopping her heart and killing bloodflow to the body, but decide this would be near-immediately fatal to the patient. Rather than do anything drastic to starve the parasite of blood, they're just going to up their game and fix individual organs faster than the parasite can reproduce and reinfect them.

Strike 2/6.

Off to a bad start with the game-upping- and you can only spend Luck after the roll if you take a Karma, too. Which they do- taking it to a mixed success. They repair the liver and kidneys, which act as a filter on the blood, keeping it clean while accelerating the liver and kidneys' reinfection rate. But it takes some extra time... and I use that Karma against them immediately.

Gelly drops a vampiric mind-whammy on her girlfriend, and all of a sudden there's a combat in the middle of this delicate surgery. Oliver thinks fast and neutralizes her immediately, restraining her with a glob of invisible pneumantic glue. Dall's freaking out, but they're able to continue. Looseleaf's next target- to prevent any further vampiric domination- is the brain, and luckily this time she nails it.

Gelly falls unconscious, and they move on to the digestive tract, which is a major contributor to the metabolism and reinfection of the blood. It's a mixed failure- she slows the reinfection rate, but that's still Strike 3/6.

Trying again, with a crit on the die, she figures out how to tell the organs as a whole to at least stop eating, while successfully fixing the digestive system. Reinfection has stopped, and Gelly's temporarily stable- but there's still a lot of work to do, and time to screw it up.

Next, she goes for the heart and lungs, trying to complete the purification of the circulatory system. A mixed success means she accidentally stops the heart briefly, Strike 4/6- but Karou's able to stretch and restart it, making the procedure a success. What's left?

The bones, and bone marrow. Again, a threat to the blood, and this one pretty hardy.

She can't seem to get this stuff out of the bones- it's stuck in there too tight, the blood vessels into the bones too narrow for the parasite to pass through quickly even if it's trying to leave. Strike 5/6.

No more time to fuck around! The whole party needs to contribute!

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They get to work- Oliver tries and fails to construct a scalpel out of pneuma, so Saelhen gets to work with her trusty knives. With an astounding 20/19 critical success, she's able to make clear, precise incisions, and Zzaiya doesn't even have to roll to open holes with her thermomantic laser. They're able to clean the bones out, no problem.

Only problem is... they just opened a bunch of holes in her and laser-drilled a bunch of holes in her bones. Karou needs to stretch again, taking them to Strike 6/6. Saralee Sweethoney is at her limit- but they're close to the finish line, and...

Well, I said there were six strikes, but there were actually seven. Sam Sweethoney might not be very experiences, but he is a cleric of Karou, too, with exactly one additional charge of healing insurance left, and he's just outside!

With two Karous on the scene, pushing themselves to the absolute limit, Looseleaf manages a final success.

Bones seal up, incisions close, and muscles re-knit as Karou repairs the remainder of the damage. You manage to force out all the vampire gunk, and Gelly… is breathing. You've done it.

Whew! That came right down to the wire! But the operation is complete, and the party's earned a considerable chunk of change from Dall.

...but before Karou leaves entirely, he has something a little ominous to say.

...Huh. That's... probably fine.

Next time: the party has some long-overdue talks with each other, learns about this "Iron Section" incident that vampirized Gelly in the first place, and starts making preparations to look into the situation with Dead Jane.

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 1 year ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 12a-13

Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and... Teeth?

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, we met Oliver Highhollow-Selby, @hzapping's PC. He's a half-and-halfling magic student from Thunderbrush Metropolitan University with a knack for scanning and copying objects with pneumancy, and he's been tasked by Evelyn (the school's ghost dryad shadow ruler) with spying on the party's highly concerning magical research.

Shortly after meeting Oliver, the party was accosted by a dwarf with some kind of Problem, who ran here in a hurry looking for "LuSleeve", from the newspaper headline. What's she want?

The dwarf- one Dall Odegir- manages to gasp out that she needs Looseleaf's help with a vampire problem. She can cure those, right? She's gotta be able to cure those. She promises the party money, and drinks, and whatever else they want right now please just come to her house right now it's an emergency.

Looseleaf is excited to put her new skills to work- but the others take a little more convincing. Oliver's a little worried about- hey, sorry, what, there's a vampire? There's a medical emergency involving a vampire? That sounds pretty dangerous! Dall has to really assure him and Zzaiya that everything will be fine and there's definitely no risk involved.

(Note: later on in this session, someone is going to scream "AAAAAAAAAAAA MY BLOOOOOOD", if that helps.)

The party follows Dall to Welcoming Trails, a huge chasm in the middle of the city. It's lined with dense scaffolding and tunnel homes, forming practically a third city perpendicular to the normal one. It belches smoke from various smokestacks connected to mineshafts and forges deep underground, which rises up to Tonnera Mighty's canopy.

The party boards a rapid-transit system built into the chasm's scaffolding- high-speed carriages on tracks, propelled by coal-burning "combustion engines". This system lines the outermost layer of the scaffolding, with the middle layer reserved for foot traffic and the wallmost layer lined with shops and residences.

This being the usual transit system for the city's dwarves, it's surely a smooth and well-engineered ride and hey would everyone like to roll Stamina to not yartz?

This thing is a fucking rollercoaster, powered by a shaking, smoking furnace and speeding down rickety rails. It seems insanely perilous, and everyone but Saelhen gets off feeling a little green. Oliver uses his pneumancy abilities to 3D-print a bucket to heave into. Saelhen holds Zzaiya tight, being a real smooth operator and freezing her with embarrassment.

...Looseleaf notices that Zzaiya's body language is very similar to mothfolk body language, despite waspfolk ostensibly being different species who as far as she knows haven't had any contact with the moths. That's a little odd.

So... the rollercoaster passes into a large tunnel, and into a huge cave system that appears to run beneath the city. It's not just the chasm- Welcoming Trails is huge, underneath, intersecting with and supporting Tonnera's root system. But as they progress, Tonnera's roots disappear and are replaced with a different, more withered-looking root system.

Dall lives in a bad part of town, see. It's the territory of the Sounds, the gang led by the ghost dryad Fallen. But she assures the party she's paid up on her protection fees, so... it'll be fine!

She leads them into a building with a big sign reading "BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS - Historic Handforge", with a smaller sign advertising a new promotion- "Stained With Valor- forge your blood into custom pieces to commemorate your courage!"

Dall heads into the back of the forge, where she's dug out some sort of messy and sooty residential chambers lit by an odd hole in the ceiling that intermittently goes dark. She finds a knob of rock way in the back, and opens up a secret passage to a pitch-black room.

Sorry! All that's inside is a cute bedroom, which is decorated with floral-print hangings and is substantially cleaner than the rest of the residence. Inside is...

Dall introduces her girlfriend Gelly, who's been having some trouble with a recent vampiric infection. She's been trying to taper off blood, but it's not working- she just keeps getting hungrier, and the grift with the Stained With Valor promotion is starting to dry up. The situation is apparently connected to something called the "Iron Section" incident, but before she can explain in detail...

Well, first, Looseleaf rolls to spirit-read Gelly, who it turns out is in pretty bad shape. It's clear that she's not completely a full vampire yet, insofar as a full vampire has completely had all their tissues replaced and isn't just infecting the blood, but she's more than halfway there. Dall's tapering-off strategy doesn't seem to have been effective- the more blood she's been taking in, the more the infection has spread. It's not to the point of full replacement, but it's really deep in there in her vital organs. Telling it all to rip itself out and report to the stomach to be vomited out... would probably kill her. This is probably going to require a conjunction of spirit healing and divine healing to fix up the infected organs, and even then it'd be pretty risky and difficult.

Second, they get a telepathic ping from Miriko Watchwood, their other vampire "friend" who works for the local information brokers/blackmail ring. She's apparently made contact with her boss, and wants to report in.

Third, there's a heavy knock on the door.

The ghost dryad mafia are here to squeeze Dall for more protection money! Fantastic! Saelhen is eager to offer her services as a negotiator.

Step one of negotiations: make the other party look foolish by opening the door and timing it just right so they attempt to knock on empty air.

Step one of negotiations takes a Speed roll to time it, and the result is a mixed crit- a 20 and a 1 on the two dice. So... she very successfully opens the door at exactly the right time, but rather than knock on empty air, the huge rock golem type person on the other side knocks directly on her face for 2 damage.

(Also on the other side are five other people- a half-orc dwarf with a broadsword, a wiry human woman with an axe, a sleepy-looking halfling with a machete, a jittery, nervous-looking goblin in rags- and a goblin in a slightly-tattered waistcoat, who seems to be the one in charge and does all the talking.)

Saelhen has... a plan, here. Is it a good plan? Well, the plan is to pretend to be affiliated with the slaver gang, claim to have already kidnapped Dall Odegir so they should probably leave since there's no one to shake down, and start a gang war.

Here is a selection of problems with this idea:

The party had some unreliable information re: which gangs were selling slaves, and have implied that they're affiliated with a completely different non-slaving ghost dryad mafia

Even if it worked, the jig would be up as soon as Dall went back to work operating her forge and clearly being non-kidnapped

The racketeers here- while their bread and butter is shaking down defenseless people for protection money- do against all odds consider themselves heroic anarchist freedom fighters, and they've just been given an opportunity to actually do some of the protection they're ostensibly being paid for

The first targets in the gang war they've started happen to be in this very room.

Saelhen immediately turns invisible and drops invisible ball bearings all over the floor! Bet Dall's going to be real appreciative of that later!

Oliver... also turns invisible! Not the fancy divine artifact way, but the standard epistomantic way- an enchantment that turns you into a visual blind spot people can't perceive. Before they can move, he slips through the doorway and out behind them, and conjures an invisible wall in the doorway with pneumancy, to buy the others a bit of time to react.

That leaves... Looseleaf and Zzaiya, both fully visible, and both fully squishy wizards who were not planning on being in a fight for their lives with a squad of mafia enforcers ten seconds ago. Thanks, Saelhen!

They do what they can, here- Looseleaf and Zzaiya both have spells that can go through the invisible wall (which Oliver made conductive), and do some damage to the encroaching gangsters- but it's not enough to take any of them down or even meaningfully slow them.

But then: half the enemy team charges into the room, and immediately slips and falls on the invisible ball bearings all over the place. Never let it be said Saelhen du Fishercrown didn't have a plan!

There is one other complication, though- the huge rock golem guy, Radish, tries to fit through the doorway... and gets stuck, totally blocking it off. So there's now no escape... right?

Well, there's a secret room in the back, here. And as long as they don't see them go in, they can disappear without a trace until the gangsters leave! Which they can do, because Looseleaf still has a bottle of the complimentary magical darkness from Cabana Jim's resort, which she can use to black out the whole room! And... they're gonna be a bit theatrical about it, first.

It's a pretty effective tactic! They all pile into a cramped and dark room with a starving vampire, for safety. They didn't see the rolls I was making for Gelly's self-control in that situation, but luckily it all worked out.

In the cold light of day- or, uh, the kind of muggy darkness of so-far-underground-it-doesn't-really-matter-whether-it's-day- they realize that Saelhen's deception might not be working in their favor. They can hear the Sounds outside, trashing Dall's room in search of some secret hiding place or escape hatch. Their big golem is still stuck in the door, so they're pretty sure the party can't have left through there- which means there's a decent chance they get found, if their blind thrashing in the darkness eventually becomes a thorough search. And... this conflict really doesn't need to be happening, does it?

Oliver, though, has an idea- he's outside, and he's got a secret technique.

See, there's a few key physical facts about pneuma, the intangible vapor-like stuff that blows around the world to be turned into objects by pneumancy:

Physicalized pneumantic objects block the intangible form of pnuema- it's not intangible to those.

Under normal circumstances, pneuma is fairly incompressible.

When turned into a gas, pneuma is sort of 1:1 in terms of volume- but there's a compression ratio for turning it into liquids or solids. A solid pneuma pellet, if "released" and turned back into pneuma when the flow of mana stops, expands to about fifty times its size.

Oliver exploits these properties to construct a pressure bomb- a hollow shell of pneuma-solid around a pellet payload. The pellet inside is cut off from mana when the shell is complete, and when it does, it attempts to expand rapidly- exerting a force on the pneuma-solid walls surrounding it. This force shatters the bomb and sends shrapnel everywhere in a wave of concussive force.

So... he detonates one of his invisible bombs outside the forge, which does some damage to the scaffolding and distracts the gangsters inside.

Problem with that is... Radish is still stuck in the doorway. Until they can get him out, the ones trapped inside, distracted though they may be, aren't leaving the room.

Saelhen has a new plan, then. She needs to make them think, for sure, that they really did escape, so they'll focus on getting Radish unstuck and chasing them. The first part of this plan is using Saelhen's impersonation abilities to just say that- but the problem is, they need to silence whoever they're impersonating, so they don't immediately contradict her.

So she has an idea.

Wow! Great plan! I bet there are no consequences for this! Except, um, maybe the part where if she rolls a mixed success on the Deep stuff, she has to roll a d100 on a consequence table.

So, one thing that happens is that Saelhen feels the goblin convulse, and something warm and wet splatters her dress. His audio snaps back into reality, and he SCREAMS BLOODY MURDER.

EVERYTHING IS VERY BAD NOW. Something has foot-long fangs stuck in this goblin's body and is shaking him around like a ragdoll, there's screaming, no one can see what's going on or move properly because there's invisible ball bearings all over the floor, these gangsters think the party are slavers and want them dead, and something outside has exploded and witnesses are starting to gather.

Oliver leaps into action, calling for help and warning people about monsters. A bunch of bystanders- not guards or anything, but dwarves around here tend to have pickaxes and armor and can take care of themselves- start to head into the forge.

Dall bursts out of the hidden room and brings a hammer down on one of the monsters (by roughly pure luck- it's pitch black, she just sort of doesn't care which of the people in that room she hits with a hammer at this point)- and it explodes into acrid goop. For how terrifying these things are, they're not all that sturdy.

Meanwhile, the people outside manage to dislodge Radish from the door, and the magical darkness begins to spill out of the room and into the forge, dissipating a bit.

You know what else spills out of the room and into the forge? A hideous beast that seems to be made mostly of teeth, with no visible head but several headlike protruberances whose teeth are gnashing and chomping wildly! It immediately sinks its teeth into the closest person to the doorway who isn't made of rocks, which would be Wide-Smile, the goblin in charge of this shakedown.

Saelhen tries stabbing this thing and running! It turns out... to not exactly be made of teeth. The "teeth" making up its body are sharp at the tips, but the walls are soft and pop easily, into some sort of acrid goop, so the knives do some damage. Aaaaand attract its attention, so it wheels on Saelhen.

Oliver summons a club made of pneuma-solid and brains this thing, and the impact sends bits of toothpoint flying and causing a chain reaction that makes the whole damn thing detonate into nasty goop, leaving behind only a strange skeleton of twisted muscle fibers twitching pathetically on the floor.

The combat is over, now- the monsters are gone, and there are too many witnesses for the gangsters to just go ham. But the situation is far from resolved- and next time, the party will have to clean up their mess and actually do the job they came here to do. They've still got a vampire who needs curing!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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itsbenedict · 1 year ago

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Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 12a

Oliver Highhollow-Selby

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, with Saelhen cheering her on, Looseleaf devised a cunning strategy that led the Blacksky Iron Hounds to victory over their rivals the Thunderbrush Darts in a tense and unorthodox semifinal match!

But... someone was watching their performance, and has questions.

In Blackout year 241, Otto Rangarre Counter-Auditor Selby, Most Trusted Provider of the Interecumenical Administration of Thunderbrush, was facing a downturn in fortunes.

Before, he had been a great man. His family had long been trusted to operate a vast rice plantation in the fertile plains north of the Mighty, and their botanical expertise made them local experts on fresh produce- they could near-infallibly predict the longevity of food, and they were trusted to stamp produce labels with precise expiration dates. "Selby: R-4-243" stamped on a bag of rice was a guarantee that that rice would, if kept dry, not spoil until the fourth day of the Rainy season in Blackout 243.

But now, the IAT had dwindled to nothing- their authority supplanted by Tonnera Mighty, arboreal tyrant, and her cronies in the church and the new city guard. His vast fields of rice withered in her literal shadow, as her branches grew thicker with the hovels of a thousand squatting birds pretending at civilization. He'd been forced to sell acre after acre of productive riverbank land to the stinking fishermen spilling out from the city- just to stay afloat! The Selby estate was dying.

Otto Selby was a proud man, but even the proud can surrender to an enemy who has them by the throat. It was becoming more obvious by the day that the only way to hold onto power in Thunderbrush- without selling one's soul to the criminal syndicates of the zombies to the south- was to become a close personal friend of the tyrant whose roots were slowly strangling the city.

But Otto Selby was not a charming man- so this duty fell to his daughter, Grace. He'd spied an opportunity for the girl- one of the upstart craftsmen working for the Mighty, her personal doctor slash architect slash mad scientist. One Basil Highhollow, the Mighty's darling- a handsome chap, if a bit short, and conveniently to his daughter's tastes.

He directed her to seduce, and soon the two were wed- the falling fortunes of the Selby clan bound to the rising fortunes of the Highhollows. Content that he had saved the Selby family from wretched ignominy, and that there were no problems whatsoever with the relationship he had arranged, Otto Rangarre Counter-Auditor Selby passed away peacefully in his sleep at the wheel of his schooner, crashing into a pier and drowning before the birth of his grandson.

Some years later, his grandson, Oliver Highhollow-Selby, sat in the stands of a Jewelwide Academic Warball Society game, eyeing the foreign students who'd just trounced his school's team with a curious look.

Thunderbrush Metropolitan University's chief student coordinator, Evelyn the ghost dryad, likes to keep up mutually beneficial relationships with the student body. Trading favors and privileges, in exchange for odd jobs or the odd bit of lifeforce. Keen-eyed Oliver is one of her favorites, if a bit too volatile for her Student Council.

According to Evelyn, there's a group of students from Blacksky who arrived at TMU under mysterious circumstances. An academic exchange program, kept secret from her by TMU headmaster Grizzly Goodcrest and Blacksky's provost Hamori Los. Her student council president, the ever-paranoid Long-Arms, doesn't trust them- and even though the boy has once again cried wolf, Evelyn suspects there may indeed be wolves among the sheep.

So... wouldn't Oliver like to gather a little information on these student interlopers? The ones studying necromancy, and disappearing giant scorpions with a divine artifact?

The exchange students are chatting in the stands with that weird secretive wasp girl from the Artificing department, who was cheering really loudly for Blacksky for some reason. They're making some sort of small talk, until something juicy comes up:

Looseleaf: “Anyways, Zzaiya, I also wanted to ask you about- you mentioned that the artifact-reading thingy you used on the bracer was probably powered by Lepichon’s power or something, right?” Zzaiya: "Oh- uh, right. It doesn't have a sigil, so it's hard to be sure, but it seems like her domain- it destroys and scatters the, uh… we're not entirely sure what it is, the… substance? Connection? There's a measurable something that seems to be the conduit for divine energy to the artifact." Looseleaf: “Right, I was wondering, do you know any place I could go to get more knowledge about Lepichon?” “Like, what her sigil is, any other knowledge about her, especially historical-domain knowledge…” Oliver Highhollow-Selby: Oliver comes near them and attempts to just overhear the conversation without looking too suspicious, planning to perhaps insert himself if an opening appears. Zzaiya: "The isolation sphere dissipates that something in a way that's extremely similar to other Lepichon-aspect relics." "And, er- zzz, more knowledge about... that's difficult. I could show you the other Lepichon relics in our collection, but that's like... two other ones. There are no known clerics of Lepichon, so information is scarce."

Oliver manages to stay on the outskirts of this conversation, rolling Be Sneaky pretty well and successfully eavesdropping for a bit. The students are asking questions about Lepichon- Dustsweeper, Goddess of Ruin, apparently involved in necromancy?! What's all this about?

Oliver opts to insert himself into the conversation, complimenting their performance on the Warball field, and awkwardly changing the subject to Lepichon. He's, uh, heard rumors about her! Students discussing it! In what context? Uhhhhhhhhh

Yeah, he doesn't lie too well. They can tell he's got ulterior motives right away- and he spills the beans pretty quick, confessing that Evelyn sent him to spy on them. Which they take... surprisingly well! Apparently, they don't have any secrets to hide, and they're happy to just let him spy. Why not?

He then opts to push his luck a bit. He's got a spell, see- a sort of scanning spell, which uses epistomancy to scribe blueprints of objects. The exchange students see no problem with letting him use unfamiliar magic on their divine artifact!

...But he doesn't get much. As far as his homemade scanning spell can tell, this thing is just solid stone- he doesn't get any picture of the internals, nor can he get an image of the part of it that's in contact with "Lady Noeru de la Surplus's" arm. Still, he can...

...well, he can use a form of arcane magic called "pneumancy", a branch concerned mainly with the "summoning" of physical objects. The world of the Jewel is suffused with an intangible gaseous substance called "pneuma", which floats around in clouds and clumps and has its own invisible, immaterial weather systems. Pneumancers are capable of harnessing this ghost-matter and magically coercing it into a simulacrum of regular matter- imparting properties like solidity, weight, visibility, friction, and other useful attributes.

Oliver is very talented in his field, and has developed a fairly unique technique which his particular mana is well-suited to. After using his epistomantic scanning spell to scribe a blueprint of an object, he can then use pneumancy to reproduce the object, essentially copying and pasting real things. His copies are temporary magical constructs that require mana to sustain, and can't necessarily copy exotic or magical properties- but he has a toolbox of blueprints for all kinds of useful things in his spellbook.

So now, Oliver can print off a replica of Lady Noeru's bracer- minus its magical properties like projecting a glowing arrow or sending stuff to the shadow realm. Huh!

He does so, and... Lady Noeru does something odd. She touches it, and then... makes it disappear. The replica bracer goes to the Deep, and Oliver's mana starts going haywire- like it's simultaneously closeby and far away, physically straining him. Freaking out a bit, he lets go, and the replica bracer poofs into pneuma.

There are a thousand things wrong with this- not least among them "teleportation hasn't been possible for 273 years, what the fuck"- and Oliver kind of freaks out about this at them.

Oliver, rattled and in ask-ALL-the-questions mode, starts asking directly about Looseleaf's recent foray into necromancy.

Looseleaf: “I was doing an experiment involving using my unique magic to inspect rat souls and I thought ‘hey wouldn’t it be interesting if I sedated one and then killed it to see the process of the soul detaching from the body first-hand’ and it turns out when you do that what happens is you also go to hell with it.” “I managed to come back though!” “That has been the story of my exciting venture into the thanatic sea.” “…Gods that makes me sound like a mad wizard doesn’t it.” Oliver Highhollow-Selby: Oliver looks at you with an expression that's a mix of shocked and 'you're not making any sense'-tier confused. Looseleaf: “I swear I’m not! I’m very nice and friendly!” “Zzaiya tell him I’m a good person,” Looseleaf pleads. Benedict (GM): Zzaiya's been kind of agog for the last few minutes. "I- you- sorry, you did what?"

Zzaiya and Oliver both start to kind of panic about these really quite fucked-up revelations- and Lady Noeru attempts to defuse the situation by inviting everyone out for drinks. Quite unsuccessfully, to be honest- so when another distraction rears its head, it's a welcome thing.

A muscled and bedraggled woman, identifiable as a dwarf by her (currently bare) beard-hanging studs, runs up to Looseleaf, out of breath. She gasps out something about fixing something, trying to recover from what has clearly been a prolonged sprint.

That's right! She's Lusleeve! And next time, we'll see what she wants from her! And Oliver- our third PC, played by @hzapping- will be tagging along!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel

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